Recent research into the history of notions of racial identity and difference in England has identified the late eighteenth century as a significant turning point. Roxanne Wheeler, Dror Wahrman and others have argued convincingly that what Wahrman calls the ancien régime of identity was underpinned or framed by a fundamental notion of the mutability of identities. Over much of the long eighteenth century, up until the mid- to late 1770s, notions of gender, race, and social status (or class) were highly fluid, which produced a sense of “self” radically different from what we understand as “modern.”
In her valuable study, Iris Idelson-Shein builds on this more general body of scholarship and makes a major contribution to the study of Jews and racial thinking. Existing work on Jews and race, as Idelson-Shein points out, has largely focused on the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the early modern period (e.g., the work of Jonathan Schorsch). Idelson-Shein's work begins to fill in the gap, which includes the period of the Haskalah, so that we now possess a much fuller and richer picture of how Jews appropriated and translated racial categories and images and used them for their own ends. One might quibble with her claim at the outset that she is almost alone in turning from the Jews as mere passive objects of racialist discourse, and investigating Jewish agency in the making of Jewish racial identities. Indeed, a fairly substantive scholarship now exists that places such agency at the core of its research. However, Idelson-Shein is certainly correct in asserting that most of the scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the European (and North American) contexts. She, on the other hand, is interested in the Jewish racial representations of non-Europeans in the context of the colonial encounter. Moreover, as she points out, the existing scholarship that does range beyond Europe has focused almost exclusively on Jews and blacks. These all approach the topic, according to Idelson-Shein, through the colonialist lens. One of the many things Idelson-Shein's work demonstrates is that the Jewish encounter with colonialism was hardly static. It developed over time and became increasingly similar to, if not identical with, non-Jewish European discourse. Central to this development was the increasing importance of skin color for Jewish writers and storytellers. It would be a mistake, Idelson-Shein argues, to imagine that racial thinking was always mainly about differences of skin color, and that Jews, too, inevitably focused on this. The major shift in Jewish racial thinking that Idelson-Shein identifies, and upon which she constructs her argument, rests on the fact that “at least up until the late eighteenth century, skin color did not play a significant role in European Jews' depictions of other peoples” (5). Until the turn to skin color, it was climate and a host of what we would call cultural practices that differentiated Jews and Christians from non-European “savages.”
Idelson-Shein's method or narrative strategy, as she informs us, is to devote each of her four main chapters to a deep reading of one particular text, and use that to then explore other texts and contexts both diachronically and synchronically. This offers Idelson-Shein the opportunity to discuss a wide array of fascinating texts and themes, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and to demonstrate that when it came to thinking racially, Jews were both similar and different from non-Jews.
She begins with the story of the pious Jew and his two wives in the memoir of Glückel of Hameln. She stresses the differences between Glückel's version and those that proceeded it, and casts Glückel's narrative of cannibalism and maternal infanticide as “a uniquely dismal version of the colonial encounter, which is not a love story but a horrendous tale of rape and infanticide in which the savage woman arouses neither empathy nor pity, but rather abhorrence and disgust” (23). In Idelson-Shein's reading, Glückel's tale reflects the relative indifference of Ashkenazic Jews to the colonial enterprise. Unlike previous non-Jewish narratives of the tale, Glückel's is not a colonial romance, used to explain and excuse the conquest of native Others. “In this sense, Glikl is paradigmatic of the problems inherent in attempting to read early modern Jewish texts on the non-European world through a purely colonial prism” (23). Glückel's captivity narrative must be read as an expression of particularly or uniquely Jewish concerns, even if it also must be contextualized within the much broader non-Jewish European narrative traditions regarding matters of difference. Glückel's is not a traditional European colonial narrative of conquest, but rather an expression of Jewish anxieties over Christian-Jewish relations and Jewish assimilation.
Glückel's tale of the pious Jew also offers a clear example of Idelson-Shein's main point about race in the long eighteenth century: difference here is not about skin color, but about what we would call cultural practices, including but not limited to religious differences. This becomes clear in chapter 2, and Idelson-Shein's reading of a key work of the early Haskalah, Yehudah Horowitz's ‘Amudei beit Yehudah. She situates Horowitz within the tradition of the conservative Enlightenment, and more specifically within the eighteenth-century anthropological tradition, a tradition infused with an Enlightenment universalism that posited an underlying unity of mankind and understood differences as environmentally rather than biologically determined. And religious differences remained of primary interest and importance for early Enlightenment thinking. It is religion, Idelson-Shein writes, “that stands at the heart of Horowitz's book” (61–62). Horowitz certainly used the “savage” to elevate Judaism and even create a sort of equality of identity between Jews and Christians in Europe, but he did not surrender his underlying assumption in the basic commonality of all humans or his belief that this provided the groundwork for a necessary tolerance.
By the late eighteenth century this earlier understanding of difference rooted in environmental or cultural explanations was giving way to an anthropology that identified difference as a matter of biology, including skin color. And Jewish thinking about race followed suit. This shift, according to Idelson-Shein, “was articulated most clearly in a new genre of Jewish and particularly Hebrew writing, the genre of popular science books, which were almost always translated from non-Jewish sources, and particularly from German children's literature” (111).
In the last two chapters, Idelson-Shein uses Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and subsequent translations into German and Hebrew to demonstrate the broader shift in notions of race that marked the late eighteenth century. As other studies of Defoe's work have also noted, the main signifier of difference in the original was religion. Friday's Otherness was indicated by all sorts of physical and moral differences, but in line with earlier notions of identity, these differences were highly fluid and mutable, and in many respects Friday appeared more European than not. Revealingly, Defoe appears to have been either relatively uninterested or at least confused, according to Idelson-Shein, about the savage's skin color. By the late eighteenth century, and Joachim Campe's 1781 reworking of the story in German, this had changed. “In Campe's description of Freitag, on the other hand, color takes on an entirely different meaning” (173). While Defoe relegated Friday's skin color to a position of relative insignificance, Campe placed it at the forefront. The Jewish writers who then reinterpreted Campe integrated this new understanding of the centrality of color into their own works. Idelson-Shein does a masterful job, especially in the last two chapters, in drawing out the complex web of texts—scientific and popular—and contexts within which Jewish authors such as Baruch Lindau, Baruch Shenfeld, and Menachem Lefin created their works.
The overarching argument Idelson-Shein develops about Jews and racial thinking is subtle and convincing. Yet the subtitle of this book does a disservice of sorts to this work, which is more ambitious and ultimately satisfying because it does not focus on the centuries-long debate over race as such. Anyone coming to this book expecting an extended discussion of eighteenth-century Jewish equivalents of Buffon, Linneaus, or Blumenbach will be disappointed. Idelson-Shein certainly does show us how the ideas of these scientists and others made their way into Jewish texts. For instance, she goes into some detail about the influence of Buffon's Histoire naturelle on Baruch Lindau's 1788 work Reshit limmudim. However, Idelson-Shein's is no straightforward intellectual history. Rather, it is a sophisticated work of cultural history that shows us Jewish writers and thinkers engaged in debates over the idea of what it means to be human, about the state of nature and of civilization, and the role of reason and religion in these debates. Idelson-Shein certainly discusses in places what we would understand as questions of race: skin color, hair texture, facial features, etc. But since her point is that for much of the long eighteenth century “race” was not about color, or biology, but about environment and culture, her focus is just as often on externals such as dress (or nakedness) and food, and the crucial role played in discussions of the savage and the civilized.
These questions about identity and difference, about notions of selfhood, exceed the category of “race” as it came to be understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Idelson-Shein allows us to see, with exquisite detail, the ways in which Jews, participating in Europe's making and remaking of the non-European Other, remade their own identities over the course of the long eighteenth century.
