GIL ANIDJAR
…and the mirrors are many
Enter them so that we can come out! Soon we will seek what
Has been our history around your history in the distant lands.
—Mahmoud Darwish
In Auschwitz, the inmates who had reached extremities of hunger and exhaustion and descended to the abject bottom of the camp hierarchy were called Muslims. The oddity of this fact—there were Muslims in Auschwitz?—has only been compounded by the equally strange popularity of the appellation.1 Muselmänner—the German word in use in the camps—were so designated by guards and kapos, by inmates, and later by countless witnesses, beginning with the earliest and most illustrious among them (David Rousset, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi).
All the Muselmänner who go to the gas chambers have the same story, or, more exactly, have no story; they have followed the slope to the bottom, naturally, like streams running down to the sea. Once they entered the camp, they were overwhelmed, either through basic incapacity, or through misfortune, or through some banal incident, before they could adapt; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German and to untangle the fiendish knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already breaking down, and nothing can save them from selection or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always the same, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death—in the face of it they have no fear, because they are too tired to understand.
They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could encompass all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image, which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, head bowed and shoulders bent, on whose face and in whose eyes no trace of thought can be seen.2
Muslims in Auschwitz. They have been mentioned again and again by writers and scholars (Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, Wolfgang Sofsky, Maurice Blanchot), by painters, performers, photographers, and filmmakers (Yehuda Bacon, Aleksander Kulisiewicz, Eric Schwab, L. S. Graye, Udi Aloni), with few or no elaborations and to little public effect and reaction.3 In the decades following the Holocaust, and with the sole exception of Primo Levi, very little was said—or asked—about their name.
Common to all the Lagers was the term Muselmann, Muslim, to describe prisoners who were irreversibly exhausted, emaciated, and close to death. Two equally unconvincing explanations for its origin have been proposed: fatalism, and the turban-like dressing of head wounds.4
Muslims in Auschwitz. The profuse dissemination of the phrase in every European language, and in Hebrew and Yiddish as well, is not in doubt. And since the publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), the term has even accrued a remarkable and growing notoriety, across publications and aesthetic representations, generating queries and discussions, online and off.
The most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God. It is this meaning that lies at the origin of the legends concerning Islam’s supposed fatalism, legends which are found in European culture starting with the Middle Ages (this deprecatory sense of the term is present in European languages, particularly in Italian). But while the muslim’s resignation consists in the conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even the smallest events, the Muselmann of Auschwitz is instead defined by a loss of all will and consciousness…. There are other, less convincing explanations…. In any case, it is certain that, with a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews.5
Muslims in Auschwitz. Jews and Arabs. Shoah and Nakba. Where some might see an analogy (likely an illegitimate or reductive one) or a contrived condensation (Israelis are not all Jews, Arabs and Palestinians are not all Muslims, nor are all Muslims Arabs), I argue that the very terms hereby juxtaposed partake of a connection, register a charged articulation—and, equally significantly, a disarticulation—between Jews and Muslims, Aryans and Semites, race and religion, democracy and totalitarianism (or fanaticism). At stake is a complex and shared history, a common language of alleged and naturalized empiricity (nationality, race and ethnicity, or religion), analytic and political distinctions and categories (conquest and genocide, settler colonialism and apartheid, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia), the very nature of the distinct “events” the present volume addresses, as well as the possibility of disentangling the terms and positions and the logic of separation, distinction, and division that operates across and between them. There, where historical or spatial distance provides for nothing more than an analogy, a less than compelling substitution, and an arbitrary approximation (or else, an alleged competition of victims), one finds instead a Gordian knot.
But Christianity has already made great conquests in the domain of heathenism, and theologians boast with great satisfaction that the Old Testament prophecies have been fulfilled or are at least approaching fulfillment, that belief in Christ will soon be spread over the whole earth, and that all nations of the world shall serve him. The result of this abundance of Christians is that zeal for conversion has become much cooler. Although controversialists have retained the entire arsenal of those Christian weapons that have won so many victories against the Jews and the heathen, and although there would still be plenty to do among the Jews and particularly the Mohammedans [auch an den Mohamedanern besonders und auch den Juden],…what might be expected from the multitude of nations who together make up Christendom, especially when we think of their wealth and their superiority in all the arts. Against the Jews, finally, who are making their homes among us to an ever increasing extent, there rises no more than a cry that “Gentleness will conquer,” and even so, only small numbers of people are roused to join in that crusade.6
Muslims in Auschwitz. Real Muslims? This could only be—as Primo Levi insisted—a case of radical decontextualization, an instance of dramatic resignification. The language of Auschwitz could neither draw on prior linguistic usage nor could it continue to signify, after Auschwitz, in any recognizable manner. And yet the spread of the term as a caption of sorts for haunting images and its reiteration across Holocaust testimonials, literary and cultural production, and scholarship belie any attempt to confine and regulate it according to its seemingly restricted usage in the camps. In fact, it is that belated citation and recognition across a wide array of languages, sites, and documents that undoubtedly constitutes the most striking argument against its confinement to Auschwitz or its isolation in Holocaust literature and scholarship. Long lingering in conspicuous yet unattended archives, the term has indeed broken out of its “original” context, invariably retaining its most obvious and older meaning, while the shock of the juxtaposition (Muslims in Auschwitz) failed to generate—at least until the 1990s—all but the briefest of glosses, much less inquiries as to, say, orientalist and anti-Semitic stereotypes, Nazi race doctrine and policies with regard to Muslims, or the larger issues of race and religion, to name a few examples.
C-a-f-f-e-e C-a-f-f-e-e
trink nicht so viel Caffee!
Nicht für Kinder ist der Türkentrank,
schwächt die Nerven, macht dich blass und krank
Sei doch kein Muselmann,
der ihn nicht lassen kann!
C-o-f-f-e-e C-o-f-f-e-e
don’t drink so much coffee!
The Turk’s drink is not for children;
it weakens the nerves and makes you pale and sick.
Don’t be a Muslim
Were we to describe the term “Muslims” as a stereotype (which it is, of course), we would have to acknowledge that it operated and continues to operate by way of a natural evidence of sorts. Given the staying power of its semantic and syntactic value, or because of the possibility of its recognizability, the conditions of possibility for its recognition (and nonrecognition) have remained fundamentally unchanged. Indeed, the term Muselmann has a long and enduring history in the German language, its theology and philosophy (from Luther and Kant to Hegel and Freud), and in its music too (from Carl Gottlieb Herring to Heinz Erhardt and Volker Schindel), a history of stereotypes and propaganda (against coffee—der Türkentrank—and other matters) which goes well beyond the borders of the modern German state.8 The broader significance of such a rhetorical oddity (Muslims in Auschwitz) should have registered otherwise upon our conception of orientalism at large in the joint study of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and their shared vicissitudes, just as it should have impacted our understandings of Israel/Palestine. Accordingly, the appropriation of the term ex post facto toward an exclusive demonstration of either Islamophobia or anti-Semitism unwittingly reignites secular investments in that separation. For, just like Shoah and Nakba, Muslims in Auschwitz testify in fact to the peculiar associative and dissociative logic that structures and infuses the matter. Here, notoriety remains inseparable from invisibility; obvious significance is overshadowed by restricted meaning; inscription in a long chain of iterations resonates only in the narrowest of circles.
Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor any likeness either of that which is in heaven, or on the earth, or yet under the earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people felt in its civilized period for its religion when it compared itself with other peoples, or the pride that Mohammedanism inspired.9
Muslims in Auschwitz. A scandalous concatenation of what appear as two unrelated histories, two trajectories, two antagonistic lines that, too distant to be described as parallel, would (almost) never cross. The emblematic name Auschwitz would have nothing to do with Muslims, who in turn would have nothing to do with Jews, the emblematic victims. In Auschwitz, after all, not all victims were Jews, and not all Jews became Muslims. Yet how do we identify the two histories and trajectories thereby traced, there where they nevertheless intersect? Was there, is there, a Muslim question in addition to the more famous (and infamous) Jewish question? It could become clearer—at the very least when watching the daily news—that these questions do in fact intersect, that they travel together. And though one could not take such advances for granted, neither should one expect utter incomprehension when mentioning the “intersection” of Jews and Muslims. For something here resists and persists against all attempts to distinguish—in the name of truncated understanding and politicized empiricity, in the name of identity—Shoah and Nakba, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Nazism and colonialism, democracy and fanaticism.
In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood.10
Muslims in Auschwitz. One among numerous iterations in which the Christian West has encountered, confronted, feared, denied, and combatted at once the Jew and the Muslim, where it contended with, displaced onto, and finally solved its interminable questions. It was always an asymmetric dispute, steeped in divisions and in denials (turning one from the other, using the other against the one), not least because the very proximity of Jew and Muslim long occasioned great anxiety on the part of Christians—for understandable reasons, no doubt, if not inescapable ones. As Christian theologians recognized early on, Islam carried all the signs of a return to a Jewish order. Just like the stubborn persistence of the Jews, Islam constituted at the very least a theologicopolitical challenge of great magnitude. Easier were the ensuing constructions of the (theological) Jew as “internal” enemy and of the (political or military) Muslim as “external.” The spatial division was (and still is) an essential part of the apparatus whereby war is conducted, understanding governed, and denial enforced. Just like the (intolerable) interiority of the Jews, the exteriority of the Muslims to Europe (an anachronistic term, that last one, for much of the history in question) was always empirically dubious, and it still is, in spite of the much proclaimed novelty of “Islam in Europe.” Such exteriority, moreover, certainly did not correspond to the imaginative geography that placed Jerusalem at the center of the Christian world. It did not fit the presence (and the present absence) of communities and ideas, threats and alliances, objects and artifacts, the porosity of borders, and the intimacy of fear. And just as the Jews—banned from the kingdoms of France and England and later from the Iberian peninsula, then ultimately eradicated from most of Europe—were more often than not a figurative presence, so were Muslims found, fought, converted, and expelled, both inside and outside of shared and troubled cartographies. There is nothing coincidental, therefore, about a juxtaposition that must be considered in its diachronic and synchronic dimensions. The terms Jew and Muslim always function together, one word joining, authorizing, or effacing the other. Accordingly, today the war on anti-Semitism inherently partakes of the vilification of Muslims, while the study of Islamophobia is perceived, after well-pondered analysis, as a new and independent chapter in the history of prejudice, at best a historical substitution, a displacement of animus from (past) Jews to (contemporary) Muslims.
Muslims in Auschwitz. This is a history—and it is one history, and thus ultimately one question—that continues to be thought under two different headings: Europe and the Jews, Islam and the West, or again, anti-Semitism and orientalism. A long and turbulent history it is that mobilizes the Christian imagination as one, engaging along these lines its leaders and its theologians; its crusaders, soldiers and philosophers; its jurists and philologists; and other technocrats too. More recently, one may proactively “witness” on the same complicated map Israel and Palestine (Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, or Jews and Muslims—depending on the “approach”). Once each year one might even lament the “conflict,” the absence of peace in Bethlehem, while actively weaponizing the Israeli military. At the current center of this meandering series of divisions is also, as the editors of this volume rightly have it, Shoah and Nakba.
Signs of the base, an empty Arab village, became more frequent. Interrupted echoes. An abandoned anthill. The stench of desertion, the rot of humanity, infested, louse-ridden. The poverty and stupefaction of wretched villagers. Tatters of human existence. A sudden exposure of the limits of their home, their yards, and of all within. They were revealed in their nakedness, impoverished, shriveled, and stinking. Sudden emptiness. Death by apoplexy. Strangeness, hostility, bereavement. An air of mourning—or was it boredom?—hovered there in the heat of the day. Whichever, it doesn’t matter.11
Muslims in Auschwitz. In each case, then, there operates a mixture of unconscious denial and hypervisibility, the obviousness, one could say, of intolerable associations: race and religion, religion and politics, or, in the striking names Shakespeare immortalized, Shylock and Othello (The Merchant of Venice and The Moor of Venice). The enemy’s two bodies.12 And there is much more, from Paul to Luther, from Augustine to Hegel, from Aquinas to Freud, from the crusades to the colonies, and beyond. There is, for instance, the evidence of the Semites (that powerful fiction by which, just yesterday, Jews and Arabs were deemed one and the same) along with the much-proclaimed impossibility today of an anti-Semitism targeting Arabs and/or Muslims. There is, in a different register, the villa and the jungle. In Auschwitz, what may have come to light was a culmination of sorts, a new and renewed dispensation, namely, that the most extreme denial of the religiosity of the Jews would buttress the theologized figure of the fatalistic and death-bound Muslim, the essence of the despotic subject, the abject (and fanatic) slave of the most absolutist power. Indeed, for the Nazis too, Judaism was a race, Islam a religion. The impossibility of Muslims in Auschwitz speaks to these uncanny yet naturalized divisions, finding their source in the history of the exegesis of the flesh and the spirit; nation, race, and religion; and fanaticism and democracy—all of which come true in and upon the enemy’s two bodies, the only political theology that matters, where the word became flesh and the tortured a word.
All this stems from the characterization of God as the lord whose worship is a form of service through which the subjective spirit does not attain freedom; thus there is no differentiation between divine and human laws. In this abstract direction toward the one Lord lies the ground for that formalism of constancy which we find in the Jewish spirit in reference to its religion, in the same way as in Islam we find the formalism of expansion. And because the subjective spirit achieves no freedom in it, there is also no immortality; rather the individual vanishes away in the goal of the service of Jehovah, preservation of the family, and long life in the land.13
Muslims in Auschwitz. At a formative moment, Ernest Renan had called for “the destruction of the Semitic thing” (la destruction de la chose sémitique par excellence), a warrant for genocide that clearly included both Jews and Muslims, drafting anew and reiterating a declaration of “eternal war, the war that will not cease until the last son of Ishmael has died of misery or has been relegated to the ends of the desert by way of terror” (la guerre éternelle, la guerre qui ne cessera que quand le dernier fils d’Ismaël sera mort de misère ou aura été relégué par la terreur au fond du désert).14 Here and elsewhere, Semites (as phantasmic a name as Muselmänner) have served as an explosive locus—an opportune target for indiscriminate bombings—in the Western imagination and in its current geopolitical (or rather theologeopolitical) order and incarnations. To a quite complete extent, Semites were, like their ever so distant relatives the Aryans, a concrete figment of the Christian imagination, the peculiar imagination that found another striking expression in the divided event—Muslims in Auschwitz—that occupies me here.
While the exclusion from racial discrimination could be backed by some race theory with regard to Persians and Turks, the case of the Arabs was more problematic, as they were seen by most racial ideologues as “Semites.” Regime officials were well aware that the term was problematic, as it targeted groups they did not wish to offend. As early as 1935, the Propaganda Ministry therefore instructed the press to avoid the terms “anti-Semitic” and “anti-Semitism” and to use words like “anti-Jewish” instead, as the fight was only against Jews and not Semites in general…. In early 1942, the office “Anti-Semitic Action” (Antisemitische Aktion) within the Propaganda Ministry was renamed “Anti-Jewish Action” (Antjüdische Aktion). Later that year, Goebbels reiterated his instructions to the press to avoid the terms “Semitism” and “anti-Semitism” in their propaganda…. Ultimately, even the NSDAP Office of Racial Politics would support the abolition of the terms. In an open letter to Rashid ‘Ali al-Kilani, which was published in the Nazi organ Weltkampf in late 1944, Walter Groß insisted that Jews had to be “strictly distinguished” from the peoples of the Middle East. Therefore, the term “anti-Semitism” was wrong and had to be changed to “anti-Judaism.”…On trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann after the war reiterated this point, explaining that the term “anti-Semitism” was “incorrect” and should be replaced by “anti-Judaism,” as the category “Semites” also included Arabs.15
Muslims in Auschwitz. Muslims long became deicide, pictured as present at the crucifixion; the suffering Jew (once denied its collective claim as “suffering servant”) has been Christologized. Each of these sedimented figures comes full circle in Auschwitz and—where else?—in Jerusalem. Accordingly, the selfsame site of apotheosis of the Aryan nation can now project itself outward, with repentant benevolence, and turn the blond beast of old into the (current) Semite. Blaming Nazism on Islam (as “Islamo-fascism”), it rides an industry that has long granted pride of place to the Palestinian mufti Haj-Amin al-Husseini.16 Just like the exclusive, indeed competing focalizations on anti-Semitism or Islamophobia, the attempts to construe the debates summarized by the heading “Shoah, Nakba” as some belated interpolation, as a novel contest of victims, are part of a long history, one history and one history only, structured by division and separation, denial and denegation. This history constitutes the divided burden of the Christian West; it conveys the extended struggle to distinguish and isolate the theological from the political, race from religion, the Jew from the Muslim. The successes and failures of that history—solutions rather than answers to all too numerous “questions”—make for a long history of partitions.
Muslims in Auschwitz. Unsurprisingly, this is also a history of translation, of mistranslation and of untranslatability. Christendom has, after all, long seen itself in a constant contest with an enemy it imagined, fought, or conquered, and struggled all the same to name: as Ishmaelites and Agarenes, Saracens and Moors, Turks and Mohammedans, Moslems and Muslims, Semites, migrant workers and Gastarbeiter, Turks again, and then again as Muslims. Along similar lines, and though they were granted a few different names of their own (Jews and Hebrews; Israëlites or of Mosaische Konfession; “the Palestinians among us” [die unter uns lebenden Palästiner], as Immanuel Kant referred to them; and again Semites), Jews were as rapidly a morphing object for the shifting Christians, who saw in them the witness to their own fall from grace as well as Christ killers; children of the devil and allies of the Muslims; a religion, a nation, or a race; and more recently as an “ethnicity” or even those newly praised members of “Judeo-Christian civilization.” (With no apparent irony, President Obama remarked at the funeral of Israeli politician Shim‘on Peres that “anchored in a Judeo-Christian tradition, we believe in the irreducible value of every human being.”)17 There are complex reasons for the oscillations and distinctions, for the collapses and—again, more frequently—the separations of Jew from Muslim in the Christian imagination in its changing forms and implementations. Most obvious are the similarities that were readily observed (circumcision and strict dietary restrictions chief among them, and often a shared language and shared neighborhoods) as well as the no-less-perceptible differences that varied across time and place. Accordingly, theological or representational collapse as well as an insistence on preempting feared alliances, shifting agendas, orientalist equations, differential treatment in the colonies, and later the vocal importance of “analytic” distinctions—all these and more make for a complex history of association and dissociation, which it remains urgent to scrutinize, if only resistances were acknowledged, let alone conquered.
The presence of Muslims in Israeli culture is equally complex, though the extent to which it constitutes a new chapter remains to be seen. Indeed, to call attention to the enduring shapes and effects of a name and of a history is not to conflate its actors. It is not to identify Palestinians with a “religion.” It is rather to call attention to the powers of separation that operate still under the guise of empirical or analytic distinctions. Are the Jews a nation, a religion, or a race? Are Palestinians? Muslims in Auschwitz—this translates, I have said, race and religion, religion and politics. From the novels of Ka-tzetnik to the paintings of Yehuda Bacon, from the writings of S. Yizhar and Dov Shilanski to the translations of Primo Levi, and to the explosion of punctilious scholarship in their wake, the successes and failures of a separation that governs history (the negation of exile, the racial identification of Jews as Semites), memory (Shoah, Nakba), and policy (colonization and occupation, education and collaboration, the impossibility of the Arab-Jew under the administration of “national” difference, le’om). At stake here is also the localization of a history and the geography of a conflict (“the region”).
Muslims in Auschwitz—this requires a different cartography, one that recognizes that, just as Jerusalem has long functioned according to changing coordinates, as it were under different latitudes, so does Auschwitz signify the European colonial imaginary as it continues to conquer the planet under the guise of a war on terror, buttressed by Israeli military expertise. The globalization of memory, the lessons of the Holocaust as the institutionalized measure of crimes against humanity, the diplomatic force of anti-anti-Semitism, the ease—and denial—of Islamophobia, the pertinacity of colonial rule over the Middle East and the extraordinary levels of destruction inflicted upon it—these signify that the center does not hold. It is not where it seems. Muslims in Auschwitz reminds us that history here does not mean the serial and linear occurrence of events, but rather their concatenation as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”18
Historians are finally coming around to treating the two world wars as what they were: one extended civil war.19 Muslims in Auschwitz carry a similar lesson for Shoah and Nakba. No analytic distinction, and certainly no geographic distance, no identity claim, will suffice to maintain the separation in which Christian Europe, along with its nationalist avatars in “the region,” continues to be invested. If the protracted demise of Sykes-Picot bears the shattered form colonial imposition has taken (peoples at war, borders on fire), it is also because Europe never found the way to answer its own, aberrant questions. It insisted on implementing and fostering solutions and dissolutions, separations and divisions, across time and space. Much as it drew borders and created countries out of thin air, Europe instituted other kinds of boundaries between Jews and Muslims, between Nazism and colonialism. These borders should not be conceived as analytical advances or as narrowly epistemological, even if “epistemologic nationalism” has played its part very well to that effect.20 Muslims in Auschwitz—this names an imperative to hold together one history, one question.
NOTES
1. Gerhard Höpp, “‘Gefährdungen der Erinnerung’: Arabische Häftlinge in Nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern,” Asien afrika lateinamerika 30 (2002): 373–386; and Höpp, “The Suppressed Discourse: Arab Victims of National Socialism,” in The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives From Africa and Asia, ed. Heike Liebau et al. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 167–216. See also David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 242–243.
2. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Orion, 1959), 103. I revisit here a much longer series of arguments made in The Jew, the Arab, two chapters of which were devoted to Muselmänner and to the broad significance of the appellation within Christian Europe as well as in Palestine/Israel. Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); see also Anidjar, Semites: Religion, Race, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Retracing the discrete steps of these arguments, commenting on all the sources (some of which I re-cite here, without reproducing the readings I have already proposed), just as assessing the slew of publications that have appeared since, is obviously not possible within the space allocated. I ponder instead the perdurance of a logic of separation that, against the obviousness of recurring juxtapositions (Muslims in Auschwitz, Shoah and Nakba, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia), continues to govern even the best-intentioned readings and critiques.
3. On Bacon, see Glenn Sujo, “Muselmann: A Distilled Image of the Lager?” in Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, ed. Griselda Pollock and Max Silvermann (London: Tauris, 2014), 133–158. On Kulisiewicz (whose song “Muzulman-Kippensammler” is available on Apple iTunes), see the website Music and the Holocaust, http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/central-europe/sachsenhausen/kulisiewiczaleksander/, accessed September 20, 2016; and Michael Beckerman et al., “Auditory Snapshots from the Edges of Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 22 (2012): 207–208. On Eric Schwab, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
4. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 98. See also Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 138–146. It was only in response to Giorgio Agamben’s work that the invisibility began to be partly lifted by scholars like S. Parvez Manzoor, “Turning Jews into Muslims: The Untold Saga of the Muselmänner,” Islam 21, no. 28 (2001): 1–7; and Fethi Benslama, “La représentation et l’impossible,” Evolution Psychiatrique 66, no. 3 (July–September 2001): 448–466.
5. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Homo Sacer III), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 45. Strangely, Agamben’s Italian original says “con una sorta di feroce autoironia,” expressing a kind of ferocious self-irony that suggests, as others will after him, an agency of sorts. It is as if, in Agamben’s account, the Jews named themselves “Muslims.” For an extensive catalog of the literature on and around the Muselmänner, see Paul Bernard-Nouraud, Figurer l’autre: Essai sur la figure du “musulman” dans les camps de concentration nazis (Paris: Kimé, 2013).
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 94. See also Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 125–133.
7. Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 142 and 227n93. Attributed to Carl Gottlieb Herring (1766–1853) and popular among German Kinderlieder, this song continues to be taught, sung, and performed in concert halls (see, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEhtaGMGixE).
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156; see Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 120–125.
10. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 27–28.
11. S. Yizhar, “The Prisoner,” trans. V. C. Rycus, in Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. Robert Alter (West Orange, NJ: Behrman, 1975), 297–298. For more on this canonical Hebrew author and his rendering of the Nakba, see Anita Shapira, “Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1–62; Shaul Setter, “The Time That Returns: Speculative Temporality in S. Yizhar’s 1948,” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 38–54; and Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 114–119, 146–149.
12. In The Jew, the Arab, I devote a chapter entitled “The Enemy’s Two Bodies” (pp. 101–112) to a discussion of these two Shakespearean figures, whose proximity had symptomatically failed to register with most readers and scholars. But denials and denegations have continued, as when belatedly and grudgingly acknowledging the comparison with Othello, Stephen Greenblatt proclaims that “Shylock refuses to be a suicide bomber.” Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and Shylock,” New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, Determinate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 742.
14. Ernest Renan, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation. Discours d’ouverture du cours de langues hébraïque, chaldaïque et syriaque au Collège de France, septième édition (Paris: Michel Lévy; Librairie Nouvelle, 1875), 39. For a more detailed commentary, see Gil Anidjar, Sémites: Religion, race et politique en occident chrétien, trans. Marc Nichanian (Lormont: Le Bord de l’Eau, 2016), 7–11.
15. Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War, 58.
18. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 257.
19. Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2016).
20. “The area studies enterprise is underpinned by two core methodological claims. The first sees state boundaries as boundaries of knowledge, thereby turning political into epistemological boundaries…. The second methodological claim is that knowledge is about the production of facts. This view translates into a stubborn resistance to theory in the name of valorizing the fact.” Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), xii–xiii.
