Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Translators' Note
- Introduction
- PART I THE FIRST MIRROR
- PART II THE SECOND MIRROR
- PART III ATHENS IN JERUSALEM
- 12 Back to History: The Secularization of the Ancient Jewish Past
- 13 The Children of Japheth (Aryans) and the Children of Shem (Sernites): Race and Innate Nationalism
- 14 The People and its Land: Country, Landscape, and Culture
- 15 A ‘Polis' in Jerusalem: The Jewish State
- 16 The New Jewish Culture: Ideal and Reality
- Conclusion: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - The Children of Japheth (Aryans) and the Children of Shem (Sernites): Race and Innate Nationalism
from PART III - ATHENS IN JERUSALEM
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Translators' Note
- Introduction
- PART I THE FIRST MIRROR
- PART II THE SECOND MIRROR
- PART III ATHENS IN JERUSALEM
- 12 Back to History: The Secularization of the Ancient Jewish Past
- 13 The Children of Japheth (Aryans) and the Children of Shem (Sernites): Race and Innate Nationalism
- 14 The People and its Land: Country, Landscape, and Culture
- 15 A ‘Polis' in Jerusalem: The Jewish State
- 16 The New Jewish Culture: Ideal and Reality
- Conclusion: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is Indo-European growth; Hebraism is Semitic growth.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, Culture and Anarchy… the two great races to whose existence is due all, or nearly all, which makes man distinctively man: the stately thoughtful Semitic race … and the noble, ever-progressive Aryan race …
F. W. FARRAR, Families of SpeechTHE NATURAL TRADITION IN JUDAISM
THE new historical awareness put the people in the centre of the stage. But if it is the people which created its own identity, who is this people and by what force did it create its individuality and shape its history? In a short story, ‘Shem and Japheth on the Train’, published in 1890, the author Mendele Mokher Seforim (Shalom Jacob Abramowitsch, 1835–1917), tells about a trip on a train. In the railway car, the narrator hears from his fellow passenger, Moshe the tailor, the life-stories of two men—a Jew and a Pole—whose fate brought them together when they were deported from Bismarck's Germany back to Poland. During the conversation his companion tells him about the new racial concept that prevails in Germany; a combination of ethnography, racial morphology, and religious and popular prejudices.
'But the Germans think otherwise', said Reb Moshe quietly. ‘The Germans who perform miracles of science, have turned the clock back a thousand generations, so that all of us at this day are living in the time of the Flood. Nowadays they call the Jew “Shem” and the Gentile ‘'Japheth'’. With the return of Shem and Japheth the customs of that far-off age have turned too, and the earth is filled with violence. The non-Semites are hostile towards the Semites …'
Why was the East European Jewish narrator so surprised to hear of these concepts, which divide the peoples into races? To explain that, it is necessary to clarify the difference between ethnic stereotypes and the theory of race.
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- Athens in JerusalemClassical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew, pp. 381 - 402Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1997