This is a fundamental question, maybe one of the central questions, of our times. Having arrived at this vantage point, we are given a perspective where we can start synthesizing elements which might have seemed unrelated. Antisemitic agitations, pogroms, and eventually genocide happened mostly inside the european geographic space and sphere of influence. Colonial expansion was directed toward people living outside of that space. However, the political philosophy behind both these tragic developments was the same. On one hand, even the colonial conquered spaces were under the same antisemitic decrees which affected Jews in Europe. Black or white, if anyone was found practicing Judaism, they were tried and most often killed by the Inquisition. On the other hand, the laws under which Jews were placed were the same as given to conquered and disposessed nations. It is even possible to argue that since Rome, Jews within the Empire were used as the meta-model for conquered nations. When the crusades broke out, this became a fact. The Jewish communities, on the path of the crusader’s human hordes, were first wiped out, as a preview of what will be done to conquered disbelievers infidels and other foreigners. The attitude of Vichy’s government toward Algerian Jews in the second world war, fits in an ideological continuum which shows that from the side of the colonial ruler, this amalgamation between Jew and colonized is obvious. In the post-colonial social context, traces of this toxic mixture still remain in the form of traumatic relationship to history, and identity reconstruction.
The colonial powers insisted on teaching that the Jew, as rebellious conquered, who insists on maintaining his original identity, is bad. Religion was used as a pressure tool to make no qualms about it. Either you believe like the conqueror tells you to, or you will be cursed and treated like the Jew. Many people who were historically conquered by religious brutality still have these ideas ingrained by centuries of colonial mental domination. It takes reading the thoughts of such great thinkers as Emperor Haile Selassie
W.E.B. Dubois, and Reverend Martin Luther King, along with other true humanists, to start having an idea on the extent of the psychological ravages of the racial colonial conquest on the soul of humanity. Haiti as a nation who knew the full force oppression of slavery and freed itself from colonial rule long ago, grasped the necessary equivalence.
During WW2, while Europe and even America left Jews to their fate and sent their boats back knowing they would get killed, Haiti understood the commonality of fate, sent passports for Jews and offered them refuge. Can we really separate between colonialism, its transformation into anti-black racism, and antisemtism? Is it historically possible?
Can one really separate antisemitism from colonialism?
