Abstract

Excerpted From: Oded Y. Steinberg, Nineteenth-Century Contextualization of “Race-Religion”, 118 AJIL Unbound 108 (2024) (22 Footnotes) (Full Document)

In her wide-ranging article, “An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law,” Rabiat Akande delves into the realms of history illustrating how the “race-religion” constellation became formative in current international law, specifically in Western discrimination toward minorities. As Akande writes, “the legacy of that past survives in the continuing interplay of the racial and religious othering of the non-Euro-Christian other.” This racialized-religious heritage, for instance, is evident in Western debates on the Hijab, Jewish circumcision (Brit Milah), and various other rituals practiced by religious minorities in the West. As a historian of the nineteenth century, in this essay I mainly focus on Akande's reconstruction of the historical aspect of the “race-religion” nexus. I begin by partially validating Akande's argument concerning the emergence of race-religion during the end of the nineteenth century, and by emphasizing Western racial discrimination against Islam and Judaism--the two “sister Semitic” religions. I then add what I see as important nuances that must be considered in the historical analysis of race-religion. Primarily, I illustrate how race-religion was “fluid” at times, allowing specific groups to “enter” Western civilization, while in other cases, race-religion was rigid, barring the inclusion of groups. Akande argues that the nineteenth century colonial expansion (in Africa, the Middle East, and India) dramatically contributed to the rise of the shared European categories of whiteness and Christianity. This emerging Western identity was antagonistic to the alleged “barbarism” of the non-whites and non-Christians. Nevertheless, further nineteenth-century inner-European contextualization is needed since the exclusion through race-religion also targeted, exactly at the time of this European imperial expansion, other “fellow Christian whites,” such as the Catholic Irish and Poles. It is not only “whiteness” per se that became prevalent, but a specific form of “whiteness” (e.g., Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Aryan) that was constantly reimagined and redefined.

Although, as Geraldine Heng and others show, there were early modern European adoptions of race-religion, the popularization of this constellation mainly occurred in the nineteenth century. This popularization principally relates to the term “race” which, resembling the nineteenth-century ascent of nation and nationalism, became entrenched in the scholarly and public discourse of the period. It was through the association between language and race as well as the “biological” classification of human types that race was bestowed with an assumed scientific aura.

Nineteenth-century European scholars based racial typologies on two dominant reasonings that could be crudely framed as “biological” and “civilizational.” The biological assumed fixed physical differences between human types with some human groups claimed to be superior to others. For some racial thinkers, biological differences could never be altered. In contrast, others asserted that a process of racial assimilation could transform the group or the individual's biology (for better or worse). To put it simply, civilizational reasoning assumed a hierarchy that differentiated between “civilized” and “barbarian” societies. Theoretically, through an extended process of learning Western “customs,” every human group could move up the imagined “civilizational ladder.” For example, conversion to another religion, particularly Christianity, could connote a major civilizational leap forward. Hence, “race,” according to some nineteenth-century readings, was also “cultural” and could be transformed through religious conversions. It must be noted that the biological sometimes merged with the civilizational, and scholars who adopted one reasoning sometimes referred to the other (even in the same work). Furthermore, at first sight, civilizational reasoning seemed less fixed and less malignant than the biological one. However, civilizational transformation could take a very long time or never even come to pass if the racial-religious other failed to demonstrate the requirements of “progress.” The practical implications of biological and civilizational forms of reasoning were that some races were marked as superior and attained the right to rule and exploit “inferior races.”

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Certainly, the Christian European strife in the decades if not centuries following the Protestant Reformation was far bloodier and cannot be compared to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' Christian antagonisms. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century racialization against the white-Christian Irish and Poles exemplifies that inner European racial-religious hierarchies flourished when Western imperialism was at its height. Therefore, a more composite picture must be considered when speaking of the historical endurance of race-religion from the nineteenth century. That being said, I concur with Akande's thesis that especially in recent decades, also due to growing migration, the inner white-Christian prejudice has become marginal in comparison to the discrimination against the Black-Muslim “Other.” Furthermore, I find Akande's study of the long history of race-religion immensely significant since she illustrates how the endurance of this constellation from the nineteenth century is formative in contemporary realities.

The crises of the last decade validate this point. For instance, while the majority of Western states are apathetic toward the hundreds, if not thousands, of Muslim and Christian African migrants that drown every year in crossings in the Mediterranean Sea, Europe has welcomed white Christian refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine with open arms. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that Western governments should have treated the suffering Ukrainians with the same indifference as their southern counterparts. Instead, my objective is to highlight an abiding humanitarian hierarchy that is shaped by racial-religious perceptions. Indeed, mainly due to the horrors of the Holocaust, certain imagined categories, particularly “Aryan,” are no longer spoken of, yet their destructive meanings linger on, still shaping attitudes and practices. Akande's contribution, for that matter, adds another facet to our understanding of how race-religion operates in our present reality.

European Forum and Department of International Relations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.