progress

It’s been quite a week. Devastating Supreme Court rulings, a big fat bill in Congress that further strips and reduces vital services, and the 56th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. I was particularly grateful for a post on Instagram by artist and author Leo Herrera with a poem from his forthcoming collection, Sentences, that begins with a question that, I suspect, many of us have been grappling with: 

How are we back here again? 
we ask in a stupor, 
watching our rights in reverse. 
I thought we were done with this shit. 

Herrera’s poem reminded me of a course in college about the social history of Jews and Christians. We explored the relationship of the two groups from the early centuries of the common era to the rise of the Modern era, from the establishment of Rabbinical Judaism and the development of Christianity from a peculiar blend of early Rabbinical Jewish and late Hellenic philosophy and religious practices to the era of Emancipation in Europe. Over the years, I’ve occasionally returned to this course and Professor Behre-Miskimin’s insights to inform my teaching and to make sense of things, but in the past couple of years, I’ve thought about this course daily. 

Among other aspects of the course’s subject matter, one of the things we paid attention to was the throughline from the earliest Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric to the Shoah (the Holocaust) in the 20th century. Ok…very quick summary of a couple thousand years: In the earliest days of their coexistence under the thumb of the Rome, Judaism and Christianity were both radical minorities–radical in the sense of extreme size and in the sense of sharp divergence from imperial religious practices, which came with political implications–and they competed for converts. In this competition, they hurled accusations and insults and spread vicious rumors and lies about each other, but then Constantine declared Christianity the imperial religion (without himself converting), seeing in Christianity a way to unify an increasingly fractured empire. Overnight, Jews became the sole minority in their frenemyship with Christianity, and the rhetoric of insults and myths survived. For the centuries that followed, Jews constituted a minority without equitable rights and with additional burdens to varying degrees throughout Christian-ruled monarchies.

Throughout the Middle Ages in Christian-ruled regions, Jews were systematically disenfranchised from places that had served as home for generations. Typically denied rights like property and free movement, Jews were forced into a narrow range of trades and avenues for income. Because of the strict Christian ban on usury, a handful of Jewish families prospered by establishing and expanding the banking industry. Because of this success, local rulers would often welcome Jews into their courts, usually with a desire to collaborate and benefit from the reach of the banking and trade system that Jews operated, but just as often those monarchs would refuse to pay their debts to Jewish lenders, often bankrupting and otherwise imperiling Jewish communities whose safety depended on good relations with the local ruler. Sometimes Jews would be banned and expelled from a region, expulsions often justified by dangerous myths. Jewish communities were blamed for everything from failed crops to the bubonic plague, and every time, Jews were prosecuted, lynched, or expelled, their property and their coffers confiscated and added to the local ruler’s accounts. 

Religious holidays often brought scrutiny to Jewish communities–contemporary Passover seders include the opening of the door to welcome Elijah, a practice rooted in opening the door so suspicious Christian neighbors could see that Jews were not fulfilling the gruesome myths that circulated, including the “blood libel,” and whole towns or enclaves suffered pogroms and random violence when Christian fervor was ignited by myths. The Crusades, mass ventures coordinated between various monarchies and the Vatican to conquer the “Holy Land” and push back the encroaching Ottoman Empire, manipulated religious devotion to send thousands of “crusaders” to pillage the local populations in the regions we know now as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Israel. When European Christians wanted to join a Crusade but couldn’t, they’d take out their holy anger on locals who were different–cultural and religious minorities like Jews and Muslims. 

With the rise of the Modern age, though, absolute monarchies crumbled and parliamentary structures rose along with the question of citizenship–in the absence of an absolute monarchy, who are the peers who will govern? More simply, who gets to vote? The rationalists won equality for each individual (though who counted as an “individual” differed from country to country), and the era of “Emancipation” for Jews began. France granted Jews citizenship in 1790, and various countries followed, but equality of citizenship did not come with a renewed sense of shared humanity. Religious prejudices transformed into cultural prejudices, and the language of science took up the mantle from centuries of theological prejudice. Rudimentary understandings of languages and biology led to theories of culturally specific traits and rankings, and European “scientists” ranked the model European as the highest standard for human development. The false truths of “Social Darwinism” spawned eugenics, pseudo-scientific nonsense that emphasized the idea of “race” and that justified the subjugation of people of color. Judaism was granted a special category–both a religion and a race, and in the ranking game, religious prejudice pushed Jews way down the ladder. 

Meanwhile, Jews now had access to spaces they’d been excluded from–property ownership, wider access to trades and businesses, civil service and government office, and celebrity. What they couldn’t have anticipated, though, was that the religious prejudice never went away, and, intertwined with “scientific reason,” by the start of the 20th century, Jews remained targets to take the blame for a variety of economic, natural, and social disasters, and greater visibility made it easier to find them. When fascism rose in Europe, it was fueled in many regions by hatred for Jews and others on whom various “leaders” set their crosshairs, including groups defined as minority ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual identities, people who lived with developmental and intellectual disabilities, and political minorities who questioned or threatened fascist expansion. 

My professor made an observation that rattled me and has stayed with me: greater visibility led to greater targeting. This insight helped me see a broader pattern endemic to human communities. Natural, economic, or social catastrophes are always followed by a scramble for access to or control over resources and the systematic targeting of vulnerable minority groups. As a teacher, I tried to get my students to see what I had seen–the prejudices that drive violence against marginalized groups today didn’t begin with anyone who is currently alive. It began thousands of years ago, and we’ve all inherited the trauma of this history of violence. It’s quite literally in our DNA, and I can’t help but believe that this is why we seem fated to repeat that history. Some of us perpetrate it, consciously and unconsciously, but some of us resolve it, heal it, or refuse to pass it on. In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem demonstrates both this terrible inheritance and methods to heal it, not just through behavior modifications but by attending to our bodies. Menakem’s insights only emphasize that change has never happened naturally. It doesn’t just happen–the cycle of life continues, but how we as individuals and as a species move through that cycle depends on both individual and collective choices. Change, or at least the change I hope for–toward equality, toward peace, toward justice, toward harmony with and stewardship of our planet–only happens when individuals make choices to see other humans as humans, other people as peers. True and lasting peace depends on people seeing themselves in, empathizing with “the other.” 

In grad school I took a course about the relationship between religion and politics in US history. The professor was focused on the ways theological or spiritual ideas made their way into political rhetoric, but I was disappointed in his and most of my classmates’ appreciation of the danger of that combination–for me, it was a disillusioning moment, one of those moments I suddenly understood the criticism of the “ivory tower,” because in that room, playing with ideas and fascinations with clever language ignored psychological and sociological warnings. For one paper, I did some research on religious anti-gay rhetoric (it was the 90s…I would’ve called it anti-queer or anti-LGBTQ today) and came to the conclusion that the gays were the new Jews. The escalation of rhetoric that appealed to theological sources to stoke religious prejudice against queer folx in the US paralleled the escalation of anti-Jewish rhetoric in late 19th and early 20th century Europe. We know what happened in that history, I argued, so aren’t we ethically bound to stop that history from happening again? Most of the focus after the Shoah was on rehabilitating a decimated Jewish community, but no culture has yet eradicated anti-Jewish sentiment. And as the language of intersectionality has increasingly demonstrated, prejudices rarely stay in clearly marked lanes–prejudice against one ethnic group typically spreads into prejudice against a broad range of ethnic groups; prioritization of one religion leads to the degradation of others; and in this case, I argued, animus against Jews, a religious and cultural minority who were subjected to religious, psychological, and economic persecution, spread to queer people. My professor gave me a B and in his comments suggested that I was exaggerating, that my fears were hyperbolic.

Well, he was wrong, and Anita Bryant was just the tip of the iceberg. The rapidly expanding visibility of queer people in US culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially in the decades since Stonewall, has ignited an equally if not more rapidly expanding animus against queer people. Gains in legal equality are almost always followed by threats to social safety, and queer people find themselves both in the crosshairs, visible targets for hatred and harassment, and constantly facing other citizens who can’t see queer folx as people. People who have found themselves on the margins for any reason can relate to this–and we’re all increasingly connected by our common persecution, whether or not we like or admit it–but I don’t think the response that will lead us to peace and justice is the formation of a new tribe or the derogation of others as enemies. We on the margins have to remember that the people who hate us are people, too. Yeah, empathy is a mother fucker. 

We know how the other story ends. That should be chilling and terrifying knowledge, and if history repeats itself, the prospects for queer people, for people of color, for immigrants, and the rich and complex culture they fuel and support. When we see queer history deleted from government websites, we know that it’s just an extension of their desire to eradicate us from the species. This is what queer people are facing today, every day, with every headline, and with every micro- and macro-aggression (which are on the rise everywhere). Despite this, I feel a stirring of hope in Herrera’s words, and I hope his words become an anthem for us in the days and months ahead:

We were never promised linear progress, beloved. 

Nothing about us has ever been straight. 

You are not a line, 
You’re a propeller.