Erotohistoriography: sensory and emotional dimensions of antisemitism

David Engel asks if the term "antisemitism," when applied to a variety of incidents, distracts us from the uniqueness of each and fosters a generalization that distorts rather than illuminates. Because the term can refer to hostilities ranging from discrimination to violence, hostilities based on political, racial, or religious grounds, and hostilities that were not intended or perceived as such, gives rise to a "conceptual muddle." The term "antisemitism" becomes essentialized and reified, Engel argues, as if it were a causal agent: Jews are attacked because of antisemitism. Engel is correct: Blaming "antisemitism" for denigrating language, images, or even violence directed against Jews and Judaism shifts agency from human beings to an ideological construct. Used that way, antisemitism functions as one of the long-discredited "covering laws" that fail to explain. Yet Engel goes too far in asserting that "no necessary relations among particular instances of violence. .. can be assumed."1 Scholars of racism would never make a similar claim, nor would a scholar of race view the term "racism" as a socio-semantic error. The enslavement of Black Africans by American whites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has a clear and essential relationship to the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the growing mass incarceration and police murders of Black Americans today