I wanted to outline my understanding of the West’s relation to Zionism since it’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m interested in feedback for any details I might have wrong or lacking context.
So, we have Christianity being born out of Judaism and then being syncretized into the Roman Empire, which propagates its version of Christianity throughout its territory as part of its imperial structure. The empire wanes and leaves behind the politico-religious concept of Christendom or “the Christian world”.
By the time that capitalism became Europe’s dominant mode of production, Western Christianity was largely separated from Eastern Christianity and thus Eastern Christendom, and was relatively united under Catholicism. Importantly, papal bulls had established the Doctrine of Discovery, which set out instructions for (implicitly Western if I understand correctly) Christian countries to cooperate in the mission of subjugating and Christianizing non-Christian peoples. Even as the Reformation birthed Protestantism and wars were fought within (Western, but this is the last time I’m going to note that distinction) Christendom, the Doctrine of Discovery was mainly respected as something like property law among European Christian nations, including Protestant ones.
Notably, Europe is white as hell and the people they colonized were not. Through various means including pseudoscience and theology, European colonial powers reinforced their ideology with a new system of racism that would become the white supremacism we can recognize today. Tied in with the notions of Whiteness and Christendom, Europe (including the Russian empire in this instance) also forged the variety of antisemitism that would ultimately be advanced by the Nazis.
To this day, the successor states of former European colonies including the US cite the Doctrine of Discovery as their root source of legitimacy. This is reinforced by white supremacist ideology outrageously insisting indigenous peoples had no “civilization” in the first place, so that instead of unjustly plundering the world, the White Christian West was merely building civilization where none had been before. It follows the same racist reasoning, then, to claim that disparities in wealth between the West and its colonies were due to intrinsic differences in peoples and/or some need for a people to “mature” for generations under Christianity.
By the early 1900s, antisemitism remained homogenous across the West. Most notably it helped fuel the rise of Nazi Germany, which left the US in a privileged position to capitalize on WWII and centralize bourgeois power under its own flag. Still homogeneously antisemitic, the West, led increasingly by the US and witnessing the deterioration of the traditional colonial relationship, determined to concentrate much of its Jewish population in Britain’s colonial territory in Palestine. The status of Jews as non-white was leveraged both to drive Jews out of the imperial core and to encourage an impression that they could only become and remain liberated by forming a “homeland” in the fashion of the West. This both gratified antisemites by voluntary deportation of Jews, and solved the problem of holding on to an increasingly unprofitable colony.
The present result would seem to be a near-universal Zionist stance within the Western bourgeoisie (which is the bourgeoisie in the global sense) and its institutions, and an Israeli ethnostate that is nominally Jewish but is in fact syncretized with White Supremacism as evidenced by their treatment of black Ethiopian Jewish immigrants.
actual critique of your theoretical basis: racial theory emerges just from the fact of domination. the Doctrine of Discovery was an ex post facto justification for things that already happened because burgeoning bourgeois and political interests pushed ‘exploration’ as exercises in conquest. Conquistadors were greedy fucks tryna squeeze a profit, and used violence & political usurpation as their tools—then a still-feudal state came in and its church (which constituted a large part of the bureaucracy) figures out how to justify it and conceive of it in terms that make sense to them. The Doctrine of Discovery was not the source of legitimacy, nor particularly respected (look up claims of the US east coast lol)
and in Spain’s case, the antecedent was the conquest of Granada followed by the expulsion of jews and moors. what motivated that was simple, conquer a kingdom, steal their shit. the citizens who are still around though, you could knick their stuff too, couldn’t you? enough of a kickback to the crown and boom, bye-bye jews and muslims–this is a Good Christian Act, and any who convert get to stay!
…but what if they’re lying? my rich neighbor converted and i’d quite like his house. i think he’s secretly practicing judaism, and the inquisition is happy to oblige an investigation. they torture people, and they usually confess.
and from there we’re almost to race, all we need to do is slowly substitute a failure to be christian and the suspicion those who convert didn’t really to skin color. which gets easier when encountering whole populations that never heard of a christ before, and the colonial authorities really want to keep in bondage. the first rebellion against european authority in america–by europeans–happened in 1542 in response to laws against killing and enslaving all the natives (elevating them to the esteemed position of rightsless peasants)
i can’t recommend this book enough as it pertains to the confluences of religion and ethnicity with regards to a colony, at the very beginning (linking my own post about it). the colony of crete didn’t actually develop into a settler-colonial early-modern state, which is how we know the theoretical observations which we can recast on ireland, spain, and the americas are kosher
Fascinating, and that book is now on my e-reader. It sounds more detail oriented than my usual but frankly I could stand to pay more attention to detail
All of that is news to me, though I’d like to clarify that when I said the Doctrine is cited as a root source of legitimacy, I did think that it had more impact in its time than it sounds like it really did, but I particularly mean it gets affirmed in relatively recent court cases. For instance, Justice Ginsburg name-drops it in Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation
it getting name-dropped in the US supreme court was definitely not something i expected when i was looking it up, there’s something to that modern usage in jurisprudence but i don’t know very much about it. it seems totally removed from it’s original context, to be honest—but it’s well in keeping with the thesis about judges working backward with their justifications for theft.
Yeah, the present context is the only one I’m familiar with in anything resembling depth, but it’s the only name I know for “The thing where European nations only respected each other as equals to do traditional war and commerce with, while all others were slated for genocide and enslavement.”
I’m looking forward to reading Uncommon Dominion. Anticolonial theory beyond “it’s plainly evil and any mystification of that fact is plainly racist” is very new to me, and at this rate I only have about a week left before I finish Wretched of the Earth
Christendom and ‘global’ (medditerrean wide) christian community was synthesized later than the Roman Empire. as that state fell apart “christianity” was quite divided and rudderless because half the new kingdoms rejected the roman doctrine, and in the absence of an (nearby) emperor the church didn’t have a leader. primacy of the bishop of Rome is a political concept that develops through the 800s-1100s, and was a significant departure from equality of the patriarchates who were coordinated by the Emperor (and the bishop in his capitol who’s usually his crony).
Recognizable medieval ‘Christendom’ started through a… you could call it a ‘revival’ movement but a lot of it was new–lead by missionaries and monks in the 700s-800s, focused around converting the pagans in western europe and reconciling the heretics. The Frankish kings threw their weight behind it & used spreading christianity as a vehicle for expansion, going on primitive crusade in Germany and a few campaigns in Iberia. Big Karl Magne was very careful to position himself that way as a leader of christianity, and integrated/patronized the church to a large degree in his territory—and the ratification of this process is when he gets crowned the Emperor, which at this point was still synonymous with the religious leadership.
Karl & Sons gets us to the point of most of west-central europe being (the same kind of) ‘christian’ and starting to self-identify in that way, and with their own Christian Emperor. Independent and supreme Bishop of Rome comes from the following centuries where the big Frankish Empire dissolved & couldn’t protect (or put their thumb on) the Bishop of Rome, as Rome was peripheral to gaul & germany. pretty soon the Pope was wheeling and dealing between all parties, and i’d say by the First Crusade had more-or-less fully positioned itself as a quasi-independent international entity, though it kept fighting the German Emperors & other feudal nobles about shit. And it’s after the Roman clergy has cultivated an independence & ‘domain’ over the west that the question of eastern christianity comes up—because they were mostly just trotting along with the idea their patriarchates were equals (except ones under the byzantine emperor ofc) like usual, but the Pope starts demanding the subordination of other diocese(s?i?) at various points, mostly from crusades as french/italian military power could be threatened or withheld. you gotta appreciate that the ‘schism’ between western and eastern churches was a question of ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the more distinct features/beliefs we have today just following centuries of independent development. as late as the 14th century the greek & latin churches formally re-entered communion a few times, with the main religious issue just being a specific kind of prayer/meditation.
so fuck that’s a lot of words and oversimplification just to attempt clarify Christendom and Caesaropapism. and this isn’t even getting into race and antisemitism
Thanks for the info! I’ll try to reply when I have a better opportunity to focus, but for now I have a genuine question: Do you think I should delete this and come at it from a different angle?
I wanted to organize and condense my thoughts on white supremacism - and, necessarily, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery - in writing, but if I’m making a bunch of ahistorical assertions in the process I’d rather not put that out into the world and handle it differently instead
do not delete. i was just going off at a particular two facts that doesn’t matter that much to the thesis and i happen to care too much about. i just made another comment but it’s not really a repudiation if i phrased it right. sorry if it comes off corrective
just wanted to add to yours and provide extra food for thought if someone wants to read it, yours is more than enough to get someone through it
I have no additional knowledge to contribute or critique here. But yeah, early Jewish Zionism since Herzl knew it was 100% a European colonial project and got support of Christian Zionists like Balfour and Churchill precisely through that angle. See the difference between treatment of Jewish people in 1800s Christian Europe vs in Ottoman-era Palestine (where all three Abrahamic religions lived relatively peacefully). Not to say the Arab world did not have anti-Semitism, of course, but compared to Christian Europe, it was relatively better (and only worsened after colonialism and Israel). Also, see the treatment of Mizrahi/Arabic Jewish people by the Europeans who settled in Israel after they left Arabic lands for Israel. Just another example of how intertwined whiteness and colonialism has been to Israel since the beginning.
