Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello and salaam, dear listeners, this is your host, Roshan Iqbal, and you're listening to History Speaks, a Maidan podcast.
Today, instead of an academic intro, I would like to start with a story.
A story that illustrates how I think of our guest, Dr. Santiago.
Once upon a time, I watched a documentary about climbers descending from the summit of what, if I remember correctly, was Mount Everest.
On their way down, exhausted and low on oxygen, they came across another climber, alive, but barely.
His oxygen tank had failed. He was sure to die.
And the group faced a terrible question.
Should someone stay behind and hold his hand as he died? Give him at least the dignity of not dying alone? If anyone did, they'd risk their own descent, maybe even their own life.
One climber chose to stay. He sat beside the stranger and held his hand until he died.
When I saw that, I had to ask myself, could I be that person? When would I stay?
At the time, I was studying a legal text in classical Arabic with an elderly Islamic scholar, and I asked him this question.
What is my legal and moral responsibility towards a dying person in Islamic law? The protection of life. Hibz al nafs is one of the five essential objectives of the Maqasid al Sharia. It is sacred.
So I asked him to answer not just legally, but but morally.
Part of me feared that the legal answer would be, save yourself first. You have a family, obligation, a future.
But maybe morality would whisper something different about dignity and compassion. And to my great relief, he said, you cannot leave a dying person alone.
That answer brought tears to my eyes. Because, contrary to what modernity and capitalism keeps insisting that everything of value can be measured or monetized, the most important things we do as humans have no economic value at all.
The human in our humanity lives precisely in those immeasurable acts. And that's how I think of Dr. Santiago. He's one of those people who, though Jewish, stands beside the dying, not knowing what danger it might bring or whether it will make make any measurable difference, but standing there anyway, standing by principle, by compassion, by truth.
Now, all that said, I should also tell you who he is on paper because, well, we are still in academia.
Dr. Santiago, who is from Argentina, holds the Florence and Robert Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and directs the Interdisciplinary Jewish Studies Program at Hofstra University.
His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award for his book Decolonial Judaism Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking.
He has also received the Fisher Mentor Award from the Claremont School of Theology and the Exemplary Annual Teaching Award from the General Board of Education of UMC Institutions.
So yes, he is all of those things, but for me he'll always be that climber, the one who stays behind to hold the hands of a dying stranger.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: First of all, I would like to thank very much Roshani Kpal for this invitation and Agnes Scott College for the possibility of actually engaging with you yesterday night. We have a wonderful experience with many, many, many students of the college who really engage with these ideas and we are able to actually show how the future actually is creating crack in the systems of OPP for us to actually move forward.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Let me start us out with the title of this podcast, which is what happened to the Judeo Islamic why do you think it's important for us, Dr. Santiago, to think about the erasure of the Judo Islamic tradition and what's at stake in recovering that shared history today?
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Thank you very much for the question and I want to tell a story.
The story is a story of people around the world who suffered and got interconnected, sometimes even without them knowing.
The history of the erasure of the Judeo Islamic is a history of divide and conquer.
For most of its history the majority of Jews have lived under Islamic rule.
And not only this, but also that Jews belong to the social fabric of the Islamic world.
Just to have some Examples, between the 15th and 18th century the population of Jews in the Ottoman Empire multiplied between five and seven times after the second World War. One of the very few Muslim countries in Europe, Albania is the only country that had more Jews when the Holocaust finished than when the Holocaust began.
This is because most of the time when Jews were persecuted under Christian they escaped to Muslim lands and the question is why and what happened that this history is being erased. And this is the history of what Ela Shokhat Iraqi Jew talks about some small and savvy raptures.
One of the first small capture happened at the same time. The Jews and Muslims we are orientalized together and racialized in tandem with each other.
But at the same time, when European forces try to conquer the North Africa, they try to elevate some populations over others to help them rule.
Jews were among them especially in Algeria, also in Morocco or Tunisia, even a little bit less. But they weren't the only ones. Copts in Egypt, Tuttis in Rwanda, it has been the same case of minorities being elevated and being split from the other population. But even then when this attempt of splitting Jewish amongst the populations, many Jews remain loyal to the struggles of the place, understanding that they have some privileges, but also they were colonized.
But the full break didn't happen until 1940s. 1940s, 1940s, after the Holocaust, it came up in multiple places, multiple breaks.
Israel was established with the conception they represent the whole Jewish people, such they need to make a complete split between Arab and Jew.
The same time in the US in the attempt of divorcing themselves from the impurity and war and genocide in Europe, they recover what was at some point an anti Judaic and then antisemitic concept of Judeo Christianity, which means that Christians who have superseded Judaism and they took it in order to present themselves as the defender or also Jews, first against Communism, second against Islam.
The construction of this Judeo Christian tradition, which is extremely recent, truly only 80, 90 years, 200, if you want to be very, very generous, is confronted with 1,000 years of the emergence and development of the Judo Islamic.
Today I want to recover the Judo Islamic because it's a ghost that is waiting for us to crack the system.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Thank you so much for that.
As a student of South Asian history, I understand the role of divide and role really clearly.
The idea of erasure that you mentioned makes me think about the ways religious traditions are framed, sometimes to include, sometimes to disinclude.
And that brings me to another formulation that you just mentioned and that we hear a lot about, which is you've argued that the idea of Judaic Christian tradition is very recent and that it's been used for political purposes. I'd love for you to unpack that a bit. And I have to say, your phrase in the book, you use the Christian west as a site that's too big to be seen, really stuck with me.
And could you explain what you mean by that a little bit?
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. This particular concept I take from a very, very work of Gil Hochberg.
The argument here is the following.
If you look at, for example, American history and you look at every time that idea of peace was attempted, you will see on the one side an Arab and or Muslim, depending on the time, how they are qualified, on the other one, a Jew representative. And in the middle, you are going to see an American president.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: So I'm thinking about the pictures I've seen of Bill Clinton, of Jimmy Carter.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Jimmy Carter and then Trump and also Obama as well.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: So in every occasion it seems that you have two sides, that they hate each other since immemorial times, supposedly. Yes, supposedly, supposedly. And later on, an arbitrator that is neutral, that is objective, that only want the best for the people who can solve their own issues.
The problem here is that this presentation of internal hatred, as we showed before, is very new. It's actually construction of the West.
I want the listeners to think with me a little bit the following.
Can the same collective the Western world that created the problems be the source of its solution?
I would just say that all these conceptions are very fluid. Jew, Muslim, Arab, Christian, Western has been repurposed at many times for different reasons.
We need to understand that in the current formulations, they have intentions.
The Western world is not an arbitrator between two underdeveloped people who hate each other and can solve their own problems as they were two kids who need an adult to come to the room.
It is a side that has its own interests and also that present those interests. Historically speaking, even though my have changed a little bit now, but still as objective, as neutral.
Something that for example, when we actually discuss issues of gender, women understand very well.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: So what we want to think with this is that I want to recognize the west not as a mediator, not as an arbitrator, but as the construction that created the problem.
And as a side with its own interests.
That is not objective, it's not neutral, but is going after their own profit.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Thinking about this constructive narrative that you just kind of described for us and how it's been repurposed, it makes me want to step back even further to the foundations of Western modernity itself and how it shaped our understanding of history and power.
In your book you offer a Jewish decolonial critique of Western modernity. Can you unpack what that perspective helps us see differently? I'm especially interested in Your thoughts on 1492, why this year is so significant and how it connects to the rise of the European wealth, European power, as well as the self appointed epistemological privilege of the West.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Thank you very much for the question.
So first of all, when we look at the map of the world around 100 years ago, we are going to see that over 80% of the lands of the world have been conquered at one point or another by Europe through imperialism, colonial extractivism, settler colonialism or other.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Forms about which I will ask you a little bit later, but absolutely, and.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: 100%, and I'm very happy to talk about this later. And 100% has been deeply influenced.
And the question is when this started?
Any good historian will tell you there is no the turning point in history, okay? But 1492 is a year where Jews and Muslims are forced to convert and or expel from the first modern empire. Spain.
Second, the Spaniards arrive to attack the Caribbean, what is today the Americas and start that start the process of the massive kidnapping of human beings in Africa to enslave them. That even though preceded, but now becomes much more what we'll call massive.
And as such we are going to have at the same time of Jews, Muslims, natives, people kidnapping Africa made to slaves and also the persecution of women in Europe itself.
We are going to see a number of communities who have been affected by undermining their knowledges, their bodies, their living, their space, their security, in order to construct a world that is going to finish, as I said before, with over 80% of the world actually conquered.
There are two ways of reading this.
We can fall into Olympics of suffering, looking about who suffered the most and emphasize that. Or we can go with what again, what I say. Ella Shohat. Explain Ella Shohat and Bob Stamm as a relational method that will allow us to actually see how one casualization help the other to develop.
For example, we do know that the conception of people having impure blood was transformed into the Americas to talk about the mostly originally to describe Jews and Muslims was brought into the Americas to talk about the inhumanity of natives and Africans and then got back into the into Europe to talk about the inhumanity of Muslims and Jews. In the same way we know that the new rumor laws that precede the Holocaust we are being based on interpretation of the Jim Crow laws.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: So it's so amazing, all these interconnections.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: Absolutely. So the question here is, are we going to tell the story in a parochial nago way to only defend ourselves or we are going to try to understand the structure and how the structure has rationalize all these communities and how we need to confront this in relation with each other. So what the decolonial Judaism will do is try to bring alive the lies, the texts or the events of Jewish solidarities with other others, not leaving aside the Jewish identity, but bringing the Jewish identity into politics to defend everyone who suffer from a systemic system of coloniality. That this humanized people and also today creates genocides.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: When we think about how power shapes our historical narrative and the structural issues, all of this also affects how we understand events that are treated, often treated as exceptional, like the Holocaust.
So my next few questions are going to be slightly sort of meta categorical questions.
Elsewhere in your book you've argued that the Eurocentric way of framing the Holocaust is an aberration. It's framed as something outside the norm, rather than part of a broader historical pattern. Could you say More about that?
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. We do know that the Holocaust in Europe that murder 2/3 of European Jewry and 1/3 of world jury is an event that should be remembered, sought and should be actually confronted.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: And that added to the millions of people such as Roma and Sinti political prisoners and also LGBQI people who also we are killed in the same process.
The point here is that the Holocaust didn't come from nowhere.
The Holocaust came and got informed by a number of years of which Europeans we are practicing genocide outside of Europe.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Could you tell us a little bit more about that? I think examples would be helpful.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: So for example, the German government itself has Bruce A genocide in Nambia against the rail. Namaste.
We are excellent work. For example, George and Zimmer actually explain the relation between one Chilicide and the other. Preceding the German in Europe have always been practices of mass murder of people.
The only point is that the people we are from the global south, we are beyond the metropolis and we are seen as sometimes necessary in the expansion of the West.
When we think about the Holocaust as narrow and parochial, we think of the Holocaust as both incomparable and the genocide everything should measure too.
But when we think about the Holocaust with what Michael Rothbard called multidirectional memories, we can think how the Holocaust both historically and also at the level of memories have been preceded and was followed by by many other genocides.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: So historically it was preceded and followed by many other genocides.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: And also in terms of memory, the possibility of thinking the Holocaust in order to find a language to speak about other genocides had been used in the Caribbean, in South Asia, in Latin America.
Putting in conversation the Holocaust with many others. I want to make something clear. Yes, the Holocaust some part has some particularities. I do not know any historical event that does not have particularities the Holocaust among them.
The problem is that many times in the way in the US the Holocaust memory was presented was presented as a sero suma game of competitive memories. And again, the work of Michael Rothberg is actually very good on this regard.
And in this context, this memory has always been pit one community against the other in an Olympus of suffering.
The problem here is not only that we don't recognize other genocides along with the Holocaust. Not instead. It's not only that historically was preceded and informed other genocides, but also that many people have actually employed the Holocaust in relation with others in order to actually speak of some genocides that yet don't have a language. The problem in the US is that we have a Narrow, narrow and parochial way, where the Holocaust is everything to be measured against, but at the same time incomparable.
And more important than anything else.
In many narratives, it presents the historical events as outside history originally, or at.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: Least not originally, which then can't be investigated, Right?
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Absolutely cannot be investigated. But also an important factor is that most of the time this replicates an anti Judaic Christian understanding that Jews, once they reject Jesus, they are going to be wandered around the world without being part of history. And their suffering is almost justified because of the rejection of Jesus.
And as such, the idea of taking Jews out of history present the possibility of seeing the Jew in space.
And even though I am not against just being a space, the people who suffer the Holocaust, they suffer it in this. On this earth. And I want to relate it and put in communication with many others who have suffered in the past today, and unfortunately are going to suffer in the future.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: You know, I remember when I was like, sort of looking at numbers and you.
It's kind of amazing to me how like, no other suffering is considered so as the Holocaust was happening to the Jews. And it is like an impossible and a very tragic event.
But at the same time, the Roma and Senti were dying in the same numbers and at the same time in the same years. Yes. In a different place. In South Asia, the Bengal famine was taking place. Right. And this was done through British colonial hoarding. And the same number of people died. Yes. It's true that 7 million people that died in Bengal were only 10% of the population, and the 7 million people that died in Europe were one third of the Jewish population. But 7 million Roma and Senti also died, who are also one third of the population. And this never gets spoken about. And I just think that there is something there in how we should sort of think about what kind of history is being taught to us and why and how it's being utilized. So this does bring me to sort of, again, a meta definition kind of question. And could you talk to us about colonialism, settler colonialism, neocolonialism, liberal colonial altruism and coloniality?
What do these concepts have in common? How, if at all, do they differ?
How can thinking about them help us avoid misreading history like we have done with, like, you know, we just spoke about three events that were happening at the same time, but there's a completely different understanding globally about these events. Two are completely raised and one exists as an untouchable event.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: Thank you very much for the question. I believe that for a long time, colonialism was occluded reality of how the modern world was constructed.
In the last years, things have changed.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: So you said occluded the reality of how the modern world was constructed. Okay, absolutely.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Thank you so much for raising that.
In the last years, fortunately, there have been a lot of. First of all, social movements and then academics. We academics many times we come late and the social movements precede us. But the important thing is that the academics and social movements are all the time in relation with each other. The social movements that are in dialogue with intellectuals and intellectuals who learn from certain movements, I believe they are the most powerful ones. Yeah.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: So agreed.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Absolutely. So now the colonialism has become a term many times is a term devoid from.
From content. Because. Has become too popular.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: I would say the same thing. And that's why I asked you, because I feel like everyone uses the term colonialism, but nobody understands what it means.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. So what we talk, when we talk about colonialism, at least the people that I am in dialogue with understand that even though we can see many colonialism through history, we are not going to have a process of global dominance as we are going to have with the Western world.
The Western world is going to have multiple strategies in order to make this happen. We mentioned before divide and conquer and the divine conquer was put in practice in multiple kind of colonialisms.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Divide and conquer. Yes.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: Some of them will be settler colonialism, which is when a particular community is getting displaced in order to actually be taking over. But largely Europeans, not only.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Which would be the Americas and Australia and New Zealand. Yeah.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: And particularly has been the case with British colonies. But not only there is extractivist colonialism, where there is an attempt of spaces, and that happens very much in Latin America, of extracting the resources, resources from there.
And there are multiple other spaces and between each one that we are going to have a multiple, multiple types. But what is common among them? I would say what is common among them is a structure, a system.
And this is why Aniva Quijano, a Peruvian intellectual, has actually explained that there is a particular concept called coloniality. What coloniality means. Coloniality means the structures of domination that develop during colonial times in colonial locations that have become common sense and part of the story today in such a way we don't ask why it happened, why the west is more rich than the non west, why whiteness is presented as higher than blackness and we can keep going and going and going. Why Jews are associated with conspiracy theories, all that structures that they were presented through coloniality, that today we see them as Almost common sense in many spaces.
What I want to investigate, and I think it's very, very good people who do this work.
Colonial extractivism has been very well presented by dependency theory.
Settler colonialism has very well investigated by people like Patrick Wolff, Ernesto Vernacci and other people I am interested with Animal Quijano, Walter Miolo, Maria Lugones and many others to talk about coloniality as those structures imposed since the 17th century we are still living with.
I will just say that Jews and Muslims, we are seen for most of the time as part of the same.
Even before when Christians went in the first Crusade in the first century and they killed. They took the tour to kill Jews in the way, because Jews and Muslims who are completely associated.
But then because of the breaks I showed before, the breaks produce a separation between Arab and Jew, Muslims and Jew, depending on the context and how people are being defined.
Not all Muslims are Arabs, not all Arabs are Muslims. But people can get confused one or the other, depending on the time.
So what is important here is that the split and the erasure of the Jewish Islamic is a start of coloniality. And I want to bring it back because every system can look very strong, but every system has cracks. And the Jewish Islamic can be a crack to break the system.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Okay, thank you so much. So, of course, these systemic structures that you have sort of defined and understood, or you think that it would be better for us to understand as coloniality don't exist in the past. Right. They continue to shape our societies today and in ways that often underpin discrimination in multiple forms.
So I was interested in asking you about another argument you've made about antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, which you say emerges from the same underlying forces and systemic continuities, in a sense.
Could you tell us more about that?
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. So most of the time history is being told today in such a way that is a continuous conception of antisemitism eternal. Any historian would dismiss it not because Jews have not been persecuted, but most of Jews for most of the history has lived under Islamic rule, not on the Christian rule, where that anti Judaism existed.
There is a turn from religious anti Judaism to racial antisemitism. There is a debate when it happens in the 16th century, precise in the 19th century, but that turn it happened.
The question here is the following.
Why there was not actually historically verifiable attempt of Christians trying to completely annihilate a population of Jews in Europe as it happened in the Holocaust is because before with anti Judaism, when Jews convert to Christianity more times than not, and there are some cases in England, and some especially cases more times than not, Jews will be welcome. Not only this, but also like other people who were converted, sometimes they can actually raise very high in the hierarchies.
Starting in the 14th or 16th, 17th century, depending on how we tell the story.
Jews are going to be accused of having impure blood.
And Muslims as well. Yeah.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: And as such they will Native Americans.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: And convert it and then transport it. Even if they converted, they will not be able to actually access. They will always be suspected like Jews in conspiracy theorists are suspect.
So even if Jews converted, they will do it. And this is why it's important to understand that the anti Semitism we are living today is not divorce from the other racisms.
It is part of a modern project of racism that include Jews and many others.
If we focus only in antisemitism, we are just going to reproduce, put one community against the other.
What we need to confront is a center of racism that include antisemitism, but doesn't have antisemitism. And as its only so we need communities who have been racialized not to fight against each other, but try to deconstruct a system to create a much more just world.
[00:31:39] Speaker A: And I would like further add in terms of the appropriation of antisemitism in the US in this present moment, I think it has not to do that. They actually want to prevent that. It has to do with sort of utilizing it against academic freedom, against freedom of speech, against sort of intellectual engagement. Real, robust intellectual engagement.
So this brings me to my final question. One about perspectives and who gets to write history.
How we look at the past shapes everything we think and know about the present.
Broadly speaking, you argue that reading history only from a European perspective is problematic. So what insights might people from the global south, including Jews, Christians, Muslims and others, offer that can help us see history differently?
[00:32:36] Speaker B: First of all, I want to bring a particular reflection of M. Cesar, the Afro Caribbean thinker who once said that the Holocaust is presented as an aberration when you see it from the perspective of Europe.
But when you see the perspective and experience of everyone in the global south, the Holocaust becomes more the norm. Not because the particularities are the same, but because before Jews in Europe suffered a tremendous genocide. A lot of people in the global south suffer genocides that enable and inform that genocide.
And as such, what why it's important to see the world more globally is because when we think about the Holocaust, when we think about what happened in European history as part of a more global context, we can see what is normal and what's navigation.
We can also have possibilities of thinking about solutions. For example, when you see antisemitism as a problem of only the nation state, or at least a problem of European nation state, you will think that ok, if Jews have their own nation state, it's going to solve the problem.
But when you think that racism emerged many times, especially in 16th century Spain, as a way to unify the one particular kingdom, at that point the nation and the state are going to overlap in such a way that one group is going to have the supremacy and everyone else needs to be eliminated.
We understand that we cannot solve the problem with the same system that created the problem.
A particular entity that attempts to have a supremacy eliminated all difference is actually what led to the Holocaust.
You cannot solve the problem the nation state created with another nation state.
The way to fight against antisemitism is not with supremacy in one nation state.
It's not elementary difference of people who are living there. And yes, I am talking about Palestinians, it is about confronting the supremacy of one group of people in any state, any state as the only way to define that nation state.
The same structure that created a problem cannot solve them.
And this is a particular words of a Palestinian thinker, Hatem Basyan, who said he's all the time asked about public policy questions and I am not going to solve the problem that imperialism created with the same resources of imperialism.
I am going to solve it with solidarity across the people who have been rationalized and wrong the system.
So along many, many Jews today, among many young Jews today, around the world and in the US in particular.
The important part is to find a just peace in Palestine and Israel. Not just peace, not just pacification. And I would like to return to the work, for example, of Atalia Omer about this is a truly just peace for everyone who is living in that terrain.
And that particularly include the people who have been suffering a genocide today in Palestine.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Dr. Santiago, for sharing your insights with us today. I hope that our listeners come away with a deeper sense of history's complexity and a renewed curiosity about the ways we can see the world differently beyond the stories that we have been told that we've accepted uncritically. Thank you so much.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me.
