This book will look at how the trajectory of imperialism throughout the nineteenth century in Europe came to influence our appreciation of Jews as both White and not quite White. The term ‘ ‘Jewish ’ ’ itself exists as a category of peculiar and uneven racialisation that has everything to do with Europe’s imperial relationship with Africa, Asia , and the Americas. The visual projection of ‘ ‘the Jew ’ ’ becomes the very stuff of modernity and continues to have a place in visual culture as a canonical element of modern representation itself. As people of the book, of the Old Testament, the financial ledger, the journalistic prose, Jews are meant to have no visual culture, and if one exists, the same logic goes it has to be one enforced upon them wrongly by outsiders in most instances. Neither, of course, can be strictly true but there is something uniquely fascinating about the notoriety of Jews as a global phenomenon and that as we imagine them as global, our thinking runs quickly to the imperial. The limits of a European Jewry simply don’t square with that so, in effect, modernity’s project in conjunction with imperialism , must seek to visualise ‘the Jew’ as though they were everywhere local and international. The Jew is both accountant and accountable to the facticity of their being otherwise Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, Arab; everywhere the product of a classification from elsewhere, temporarily, spatially, but never visually convincing beyond their congregations. Jews are aggregated if they can be said to exist at all. ‘The Jew’ is only relevant if you are of the school of thought that maintains that they are of a born of a religion that can be personally chosen or unchosen. Modern racial science solves the Jewish question regarding their consensual relationship to religion by making of Jews a race. Once God’s ‘chosen’ race when they dwelt in Israel, the racialist logic of the nineteenth century held that their ‘Semitic’ blood had long since been adulterated with both ‘Aryan’ and ‘Black’ blood. In order for it to be redeemed, it must be compelled to come back upon itself by means of violent statehood, becoming both a European and Eastern ideal representative body of all things ‘whiteness’, in a shadow facing Aryanisation that takes place over the twentieth century to rehabilitate a lost people.
