Judeo-Christianity and Its Fates: Jewishness, Blackness, and the Racial Politics of Religion in Postwar French Thought

"Judeo-Christianity and Its Fates: Jewishness, Blackness, and the Racial Politics of Religion in Postwar French Thought" tracks the relationship of Blackness and Jewishness to conceptions of race and religion in French thought to destabilize a question that continually emerges in American politics, and which reverberates globally: are Jews white? Delving into the politics of this formulation, I trace out how race and religion, deeply intertwined in the nineteenth-century figure of the Jew in France, are separated and placed in opposition through a new conception of the Jew that emerged in twentieth-century France as the basis for political critique. It discusses three textual conversations: the comparison of Blackness and Jewishness in work by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon; the substitution of religion for race as what defines Jewishness in Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida's writing on Jean Genet, Judaism and philosophy in Glas, along with Genet's own controversial representation of Blackness, Jewishness, and Palestine. Through archival research on these authors and close readings of key works, I ask how race and religion were redefined in twentieth-century theory, and what this history can tell us about the roles of race and religion in current discourses on whiteness, colonialism, and Zionism.