Race is a concept that was developed in order to categorise people in order to rank them in terms of quality, so there are no prizes for guessing who gets top spot and what the people at the other end of the scale look like. Ivan Hannaford has looked at the rich history of this concept, from a time when it did not exist, from a time when it meant something different from what it is today, and in all cases, something made up by humans with the assumption of 'scientific' rigour.
Race as 'science' was discredited as a consequence of its application in the Third Reich and for the obvious reasons. Race continues to be applied with dismal results, as anyone familiar with the claims of the controversial psychiatrist, HK Eysenck will know, where intelligence is claimed to be determined by race, which enables certain people to be ranked as Highly Intelligent, and others as being not very intelligent, and I don't need to say more about it.
Racism has become a convenient tag for people too lazy to think through the concept and realise that any so-called 'system' that classifies human beings according to the shape of their eyes, the width of their lips, the colour of their skin, the fruit of their brains, or whatever else is claimed, is an invitation to discrimination, which is the key agency at work and the most insidious if fatally human reaction that societies have to people they class as 'outsiders'.
Read Frank Snowden's wonderful history
Naples in the Time of Cholera, and there is a chapter on cholera in Puglia, where at one time it was known as
lo zingaro -'the gypsy' because Italians believed diseases were imported from outside their towns by wandering Gypsies -with all the ramifications for discrimination and violence that entails.
The argument that 'most Jews' of the modern world are descended from the Khazar who were converted to Judaism was discussed in Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe. The argument is frankly irrelevent to the Jewish experience in the modern world. The cardinal point is that anyone can be a Jew, by conversion, many have become so; others have become Jews through marriage, while Jews have, like many other people, migrated across the globe so that there are Latin Jews in South America, Chinese Jews in China, and Black Jews in Africa. Many Jews remained in the 'Holy Land' after Jerusalem ws destroyed by the Romans, many migrated to other parts of the Middle East and still live there today (for example, in Iran). Those who isolate Jews as if there was some inherent flaw in the narrative of their origins and development usually have a motive for highlighting it to prevent Jews from, say, occupying Palestinian territory. The same argument that says Black people do not 'belong' here, wherever here is; the same argument that says 'Muslims' do not belong in Britain.
The Jewish claim on Palestinian territory is political, not religious; the discrimination against Black people in the USA was, and has been political, not racial; the discirmination against the Roma in Italy is political, not racial; the discrimination against the Muslims in Bosnia by 'Orthodox' Serbs was political, not racial.
Let us put this tired, meaningless concept to bed and let it sleep forever, with the fishes.
Race: The History of an Idea in the West Woodrow Wilson Centre Press: Amazon.co.uk: Ivan Hannaford: Books
