MINDING YOUR GREEKS AND JEWS: EUROPE’S IMAGINARY FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
MINDING YOUR GREEKS AND JEWS: EUROPE’S IMAGINARY FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

Summary/Abstract: As has often been pointed out, the Jew is the figure par excellence of Europe’s internal enemy, while the Arab or the Turk or Muslim more generally is the traditional external enemy. These figures now meet in the imaginary melding of internal and external enemy in the form of the Muslim migrant, the external threat that is now attacking us from within. Gil Anidjar, in his book The Jew and The Arab, has developed this view further, presenting a theory on the representation of the aforementioned groups as the enemies of Europe that draws directly on the political philosopher of Nazism, Carl Schmidt, and his concept of the Enemy. Enemies here refer to the imaginary projections that internal consistency in a given political group requires. For Anidjar, whenž the Muslim enters the European consciousness as an enemy, it is to be mediated through the already existing representation of the Jew as Enemy of God, which goes back to St. Paul (he neglects its non-Christian roots, as the Romans were also prone to regard the Jews as enemies of mankind). The Muslim is thus initially a sort of double of the Jew, but as time goes by a certain differentiation emerges, a division of labour based on the areas in which they represent the enemy. As well as the internal enemy, the Jew becomes the theological enemy, while the Muslim/Arab is both the external and the political enemy.

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