One phrase that really gets to me is “Judeo-Christian”. I’ve never seen it used in a reasonable argument — it’s always done when talking about some religious origins of legal systems and how this is supposed to matter today. This is particularly common in the US, but I’ve gotten even more peeved when I saw it being used back home. For instance in discussions about the current secular ethics trial in NSW schools an opinion piece says “it is the Judeo-Christian ethic that sets the way we live apart from the way other cultures live“.
There’s a great irony in how this phrase is typically used. It’s supremacist because it’s pretty much always thrown in opposition to how “the others” (read: largely non-whites) live (read: unethically/like savages/life is cheap there etc.). But singling out Christianity makes the supremacist nature a but too apparent. So the point of adding the “Judeo” bit at the end is to make it a bit more inclusive. See, it’s not about a white Christian club, we’ve been nice enough to include some Jews too. I’ve seen quite a lot of posts that question the “Christian” part of this expression, especially in the problems about the supposedly-Christian origins of the founding of the US. See this post by Ed Brayton too.
But today I’d like to focus on the Judeo part of this nonsense. See, I have just a few questions, kind reader:
- When people say Judeo, do they mean their legal/ethical system also comes from the ethics of Sephardi Jews, who are mostly non-white and have a very different culture to the Jews those who coined the term know? Are they bothered by the fact that when broadened to this scope, Judeo means the legal/ethical system of a culture much closer to Arab and Muslim culture? Or if they mean to exclude Sephardi Jews, then why not just replace “Judeo-Christian” with “white” since that’s now the common factor?
- When people say Judeo, do they mean their legal/ethical system is based on animal sacrifices, which still form a huge portion of what’s studied by religious Jews today and which they hope is reinstated as soon as possible?
- Are they associating their beloved moral code with a Jewish culture that sees a woman’s voice as too intrinsically erotic for her to sing in front of a man?
- Are our ethics really based on the idea that if a man dies his brother should marry his widow but that we’re too licentious to do it properly these days so it’s out?
- Are our ethics based on not lending on interest (but only to the in-group)? Or about lending on interest as long as the proper circumventions have been set up?
- And certainly our sexual morality is definitely based on avoiding contact with menstruating women, including the specialised religious procedure of appropriately checking yourself with a cloth?
There are literally thousands of other examples that make it just as ridiculous.
3 comments ↓
I could be wrong on this but it strikes me that the Judeo part is included so that they can claim the Ten Commandments as a central part of a Christian legal system, as well as scripturally justify discrimination against gays.
It’s a phrase that has long confused me, and I’ve sometimes wondered what the point of its use is. It’s interesting to note that the phrase was initially a liberal idea, intended to be inclusive; quite the opposite of how it is used by cultural conservatives of the Religious Right these days.
The phrase was originally meant to counter anti-Semitism. One notes how it began to be used after the horror of Nazism, and of the Holocaust in particular, became widely known. But it is a phrase that has been hijacked, and the way it is used today does seem to be code for “white Fundamentalist Protestant Christianity”.
(I refuse to call it by their preferred term of Evangelical Christianity. The modern ‘Evangelical’ movement is Fundamentalist, and was originally, unabashedly, called so. The change in name was a concious and deliberate effort to improve the image in the wider public.
I also have a problem with the use of the phrase ‘anti-Semitism’. Most Jews are not Semitic, and not all Semitic people are Jewish. But it is the phrase that is used to express anti-Jewish sentiment, so I grudgingly employ it.)
It is a nice, lovely phrase that gives the impression of having abandoned the anti-Semitism of older Christianity. But it does hide an ugly idea. In the Christian Fundamentalist context, Jews are acceptable only because of what benefit it confers to Christian Fundamentalists. Namely, the Decalogue and the Temple Mount, and that is a horror of its own kind.
I guess maybe it is also a justification for highlighting the 10 commandments, although that doesn’t even make sense since most branches of Judaism don’t make nearly as much of a big deal of it as Christianity (in fact it’s probably one of the main Christian misconceptions about Judaism). It might even be also a case of Christianity trying to subsume Judaism and put it in the vocab it knows best.
On anti-Semitism the term Semitic tends to imply some stable Platonic “essence” of an ethnicity which is false anyway. But people use the word consistently so I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on what the “real” meaning of the word is. For instance it’s usually homophobes who object to the term saying that it means being *afraid* of homosexuals which they say they’re not. Actually the latest Jesus and Mo covered the term anti-Semitism very well: http://www.jesusandmo.net/2010/06/25/shem/
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