50 pages • 1 hour read
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
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Part 2, Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “History, Race, and Perception”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “1877: The Instability of Race”
Chapter 4 opens with Henry James’s The American (1877) and the novel’s “quiet” absorption in race: the narrative propels itself through a “physiognomical surveillance” of every face to reveal supposedly racial and hereditary origins. This begins the chapter’s focus on race not only as a conceptual category, but as a perceptual category.
Charles Dudley Warner’s two-volume sequence of his travels through Northern African was published in 1876 (Mummies and Moslems) and 1877 (In the Levant). Like James’s The American, Warner’s travel books are not only geographical but also “physiognomical tours.” Warner represents the Levant through the American “racial palimpsest” that is the result of the race-inscribing process of “conquest, enslavement, emancipation, and immigration” (145). For Warner, there is a binary of “civilization” and “barbarism” or “savagery,” with Europeans usually standing in for the civilized. Yet within this binary are shades and, thus, degrees of civilization and savagery. Warner, for example, also talks about white people as savages, too, when it comes to the Irish, Jews, and Greeks, all of whom are sometimes seen as white and sometimes as savage.
Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley sent his dispatches to the New York Herald from Africa in 1877 and had a large readership. These descriptions of “darkest Africa” appeared at the moment when Black citizenship was most ardently debated, with many arguing that African Americans enjoyed the civilization of the United States and were politically redeemed at the very moment that the South was moving out of Reconstruction and into the horrific violence of the Jim Crow era.
The year 1877 also was a time of frontier encounters with Indigenous people, Mexicans, and Asians. Alaska was a new frontier, and Indigenous people there were contrasted with the other Indigenous people within the more southern states. In the other states, there was discussion of the Osage and Sioux in the context of the consideration of the Indian Appropriation Bill. This same Congress was concerned with the Mexican border, and much of the rhetoric surrounding this discussion conflated Indigenous people and Mexicans as a homogenized group of savages in contrast to the homogenized group of whites.
The Chinese were another group of people about whom information was initially gleaned through imperialism. The largest US employer of Chinese labor at this time was the railroad. The House’s 1877 “Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration” vacillated between the nomenclature of “Asiatics” and “Caucasians” and “Chinese” and “whites.” The main point of the report was its insistence on the threat of immigrant Chinese labor to white workers, and within this report, there is a gradual move away from “Chinese” to the “ethnological category” Mongoloid. Many anti-Chinese activists were Irish, and many “less racist” treatments of the Chinese are grounded in nativist anti-Irish discourse: Nativists pitted the Irish against the Chinese, as the Irish occupied a certain whiteness that was still not complete.
Whether ongoing racism against African Americans, frontier violence against Indigenous people and Mexicans, reports from Africa, or anti-Chinese immigration, almost all discourse was grounded in a notion of whiteness as contrasted to all others. At the same time, immigrants from Europe who were not entirely seen as civilized, such as the Irish, were not considered white but Celts, as Jews were considered Hebrews. Nonetheless, these groups were generally considered white when contrasted with an obviously othered racial group.
In July 1877, the (Hilton) Saratoga Springs Grand Union Hotel refused Joseph Seligman, a Jewish immigrant, and this has been considered the first explicit, major anti-Semitic act in the United States. Another 1877 event was the trial of some members of the Irish group the Molly Maguires, who the press often described as foundationally savage, for murder. Whitenesses varied and were volatile.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews”
The racial perception of Jewishness was constantly changing in the United States. In the American colonies, the concept of Jewishness as an inferior difference can be seen in Peter Stuyvesant’s letter to the Dutch West India Company, explaining that Jews were told in a “friendly way” to depart New York and describing Jews as “a deceitful race” (171). Pre-Revolution, Jews were not generally seen as racially different but as religiously stunted. However, like other non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants who came in under the 1790 Naturalization Act, they increasingly were perceived as a distinct racial group from the mid- to late-19th century, especially as immigration moved away from Western European Jews to Yiddish speaking Eastern European Jews. Like other non-Anglo Saxon European immigrants, Jews came to be seen as Caucasian, however, by the mid-20th century.
Anti-Semitism in the United States takes on its own unique flavor but emerges out of European anti-Jewishness and cannot be separated from this European context. The question of Jewishness changes in an increasingly secular world and in the context of the Holocaust. The determination of Jewishness, then, comes down to physicality, hence the importance in various texts from this period and into the present moment on the notion of a “Jewish face.” This is important because these visible markers are attributed to internal, intellectual, and moral attributes. The history of racial Jewishness is not, however, entirely negative, and often refers to positive attributes.
Part 2 Analysis
Part 2 is much briefer than Part 1 (and Part 3), and its focus is more specific, both temporally and demographically. While Part 1 examines 175 years of the shifting category of whiteness, tracing its developmental exclusions and inclusions along the way, Part 2 takes up the question of how this instability manifests for Jews in one particular historical moment. Chapter 4 examines Shifting Constructions of Whiteness regarding Jewishness, specifically grounded in visual perceptions of Jewishness.
Developing the relation between race as a conceptual category and race as a perceptual category from Chapter 4, Jacobson explores the late-19th-century obsession within both “high” and “low” culture with the physical nature—and, specifically, physiognomy—of Jewishness. Chapter 5 analyzes a range of texts, many of which are travel narratives, that are constantly surveilling not only geographic but also facial landscapes that claim to offer visible “proof” of Jewishness.
Part II focuses, narrowly, on the “ethnoracial conceptions and perceptions of Jewishness” (176), or what Jacobson describes as answers to the question, “Is Jewishness a parcel of biological, heritable traits?” (176). These questions have been important for a range of reasons to both Jews and non-Jews. In addition, Chapter 5 examines how Jews have been considered both white and other and the historical terms surrounding their “probationary whiteness.”
Chapter 5 thus pays careful attention to terminology and nomenclature. Jacobson argues that discrepancies in terms that today we might consider interchangeable are not the result of mere sloppiness in the past and do not represent insignificant distinctions. Instead, movement between these terms reflects historically based racial paradigms. Notably, “Caucasian” and “Anglo-Saxon” are sometimes used interchangeably in 1877, despite Caucasian encompassing a much broader category. This points to the ways that Anglo-Saxon is becoming synecdoche for Caucasian. These inconsistencies must be attended to for the “fossilized power relationships embedded within them” (170) to show who is gaining Property-in-Whiteness through this shifting terminology.
Jacobson also pays particular attention, as he does earlier in the book, to specific events. The inherent instability of race becomes most apparent when an individual or group is removed from one racialized context and placed into a differently charged racialized context. Jacobson moves into the imaginative realm in asking the reader to consider Joseph Seligman removed from 1877 New York and relocated to post-Reconstruction 1877 New Orleans. Jewishness in New Orleans, where The Construction of the White/Black Binary was often blurred, situated Jews very differently than in New York. This attention to context, too, calls for reconsiderations of the South as always and only grounded in the binary of Black versus white, a blurring that in turn arguably makes New Orleans a more liberal place for Jews than New York in 1877.
At the same time, the trajectory for being folded into whiteness is panoramically unique for Jews among other not-quite-white groups, such as the Irish and the Eastern and Southern Europeans who immigrate in the 20th century. WWII marks a stark turning point for the question of Jewishness as a race and is a time when “‘racial’ Jewishness was still alive, yet a newly intolerable, conception” (176). Harkening back to The Jazz Singer, when blackface was the means by which the character Jackie Rabinowitz whitened himself conceptually and perceptually in the literal act of blackening himself (thus demonstrating that he was not, in fact, Black), Jewishness post-WWII is placed within a context that de-racializes lingering conceptions of it as a distinctive race, incorporating Jews into whiteness. Thus, post-WWII movies like The Ten Commandments and Exodus insist on removing representations of Jews from any kind of physiognomy that was so obsessively searched for and surveilled in 1877, so that Jews are represented in something akin to “white face.”
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