I was just reading chapter from Richard Sennett’s book Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, a chapter entitled “Fear of Touching”, which was about the creation of the Jewish ghetto (and whence the term originates) in renaissance Venice. It’s quite a fascinating history, and reminds us that anti Semitism has a long and varied history in Europe.

Some interesting tidbits: the Venetians of the time segregated the Jews into ghettos, and enforced a curfew on their activities, allowing them to mingle among the rest of the population during the day. However, they were forced to wear yellow when they were outside to mark their identities–and so were prostitutes/courtesans, though perhaps using a different piece of clothing. The net effect, however, was to connect, in the mind of Christian Venetians, prostitution, syphilis, moral debauchery, and Jewish otherness–with the moral and economic decay of the time. So don’t think that the Nazis were the first to make the Jews wear yellow badges and decry the moral despoilment of Christian civilization: and remember that the reason why the population of the Venetian ghettos grew so much, necessitating even more ghettos, was rooted firstly in the expulsion of Jews in 1492 and the pogroms against Jews in Germany around the same time, bringing both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews to the prosperous port of Venice.

Another tidbit: Christians once viewed circumcision as a barbaric act of self-mutilation. And now, of course, we consider it hygienic, good for the penis, good for those that the penis touches. Of course this is no argument for moral relativism: genital “mutilation”–you have to unpack the meaning of the word, and you have to figure out just what criteria you are going to judge the whole thing with. If the practice is painful and brings to tangible health (both mental and physical) benefits to the person , and is rooted in say, the pleasures or predilections of another group altogether (i.e., husbands, men, socially elite men), then this, like foot-binding, probably should be placed in the historical dustbin.

Last thing, and that which connects this post, as promised in its title, to Gaza and the “situation” there:
here’s a passage from the end of the chapter, where Sennett talks about the pogrom of 1636, where Christian mobs went in and stole books and relics, and set fire to buildings. Sennett quotes Leon Modena, a famous Jewish rabbi and scholar of the time, who, in his old age, witnesses these tragedies and records in a melancholy vein, these events in his memoirs. Sennett sums up by saying:

In this lament, we hear a larger echo than one man’s tragedy. A group identity forged by oppression remains in the hands of the oppressor. The geography of identity means the outsider always appears as an unreal human being in the landscape–like the Icarus who fell unremarked and unmourned to his death. And yet Jews had taken root in this oppressive landscape; it had become part of themselves. It can be no reproach to say that they had internalized the oppressor in making community out of a space of oppression. But this communal life proved to be, at best, a shield rather than a sword.

This paragraph immediately reminded me of the Gaza situation as as whole. So many of the people that I have met there have never had the chance to leave the place. Some might have stepped in Israel, some might have gone to Egypt–but in general, Gaza is a large-sized ghetto. Gazans that work in Israel return, after work, to Gaza–reminding one of the Lesotho/S. African situation as well. In any case, I think it vital for humanity to think on what Sennett has summed up here in relating oppression, group identity, and the geography of isolation and oppression. Wake up, Israel: is there any wonder, given the situation in Gaza over the last forty years, that one would see the rise of Hamas, or militancy in general? And military action–bombings–of Gaza can only be predicated on the otherness of the people being bombed–their unreality as human beings. They must be reduced to niggers and gooks, terrorists, cockroaches, what have you. They cannot be allowed to say or plead, as Shylock did in The Merchant of Venice, for our common humanity–because that would just make eliminating them much more of a problem. Especially in a purported democracy with a free and open press.

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

(from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)