From One Paradigm to Another: The Jewish History of Race and Religion in International Law

Rabiat Akande's article, “An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law,” draws attention to the gap in frameworks of protection from religious discrimination, on the compelling rationale that much contemporary discrimination continues to work through racialization. And she provides a genealogy to show that this gap is not there by accident—it presupposes a specific set of histories that excluded the racialization of religion from protection, because such protection was devised to respond to some kinds of wrongs (especially those of concern to white Christians) rather than others. In this essay, I would like to draw out much more explicitly than she does Akande's momentous point that Jews—racialized by white Christian Europeans—once experienced and fought this very same protection gap. This story is of great historical interest in its own right, but it also redoubles the familiar lesson that colonialism never just ends. Instead, it endures in complex ways and facilitates ongoing cycles of suffering and unfreedom.