As the previous chapter showed, a key feature of this analysis has been a critique of racial essentialism, the idea that racial or ethnic groups have an ‘essence’ to which all members of the group do or should conform.

FREEZING DIFFERENCE: THE PROBLEM OF ‘ESSENCES’

We have seen that this essentialism can be used to stigmatise or to impose conformity within a group. As chapter 3 showed, Marr, Chamberlain and other anti-Semites regarded Jews as inherently evil or as threats. In their view this evil or threatening nature is a product of birth, just as a ‘black, brown or yellow skin’ is a permanent marker of inferiority purely as an accident of parentage. For the ideologues of the Israeli state and their allies – as well as many of today’s anti- Semites, of course – a particular brand of ethnic nationalism is ‘authentically’ Jewish and all other expressions of Jewishness are, at best, cheap imitations, or, at worst, frauds which pretend to be Jewish but are not.

The theorist and philosopher Judith Butler, in her attempt to develop a feminist alternative to essentialism, notes that it enables ‘the regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of coherence’. Essentialisms are ‘hostile to hybridity in that they promote policing the boundaries of identity and acts of exclusion and domination sanctioned by an appeal to an essential core of an individual’. Essentialism ignores or suppresses differences within identity groups and cultures and vastly exaggerates differences between them. It also denies the reality that all cultures are influenced by others and that the loudest advocates of cultural authenticity often promote practices that are borrowed.

One of the ironies that essentialism produces is that, while it sees all members of a group as one, it creates differences within the group because its adherents use it as a weapon to police the boundaries of what is acceptable within the group. Smearing Jewish opponents of the Israeli state as inauthentic Jews is a frequent tactic. Rudyard Kipling did not regard Indians who valued British education, culture and customs as really Indian; his Indian acolytes today use the ideology of Hindutva to stigmatise ‘self-hating’ Hindus. His fellow colonial ideologues who encouraged the colonised to become like the coloniser were not breaking with essentialism.