CW: racism

(This section is, admittedly, something of a tangent, and you can skip it for now, although a lot of this is is going to come back in discussion of Christian identification of the younger son with gentiles.)

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I suspect that this Christian obsession with the idea that Jews divided human beings into The Pure and The Impure is a case of projection.

Christian theology has, at times, posited that The Saved and The Unsaved are inherent, immutable categories that divide humanity (see, for example, Calvinism, the idea of predestination, the Elect, and so on). A full treatment of the relationship between Christianity and whiteness is certainly beyond the scope of this site, but I have included recommendations for further reading in the Learn More section.

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It may seem like quite a leap to associate the binary between the saved and the unsaved with racism, but they are intimately related. That division of humanity may have been the origin of modern conceptions of race and the idea that members of different races have inherent qualities so immutable that a single drop of blood can "corrupt" the purity of another. 

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In Blood: A Critique of Christianity, Gil Anidjar traces the beginnings of this line of thinking: 

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Along with the spread of Galenic medicine and the rise of Aristotelian, hematocentric embryological conceptions, the so-called Middle Ages witnessed the conjunction of medical knowledge with genealogical claims made on the basis of blood lines (together with the sedimentation of perceptions of kinship as “blood” ties—as if blood was the natural locus of genealogy), and the seeds of what was to become “scientific” racial thinking. What was occurring was the unification of thinking.

What was occurring was the unification of the entire Christian community into an immanent, organic whole: the community of blood. More directly relevant here is the fact that Christian blood became completely distinct, completely good, and, more importantly, completely pure—if also vulnerable (“If thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood …”). Announcing a similar shift in Christian attitudes toward money, blood—Christian blood—was thus transvalued. Whereas along with flesh and blood (carnal as opposed to spiritual), along with kinship and money, blood had been the object of an explicit taboo, it now became the bearer of a new, positive valuation. Blood became, as it were, the liquid ground or underground upon which would be drawn drastic and radical distinctions between bloods. And “beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.”

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Anidjar's writing can take some effort to unpack, but what he's saying here is that during the Middle Ages, blood became the metaphor by which people traced genealogical connection—that is, biological descent. The concept of kinship, once more ambiguous, focused on that biological descent. The understanding of kinship as ties of biological descent became an understanding of peoplehood as common biological descent: that is, the modern conception of "race."

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As the understanding of Christians as a people met the understanding of peoplehood as biological, as based on blood, Christian "blood" became pure, leaving non-Christian blood to become impure. 

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(Anidjar contrasts Jewish peoplehood in the Tanakh, figured as being as much about names and memory as biological relationships. After all, there are many descendants of Abraham who aren't included in the covenant community, just as there are members of other peoples who left Egypt with the Israelites and became part of the community, converts like Ruth, people who married in, and more.)

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For Anidjar, Christianity becomes a biological division between those who do and don't possess the right blood, a distinction that takes on both overt and deadly form in the Spanish limpieza de sangre ("cleanness of blood") statutes barring Christians with Jewish or Muslim ancestry from full participation in society. 

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Denise Buell, a religious studies professor at Williams College, and J. Kameron Carter, a religious studies professor at Indiana University, have written books (Why This New Race? and Race: A Theological Account, respectively) that form a mutually reinforcing reexamination of the relationship between Christianity and race. Carter argues that rather than Christianity being a tool of whiteness, whiteness is instead a product of Christianity. Buell argues that early Christianity already used racial/ethnic reasoning as a division between Christians and non-Christians.

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Background: Are Race and Racism "Modern"?

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Buell explains how contemporary scholarship almost universally accepts the idea that early Christians offered a universally accessible salvation that was free of ethnic/racial particularity:

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The almost unanimous view that early Christians defined themselves over and against ethnic or racial specificity (that is, as a movement open to all humans regardless of ethnicity and race) relies on an understanding of race/ethnicity as ascribed or fixed. Race and ethnicity are positioned as irrelevant to early Christian self-definition because they seem to contrast with universalism. In this way of thinking, racially or ethnically specific forms of Christianity may exist, but these variations are viewed either as incidental (not affecting a perceived underlying essence of Christianity) or as problematic (obstructing the achievement of a Christian ideal to dissolve racially or ethnically linked forms of religion and society). This interpretation of the relationship of race/ethnicity to Christianity was especially elaborated in modern historical contexts in light of arguments that race/ethnicity are natural, biological traits.

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This combines with the idea, which has also been almost universal for some time, that race and racism as we understand them today are products of modernity, so much so that stalwart cultural institutions like PBS can state it as fact:

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Race is a modern idea. Ancient societies, like the Greeks, did not divide people according to physical distinctions, but according to religion, status, class, even language. The English language didn't even have the word 'race' until it turns up in 1508 in a poem by William Dunbar referring to a line of kings.

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The association of race and modernity has probably been stated most famously and starkly by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989):

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As a conception of the world, and even more importantly as an effective instrument of political practice, racism is unthinkable without the advancement of modern science, modern technology and modern forms of state power. As such, racism is strictly a modern product. Modernity made racism possible.

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Even earlier, in 1944, Eric Williams, who would become the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, wrote in his doctoral dissertation (later published in 1968 as Capitalism and Slavery):

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Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.

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Devin Vartija, a history professor at Utrecht University, in a 2019 review of a collection of recent books on racism and modernity, concludes:

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Although it is likely untenable to limit racism, even narrowly defined, to the modern period alone, these studies demonstrate that a number of trends central to modernity created the conditions in which racism arguably became more systematic and widespread. The egalitarian claims of modern liberal democracies necessitated new and modern justifications of inequality, and the idea of a racial hierarchy served this purpose in many places around the world. The strong racial component of the transatlantic slave trade and the establishment of New World slave societies meant that discriminatory practices and extreme exploitation in the modern world have shaped processes of racialization.

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Even if we assume that a modern conception of race (generally classified as "scientific racism" based on the idea of genetic, or blood, inheritance, and dividing humanity up into a discrete number of races) is distinct from any attitudes that existed before modernity, it's hardly a stable concept, as Omar H. Ali notes on the Oxford University Press blog:

Race, being a social and political construct, and therefore unstable and inconsistent across time and location, has changed repeatedly. In the United States alone racial groupings as they appear in the US Census have changed over one dozen times since 1790. Moreover, what constituted “black” in one state changed when entering another state. Along these lines, someone considered “black” in the United States might be considered “white” in Brazil. Such racial distinctions—whether in North America, South America, Africa, Western Europe, South Asia, or East Asia—have had a profound, and often limiting, if not destructive impact on people’s lives.

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Among the consequences of what may be called scientific racism (including theories of monogenesis and polygenesis) has been the justification of violence against certain identifiable groups of people for economic exploitation—most notably, sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants in the Americas—centered on notions of “natural” inferiority. The “science” was expressed in medical terminology: during the nineteenth century enslaved African Americans were diagnosed, for instance, with “drapetomania,” a term coined by Virginian physician Samuel Cartwright (the “disease” of black slaves wanting to run away from captivity, with the prescription being whipping).

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To be clear, the reason the construct is unstable is because it's false: "scientific" racism is a disproven concept. Race is socially, not biologically, constructed, but even disproven, the concept continues to do deadly harm.

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However, despite prior consensus, the question of whether modern racism is actually modern is anything but settled. We may have not understood and articulated heritability in the genetic terminology we now use for it until the 1700s, let alone discovered genes until the 20th century, but that doesn't mean that nothing similar to our modern idea of "race" existed until then. 

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This position has been undergoing a reevaluation, and many scholars (including Anidjar, above) now consider it to have originated in the Middle Ages. As I noted above, the Spanish attitude toward Jews and Muslims and their Christian descendants, and even their name for it, evoking blood "purity", seems to align well with modern racism.

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Adam Hochman, a philosophy lecturer at Macquarie University, outlines the transition:

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In the late Middle Ages, ‘races’ were understood to be biological lineages formed through reproductive isolation. This sounds so similar to modern scientific conceptions of race that we might be tempted to conclude that later scientific approaches to race were not uniquely modern – that ‘race’ science just gave the existing race concept a scientific gloss. But there were some radical changes in how ‘race’ was understood during modernity. In medieval Spain, the Jews and the Moors were understood to be ‘races’, but nobody else appears to have been given this label. This changes with modernity.

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He concludes (noting in more detail, in a paper, that his titular question is actually six different questions with different answers):

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We can already see why race scholars have trouble locating the race concept historically. We tend to confuse scientific concepts of race with the concept of race itself. The concept of race is late-medieval, but race as a scientific concept – which brought the idea into contact with taxonomy and physical anthropology – is modern.

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To understand modern conceptions of race, and the argument that it is a modern phenomenon, we have to understand the concept of whiteness, which is generally conceived as the absence of race, as Trechter and Bucholtz explain in White Noise: Bringing Language into Whiteness Studies (2001):

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As a cultural sign, whiteness works much like a linguistic sign, taking its meaning from those surrounding categories to which it is structurally opposed, such as blackness, indigenousness, and foreignness. As an element in each of these binaries, however, whiteness is not opposite and equal, but opposite and unequal. It is in its unmarked status that the power of whiteness lies. Ideologically, whiteness is usually absence, not presence: the absence of culture and color. 
 

One we focus on whiteness, we start to see where the distinction between modernity and everything before it comes from. In a Guardian article on the history of whiteness, Robert P. Baird begins with the following lead-in:

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Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world.

That's true. But in understanding whiteness as the unmarked racial case, rather than focusing on whether the word "whiteness" is used, we can find it earlier. In Spain, the unmarked race was the Old Christians, with their purity of blood (the origin, in fact, of the idea of "blue blood"), as opposed to the racialized New Christians with their Muslim and Jewish ancestry, as in the Hochman quote above. 

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Prior to that, the unmarked case was, simply, "Christian."

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The usual argument is that what existed prior to modernity was xenophobia, in which everyone thought they and their city-state were normal and everyone else was weird and not to be trusted, as opposed to racism, which views race as the primary determinant of human capabilities and a source of inherent superiority or inferiority. Ali catalogues a few examples:

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Ancient and other pre-modern societies took difference in tribal affiliation, place of origin, language, class, religion, and foods eaten, as distinguishing factors among people: Egyptians during the New Kingdom depict four “races” in the Book of Gates, but presented these as geographic in origin, with each figure holding similar status; in China, distinctions were made between “raw” and “cooked” peoples; meanwhile, Aristotle in Politics argues that colder climates produced socially and politically inferior kinds of people in comparison to those who lived in temperate climates, such as his own Aegean. Centuries later, Muslims divided people into “believers” (People of the Book) and “nonbelievers” (kaffir), the latter implicitly viewed as morally inferior (now used as a racial slur in southeastern Africa); and in the Deccan, paintings from the early modern era depict dark-skinned Abyssinian elites in India being attended to by lighter-skinned pages, with class being the overriding distinction in that case.

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And it's worth noting that gnosticism, a powerful strain in early Christianity, posited the sort of inherent racial hierarchy we might recognize from modernity:

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For example, Clement of Alexandria claims that a rival teacher, Theodotos, holds the view that humans come in three types—the “naturally” saved (the “pneumatics,” named for their pneuma or spiritual element); those that have the free will to choose salvation or damnation (the “psychics,” named for their psychē or souls); and those that are “naturally” excluded from salvation (the “hylics,” named for their hylē or materiality).

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If these examples show anything, it's that ancient world racism/xenophobia wasn't monolithic. I think the main difference between this and modernity isn't the idea of racial characteristics as inherent, but rather the lack of whiteness or an analogue, both in the sense of hegemonic global power (Egyptians might think the Greeks were strange and not as good as Egyptians, and the Greeks were free to think the reverse right back, and they didn't operate in a global society that all agreed on the superiority of one or the other, let alone had power to enforce that hierarchy) and in the sense of being an unmarked self versus a racialized Other.