Science Fiction, anti-Semitism and Cultural Norms
Paul Sturtevant is one of those pseudo-intellectual internet dweebs that academic historians like myself often end up having to answer by proxy, because of the stuff that undergraduate students imbibe from their high school tutors and the internet. He is rather like the ‘Ancient Aliens’ crowd in that he writes about a specialist discipline – where public knowledge of the subject is absolutely minimal - within academia that deals with the broadly-defined medieval period in history aka medievalism.
His modus operandi is to present himself as a pioneering scholar of the medieval period – rather a leftist with an agenda and a PhD who cannot get an academic appointment (he is currently working as a ‘Visitor Research Specialist’ for the Smithsonian) – (1) and to write god awful screeds recycling the claims of Marxists from the 1950s-1960s with a new modern veneer.
Examples of this pseudo-intellectual clap-trap peddled by Sturtevant is his claim that people in the medieval period didn’t recognize race but used class instead. (2) In order to defend the portrayal of Negroes as medieval European knights by ‘tearing down whiteness’ in the vein of Noel Ignatiev and Susan Sontag. (3)
Now the Washington Post – that bastion of free market capitalism combined with superstitious cultural Marxism – has decided that Sturtevant – an avowed leftist – should be allowed to publish opinion pieces about computer games and science fiction in general. Sturtevant certainly fits the bill as he is a morbidly obese nerd with the social and intellectual skills of an amoeba.
In an article titled ‘Science Fiction’s anti-Semitism Problem’ Sturtevant writes that:
‘Like many other gamers, last week I fired up “No Man’s Sky” again. It is a massively popular and hugely ambitious science-fiction game. In it, you explore a vast galaxy, discover new planets and species, and uncover the mysteries of the universe.
Along the way, you encounter three sentient alien species: the scientific Korvax, the martial Vy’keen and the greedy Gek.
The Gek are, in essence, space Jews.
They are a species of short, hook nosed humanoid creatures with shrill voices — and sometimes hats and glasses. And where the Korvax are logical robots and the Vy’keen are proud warriors, the Gek are scheming capitalists.
In short, these characters are yet another retread of a tired, anti-Semitic stereotype given a sci-fi veneer. This is, unfortunately, fairly common for speculative fiction: Stereotyped crypto-Jews have long filled the fantasy and science-fiction genres — from J.K. Rowling’s goblins to Watto in “Star Wars” to the dwarves in “The Hobbit.”’ (4)
The problem with Sturtevant’s ‘reasoning’ here is that he associates the reproduction of cultural norms as being covert expressions of ‘anti-Semitism’. As opposed to cultural norms being reflections of empirical reality – jews really do have hooked noses, tend to be short and have an inordinate obsession with money – Sturtevant implies that cultural norms are created as either a deliberate push to create these via a political actor or actors or created in a mysterious process of cultural valuation that takes place in an intellectual vacuum.
It is indeed strange that Sturtevant – who appears to believe in some form of materialism – would invoke magical thinking to ‘explain’ why accepted cultural norms are really ‘a reflection of social prejudice’ rather than a reflection of empirical reality.
The latter makes a lot more sense after all, because we do not see Mormons as being labelled as inveterate political conspirators and subversives today. Even though there was a time in the nineteenth century that the cultural norms did label the Mormons this way, because this was exactly what they were doing and which caused the Mormon Wars of 1838,1844-1846 and 1857-1858.
Yet when the Mormons surrendered to the United States and – ostensibly at least – stopped their quest for independence and statehood. The cultural norm faded away and died. Yet this has not happened with the jews and the stereotype of a jew being a short person with a hooked nose and an unusual obsession with money.
How absurd is it to contend that ‘social prejudice’ against Mormons would wither away but yet ‘social prejudice’ against the jews would not. If it is truly irrational and not based upon empirical reality then both should disappear or remain not one disappear and one remain. Looking at his issue empirically explains that simple reality by looking to the discipline of history as well as at current affairs and that simply tells us that the Mormons changed their ways and therefore lost their stereotype. However the jews did not and retained theirs.
Sturtevant later blathers on about ‘unconscious bias’ – a concept which is remarkably unscientific and distinctly Freudian – as the medium for this ‘covert expression’ of ‘anti-Semitism’. What this forgets of course is you cannot make up something and then have it continually reinforced by experience, which is the assumption that underlies the idea of unconscious bias inegalitarian thought. In thought that deals in empirical reality like racialism it is explained far more simply by the results of two scientific disciplines: evolutionary psychology and socio-biology.
Sturtevant by contrast claims that:
‘Creating characters that embody anti-Semitic stereotypes is not always an expression of overt bias. Rather, these characters may have been unwittingly developed from caricatures drawn from pervasive stereotypes about Jews. These caricatures have been remixed and ingrained in popular culture over centuries from sources as varied as “The Merchant of Venice,” “Candide” and “Oliver Twist.”
In short, these modern creators may have reproduced anti-Semitic caricatures despite, rather than because of, their intentions.’
This is typical lazy thinking by Sturtevant that ironically relies on modern cultural norms rather than refocusing the question back into the empirical realities of the process of science. He in essence claims that these ‘stereotypes’ are ‘reinforced’ by literary creations and that this explains the transmission of such cultural norms from the medieval period to the present.
The problems with this assertion are obvious however.
Most people throughout said period didn’t read and even if we assume that the literary stereotype was distributed orally.
Then Sturtevant is guilty of a wholesale misrepresentation of the history of literature.
As for every ‘Oliver Twist’ there is a ‘Daniel Deronda’, for every ‘Merchant of Venice’ there is a ‘Hebrew Melodies’ and for every ‘Candide’ there is a ‘Ulysses’.
So why do the negative stereotypes get transmitted and not the positive ones?
The reality is simple enough in so far as empirical reality sorts the realistic from unrealistic. If we take the example of the Mormons again. The charges of political subversion laid against them from the 1830s to the 1860s were realistic, because we know from historical research that this was indeed true. Portrayals of the Mormons as patriotic citizens of the United States were unrealistic by dint of the same facts.
Therefore the feeling on the street – which is often equivalent to the empirical reality in the context of stereotypes – was that the stereotype of the Mormon as a political subversive was realistic and thus transmitted. While the stereotype of the Mormon as a patriotic citizen was unrealistic and therefore not transmitted.
If we but apply that same logic to the jews. It results in the simple explanation that civilizations have – since the earliest written records – seen the most realistic stereotype of the jew as being the negative one based upon empirical reality and experience, while the positive stereotypes are judged unrealistic and in concord with empirical reality and experience.
Doesn’t this make a lot more sense than facile claims that stereotypes persist because they are ‘reinforced prejudice’ made from the dual position of literary ignorance and ideological fervour?
Such ignorance and ideology is beautifully demonstrated when Sturtevant writes that:
‘The “greedy Jew” stereotype began in the 11th and 12th centuries as new Jewish communities sprung up across Western Europe. These communities were filled with migrant professionals from the more-advanced economies to the south and east.
Their experience, coupled with Jewish cultural, religious and educational traditions, made them very well suited to work at the apex of the developing economies of their new homelands.’
This is not only an absurd claim to make. It is also wrong, because the ‘greedy jew’ stereotype can be found in both the Written Torah – when the jews ‘are gifted’ the entire wealth of Pharaoh in Exodus and then Pharaoh ‘changes his mind’ and pursues them with his army - and in classical sources such as Cicero’s ‘Pro Flacco’ (circa 63 B.C.) (5) and the Emperor Claudius’ letter to the jews of Alexandria in 41 A.D. (6)
Even in Christian sources we find the same ‘greedy jew’ stereotype in the writings of Bishop Agobard of Lyon in the 9thCentury among others. Nor does Sturtevant mention the established fact that jews engaged in coin-clipping among other things during the medieval period, (7) which points us back to the fact that stereotype that continue to be used have to be realistic and match empirical reality and experience.
It is also worth noting that Sturtevant borders on saying something ‘socially prejudiced’ when he claims – in effect – that jews are especially suited by their ‘cultural, religious and educational traditions’ to mercantile endeavours. He is basically claiming that jews are obsessed with money because they are taught to be by their culture, religion and education system.
So who is using ‘anti-Semitic stereotypes’ now?
He continues by prating that:
‘Then the church banned Christians from collecting interest on loans to other Christians. Jews, however, were not placed under this restriction. Christians, especially aristocrats, were enthusiastic customers of Jewish moneylenders because loans are a necessary part of any advanced economy. But this created animosity; moneylenders are rarely popular.
Thus, the “greedy Jew” stereotype was born. This was made even worse because in many places, Jews were restricted from many other professions by the discriminatory emerging guild system. And so this stereotype is deeply ironic. Jews were encouraged, then forced, to be moneylenders, and ultimately hated for lending money.’
Yet what Sturtevant fails to mention is that there were many non-jewish bankers – such as the 14th to 17th century Fugger family – who – while no one ever likes paying money back – have not been subject to the same negative stereotypes as the jewish moneylenders.
Why is that?
Well firstly jews lent to all sections of society, (8) secondly Christian were not infrequently forced by the authorities to takeout loans with the jews, (9) thirdly the jews engaged in extreme debt collection practices based largely upon their status as being ‘owned’ by the monarch (10) and these business practices also predate Christianity as seen by combining the commentary of Cicero and the Emperor Claudius with Suetoninus’ comments about the successful jewish demands from Julius Caesar and Augustus for special economic privileges and rights.
So in other words; it has nothing to do with the jews being forced into anything by Christians, but is rather is likely to because by the empirical reality and experience of the people at large across multiple civilizations and religious confessions reinforcing and proving the truth of the ‘greedy jew’ negative stereotype.
The failure of Sturtevant’s ideological rationalization... sorry ‘scholarly explanation’... is evident when he writes that:
‘Over the 18th and 19th centuries, Jews fought for and achieved more rights and freedoms, squashing many medieval stereotypes. But economic anti-Semitism remained. In fact, as Europe industrialized and adjusted to a global market economy, the myth of Jewish greed metastasized into the myth of the “Jewish world conspiracy,” wherein Jews are not just greedy, they diabolically control the entire economy.’
One wonders how the other stereotypes about jews were ‘squashed’– and Sturtevant is wrong because they weren’t ‘squashed’ in sense of debunked but rather forcibly suppressed – but the ‘myth of jewish greed’ was not. Sturtevant has no real answer for why this was the case if we accept his bald-faced lie pretending to be ‘historical scholarship’ as true for a moment. All he claims is that ‘social prejudice’ breeds more ‘social prejudice’ via the self-sustaining mechanism of confirmation bias. Yet he doesn’t actually explain this mechanism beyond claiming that this ‘social prejudice’ exists and ignoring why said ‘social prejudice’ began in the first place and why it just so happened that one stereotype about the jews kept going so strong while others have disappeared.
Sturtevant then warbles in his typical clueless vein that:
‘This economic prejudice was weaponized by the Nazi regime. Propaganda films like “Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew)”regularly blamed supposed Jewish manipulation for the economic crisis that gripped Germany.’
Now I have addressed this idea of the ‘weaponization of economic prejudice’ before in my article on the international jewish boycott of Germany in 1933 that triggered German reprisals of the famous anti-jewish boycotts of that year. Sturtevant has clearly also never watched ‘Der Ewige Jude’ (1940) since the film doesn’t actually ‘blame jews for the economic crisis that gripped Germany’ but rather discusses the fact that jews were involved in a series of high-profile financial scandals during the Weimar Republic and that these contributed to the economic situation.
These are simply facts not so-called ‘social prejudice’.
This is Sturtevant’s problem: what he writes denies logic and know facts and instead presents irrational ideological claims as if they were ‘deep answers’.
References
(1) https://www.publicmedievalist.com/about-us/public-medievalist-staff/
(2) https://www.publicmedievalist.com/medieval-people-racist/
(3) https://www.publicmedievalist.com/race-racism-middle-ages-tearing-whites-medieval-world/
(4) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/08/14/science-fictions-anti-semitism-problem/?utm_term=.f2325423cf3b
(5) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/cicero-on-the-jews
(6) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-emperor-claudius-on-the-jews
(7) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-coin-clipping-in-medieval
(8) Christopher Dyer, 2002, ‘Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850 – 1520’, 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, p. 178; Rodney Hilton, 1975, 'The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 183
(9) Dyer, Op. Cit., p. 223; Robert Chazan, 2006, 'The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000-1500', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 165
(10) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-the-german-boycott