In the summer of 1903, soon after the anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, the government of Haiti barred foreigners from retail trade and stood by during the repeated anti-Levantine pogroms that followed. For two years, local newspapers (including L’Antisyrien, created expressly for the purpose) inveighed against “Levantine monsters” and “descendants of Judas,” occasionally calling for “l’extirpation des Syriens.” Only pressure from foreign powers (whose representatives were themselves ambivalent about the Levantines) prevented the expulsion orders of March 1905 from taking full effect. About 900 refugees left the country.56 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Lebanese population of Freetown, Sierra Leone, spent eight weeks in 1919 under protective custody in the town hall and two other buildings as their property was being looted and destroyed. In the aftermath, the British Colonial Office considered wholesale deportation “in the interests of peace” but opted for continued protection. About twenty years later, the cultural commissar of an incoming prime minister of Thailand delivered a much publicized speech in which he referred to Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies and declared that “it was high time Siam considered dealing with their own Jews,” meaning ethnic Chinese (of whom he himself was one). As King Vajiravudh had written in a pamphlet entitled The Jews of the East, “in matters of money the Chinese are entirely devoid of morals and mercy. They will cheat you with a smile of satisfaction at their own perspicacity.”57
The nearly universal condemnation of the attempted “extirpation” of the Armenians and Assyrians in Turkey and the Jews and Gypsies in Europe did little to diminish this new anti-Mercurian zeal. In the newly independent African states, “Africanization” meant, among other things, discrimination against Indian and Lebanese entrepreneurs and civil servants. In Kenya, they were squeezed out as “Asians”; in Tanzania, as “capitalists”; and in both places, as “bloodsuckers” and “leeches.” In 1972, President Idi Amin of Uganda expelled about 70,000 Indians without their assets, telling them as they went that they had “no interest in this country beyond the aim of making as much profit as possible, and at all costs.” In 1982, a coup attempt in Nairobi was followed by a massive Indian pogrom, in which about five hundred shops were looted and at least twenty women were raped.58
In postcolonial Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese became the targets of similar nation-building efforts. In Thailand, they were excluded from twenty-seven occupations (1942), in Cambodia from eighteen (1957), and in the Philippines, relentless anti-“alien” legislation affected their ability to own or inherit certain assets and pursue most professions—while making their “alien” status much harder to escape. In 1959–60, President Sukarno’s ban on alien retail trade in Indonesia’s rural areas resulted in the hasty departure of about 130,000 Chinese, and in 1965–67, General Suharto’s campaign against the Communists was accompanied by massive anti-Chinese violence including large-scale massacres, expulsions, extortion, and legal discrimination. Like several other modern Mercurian communities, the Chinese of Southeast Asia were strongly overrepresented among Communists, as well as capitalists, and were often seen by some indigenous groups as the embodiment of all forms of cosmopolitan modernity. In 1969, anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur left nearly a thousand people dead; in 1975, Pol Pot’s entry into Phnom Penh led to the death of an estimated two hundred thousand Chinese (half the ethnic Chinese population, or about twice as high a death toll as among urban Khmers); and in 1978–79, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Chinese fled Vietnam for China as “boat people.” The end of the century brought the end of Indonesia’s president Suharto, who had closed down Chinese schools and banned the use of Chinese characters (except by one government-controlled newspaper), while relying on the financial support of Chinese-owned conglomerates. The popular demonstrations that brought down the regime culminated in huge anti-Chinese riots. According to one eyewitness account, “ ‘Serbu . . . serbu . . . serbu’ [attack], the massa [crowds] shouted. Thus, hundreds of people spontaneously moved to the shops. Windows and blockades were destroyed, and the looting began. The massa suddenly became crazy. After the goods were in their hands, the buildings and the occupants were set on fire. Girls were raped.” After two days of violence, about five thousand homes were burned down, more than 150 women gang-raped, and more than two thousand people killed.59
There is no word for “anti-Sinicism” in the English language, or indeed in any other language except Chinese (and even in Chinese, the term, paihua, is limited in use and not universally accepted). The most common way to describe the role—and the fate—of Indonesia’s Chinese is to call them “the Jews of Asia.” And probably the most appropriate English (French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian) name for what happened in Jakarta in May 1998 is “pogrom,” the Russian word for “slaughter,” “looting,” “urban riot,” “violent assault against a particular group,” which has been applied primarily to anti-Jewish violence. There was nothing unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe, but there is something remarkable about the way they have come to stand for service nomadism wherever it may be found. All Mercurians represented urban arts amid rural labors, and most scriptural Mercurians emerged as the primary beneficiaries and scapegoats of the city’s costly triumph, but only the Jews—the scriptural Mercurians of Europe—came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere. The Age of Universal Mercurianism became Jewish because it began in Europe.
Chapter 2
SWANN’S NOSE: THE JEWS AND OTHER MODERNS
The nose looked at the Major and knitted its eyebrows a little. “You are mistaken, my dear sir. I am entirely on my own.”
—N. V. Gogol, “The Nose”
The postexilic Jews were the Inadan of Europe, the Armenians of the North, the Parsis of the Christian world. They were quintessential, extraordinarily accomplished Mercurians because they practiced service nomadism for a long time and over a large territory, produced an elaborate ideological justification of the Mercurian way of life and its ultimate transcendence, and specialized in an extremely wide range of traditional service occupations from peddling and smithing to medicine and finance. They were internal strangers for all seasons, proven antipodes of all things Apollonian and Dionysian, practiced purveyors of “cleverness” in a great variety of forms and in all walks of life.
But they were not just very good at what they did. They were exceptional Mercurians because, in Christian Europe, they were at least as familiar as they were odd. The local Apollonians’ God, forefathers, and Scriptures were all Jewish, and the Jews’ greatest alleged crime—the reason for their Mercurian homelessness—was their rejection of a Jewish apostate from Judaism. Such symbiosis was not wholly unparalleled (in parts of Asia, all writing and learning, as well as service nomadism, were of Chinese origin), but probably nowhere were tribal exiles as much at home as Jews were in Europe. The Christian world began with the Jews, and it could not end without them.