“Improbable Spectacles”: White Supremacy, Christian Hegemony, and the Dark Side of the Judenfrage

This article works to clarify the dynamics of Jews, white supremacy, and Christian hegemony in the United States by addressing Karl Marx’s attention to the “free states of North America” in his infamous review essay “On the Jewish Question” (1844). Marx’s review discloses both the Christian form of subjectivity universalized by political emancipation and the racial whiteness upon which Jewish emancipation rested in settler-colonial territory. Together, these paths untraveled but implied by Marx demonstrate the complementarity of Jewishness and whiteness in the racial imagination of US democracy, dismantle assumptions that antisemitism and white supremacy are necessarily isomorphic, and suggest how Jewish inclusion as citizens in the democratic state signals the constitution of a Judeo-Christian subject.