Vol. 25: “After all, it’s only an animal”: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Human-Animal Great Divide

In his Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno isolated the phrase “After all, it’s only an animal” as the telltale justification for the possibility of “pogroms” against “savages, blacks, Japanese [and] Jews” by its overcoding their human status with animality. Concomitant with rendering their human identity invisible is rendering their animal—their species—difference visible. The imputation of intersecting identifiers not only enacts both the subordination of those marked in the collective singular (the Jew, the Black, the Animal) and the dominance of the unmarked markers (Gentiles, Whites, Humans), it also (re)constructs the authority of hierarchical oppositions indexed by each identifier. Hence to analogize Jews or Blacks with animals not only maintains the hierarchical opposition of Jew and Gentile or Black and White, but that of Animal and Human as well. This work focuses upon several shared loci for the generation by Gentiles and Whites of bestial ascriptions of, respectively, Jews and Blacks: two, happenstances of geography and diet, that identify them with specific animals, and one, fears of their passing in the wake of their legal and political emancipations, that identifies them with “the Animal” in its visible varieties to render their respective differences as discernable and self-evident.