Protoracism

This protoracism, however, was only one component of early German romanticism; of equal importance, in the subtext of much of the legendary material collected and published during the period around 1800, are religious devotion (antirationalist and proclerical), barter economies (anticapitalist), loyalty to monarchs and nobles (antidemocratic), and nationalistic views of a new Germany restored to its lost unity, military might, and territorial hegemony.

Following Balibar's diagnosis, I argue here that Shakespeare's Othello provides a canonical articulation of this protoracism insofar as the play fashions the Muslim in the image of the Jew according to the protocols of Pauline exegesis; in Balibar's terms, Othello stages a "culturalist" rather than a biologistic ordering of intergroup relations, a religiously grounded discourse barely visible from the vantage point of the modern racial theories that have since displaced it, yet intermittently readable in the strange light of the neoracism that has emerged in recent years.

Like the Jews, the Africans were subjects of a religious protoracism, since even the Christians among them were under suspicion for being “of African blood.”