On Yom Kippur, in 1904 in London, say — or else in Montreal, in 1905, or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1900, or Warsaw, Poland, as late as 1927 — a group of young Jewish men gather at a tavern. It’s the holiest day of the year. They should be fasting and repenting. Instead they’re ordering vodka. They begin to get drunk. They call for bacon, proscribed at all times, and more vodka. They get drunker; they toast to reason; they roll cigarettes and mock the rabbis. And then it’s off to the Yom Kippur Ball.
Such anticlerical revolts were a notorious feature of life across the Jewish world in the early part of the last century. Beginning earlier, in the 1880s in London, irreligious Jews, usually on the political left, would organize carnivalesque inversions of the solemnities of Yom Kippur. Violence from offended religious Jews would sometimes ensue. As a New York Times headline put it in 1898, “Mob of Hebrews Again Attacks Diners … THE POLICE ARE KEPT BUSY … Crowd Could Not Stand the Sight of Their Co-Religionists Eating on the Day of Atonement.”
To their thousands of participants, these ritualized performances of emancipation seemed necessary — freedom from the old strictures and the old power structures required desecrations of the old symbols. Giving offense was felt to be a requirement of freedom. As Eddy Portnoy writes in Tablet, “Some people partook to spite a god they don’t believe in. Others to antagonize their parents. Still others to harass the religious establishment. In fact harassment may have been the biggest draw.”
But try it on a college campus now and you might get in trouble. That’s one of the lessons of Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder’s latest piece for The Review. Khalid and Snyder use a recent controversy over anticlerical art at Macalester College (a series of drawings called “Blasphemy,” by the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand, depicted a woman in traditional Muslim dress in erotic poses; some Muslim students said they suffered “harm"; the administration temporarily closed the exhibition) to pose an essential question: “What to do when a campus controversy results in conflicting claims of harm”? After all, other students felt harmed not by Talepasand’s irreligious work but by the conservative reaction to it. As one Iranian student told The Mac Weekly, “It was really hurtful to see my people die” — in the ongoing protests over the compulsory hijab in Iran, set off when Mahsa Amini was beaten to death for not wearing a hijab — “and then see someone who’s like, ‘But why are they protesting in this way? Why is someone making this art?’ It was really frustrating and felt very invalidating.”
The Macalester incident is especially interesting because, unlike the earlier Hamline controversy over a medieval devotional depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in an art-history class, it does indeed involve an irreligious, even antireligious, intention (you don’t call your drawing “Blasphemy” if you’re not hoping to ruffle some religious feathers). The Hamline case was about the right of scholarship and teaching to proceed unimpeded by the strictures of religious orthodoxy, and so cuts to the very heart of the academic enterprise. The Macalester case is about the right to forms of cultural expression — here, in the service of a political protest against the government of Iran — that offend religious sensibilities by design. Like the freethinking Jews desecrating Yom Kippur a century ago, Talepasand’s offensiveness makes an argument: Political emancipation necessitates anticlerical offense.
Such disputes have a long history. The Macalester administration’s deference to the wounded feelings of its religious students should be understood not just with respect to the newly sensitized campus and the impingements of what Khalid and Snyder call “DEI Inc.,” but also to a problem that has occupied secular or secularizing states since the 19th century: Are insults to religion a form of dignitary harm? And if so, are the irreligious similarly protected?
For most of the history of blasphemy prosecutions in the West, of course, “blasphemy” was not at all a question of how it made anyone feel. It was wrong per se — and it risked precipitating God’s wrath. That’s why they killed you for it. But by the time of the last execution for blasphemy in Britain (Thomas Aikenhead, in 1697), both elite and popular sentiment were turning against such punishments. Other parts of Europe took a little longer, and blasphemy remains a capital offense in some of the Muslim world. But in Britain at least, by the second decade of the 19th century, “the time had passed when the government claimed to prosecute because of the affront of blasphemy to God, religion, or Christianity,” as Leonard W. Levy puts it in Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie (1993). (I have relied on Levy throughout.) What prosecutions did occur were justified by the public good — namely, maintaining peace and order by preventing blasphemers from stripping the poor of “the consolations of religion.”
