ABSTRACT
Although, as mentioned above, pseudo-scientific arguments in anti-Semitic discourse had already reached China as early as at the end of the nineteenth century, they were not widely propounded until the New Culture Movement after 1915. Together with Western learning, the ‘science of race’ was introduced to a larger audience. The appropriation of the language of science, however, was limited to the educated sectors of the reading public. 1 While indigenous folk notions were revived through the selective use of new scientific vocabularies, elements of European anti-Semitic discourse were selectively introduced, mainly in order to accommodate the ideas and anxieties of the intellectuals. On the one hand, for example, the circumcised penis – one of the most crucial ‘racial’ marks of the Western image of the ‘male Jew’ 2 – was understood as a purely religious practice which had nothing to do with ‘racial inheritance’:
[Abraham] instituted a religious rule – circumcision – for his family as [a part] of the covenant with this one and only God. Circumcision is to cut off the male foreskin in order to abandon sexual desires … It was the opposite of the ancient Babylonian and Canaanites’ religious practices: they indulged in sexual immorality between male and female gods in their religious ceremonies. For this reason, promiscuity was very popular in the land of Canaan at that time. Abraham wondered how one could worship God in such an immoral human society: as the morality of God was higher than any human standard, one should therefore worship God from a higher level of morality. This was the reason for setting up the practice of circumcision. 3
