Of Fear and Strangers : The Forgotten Histories of Xenophobia

 

The most influential physician to ever preside over Western medicine observed that a man bitten by a rabid dog developed a raving form of madness. During the second century of the Roman Empire, Claudius Galenus wrote that “hydrophobia” was heralded by a frothing at the mouth and a bizarre aversion to water. So the “phobias” in medicine began.
 
Soon after the French Revolution, an entirely new class of phobic troubles appeared. During the Jacobin Terror, Philippe Pinel, the French founder of “mental medicine,” noted that some of his traumatized patients suffered from a nervous state akin to canine madness. It too was marked by a foaming fear, but his patients’ troubles were preceded not by a dog bite but rather by a sudden, violent emotion. Alienists began to follow the influential Dr. Pinel and refer to these patients, with their agitation, shortness of breath, and tight throats, as cases of “nervous hydrophobia.”
 
That was the first crack. After 1850, as more nervous specialists left the hospitals and opened outpatient offices, they happened upon many outwardly normal citizens who secretly suffered from what was called, among other things, anxiety, angst, obsessions, morbid fears, and deliriums of doubt. In 1871 phobia would be added to that list, when the German alienist Carl Westphal wrote of a gentleman who came to him with an overwhelming terror of open spaces. The doctor suggested that this state was best named by combining the Greek word phobos with the prefix agora, the place of public assembly in ancient Athens. And so “agoraphobia” was born.
 
A swarm of phobias seemed to menace the populace. Doctors reported cases of zoophobia, hematophobia, toxophobia, syphilophobia, monophobia, and phobophobia, the fear of being frightened. In this gathering of great frights, the neo-​Grecian compound term “xenophobia” made its debut. Roget’s Thesaurus listed “xenophobia” as a synonym for “repugnance” and cross-​referenced it with “hydrophobia” and “canine madness.” Its cause—​a violent shock or some strange inheritance—​never was clear. Still, the term found its way into Thomas Stedman’s influential medical dictionary, defined as the “morbid dread of meeting strangers.”
 
By 1900 skeptics had begun to roll their eyes at this naming furor. Either phobias were a new plague, some said, or the physicians themselves were worked up into some frenzy. When a patient presented with a new dread, someone grabbed hold of a fancy prefix, added “phobia,” and presto, a malady was born. One commentator dryly noted that the number of human phobias seemed limited only by the Greek dictionary. He was being kind. There were also lots of choices from Latin.
 
 As xenophobia splashed and then sank into medical obscurity, it simultaneously bobbed up within political discourse. Around 1880 anonymous journalists in the British and French press began to describe an extreme trouble called xenophobia or xénophobie. From London and Paris, this expression spread, carried forth during the heyday of newspaper publishing.
 
During the last years of the nineteenth century, readership skyrocketed as hundreds of dailies and weeklies sprang up, thanks to increased literacy, decreased censorship, technical advances in printing, and telegraphic lines that ran under oceans. Centralized press agencies like Reuters emerged as nodal points for gathering and dispersing stories from abroad. During this fertile age for print journalism, xénos was linked to phobos, in a manner that might seem to be associated with medicine and science, but in reality had little relation to them. Instead, it made sense of a new kind of political antipathy, not so much the religious zealotry of earlier times, but a malady called “nationalism.”
 
After the American and French revolutions, as well as the Napoleonic wars, many nineteenth-​century Western nations gradually altered their makeup. Once feudal European states secularized and adopted more republican values, by which sovereignty was vested in the people. Weakened traditional elites and religious authorities, once wielding the crown and cross, could no longer as effectively use such time-​honored methods to ensure social order. Into this vacuum, nationalism emerged with different self-​defining strategies intended to cement the commitment of the citizenry.
 
A state is a bounded geographic and political entity, but a nation may be little more than a shared group of ideas. While these might seem parochial, overvalued, or arbitrary, a firm commitment to them was lauded by that Counter-​Enlightenment thinker, Johann Gottfried von Herder. Against the universal principles carried forth by Napoleon’s invading armies into Germanic lands, against abstractions like liberty, fraternity, and equality, this friend of Goethe sought to protect, preserve, and invest pride in one’s own nation and its mother tongue. A brilliant, wide-​ranging thinker whose work on linguistics and anthropology would be seminal, Herder took a stand for the local cultures that he believed were menaced by French edicts. He defended the Germanic adaptations and solutions that made up their culture. Thus for Herder, national identity was founded not on natural law, philosophy, or ethics, but rather on history. It took shape from common customs and beliefs, and a body of defining stories. National unity and pride were supported by public monuments, the hoopla of rousing anthems, flags, festivals, shrines to the dead, and commemorative holidays. All this boosted the nation as the focus of individual loyalty and sacrifice.
 
 Nationalism also found its way into the dark political arts. By undercutting the universality of Enlightenment principles, nationalism could be used to justify oppression, inequality, and division, and it had the power to unleash conflict based on hyped-​up differences with other nations. That was a chronic problem but also an advantage, since national enemies made even a quarrelsome, divided community sacrifice their young, pay their taxes, and remain closely united. Such rivals were best if irredeemable, thus available to be invoked at any time. Newly constructed national identities were especially likely to stabilize themselves by pitting a “unique” national character, just the way we are and always have been, against those of a rival. Minor discrepancies could be made immutable, essential. Ancient massacres and battles could be cultivated, taught to the young, and repeated in days of remembrance. Old wounds could be pried open and never allowed to heal.
 
Such nationalist strategies proved to be potent, so much so that they risked spiraling out of control. Alarmed, commentators began to discuss the risk of stoking these embers. Take, for example, the burning hatred that existed between the British and the French. At war on and off for five hundred years, these nations during the nineteenth century were said to be ill. Londoners worried that France harbored many “Anglophobiacs” or “Anglophobists.” On other side of the Channel, French journalists commented on their readers’ ravenous appetite for anything that fed their “Anglophobia.” They wondered if the British public had equally succumbed to “Francophobes.”
 
Patriotic zealotry began to be referred to as a “phobia.” Given its position as the most dominant power on the globe, Great Britain was said to be the most popular target for such a wild animus. By 1870 the field of national phobias had grown more crowded. Heated rivalries led journalists, scholars, and diplomats to routinely claim that fair-​minded, rational political dialogue had been supplanted by “Francophobia,” “Germanophobia,” and “Russophobia,” not to mention “Austrophobia,” “Sinophobia,” and “Turkophobia.” In addition, there was a phobia for that supposed nation of wanderers, a “Judeophobia” or “Hebrewphobia.”
 
As discussions of national prejudices mounted, an even more menacing distemper stepped forward. Some nations were so deeply hostile to rivals that they targeted all other nations. “Xenophobia” described such an overheated hatred. Extreme but mercifully rare, “xenophobia” was the most vicious form of ultranationalism. An early, revealing use of this anonymously coined term occurred in 1880 during a visit to London by the ardent Frenchman Ernest Renan.

 
Born in 1823, Renan was a diligent, provincial boy who seemed headed for the priesthood. He excelled in his seminary studies and developed a passion for the Hebrew language, which he told his mother “holds the greatest charm for me.” He expanded his study to other Semitic languages at the Collège de France and became deeply immersed in philology. This, however, led to a profound crisis. Renan was dismayed to find that mistranslations of Hebrew guided certain matters of Catholic faith. Stung and shocked, the sincere youth forever renounced the church. As a friend wryly observed, he “gambled his life on a comma.”
 
Renan turned his considerable energies to the Near East, Semitic languages, and the history of religion. In 1855 his General History of the Semitic Languages led him to offer a conclusion not just about these languages but about the “races” that created them. With evident pride, he proclaimed: “I am then the first to recognize that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-​European race, actually represents an inferior combination of human nature.” For that achievement, he would also be dubbed the first “anti-​Semite.”
 
Five years later, the French government sent Renan on an archaeological expedition to Lebanon, a trip he undertook with his wife and his sister Henriette. The pilgrimage was life-​altering. Inspired by the sights and smells of the Holy Land, Renan began to write a popular history of Jesus Christ. The project, though, was tinged with tragedy, for the originator of this idea, his sister, succumbed to malaria in the seaside town of Amchit. After returning to France, Renan published his biography of Christ, that “incomparable man.” Man? His Life of Jesus was swiftly denounced by the church, and following that well-​worn path, it became a bestseller.
 
After France’s humiliating loss to the Prussians in 1871 and the chaotic rise and fall of the Paris Commune, the once liberal Renan became a devout nationalist, an authoritarian, and an advocate of foreign conquest. France must become a colonial power, he declared, or it would descend into civil war. This was the Ernest Renan who arrived in London to deliver the Hibbert Lectures a decade later. By then, the traditional enemy of the English, the French, had established an empire that was growing at a staggering rate, and Ernest Renan was rightly considered a zealous nationalist.
 
Despite all that, Renan’s lectures in London were mobbed. To win the crowd over, he used flattery, telling them that England had established the one dogma that “our society” should always hold: “Liberty, respect for the mind.” He then launched into his history of Christianity, singing the praises of the Savior who rose above Judaism—​a religion far too “primitive” to ever become global. He piled contempt onto Rome and the Pope. And then he departed, bathed in British adulation. The Daily News, stunned by Renan’s popularity on British soil, called it a “xenomania.” This stance, they added in what may have been a dig at the French, was always preferable to “xenophobia, which is of necessity and always unintelligent.”
 
Xenophobia, for some, seemed to be nationalism gone utterly mad. Or was it the foundation beneath all the specific national biases? The French Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, a future Noble Peace Prize winner, believed it was the latter. He wrote: “Before being Germanophobe,” the warmongers “were Anglophobe and Russophobe,” that is, always “xenophobe or demophobe.”
 
Such irrational loathing was not unlike those described by the medical men, only this time the illness struck whole nations. If the nation offered a powerful framework for identity, ​if it puffed itself up with ceremonies and song, it also might whip up fright and dislike for foreign nations, perhaps all other nations.
 
One of the most influential thinkers to contemplate such risks was none other than the same Ernest Renan. In 1882 at the Sorbonne, he delivered a widely circulated lecture entitled “What is a Nation?” While some equated the nation with one’s bloodline and race, Renan—​despite his own bigotry—​rejected this as absurd. What race made up France? Celtic, Iberic, and Germanic, and more. No, the most noble nations were of mixed heritage and “mixed blood.” Purity of religion, ethnicity, and language defined no nation. Large, successful nations glued together multitudes.
 
Across the Atlantic, the African American orator extraordinaire Frederick Douglass had made a similar case for a “composite nation,” one whose citizenry included Chinese immigrants, with “the negro, mulatto, and Latin races,” offering all full citizenship and benefiting as a result. However, in such a composite, what was the glue that held everyone together? If states had geographic borders, what boundaries defined a nation? Nations, Renan declared, were not racial or hereditary, but man-​made. A national community bonded over a set of remembrances but, perhaps more importantly, shared amnesias. Everyone would thereby inhabit the same memory-​scape.
 
For Renan, making a nation required a violent relation to one’s past. Continuities must be broken, failures erased, and false connections inserted so as to serve the nation, this dreamed-​up creation. Citizens were emboldened by accounts that claimed so-​called victims of their nation’s actions never existed or deserved what they got. For Renan, that also meant that shifting the boundaries of memory could be political dynamite. Prior members of the nation might suddenly seem like outsiders. Forgotten actions might bring to light injustice or illegitimate acts. In a flash, brothers might seem like foreigners, allies like enemies, and supposed enemies not so at all.
 
 Excerpted from Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia. By George Makari. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2021.
 
A Malady Called Nationalism. By George Makari. Lapham’s Quarterly, September 15, 2021.

No one remembers  Jean Martin de Saintours. Though his aspirations were at times grand, he lived out his days scuttling between France and England, confined to a life of intellectual hard labor as a translator and stenographer. And yet I found him at the center of a storm that crashed over much of the globe, and now seems to be doing so again.
 
Five years ago, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, I set out in search of the origins of the word “xenophobia.” Its birthplace seemed obvious. In ancient Greece, it was said, a wise man combined “xénos” — which connoted both stranger and guest — with “phobos,” their word for fear. Since xenophobia was an eternal and ubiquitous human problem, it made sense that its origins lay near the start of Western civilization, when some Aristotle-like figure opened his eyes and spotted it before him.
 
All that, I discovered, was nonsense. The ancient Greeks — or the written record we have of them — never employed this term. Instead, in a historical moment with similarities to our own, the word emerged alongside troubles fostered by rapid globalization. And lingering by the starting blocks, off to the side, stood Jean Martin de Saintours.
 
 
Around 1880, a number of influential psychiatrists concluded that irrational fears constituted discrete illnesses. In a flash, French, German, British, and American doctors proposed dozens of medical “phobias.” First came claustrophobia and agoraphobia, then zoophobia, hematophobia, toxophobia, syphilophobia, monophobia, and phobophobia, the fear of being frightened. In this gathering of great frights, the neo-Grecian compound term “xenophobia” made its first, fleeting appearance.
 
As that coinage splashed and then sank into scientific obscurity, another simultaneously bobbed up in fin-de-siècle French and British newspapers. During this fertile age for print journalism, xénos was linked to phobos to describe an extreme form of nationalism. Political commentators worried that modern nation-states, stripped of Crown and Cross, now sought to maintain internal unity by stoking hatred for a common enemy. “Anglophobia,” for example, served to unite disparate members of a rival nation, but it might also provoke constant bloodshed. The worst form of this trouble, an expert advised, occurred in wobbly places like Romania, where a fear and hatred of all nations — xenophobia — might take root. This extravagant claim — really, all nations? — found few defenders.
 
The history of ideas is filled with such half-run races in which, after a short burst, the explanatory power and relevance of a notion fades and collapses. However, when the historical context shifts, that concept may find new purpose and re-emerge as the missing piece of a newly assembled puzzle.
 
 
On April 14, 1900, the Exposition Universelle in Paris threw open its doors to adoring crowds. Millions of visitors toured its marvels, which included ethnological villages and human zoos stocked with members of far-off tribes like the Malagasy from Madagascar and the Dahomean from West Africa. A poster depicted Arabs and Asians at the foot of a heavenly, white goddess. Thanks to Western technology and industrial wealth, it seemed, the entire world was coming together.
 
Alongside these festive reports, French newspapers featured a more disturbing story, one of things falling apart. On July 17, 1900, Le Constitutionnel ran a short, unsigned dispatch from Shanghai telling of a new “xénophobe” movement in northern China. Three days later, Georges Clemenceau’s left-wing paper, La Justice, picked up the story and used that term. Next, it showed up in L’Univers, then one of the most literary papers, Le Journal. As fall arrived, La Presse featured a headline warning of China’s xenophobia, and by October, Le Figaro and Le Matin assumed readers knew exactly what was meant when they denounced Chinese “xénophobes.” In less than a year, xénophobe and xénophobie had become part of the French lexicon.
 
Parisians learned that the trouble with “les xénophobes” commenced in a corner of northern China during the winter of 1899. Amid a drought, a group of young Chinese men united the traditions of mass possession from the Spirit Boxers with the invulnerability rituals and beliefs of the Big Sword Society. Using spells, swallowed charms, deep breathing, and martial arts, they came to believe themselves invulnerable to swords and bullets. These “Yihequan,” or “Boxers United in Righteousness,” adopted a simple slogan: “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners.”
 
Two years earlier, a pair of German missionaries had been killed, a harbinger of what was to come. On December 31, 1899, a British evangelist was murdered, followed by a group of four French and Belgian engineers. As the disparate national identities of the victims made clear, the Boxers were not specifically Anglophobic, Francophobic, or Germanophobic. Their country was occupied by many foreign powers, and they declared war on all of them. Over the next months, as tension built, more skirmishes were reported, and then, almost overnight, thousands of Boxers swarmed the streets, eager to burn down Western churches and chase down immigrants. In the rioting, nearly 200 non-Chinese were murdered.
 
The Boxers’ revolt followed decades of furious globalization. During the second half of the 19th century, a tidal wave of Western expansion was driven by demographic pressures at home and new advances like steam power, the telegraph, and medicines like quinine. A grand reunion of human tribes thus began, cheered on by some as the dawn of a universal age. Beneath the grandeur of such proclamations, however, another reality lurked. International interdependence commenced at the end of a long gun. Between 1870 and 1914, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium conquered weaker lands in a stampede for new markets, cheap resources, and forced labor. Japan and America jumped in as well, but this was mostly Europe’s party. Their unprecedented conquests spread out over nearly all of Africa, as well as many parts of Asia.
 
A thick web of narratives justified these actions. The expansion of European culture eastward was widely celebrated, thanks to what the French called their “civilizing mission.” British Anglo-Saxon, German Teutonic, French Catholic, and Russian pan-Slavic expansionists were encouraged to imagine themselves as philanthropists. They came, it was said, not in a mad scramble for wealth, land, and power, but as peacekeepers, liberators, and educators. Missionaries, schoolteachers, and functionaries carried the flags of freedom, rubbing up against a motley crew of fortune hunters, ex-convicts, libertines, slave traders, and pirates. So confident were they in their righteousness, the good of their God, and superiority of their lineage, that they could make little sense of the hostile reactions of their hosts. When a whirling group of rebels in China announced their mission to attack and destroy all foreigners, this terrifying reaction demanded an explanation.
 
German commentators warned of a “Fremdenfeindschaft,” “stranger-as-enemy relationship” endemic to the Chinese. That never translated into other tongues. Instead, the French xénophobie infiltrated English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and more. Almost immediately, readers of those languages heard stories about “xenophobic propaganda,” “secret xenophobic societies,” and the power of “xenophobes” to stir up bloodlust in the masses. The British and French discovered xenophobia not just in the Chinese but a wide array of Asians, Africans, and Arabs. The Italians decried it in their recalcitrant hosts, the Ethiopians, while the Spanish diagnosed it in the Moroccans. In a few years, everyone from an American reader of glossy magazines to a British diplomat to a French businessman knew exactly what was meant by “xenophobia.”
 
Xenophobia answered the plaintive colonizer’s question: why do they hate us? The response had nothing to do with land grabs, theft, indentured servitude, or occupation. Nor was this an exercise in Romanian-style ultra-nationalism. This xenophobia was due to an in-born condition, a reflexive fear and hatred of all strangers that, anthropologists duly explained, stemmed from the racial inferiority of these primitives. Race-based xenophobia became the missing piece of the colonists’ puzzle.
 
 
Why could I find no memorialization of this upside-down birth? And who was the wordsmith who first used xenophobia in this, well, xenophobic way? Unfortunately, news reports, like the first one published in Le Constitutionnel, went unsigned. Some unknown scribe had sent a report from Shanghai to a news service, where a faceless dispatcher received that report and then disseminated it. Along the way, their hidden hands framed faraway events for a vast reading public. Learning more than that seemed impossible.
 
Then, while scouring the results produced by powerful, online search engines, I found a cranky letter, dated June 4, 1915, to the editors of The Globe, one of London’s leading newspapers. The author quickly established himself as the kind of fellow who took pleasure in correcting another’s grammar. He chastised the editors for their misguided usages of “Boche,” a derogatory French term for Germans, which the letter-writer explained came from the Latin for “Kaiser of the Teutsch.” His note ended with an aside:
 
   “The process by which some words come into general use is rather obscure. During the days of the Boxers’ Rebellion, I launched the word “Xénophobe.” It caught on in the French Press, and is now to be found in some dictionaries!”
 
The letter was signed, “Yours faithfully, Jean de Saintours, The College of Preceptors, W.C.” After piecing together his noms de plume — Jean P. A. Martin de Saintours, Jean P. A. Martin, and J. Martin-de-Saint-Ours — I discovered that this man descended from a dwindling noble line with roots in the Périgord region. In 1883, the young scion was listed as French deputy consul to the United States. Under that title, this patriot hosted a conference in Lyon on the need to teach French to natives in the colonies.

 
During the following years, he developed a formal expertise in stenography, then a lively semiotic science, quite useful when deployed in tandem with the telegraph and that new wonder, the telephone. Our man, I found, took out ads in French newspapers offering his services to journalists who wished to employ transatlantic telegraphic or telephonic means to send or access news from abroad. By 1893, Jean Martin had been appointed senior telephone stenographer for Reuters. In this capacity, he gathered information, wrote reports, and distributed them to news outlets.
 
As news of the Boxer uprising broke, an ad for his services placed Martin at 32 rue du Rocher near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Right place, right time. The idea that he would have the nerve to coin a new term was also believable. In his scattered writings, Martin reveled in wordplay and neologisms; he even jumped into kooky linguistic debates, like the ones stimulated by the British Simplified Speling Sosieti. Unless he chose to lie about a matter that no one cared about, the polyglot Jean Martin de Saintours, sitting at the hub of a network of global communications, concocted the compound word “xenophobe” to account for these Chinese rebels, and seeded this explanatory term throughout Western metropoles and their colonies.
 
All of that was swiftly forgotten in a fog of collective amnesia. Just as well, I first thought. Why sully this noble precept with its sordid start? And yet without that beginning, the following chapters — in which this new “commonsense” was transformed into rank prejudice — also faded from view. An array of critics ripped at the extravagant lies tied to colonialism and racist theorizing, until the original conception of xenophobia collapsed into contradiction and paradox. It then was made to do an about-face, so as to account for bigoted imperialists who could not imagine that occupied people might have legitimate grievances, and for anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic movements in London, Paris, and Berlin. Subsequently, behavioral scientists took up the hunt for the sources of this redefined, psychosocial ill.
 
That sea-change happened neither effortlessly nor overnight. Only by remembering xenophobia’s first instantiation do we bring these broader battles into focus. For the contested ground named by Jean Martin de Saintours became far more than a matter of semantics; it buttressed aspects of Western ethics, psychology, science, economics, and political power. In the end, what was at stake was nothing less than fundamental notions of identity — of I and thou, us and them, stranger and host — that had been thrown into question by new forms of global interconnection and radical technological change, disruptions not unlike the ones we face today.
 
 
This essay was adapted and excerpted from Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.
 
 
The Invention of “Xenophobia”.  By George Makari. Los Angeles Review Books, October 6, 2021. 

What has caused the recent international resurgence of xenophobia? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea’s origins. He discovered that while the fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, the notion of a dangerous bias called "xenophobia" arose not that long ago.

 
Coined by late-nineteenth-century doctors and political commentators, and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged as a popular cultural concept alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide. Makari chronicles the concept’s rise, from its popularization and perverse misuse to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of the Holocaust, and then on to its sudden reappearance in the twenty-first century. He investigates xenophobia’s evolution through writers like Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus and Richard Wright, and innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. Weaving together history, philosophy and psychology, Makari also offers insights into related ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the authoritarian personality, the other, and institutional bias.
 
Makari offers a unifying paradigm for comprehending more clearly how xenophobia, other irrational anxieties and contests over identity sweep through cultures and lead to the dangerous divisions so prevalent today. George Hammond talks with George Makari.
 
 Commonwealth Club of California, September 29, 2021. 

W.W. Norton  & Company