Sander L. Gilman Aliens vs. Predators: Cosmopolitan Jews vs. Jewish Nomads The history of cosmopolitanism from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century focused on the double strand of a positive or a negative image of mobility.¹ The Jews were the litmus test for this in German-speaking Central Europe: were they “aliens,” a beneficent or at least malleable population because they were mobile, or were they “predators,” a threat to established or evolving national identity because of their mobility. This discourse, with all the ambiguities on both sides of the issue, finds expression in the idea of a cosmopolitan versus a nomadic people. The Jews, from the Old Testament to the present, figure as the exemplary cases for each position. From the Baroque concept of the Jew as the original Gypsy to the Enlight- enment discourse about the movement of peoples, and throughout the debates within Zionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the rootedness of the Jew, the antithetical idea of the movement of the Jews as an indicator of potential integration or isolation from the national state remains a factor in defin- ing the cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism and its sister concept nomadism repeatedly acquire differ- ent meanings when their referent is the Jews. Applying this litmus test reveals that both cosmopolitanism and nomadism are symbolic manifestations of the antisemitic stereotype that associates Jews with capital. This history of the term “cosmopolitan” points to the ambivalence of these concepts when applied in the present to specific categories of social and geographic mobility, whether in refer- ence to the Jew, the asylum seeker, the migrant, or the undocumented immigrant. The marginal and excluded people of Enlightenment Germany may have trans- muted into the global citizens of the twenty-first century in some instances, but the aura of the corrupt and corrupting, of the rootless and the transitory, of the foreign and the unhoused always remains beneath the surface and shapes what it means to be cosmopolitan and global. As such, it influences the self-image of those so defined. The term “globalization” and its surrogate cosmopolitanism imply a univer- salist claim that all human beings share certain innate human rights, including the free movement of peoples across what are seen as the superficial boundaries of nation, class, race, caste, and, perhaps, even gender and sexuality (Brennan 1 See, for example, Beck and Sznaider (2006a and 2006b). Recently, David Nirenberg (2013) has raised the question of the projection of such spectral qualities onto the stereotype of the Jew. DOI 10.1515/9783110367195-005, © 2018 Sander L. Gilman, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License.