|
|
Sartrean Quotes : Anti-Semite and Jew
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans. George Becker. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
What is anti-Semitism; Who is the anti-Semite?
Opinion suggests that all points of views are equal; it assures us, for it gives an inoffensive appearance to ideas by reducing them to the level of tastes. [7]
We look upon persons and characters as mosaics in which each stone coexists with the others without hat coexistence affecting the nature of the whole. [8]
But I refuse to characterize as opinion a doctrine that is aimed directly at particular persons and that seeks to suppress their rights or to exterminate them… Anti-Semitism does not fall within the category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. Indeed, it is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a passion. [9-10] You cannot confine passion to one sphere. [22]
Anti-Semitism is a free and total choice of oneself, a comprehensive attitude that one adopts not only toward Jews but toward men in general, toward history and society; it is at one and the same time a passion and a conception of the world. [17]
How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. [18]
The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. [19]
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. [20]
If the, as we have been able to observe the anti-Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious. He has also chosen to be terrifying. [20]
What he flees even more than Reason is his intimate awareness of himself. [21]
Thus I would call anti-Semitism a poor man's snobbery. [26]
This elite, in contrast to those of modern times which are based on merit and labor, closely resembles aristocracy of birth. There is nothing I have to do to merit my superiority, and neither can I lose it. It is given once and for all. It is a thing. [27]
Now the anti-Semite flees responsibility as he flees his own consciousness, and choosing for his personality the permanence of rock, he chooses for his morality a scale of petrified values. [27]
Authentic liberty assumes responsibility, and the liberty of the anti-Semite comes from the fact that he escapes all of this. Floating between an authoritarian society which has not yet come into existence and an official and tolerant society which he disavows, he can do anything he pleases without appearing to be an anarchist, which would horrify him. [32-33]
Anti-Semitism is thus seen as a form of Manichaeism. It explains the course of the world by the struggle of the principle of Good with the principle of Evil. [40] The Manichaean anti-Semite puts his emphasis on destruction. What he sees is not a conflict of interests but the damage which an evil power causes society. [43]
The anti-Semite has chosen o be a criminal, and a criminal pure of heart. Here again he flees responsibility. [50]
Anti-Semitism is only a justification for their existence. [51]
In espousing anti-Semitism, he does not simply adopt an opinion, he chooses himself as a person. He chooses the permanence and impenetrability of stone, the total irresponsibility of the warrior who obeys his leaders - and he has on leader… The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torent, a devastating thunderbolt - anything except a man. [53-55]
History, as the working class sees it, is the result of the play of economic organisms and the interaction of synthetic groups. [36]
His dialectical "materialism" signifies that he envisages the social world in the same way as the material world. On the other hand, the bourgeois -- and the anti-Semites in particular - have chosen to explain history by the action of individual wills. [36-37]
Without the presence of this metaphysical essence, the activities ascribed to the Jew would be entirely incomprehensible. [38]
The Jew is free to do evil, not good; he has only as much free will as is necessary for him to take full responsibility for the crimes of which he is the author; he does not have enough to be able to achieve a reformation. Strange liberty, which instead of preceding and constituting his essence, remains subordinate to it, is only an irrational quality of it, and yet remains liberty. [39]
In the eyes of the Marxist, the class struggle in no sense a struggle between Good and evil; it is a conflict of interests between human groups. The reason why the revolutionary adopts the point of view of the proletariat is, first of all, because it is his own class, then because it is oppressed, because it is by far the most numerous and consequently involves the fate of mankind in its own destiny, finally because the results of its victory will necessarily include the abolition of the class struggle. [41-42]
The goal of the revolutionary is to change the organization of society. To do that it will no doubt be necessary to destroy the old regime. But that will not be sufficient; above all it will be necessary to build a new order. [42]
In opposition to that magical possession that is refused him and which deprives him even of the objects he has bought, he becomes attached to money as the legitimate power of appropriation by the universal and anonymous man he seeks to be. [127] Money is a factor of integration [128]
The Jew is utilitarian because opinion refuses him all enjoyment of things except use. At the same time he wishes to acquire through money the social rights that rae refused him as an individual. [129]
The Jew and the Democrat
But his own declarations show the weakness of his position. In the eighteenth century, once and for all, he made his choice: the analytic spirit. He has no eyes for the concrete synthesis with which history confronts him. He recognizes neither Jew, nor Arab, nor Negro, nor bourgeois, nor worker, but only man - man always the same in all times and places. [55]
The democrat, like the scientist, fails to see the particular case; to him the individual is only an ensemble of universal traits. [56]
The former (Anti-Semite) wishes to destroy him as man and leave nothing in him but the Jew, the pariah, the untouchable; the latter wishes to destroy him as a Jew and leave nothing in him but the man, the abstract and universal subject of the rights of man and the rights of the citizen. [57]
The anti-Semite reproaches the Jew with being Jewish; the democrat reproaches him with willfully considering himself a Jew. [58]
Sartre Speaks
We are in agreement with the anti-Semite on one point: we do not believe in "human nature"; we cannot conceive of society as a sum of isolated molecules; we believe that it is necessary to consider biological, psychical, and social phenomena in a spirit of synthesis. But we take leave of the anti-Semite when it comes to applying this spirit of synthesis. [59]
Man is defined first of all as a being in a situation …To be in a situation, as we see it, is to choose oneself in a situation, and men differ from one another in their situations and also in the choices they themselves make of themselves. What men have in common is not a "nature" but a condition, that is, an ensemble of limits and restrictions: theinevitability of death, the necessity of working for a living, of living in the world already inhabited by other men. [59-60]
I agree therefore with the democrat that the Jew is a man like other men, but this tells me nothing in particular - except that he is free, that he is at the same time in bondage, that he born, enjoys life, suffers, and dies, that he loves and hates, just as do all other men. I can derive nothing more from these excessively general data. If I wish to know who the Jew I, I must first inquire into the situation surrounding him, since he is a being in situation. [60]
We must therefore envisage the hereditary and somatic characteristics of the Jew as oen factor among others in his situation, not as a condition determining his nature. [64]
If it is true , as Hegel says, that a community is historical to the degree that it remembers its history, then the Jewish community is the least historical of all, for it keeps a memory of nothing but a long martyrdom, that is, of a long passivity. What is it, the, that serves to keep a semblance of unity in the Jewish community? To reply to this question, we must come back to the idea of situation. It is neither their past, their religion, nor their soil that unites the sons of Israel. If they have a common bond, if all of them deserve the name of Jew, it is because they have in common the situation of the Jew, that is, they live in a community which takes them for Jews. [66-67]
Thus it is no exaggeration to say that it is the Christians who have created the Jew in putting an abrupt stop to his assimilation and in providing him, in spite of himself, with a function in which he has since prospered. [68]
Collective Authenticity and the Jew
The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start. [69] Thus the Jew is in the situation of a Jew because he lives in the midst of a society that takes him for a Jew. [72]
Vigorously attacked, feebly defended, the Jew feels himself in danger in a society in which anti-Semitism is a continual temptation. [73]
To be a Frenchman is not merely to have been born in France, to vote and pay taxes; it is above all to have the use and the sense of these values…Now a Jew is a man who is refused access to these values in principle. [80-81]
But it is of no importance that this is an erroneous notion; the cat is that it is a group error. [82]
The Jew is not yet historical, and yet he is the most ancient of all peoples, or nearly so. That is what gives him the air of being perpetually aged and yet always young: he has wisdom and no history. [84]
In a word, the Jew, an intruder into French society, is compelled to remain isolated. If he does not consent, he is insulted. But if he consents, he is no more readily assimilated on that account; he is tolerated - and always with a distrust that drives him on each occasion to "prove himself." [85]
This perpetual obligation to prove that he is French puts the Jew in a situation of guilt. If one every occasion he does not do more than everybody else, much more than anybody else, he is guilty, he is a dirty Jew - and one might say, parodying the words of Beaumarchais: To judge by the qualities we demand of the Jew if he is to be assimilated as a "true" Frenchman, how many Frenchmen would be found worthy of being Jews in their own country? [87]
Whatever he does, his course has been set for him. He can choose to be courageous or cowardly, sad r gay; he can choose to kill Christians or to love them; but he cannot choose not to be a Jew. Or, rather, if he does so choose, if he declares that Jews do not exist, if he denies with violence and desperation the Jewish character in himself, it is precisely in this that he is a Jew. [89]
If it is agreed that man may be defined as a being having a freedom within the limits if a situation, then it is easy to see that the exercise of this freedom may be considered as authentic or inauthentic according to the choices made in the situation. Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibility and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate. [90]
Most members of the middle class and most Christians are not authentic, in the sense that they refuse to live up to their middle class to Christian condition fully and that they always conceal certain parts of themselves form themselves. When the Communists set down as part of their program "the radicalization of the masses," when Marx explains that the proletarian class ought to be conscious of itself, what does it mean if not that the worker, too, is not at first authentic? And the Jew does not escape this rule: authenticity for him is to live to the full his condition as Jew; inauthenticity is to deny it or to attempt to escape form it. Inauthenticity is no doubt more tempting for him than for other men, because the situation which he has to lay claim to and to live in is quite simply that of a martyr… Thus the authentic Jew is the one who asserts his claim in the face of the disdain shown toward him. [90-91]
What characterizes the inauthentic Jews is that they deal with their situation by running away form it; they have chosen to deny it, or to deny their responsibilities, or to deny their isolation, which appears intolerable to them… In a word, the inauthentic Jews are men whom other men take for Jews and who have decided to run away form this insupportable situation. [92-93]
It is we who force the Jew to flee. [94]
It is not the man but the Jew whom the Jews seek to know in themselves through introspection; and they wish to now him in order to deny him… The Jew, because he knows he is under observation, takes the initiative and attempts to look at himself through the eyes of others. This objectivity toward himself is still another ruse of inauthenticity: while he contemplates himself with the "detachment" of another, he feels himself in effect detached form himself; he becomes another person, a pure witness. [97]
He is therefore acting in bad faith: he is concealing the truth from himself, though he knows it in his heart. He conquers a position in his capacity as Jew he keeps it with the means he has at his disposal, that is, with "Jewish" means, but he considers that each new conquest is a symbol of a higher step in the process of assimilation. [99]
From this situation there results a new paradox: that the inauthentic Jew wants to lose himself in the Christian world and yet he remains fixed in Jewish milieu… His life among Christians does not bring him the anonymity he seeks; rather, it is a perpetual tension. In his flight toward mankind he takes with him everywhere the image that haunts him. That is what establishes among all Jews a solidarity which is not one of action or interest, but of situation. What unites them, even more than the sufferings of two thousand years, is the present hostility of Christians… the constant temptation to consider that they "are not like other men," their susceptibility to the opinions of others, and their blind and desperate decision to run away from that temptation. [100-101]
What stamps the inauthentic Jew is precisely this perpetual oscillation between pride and a sense of inferiority, between the voluntary and passionate negation of the traits of his race and the mystic and carnal participation in the Jewish reality. [107]
They fail to see that authenticity manifests itself in revolt, and is not to be achieved merely by the admission that they are Jews; they seek only to be made Jews by the looks, the violence, the disdain of others, by having qualities and a fate attached to them - to be Jews as a stone is a stone: thus for a moment they can find relief from that bewitched freedom which does not permit them to escape from their condition, and which seems to exist only in order to impose upon them a responsibility for what they reject with all their strength. [108]
In the very name of universal man, he refuses to lend an ear to the private messages his organism sends him; in the name of rationality he rejects irrational values and accepts only spiritual values. Universality being for him at the summit of the scale of values, he conceives of a sort of universal and rationalized body. [121]
The disquietude of the Jew is not metaphysical; its is social. The ordinary object of his concern is not yet the place of man in the universe, but his place in society. [133]
Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew - that is, in realizing one's Jewish condition. The authentic Jew abandons the myth of the universal man; he knows himself and wills himself into history as a historic and damned creature; he ceases to run away from himself and to be ashamed of his own kind. [136]
The choice of authenticity is not a solution of the social aspect of the Jewish problem; it is not even an individual solution. No doubt authentic Jews are today much more numerous than one may suspect. The suffering that the Jews have undergone during the past few years has done much to open their eyes, and it seems to me even probable that there are more authentic Jews than authentic Christians. Yet the choice they have made of themselves does not smooth their way as individuals, rather the contrary. [138]
If we had not created for the Jew his situation as a Jew, it would be possible for him to exercise an option between Jerusalem and France; the immense majority of French Jews would choose to remain in France, a small number would go to increase the Jewish nation in Palestine. [140]
Thus authenticity, when it leads to Zionism, is harmful to the Jews who wish to remain in their original fatherland, since it gives new arguments to the anti-Semite… Thus the choice of authenticity appears to be a moral decision, bringing certainty to the Jew on the ethical level but in no way serving as a solution on the social or political level: the situation of the Jew is such that everything he does turns against him. [141]
I am told that a Jewish league against anti-Semitism has just been reconstituted. I am delighted; that proves that the sense of authenticity is developing among Jews. [151]
What must be done is to point out to each one that the fate of the Jews is his fate. Not one Frenchman will be free so long as the Jews do not enjoy the fulness of their rights. Not one Frenchman will be secure so long as a single Jew - in France or in the world at large - can fear for his life. [153]
[Go back to the Sartrean Quotes]
[Go back to the Main Page]
|
