Sartre Reflections on the Jewish Question a Lecture

Reflections on the Jewish Question, A LectureAuthor(s): Jean-Paul Sartre, Rosalind Krauss, Denis HollierSource: October, Vol. 87, Jean-Paul Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew" (Winter, 1999), pp. 32-46Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779167 .Accessed: 13/05/2011 21:53

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Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture*

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier

Following the publication of his book, Sartre was invited by the Alliance israelite universelle to give a lecture on June 3, 1947, in the auditorium of the Salle de la Chimie, rue Saint-Dominique, in Paris. This event isn't mentioned by any existing bibliography of Sartre's work nor by any current biography. Save for a few paragraphs published by Les Cahiers de l'Alliance in its June 27, 1947, issue (which were introduced by Emmanuel Levinas's "Existentialism and Anti-Semitism "), there has been no trace of it.

At this point we don't know anything certain concerning the status of the text translated in the following pages. Is it the transcript of a recording, or the stenographic record of Sartre's speech, taken on the spot by the secretaries of the Alliance? Did anyone reread it, not to say correct it? What is the status of the few hand-written remarks it bears in its margins? To whose hand do they belong? All these are questions which, unfortunately, one is not in a

position to answer: the Alliance's archives have the transcript, but nothing else. Sartre expresses himself quite freely: did he improvise from scratch or did he prepare

some notes summarizing the main argument of his Reflexions ? It will be seen that this speech differs notably from the book. To start with, the tone is different. True, the main lines of the argument are unchanged, but the mode of expression, the words used to express it, are a far cry from some of the most abrupt statements of the R6flexions. In front of an audience that was responding to the Alliance's invitation, salacious stories have become out of place. But, on the other hand, the recognition of the existence of a Jewish culture, of an Israelite fact as such, has become undeniable. In this very specific context, which leads Sartre to present himself, rather unexpectedly, as a Christian, the complex relationships he had drawn between the anti-Semite-now conceived of as belonging to a strange "secret society" and, even more strangely, as an "unassimilated" individual-the democrat, and the Jew (authentic or inauthentic), are significantly transformed since, now, the dramatis personae are only three: Sartre almost skips the topic of inauthenticity, forgetting as well any type of purely assimilationist perspective; moreover, he drops the parallelism between a future assimilation of Jews and the

* I want to thank Pierre Birnbaum for getting the text of the transcript of Sartre's lecture to us and Arlette Elkaim-Sartre for giving us the authorization to publish this translation.

I've added brackets wherever the reading of the transcript seemed problematic, as well as where it differs from the fragments published in Les Cahiers de 1'Alliance. Ed.

OCTOBER 87, Winter 1999, pp. 33-46. Translation ? 1999 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jean-Paul Sartre. Cover of Reflexions sur la questionjuive. 1946.

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destiny of a working class that would also be committed, even if later, to universality. In and

by themselves, all these points are witness to an awareness on Sartre's part that obviously requires a thorough reexamination of most recent scholarship concerning the relationships between Sartre and theJews/Israelites.

-Pierre Birnbaum

Clearly, it is only with great hesitation that one speaks of a condition one hasn't shared and in which one hasn't lived, in particular during the five years of the recent past. Not to have been ceaselessly threatened by anti-Semitism makes it difficult to address all the aspects of the problem and to put oneself in the position either of the persecutors-happily I wasn't one of them-or the persecuted- among whom I cannot count myself either.

If I nevertheless consider it possible for me to reflect on the Jewish problem, even though I haven't shared your sufferings, this is because one could say of it what a great black writer said: "There is no black problem; there is a white problem." To use the expression that was sadly fashionable during the Occupation, one could say: "There is no Jewish problem; there is an Aryan problem." And it is precisely about this problem that Christians must reflect. What I am thus offering here is the point of view of a Christian-of someone with a Christian education- on this question.

What I would like to sketch, what I would like us to think about together, are the three main protagonists of this drama that led to the catastrophe you know all too well. These three are: the anti-Semite; the defender or self-proclaimed defender of the Jew, the democrat; and the Jew himself. They are the three characters we are going to examine, less as historical figures than as human types. I've already tried to think about this in a small volume to which my Israelite friends responded in an often invaluable way, understanding my intentions and approving them or making two major objections: first, that I don't take the importance of the religious factor into account sufficiently; second, that I treat the question on a psychological and physical level and not on an economic one, whereas one should have started from a materialist approach to the question.

Both objections are somehow at odds with one another, for one of them wants to put the cultural issue in a key position while the other wants a materialist explanation to fill this role. I will thus try to address the problem without eliminating either of those aspects but basing my approach primarily on the human reaction to a de facto situation.

If we consider the personage I call the democrat, whom I would label a friend of the Israelites, we have a man who makes political democracy his principle. He is a partisan of the rights of man and of the civil rights he inherited from the 1789 Revolution. But at the same time he grounds these in a specific conception of human nature. It is indeed a bourgeois society that the Revolution brought to power, and for over a century now its ideology is based on what I would call an analytical conception of society and of man. He considers that just as a physical

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Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture 35

body is a sum of atoms that are not submitted to the action of the whole and that can enter different ensembles without being significantly modified, so man is the

prime unit of society. Societies can change form; human nature escapes change. Consequently, the social atom is the individual who, precisely because his individu-

ality, his invulnerability, allows him to escape every deep transformation, remains the same in every circumstance [and constitutes altogether a particular ensemble of human nature].

In point of fact, analysis here is not simply a philosophical or scientific device for resolving certain questions by means of dividing the complex into

simple elements. It is also a weapon, both offensive and defensive. Analysis was used during the nineteenth century to destroy whatever privilege there was. For

privilege is protected by a faulty use of scientific thought. It is asserted that between the privilege and the privileged there exists a relationship such that the

privileged is endowed with an "exquisite" nature and that this unbreakable whole cannot be destroyed without society itself losing thereby. Now, analytical thought consists of seeing nothing but a sum of elements in such a whole and in showing that those elements can be found anywhere else.

Analysis is also a weapon against all groups that are a threat to the organized societies within which they constitute states within states and subsocieties

[opposed to] the interest of the main society. This analytical thought is used by a whole category of conservative thinkers against the concept of class. They try to show that there exist only individuals who, due to a community of interests, might be brought into association temporarily, but that the synthetic concept of class is a false idea. Similarly, they try to avoid any collectivity whatsoever within the state. In my view there is both good and bad in the way this mode of thought confronts anti-Semitism by saying that there is neither an Israelite collectivity nor persons who are inherently Israelite; there are just men. I must add that for a long time I considered this point of view the correct one. Until 1939, it seemed to me that

any other would be equal to anti-Semitism. However, in 1939, in the course of a conversation with a young Israelite who came to interview me for a Swiss journal on theJewish question, I realized that I was on the wrong track. I realized that this

young Israelite, attached to his people, utterly patriotic, was rather disappointed to realize that I was not ready to see in him anything but a man similar to others and that I was missing-because I viewed things that way-some components of his person that he himself considered to be something of value and worth being respected.1 Indeed, I believe that the democrat is so afraid that a society might not be made of individuals identical to each other that he kills the Jew in the Israelite in order to keep Man. Is he right or wrong? I don't know. But what is certain is that at a time when one has to reconsider the relationships between man and society, his tools are insufficient; in order to prevent theories from submerging man within

1. This 1939 interview by Arnold Mandel appeared in the June-July 1947 issue of La revue juive de Geneve. It is reproduced in this issue of October on pp. 172-74 of Michel Rybalka, "Publication and Reception of Anti-Semite andJew." Ed.

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society, it is obvious that analytical thought is not a sufficient weapon. At a time of a growing sense of collectivity, it is difficult to admit that the best weapon would consist of continuing to repeat that the whole does not exist and that there are

only individuals. In fact, as against this abstract, bourgeois society with its abstract view of the

individual, there is a more clandestine, less assimilated society-all the more

dangerous for this reason-that represents the exact opposite insofar as it thinks

by means of synthesis, of false synthesis, thinking only the concrete, and instead of

putting its faith in social progress, remains deeply conservative. It is in this society, which is unlocatable, invisible, but which is present almost everywhere, it is in this

society that the true anti-Semite is to be found. The anti-Semite belongs to that group of Frenchmen who were not assimilated

by the 1789 Revolution. There is a whole category of people who never subscribed to the forms of the Republic that we owe to this Revolution. And this for a variety of reasons: in part because of their interests; in part because no one managed to convince them; in part for other reasons. Whatever the case, these people circulate a kind of message and this society is the spawning ground of anti-Semitism.

What are the key thoughts that motivate such a society? To start with, against the idea of the universality of man before the law or of the law before man, these

people, in their relationship with individuals as with official society, try to restore a

person-to-person type of relationship, with its character of exclusiveness as well as of intimacy. To them, a personal connection always appears to be the model of the true bind between men. In other words, there have to be privileged people and taboos. At the same time, the very idea of human nature is totally foreign to them. And it is not that they conceive, as do some historians, of human nature as in a state of perpetual becoming, that it changes with circumstances, that one can never state that man is this or that without referring it to the epoch. It is rather that they think that there exists a plurality of human species, irreducible to one another. In their view men are not alike; rather, between the Israelite and the

non-Jew there exists a difference in nature. Such a difference with regard to human nature places us in a totally different

world from the one in which the name of Jew is given to someone who simply belongs to another religion or another race. Here one has the idea of a total dif- ference and at the same time the idea that the Jew constitutes a synthetic whole.

This is the unfortunate but radical use that can be made of synthetic thought. This means that for an anti-Semite, all the qualities and all the defects of a Jewish person are entirely permeated by the fact that this person is Jewish. Imagine, for example, a conversation between a democrat and an anti-Semite. The anti-Semite would blame the Jew for whatever defect there might be, let's say the fact that the Jew is avaricious. The democrat would reply that he knows Jews who are not avaricious and Christians who are. The ariti-Semite wouldn't disagree. But basically for him the Jew's avarice is not the same as that of the Christian; for him there is a "Jewish" avarice, Jewish here meaning: influenced by the synthetic

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Reflections on theJewish Question, A Lecture

totality that the Jewish person constitutes. For the democrat, both misers are

identical, they are two individuals who share the quality of avarice, which is a certain universal entity that can be part of the ensemble of features that compose an individual. But for an anti-Semite aJew has a way of being miserly which is not that of the Christian. In other words he adopts a rigorously totalitarian point of view according to which the primary fact is that of being Jewish, an essence always engendering the same results, like phlogisten for Medieval thought. That's how one ends up speaking of Jewish mathematics with regard to Einstein. Once we've started to think that there is a principle which is that of Israelitism, which commu- nicates itself to the totality of the Jew's person, it will also communicate itself to

everything this person does. His behavior will be a Jewish behavior; a Jew won't drink in the same fashion as the Christian; if he builds a bridge it will be aJewish bridge; it will be the same for a church or for mathematics. The principle ends up contaminating everything the man in question does.

At its deepest level, the reason for such a synthetic explanation has nothing to do with the Israelite himself. Why do anti-Semites choose to consider man in this way, thinking that whatever an Aryan does he will always be at the top of the ladder while whatever aJew does will always be evil? It is just that they need a certain mode of thought that fits the type of property, the type of society, which is theirs. First of all, I think that deep down, the fundamental idea, here, is that property and proprietor (for essentially it all revolves around real estate) constitute such a whole that property ends up giving a certain exquisite quality to the proprietor. When I taught high school I had an excellent scholarship student, who came from an extremely poor family in Le Havre, and at the same time another student, an

utterly stupid young man, who as it happened turned out to be the son of a very rich anti-Semitic family. I remember a conversation I had with the mother of this

young man. She came to complain about the fact that the scholarship student was ranked first while her son was last. "That spoils everything," the lady said. "In any case, the scholarship student who succeeds at everything now will end up being ambushed in life." I told her that it was too bad her son didn't try working a little harder. "That's not what matters," she answered. "What matters is that my son lives in a beautiful house filled with beautiful things and that our family has a very refined taste for art. He might not realize it now. But he is gradually molded in such a way that he will end up bearing the mark of this influence. And if by any chance you encounter your students ten years from now you will see that my son is the one who will show exquisite qualities and not the scholarship student, who sees only poverty at home and hears only bad language." In such a view, one

recognizes the idea that man is a plant so tied to his soil that he grows in synthetic relationship with it. Finally, what you have here is a theory that justifies both

privileges and that specific mode of property that is real estate-a very specific mode of property, since it is the only one that creates such an indissoluble tie between property and proprietor, between the thing possessed and the one who

possesses it. For the anti-Semite, the idea of real estate embodies some kind of

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fantasy, similar to the relationship between individual and individual, person and

person. In reality, his problem is to justify his privilege while at the same time

giving meaning to history. Yet this character is faced with a history of which he

disapproves since he has not rallied to current society. He considers this history to be evil. There is, in fact, a variety of attitudes when faced with history. There is a way of accepting history passively; there is also one of being active in history; and then there is one that consists of blaming history by declaring that though things might be taking the course they do, history is wrong. This last attitude implies that there are bad components to history. Here, one is unable to have recourse to the laws of historical development or to the big synthetic, but intelligible, principles for explaining history, for in so doing one would already have accepted it. One is thus reduced to explaining it strictly by the action of [certain] men, and to considering that history is nothing but the product of some evil will. In other words, the explanatory principle that conservative society chooses is the principle of individuality. And this is why every time a political shift occurs, what is said in those circles is that we are dealing with a few leaders who are leading the good astray. The point is to explain the whole of history by the action exerted by a few leaders on good people.

Thus we see the image forming of a person who even though he doesn't yet truly exist for us will become more precise thanks to the ensemble of features the image will constellate. It is necessary that there are good and bad people, but also necessary that the good be always good since everything they are going to do will end up being good, necessary also that the bad be always bad since whatever they do, it will always be bad. It is also necessary that the good one ground his goodness on appropriation, possession of his land and his fields. And if he owns neither land nor fields nor a house of his own (what people reproach Jews for is that they don't have houses, they live in "rented apartments"), at least he owns the totality of the soil together with everything that is to be found in the country-for the "good" consider themselves to have synthetic relationships with their country. To be French means having a kind of possession of the French land similar to a man's with the things he owns. Consequently, the man who is evil appears under the guise of a person who owns nothing and since he owns nothing, since he's not entitled to own anything, since he can never be sure of owning what he owns, it will be as though he is "on scholarship" within the nation, like a man who is just tolerated and can in no way be assimilated to the good to whom I've just referred.

Finally, just as we see that for the anti-Semite history needs to be explained by the action of individuals on the masses, so we have here men who, since-as I said-they don't own anything, since they are thoroughly evil, are excluded from the society of the good and thus are endowed with the attributes that are required to act on history. You can see how the abstraction of a man has been contrived as that of a man who would be able to fight against the conservatives and how, once this type was fixed, someone was found who could be said to embody it. It is the Jew. Clearly, thus, nothing is explained if one starts with the Jew himself but only if one starts with the position of the anti-Semite.

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Reflections on theJewish Question, A Lecture

You can see how this leads us to a Manichaeanism, that is to an explanation of the course of the world by the fight between the principle of Good against that of Evil, to a strict division of men into good and evil. This is the only way we can make sense of the anti-Semite's arguments against the Jew. At times we are told that the Jew who is a tradesman and owns his business and thus-simply because he's a tradesman-must, if he behaves logically, be interested in the prosperity of the whole society, we are told that he wants to destroy it, and that, for example, he is tied to "Judeo-Communism." But at other times, on the contrary, in reference to a Jew who didn't succeed very well in France, who is poor, who lives in a poor neighborhood-rue des Rosiers for example-and can in no way be considered a

capitalist, we are told that he is one of those capitalists. He will thus be turned into the incarnation of a certain type of abstract property, as opposed to this

mythical concrete property that is supposed to transform its proprietor. The only explanation for this requires that one discern in the Jew a principle

that leads him to do evil in every circumstance, that one think that theJew incarnates evil. No psychological explanation is valid. That's how the anti-Semite naturally ends up incarnating evil in the Jew and he does so precisely because he needs to

personalize evil. On the basis of those premises we are in a position to understand everything

that occurs in history. It becomes obvious that collective events such as a major strike or, even more blatantly, a war, are more and more difficult to explain by human [agency]. Thus they can only be explained by the Machiavellianism of

Jews. For the anti-Semite's thought is Machiavellian thought; he is always prone to

perceive the meddling of Israelites because otherwise he wouldn't be able to understand a history he has refused.

Basically, the true enemy of this man, whom I will for a while keep calling conservative because I am not yet in a position to expose him as anti-Semitic, would be the Republican democrat, that is to say, the member of established society with its institutions, its laws, its electoral processes, its way of thinking, its science- all things that require analytical thought as well as synthetic thought. Our man, on the other hand, is clandestine, is someone who believes himself to belong to a sort of diffused society, which is what Maurras used to refer to as "real France." No one ever saw it, but it is all the more "real" for not having been seen. This kind of

society, which one does not clearly understand but in which one participates through an obscure feeling of belonging, never dares to revolt against established society expressly and directly. Its adherents are not people who would openly claim to be anti-Republican and anti-democratic and thus they project what they hate into a figure who is the Israelite.

This explains the accusation addressed to Israelites that they have an

excessively analytical turn of mind, as well as a critical and negative cast of thought. For they are thus being reproached for the very principle of democracy. Analysis is always negative since it destroys wholes and separates elements. Throughout the eighteenth century and during part of the nineteenth, reason, insofar as it was analytical, was a negative reason.

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When, therefore, one criticizes the Jew as negator one is in fact targeting him as the embodiment of critical and analytical thought. One rejects the person; but in reality what is being rejected are all the conquests of this analytical and critical method as well as the threat it constitutes for privilege.

To be anti-Semitic means refusing reason because the Jew is a reasoner. Is he truly a reasoner? Has he really the critical turn of mind one attributes to him? The question is irrelevant; if the Jew didn't exist the anti-Semite would be obliged to invent him, for he needs someone on whom to act out all these interdictions, all these taboos. For it is indeed most advantageous at this point to select certain citizens who are not defined by real property-who can be deeply tied to the national community but who, in addition to that, have the characteristic that is designated as being Israelite-and to declare them enemies. At this point one can fight and do so without taking responsibility for it. Imagine a revolutionary who wants to change the structure of society. He needs to be inventive, to construct hypotheses, to ask himself what is bad in the structure and how to change it. All this implies taking considerable responsibility. Indeed, one can imagine how much responsibility was shouldered by the first Bolsheviks when they undertook to change their country's structure. The anti-Semite, since he is unable to think in terms of universality, is most often as totally ignorant of economics as of politics; yet he esteems that something in the world is amiss. [And he is right. Many things in the world are amiss and the point is to change it.] But instead of changing it in a positive way, he imagines changing it in a negative way by means of destroying something. The anti-Semite thinks that there are two principles in the world: the Good, which means himself and the "real" society; and Evil-Jews. Just kill Jews and everything will be fine. In other words, what suffices is to perform an act that commits one to nothing (and I am not even addressing here the moral aspect of the problem), since one has nothing constructive in mind. One need only chase theJew, kill him, and evil will disappear.

As you can see this is a negative solution, an easy way out, that absolves the anti-Semite of the responsibility to construct something.

At the same time, the anti-Semite finds himself in a situation that, to an undeclared sadist, is rather gratifying; he is constantly fighting Evil but without ever doing anything Good. The anti-Semite might possibly say that in every type of society there is something to be done but only for later because as for now the Jew is here who taints everything at the root. Consequently, let's postpone every action, since it is premature. The only battle we have to fight is the one against Evil; we will thus be perpetually in contact with Evil, telling every kind of story about Jews, accusing them of responsibility for everything that goes wrong and doing every wrong to them. We keep busying ourselves with evil, but without any responsibility whatever. One just need open certain anti-Semitic books to see that they are a collection of repulsive anecdotes, of stories about obscene or criminal actions. But the author attributes all of them toJews, which allows him to discharge himself without being compromised; he's responsible for nothing. He cleanses himself from those actions whose description gives him pleasure.

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Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture

For the one who doesn't want to commit himself, who loves Evil, who has

difficulty understanding time and history, being anti-Semitic is pure benefit. Thus one can understand that in reality anti-Semitism is a revolt against

official society within which each individual has a place. Yet the anti-Semite doesn't want to be a revolutionary. To be anti-Semitic means creating a certain

type of society that is based in a certain way on solidarity. It is a society of anti-

Semites, the society of those who own France as one owns land. From that moment on, this society is bound together insofar as everyone belongs to it equally; basically what we are dealing with is a type of society that is not organized, that resembles a crowd in which everyone talks to everyone else because they are going to lynch someone. Such is the society behind the official society which is the anti- Semite's dream. And this is why, naturally, this almost secret society fights the

inequalities of established society. At a time of anti-Semitic crisis, two anti-Semites

belonging to different classes can easily find themselves shoulder to shoulder and

shaking hands. Proust has shown, for example, how anti-Dreyfusism brought the Duke and his coachman together, how thanks to their hatred for Dreyfus the Verdurin family, a bourgeois anti-Semitic clan, was admitted into the aristocratic

society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In other words, there is something that

profits the anti-Semite here, allowing him to belong to that superior and closed

society. Thus we have the ubiquitous spread of a sort of society that is the anti-

Semitic one, plainly representing a nonassimilated society, one that uses the impe- tus provided by a given individual to try to rebuild itself as a kind of vast secret

society, a society of the privileged, of synthetic thought, of Manichaeistic and anti- Semitic explanations of history.

When we consider these two social structures, it appears that behind the official

society there hides a more secret one, hard to number, a minority to be sure, but which nevertheless exists, and this is the society of anti-Semites. Further, it is to be feared that very often, in the same individual, the strictly democratic side, which is the official aspect of his soul and his mind, hides a vague, synthetic tendency of the kind I've indicated and that his democratism harbors a slight synthetic tendency.

If we consider an Israelite (someone whom others call Israelite and treat as

Israelite), he finds himself in France in a society characterized by the fact that it welcomes and receives him and that in it he feels wholly at ease, with all the rights of a French citizen. This is the official, democratic society. But on the other hand, he encounters a mysterious but ubiquitous society that only rarely attacks him

frontally, but in reality deprives him of the possessions to which he has the right in whatever domain it might be or of the free exercise of his civil rights. In a remote

way this resembles what happens in the southern states of the U.S. where officially there is the right to vote for every individual but where in spite of this a group, without negating this official law, without ever openly opposing it, manages to ensure that the black population will be deprived of such a right. Of course, I am not comparing the two countries, which would be absurd; I simply want to compare both clandestine societies.

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Under these conditions, what is the situation, for example, of an Israelite in France? Here we are moving toward our third protagonist, a character who is

accepted by the official society but refused by this kind of ubiquitous, clandestine society sometimes to be found as well in the very minds of those who accept him. His condition can be explained neither by economics nor by religion. I emphasize the fact that quite often Israelites are nonbelievers and moreover are the sons of people who were nonbelievers. TheJew has to be explained by his situation.

We start with the formula: the Israelite is one whom other men consider an Israelite. We say: there is nothing in him that is different from other men. This is the analytical, democratic formula. For we start by agreeing with the democrat; one cannot take into consideration ethnic traits that are endlessly variable and strictly physical. One must take into account the situation itself and only the situation. Can we say that it is nothing for a man to be the one other men consider a Jew? In reality this constitutes a situation which is strong enough to lead a man to make a decision about himself in function of this situation, to lead a man either to be defensive against it and deny it or to claim it proudly. In other words, once we've seen that a whole society designates a man when it gives him a name, this man finds himself in such a position that he has either to accept or refuse himself in function of this given society.

The origin of the problem here is society itself, but the one who has to solve it is the man who finds himself in that situation. For one must see that at this point anti-Semites, who are to be found randomly everywhere, spreading the thing, having constructed from scratch aJew who is simply the replica of their hatred of analytical spirit, of negation, of nuance, have created a portrait of the Jew that ends up being the image we encountered during the period of the Occupation- a man with a hooked nose, protruding ears, a grasping air, etc., etc.-which represented the physical and moral portrait of theJew.

We thus find that a man considered as Israelite has to face the collective representation that has been forged of him. From which it follows that the first thing that defines his situation is this overdetermination. Each of us is faced with a representation that is made of us: we are cowardly, courageous, faithful, or not, etc., and it is hard for us to know for sure if we correspond to these attributes. But for us who consider ourselves Christians those are the only characteristics we have, since the anti-Semite brought off the amazing feat of having us believe that each of us incarnates man. He managed for us to have those characteristics without having to interrogate ourselves about our religious feature. To the contrary, once his Israelite character has been discovered, an Israelite finds himself with one more characteristic that does not belong to him the way it would to Peter or Paul but only insofar as he is an Israelite and insofar as everyone seems to want to impose it on him. He thus ends up facing a reality constituted by people's opinion of him. For example, if a war breaks out there are always people who will say that Israelites join it later and participate in it less than others. At the time of Munich, one of my friends was not called up in just the same way as many others were not,

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Reflections on theJewish Question, A Lecture

since only one fourth of those eligible were mobilized. The rest of the French were not and had the right to walk freely in the street. But two days after the mobilization, people were already throwing stones in the window of my friend's

shop, accusing him of having bought his way out of the army. This only happened because his being Jewish created a presumption. In other words, in order to

prevent stones being thrown at him he would have had to leave a little earlier than others. Similarly, an Israelite who tries to prevent himself from being accused of

profiting from other people's suffering would himself need to suffer at least slightly more than others. Because of what I have described as the diffused society, an Israelite who wants to enjoy the same rights, to be treated the same way as another man, will thus have to do more than others. And considering the conditions the

Jew has to fulfill in order to be accepted as a Frenchman, one is entitled to wonder how many French men could be admitted within the French community. In this we find the Israelite submitted to the special imperative of proving more, which constitues the first characteristic of his situation.

The second characteristic is that even if he provides this proof, one further

proof always remains. From the outset the clandestine society declares: We know

everything about France because we own it, because we have real estate, because we have an ancestral tie with France. A line by Racine-we understand it, while a

Jewish university professor won't, because he does not share in the same life world. In other words, it is required that this professor, who by the way might very well be the son or grandson of French people, bring a proof that he understands the Racinian line. Maurras tells us that a Jew will always be unable to understand Racine's: "Dans l'Orient d6sert, quel devint mon ennui."2

Yes. If you understand it in all its beauty and in its meaning as well, if you are

scrupulous to the point of understanding it in connection with its era and the

language of its time, the anti-Semite will come and tell you that true comprehension goes beyond this and that in order to understand the line truly, one has to belong to "real France."

And it will be the same for everything owned in the same manner. The anti- Semite operates behind the Israelite's back to declare that everything an Israelite wants either to know or to understand escapes him: he cannot possess it and his mode of possessing it is not the true one.

So the Israelite's situation in society is as follows: it starts on the one hand with a false persona that is foisted on him from all sides; then it refuses him the

ownership of whatever he can gain through his work since he is told that true

possession is always beyond what he believes he owns and consequently wherever he is accepted such acceptance is always held in abeyance.

What can the Israelite do under those conditions? I have to excuse myself for

speaking of what is happening in the minds of people who are in this situation. If I

2. Antiochus to Berenice, queen of Palestine, in Racine's Berenice (I, iv) ("In the empty Orient, how deep became my weariness"). Ed.

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do it nevertheless it is only because it is philosophically possible to conceive of

every type of situation. Two solutions are available. The first one would be to say: You are the one who causes me to be an Israelite. I will adopt the democratic

point of view itself. According to it, the Israelite can very well claim France, its

institutions, its laws, and affirm that the Jew is nothing more than a ghost others have made. In this case he will try to deny he is Jewish. There is no Jewish reality, he will say. Yet, if he chooses not to be Jewish, if he declares that the Jew does not

exist, if he violently, desperately, denies the Jewish character in himself, it is

precisely in so doing that he is Jewish; for a man who is not aJew does not need to

deny it and what characterizes the Jew is the desperate attempt he will make to convince others as well as himself that he is notJewish.

The second available position consists in proudly claiming the situation

people want to impose on him. One then states: Indeed, the Jew is not only a man, but one whom others consider, in addition to that, as being aJew. This contributes to creating the particular situation each Jew has in common with others who are

similarly considered Jewish. This is what constitutes the bond between us and thus we claim this very character.

This is what one would call "assuming one's situation." Must one, then, assume one's situation, assert one's Jewishness by an act of will, and reclaim a situation which is practically equivalent to martyrdom? Or should one escape it, and in so doing become more and more an Israelite? This is up to each and every one to decide. But in both cases, since the clandestine and diffused society we have described surrounds the Israelite from all sides, confronting him with its

image of him, there is no other attitude available than one of the two I've outlined; in any case his chances of ending up in the situation of being a Jew are ever

greater. Either he accepts himself and proclaims his Jewishness, or he doesn't and his very efforts to escape his situation make him prove himself an Israelite.

Neither of these options is a solution. For in the latter case we are facing a situation of inauthenticity consisting in escaping the situation. Obviously, at every moment we'll find individuals in France who deny beingJewish. But we'll also find others who deny them assimilation. Americans blame Israelites for being inassimil- able, while in fact they are the ones who do not want to assimilate them. After two or three generations no one in America will call himself Dutch, Belgian, and so on. If one does it with Israelites, it is because they try to deny it, thus returning them to their very situation. Denial originates in society itself. And every time one hears that an ethnic group is not assimilable, we are dealing with a refusal to assimilate it.

On the other hand, given those premises, an Israelite can decide defiantly to reclaim his identity. But this very behavior, perfectly ethical from the point of view of generosity and authenticity, turns back against the Israelites because then they are being told: You yourself see that you are not part of our social fabric.

That's how the anti-Semite always ends up taking advantage of whatever choice theJew decides to make. TheJew can reclaim his place in French society by declaring that he isJewish, since beingJewish is neither belonging to a religion nor

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Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture 45

to a race but rather to a certain culture, to a history, to a religious proclivity or a series of persecutions. But it also can mean claiming a place in a social group that would be strictlyJewish, since society refuses assimilation.

All would be fine if the surrounding society, traversed by the anti-Semitic currents I've spoken of, were able to avoid exploiting this new division-which is not one-and which could very well issue into a perfect union. For nothing prevents one from imagining a Jewish nation on the one hand and a community on the other into which it could integrate itself.

However, the Zionist can blame the Israelite who wants to remain in France for betraying him in the eyes of society while he who remains in France blames the Zionist for demonstrating that Israelites have a homeland other than France. This struggle very often results from the way others use and interpret the behavior ofJews.

In any case one is faced here with a poisonous situation. Now we can envision the three protagonists of the drama. We didn't

elaborate this description in the hopes of finding a solution, but only to mark positions so that we would be able to recognize what the Israelite is, to see what help an Israelite can receive from the analytical democrat, and also to see how the three characters relate to one another.

Even if we cannot find a solution, however, we are able to see one thing more or less clearly: that the anti-Semite belongs to a type of humanity who has a very specific cast of mind, that it is not pure chance that he is anti-Semitic, but that this follows from the very choice of a world, involving a certain mode of relating to life. It appears to us that if this man is the one who prevents an Israelite from being assimilated, this is because he himself is an unassimilated and inassimilable individual who is dedicated for that reason to preventing the total assimilation of others.

In other words, as long as this type of relationship and thought will exist, as long as these unassimilated elements of society will remain, it will be inconceivable that anti-Semitic reaction will disappear, since it does not depend on the character of the Israelite.

In order to envision a solution to this problem, one has to decide what one wants, for two solutions are obviously possible: one is an assimilationist solution; the other a solution whereby one would reclaim the Jewish character. The first is that of the democrat as well as of the Israelite himself when he is tired of persecu- tions and dangers. Let's finish it, he says to himself, and let's say that there are only men; for this purpose, let's tell Jews to be baptized, let's create a society in which Israelites would be unidentifiable.

Such a solution is abstract, but, moreover, it does not take into account the pride of men who have decided to claim their situation as Israelites.

There is thus another solution that is more synthetic in kind. It consists in claiming full civil rights for every concrete person whatever his race, color, or creed, not because this person is a human being, but because he belongs to society,

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a society to which, one way or another, [he gives a certain coloration]-through his work, through his Jewish way of approaching certain issues, which is that of the individual who takes responsibility for himself in a situation such as the one I've

just described-a specific way of thinking and reflecting about the world and about his problem. If such a culture exists, [if it is true that there is an Israelite

way of thinking, a Jewish thought], then, it is so insofar as, through it, the Israelites contribute to the general culture, that it establishes them within society at large. They have full rights but they have these as Jews. Which means that one must not ask them to be merely men, abstract persons, but concrete ones, exactly the same way one does not ask a woman when she votes to change gender, to become a man. A woman's vote is strictly equal to a man's, but it is as a woman that she votes, that she enjoys full civil rights. This is a question of concrete democratism.

However, what are the means of obtaining such a solution? If one admits that anti-Semitic society is one that is not integrated, nonassimilated, if we under- stand that only the disappearance of such a society can lead to a change in the attitude of the official society with regard to Israelites, we will be in a position to understand that there is only one way of preventing society from taking the

position it does today. It is to get rid of anti-Semites. Not through extermination but by finding a solution such that the intellectual stance of the anti-Semite would no longer find the same opportunities to manifest itself. And since it represents a certain kind of relation to history and society, it is obvious that it is through a new wave of integration that one can expect to see the disappearance of such an attitude. Such a new watershed would not simply complete what the French Revolution has not achieved. It entails something larger and involves many different

problems. What is needed is a collective integrative conception that would transform property.

It is only when the type of property that anti-Semitism defends will be eradi- cated that a society rid of anti-Semitism will be conceivable. And once one has

begun to see things in this light, one realizes that the greatness of Israel is, among other things, that whatever its individual sufferings are, its problem cannot be solved in isolation.3 One can and must fight anti-Semitism all one's life by means of legal or social measures, by creating leagues against anti-Semitism, by using propaganda, etc. Thus one will manage to improve the situation of Israelites, and

possibly avoid cataclysm. But the problem itself will not be canceled. It is no

longer possible to envision the solution of the problem of Israel separately for the

very reason that there is no difference between the problem of Israel and the

problem of man. To choose a new society where man's situation would be a situation for Man and to refuse anti-Semitism is one and the same thing.

3. Israel here refers to the Jewish people and not to the State of Israel, which didn't exist yet. Ed.

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