BEREL LANG

Self-Description and the Anti-Semite: Denying Privileged Access

IN A RECENT REVIEW of a comprehensive history of Europe, the reviewer pointed out certain blatant distortions in the book’s account of European Jewish history—but concluded that since the book’s author had denied being anti-Semitic, this explanation of the distortions could be ruled out: “On that matter,” the reviewer wrote, “we have to take the author at his word.” ²⁴ In a letter to the editor (published, no doubt, because of its brevity), I asked a simple question about this conclusion: “Why?” The question seemed to me obvious, not only as it applied to that book’s author, but to any writer or speaker who asserts that he or she is not anti-Semitic or an anti-Semite. It is not that self-descriptions of this sort should not count as evidence at all, but that they are at most only partial evidence (in both senses: fragmentary and self-interested) to be considered in judging the presence or absence of anti-Semitism.

On the surface, this thesis will seem no more than a commonplace. After all, a large number of public figures who by any reasonable measure were clearly anti-Semitic have, for a variety of reasons, explicitly rejected that description. (I think here, at an extreme, of Eichmann’s memorable line, that he had “nothing personal” against the Jews.) Such denials, when confronted by independent and contradictory evidence, are no more persuasive or interesting than other mistaken or deceptive self-descriptions, which are, after all, a familiar part of our moral and psychological landscape. But a conceptual issue is at stake here that goes more deeply into the ascription of antiSemitism than the fact that certain anti-Semites (like many other people) may lie or deceive themselves about their private feelings.

The issue I refer to here is part of a broader one in the theory of knowledge; it concerns assertions which claim “privileged access”—that is, the group of statements made by speakers who are supposedly in a position of special (in the event, final) authority so far as concerns their truth or falsity. In the statement, “I feel warm,” for example, the speaker might of course be lying because of a wish to deceive the person(s) being addressed. But putting this possibility aside (it applies, after all, to any statement), we would not ordinarily consider responding to that statement by disagreeing: “No, you’re mistaken; you don’t feel that way.” And we would not venture this response even if everyone else in the room had just been commenting on how cold the room was. (Someone might suggest that the person who “felt warm” was ill [or ironic], but these are different matters.)

The presumption at work here is that where feelings are concerned, it is the bearer of the feelings who knows best—not only best but definitively; they’re his or her feelings, after all, nobody else’s. Even if someone lies about those feelings to others, it is still the person who feels them who knows better than anyone else what those feelings truly are. But does this same authority of “privileged access” extend to a person’s judgment of being anti-Semitic? It is just this claim that the book-reviewer referred to above implied, and it is also just this claim that analysis of the concept of privileged access in matters of self-description demonstrates to be unwarranted.

To be sure, the question cannot be avoided here of exactly what actions or words, and how many of them, are required to meet the “standard” of anti-Semitism; there is an evident problem as well in applying that single term to individuals as distant from each other in the expressions of their anti-Semitism as (for example) Hitler and T. S. Eliot. It is also clear that as for any theoretical criteria applied to practical circumstance, there will be boundary-line cases about which doubts remain; there is no simple litmus test to produce immediate and certain findings. One point that does emerge clearly, however, against the background of the concept of privileged access is that the “title” of anti-Semite cannot be ascribed either exclusively or decisively as a function of feelings, not even as the measure of a disposition to act or to speak in a certain way. The reasons for this view should now be apparent: For one thing, as already noted, if anti-Semitism were judged on that basis, then the “feeler” of anti-Semitic feelings would indeed have the last word on his own status. And more than this, not feelings alone, and not even words, are in fact decisive for such judgment; they can be assessed only in conjunction with the actions that accompany them, and these, too, can be judged only in a context of the whole.

The positive side of this argument adds still greater weight to the negative side, as pertinent not only to issues of antiSemitism but to the status of self-descriptive statements in general. It is commonly recognized, for example, that other people are at times more accurate interpreters of our actions than we are ourselves: we often intend (or believe we intend) to say or to do one particular thing—and discover when someone else points it out to us that we have done or said something quite different. Even at the level of intention, the person whose intentions they are is not necessarily the only or the best judge. We are all familiar with apologies or excuses that end with the phrase “but my intentions were good.” And here, too, the audience, especially if they have heard the same refrain from the same person many times before, might well be skeptical. It is not only that people sometimes deliberately misrepresent their intentions, but that at times they are not the best or even good judges of what those intentions are.

If anti-Semitism then is not simply a set of feelings or a state of mind (to which privileged access would hold the key); and if, furthermore, people can sometimes be mistaken about what exactly the intentions behind their actions are—then it should not be surprising to find that someone could deny being anti-Semitic, and yet be judged from the outside, by others, to be just that. Required for this reversal of judgment is no more than what is required for any judgment of someone’s state or condition: the gathering of evidence. This would of course include self-descriptions by the person being judged, but also much more: accounts of conduct and actions (including other words) in which the person has engaged.

It is only by such broader criteria, for example, that the cliché that recurs in self-descriptive denials of anti-Semitism— “But some of my best friends are Jews”—can be understood as not at all inconsistent with being anti-Semitic. There is nothing in the concept of anti-Semitism to prevent the anti-Semite from making exceptions for some Jews; when that happens, it is just because they were exceptions—which invariably means that they are not like the “others,” that is, like the much greater majority of Jews—that the anti-Semite accepts them. But for us to be able in this way to override the denial of being anti-Semitic requires the possibility of appealing to other external evidence, not to the person’s words alone, and certainly not to the person’s feelings about Jews. For this, again, is the point: anti-Semitism is not only or decisively a state of mind or a psychological disposition. For one thing, no one has clear access to these (not even the person whose they are); and for another thing, by themselves, so long as they do not manifest themselves in words or actions, they hardly count as anti-Semitic or anti-anything. Where anti-Semitism matters is in the acts or conduct for which the concept (and term) stand. And although the person responsible for those actions may well also provide an interpretation of them, that remains but one account among several possible ones.

This skeptical analysis of statements in the form, “I am not an anti-Semite,” has the odd consequence that someone might say that he or she was an anti-Semite—but turn out to be mistaken about that. We might prove, in other words, that also this self-description was, on balance, without a basis in fact—for here, too, there is no privileged access: If we have rejected privileged access in this area as such, that rejection would apply no matter what a particular self-description asserted. Such instances as these are rare, of course; when they do occur, they appear more as a parody or ironic joke than anything else. But the possibility cannot be ruled out (I’ve known at least one person like this, a good friend, in fact), and it is in any event a small price to pay for understanding the basis on which we feel entitled to reject the much more common claim of privileged access as it is used to support denials of being anti-Semitic. If anti-Semites were as transparent in their denials as was the English author/diplomat Harold Nicolson when he wrote that “Although I loathe anti-Semitism, I do dislike Jews,” we would have no need for this, or indeed for any, clarification. And certainly for many instances of anti-Semitism, self-descriptions and acts appear in close harmony; nobody is in doubt about the fact itself. But there are also instances of denial which base themselves on the claim of privileged access—and there is no need, I have argued, to accept those denials, certainly not at face value.