We all know Mr. Sartre’s landmark essay on the psychology of the anti-Semite.1 In a letter that he saw fit to make public, Mr. Sartre said that he had initially forwarded this present study of a portrait of Jews to his colleagues in publishing. But upon the advice of friends, some of whom were themselves Jews, he felt he needed to reverse his decision. I keenly regret his doing so, for anyone familiar with this author’s writings knows that his analyses are what’s best about his body of work. [ . . . ]
What is the result of this all-too-short analysis? The Jew has no objective feature that an unprompted outside observer could point to as designating that person as Jewish, and the anti-Semite is someone who has an image of the Jew already in his head. To be a Jew is to wear a mere label beyond which there is nothing—an empty signifier. In all likelihood, Mr. Sartre would not disavow this conclusion, since he has written that “the characteristics (of Jews) are for me neither ethnic, psychological, nor religious.”
And yet, something lingers outside this analysis: some people behave as if there were indeed such a thing as a Jew, as if the Jew existed, and this as if, which perhaps has reasons of its own, is also enormously important. God may very well not exist, but all it takes is for certain people to act as though he did for them is to rush to church, for this notion of God to influence their behavior, for this idea to take on meaning for them. Because others believe that the Jew exists, that there exists a real difference [ . . . ] between the Jew and others, [ . . . ] because they behave toward the Jew as if he were different, the Jew already exists to a certain extent as a different being. [ . . . ]
In short, the Jew exists for others, deriving his existence above all from other people. [ . . . ]
Just like God, however important he may be in some people’s meditations and attitudes, Jews do not have their own existence but exist only to the extent that others believe or feign to believe they exist.
However, we won’t have exhausted the main themes of this short analysis unless we state that this idea of the Jew that translates into the behavior of the non-Jew ends up influencing the behavior of the Jew himself. Once subjected to this other’s gaze, the Jew behaves as if he were different from others, and by behaving differently, he is already different somehow. Let me be clear, I am not saying that [ . . . ] he is actually different as construed by others; I am not saying that he actualizes the image that others have of him. [ . . . ]
The accused [ . . . ] may well be just a suspect but one who acts like the accused [ . . . ] even though he neither abides the accusation nor justifies it.
Subjected to certain conditions, then, [ . . . ] tantamount to persecutions at sufficiently frequent intervals, such that [ . . . ] he cannot forget that the other has not forgotten him, the Jew also cultivates this idea of the Jew that he detests but that he takes into account nevertheless. What we have here is an infinite feedback loop of action and reaction. Thus, the Jew’s cautious or aggressive attitude triggers [ . . . ] particular attitudes or further layers of irony, which only reinforce the Jew’s supposedly characteristic behavior. One can understand those gatherings of Jews who have nothing to talk about with one another except anti-Semitism, their only common bond in the end. This is what the well-known Jewish solidarity boils down to: not a solidarity for affinities and common origins and goals but [ . . . ] defense against a shared injustice, against the other’s false assessment of them, a defense that, by virtue of its very existence, lends credence to this same assessment. Jewish behavior comes down to this: a form of protest.
In short, Jews consider themselves Jews because others consider them Jews. [ . . . ] That brings us right back to my earlier conclusion: to be a Jew is to be considered a Jew. [ . . . ]
It seems odd that Mr. Sartre, [ . . . ] having observed that many Jews sought to shed their identity, never appeared to wonder why they might feel that way. After all, people are not usually ashamed of a foreign nationality or a race or a language. Logically, the Jew should be no more offended at being called a Jew than would an Englishman at being called English or a Frenchman French. The point is, the Jew refuses to be what others think he is, and justifiably so.
That said, we shall see more clearly why Mr. Sartre and I part ways when it comes to solutions. Making a distinction, which will sound familiar to anyone who reads his philosophy, he differentiates between the inauthentic Jew [ . . . ] and the authentic Jew, [ . . . ] and we understand, of course, which one he prefers. [ . . . ]
What is an authentic Jew? “Authenticity begins, for the Jew, from the moment he says ‘I am a Jew.’ That is, once he has endorsed . . . the traits endowed upon him by others, from the outside, and which end up penetrating him to the marrow in the form of the other’s gaze.”
So, returning to the original question, if the Jew does not want to be “the bad guy,” [salaud] he must accept being for others; he must actualize the image that anti-Semites in particular have conceived of him. But because this image is that of an odious person, for fear of being a “bad guy,” the Jew must then be an odious individual.
It might appear that I am turning in circles here, but the Sartrean solution does bring a new element to bear. The Jew must not only [ . . . ] be considered a Jew but also consider himself a Jew. [ . . . ] What is interesting in this solution is that it aims to be dynamic: the accusation of the other is but one step, yielded to by an effort that strives to move beyond it. Unfortunately, it is dynamic in appearance only. [ . . . ]
The effort does not move beyond this stage and dies for lack of a clear goal. Better still, the effort defines itself by this stage, and only through it does it take on true meaning. The Jew must consider himself as Jewish, [ . . . ] which means [ . . . ] he must accept to be considered as Jewish.
But for the time being, let us accept the basic premise of Sartre’s solution: that there needs to be a Jewish will to live. There are only two solutions, then, and I agree, at least [ . . . ] in form, with Sartre: to accept oneself or to deny oneself as a Jew. But I wish to show that, unlike in Sartre’s analysis, accepting oneself as a Jew in no way amounts to accepting the classic conception of the Jew, nor does denying oneself as a Jew make one a “bad guy.” In effect, denying oneself as a Jew does not equal refusing to assert oneself, but rather, refuting a series [ . . . ] of unjust and false accusations. Accepting oneself as a Jew means precisely to refute and counteract the idea that anti-Semites conceive of Jews. In both cases, I am a long way from the initial premise of Sartre’s contention.
Unless we wish to limit ourselves to [mere description, to] a purely interior and symbolic [and therefore illusory] affirmation, we will have to closely examine the practical ramifications, the social integration of this self-affirmation by the Jew. [ . . . ]
It is plain to see that the first case leads to revolution and the second to Zionism.
One point I share consistently with Sartre is this: there is no middle position. [ . . . ]
Ignoring anti-Semitism will not make it go away. The Jew can shrug it off all he wants, but he will still be considered a Jew and treated as such; it seems beyond his control. Even so, the contempt he may be feeling might also be called cowardice. In fact, he can either be resigned or attempt to change his situation, but by resigning himself he has still at least made a choice, but the cowardly one. If he is determined not to be a coward, whatever solution he opts for in the end, he has to take his fate into his own hands and exercise his freedom, which means he has to fight back. It is not hard to see a whole Sartrean development here. But I say that both courageous decisions consist of refusing [ . . . ] the Jewish condition, the condition forged by the anti-Semite, and not of accepting the condition in order to move beyond it, as Sartre posits, but refusing it outright and immediately. On that point, Sartre’s terms are unequivocal: “Fully acknowledging this condition,” he writes. The condition must be acknowledged if it is to be overcome, he says, but it must first and foremost be acknowledged. And this is what we refute.2
The decision of the Jew who wishes to assert himself from the Jewish perspective, that is, the perspective that differentiates him from other people, would lead him inevitably to Zionism, or at least to some reconstitution of a Jewish nation. (It is likely that historical circumstances and certain actors most definitely wished this nation to be revived in Palestine.) This is why [ . . . ] I define Zionism as Jewish national reconstruction, while [nevertheless] reserving the debate over the possibility of its establishment in another land. Here again, if the Jew accepts Judaism, he must ask himself beforehand what Judaism involves; then, having learned this, he must live it, which means living up to his commitments. But Judaism culminates in Zionism. Anyone involved in reviving Jewish tradition and treating it like something other than a set of symbols has arrived at the same conclusion. The only opponents to this obvious fact are [ . . . ] a few Jewish and non-Jewish clerics who stubbornly uphold only the religious and ritual aspects of [ . . . ] [this] tradition. But even a cursory examination of most Jewish religious holidays will prove they involve a national significance. What is Hanukkah if not the commemoration of famous independence struggles carried out by the Maccabees? Passover is most certainly not only the celebration of divine intervention against the Egyptians but also an episode of the history of the tiny Hebrew nation. Purim, again, is all about national rescue, and the ghettos of the East were not mistaken when they linked the memory of Haman, the king’s treacherous advisor, to that of Hitler, only the most recent of national enemies. Perhaps the deep connection between religious and national matters springs from the primitiveness of this tradition, preserved in amber when the nation scattered. But Judaism is what it is, in the end, and believers cannot deny the national aspect [ . . . ] without distorting it. Those seeking to recover a more spiritual Judaism find themselves in the same situation, almost in spite of themselves; otherwise, why would they glorify the resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto, whose bravest [ . . . ] were members of an organization for which religion was meaningless?
One might conclude, perhaps, that all of this involves issues of a far too practical nature. But these issues will be raised eventually, by necessity, as soon as the basic premises have been laid down. And the fact of the matter is that these issues have already been raised and resolved by the Zionists. Since one can’t assert oneself halfway, and Sartre would hardly be one to contest this, the Jew who wishes to assert himself becomes a Zionist. Now that we have reached this point in my argument, perhaps Mr. Sartre [ . . . ] would not refute my conclusions about Zionism, but I have strayed far from the Sartrean solution, if indeed it is one, and am moving even further afield. For the Zionist is someone who has indeed denied this “gaze of the other” as absurd and unjust. The Zionist wants to prove that the Jew is as capable as anyone else of building cities, digging wells, and earning his living by the sweat of his brow. And this is precisely what certain Jews, who reason more like anti-Semites in reverse, hold against Zionists: they overlook any real difference between Jews and non-Jews, they deny that purported sacred character of the purportedly chosen people. They don’t strive to cultivate particular characteristics; they just want to do away with the stupidity and injustice of others. It is true that they sometimes speak of forging a New Man, but what they really mean is ridding the Jew of the other’s overwhelming gaze that has them constantly jumping through hoops. They mean to found generations unburdened by any complex of fear, shame, or indecisiveness but never to accept the other’s gaze as in any way valid.
But now I’m moving even further away: Mr. Sartre’s solution consists of claiming “an absolute equality with non-Jews.” And yet, it is exactly the Zionists, if they are being consistent, who no longer claim that equality. For the destiny of the Zionist, which he has chosen for himself, is to set out for Palestine, leaving non-Jews behind. Once again, it is impossible [ . . . ], while remaining at the purely moral level, not to envision the practical implication of the Zionist decision, for then, this decision would be drained of its very theoretical meaning. The Zionist is someone who has recovered his language, different from that of the country where he lives, of his particular culture and nationality. [ . . . ] He feels like a stranger and decides to become a foreigner in the country where he lives. One may well declare that the cutting up of the universe into nations is absurd [ . . . ] that people are citizens of the world, and so on. But this remains to be achieved, which brings us to our second solution: revolution, which I will examine further on. [ . . . ]
I am not saying that any Jews who declare themselves Zionists should be stripped of their citizenship. Before setting foot in Palestine, they have neither the rights nor the duties of that country’s citizens. Conversely, they have not truly abandoned the culture and interests of their provisional homeland, and their behavior [ . . . ] whenever that homeland is threatened provides conclusive proof of their loyalty. [ . . . ]
Their actualization as Jews is a pledge. But they must strive to achieve this pledge, to leave behind their culture and their country. As a consequence, they can no longer claim equality with their fellow citizens as Jews, since being a Jew means no longer being a fellow citizen of that country. They can and should claim it as men and women, but only as such.
Failing to see that the Jew who asserts himself as a Jew asserts himself as a Zionist means seeing only part of the truth; failing to see that the Zionist is destined to leave his homeland behind amounts to missing the point entirely.
Failing to say that the Jew who asserts himself as a Jew asserts himself as a Zionist means [ . . . ] stopping short of the whole truth, and failing to say that the Zionist is destined to leave amounts to a refusal to clarify that word.
Finally, either the Jew parts ways with the non-Jews, in which case his claim of equal rights [ . . . ] makes no more sense, [ . . . ] or the Jew remains among the non-Jews, where he can make no claims as a Jew.
But if we set Zionism aside, [ . . . ] the struggle for equal rights prevails, as a basic human need that will always prevail, in fact, even as the Zionist project has yet to be achieved. This struggle, necessary for all mankind, [ . . . ] even more so for Jews, is the revolutionary struggle. Here again, the practical implications are not easily deduced from Sartre’s arguments: once he has understood that he was Jewish only for others, the Jewish revolutionary denies himself as a Jew, refuses to exist exclusively for others. Whatever path he takes, the Jew must have the courage to go the distance, to refuse to abet prejudice. He must flatly refuse to go to synagogue to be blessed on Yom Kippur just to “make the old folks happy.” He must marry a Gentile if [ . . . ] she appeals to him and not exclude her automatically from consideration “to avoid making trouble.” I have known a number of young Jewish Communists who marry religiously, so as not to “needlessly disrupt communities.”
For that matter, the same courage should be demanded of all young people everywhere. This is not a specifically Jewish problem. Young Catholics should be equally bold, as should all people in all circumstances. [ . . . ] Jews should refuse Judaism.
That statement, taken in isolation, would certainly ignite protest from both Jews and non-Jews and seems to deserve the accusation of cowardice (or inauthenticity, as Sartre would put it), and particularly, of ineffectiveness. Such protest would be justified, if we were content to advise indifference toward Judaism and contempt for the anti-Semite, since contempt will in no way disarm the anti-Semite, and assimilation had already been tried, and failed. But if assimilation is impossible in the current state of affairs, it could be the eventual outcome of a hard-fought struggle. The issue here is not a passive assimilation, a kind of mimicry [ . . . ] immediately detectable by the anti-Semite, but an active, aggressive assimilation. It won’t be enough to passively abandon Judaism, but rather to actively refuse it.
It will no longer be enough to transform the Jew, which is often not necessary, but the social conditions in which Jews live must be changed—the society that gives rise to and tolerates anti-Semitism. Thus understood, assimilation clearly does not equal inauthenticity, but rather revolutionary aspiration.
Once again, I find myself at a distance from Mr. Sartre, for it would seem that the revolutionary solution, if it wishes to be purged of all implicit Zionism, [ . . . ] means that the Jew is struggling not for a society that acknowledges his rights as a Jew but for a society that refuses anti-Semitism, one that cannot allow it to come about in the first place. (Here again, we see that this struggle cannot remain at the level of the individual.) For that matter, how could it be otherwise; how could this struggle make any other kind of sense, since most of the time, the Jew already enjoys these rights? [ . . . ] In France, for example, a lawmaker can claim that he doesn’t know what anti-Semitism is. If the Jew’s struggle were to consist solely of demanding rights equal to those of other citizens, since the French Jew already benefits from these rights, there is no need for struggle. Otherwise, his “struggle” would be purely defensive, which is precisely the purpose of various leagues against anti-Semitism and racism.
But it appears that these legal rights have not done away with anti-Semitism, and [ . . . ] the defense work carried out by antidiscrimination leagues has been only marginally effective. That is exactly why a positive struggle is urgently needed, [ . . . ] to wipe out anti-Semites and anti-Semitism through change in social conditions, through revolution.
The reversal of positions is crucial, and two-pronged: it is no longer an issue of Jews defending themselves, but of attacking, and not as Jews but as human individuals. Here is where the comparison between the condition of Jews and that of workers begins to break down, since the latter must accept their condition and struggle for emancipation as workers. This comparison [ . . . ] is perhaps the central intuition out of which emerge Mr. Sartre’s premises concerning the Jewish question. There are positive connotations to being a worker, which signify not only being considered as a worker but also being one economically. When a laborer tries to pass as middle class and when someone in the middle class tries to pass as an upper-class person, there is a discrepancy with the economic situation: the middle-class person who dresses as if he were wealthy will not have enough to eat. Conversely, if a laborer gets rich, his son is no longer a member of the working class, nor is he, perhaps. But even if a Jew changes his economic status, nothing changes: he is still a Jew. But a Jew who moves away and lives incognito could escape anti-Semitism. His troubles begin only if others learn of his origins. In other words, Jews are Jews for others only, and that being the case, why should they acknowledge this situation as somehow valid?
Since the Jewish condition [ . . . ] means nothing but being for the other, Jews cannot claim this condition for its own sake. What Jews must demand is that others cease to consider them as such, so that Jews can cease being for others, so that they can disappear.
To sum up, the solution to the “Jew as fact” is for that fact to disappear, that is, for the Jew to be liberated by disappearing as such. With him will disappear the anti-Semite; ultimately, that is, through a transformation of social conditions. [ . . . ]
The problem can also be approached from the purely psychological and individual standpoint, and psychoanalysis will certainly have a voice here. It is possible to save a few anti-Semites and a few Jews, and no one has peered more profoundly than has Mr. Sartre into the psychological makeup of the anti-Semite. I am a great admirer of his work on this subject. But at the risk of draining all meaning from the theoretical data, it is indispensable here to see the practical ramifications, meaning how everything gets integrated at the social level. [ . . . ]
It does not take long to understand that the social struggle of the Jew can assume only two forms, Zionism or revolution. In both cases, it turns out, there is a refusal of the commonly accepted image of the Jew, which means a decision to disappear as Jew, if the Jew is understood as such. Again, in both cases, authenticity is not the one pinpointed by Mr. Sartre. In Zionism, a contention that, believe me, would make more sense in the ramifications of Sartre’s arguments, it is not about acknowledging a situation, even to overcome it later on, but rather about constructing an entirely new situation. [ . . . ] For the revolutionary [ . . . ] refusing that society, it’s about constructing one where the very conditions of differentiation among people will be made to disappear.
For three reasons:
This book is of particular importance for me, and I hope that the readers who have honored me by their steady devotion to my work will pay this one special attention, for it summarizes, completes, and concludes everything I have written thus far. Everything I have to say on this crucial aspect of my existence is addressed one last time and taken further, toward a more general significance. I try to move in at least three directions:
I am now getting at that other aspect of myself: I am also a J[ew]. An essential aspect, in that it seems obvious to me that I cannot evade it, whether I opt for lucidity and fearlessness or diversion and avoidance. [ . . . ]
Having decided to know who I am, to understand myself and the way I am seen by others, whether living every day or looking further down the road, it is impossible not to take this facet seriously into account. [ . . . ] I might prefer to live removed from who I am, to forget myself, but other people do not forget and continuously, insistently set about calling me back to myself. At any rate, the basic facts remain unchanged, in the end, and I must come to some arrangement, to grapple with the condition I was born into. I refuse, and I will say why, to spend my whole life rehashing my condition as J[ew], but since the issue cannot be circumvented, it seemed wise for me to give it a thorough treatment, at least this once.
The reason I preferred to restrict myself to my own case, to speak systematically in the first person singular, has nothing to do with excessive modesty or shamelessness. Rather, I hope to avoid useless quarrels, where resistance caused by bad conscience or bad faith distorts objectivity. By speaking on no one’s behalf but my own, I can ensure that my remarks will be sincere and accurate. I shall let readers judge whether I’ve gone beyond mere self-portrait. If they [ . . . ] decide to read it as a confession, I don’t mind; what I put forth is sufficient unto itself. Let’s say, then, that all I am doing is, once again, taking stock of my personal life.
With that said, here is my second ambition. There is hardly a writer who does not strive through his narrative to move from the idiomatic singular to a broader statement on the human condition. I do [ . . . ] believe, in truth, [ . . . ] that my trajectory overlaps with so many others that this portrait comes to resemble a great number of J[ews]. Depending on the case, small adjustments need to be made, accentuating one feature shading off another. But those are only variants, few in number, of a basically common condition [ . . . ] and this [ . . . ] dynamic portrait makes it possible to anticipate and avoid them. In short, I believe we can speak of a Jewish condition, and beyond this portrait I confess to having attempted to pin it down. [ . . . ]
After all these caveats, it is with ever more caution that I posit my third purpose in writing this book. This self-portrait, however important it may be for me, is but one fragment of a far larger picture.
It was Gide, I believe, who regretted being unable to deliver his entire body of work all at once. One would have to be God [ . . . ] or have the forbearance to wait until everything was complete. I did not have such patience, I admit, and have exhibited my grand mural piece by piece, unfolding in four main parts: the condition [ . . . ] of the colonized, which I detailed in my book The Colonizer and the Colonized; the Jewish condition, with my Portrait of a Jew, the present work; the proletarian condition [ . . . ], the title of which has not been finalized; and the feminine condition, which I will most likely not submit for publication, since Simone de Beauvoir has already so masterfully covered the subject. [ . . . ] Taken together, they will be entitled Impossible Situations, and we’ll see why later on.
Why this choice of issues, and what makes them cohere? I would answer that these four panels represent, in my view, the four major figures of oppression today. There are others, less clear-cut but typical nonetheless, and I shall be mentioning them in passing, but these four portraits depict what is essentially oppression as experienced at present. One can see that this is not a philosophy of oppression; that has already been tackled by those more qualified than myself. Furthermore, I felt it was not enough to posit a dialectic of oppression in abstract terms; it was time to embody it, to show how oppression is really experienced by people who are suffering, be they resigned or outraged. This resulted [ . . . ] in a fragmentation into dozens of particular forms of oppression: [ . . . ] colonial oppression was not strictly identical, in concrete terms, to the oppression of Jews; nor did the oppression of women coincide with that of the proletariat, which meant that for each of these particular cases, the general notion of oppression had little interest. Or more precisely, it was only after a thorough inventory of concrete, comparative instances that the general definition could make sense.
Thus, on the one hand, in order for us to fully understand all the figures in the tableau, each one must be viewed with respect to the others’ perspective, and as one character in a larger picture where all figures are in a dynamic relationship with the others. Along the way, [ . . . ] I shall attempt to elucidate one with the other, to note wherever possible the kinship among these various figures of oppression, to highlight the general mechanisms at work via a series of modes of oppression as experienced in real life. In my effort to build a concerted and organizing body of work, I dare hope that the ideal reader will have in mind everything else I have written as he or she reads this one. [ . . . ]
On the other hand, let the rest of readers be reassured: each portrait is self-contained, [ . . . ] in such a way as to showcase the particular viewpoint of a moment circumscribed in space and time, [ . . . ] as when the camera zooms in on a small area of a larger painting. [ . . . ] Each portrait, and this one in particular, strives to fully express what it would take to understand it. Still, in order not to weigh the text down, convergences [ . . . ] with the other portraits, references, notes on methodology, and anything else that goes into the development of the portrait from the outside have been relegated to footnotes that, taken together, constitute a kind of commentary, an expansion that readers are welcome to ignore at no cost to the overall clarity of the portraiture’s trajectory.
You will see that this book is in fact a series of books, one inside the next, like Russian dolls. I rather enjoy this way of placing one work inside another, then a third in the second, etc. This is not a contrivance; on the contrary, I believe that this is an expression of how reality works, digging ever deeper, uncovering as one goes. By starting from my condition as Jew, then my condition as a colonized subject, I rediscovered the meaning of other conditions of oppression, one of the most enduring aspects, unfortunately, of the human condition in general.
And now, enough with promises, the time has come to keep them; let us begin. [ . . . ]
When I announced my intention of writing this book, I was greeted by a storm of protests from both my Jewish and my non-Jewish friends. “You are going to stir up monsters that are only asking to be roused,” they told me. “The best thing for this subject is silence!” I am not convinced of that. [ . . . ]
I believe firmly that anti-Semitism is profoundly widespread and real; I fear we must start with this generalization, for it is among the half-truths of the nation in which I live.
When you tell me indignantly: “We are not xenophobes! We are not racists!” I do not doubt your good faith. [ . . . ] Do you imagine that you represent the whole or even the majority of your people? And what do you actually do but stand aloof, refrain from doing anything? Is not that, in the final analysis, the advice you are giving me: discretion, silence, forgetfulness? We had exactly the same friendly quarrel when I drew the portrait of the colonized natives. [ . . . ] There again, I have known men whose equity, benevolence and courage are beyond dispute; but has that changed the general aspect of the colonial situation? Has the recent significance in relations between colonizer and colonized been transformed? Has the current picture of the European colonial taken on a different coloring, a different form? [ . . . ] Many non-Jews, you tell me, have no anti-Semitic sentiments, have never contributed to the Jewish misfortune. Better still, entire groups, companies, various social units, are apparently unaware of any hostility toward the Jew; it does not enter into their plans. All that, however, scarcely helps me if society in general remains hostile to me, if I continue to live in a structurally hostile universe. Some men, it is true, make a sincere effort not to treat women as inferior beings, to talk to them as they would to men, and are fully as indignant over woman’s position in the world as she is herself. But for all that, does not woman still occupy an inferior position, is she not still oppressed? I do not believe, in short, that the generosity of a few men, feigned or real, spontaneous or calculated, can change the essential substance of my situation.
The truth is that anti-Semitism, like all oppressive relationships, goes beyond will power and good will [ . . . ]
That fact is almost a part of our institutions, our collective customs and our culture, like certain huge, ugly old monuments, which no one thinks of destroying, so much do their age and their bulk seem to defy the powers of the wreckers [ . . . ] The Jewish misfortune [ . . . ] is first and foremost a collective and world-wide phenomenon. And not only a collective phenomenon to non-Jews but (I shall return to this later) a fundamental relationship between the Jewish group and the non-Jewish group; in other words it affects and colors all relations between Jews as a whole and non-Jews as a whole everywhere. [ . . . ]
Of course I can have loyal non-Jewish comrades, affectionate friends, even a non-Jewish wife. Nevertheless, non-Jews as a whole constitute that universe of hostility and exclusion. This I feel strongly. I believe that all non-Jews are part of a society that renders the life of the Jew unlivable as a Jew. [ . . . ] Why, for instance, do they become irritated when they are reminded of the horrors suffered by Jews and other oppressed races? [ . . . ] After the war, once past the first stunned surprise and the first demonstrations, people turned a deaf ear all too quickly to those stories of massacres, deportations and plunderings as they would to an obscenity. [ . . . ]
Just as all men, each and every one of us, are responsible for that social order that makes women servants or dolls, that permits great numbers of women to be turned into prostitutes, so every non-Jew, directly or indirectly, shares the responsibility for the Jewish misfortune; every non-Jew, willingly or unwillingly, shares the responsibility for oppressing the Jew. [ . . . ]
I do not consider the rabid anti-Semite an unusual being, a pervert, a kind of absolute evil, an immoral monster on whose shoulders one can calmly unload the sins of racism and xenophobia of an entire society. I think, on the contrary, that the anti-Semite is the natural product, the fruit of that society and can only be explained through it. Psychologists maintain that the anti-Semite has a special personality, narrow, rigid, sclerosed, phobic. [ . . . ] But why does a narrow and rigid personality find revenge and compensation in hating the Jew? Is it not because society so conveniently, so generously, suggests it to him? [ . . . ] There is no rupture, no real break between the anti-Semite and his people, but a gradation, an exasperation, a systematization. [ . . . ] The anti-Semite, in short, is always the anti-Semite of a given society: he is only repeating statements, whispered or barely expressed, but he speaks them aloud in a snarling, sadistic tone, more or less badgering, more or less trenchant. [ . . . ] There is nothing original about anti-Semitism. Its curses, its accusations, its aggressions merely express the surprise, the rage and the will to murder of all non-Jewish society. Anti-Semitism openly borrows the language, the images and the obsessive themes from the society in which it lives. [ . . . ]
When I hear the ritualistic phrase “I am not a racist but . . .” I know that the racism-trolley has started, that the questioning has begun, that sooner or later, my life is in danger.
Let no one tell me: now there you are expressing a personal opinion, one that derives from your own experience; that great collective outcry you persist in describing exists, perhaps, in those distant, and frankly rather backward, countries, where you were born, in those oriental ghettos, so poor and so terribly vulnerable, where Jews had no choice but to submit en masse to the hostility of other groups. I thought so myself until my first trip to Europe. It is not the same thing, of course, to have lived in a North African mellah, in an East European ghetto or in a large, anonymous city.3 It is one thing to have had socially outcast parents whose Judaism was intensified and increased by poverty and humiliation, and quite another to have had parents whose money and culture compensate for many worries. And finally it is not the same thing when one has been aware of being a Jew from birth or when one “discovers” it from the whispered words of strangers and even of one’s own people. But I have always found the same question that non-Jews ask the Jew; or, what amounts to the same thing, the same question which the existence of the Jew poses to non-Jews. “Since the day of the promise,” notes J. Nantet, a particularly belevolent Christian in Les Juifs et Les Nations [sic], “Israel has never ceased to be a problem to other peoples. It lives among them like a stranger.” [ . . . ]
I say, in short, that I am a problem, that in our societies the Jew is of necessity considered a problematical being; he is driven to become a problematical being. A problem to other men, why would I not be a problem to myself?
[ . . . ] I must now try to answer the question: Am I or am I not different? Does the difference exist? [ . . . ] This problem has been too persistent an irritation; I cannot be satisfied to shrug it off, to evade it. [ . . . ]
It will not be easy. It is remarkable that on this problem of the difference between Jew and non-Jew, everyone, except the avowed anti-Semite, stumbles. It would be a simple matter if I could answer yes or no. Preferably no: the anti-Semite would be wrong and that would be that. In fact, as I have said, I am troubled and doubly so. I am well aware that I cannot be so trenchantly dogmatic. Moreover, those differences, real or supposed, are regarded by everyone as a taint, an evil, and often a defect. In short, everyone admits that difference works to the advantage of the accuser, that it furnishes him with an important argument.
The anti-Semite knows this so well that he makes it his chief weapon of attack. In defining the Jew as different from his fellow-citizens, he at the same time exposes him to their mistrust and vindictiveness. He hopes to stir them up against him and thus obtain a quick and unfounded condemnation. It is true that in so doing he echoes the too-frequently blind wisdom of nations, which feel an unquestionable suspicion of difference that is deeper and more tenacious than any impulse towards universal brotherhood. [ . . . ] Children, as we know, show a spontaneous aggressiveness when confronted with a strange piece of clothing, an unusual haircut. [ . . . ]
Difference is, in a certain way, turmoil and negation of the established order. When you see how strange the other man is, you almost wonder about yourself. To reassure yourself, to be confirmed in your opinion, you would have to reject and deny the other; it is either he or I. If I am right, he must be wrong; if my way is good, his must be bad. [ . . . ]
I would begin the argument by unveiling and challenging the implicit principle that governs the whole discussion: is difference bad in itself and to be condemned? [ . . . ] For if the Jew’s enemy accuses him of being different, the Jew’s friend would spare him that misfortune; both agree on this point: it is intolerable to be different. Now, in what name do they condemn difference? [ . . . ]
Do I consider myself different? Yes, I do and I admit it calmly: on a great many points the Jew is different from the non-Jew. Having exorcised the difference, I see no reason why I should try to attenuate it as I have forced myself to do for so long. On the contrary, I am now convinced that this hesitation, these anxious reticences in the face of such blatant evidence, are one of the typical signs of Jewish oppression. The first reaction of the oppressed is always to deny difference. He insists that he does not see what separates him from his oppressor. That is the best way he can find to draw closer to his oppressor, to lighten his oppression. To that end he is ready for any sacrifice, even [ . . . ] repudiating himself for the benefit of his oppressor, whose person and values are held up to him as superior and steadfast, a height to which the oppressed aspires. To me there is nothing more intolerable, more humiliating than the memory of certain Jewish appeals to non-Jews: “We are all alike, aren’t we?” On the lips of the oppressed that statement of equality and brotherhood always has the same note, humble, unconvinced and desperate. When I hear a Jew deny any difference, I cannot help suspecting him either of lying or of fooling himself. [ . . . ] From now on, we must get it into our heads and state positively that to be different is neither good nor bad in itself. True justice, true tolerance, universal brotherhood do not demand negation of differences between men but a recognition and perhaps an appreciation of them. [ . . . ] “In the nineteenth century,” Nahum Goldmann, a Jewish leader, recently said, “we had to fight for the right to be equal; in the twentieth century we have to fight for the right to be different.”4 [ . . . ]
I shall merely add that we are already different, and we always have been, even when we were clamoring for equality. [ . . . ] Now, however, I am convinced that difference is the condition requisite to all dignity and to all liberation. To be aware of oneself is to be aware of oneself as different. To be is to be different. [ . . . ]
Difference is far more than a word: this word [ . . . ] would already have the appearance, the concreteness and the power of a social fact. [ . . . ] The Jew encounters [differences] from childhood, throughout his whole adolescence, his whole life, as an integral characteristic of the society in which he lives. The non-Jew meets them in his education, in the family, in school, in church, in his culture, and in his traditions. [ . . . ] What effect do you think this has on his physiognomy, his behavior, his very existence? [ . . . ] The Jew is one of the most perfect examples of a defendant in our day. He thinks and acts like a defendant: he is convinced that he is accused and conducts his life accordingly. Looked upon as different, treated as different, he considers himself different. That is one of the most pertinent comments of what might be called a philosophy of points of view: a sustained point of view ends by becoming his very flesh. [ . . . ]
Here I leave the philosophies of points of view; they have taken us only halfway. Whatever the corrosive acuity of that point of view, the Jew is not merely the product of other men’s views. He is not only the man who is looked upon as a Jew. If he were only that, he would be nothing more than pure negativity, anxieties and confusions, wounds and scars. Though he is unquestionably malaise and misfortune, he is also much more than that. His negativity is much richer, unfortunately, than a set of responses to the views of other men. [ . . . ] In many ways his life is always limited, restrained, curtailed. Like the colonized native, the proletarian, and most certainly in his own guise, he is a concrete negativity. [ . . . ] But he is not only that: he is also history and traditions, institutions and customs. He is brimming over with positive traits, he is also broad and rich positivity. In short, the Jew is far above the poor, shabby, cantankerous fellow the anti-Semite pictures. If only the anti-Semite knew what Jewishness really means and hides. [ . . . ]
The Jewish fate goes far beyond the relation of Jew to non-Jew, even though they are closely connected. The Jewish fate is the views of other men and the incarnation of those views; it is accusation and response to the accusation; it is the determination of the Jew and the determination of the non-Jew, that is to say, their behavior, their collective habits and their institutions. It is at once viewpoints and concrete situations; in a word, there is a Jewish fate.
I therefore found myself before a mythical portrait of myself: like the mythical portrait of the colonized native which I have described and a mythical portrait of the poor which I hope to discover. [ . . . ]
For many Christians, the Jew is supposed to have, above all, a marked theological aspect: it would be a mystical destiny, condemnable and most certainly condemned for various grave crimes, the most shocking of which would be the murder of Jesus Christ. [ . . . ] In this theological description of myself, I recognize the same familiar and fundamental accusation; my existence in the world of other men is a calamity, or, in theological terms, an irremediable curse for me and for others.
The same reasoning holds good for the cultural accusation. An amazingly evil person, I would contaminate and warp the minds of other men as my people have always contaminated the growing minds of men. [ . . . ] The same reasoning applies to my supposed political role: the Jew is supposed to have had an extraordinarily heavy, occult and of course injurious influence on the social and historical destiny of others. Thus, the Jews would not be without responsibility for the outbreak of World War II. Every man, in short, expresses in his own language, through his own ideology, his particular concept of the Jew; theologians use theological terms, writers a cultural description, and politicians political characterizations. But it is always the same idea and the same outcry: the Jew is pictured as an absolutely formidable being, possessing an extraordinarily maleficent power.
In every case, it seems the accusation [ . . . ] is magnified and finally becomes a veritable myth. In other words, it retains just enough distant connection with the initial reality to live its own life. [ . . . ] The anti-Semite’s slightest description teems with incoherence and contradictions. [ . . . ]
Everything about the Jew, in short, is said to be bad, even what at first sight may seem to be a virtue. Is it said that the Jew is intelligent? Can we consider that a virtue? No indeed, he is too intelligent, his sagacity is destructive, corrosive. [ . . . ] I have shown that, although the colonizer unwillingly admitted the qualities of the colonized native, he nevertheless interpreted them as defects: generosity as prodigality, gaiety as vulgarity. The differences that separate the Jew from other men are not condemned solely because they are differences, as we have seen, but on the pretext that they are harmful. The Jew is not only economically different, he is said to be economically dangerous. [ . . . ]
At the worst the Jew is depicted as absolute evil, the devil of the Middle Ages, which means, to be specific, that his accuser demands the death penalty for him. [ . . . ] Why is the Jew accused of murder? I shall answer bluntly: to give his accusers an excuse to kill him. The Jew killed Christ, he profanes the host, that is to say he continues to kill Christ throughout the ages.5 The accusation is not confined to symbols, the Jew kills concretely: every year at Easter a Christian child disappears.6 This theme of the Jew as a murderer goes back far beyond Christianity. The historian Jules Isaac found it among the ancients: a Greek was periodically carried off, fattened and sacrificed. Moreover that theme is still present in a new guise. The Nazi accusations are only a secularization of this theological method of radical condemnation. Modern racism is merely employing a language more adapted to the present day. “The Jews plot to conquer the world and suppress all peoples,” explains an Arab tract distributed in Bonn in 1959 by delegates of the Arab league. [ . . . ] The Jew commits the most atrocious crimes, therefore one need have no scruples about killing him. [ . . . ]
The function of the mythical portrait of the Jew is obviously to justify oppression; and therefore, to a certain extent, to help maintain it. [ . . . ]
Oppression creates the myth and the myth keeps oppression alive. [ . . . ] If the non-Jew is not guilty, then the Jew must be. If the vagrant and the prostitute are not guilty, then we are; therefore the vagrant and the prostitute are responsible for their own misfortune and for the disorder they introduce into society. Guilt must be changed into its opposite, the guilt of the oppressor must become the guilt of the oppressed. [ . . . ]
By a simple antithesis, the Jew is at the same time accused of not understanding others, their art, their culture, or their sensitivity; and of not being comprehensible to others. The Jew, in short, is not of their world: degradation ends in de-humanization. The myth is complete: it has reached its goal.
How can one fail to reject and condemn such a creature? Physically hideous and corrupt, morally despicable, economically harmful, politically dangerous, spiritually evil, theologically damned [ . . . ]
In North Africa [ . . . ] one of the first acts of the new governments was to tighten the bonds of solidarity with other Arab nations, an understandable and legitimate move. Now one of the foundations of that solidarity today happens to be a pronounced anti-Judaism. In vain we pointed out to our co-religionists that anti-Judaism was still fairly half-hearted among Moroccans and especially Tunisians. [ . . . ]
Their anxiety is no longer unfounded. Moroccan Jews can no longer write to their relatives in Israel; all postal connections are prohibited. Any truly Jewish activity, in Tunisia as in Morocco, is always in danger of arousing a suspicion of Zionism. A young Tunisian minister, who should have known better used these very harsh words one day: “We do not want the Jews to have their wallets here and their hearts elsewhere!” [ . . . ]
Arab solidarity is a fact, as I well know; the Arab people feel it, governments utilize it. The Moslem religion is another fact; the leaders are obliged to take it into account and naturally are tempted to make use of it. The result is that Jewish citizens find themselves once more sacrificed to necessities that are always to some extent legitimate and respectable. Doesn’t this suggest at least that they are not citizens like other men, that they are less valuable than others? [ . . . ]
To the inhabitants of the ghetto—and every Jew carries within him his own ghetto—for the Jewish masses, persecution seems vaguely to be a natural calamity. It seems to them to flow almost of necessity from their lives among non-Jews. They admit it without a protest in talks of misfortune, oppression and massacres. This explains the success of a book like Schwarz-Bart’s, The Last of the Just.7 And that popular belief is, I am convinced, fundamentally correct and historically justified: persecution is the paroxysm of social and historical discomfort; now malaise is consubstantial with the Jewish fate. [ . . . ]
There is a negative unity of all Jewish destiny and of all individual Jewish destinies; an actual unity, a concrete negativity, as I have sufficiently explained, that crushes and marks that destiny in a certain way. It is not just the simple accusations, mere glances, calumnies, “insults that fly with the wind,” I had already written about in regard to the colonized natives. The negative conditions of Jewish existence are as much actual difficulties in living, impossibilities, iron collars and knives, wounds and amputations, in his flesh and in his measure as a man. [ . . . ]
Before closing this evaluation of my life, I have one final hesitation; have I not painted too gloomy a picture? Have I not exaggerated the importance of the Jewish misfortune?
No, sincerely, this is just the way I have lived it; everything I have written has almost always seemed obvious to me. [ . . . ] That is why I warned from the beginning (and I remind you of it again), that this was a portrait of myself and only by extension the portrait of other Jews. But I still think that every Jew, if he forces himself, must describe the same processes and the same restrictions on his life, in some ways more or less obvious, of course, and more or less acknowledged. [ . . . ]
I believe, in short, that there is a Jewish fate, a specific Jewish fate. This fate makes the Jew a minority being: different; separated both from himself and from others; a being abused in his culture and in his history, in his past and in his daily life—in the end, an abstract being. What have I done up to this point but sketch the principal traits of a figure of oppression? Yes, as a Jew, I am above all an oppressed person and the Jewish fate is essentially a condition of oppression. [ . . . ]
If it is not always clear that the Jew is an oppressed person, it is because oppression does not always have the same appearance. It can be obvious as in the case of the proletariat, an oppression of class against class within the same nation; or as in the case of the colonized where it is an oppression of people against people, nation against nation. The oppression of the Jew stands midway between the two: It is within the same nation without being involved in the class struggle. The oppression of the American Negro is still more complex; it includes at the same time economic, cultural and political pressure. The oppression of woman is probably the most artful, being tempered and disguised by eroticism and maternity. I said, at the beginning of this book, that I would one day try to bring together in a single picture the similarities and differences of all these contemporary oppressed peoples. But did I need to wait till then to discover that though each has his own special characteristics, we are all brothers in suffering and bitterness, that we are all burdened with negativity and that our positivity is gravely threatened? [ . . . ]
The longer the oppression lasts, the more it profoundly affects him. It ends by becoming so familiar to him that he believes it is part of his own constitution, that he accepts it and could not imagine his recovery from it. This acceptance is the crowning point of oppression. [ . . . ]
The two men who have done most to reveal the working society are Jews: Marx and Freud. The former discovered the economic scope, the foundation of the pyramid, the latter the motor of the wish motive behind alibis and ideologies. Perhaps to accomplish that they had to be Jews: they had to be able to look at that society both from within and from without. [ . . . ] Not all Jews become a Marx or a Freud, not all Jews turn the hostilities of others and their restlessness into intuitions of genius. But almost all Jews are oppressed, anxious and ostracized, with no control over their destiny and in doubt as to their future. Almost all Jews are afraid, and it is not good for a man to be afraid for such a long time, from father to son. All Jews are at grips with the fate which is imposed upon them, and they must try to respond to the problems which this fate poses for them.
What history has done, history can undo. Every time the Jew is treated as a complete man, he behaves like other men, not to say better than they. The events in Israel have largely confirmed this. [ . . . ]
I must add that I have made as great an effort as possible to write in the past tense, as if all this belonged to the past; and, in fact, I believe it does in part, and I say this not merely to avoid arguments. The rebirth of a sovereign Jewish state, the still fresh memory of a terrible war in which Jews paid so dearly for being Jews, in which nearly the whole world connected anti-Semitism with a government of shame, have made an open expression of hatred of the Jew difficult, at least for the present time. It is even possible that we may have entered upon a wholly new period of history, one that would see at last the progressive liquidation of that oppression the Jews have suffered for so long.
I feel that Portrait of a Jew and The Liberation of the Jew are just as important for the broader understanding of oppression, not only of the Jews but also of any oppressed persons, in that they are often richer in detail, more amply descriptive and acutely observed, than my other writings, for this is a condition that I know particularly well from the inside. [ . . . ]
I entitled my first book Portrait of a Jew, it is true, out of caution and modesty, to highlight what it contained of my lived experience. I was soon to discover that, in order to answer the question “Who am I, myself, as a Jew?” I had to first answer the broader question, if only between the lines: “What is a Jew?”
A Polish-Russian Jew has spoken out to confirm that our exploits, our hopes, and fears bore a remarkable resemblance, though seen through different local colors. If Arabic, my mother tongue, were replaced by Yiddish, that same ambiguity toward language as experienced by Jews applied in both cases, the same intimate separation between the secret mother tongue, spoken at home but never in proper society, and the language of the majority, a cold, impersonal tool for communicating with others. [ . . . ]
There exists a common Jewish condition, common to the overwhelming majority of Jews, naturally, if not to all. [ . . . ]
Being Jewish means not only the awareness of it, it means enduring an objective condition. [ . . . ]
What we have here is all the objective negativity of an oppressed person’s entire existence. [ . . . ]
“What is a Jew?” Here [ . . . ] is my answer. [ . . . ]
That would not be so awful if I hadn’t discovered at the same time that being a Jew also involves
“If such is the condition of the Jew, always threatened, always anxiety-ridden, in a fundamentally hostile world, despite its superficial liberalism, how is this condition to be transformed?” [ . . . ]
Israel represents the still tenuous result of Jewish liberation, just as decolonization represents the liberation of the Arabs or Black peoples of the Middle East and Africa. [ . . . ]
If I wished to conclude this lengthy research, around and within myself, I would say that what matters for oppressed people is that they take their lives into their own hands. And to do that, they need to start by becoming aware of what they have become, of their exact place among others, prior to taking any action. If they are clearheaded and courageous enough to reach this point, they have already proven their readiness. This lesson applies to individuals as well as entire populations, whether colonized, Black, or Jewish. Half measures can be misleading, and early results may well disappoint, but what matters is to keep heading in the right direction, eliminating unworkable solutions along the way. In this sense, beyond the Jewish condition and eventual liberation, I once again have attempted to test different paths to the liberation of any and all oppressed people.