“For us Jews,” wrote the French essayist Wladimir Rabi in September 1945, “the fight against antisemitism belongs to the past. We believe that it behooves the non-Jews, and the non-Jews alone, to lead this struggle.”Footnote 1 Throughout the 1930s, the predominantly Jewish members of the LICA (the International League Against Antisemitism, created in 1928) countered the antisemitic far-right in the name of “humanism (…), the irreducible refusal to admit the inequality of human races.” In 1942, Jewish resisters close to the Communist party founded the clandestine National Movement Against Racism (MNCR), the precursor of the left-wing antiracist association MRAP. After the liberation, the two organizations united forces to erase the “profound traces left by German propaganda” in the country.Footnote 2 Anti-defamation efforts, argued Rabi, were admirable but futile. After the dark years of Vichy collaborationism, a “secret wound” separated Jews from the rest of the population. Feeling “terribly isolated,” the Vilna-born publicist left activism to others. Jews had done what they could: The containment of antisemitism was now the responsibility of “the non-Jews, and the non-Jews alone.”
The Italian Jewish writer Giacomo Debenedetti viewed the problem differently. The antifascist literary critic was more worried about the danger of philosemitism than the threat of antisemitism. To be “gratuitously loved, undeservedly loved, that is, wrongly loved,” he warned in September 1944, would be worse than bigotry. After years of persecution, the Jews’ only demand was to recover “the right to not have special rights. Special, meaning racial.” Debenedetti not only rejected demonstrative solicitude. He also claimed that among “the liberties that constitute Liberties is the liberty to be anti-Semitic.” What he benignly called “an anti-Semitism of free men” was in his mind a blessing in disguise. After years of persecutions, “Liberal anti-Semitism” offered Italian Jews an opportunity “to speak out in the open.” While Rabi enjoined his coreligionists to leave the fight against antisemitism to non-Jews, Debenedetti found disputation “revitalizing, regenerating for the Jewish people.”Footnote 3
Rebuilders of Jewish communities in Western Europe navigated between these two positions. Cautious distance from society in West Germany and Austria, retreat into communal affairs in the Netherlands, faith in the protective Republic in France, alignment with the antifascist consensus in Italy, and quiet interventionism in Britain (although Jewish ex-servicemen favored more muscular tactics): In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish communal leaders responded in multiple ways to manifestations of hostility.Footnote 4 Vigilance against antisemitism, however, soon became one the main functions of Jewish representative institutions. In France and Britain, the only two countries with still sizeable Jewish populations in Western Europe, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF) and the Board of Deputies of British Jews took over the years an outspoken stance against defamation in the press or the political arena.Footnote 5 Smaller federative bodies remained behind the stage of politics until the late twentieth century but likewise rang the alarm on antisemitism. Jewish communal institutions in democratic Europe evolved from confessional entities to watchdog organizations: The moratorium on public antisemitism enforced after 1945 legitimized in return bolder Jewish militancy.
The containment of antisemitism, however, did not only rest on Jewish shoulders. The American historian Koppel S. Pinson, a scholar of German antisemitism and editor of Jewish Social Studies, acknowledged at the end of the war the primary role of non-Jews in this regard. “There is a greater awareness (…),” observed Pinson, “that antisemitism is not so much a problem for the Jew to solve as it is for the non-Jewish world.” The historian Salo W. Baron similarly stated that “the Jews themselves can do relatively little about combatting antisemitic propaganda.”Footnote 6 The West European transition from Nazism, fascism, or pro-Axis collaborationism toward democracy fortunately required the rejection of overt prejudice in mainstream politics. Although the delegitimization of antisemitism forced the recoding of Judeophobia, democratic Europe also pushed anti-Jewish animosity beyond the pale of public permissiveness.
Moderate conservatives, Liberals and above all the antifascist left, to be sure, had already disapproved of antisemitism before the war. But what began to change in 1945 is not only the vigor of this reprobation but also the position of antisemitism in relation to other forms of racial prejudice. “Of all the various group tensions, that known as Anti-Semitism concerns the whole world and calls for special treatment,” declared the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish participants in an emergency meeting convened in Switzerland in August 1947. The Seelisberg conference was only a first step toward a new relationship between Christians and Jews after the Holocaust, but its concluding report revealed a new approach toward antisemitism. Since “an attack on Jewry” was an assault on “our ordered human society,” it was “advisable to deal with anti-Semitism as a special case requiring special treatment.”Footnote 7 On the eve of decolonization, the Seelisberg ecumenical forum did not specify whether European colonial domination also counted as assault against “human society.” In the aftermath of the Holocaust, intimated the first protagonists of the Christian Jewish dialogue, the containment of Jew-hatred was particularly urgent: The moral purification of postwar European societies required special attention to the antisemitic disease. This viewpoint was still minoritarian both within the Church and secular society. It was nonetheless indicative of a new political, theological, and philosophical commitment: In 1945, anti-antisemitism began to mutate into a singular crusade against the scourge. Never disentangled from the question of Zionism, the writings of first-generation “anti-antisemites” illuminate the genesis of this struggle.
“Rationally Anti-antisemitic”
“We were pro-Jew in 1939 as part of antifascism,” reflected the British socialist Richard Crossman in 1946; “now most of us are not emotionally pro-Jew, but only rationally ‘anti-antisemitic’ which is a very different thing.”Footnote 8 The thirty-eight-year-old Labour MP for Coventry did not only use rare terminology. He also implied that to be “anti-antisemitic” after Nazism required a departure from humanist antifascism. Whether liberals or communist fellow-travelers, however, antifascist intellectuals in the 1930s took an unbending stand against racial persecution in the Third Reich. Admittedly, the distinguished European writers committed to the “defense of culture” prior to 1939 understood Nazism as an onslaught on civilization more than a longing for a world purified of Jews. In antifascist eyes, Hitler’s ideology remained above all a reactionary attack against freedom and progress, or the product of monopoly capitalism in the view of economic Marxism.Footnote 9 Antifascism, however, did not blind his followers to the realities of Jewish victimhood. “We, who boast that we are fighting for humanity and human dignity against barbarism,” wrote the exiled Thomas Mann in the last months of the war, “must ask ourselves if we are doing everything in our power to allay this indescribable suffering, which debases all humanity.”Footnote 10 As Crossman himself acknowledged, it was through antifascism than he initially felt “emotionally pro-Jew.” But after the war, the former Oxford don strayed from the universalism of the left in favor of “rational” anti-antisemitism: a search for unique remedies to the special problem of Jew-hatred.
Although Crossman was initially skeptical of Zionism, the realization of Jewish statehood in Palestine became his preferred solution to antisemitism. Appointed by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in November 1945, the Labour politician did not begin his mission with high appreciation for the Zionist movement.Footnote 11 “Any Gentile, who is compelled to study Zionism for weeks on end, reached a point where he feels inclined to bang on the table and walk out of the room,” he pointed out in his recollections. But after encountering Holocaust survivors in Vienna and Jewish displaced persons in occupied Germany, Crossman took stock of the destruction of Jewish life in East-Central Europe. Until late 1945, he still maintained that “it is the anti-Semites and racists who want to clear the Jews out of Europe and place them together in Palestine.” In September 1946, however, the “rationally anti-antisemitic” socialist pleaded for the relocation of East-Central European Holocaust survivors out of the continent: “In Poland, Hungary and Rumania, the Jews have the bare choice of either ceasing living as Jews or of leaving Europe … this nation must emigrate.” Crossman generalized this diagnosis to the whole continent: “The Jew who wanted to be a Jew, separate from the rest of the nation, must leave Europe; those who remain must accept assimilation.”Footnote 12 In agreement with the Committee’s report issued in April 1946, Crossman advocated the admission of 100,000 Holocaust refugees in Mandate Palestine while urging other countries, including Britain and the United States, to also open their gates. Within weeks, however, Crossman and his Labour acolyte Michael Foot supported the establishment of a “Judean state” in partitioned Palestine.Footnote 13 The price exacted on the native Arab population appeared tolerable. “Looking at the position of the Palestinian Arab,” he observed during his short visit of Mandate Palestine in March 1946, “I had to admit that no western colonist in any other country had done so little harm, or disturbed so little the life of the indigenous people.”Footnote 14
Jewish statehood, however, appealed to Crossman for another reason. A “Jewish commonwealth,” he still believed immediately after the war, “will neither solve the Jewish problem nor reduce anti-Semitism.” But on this topic too, Crossman quickly changed his mind. The fulfillment of Zionist goals, he told Jewish audiences in the United States in November 1946, was necessary to salvage Western democracy from antisemitic contamination. His anti-antisemitism derived from pragmatic calculus: Regardless of the claims of Palestine’s Arab population, less Jews in Europe meant less antisemitism on the continent. “Unless we British Socialists could accomplish the right relationship to the Jewish problem,” Crossman declared in New York, “our whole democracy might be corrupted by the seed of antisemitism.” As he told a Manhattan audience, “every Gentile has the virus of anti-Semitism in his veins.” Awareness of the disease was the first step to recovery: “then you can make the rational compensations that are necessary in this life of Jew and Gentile.” As Crossman candidly acknowledged, his pro-Zionist Labour faction did not oppose Ernest Bevin’s “policy of injustice (…) because we like the Jews.” Crossman’s concern was for “our own Gentile democracy”: A potent “antisemitic virus” jeopardized its existence. This metaphor equated antisemitism to an infectious disease, yet immunity was within reach. Support for a Jewish state, Crossman avowed, helped “conquer [antisemitism] in ourselves.”Footnote 15 The Labour MP, to be sure, admitted partiality. “If I were an Arab,” he recognized, “I would fight Zionism with all my powers.”Footnote 16 But Crossman was an Englishman worried of the negative effect of antisemitism on the democratic West. For the future editor of the liberal anti-communist manifesto The God That Failed (1949), the fate of Western liberalism hinged upon the robustness of its anti-antisemitism: “The test of a democracy in the modern world is how it manages the Jewish problem. It is a very simple test of freedom.”Footnote 17
In his pro-Zionist writings, Crossman abundantly referred to the existence of a “Jewish problem” begging for solution. “This is the very centre of the Jewish problem, in a world of nation-states the Jew is in a false position,” he wrote in Palestine Mission.Footnote 18 This “problem” differed from the one propagated by Judeophobes after Nazism: black-marketeering (in occupied Germany and Austria), overrepresentation in commerce or the professions, “ghetto mentality,” or as the French playwright Gabriel Marcel lamented after the liberation of Paris, the tendency of Jews to “encroach” on society.Footnote 19 Crossman’s “Jewish problem,” to the contrary, referred to the disadvantageous position of Jewish survivors in East-Central Europe: The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, to which he belonged from November 1945 to April 1946, was precisely established to investigate “Jewish problems in Palestine and Europe” – a formulation also used by sympathizers of Zionism.
Evocations of a “Jewish problem,” however, inevitably echoed century-old debates over Europe’s “Jewish question.” Popularized in the mid nineteenth century amid a broad “age of questions,” the expression referred to the problem of Jewish incorporation in modern European societies.Footnote 20 Bourgeois liberalism and Marxism alike traditionally offered integrationist solutions. Both advocated assimilation in the nation-state or the working class to remedy oppression or prejudice. Political antisemitism, to the contrary, transformed the “Jewish question” into a rallying cry against Jews to reverse the process of emancipation. Nazi racial warfare, lastly, sought cosmic redemption from Jews and Judaism. The last grand theorists of the “Jewish question,” Hitler’s henchmen used the slogan to justify genocide: The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” indeed left an indelible taint on the expression. In January 1946, however, the exiled Hannah Arendt still accepted the validity of the term. As she wrote to her former mentor Karl Jaspers, “I have refused to abandon the Jewish question as the focal point of my historical and political thinking.” But other German-speaking Jewish thinkers soon discredited the phrase. The philosopher Ernst Bloch argued in 1963 that whoever speaks of the Jewish Question” “verges upon, and perpetuates, an anti-Semitic way of framing the problem.” The Austrian-born writer Jean Améry likewise abhorred the notion. For the Auschwitz survivor, the “Jewish question” remained “the anti-Semites’ preserve, their ignominy, their sickness.”Footnote 21
In 1945, however, anti-antisemite defenders of Jews seized upon the catchphrase. Reopening the “Jewish question,” of course, risked reviving the language of extermination. Jean-Paul Sartre drafted his Réflexions sur la question juive in the fall of 1944, only a few months after Vichy’s Commissariat-General for Jewish Questions ceased its infamous activities. Discredited over time, the slogan nonetheless offered Sartre a point of entry into the problem of antisemitism. In 1948, the Hungarian democratic political thinker István Bibó probed the depth of antisemitism in his country through a similar lens. The communist take-over soon sidelined Bibó but his “Jewish Question in Hungary” turned the table on the phrase’s antisemitic connotation.Footnote 22 With Sartre in France and Bibó in Hungary, the “question” underwent epochal rehabilitation: Synonymous with the permanence of antisemitism in European societies, it became a crucible for postwar morality. As the French protestant leader Charles Westphal wrote in 1947, it was now “the question among all questions.”Footnote 23 Jewish observers favorably looked upon this phenomenon. “It requires more personality in a Gentile to take a dispassionate or a truly Christian interest in the Jewish question,” wrote the British historian Lewis Namier in 1946, “that for a Jew to be disturbed about it.”Footnote 24 How to approach the “question” nonetheless divided opponents of antisemitism. At the end of World War II, new anti-antisemites reopened the Jewish question to declare war on Judeophobia. Old ones, however, immediately announced its closure.
Closing the “Jewish Question”: The European Left, 1945–1948
“There is no Jewish question,” opined Herbert Kohlich, an editor of the Viennese socialist newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, in March 1946. After Nazism categorized Jews as racial outsiders, Austrian Social-Democrats championed their civic and legal rights in the newborn Second Republic. Yet the “martyrdom endured by the Jews,” added Kohlich, did not justify any “special treatment”: Giving Jews any other status than “Austrian citizens of the Jewish faith” would amount to “racism in reverse.” Jewish victims, in any case, “only amounted to a sixth or seventh of the thirty-four million victims of National-Socialism.” Oscar Pollak, the newspaper’s Jewish editor-in-chief, reminded his colleague that “promoting empathy is the responsibility of each individual socialist.” But Kohlich’s article only stirred up minor controversy. Like their Christian conservative coalition partners, Austrian socialists disapproved of special relief and restitution policies for the miniscule community of Jewish survivors in Vienna. After the country was recognized by the Allies in 1943 as the “first victim of Hitlerite aggression,” the ruling political parties made a point of claiming that all citizens had suffered equally. As the governmental mouthpiece Wiener Zeitung editorialized in January 1946, justice commanded “equality between all confessions.”Footnote 25
The Jewish publicist Artur Rosenberg, however, countered that a “Jewish question” was alive and well in postwar Austria. Enduring antisemitism, difficulties in restitution, and denial of co-responsibility for the persecution of Jews since 1938 were its unmistakable features. Abolishing the Jewish question, agreed Rosenberg, was “an ideal to be aspired to.” Yet for the time being, its erasure only encouraged evasion of guilt.Footnote 26 A Viennese Jew long distanced from his Jewish roots, the socialist writer and returning exile Hans Weigel inveighed against Rosenberg’s “racially defined” attitude. Throughout his political career, the konfessionslos (nondenominational) Jew and future socialist prime minister Bruno Kreisky would similarly object to the existence of a “Jewish question.”Footnote 27 The dissenting Rosenberg drew another conclusion. The relegation of the “Jewish question” to the past, he argued before his emigration to France in the summer of 1946, first required the acknowledgment of its existence.
Whereas in Vienna socialists marginalized the “Jewish question” in favor of pan-Austrian victimhood, in occupied Germany the Social Democratic Party (SPD) did not steer clear from the phrase. Although the expression was still redolent of Nazism, the SPD leader Kurt Schumacher reversed its meaning: The “Jewish question” conveyed in his eyes the “injustice committed against the Jews” as well as a duty of “moral and material reparation.”Footnote 28 Banned under Hitler, the SPD opposed the idea of collective guilt and did not place Jews above other victims. An outspoken anti-Nazi, Schumacher himself spent more than ten years in various concentration camps. In June 1947, however, he enjoined socialists to “for once talk about the Jews in Germany and in the world.” The party, he declared, recognized that the “Third Reich attempted to exterminate Jewry in Europe. The German people are obligated to reparations and compensation.” The statement squarely blamed the Jewish genocide on the Nazi dictatorship but was nonetheless a rare admission of responsibility. Before the Federal Republic’s official policy of “reconciliation” with the Jewish world initiated during Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship (1949–63), Schumacher urged an honest examination of the Nazi past. “The average member of the cabinet does not think much about the Jewish question and is generally cool and passive about it,” he lamented in November 1950. Contrary to ruling Christian Democrats, he reminded, the SPD had been since 1945 the only German political party “dedicated to the Jewish question.”Footnote 29
Socialist parties elsewhere similarly turned the antisemitic “Jewish question” into an issue of persecution and injustice. Because of its negative connotation, however, the phrase itself was absent from their vocabulary. In March 1946, the Labour-friendly Manchester Guardian featured a lengthy essay on the “Jewish Question” penned by the pro-Zionist historian Lewis Namier.Footnote 30 Yet the Labour party, like its counterparts on the continent, now avoided the term. Socialists showed instead sympathy for the “Jewish problem” of statelessness after the Holocaust. Even Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, an opponent to large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine, declared in November 1945 that the “Jewish problem is a great human one.”Footnote 31 Although the Attlee government refused to lift restrictions on the number of Jews allowed to settle in Palestine, most Labour backbenchers continued as before the war to support Zionism. In France, socialist politicians facilitated the covert embarkation of Jewish refugees from Mediterranean seaports to Palestine. From 1945 to 1948, the social-democratic solution to the “Jewish problem” coincided with the “solution to the Jewish question” in Palestine, a formulation still in use in Zionist pamphlets circulated in 1945.Footnote 32
East and West of the Iron Curtain, Communists returned to old Marxist ideas on the “Jewish question” and antisemitism: Both were bound to fade away with the advent of a classless and just society. In Soviet-occupied East Germany, the new leaders of the self-proclaimed antifascist nation aggressively suppressed the “question.” Although Jewish survivors received recognition as indistinct “victims of fascism,” the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) deflected attention from the particular fate of the Jews. In Soviet-controlled Europe, Marxist ideologues briefly resurrected the “Jewish question” to give it proper burial. “The capitalist activities of the Jews and the hatred of Jews are correlated,” wrote the Hungarian historian of Jewish origin Erik Molnár in 1946. Socialism, he prophesized, will eliminate the root cause of antisemitism. “An artificial creation of politically motivated demagoguery,” the “Jewish question” stood on the brink of extinction. Longing for assimilation and equality, Jewish communists in East-Central Europe similarly yearned for the question’s disappearance.Footnote 33
The French PCF and Italian PCI, the two largest communist parties in Western Europe in 1945, did not think differently. Yet contrary to Eastern European ideologues, they refrained from speculating on a “question” reminiscent of Nazism: Accelerated Jewish integration in the party, the working class, and the nation was their antifascist response to the Final Solution. In the immediate postwar period, this proposition still appealed to Eastern European Jewish immigrants in France or Jewish intellectuals in Italy. “At this time,” wrote the Jewish communist Emilio Sereni in July 1946, “the cause of Judaism is bound, more than ever, with the worldwide cause of defending democracy and peace.” For the young writer Amos Luzzatto, “applied communism” remained the “single possible answer to anti-Semitism.”Footnote 34
In 1946, however, the Belgian Trotskyist of Jewish origin Ernest Mandel attempted to rejuvenate Marxist thought on the “Jewish question” – as his mentor Abraham Léon had done before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944.Footnote 35 The “Jewish tragedy,” claimed Mandel in reference to the Holocaust, “pushed to the point of paroxysm the barbarity of imperialism’s customary methods of our time.” Like Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Mandel related the Nazi program of extermination to the history of European imperial violence. The genocide of the Jews, in his mind, also showed humanity the “mirror of the future,” a new age of colonial and nuclear terror. “The perspective of the disappearance of the Jews from the earth,” wrote the Jewish revolutionary, “is part of the perspective of the destruction of the human species.” The conceptualization of Auschwitz as blueprint for Hiroshima or Cold War Armageddon departed from Marxist economic interpretations of Nazism. Mandel’s solution to the “Jewish question,” however, stayed within orthodox bounds. “The Jewish masses,” he proclaimed, “will owe their final emancipation to a devoted struggle to the cause of socialism.” Contrary to the Frankfurt School’s psychoanalytical take on Marxist philosophy, classical Marxism after the Holocaust had little new to say on the nature and function of antisemitism in society.Footnote 36
In liberated Western Europe, some of the first “querists” – non-Jewish writers who opened the question anew – came instead from the ranks of the Christian church. Martinus Slotemaker de Bruine, a Dutch Reformed pastor who during the Holocaust pleaded with Reichskomissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart to stop the deportations of Jews, penned his Het joodse vraagstuk [The Jewish Question, 1946] out of self-declared compassion. De Bruine’s concern was for the “Jewish human being, that very particular and peculiar form of life that arouses so much estrangement and strong affective reactions.” Yet by his own admission, his essay was not “typical philosemitic writing.” In fact, “anyone who wishes so could even hear antisemitic tones in it.” While Jews had “cultural talent,” they also displayed “egocentric attitudes” and a “hardly concealed sense of superiority.” The Protestant leader did not advocate the conversion of Jews to Christianity, but he advised them to disappear into Dutch society: The precondition of acceptance remained as in the past a drastic change of Jewish behavior or better, full assimilation. This goal required difficult negotiations: “many exchanges of views will still have to be conducted (…) before the mentality of the ghetto can finally be overcome.”Footnote 37 Post-Holocaust Christian writers on the “Jewish question,” as the Dutch clergyman demonstrated, still liberally blamed Jews for antisemitism. In England, however, the Anglican pioneer of Christian-Jewish dialogue James Parkes had since the 1930s followed a different path. The “Jewish question,” he countered, was synonymous with the question of Christian anti-Judaism in the West.
“Enemy of the People”: James Parkes’s Anti-antisemitism
In The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: The Origins of Antisemitism, first published in 1934, Parkes challenged a core tenet of Christian doctrine. Responsibility for antisemitism, wrote the Anglican scholar, did not rest on the Jews’ rejection of Christ but upon theological representations of the Jew “as a being perpetually betraying God and ultimately abandoned by Him.” After the outbreak of World War II, Parkes reiterated this position in his pamphlet The Jewish Question, written to sway the wartime British public away from anti-Jewish prejudice.Footnote 38 Parkes’s exculpation of Jews for their victimization was even more trenchant in his Emergence of the Jewish Problem 1878–1939 published in 1946. The hatred of Jews, he explained, functioned as a “political weapon deliberately invented (…) for ends which have nothing to do with the Jewish people or the Jewish religion.”Footnote 39
This interpretation, of course, was not new to Jewish theorists of antisemitism. On the eve of the war, Hannah Arendt had already observed that as opposed to earlier periods, in the twentieth century “the foundations of antisemitism are found in developments that have very little to do with Jews.”Footnote 40 But coming from a clergyman, such discharge of Jews from culpability departed from the “philosemitic antisemitism” still rife in European Christian discourse: a condemnation of anti-Jewish bigotry or violence which also blamed its victims for the phenomenon. The idea of the Jews’ responsibility for their otherwise contemptable persecution had not disappeared at the end of the war, least among churchmen or writers still convinced that Jewish suffering was the consequence of deicide. The provocative Parkes claimed, to the contrary, that antisemitism was exclusively “a problem of the Gentile” independent of Jewish actions.Footnote 41 The Anglican reverend reversed the classic terms of Jewish emancipation: The burden of verbesserung or “regeneration,” once the obligation imposed on Jews for their acceptance in modern European societies, now exclusively fell on the non-Jews.
Parkes’s acquittal of Jews for the hatred surrounding them reflected a new direction in post-Holocaust theories of antisemitism: a shift from the “Jewish question” to the “antisemite question” peculiar to the Christian West. Parke’s focus on the Gentile’s deficiencies, however, did not leave Jews without faults. In An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism (1945), a book published in England and the United States and distributed in occupied Germany to promote denazification, Parkes stressed again that “the onslaught on the Jews” did not result from “actual Jewish conduct.” But in a chapter dedicated to the “Psychological and Sociological Problems of Jewry,” Parkes validated some of the stereotypes he sought to discredit. The Jews’ “contempt for the non-Jew” or their “lower business morality,” he claimed, were “disabilities a minority must suffer from.” Such unattractive Jewish traits, he predicted, will fortunately disappear with the full acceptance of Jews in Christian society.Footnote 42 The Austrian-born Jewish émigré psychologist Marie Jahoda, however, doubted Parkes’s benevolence. “The lapsis mentis of Dr. Parkes,” she charged in 1947, “offers additional sad evidence (quite unneeded) of the ubiquity of anti-Semitism.”Footnote 43 Jahoda harshly judged a clergyman who according to his Jewish admirers “also spoke as a Jew.”Footnote 44 Yet Parkes inadvertently gave credence to Jahoda’s criticism. “If I were asked what proportion of the population were at least slightly unbalanced on the subject of the Jews,” he speculated, “I would say: about 95 per cent, including (…) all the people who have made a deep study of the Jewish question.”Footnote 45
Parkes’s lapses proved again that anti-antisemitism did not preclude negative or ambiguous views of Jews. The Anglican scholar nevertheless declared an all-out crusade against the scourge. He described the struggle in epic language: “The giant [of anti-semitism] is as dangerous an enemy (…) as any that we shall meet.” The Holocaust, however, played little role in Parkes’s call to arms. Published in 1945, An Enemy of the People enjoined the Christian public to act against prejudice without evoking more than in passing the Jewish tragedy.Footnote 46 Antisemitism was above all a danger because of its corruptive effect on Christian society. The crushing of the “giant” was above all self-purification: “For our own sakes, we must clear him from our path.” Parkes’s secondary goal was the protection of the Jews. The behemoth, he urged, “we must slay also for the sake of the victims, for the sake of the Jews.”
One means of eradication, Parkes argued, was the education of Christians in schools and churches. But a more immediate form of action was support for Jewish statehood. “In southern Syria,” admitted the Church of England reverend, “conditions exist in which two rights confront each other, both valid.” Yet if a “Jewish commonwealth were to be established, the situation of the Jews in Europe is not difficult of solution. For there is a home to which those who do not wish to remain in Europe are able to go.” Parkes’s Zionism was pragmatic, not biblical. “The making of Palestine (or part of it) into a Jewish Commonwealth,” he claimed, “would not be destroying an Arab country; it would be diminishing the area of Syria.”Footnote 47 The benefit far outweighed the cost. Like the Labour MP Richard Crossman, Parkes envisioned the defeat of the “enemy of the people” through the emigration of many Jews to Palestine. The country is “not empty,” recognized Parkes, “and the resulting conflict of interest is one which will need the most serious attention.” But group settlement in Palestine was still preferable to Jewish “infiltration in the world’s great cities,” the traditional “breeding grounds for antisemitism.” With or without Arab acceptance, Palestine was enrolled into Europe’s battle against its antisemitic self.Footnote 48
Parkes’s ruminations on the “Jewish question,” in sum, encapsulated the key tenets of the new anti-antisemitic cause. “The present general neurosis about the Jews” was not the result of Jewish actions but the exclusive “problem of the Gentile”; the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudice hindered the reconstruction of healthy societies; distinct from antifascism or progressive politics, anti-antisemitism sought to expunge the “virus” from the body of the citizenry; support for a Jewish state in Palestine became part and parcel of the struggle. Other anti-antisemitic writers, however, ascribed an additional purpose to the “Jewish question”: to serve as blueprint for new ideas of rights.
Personhood and the “Jewish Question”
In Intorno alla questione ebraica [On the Jewish Question], published in 1942, Ernesto Orrei, a law professor at the University of Rome, courageously protested Mussolini’s racial laws in effect since 1938. This was a risky attempt. To deflect censorship, the legal scholar disguised his criticism of the Fascist regime behind the writings of historical figures known for their defense of Jews. The early nineteenth-century Prussian reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt, who pledged to “labor ceaselessly with all my strengths (…) to give Jews full civil rights,” was one of his decoys.Footnote 49 True to form, Orrei also argued in favor of the “reconstitution” of a Jewish state integrated in the international order. Such resurgence, he claimed, would finally disprove the antisemitic claim of “Jewish ethnic inferiority.”Footnote 50
Yet Orrei’s “examination of the Jewish question,” reissued in 1947, pleaded above all for the “full recognition of the rights of the personality.”Footnote 51 Since the interwar period, Catholic intellectuals in Western and Central Europe championed the “rights of the human person” against the “rights of Man” dear to secular liberalism. “The concept of, and devotion to, the rights of the human person,” wrote the French philosopher Jacques Maritain from the United States in 1942, “is the most significant political improvement of modern times.”Footnote 52 At war’s midpoint, Pope Pius XII similarly called for the restoration “to the human person [of] the dignity given to him by God from the very beginning.” In his notorious 1942 Christmas address, however, the pontiff made only one oblique reference to the ongoing annihilation of European Jews. Through the dignity of the human person, Pius XII claimed a Christian stake in postwar human rights politics without reference to antisemitism. Orrei, to the contrary, derived the “principle of personhood” from his sympathetic discussion of the “Jewish question.” The persecution of the Jews revealed to him the urgency of a “progressive law” grounded on the sacred “rights of the personality.”Footnote 53 The Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica rightly recognized in Orrei’s essay “a defense of the Jewish cause based on respect for personality, humanity, and civil tolerance.” But the Vatican’s unofficial mouthpiece also protested Orrei’s excessive philosemitism. Charity and justice for the Jews, the Catholic public was reminded, did not preclude “a prudent and moderate defense” against them.Footnote 54
The French Left-Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier similarly referred to the “Jewish question” to highlight the idea of personhood. In 1936, his influential “Personalist Manifesto” had affirmed the absolute value of the human person without any reference to Judaism. Influenced by Catholicism, personalism reacted against the “tyranical reality” of bourgeois liberalism, fascism, and communism. Against decadent individualism and mass politics, Mounier and his “non-conformist” followers idealized the human person grounded in community.Footnote 55 In September 1945, however, Mounier added a Jewish dimension to his personalist philosophy. Modern Jews, explained the founder of the review Esprit, traditionally faced the choice of assimilation or retreat into the ghetto. Yet because of “persecution and the rising force of Zionism,” he noticed, many Jews now refused the dilemma of emancipation. Mounier drew inspiration from the Jewish poet and writer Henri Hertz, who in Esprit rejected integrationism in favor of dual belonging to France and a “Jewish nation.”Footnote 56 Discovering through Hertz the idea of diaspora nationalism, Mounier marveled at the fluidity of Jewish identity. The “Jewish paradoxe,” he wrote, was “a model for the new world”: the emancipation of the human person from the “univocal nationalism of the Jacobins and the Maurassists,” from French republicanism and its far-right enemies. In the same vein, the Esprit essayist François Bondy praised the Jews’ “plurality of bonds,” a model for “open society (…) and the full development of the personality.”Footnote 57 Mounier waxed even more lyrical: A “force for the future,” Jewishness heralded the age of “entangled belongings” and supranational “European patriotism.”
Against appearances, however, the personalist thinker was not a prophet of cosmopolitan Europe. The Jews’ simultaneous belonging to a “temporal Jewish community” and to a “French, Russian or English community” reminded him instead of medieval Christendom. “Was not the Christian medieval lord,” Mounier asked, “already bound to different loyalties: to his overlord, to the King of overlords, and to the head of his Church?” The hybridity of Jewish identity, ultimately, only validated older forms of Christian bonds. Mounier nevertheless assigned a positive purpose to Jewishness: to serve as a template for more “complex” identities in the postwar era. The personalist philosopher, to be sure, did not forget the Jews’ “errors, deficiencies, faults, some at times more irritating than others.” Fortunately, these defects were correctible: “What history did, history can undo.” His remarks nevertheless valorized the function of Jewishness in postwar society. They also disrupted the “strange silence” which, to his dismay, surrounded the issue of Jewish victims in liberated France.Footnote 58 Since the fall of 1944, however, the rising star of the French intelligentsia had already set out to give the “Jewish question” unprecedented publicity.
Sartre’s Philosemitism
“It is not up to the Jews first of all to form a militant league against antisemitism,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his Réflexions sur la question juive [thereafter Réflexions], “it is up to us.”Footnote 59 In his well-known essay, the existentialist philosopher famously reframed antisemitism as a problem for non-Jews. Like James Parkes, who across the Channel defined Jew-hatred as a “problem for Gentiles,” Sartre notoriously posited that “antisemitism is not a Jewish problem, it is our problem.” Parkes, however, remained throughout his life a dissident voice within the Anglican church. The French philosopher’s growing prestige, to the contrary, lent to the “non-Jewish problem” incomparable visibility. Although the first edition of Réflexions was brought out in 1946 by a little known company (the famed Gallimard publishing house reprinted it in 1954), Sartre’s towering position within the French intelligentsia gave particular resonance to his plea: “We must be very blind indeed not to see that [antisemitism] is our concern to the highest degree.”Footnote 60
That “not a word” was being said about Jewish victims in liberated France is what prompted Sartre to start writing Réflexions in the fall of 1944. The essay’s philosophical origins, however, harkened back to his prewar thought. The forty-year-old philosopher approached the “Jewish question” through existentialist phenomenology and the ethics of intellectual commitment.Footnote 61 In Refléxions, the Jewish problem becomes the problem of the antisemite, a displacement of responsibility greeted with emotion by his first Jewish readers. During the German occupation, the French Jewish philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch had already remarked that “antisemitism succeeds at creating a question that does not exist, and yet exists on its own in the mythology of the executioners.”Footnote 62 While also drawing the “Portrait of the Jew,” Réflexions similarly examined the phenomenon of Jew-hatred from the aggressor’s perspective. Yet Sartre’s “Jewish question” was not just the lethal fantasy of executioners. Because antisemitism made “hangmen of all of us,” the Parisian celebrity recognized the syndrome as a central pathology of modernity.
Exiled in the United States, the mainstays of the Frankfurt School of critical theory had already diagnosed a similar ill. “A malady so deeply rooted in civilization,” wrote Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1943, antisemitism was a “deeply imprinted schema, a ritual of civilization itself.”Footnote 63 Their sociopsychological critique, however, was a German Jewish response to the catastrophe unfolding in Europe. “Jews have been made what the Nazis always pretended they were, the focal point of world history,” finally realized Horkheimer in 1944.Footnote 64 Like Hannah Arendt, the Frankfurt School émigrés reacted to the genocide by deciphering the function of Jew-hatred in Europe and the United States. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944 and 1947), Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), and Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) revitalized critical theories of antisemitism after the Holocaust.
These seminal works nonetheless continued a distinctively Jewish project. From the start of the 1920s to World War II, critical theories of antisemitism in Europe chiefly emanated from German-Jewish thinkers.Footnote 65 Some of the explanatory schemes of antisemitism popularized after 1945 had indeed already been hammered out during the Weimar Republic. Arnold Zweig, a great admirer of Sigmund Freud, presciently attributed to antisemitism a psychoanalytical function. “As long as we know about the antisemitic affect,” he wrote in 1927, “it has been used as a means to something else.”Footnote 66 In 1929, Norbert Elias offered a sociological diagnosis of German antisemitism. Ahead of Hannah Arendt’s writings on the subject, Elias traced the roots of the phenomenon to the “changing social position of the Jews.” Four years before the Nazi seizure of power, he also introduced an idea dear to the existentialist Sartre. In the face of antisemitic violence, argued Elias, “a clear understanding of one’s own position is preferable in any case to self-deception.”Footnote 67 In 1936, the Swedish historian of Jewish origin Hugo Valentin offered an interpretation destined to greater popularity after 1945. “For it is not Jews who are hated,” Valentin wrote, “but an imaginary image of them (…) and the Jews actual ‘faults’ play a very unimportant part in the matter.”Footnote 68
Jewish scholars of antisemitism in the United States joined the fray. Two seminal collective volumes published in New York in 1942 searched for the historical, sociological, psychological, and religious origins of Jew-hatred.Footnote 69 Non-Jewish thinkers such as the American sociologist Talcott Parsons also took part in this movement.Footnote 70 But the main contributors to the “Anti-Semitism Project” and the “Studies in Prejudice” conducted under the auspices of the Frankfurt School were Jews, most of them born in Central Europe: antisemitismusforschung (research on antisemitism) remained as in the past a Jewish intellectual project. Combining various academic disciplines, its protagonists strove toward a post-antisemitic age. “Our aim,” wrote Max Horkheimer, “is not merely to describe prejudice but to explain it in order to help in its eradication.”Footnote 71
Sartre’s Réflexions indicated the arrival of a new campaigner: the non-Jewish, anti-antisemite, “committed” intellectual. To be sure, his “exploration of the etiology of hate” unknowingly echoed the “Jewish” Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer uniquely tried to understand “the mental energy harnessed by antisemitism” through a critical reappraisal of the Enlightenment. But in addition to arguing that “society itself can only be understood through antisemitism,” they also defined hatred of Jews as “the bad conscience of the parasite”; or stressed its “largely projective character”: Sartre’s analysis of antisemitism included similar ideas.Footnote 72 Without equivalent in Europe or in the United States, however, Réflexions was the first non-Jewish philosophical intervention on behalf of post-Holocaust Jews. This fact is often eluded by fault-finding readers of Sartre more concerned with the essay’s numerous shortcomings. But one of its first French Jewish commentators did not miss this crucial dimension. Published in Esprit in 1947, Wladimir Rabi’s review of Réflexions was revealingly entitled “Portrait of a Philosemite.” The phrase was not derogatory. Although he drew attention to Sartre’s ignorance of the concrete reality of Jewishness, Rabi nonetheless recognized the philosemitic distinctiveness of his intervention: not just opposition to antisemitism but also a radical project of solidarity with Jews. Although eminent commentators of Sartre’s opus only designate the French thinker as “anti-antisemite,” the intensity of this solidarity, and the risk-taking involved, inaugurated a new form of pro-Jewish intervention: not devotion to Jews or Judaism, but a state of emergency on behalf of the Jew.
Admittedly, the investigation of the antisemitic psyche offered Sartre a convenient platform to showcase fashionable existentialist ideas: “fear of the human condition,” “inauthenticity,” and “bad faith” found in the figure of the (French) antisemite an ideal testing ground. But Réflexions above all proclaimed the absolute criminality of antisemitism, a violence “that affects us all directly.”Footnote 73 This diagnosis led Sartre to conclude that “we must fight for the Jews no more and no less than for ourselves” [AAJ 151]. This injunction potentially revived the difference between “Jews” and “ourselves,” the very premise of antisemitism. Yet with Sartre, the universalist, humanist, and antifascist defense of the Jews escalated, as the philosopher later explained, into a “declaration of war against antisemites.”Footnote 74 Although he admitted that “Sartre’s theory (…) can be disappointing,” the French-Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas immediately recognized its powerful novelty. “The most striking figure of Sartre’s fight,” the Vilna-born philosopher observed, “resides less than in his victory than the new weapons he deploys. They are wholly new.”Footnote 75 Levinas’s remarks highlighted the unique contribution of Sartre’s essay. Despite its deficiencies, Réflexions transformed the meaning of anti-antisemitism after 1945. A new politics of solidarity with Jews, Sartre’s “declaration of war” was also the first philosemitic manifesto of the postwar era.
Anti-antisemitism: Template for Anti-racism
Already the subject of voluminous scholarship, the portrayal of the antisemite and the Jew in Réflexions does not need lengthy recapitulation. Escaping freedom, dreading responsibility and truth, and projecting his inadequacies on the figure of her enemy, the antisemite creates the Jew to give her life meaning. Although superficially acquainted with Jews, Judaism or Jewish history, Sartre redefined the meaning of antisemitism: a “passion” and not an “opinion,” a “sadistic attraction,” a refusal of “oneself and of truth,” a “fear of the human condition.” As Sartrean scholars have shown, however, the existentialist philosopher immediately applied these concepts to other forms of racism. “Replace the Jew with the Black, the anti-Semite with the supporter of slavery,” Sartre stated in 1948, “and there would be nothing essential to be cut from my book.”Footnote 76 During the Algerian War (1954–62), Sartre departed from existentialist phenomenology to portray colonial racism as a system of domination based on capitalist exploitation. French rule in Algeria, in his mind, offered “the most legible example of the colonial system.”Footnote 77 But ten years after Réflexions, his support for Algerian nationalism replicated his unitary struggle “for the Jews” and “for ourselves.” Sartre’s goal was to “deliver both the Algerians and the French from colonial tyranny”: In Réflexions, France’s foremost public intellectual had already inscribed the “Jewish question” at the center of his struggle against racial oppression.Footnote 78 “The writer’s duty is to take side against all injustices wherever they come from,” Sartre proclaimed in 1947. But the philosophical foundation of his antiracism remained anti-antisemitism. The “Jewish question” propelled him to the “Negro question,” the French colonial question, the attendant “question” of torture in French Algeria, and to solidarity with Third World liberation movements.Footnote 79
Sartre’s “Jewish question,” however, did not lead him to the question of Palestine. His anti-antisemitism bore little resemblance to that of Richard Crossman or James Parkes, but he shared with them a positive opinion of Zionism. In Réflexions, the existentialist Sartre famously encouraged Jews to authenticity in order to overcome the antisemite’s aggression. Jewish self-acceptance, he acknowledged, was perfectly attainable in the diaspora, whether as “Jews in France” or integrated French Jews. The choice of authenticity, however, could also legitimately lead Jews to create “a Jewish nation possessing its own soil and autonomy” [AAJ 139]. In his first writings on Zionism (1945–48), Sartre, like most members of the European left, never considered Jewish self-determination from the standpoint of Palestine’s native inhabitants. “It is the task of the non-Jews to help the Jews, and the Palestinian [e.g., Zionist] cause,” he declared in February 1948. He reiterated this point one month before the establishment of the State of Israel. “We cannot dissociate ourselves from the cause of the Hebrews,” he wrote in April 1948.Footnote 80 Sartre provided no indication that Zionism might threaten the Arab majority in Mandate Palestine. If Jewish nationhood was at all harmful, it was “to the Jews who wish to remain in their original fatherland” [AAJ 139]. Sartre indeed worried that the establishment of a Jewish state would give Jew-haters “another proof that the Jew is out of place in the French community.” Irrespective of its consequences, self-determination in Palestine offered Jews a pathway to authenticity and freedom: Both antisemitism and Zionism provided Sartre with a test case for existentialist liberation. But his refusal to apply to Israel the anti-colonial and antiracist lens he used to illuminate other forms of oppression will soon disappoint his admirers in the Arab world.
Sartre’s assault on what he termed the “politics of assimilation” added another philosemitic dimension to Réflexions.Footnote 81 The democrat humanist who “saves [the Jew] as man and annihilates him as a Jew” becomes in Sartre’s opus the antisemite’s partner in crime. Until he dissolved it through revolution, Sartre ascribed value to Jewish difference. Like all other forms of racism, Sartre posited, the otherness of the Jew originates in a mental construct. But after its migration from the antisemite’s mind to the heart of society, Jewishness not only becomes social reality. It also forms the basis of “concrete liberalism”: the valorization of human difference against the cult of abstract human nature. “Arabs and Negroes,” clarified Sartre, were also “concrete persons” deserving as Arabs and Blacks of recognition and respect. Yet against a liberalism unable to recognize Jewish singularity, Sartre’s “Jew as Jew” typified positive difference: “It is with his character, his customs, his tastes, his religion if he has one, his name and his physical traits that we must accept him”Footnote 82 [AAJ 147].
The last pages of Réflexions, however, have notoriously exposed the Jew-friendly intellectual to the charge of inconsistency. “The authentic Jew,” Sartre wrote, “renounces (…) an assimilation that is today impossible,” but the socialist revolution will remove all obstacles for the assimilation of “his sons.” For all its value, Jewish difference suddenly seemed destined to temporary existence. In 1947, the sympathetic Wladimir Rabi stressed the ironic similarity between Sartre and the assimilationist “democrat” vilified in the essay.Footnote 83 Late twentieth-century multiculturalists, for their part, have pounced on Sartre’s “concrete liberalism.” Contradicted by the return of assimilationism in the last section of Réflexions, Sartre’s ephemeral pluralism was only a “second-best solution to the problem of anti-Semitism.” The French intellectual uniquely illuminated the psychology of antisemitism, but his misleading celebration of human diversity only killed Jews “softly.” Despite the novelty of his position, Sartre allegedly offered an all too banal leftist solution to the Jewish question.Footnote 84
Réflexions, in its closing argument, indeed returned to Marxist universalism. In a society based on “mutual bonds of solidarity,” antisemitism and Jewishness will no longer have reason to exist. Yet contrary to Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question (1843), Sartre’s most urgent problem was not bourgeois capitalism but the lethal threat of antisemitism. “The anti-Semite is in the very depths of his heart a criminal,” he solemnly wrote, “what he wishes, what he prepares, is the death of the Jew” [AAJ 49]. Because of its arch-criminality, antisemitism obligated non-Jews to stand shoulder to shoulder with Jewish difference, not just to compassion for persecuted Jews. The utopian and hasty last pages of Réflexions obscured this innovation: To the language of pity, Sartre opposed the language of solidarity. The French thinker who famously defined the public intellectual as “someone who gets involved in matters which are none of his business” perfectly fulfilled this role: The “business” of antisemitism was now central to the ethics of intellectual commitment.
“We Are All Bound to the Jew”
Sartre professed solidarity with Jewishness, gestured toward valorization of Jewish difference (“concrete liberalism”) but notoriously struggled to explain what Jewish difference meant. In Réflexions, Jews are only defined as an “abstract historical community … for it keeps a memory of nothing but a long martyrdom, that is, of a long passivity” [AAJ 66, 67]. In the wake of the Holocaust, the only Jewish difference that jumped to Sartre’s eye was the “situation” created by the antisemite: the Jew as “the stranger, the intruder, the unassimilated at the very heart of our society” [AAJ 83]. Sartre’s first critics charged that such a definition of the Jew gave the antisemite the upper hand: If reduced to a “situation,” Jewishness does not exist independently of the racist gaze. Although sympathetic of Sartre’s intervention, Emmanuel Levinas refused to “fixate the Jewish fate according to antisemitism.” Contrary to Sartre’s empty Jewishness, “being Jewish” was for Levinas an ontological and metaphysical “fact.”Footnote 85 While grateful for the “philosemite” Sartre, Wladimir Rabi condemned his disregard of Jewish subjectivity. In Réflexions, he noted, Jews are downgraded to mere “objects of Sartre’s generosity.”Footnote 86 Alongside his supposed silence on the Holocaust or his unconscious recycling of antisemitic clichés, Sartre’s inability to grasp the “facticity” of Jewish existence has since ranked among the most damning accusations leveled against Réflexions.Footnote 87 This controversial aspect of his thought has also prompted scholars to criticize the “disfiguration” of the Jew and Judaism in his anti-antisemitic intervention – and by extension in post-Holocaust anti-antisemitic thought.Footnote 88
This indictment overlooks the radicality of Sartre’s position. When he defined the Jewish condition as that of the “unassimilated at the very heart of our society,” the philosopher admittedly naturalized the antisemitic fantasy of Jewish difference. After Hitler’s war against the “eternal Jew,” however, Sartre rescued the strangeness of the Jew from abjection. In distant New York, Hannah Arendt attempted similar revalorization. Contrary to upstart Jewish “parvenus” only relishing “the permission to ape the Gentiles,” she argued in 1944, the Jewish pariah “tried to make the emancipation of the Jews that which it really should have been – an admission of the Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity.”Footnote 89 Arendt’s celebration of the Jewish pariah, however, was above all a critique of Jewish emancipation. Sartre, for his part, turned the tables on the negative image of the wandering Jew. While not an ode to Jewish rootlessness, Réflexions already announced a fascination for Jewish nomadism peculiar to French postmodern thought.Footnote 90
As his early comments on Zionism revealed, however, Sartre was equally supportive of rooted Jews. Although he hoped that one day the “Jewish problem finds its definitive solution in a humanity without borders,” as he wrote in June 1949, the creation of the state of Israel was for him “one of the most important events of our times.”Footnote 91 In addition to the national Jew, Sartre’s philosemitism encompassed the assimilated French israélite as well as the hyphenated Jew. His sympathy came at a price. Conversion to Christianity, as the German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine recognized in the 1820s, was once the Jews’ “admission ticket to European culture.” With Sartre, self-consciousness became their entry-ticket to freedom. But as he approvingly noted, Jewish self-awareness was already on the rise. “The suffering the Jews have undergone during the past few years has done much to open their eyes,” Sartre observed, “and it seems to me even probable that there are more authentic Jews than authentic Christians” [AAJ 138].
If according to Sartre minority Jews were more “authentic” than majority Christians – a philosemitic tribute to the Jewish choice of freedom – Jewishness in Réflexions is not merely an antisemitic projection. Antisemitic persecution also creates the Jew as a real social subject conscious of her otherness: The awakening of many assimilated Jewish readers to a Jewish identity rescued from vilification exemplified the regenerative power of Sartre’s thought.Footnote 92 The Jewish turn to self-acceptance warranted a new pattern of non-Jewish intervention: The novelty of Sartre’s anti-antisemitism was not only opposition to prejudice but political solidarity with all forms of conscious Jewishness. “I mistrust ‘anti-antisemitism’ if it is based on ‘a spirit of tolerance’ and ‘broad ideas’,” the philosopher had already stated in 1939.Footnote 93 “What must be done,” he explained in Réflexions, “is to point out to each one that the fate of the Jews is his fate” [AAJ 153]. When Sartre also proclaimed that “we are all bound to the Jew, because anti-Semitism leads straight to national-socialism” [AAJ 151], he arguably only saw in the Jewish fate a signal of looming danger for the rest of society. “We are all bound to the Jew,” however, were exceptional words in post-Holocaust Europe: In Paris, the star philosopher turned the “Jewish question” into a platform for friendship between left intellectuals and Jews, with crucial consequences for progressive philosemitism and philo-Zionism after 1945. The export of Parisian existentialism beyond the borders of France soon propagated Sartre’s “Jewish question” internationally.Footnote 94 In London, however, the democratic socialist George Orwell failed to understand why Sartre’s “cerebration” should be taken seriously. Commissioned in October 1948 to review the English edition of Réflexions, Orwell did not hide his intentions: “I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot.”Footnote 95
George Orwell: Reflections on Anti-antisemitism
The plain-spoken English writer delivered his main attack on what he believed to be Sartre’s main claim: “[The Jew] is wrong, at this stage of history, if he tries to assimilate himself, and we are wrong if we try to ignore his racial origin. He should be accepted into the national community, not as an ordinary Englishman, Frenchman (…) but as a Jew.” Orwell found such view “dangerously close to antisemitism.”Footnote 96 In February 1939, he already contended that the best strategy against prejudice was to “remind people that Jews are human beings before they are Jews.” Nearly ten years later, Orwell faulted Sartre for allegedly claiming that the Jew, “of whichever variety, is not just another human being.” The French philosopher, of course, did not invalidate Jewish humanity. The Sartrean Jew was both a “man” without a predetermined essence and an antisemitic creation. Such speculations, however, had more appeal on the Seine’s left bank than by the Thames. While Sartre turned the Jew into an exemplar figure of alterity, Orwell clung to humanist sameness. To single out the Jew as “a species of animals different from ourselves,” he feared, could only “make antisemitism more prevalent that it was before.”
Orwell’s scathing review featured other fusillades. One of Sartre’s shortcomings, the English writer charged, was his failure to relate antisemitism to “colour prejudice.” Orwell’s pique was not without merits. Although in Black Orpheus (1948) the French intellectual used Jewish otherness to explore Black alterity, his Judeocentric Réflexions did not engage in comparative racism. More damning for Orwell was Sartre’s inability to explain why antisemites “pick on Jews rather than some other victim.” Réflexions, in fairness, answered this question: The antisemite’s obsession with the Jew resulted from an existential choice. But as Orwell pointed out, Sartre kept silent on the historical and sociological factors accounting for enmity. “Little discussion of the subject, and no factual evidence worth mentioning,” concluded the English empiricist.
Orwell’s dismissal of Sartre, however, was not meant to trivialize antisemitism. The outbreak of World War II indeed marked a turning point in his thoughts about Jews. The man of letters who until the mid 1930s sprinkled his writings with unflattering depictions of Jews now took anti-Jewish prejudice seriously.Footnote 97 Antagonism against Jews and “refuspies” on the home front alerted him in turn to the irrationality of British antisemitism: “The Jews are supposed to dodge military service, to be the worst offenders on the Black Market etc. etc. I have heard this kind of talk even from country people who had probably never seen a Jew in their lives.”Footnote 98 Hostility also blinded the war-battered British public to the tragedy unfolding in Nazi-ruled Europe. “People dislike the Jews so much,” Orwell wrote in 1943, “that they do not want to remember their suffering.” The wartime diarist and publicist commented several times on Hitler’s intention to “kill off every Jew in Europe.”Footnote 99 But Orwell did not reflect at length on the event. What prompted his interest in antisemitism was less the destruction of European Jews than prejudice in Britain. “Why are so many people,” he wondered in January 1944, “still ready to believe that the Jews “smell,” or that (…) they are responsible for slumps, revolutions, and venereal disease? The whole subject needs cold-blooded investigation.”Footnote 100
Published in the United States in April 1945, Orwell’s essay “Anti-Semitism in Britain” attempted to answer these questions.Footnote 101 Like James Parkes, Orwell considered antisemitism “a neurosis … at bottom quite irrational.” He also ventured into psychology when he remarked that “the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a scapegoat we do not yet know.” By his own admission, Orwell did not have any “hard-and-fast theory” to offer. His observations of British public opinion nonetheless allowed him to show that “one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that are not possibly true.” Irrational claims, Orwell pointed out, did not prevent the antisemite to think of himself “as a rational being.” Here Orwell unknowingly concurred with Sartre, who had debunked the illusion of antisemitic rationality. Yet for the Englishman, hatred for Jews was not a projective phenomenon but “part of the larger problem of nationalism which has not yet been fully examined.” Belief in the superiority of “a single nation or other unit” inevitably entailed scapegoating or exclusion. More originally, Orwell also defined nationalism as a system of lies. “Every nationalist,” he wrote a few months later in his “Notes on Nationalism,” “is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also (…) unshakably certain of being in the right.”Footnote 102 The disease of nationalism, he concluded, spawned the lie of antisemitism: This was Orwell’s overall slim contribution to the anti-antisemitic genre.
Anti-Semitism in Britain is noteworthy for an opposite reason: The essay offered the first critique of the postwar anti-antisemitic position. The fight against antisemitism, Orwell first charged, did not require automatic support for the establishment of a Jewish state. Unlike James Parkes, Richard Crossman, and Sartre, Orwell disliked Zionism. His reservations derived from his aversion to narrow nationalism, the violence of Jewish terrorism in Palestine, and anti-colonialist feelings inherited from youthful years spent in imperial Burma.Footnote 103 Immersed in the dystopian world of Stalinism, Orwell never espoused the cause of Palestine’s Arabs. He nonetheless broke ranks with the British Left intelligentsia over its “incongruous” support of Zionism. The shocking persecution of Jews, he wrote, did not obligate “enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs.” This position “might be correct on its own merits,” Orwell conceded to his Jewish-American readers. But what grated on him was uncritical groupthink. Contrary to Labour party intellectuals, Orwell considered Zionism part of the “disease” of nationalism. His premature death in 1950 prevented him from expressing an opinion on Arab nationalist regimes. But in April 1945, Zionist Jews seemed to him “merely antisemites turned upside down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudice in an inverted form.”
Orwell counterbalanced his objections to Zionism with empathy for Holocaust refugees. “Hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews,” he wrote in November 1946, “are now trying desperately to get to Palestine. No doubt many of them will ultimately succeed, but other will fail. (…) How about inviting, say, 100,000 Jewish refugees to settle in this country?”Footnote 104 Orwell argued that Jewish immigrants could help remedy labor shortages and the low British birth rate: The novelist may have privately struggled with his own Jewish problem but fear of Jewish invasion did not haunt his thoughts. Solidarity with stateless Jews was also detectable in Orwell’s crowning achievement. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the main protagonist Winston Smith opens up to the possibility of dissidence after watching a propaganda film in which a “ship of refugees” is “bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.” (Orwell drafted his novel between 1946 and 1947, at the height of the British blockade against Jewish illegal immigration to Palestine.) The cinema audience, Winston noticed, gleefully laughed at drowning refugees, including a “Jewess” clinging to her child: This episode awakens the diligent Ministry of Truth employee to the dehumanizing power of the Party. As Winston’s transformative experience illustrates, the drama of Jewish refugees at sea led Orwell to antitotalitarian politics, not philo-Zionism.Footnote 105
Orwell’s reflections on anti-antisemitism also tackled the issue of hypocrisy and truth. “What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism,” he wrote, “is the assumption in the writer’s mind that he himself is immune to it.” This was both a personal admission and an invitation to collective humility. “We are all of us good democrats, anti-Fascist, anti-imperialist, contemptuous of class distinctions, impervious to colour prejudice, and so on and so forth,” Orwell wrote of sympathizers of the Left in March 1948.Footnote 106 Against these comforting certainties, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four cautioned against doublethink: the simultaneous rejection of antisemitism and secret attraction to it. Antagonism to Jews “comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency,” he acknowledged in his “Notes on Nationalism,” but the left, including its pro-Zionist component, was not impervious to it. The student of antisemitism, he advised, should start “with the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence – that is, in his own mind.”
Although published in April 1945, Anti-Semitism in Britain already challenged postwar critical theory. Instead of drawing the “portrait of the antisemite” or delineating the contours of the “authoritarian personality,” Orwell urged self-reflexivity. Without it, he wrote in his devastating review of Sartre’s opus, “books on antisemitism tend to be mere exercises in casting motes out of other people’s eyes.” Turning the syndrome into “a disgraceful aberration, almost a crime,” he added, will only help people “claim to be immune from it.” But this position forced him back to a banal explanation of antisemitism: a deplorable “nationalistic prejudice” only solvable through the eradication of “the larger disease of nationalism.” This diagnosis enabled Orwell to charge that “modern civilization,” predicated on the belief that “whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil,” is tainted with antisemitism. Yet reduced to a nationalist “lunacy,” antisemitism was not different from other forms of racial prejudice. “Disliking Jews isn’t intrinsically worse than disliking Negroes or Americans or any other block of people,” Orwell wrote in October 1948. The gravely ill author, however, initiated a debate he would not live to join: Should anti-antisemitism be part of antiracist politics or independent of it?
Futures of Anti-antisemitism
This explosive question was still premature in the immediate postwar period: The main theorists of antisemitism after the Holocaust did not disaggregate Jew-hatred from other racialized ideologies. Sartre’s Réflexions singled out the Jew from other victims of oppression yet his anti-antisemitism turned the “Jewish question” into a template for other antiracist struggles. Modern antisemitism received separate treatment in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, but she studied the phenomenon in relation to imperialism and “the decline of the rights of Man.” The Frankfurt School mainstays realized during the Holocaust that “society itself can only be understood through antisemitism,” yet Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer conceptualized anti-Jewish aggression as the key indicator of universal barbarism. Anti-antisemitism and antiracism also remained close bedfellows at the level of grassroot activism. The history of antiracist politics in post-Liberation France exemplifies this proximity. Despite its predominantly Jewish membership, the “Antiracist Alliance” formed in Paris in 1946 broadened the fight against antisemitism to include the defense of racialized people in metropolitan France and the colonies. The issue of anti-communism split the organization in 1949, but the French Left, like its counterparts in Western Europe, continued to subsume antisemitism under the general concept of racism.Footnote 107
The antiracist anti-colonial thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s similarly believed that antisemitism originated from the division of humankind into superior and inferior racial groups. During visits in prewar Poland and Nazi Germany, the African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois had already brought the “Jewish problem” in relation with other atrocities. “There has been no tragedy in modern times,” he wrote in 1936, “equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade.”Footnote 108 After the war, Du Bois related the Final Solution to a “racial philosophy” peculiar to Britain and America. His visit of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949 prodded him, however, to revise his earlier views on the “problem of the color line” in the twentieth century. In front of the monument dedicated to the Jewish ghetto fighters, the civil rights activist garnered “not so much clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as a real and more complete understanding of the Negro problem.” In interaction with the Holocaust, American racism appeared less “separate and unique (…) no longer a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics.” Racial hatred, Du Bois wrote, now reached “all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.”Footnote 109
In Discourse on Colonialism (1955), Aimé Césaire also unified antisemitism and colonial racism. Nazi terror, claimed the Afro-Caribbean poet, resulted from the import of “European colonialist procedures” until then reserved to subaltern subjects beyond the color line. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), however, the Martinique-born philosopher Frantz Fanon distinguished the form of anti-Jewish persecution from anti-Black racism. The white Jew, observed Fanon, his only “disliked from the moment he is tracked down. But in my case (…) I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me but of my own appearance.” This distinction reappears in other parts of Fanon’s classic essay. “The Jew is attacked in his religious identity, in his history, in his race, in his relations with his ancestors,” he wrote, “but it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked.” The anti-colonial intellectual nonetheless conjoined both forms of aggression. The antisemite, he notoriously proclaimed, “is inevitably anti-Negro.”Footnote 110
The unproblematic association of antisemitism and racism, and therefore of anti-antisemitism and antiracism, was not bound to last. In anti-colonial thought and politics, or in the Black Power movement in the United States, “racism” no longer referred to European racial theories – and their lethal implementation during the Holocaust – but to systemic white domination.Footnote 111 Already apparent at the height of decolonization, the denunciation of Zionism as racist oppression by the Palestinian liberation movement, Third World states, the Soviet Union, and the anti-imperialist Left, likewise splintered ecumenical antiracism. A pivotal moment in the history of this separation was the acrimonious adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), which under Soviet leadership elevated apartheid to the rank of emblematic racism but did not think the same of antisemitism.Footnote 112 Alleging both neglect of antisemitism and unfair criticism of Israel, Jewish international organizations withdrew then into separatist human rights politics, especially through campaigns in support of Soviet Jews. After the passing of the United Nations resolution “Zionism is Racism” in November 1975, anti-antisemitism entered a new phase: For an emerging network of watchdog organizations, the main danger no longer came from fringe neo-Nazism or Holocaust revisionism but from what they now viewed as the “new antisemitism” of the anti-Zionist left.Footnote 113 A decade later, a leading theorist of “new Judeophobia” lamented this fracture. “The antiracist ideologization of humanism, an apparatus that remained unitary until the defeat of the Axis powers, has since evolved in the direction of a differentiation into two opposing camps,” diagnosed the French scholar Pierre-André Taguieff in 1987.Footnote 114
This splintering of antiracist politics, and the standoff between Holocaust and anti-colonial memory within the antiracist movement, were still distant prospects in the early postwar period. For the time being, antisemitism and racism preserved their proximity because anti-antisemitism, anti-colonialism, and antiracism remained politically compatible. This bond stemmed from the enduring appeal of unitary humanism in the aftermath of World War II, despite philosophical or anti-colonial assaults on the Western humanist tradition. During the first two post-Holocaust decades, philosemitism not only consisted in the delegitimization of antisemitism, or for zealous anti-antisemites, in all-out war against Jew-hatred. As shown in Chapter 4, philosemitism also meant the reintegration of the Jew into “the family of man”: a humanization conducive to positive perceptions of the state of Israel and the first Israeli Jews.