Anti-Semite and Jew
Encyclopedia
Anti-Semite and Jew is an essay about antisemitism written by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...

 shortly after the liberation of Paris
Liberation of Paris
The Liberation of Paris took place during World War II from 19 August 1944 until the surrender of the occupying German garrison on August 25th. It could be regarded by some as the last battle in the Battle for Normandy, though that really ended with the crushing of the Wehrmacht forces between the...

 from German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 occupation in 1944. The first part of the essay, "The Portrait of the Antisemite", was published in December 1945 in Les Temps modernes
Les Temps modernes
The first issue of Les Temps modernes , the most important cultural review of the period after World War II, appeared in October 1945. It was known as the review of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was named for a film by Charlie Chaplin...

. The full text was then published in 1946.

The essay deals with antisemitism and how Jews react to it. More broadly, the book tries to explain the etiology
Etiology
Etiology is the study of causation, or origination. The word is derived from the Greek , aitiologia, "giving a reason for" ....

 of hate by analyzing antisemitic hate. According to Sartre, antisemitism (and hate more broadly) is, among other things, a way by which the middle class lay claim to the nation in which they reside, and an oversimplified conception of the world in which the antisemite sees "not a conflict of interests but the damage an evil power causes society."

Definition

Sartre argues that antisemitism is not an "idea" in the commonly understood sense of the word: it is not a point of view based rationally upon empirical information calmly collected and calibrated in as objective a manner as is possible. Sartre states that "It is first of all a passion." It is also often a deep passion, "Some men are suddenly struck with impotence if they learn from the woman with whom they are making love that she is a Jewess. It is an involvement of the mind, but one so deep-seated and complex that it extends to the physiological realm, as happens in cases of hysteria." (p.10-11)

Sartre tells of a classmate of his who complained that he had failed the agrégation exam while a Jew, the son of eastern immigrants, had passed. There was – said Sartre’s classmate – no way that that Jew could understand French poetry as well as a true Frenchman. But Sartre’s classmate admitted that he disdained the agrégation and had not studied for it. "Thus to explain his failure, he made use of two systems of interpretation… His thoughts moved on two planes without his being in the least bit embarrassed by it." (p.12.) Sartre’s classmate had adopted in advance a view of Jews and of their role in society. "Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." Anti-Semitism is a view that arises not from experience or historical fact, but from itself. It lends new perspective to experience and historical fact. The anti-Semite convinces himself of beliefs that he knows to be spurious at best.

Bad faith

Sartre deploys his concept of bad faith
Bad faith (existentialism)
Bad faith is a philosophical concept used by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the phenomenon where a human being under pressure from societal forces adopts false values and disowns their innate freedom to act authentically...

 as he develops his argument. For Sartre, the anti-Semite has escaped the insecurity of good faith, the impossibility of sincerity. He has abandoned reason and embraced passion. Sartre comments that, "It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than of reason. But ordinarily love the objects of passion: women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves." He chooses to reason from passion, to reason falsely "because of the longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may intervene to cast doubt on it.’ Anti-Semites are attracted by ‘the durability of a stone." What frightens them is the uncertainty of truth.." "The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith." He has escaped responsibility and doubt. He can blame anything on the Jew; he does not need to engage reason, for he has his faith.

The anti-Semite is a prime example of a person who has entered into bad faith to avoid
responsibility. He attempts to relinquish his responsibility to anti-Semitism and a community of anti-Semites. He "fears every kind of solitariness… however small his stature, he takes every precaution to make it smaller, lest he stand out from the herd and find himself face to face with himself. He has made himself an anti-Semite because that is something one cannot be alone." (p.22.) Anti-Semitism is a way of feeling good, proud even, rather than guilty at the abandonment of responsibility and the flight before the impossibility of true sincerity. The anti-Semite abandons himself to the crowd and his bad faith, he ‘flees responsibility as he flees his own consciousness, and choosing for his personality the permanence of the rock, he chooses for his morality the scale of petrified values.’(p.27.) He pulls down shutters, blinds, mirrors and mirages over his consciousness to keep himself in his bad faith away from his responsibilities and his liberty. The anti-Semite is afraid "of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world – of everything except the Jews." He is "a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself." (p.53.) The anti-Semite wallows in the depths of an extreme bad faith. "Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man." (p. 54.) This is his bad faith.

Jewishness and Antisemitism

In the final section of Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre turns to consider the Jew. First he goes through the various ways in which the term or identity "Jew" has been defined. One by one he proves to his own satisfaction why each is fatally flawed. Then he borrows from his existentialist and phenomenolical philosophy to define a Jew as a person that others look at and say, "look, he/she is a Jew". Just as a chair is a chair by virtue of our considering it a chair, as in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, so a Jew is a person whom others consider to be a Jew. Therefore, a Jew's Jewishness exists only to the extent they are considered Jewish by those around them.

External links

  • Summary on SparkNotes
    SparkNotes
    SparkNotes, originally part of a website called The Spark, is a company started by Harvard students Sam Yagan, Max Krohn, Chris Coyne, and Eli Bolotin in 1999 that originally provided study guides for literature, poetry, history, film, and philosophy...

  • Criticism of Anti-Semite and Jew by Joseph Sungolowsky on JSTOR
    JSTOR
    JSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...

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