Inner Obstacles

III.

Among the inner forces, the psychological factors within the individual Jew which tend to prevent re-affirmation for him and so redemption for the people, I have spoken of the false application of classificatory science to unique phenomena which persuades him to deny out of existence the facts of his personal and of his people’s historic experience; and I have spoken of these Ghetto-fears which are, closely and accurately analyzed, timorous acts of consent to the claims of the absolutist master-state which it is the equal duty of Jew, of Christian, of democrat, liberal, pacifist—in brief, of all civilized men—to negate and to resist to the uttermost.

But there are alas, still other and still deadlier inhibitions and obstacles in the soul of the Jew of the Western dispersion. Among the gravest and subtlest of these is that self-hatred which the late Theodore Lessing illustrated so powerfully in his book of biographies of renegades: Der Judische Selbsthass.

The examples described by Lessing are extreme and tragic; they are characteristic of the fury of assimilationism that characterized the German and Austrian Jews of yesterday and was without doubt among the contributory causes of the precise form taken by contemporary German anti-Semitism. I do not believe that among us in American Jewry there are many examples of self-hatred so gross and so outrageous. The disease among us (it is in very truth a disease of the soul, takes less flagrant forms; but it is very pervasive and very wide-spread; subtly it paralyzes thousands of souls who but for it would return to us and in that return find their freedom.

It is not of course a “pure,” that is to say, an unmixed emotion. Unacknowledged fears blend with it: the old old fear expressed in the proverb “mitgefangen, mitgehangen,” an ultimate dark suspicion that perhaps the world is in a measure right in its bitter total estimate of us; out of this suspicion comes seeming recognitions of those qualities which the world attributes to us as a people first in others, next in oneself. Next in oneself! And that apparent discovery leads to the strange and disastrous phenomenon that Jews will share the Gentile’s hostile perception of our differentia from Gentile norms and will not be able to rise to the vision of the liberating fact that these norms are not our norms, that none has the right to judge or evaluate us by those norms, that we are (like every people!) to be judged exclusively by those norms which in the course of history we have created for ourselves.

But this is precisely what the soul afflicted with self-hatred cannot come to see, and since none can live in sanity without a modicum of self-esteem and of self-affirmation, the sick Jewish soul transfers the affliction of the hatred of itself to the Jewish people and seeks to flee from its people and to differentiate itself and to render its people outside of and objective to itself and is a great hand at discussing “Eastern Jews” or “orthodox Jews” or “ignorant Jews” in order to put a distance between itself and Jews as such, Jews tout court, the eternal Jewish people with its saints and its sinners and its glories and its shames and its flaming triumphs and its abysmal humiliations.

So self-hatred becomes a perverted hatred of one’s people and is curable with great difficulty because the thing needed to cure it, the total acceptance and unswerving (though not uncritical) love of Israel, historic and present, metaphysical and empirical—as idea and as folk imperfectly embodying the eternal idea—this is precisely the cure which from its very nature the disease most violently rejects. The victim of self-hatred is then like a patient who could recover if only he would take nourishment but whose disease consists precisely in his inability to do so.

The commonest form of self-hatred in America is not a virulent so much as a stubborn form. It consists not so much in open flight as in what I might call minimum Judaism. You pay a trifling annual sum to the up-keep of a temple which is with difficulty to be differentiated from a Unitarian Church; half-heartedly after much searching of a supposedly “enlightened” conscience (this enlightenment consisting of the silliest negation of both history and nature) you “let” the children go to Sunday-school; to the aid of the oppressed and persecuted you contribute more generously and uninhibitedly because that is “humanitarian” and can, at a pinch, be defended on so-called universal grounds, as though universals could exist without particulars they subsum or generalizations without concrete phenomena to generalize or definitions without an object to define.

Thus minimum Judaism born of self-hatred becomes a phantasmal form without substance, a shadow and simulacrum and has the same function as a country Negro’s rabbit’s foot: it wards off certain kinds of ill-luck; it enables the practitioner to be both un-Jewish and anti-Jewish without a pang of conscience; it allays his worst fears and keeps him from facing his most crucial dilemmas; it relieves him from moral and spiritual decisions and makes of him, so far as possible, a formula rather than a human being. If a pogrom happened on his own street he would explain that the victims had been improperly Americanized and practiced kashruth. It ought, of course, not to have happened. He is, equally of course, shaking life a leaf. But he can explain . . . He can always explain . . . Explanation, in fact, is his long suit . . .