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3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew is a powerful critique of antisemitism and the failure of the liberal democratic society that allows the ideology to fester. In the book, Sartre utilizes his renowned existential philosophy to paint a portrait of the anti-semite that inauthentically creates an imagined enemy to avoid the horror of the human condition; the democrat whose naiveté makes him complicit with the violence against the Jews; and the Jews that must deal with this tragic situation he is thrown in, authentically or inauthentically. The book is also a call to action. It is a work that calls for gentiles to stand in solidarity with Jews, stating that "what must be done is to point out to each one that the fate of the Jews is his fate."
There are parts of this book that are a little weird and bad. But since I don't wish to do a gentile-splaining to anyone and since Michael Walzer's preface to the book already provides a devastating critique of the worst parts of the book, I will write about the part I like the most in the book: Sartre's characterization of the anti-semite.
Sartre rejects the view that takes antisemitism as an opinion that deserves discussing in a democratic society. He observes that antisemitism is not a conclusion reached through experience, nor is it supported by any real evidence. Antisemitism is an a priori obsession, a passion. He writes, "far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explains his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent him." Moreover, this antisemitic passion that, manipulated by the ruling class, often emerges from the middle-class milieu stems from a refusal to be moved by reason; from a desire to claim an "us" alongside the ruling class by creating an imaginary "them"; from a will to be impenetrable, to be superior, and to reject all that is valuable in authentic living. "Antisemitism," Sartre writes, "is a 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." I think this view of the anti-semite is useful in understanding not only antisemitism but also all kinds of bigotry, at least on an individual level.
(Idk where else to say this but Michael Walzer's critique of this book in the preface is just so hilariously brutal. How can any Marxist recover from having "indeed, he is a liberal, for all his Marxizing sociology" in THE PREFACE OF THEIR OWN BOOK LMAO??? It's a great preface tho)
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
The anti-Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ill-contrived for then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the result that man would be found to the master of his own destinies, burned by the agonizing and infinite responsibility.
Sharply relevant to today's political climate around hatred toward minority groups (immigration in particular) Sartre's pocket-sized thesis on what creates a social hive mind around the us vs. them ideology and provides smart commentary on the mindset of oppression and how it can inflict generational trauma with lasting effects on how people interact with their own individualism. I annotated the fuck out of this and after I lend it out to a few people I could see myself revisiting it. This is one of the first books someone recommended me for getting into Jewish theology/history and it absolutely lived up to expectations. There were many notable passages and a lot of profound insights/commentary that made rethink or reconceptualize a lot of my understanding of how to view racists and the mindset of someone who has to dehumanize another to feel safe in his own humanity. One part in particular that stood out was his commentary on social complacency toward members of the community who are loudly outspoken with their aversion to certain minority groups. "There was a tacit understanding between Jules and his family: they ostentatiously avoided talking about the English in front of him, and the precaution gave him a semblance of existence in the eyes of those about him at the same time that it provided them with the agreeable sense of participating in a sacred ceremony." which is a sentiment that, again, has great relevance today.
It took me over a month to read this book and even longer to annotate/research the climate and world powers that were central for France in the 40s but it was worth the grind and I couldn't recommend this swiss army knife of a social thesis more. 4 1/2 stars.
Sharply relevant to today's political climate around hatred toward minority groups (immigration in particular) Sartre's pocket-sized thesis on what creates a social hive mind around the us vs. them ideology and provides smart commentary on the mindset of oppression and how it can inflict generational trauma with lasting effects on how people interact with their own individualism. I annotated the fuck out of this and after I lend it out to a few people I could see myself revisiting it. This is one of the first books someone recommended me for getting into Jewish theology/history and it absolutely lived up to expectations. There were many notable passages and a lot of profound insights/commentary that made rethink or reconceptualize a lot of my understanding of how to view racists and the mindset of someone who has to dehumanize another to feel safe in his own humanity. One part in particular that stood out was his commentary on social complacency toward members of the community who are loudly outspoken with their aversion to certain minority groups. "There was a tacit understanding between Jules and his family: they ostentatiously avoided talking about the English in front of him, and the precaution gave him a semblance of existence in the eyes of those about him at the same time that it provided them with the agreeable sense of participating in a sacred ceremony." which is a sentiment that, again, has great relevance today.
It took me over a month to read this book and even longer to annotate/research the climate and world powers that were central for France in the 40s but it was worth the grind and I couldn't recommend this swiss army knife of a social thesis more. 4 1/2 stars.
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
pretty good but my man jean paul did not do his research and got kinda stereotypey at the end
“The existence of the Jew merely permits the anti‐Semite to stifle his anxieties at their inception by persuading himself that his place in the world has been marked out in advance, that it awaits him, and that tradition gives him the right to occupy it. Anti‐Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti‐Semite is a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt‐anything except a man.”
There were some genuinely great quotes and insight here, but it was buried in so much unsupported, psychoanalytic nonsense.
The Jew only serves him as a pretext; elsewhere his counterpart will make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin. The existence of the Jew merely permits the anti-Semite to stifle his anxieties at their inception by persuading himself that his place in the world has been marked out in advance, that it awaits him, and that tradition gives him the right to occupy it.
Surprisingly relevant to the current climate, a very interesting read for anyone who is interested in historical parallels and who struggles to understand the alt-right. Some other quotes that stood out to me, for my own reference:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The anti-Semite has no illusions about what he is. He considers himself an average man, modestly average, basically mediocre. There is no example of an anti-Semite’s claiming individual superiority over the Jews. But you must not think that he is ashamed of his mediocrity; he takes pleasure in it; I will even assert that he has chosen it. This man fears every kind of solitariness, that of the genius as much as that of the murderer; he is the man of the crowd. 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. The phrase, “I hate the Jews,” is one that is uttered in chorus; in pronouncing it, one attaches himself to a tradition and community – the tradition and community of the mediocre.
We must remember that a man is not necessarily humble or even modest because he has consented to mediocrity. On the contrary, there is a passionate pride among the mediocre, and anti-Semitism is an attempt to give value to mediocrity as such, to create an elite of the ordinary. To the anti-Semite, intelligence is Jewish; he can thus disdain it in all tranquility, like all other virtues which the Jew possesses. […] The true Frenchman, rooted in his province, in his country, bourne along by a tradition twenty centuries old, benefiting from ancestral wisdom, guided by tried customs, does not need intelligence.
Thus I would call anti-Semitism a poor man’s snobbery. And in fact it would appear that the rich for the most part exploit this passion for their own uses rather than abandon themselves to it – they have better things to do.
Since anti-Semitism survives the great crises of Jew-hatred, the society which the anti-Semites form remains in a latent state during normal periods, with every anti-Semite celebrating its existence. Incapable of understanding modern social organization, he has a nostalgia for periods of crisis in which the primitive community will suddenly reappear and attain its temperature of fusion. He wants his personality to melt suddenly into the group and be carried away by the collective torrent.
The advantages of this position are many. To begin with, it favours laziness of the mind. We have seen that the anti-Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. […] His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti-Semitism channels extraordinary evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti-Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people.
It is fun to be an anti-Semite. One can beat and torture Jews without fear. At most they can appeal to the laws of the Republic, but those laws are not too rigorous.
The Jew no doubt sets a proper value on the sympathy shown him, but it cannot prevent his seeing anti-Semitism as a permanent structure of the community in which he lives. He knows, moreover, that the democrats and all those who defend him have a tendency to treat anti-Semitism rather leniently. First of all, we live in a republic, where all opinions are free. In addition, the myth of nation unity still exerts such an influence over the French that they are ready for the greatest compromises in order to avoid internal conflict, especially in periods of international tension – which are, of course, precisely those when anti-Semitism is the most violent. Naïve and full of good will, it is inevitably the democrat who makes all the concessions; the anti-Semite doesn’t make any, he has the advantage of his anger. People say, “Don’t irritate him.” They speak softly in his presence.
[the Jew] is nobody’s slave; he is a free citizen under a regime that allows free competition; he is forbidden no social dignity, no office of the state. He may be decorated with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, he may become a great lawyer or a cabinet minister. But at the very moment when he reaches the summits of legal society, another society – amorphous, diffused, and omnipresent – appears before him as if in brief flashes of lightning and refuses to take him in. How sharply he must feel the vanity of honours and fortune, when the greatest success will never gain him entrance into that society which considers itself the “real” one. As a cabinet minister, at once an “Excellency” and an untouchable. And yet he never encounters any particular resistance; people seem, rather, to be in flight before him; an impalpable chasm widens out, and, above all, an invisible chemistry devaluates all he touches.
This perpetual obligation to prove that he is French puts the Jew in a situation of guilt. If on every occasion he does not do more than everybody else, much more than anybody else, he is guilty, he is a dirty Jew – and one might say […]: To judge by the qualities we demand of a Jew if he is to be assimilated as “true” Frenchman, how many Frenchmen would be found worthy of being Jews in their own country?
Surprisingly relevant to the current climate, a very interesting read for anyone who is interested in historical parallels and who struggles to understand the alt-right. Some other quotes that stood out to me, for my own reference:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The anti-Semite has no illusions about what he is. He considers himself an average man, modestly average, basically mediocre. There is no example of an anti-Semite’s claiming individual superiority over the Jews. But you must not think that he is ashamed of his mediocrity; he takes pleasure in it; I will even assert that he has chosen it. This man fears every kind of solitariness, that of the genius as much as that of the murderer; he is the man of the crowd. 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. The phrase, “I hate the Jews,” is one that is uttered in chorus; in pronouncing it, one attaches himself to a tradition and community – the tradition and community of the mediocre.
We must remember that a man is not necessarily humble or even modest because he has consented to mediocrity. On the contrary, there is a passionate pride among the mediocre, and anti-Semitism is an attempt to give value to mediocrity as such, to create an elite of the ordinary. To the anti-Semite, intelligence is Jewish; he can thus disdain it in all tranquility, like all other virtues which the Jew possesses. […] The true Frenchman, rooted in his province, in his country, bourne along by a tradition twenty centuries old, benefiting from ancestral wisdom, guided by tried customs, does not need intelligence.
Thus I would call anti-Semitism a poor man’s snobbery. And in fact it would appear that the rich for the most part exploit this passion for their own uses rather than abandon themselves to it – they have better things to do.
Since anti-Semitism survives the great crises of Jew-hatred, the society which the anti-Semites form remains in a latent state during normal periods, with every anti-Semite celebrating its existence. Incapable of understanding modern social organization, he has a nostalgia for periods of crisis in which the primitive community will suddenly reappear and attain its temperature of fusion. He wants his personality to melt suddenly into the group and be carried away by the collective torrent.
The advantages of this position are many. To begin with, it favours laziness of the mind. We have seen that the anti-Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. […] His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti-Semitism channels extraordinary evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti-Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people.
It is fun to be an anti-Semite. One can beat and torture Jews without fear. At most they can appeal to the laws of the Republic, but those laws are not too rigorous.
The Jew no doubt sets a proper value on the sympathy shown him, but it cannot prevent his seeing anti-Semitism as a permanent structure of the community in which he lives. He knows, moreover, that the democrats and all those who defend him have a tendency to treat anti-Semitism rather leniently. First of all, we live in a republic, where all opinions are free. In addition, the myth of nation unity still exerts such an influence over the French that they are ready for the greatest compromises in order to avoid internal conflict, especially in periods of international tension – which are, of course, precisely those when anti-Semitism is the most violent. Naïve and full of good will, it is inevitably the democrat who makes all the concessions; the anti-Semite doesn’t make any, he has the advantage of his anger. People say, “Don’t irritate him.” They speak softly in his presence.
[the Jew] is nobody’s slave; he is a free citizen under a regime that allows free competition; he is forbidden no social dignity, no office of the state. He may be decorated with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, he may become a great lawyer or a cabinet minister. But at the very moment when he reaches the summits of legal society, another society – amorphous, diffused, and omnipresent – appears before him as if in brief flashes of lightning and refuses to take him in. How sharply he must feel the vanity of honours and fortune, when the greatest success will never gain him entrance into that society which considers itself the “real” one. As a cabinet minister, at once an “Excellency” and an untouchable. And yet he never encounters any particular resistance; people seem, rather, to be in flight before him; an impalpable chasm widens out, and, above all, an invisible chemistry devaluates all he touches.
This perpetual obligation to prove that he is French puts the Jew in a situation of guilt. If on every occasion he does not do more than everybody else, much more than anybody else, he is guilty, he is a dirty Jew – and one might say […]: To judge by the qualities we demand of a Jew if he is to be assimilated as “true” Frenchman, how many Frenchmen would be found worthy of being Jews in their own country?
A-mazing! His arguments are quite applicable to other minority issues. While I was reading it I kept drawing correlations to the homosexual community.
My God was that a horrible read! Sartre paints the shallowest possible portrait of the Jew, so one-dimensional, so pitiful, and of such generalization that it is hard - nay, impossible! - to take him seriously. Indeed, Sartre himself comes off looking like the supreme anti-Semite, not just holding but airing his childishly simplistic views of the Jew and maintaining himself as their supreme benefactor. Weak, weak, weak, is all that comes to mind: that is, a weak argument, a weak veil for his own anti-Semitism, and a weak mind. I had heard both good and bad things about this laughable French intellectual in the past, but now my mind is set: Sartre is an imbecile. His play No Exist was enjoyable, but his actual attempts at writing non-fiction seem, so far, to be terrible; though, besides this volume, I have only ever read parts of his The Psychology of Imagination.
Not only does his talk of "the Jew" ring utterly false from its insulting and massive generalizations (indeed, the entire book is generalization after generalization for 100 pages) but this work is filled with the most asinine leaps of logic and absurd claims, such as, on one of the final pages, "anti‐Semitism leads straight to National Socialism." How in the world is Sartre hailed as being so significant a thinker?
Not only does his talk of "the Jew" ring utterly false from its insulting and massive generalizations (indeed, the entire book is generalization after generalization for 100 pages) but this work is filled with the most asinine leaps of logic and absurd claims, such as, on one of the final pages, "anti‐Semitism leads straight to National Socialism." How in the world is Sartre hailed as being so significant a thinker?