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twistingsnake's review against another edition
4.0
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.
warandpeace's review against another edition
3.0
pretty good but my man jean paul did not do his research and got kinda stereotypey at the end
djoshuva's review against another edition
4.0
“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.”
sampatpete's review against another edition
2.0
There were some genuinely great quotes and insight here, but it was buried in so much unsupported, psychoanalytic nonsense.
snowyfoxtracks's review against another edition
4.0
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?
brandonharwood's review against another edition
5.0
A-mazing! His arguments are quite applicable to other minority issues. While I was reading it I kept drawing correlations to the homosexual community.
guojing's review against another edition
2.0
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?
jacobinreads's review against another edition
3.0
Sartre's exploration of the roots of anti-Semitism and bigotry, his excavation of the psychology of the oppressor and the situation of the oppressed has diminished very little in value or truth. Sartre's writing is lucid, clear, and compelling, and I could always follow his arguments. Definitely worth a read.
velarin's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
This is a very interesting analysis of french antisemitism of 1944 and a glance at the atmosphere surrounding the jewish cause in the post-war France. Some of the claims are quite outdated and some of them are straight up unhinged and uncomfortable (anti-Semite's hatred being really a result of his sexual attraction to the Jew).
But with the context in mind it's fascinating to see how Sartre's more sensible points smoothly translate to the narratives of the present. It's surprisingly easy to substitute "Jew" for a member of any other minority of today and uncover the brutal picture of how human hatred and bigotry is always built on the same fundaments. Just as " .. he [the anti-Semite] finds the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise to whom would he be superior? ", so does the discrimination of today thrive.
An interesting but problematic read.
But with the context in mind it's fascinating to see how Sartre's more sensible points smoothly translate to the narratives of the present. It's surprisingly easy to substitute "Jew" for a member of any other minority of today and uncover the brutal picture of how human hatred and bigotry is always built on the same fundaments. Just as " .. he [the anti-Semite] finds the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise to whom would he be superior? ", so does the discrimination of today thrive.
An interesting but problematic read.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism