From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  The diagnostic criteria for psychopathy also include pathological lying, cunning, and manipulative behavior. The psychopath feels only very superficial emotions and has no real feelings for anyone; but he has developed a great ability to deceive. He can be charming to the point of being charismatic. He typically shows highly developed verbal intelligence and lies with disconcerting aplomb. He is unable to feel empathy, but learns to simulate it, sometimes with a tendency to histrionism (Latin histrio, “theater actor”). But the psychopath is more than what psychoanalyst Helene Deutsche has called the “as-if personality,” endowed with purely mimetic “ungenuine pseudo emotions”: he is a manipulator. It is through his extraordinary ability to feign, trick, trap, and capture that the psychopath draws his power. Although he himself is immunized against guilt, he becomes a master in the art of using guilt to dominate others.

  In any situation, the psychopath projects a persona, which can vary according to circumstances. The opinions he holds in public are all disguises that he tailors to his own advantage. However, lying is so deeply embedded in his nature that the question of his “sincerity” is almost irrelevant: the psychopath can beat a lie detector. The truth has no value in his eyes, or merges with the version of events that suits him. The psychopath is unable to put himself in the place of others, and thus to view himself critically. Confident in any circumstance of being right and innocent (and superior), he considers the resentment of his victims as irrational and pointless.

  According to Hervey Cleckley: “The psychopath presents a technical appearance of sanity, often one of high intellectual capacities, and not infrequently succeeds in business or professional activities.” But this appearance of sanity is misleading, for the psychopath suffers from a profound underlying disorder Cleckley calls “semantic aphasia,” characterized by a disconnection between language and emotion.718 Although those close to the psychopath—at least those who learn the hard way his true nature—can judge him raving mad, the psychopath is not “sick” because he does not “suffer.” He is innocent of neurosis, and never requests psychiatric care (except as a strategic calculation). He is not psychotic, and cannot be regarded as maladapted to social life. On the contrary, he is, in a certain sense, over-adjusted. (That is why the real mystery, from a Darwinian point of view, is not the existence of psychopaths, but their low proportion in the population.)

  Unfortunately, there have been few studies on the psychopath’s behavior as a father. Yet it is easy to understand that, if the psychopath likes to dominate, manipulate, and mentally enslave, he will find easy prey in his own children. Since we are reflecting on the relationship of Yahweh to his chosen people, what interests us specifically is the experience of the favorite son of a psychopathic father, whom the father chose as an extension of his own narcissistic self. We must also imagine a family unit whose mother is absent or erased. Let us go further: the most illuminating example might be that of a psychopath who, for one reason or another, finds himself incapable of realizing his ambitions except through his chosen or only son.

  Such a father idealizes himself as God creating man in his own image. His son is his creature, and therefore he recognizes in him only what he has shaped in him. All that the son accomplishes serves to nourish the narcissism of the father, who claims credit and expects recognition. On the other hand, he makes his son pay dearly for what he considers his failures: they are proof that, left to himself, the son is a loser. The psychopathic father demands the submission of his son, and if he wills his son’s success, it is only to feed his own ego.

  The fusional love that the psychopathic father feels for his son should not be confused with empathy. It is the exact opposite, even if the father, in his narcissistic self-heroization, confuses them. Far from seeking to promote the psychic autonomy of his son, the psychopath seeks to control him by all means, to keep him dependent. Consciously or not (it is always difficult to say, for the psychopath does not reflect on his own motivations), he will set up the mechanisms for his son’s enslavement by lowering his psychological defenses. These mechanisms often have an incestuous dimension. Though himself devoid of moral conscience, he does not hesitate to play on his son’s guilt, accusing him of ingratitude. Everything he gives is secretly conditional and serves to create a moral debt. The “double bind,” which deeply confuses the child and hinders his cognitive development, can be a deliberate strategy used by the psychopathic father.

  The psychopath isolates his victims and seeks to undermine their confidence in others. The psychopathic father will typically prevent his son from building nurturing bonds with others, especially family members who are aware of his psychological issues. An uncle who feels a particular affection for his nephew—or, worse, worries about him—will be repulsed as a dangerous rival. The psychopathic father is a jealous god: he must secure control over any relationship that his son establishes with others. If he is sufficiently vigilant, his son will find no comfort, no substitute parent figure, and therefore no lever of resilience. He will be trained to perceive all generous attention as a threat, any gesture of sympathy as an aggression. All around him he will see only potential enemies. One of the psychopath’s favorite means of manipulation is the “triangulation” of relationships, which gives him indirect and therefore less perceptible control.

  The Psychopathic God

  The behavior of Yahweh toward his people, as presented in biblical history, can be examined through the psychological prism we have just described. Yahweh is a father to his people, but a father who, to keep his son under his tight control, prevents him from forming any empathic alliance with other peoples. He convinces the Jews that all those who wish to be their friends are in fact their worst enemies, that all confidence in Gentiles leads only to disaster. The Jews must place their entire trust in Yahweh alone. The cultic and food prohibitions are there precisely to prevent all socialization outside the tribe: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26); “you, out of all peoples, shall be my personal possession, for the whole world is mine. For me you shall be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5–6). This last sentence is often cited out of context as evidence that the Jewish people are divinely commissioned to be the spiritual guide of humanity. It is a misunderstanding: what Yahweh wants is a people consecrated to his worship, just as the psychopathic father seeks, in the devotion of his son, the exaltation of his own narcissism.

  It is often claimed that Yahweh demands that his people exhibit moral superiority. The claim is nonsensical. Let us repeat: there is no trace in the Torah of any struggle between good and evil, in the metaphysical sense. The only criterion of Yahweh’s approval is obedience to his arbitrary laws. The fate of the Jewish people is linked exclusively to this criterion, so that every reversal of fortune is explained by a breach of contract on the part of the people, and serves to strengthen the submission of the people. When a people attacks the Hebrews, it is never because of what the Hebrews did to it, but because of the infidelity of the Hebrew people to Yahweh. For other peoples are but vulgar instruments in the hands of Yahweh. The guilt that the Jewish people should feel about failing to obey Yahweh obliterates self-reflection and self-criticism, and prevents them from being able to even consider the grievances of the Gentiles. In Kevin MacDonald’s words: “The idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis Gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.”719 If the Jewish people have sinned, it is against God, never against other peoples. And if they have sinned against God, it is precisely by sympathizing with other peoples, by “assimilating” with them. A terrible double bind has seized the chosen people: It is caught between the exalting glory of the Election and the exorbitant price of the Covenant; between promises of world domination and threats of extinction. Note that w
hen Yahweh refrains from destroying his people who “rebelled against me,” it is out of concern for his own reputation: “I then resolved to vent my fury on them in the desert and destroy them. But respect for my own name kept me from letting it be profaned in the eyes of the nations, before whom I had brought them out” (Ezekiel 20:13–14).

  In his book Der jüdische Selbsthaß (“Jewish Self-Hatred”) published in Berlin in 1930, Theodor Lessing wrote: “To the question: ‘Why do not we love ourselves?’ Jewish doctrine answers since the beginning of time: ‘Because we are guilty’ […] In every Jewish man there is a deeply buried tendency to interpret any misfortune that strikes him as the atonement for a fault he has committed.” The Jews, says Lessing, are “the first and perhaps the only ones” to have developed such an attitude. He sees this as the origin of a “self-hatred” that affects all Jews in varying degrees.720

  There is a deep truth in this diagnosis, but Lessing’s formulation is confusing. If to seek in oneself the causes of the violence of others means the capacity to examine oneself by putting oneself in the place of others, then it is an empathic process, based on the premise that the other shares with oneself the same humanity and therefore a comparable way of seeing and feeling things. This is not at all what Judaism teaches. And that is the problem Lessing has not grasped. As we have just seen, Judaism (biblical Yahwism as well as Talmudic rabbinism) teaches the Jews that all their misfortunes are explained by their disobedience to Yahweh, and that their most serious fault is to fraternize with the non-Jews. The biblical message, in essence, is: “Do not frequent idolaters (non-Jews), despise their traditions, and—if possible—exploit them, enslave them, and exterminate them. If, after that, they violate you, it is your fault: you have not obeyed scrupulously enough.” Such is the insane cognitive logic, internalized over a hundred generations, that encloses the Jews in the infernal cycle of chosenness and persecution. This mode of thought is based on the denial of the other’s humanity, which is indeed the essence of psychopathy. It does not occur to the psychopath to question the feelings of the other in order to try to understand his anger, because the other is fundamentally an object and not a person: his actions are events whose motivation is irrelevant. Thus, after the war that decimated the Jewish community of Alexandria between 115 and 117 CE, the fact that it was the culmination of numerous clashes between Jews and non-Jews (Greeks and Egyptians) did not lead Jews to reflect on the reasons that led the Alexandrians to collaborate with the Roman armies against them. According to the Talmudist of the second century Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, the Roman emperor was only the instrument of divine justice to punish the Jews for remaining in Egypt.721 Never, ever, has the Jewish community taken into account the grievances of its persecutors. Its elites forbid it.

  Whoever cannot bear to see himself in others’ eyes has not learned to love himself. This answers Lessing’s question: “How is it that all peoples love themselves, while the Jew is the only one who has so much trouble loving himself?”722

  Of course, in speaking here of “Yahweh” as a psychopathic or sociopathic father, and of the election he confers as a curse, I am speaking metaphorically and abstractly. I do not believe in the objective existence of such a mad god. But if Yahweh is imaginary, that does not change his psychological stranglehold. Yahweh is the persona (the mask) invented by the Levitical elites; the relationship between the people and Yahweh in the Bible is in fact only a projection of the relationship between the people and their Levitical elites. Judaism, which has the nature of an alliance—that is, a contract—between the Jews and their god, is a dictatorship based on a more or less arbitrary set of laws whose object is less the well-being of the people than the mere exercise of divine power. And since control always needs to be reinforced, the evolution of Judaism is marked by uninterrupted legalistic escalation: after Deuteronomy come the laws of Leviticus, then the innumerable laws of the Pharisees that give rise to rabbinic Judaism. According to the consecrated expression, the Talmudic laws are conceived as “a barrier around the barrier of the Torah.” Maimonides, the medieval Talmudic scholar, established a catalogue of 613 authoritative commandments (365 bans and 248 obligations).

  For a non-religious Jew, the Jews are not God’s chosen people, but his “inventors.” As David Ben-Gurion put it, it was not Yahweh who chose the Jewish people, but the Jewish people who chose Yahweh. So the covenant between Yahweh and his people is really only an alliance between Jews, whose elites dictate terms. Paradoxically, this hardly affects the religious conception of chosenness. In fact, there is even more arrogance in the profane conception, for being chosen by God at least leaves room for a sacrificial interpretation, which would imply a higher moral requirement and a vocation to suffer for humanity—a conception mostly put forward in apologetic literature for non-Jews. In contrast, the secular Jews’ concept of self-election is accompanied by an exaltation of the superiority of the Jewish people, including superiority in suffering. It is no longer disobedience to God that provokes misfortunes but the eternal hatred of the Gentiles. For Nathan and Ruth Perlmutter, anti-Semitism stems from “the jealousy of the Gentiles and their fury at seeing the Jews surpass them. […] The Gentiles, more numerous and less evolved, are annoyed to see the Jews, fewer and more evolved.”723 Alternatively, in Jacques Attali’s conception, anti-Semitism stems from humanity’s ingratitude for what the Jews gave it, namely God and money.724 Thus from within this cognitive straitjacket that prevents all self-criticism, anti-Semitism seemingly confirms the superiority and generosity of the Jews. The Holocaust, the culmination of anti-Semitism, becomes “a distasteful secular version of chosenness,” according to Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.725 The divine—diabolical—figure of the Holocaust has replaced a Yahweh who is losing authority. But it is always the same elite that uses this divinity for its own purposes. After all, in good old-fashioned Yahwist theology, it is always Yahweh who strikes Israel, using the hands of its enemies, to punish it for its infidelity.

  Killing Yahweh

  As the son of a psychopath builds his own personality under the influence of his pathological parent, he can never be fully individualized or socialized. His psychological development will depend on his father’s investment in him, his natural capacity for resilience, his access to other meaningful relationships, and factors still unknown to psychology. To simplify, we may say that during adolescence the psychopath’s son faces a stark choice between submission or self-destruction. If he submits, he will eventually internalize the father’s psychopathy (without necessarily renouncing the desire to kill him). Psychiatrists note a hereditary factor in psychopathy, but the explanation is probably less genetic than cognitive or epigenetic: when the child’s psychic tension is resolved by surrender, the child integrates the cognitive structure of the father. In effect, he becomes his father. If, on the other hand, the son chooses the second alternative, self-destruction, he will wander in the limbo of psychosis, awaiting an improbable miracle, a rebirth he may find in faith or love. Between these two extremes lies the vast domain of neuroses and unresolved Oedipus complexes, minor personality or developmental disorders, all of which are characterized by deficiencies in the capacity for sociability.

  Every Jew finds himself in such a situation, to the extent that he identifies himself as a Jew. He is torn by opposite and partly unconscious wills, which have their ultimate source in his ambivalent relationship to his ethnic god—who is, on the psychological level, merely the internalized symbolic representation of the tribal elites’ power over him. Every Jew, insofar as he believes himself to be Jewish, feels this schism, this inner tension, which is at bottom the struggle between his Jewishness and his humanity. This is the most probable explanation for the high rate of neuroses among Jews. The neurotic Jew is not just a Hollywood stereotype created by Woody Allen or the Coen brothers. The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia wrote: “The Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races and peoples among which
they dwell. Hysteria and neurasthenia appear to be most frequent.”726 Isaac Kadmi-Cohen speaks of “a congenital neurosis characterized by a lack of balance between objective data and judgment […] a nervous excitability, a chronic exaltation of passion.”727 This anomaly, often attributed to endogamy, has been a concern for many Jewish doctors and psychiatrists, including Sigmund Freud. Research by Leo Srole in the 1960s shows that the Jewish rate of neuroses and character disorders was about three times as high as that of Catholics and Protestants.728 Neurosis results from psychic tension that threatens the integrity of the self, and that can degenerate into psychosis when the tension reaches a point of rupture. Freud wrongly reduced this tension to a conflict between the id (sexual instinct) and the superego, but his schema nevertheless has the merit of emphasizing the role of the castrating image of the father. For the Jews, the symbolic image of the father internalized in the superego is superimposed on that of Yahweh.

  At the first Zionist Congress (1897), Max Nordau offered Zionism as the solution to this inner schism that undermines the psyche of the “emancipated Jew,” whose “best powers are exhausted in the suppression, or at least in the difficult concealment of his own real character. For he fears that this character might be recognized as Jewish, and he has never the satisfaction of showing himself as he is in all his thoughts and sentiments. He becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher feeling men, as is everything that is unreal.”729 But Nordau’s diagnosis is incomplete. Such alienation stems not only from the effort to be “a Jew at home and a man in the street,” but more deeply from the contradictions between Jewish tribalism and Jewish supposed universalism.