Empathy could be defined as the ability of individual souls to temporarily merge. Now, as we have seen, the Jews feel united by a kind of collective or ethnic soul that occupies a greater or lesser part of their individual souls, according to individuals and circumstances. The Jewish ethnohistorian Raphael Patai, author of The Jewish Mind, posits “consciousness of belonging as the ultimate criterion of Jewishness.”749 This is indeed how many Jews recall their Jewishness. “Being Jewish to me,” says French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, “is to feel involved, concerned, sometimes compromised by what other Jews do. It’s a feeling of belonging, affiliation; and in this affiliation, there is, for example, the tortured link to Israel.”750 This powerful “sense of belonging” is the undisputed strength of the Jewish community; every Jew experiences himself as part and parcel of the chosen people, and those who speak for the community relentlessly reinforce this feeling. Whatever commendable act a Jew achieves reflects on the community. When a Jew is a victim, the Jewish people as a whole is victimized. By contrast, if he is guilty, his Jewishness is repressed because it would implicate the whole people in his guilt: everyone knows Albert Einstein was a Jew, but who knows that Jack the Ripper was, too?751 Jewishness is in some sense a latent sentiment capable of being activated by the slightest alarm. “The feeling of Jewishness remains in me something dark, abyssal, and above all, unstable. Both powerful and labile. Nothing is as important to me as my Jewishness which, however, in many respects, has so little importance in my life,” writes Jacques Derrida.752
The self-hatred label, applied to any Jew who apostatizes or criticizes his community of origin, betrays a conception of Jewishness as a central and ineradicable element of individuality. Consider how Benzion Netanyahu analyzes the situation of the Jew who marries a non-Jewess: “His individuality, which is an extract and an example of the qualities of his nation, may then be lost in future generations, dominated by qualities of other nations. Quitting a nation is, therefore, even from a biological point of view, an act of suicide. It shows that the individual does not value his own special qualities.”753 Thus, according to Netanyahu, it is not Jewishness that is a part of the Jew’s individuality, but his individuality that is a manifestation of Jewishness. Such remarks make it possible to understand how the high degree of empathy and sociability—that is to say, in practice, mutual aid—in the Jewish community is linked to the paradigm of the Jewish group soul.
The obsessional memory of the Holocaust is also rooted in this same paradigm; for the group soul connects each Jew to the millions of Jewish victims of Nazism, with an intensity not found in any other national memorial cult. Every Jew, even the offspring of Sephardim from North Africa who never saw a Nazi uniform, feels victimized by the Holocaust, and traumatized for life as a survivor. This kind of blurred boundary between personal memory and collective memory is one of the striking symptoms of Jewishness. The phenomenon is simple to understand in the light of the sociological theory of memory of Maurice Halbwachs, who writes in Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (“The Social Frames of Memory,” 1925): “Most often, if I remember, it is that others give me incentive to remember, that their memory comes to the aid of mine, that mine relies on theirs.”754 This explains in part the number of “false memories” contained in the testimonies of survivors of the camps: the mythologizing of some becomes, forty years later, the memories of others.755
Another consequence: any aggression against a Jew awakens in him, and among the other members of his community, the trauma of the Holocaust. Any anti-Semitic, Judeophobic, or simply Judeo-critical speech brings to mind the fear of “the darkest hours” in history. Any injustice against a Jew is a little Auschwitz. Every Jew killed is a potential genocide; whoever kills a Jew kills the Jewish people. Such is the mental pattern of the Zionist Claude Ranel when he evokes the Israeli perception of Palestinian resistance in Moi, Juif palestinien (1970): “What the fedayeen did not understand […] is that any terrorist act will always be automatically interpreted by Israel as the simulacrum on a small scale of the generalized massacre of an entire population.”756 Here, I think, we have a psychological key to understanding the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Universalism and the Chosenness Complex
The association of Judaism and universalism is endlessly harped upon. Politically correct goyim assimilate the message. “We are all Jews insofar as we care about the universal,” Jean Hyppolite is reported saying to his students at the École Normale Supérieure.757 Judaism, we are told, invented the universal God, and humanism with it. We have seen what lies behind the first proposition: the universal God invented by the Jews is actually a particularly jealous tribal god seized with an exterminating rage against all other gods, and his universalism is only a disguise hiding supremacism and contempt for all non-Jewish particularisms.
Jewish universalism is artificial. It is a posture, a persona. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, writing in 1793, was not mistaken: “The Jew who overcomes the difficult, one may say insurmountable, barriers which lie before him, and attains a love of justice, mankind, and truth—that Jew is a hero and a saint. I do not know whether such Jews ever existed or exist today. I shall believe it as soon as I meet such Jews. But dare you not sell me beautiful appearances for the real thing.”758 Jewish universalism is a fable intended to obfuscate reality and confuse the goy. Aaron David Gordon, founder of the Zionist party Hapoel Hatzair (Young Worker), puts it this way: “We always shout the word Humanity louder than all others, not because we have an ethics superior to others but because Humanity is an abstraction, an ethereal notion: In life there are only peoples (Völker).”759
Such an understanding is not given to everyone. Most Jews probably do not bother to question the paradoxical character of Jewish universalism. The paradox is repressed in the recesses of the psyche. Universalism could be seen as an unconscious compensation for tribalism; the Jew absolves himself of his atavistic tribalism by an ideal image of himself as a universalist humanist. This psychological consideration is also important for understanding the phenomenon of crypto-Jewishness, which cannot be reduced to conscious duplicity. The following remark by the historian of Judaism Daniel Lindenberg illustrates the psychological dimension of these contradictions: “Anyone who has known Communist Jews, ex-Kominternists, or even some prominent representatives of the 1968 generation will know what frustrated crypto-Jewishness means: Here are men and women who, in principle, according to the ‘internationalist’ dogma, have stifled in themselves all traces of ‘particularism’ and ‘petty-bourgeois Jewish chauvinism,’ who are nauseated by Zionism, support Arab nationalism and the great Soviet Union—yet who secretly rejoice in Israel’s military victories, tell anti-Soviet jokes, and weep while listening to a Yiddish song. This goes on until the day when, like a Leopold Trepper, they can bring out their repressed Jewishness, sometimes becoming, like the Marranos of the past, the most intransigent of neophytes.”760 The role of the unconscious in this duplicity must be relativized. There is undoubtedly a very deliberate intention on the part of many cognitive elites to bluff the goyim, but also to deceive the Jews themselves about the nature of the solidarity demanded of them.
Jewish universalism is a part of the Jews’ self-image, and amounts to an expression of limitless ethnic narcissism. Remember: the best deceivers are self-deceivers, and the psychopath typically ends up believing in his own lies, for he ignores the value of truth. There is no need to question the sincerity of Jewish thinkers claiming that the Jewish people is “the seed that is germinating the humanity of the future” (Jacob Kaplan, chief rabbi of France), or “the living ladder that meets the sky” (Emmanuel Levinas), or that “Israel equals humanity” (Emmanuel Levinas),761 or that “The Jew is closer to humanity than any other,” so that “the enemy of the Jews is the enemy of humanity” and therefore killing Jews is “murdering all mankind” (Elie Wiesel).762 Worse, “Hitting a Jew is hitting God Himself,” according to Cardinal Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger,763 taken
almost verbatim from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 58b: “Hitting a Jew is like slapping the face of God himself”).
This explains why the strange notion of “crimes against humanity” was created specifically to describe the massacre of Jews (at the Nuremburg Trials in 1945), while the term “genocide” was coined for the same purpose by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. Their extension to other victims of history led to the choice of yet another term, the Holocaust—hard to beat. According to Abraham Foxman, chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust is “not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and, thus, on God himself.”764 Using strangely circular reasoning, Jean Daniel puts forward as proof of the incomparable character of Jewish suffering the fact that no one has ever questioned another human drama as did the (Jewish) thinkers by wondering “how to think after Auschwitz” (Emil Fackenheim) or what became of “The Concept of God after Auschwitz” (Hans Jonas). It follows that “meditating on the Jewish question amounts to meditating […] on the human condition.”765 What Daniel does not see is that the phenomenon he underlines demonstrates not the incomparable character of Jewish suffering but the incomparable character of Jewish ethnocentrism.
Yahweh, the Jewish universal God, is only a narcissistic tribal god, in the clinical sense of the term. Jewish universalism is only a hypertrophied ethnocentrism. For if the Jew is the essence of humanity, it follows implicitly that the non-Jew is a little less than human. Many rabbis have made the idea explicit. Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, known as Rav Cook, first Ashkenazi chief rabbi in the Land of Israel until his death in 1935, explained: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”766 Isaac Kadmi-Cohen reminds us that “in ancient Hebrew, the verb ‘to die’ applies to all living things, human or beast. For Hebrews, one uses the euphemism ‘rejoin one’s people’ (Héasef léamo).”767
It is almost always in reference to their Jewishness that Jews feel and proclaim themselves universalist. In other words, the universalism of the Jews is almost always a Jewish universalism, that is, in reality, a tribal narcissism. It is fake. Using an oxymoron, Jewishness can be defined as universalist tribalism, or tribal universalism. The Judeo-centric mode of thought is immune to the cognitive dissonance that may result from the contradiction between the universalist discourse and the tribalistic practice. If the Jew is the essence of humanity, what is good for the Jews is good for mankind, on principle: “Judaism considers only the salvation of the house of Israel, which alone will permit the salvation of the seventy nations of the universe” (Rabi, Anatomie du Judaïsme français, 1962).768 The Jews are the indispensable people. “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race,” proclaimed Ben-Gurion, the founding father of Israel.769 It is by remaining a separate people that the Jews will help unify humanity. And so their separatism is supposedly necessary for their universalism.
The double ethnic-religious nature of Judaism helps streamline the paradox that the Jews should remain a separate people in order to spread their universal religion. This is, for example, the thesis of Felix Adler (1851–1933): When the Jewish people has fulfilled its mission of dissolving the ethnicity of the rest of humanity, then it will be allowed to disappear. And so the world’s most ethnically oriented community succeeds in masquerading as the champion of universalism. Thus when Martin Buber called for a state for the Jews, it was so they could serve humanity. For it is only by fulfilling its messianic dream of a national home, he said, that the Jewish religion can lead humanity toward the messianic age.770 This argument, developed by Reform Judaism, is intended primarily for goyim but also for “soft” Jews, in order to convince them that their commitment in favor of the group is a service to humanity.
The ethnocentrism of communal Jewish thinkers is particularly apparent in their vision of universal history. Israelis, “the most separatist people in the world” according to Nahum Goldman (former president of the World Jewish Organization and founder of the World Jewish Congress), “have the great weakness of thinking that the whole world revolves around them.”771 Another fervent Zionist, Josef Kastein, acknowledges in his History and Destiny of the Jews (1933): “The Jewish world was Judeocentric, and the Jews could interpret everything that happened only from the standpoint of themselves as the center.”772 Josué Jehouda illustrates this perfectly in Antisemitism, Mirror of the World: “He who plumbs the depths of universal history, to gain an overall vision, finds that from ancient times until today two opposing currents are fighting over history, penetrating and shaping it constantly: the messianic current and the anti-Semitic current. […] messianism and anti-Semitism are the two opposite poles of the journey of humanity.”773 Such expressions of extreme ethnocentrism only confirm Karl Marx’s view that “the Jew […] can behave towards the state only in a Jewish way—that is, […] by deeming himself justified in separating himself from mankind, by abstaining on principle from taking part in the historical movement, by putting his trust in a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind in general.”774
Judeocentrism is not only a way of learning history, but also a way of writing it and using it as a weapon of domination rather than as a search for truth. The founder of sociology Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), quite critical of his Jewish community, wrote: “The Jew […] seeks to learn not in order to replace his collective prejudices by reflective thought, but merely to be better armed for the struggle. […] he superimposes this intellectual life upon his habitual routine with no effect of the former upon the latter.”775 Quite often the search for truth becomes a smokescreen, the only important question being, “Is it good for the Jews?”776 But the communal pride of certain Jewish intellectuals is so outrageous that it cannot be interpreted as purely demagogic. It often appears downright pathological, as when Bernard-Henry Levy, who is accustomed to such ethnocentric delusions, declares: “The French language is perhaps one of the most precious things in this country; and it is a Jew—and what a Jew, Rashi—who deserves credit for having almost invented it.”777
Jewishness seems to induce a blind spot among some high-level intellectuals: they become irrational as soon as they approach a subject with any relationship to their community, as if an unconscious imperative—some programmed subroutine in the superego—suddenly short-circuited their objectivity. I recently came across an astonishing example of this phenomenon while opening a book by the psychiatrist Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. Here is how the author begins his book: “When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. Just one of those comments that you hear once, and the thought never goes away. To a child’s mind (even to an adult’s) these two types of things just don’t belong together. He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true. I knew our family was Jewish, so this image of turning people into objects felt a bit close to home. My father also told me about one of his former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt, whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced to the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mrs. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them on again so that if she put her hands out palms down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside. Just one of the many ‘experiments’ they had conducted. I realized there was a paradox at the heart of human nature—people could objectify others—that my young mind was not yet ready to figure out. […] Today, almost half a century after my father’s revelations to me about the extremes of human behavior, my mind is still exercised by the same, single question: How can we understand human cruelty?”778 I had to read this passage twice to make sure I understood correctly, and to finally admit the obvious: Baron
-Cohen doesn’t doubt the stories told him by his father. And nowhere in the book does he wonder about the motivation of those who invent such stories or those who relate them to their children. The story serves only to introduce his theme: how can human beings commit such acts? This book was written in 2011 by a physician of great reputation—although not a specialist in hand surgery—whose works are, in general, models of scientific rigor.
The Holocaust Attitude
The psychopath is unable to see the other person’s point of view, and criticism strikes him as irrational aggression. He does not know the feeling of guilt, and constantly plays innocent: those who have crossed his path are solely responsible for their own destruction. Their reproaches are baseless, and their anger an irrational hatred. This is the reaction of the Jewish elites to criticism: to them it can be nothing other than the expression of visceral anti-Semitism, an atavistic goyish disease. “Judeophobia is a variety of demonopathy, with the distinction that it is not peculiar to particular races but is common to the whole of mankind,” writes Leon Pinsker, a medical doctor. It is “a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.” By way of consequence, the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred.”779 This curious formula could be the credo of secular Zionism, and reflects pretty well a widespread feeling among Jews and Israelis, as is well documented in Yoav Shamir’s excellent film Defamation (2009).
In their own eyes, the Jews have no responsibility for the hostility of the Gentiles toward them. There are certainly exceptions that confirm the rule: Thus, in a deliberately provocative way, Samuel Roth wrote (in 1934): “There is not a single instance when the Jews have not fully deserved the bitter fruit of the fury of their persecutors.”780 By such remarks, Roth has marginalized himself in his community. The politically correct point of view of a leading Jewish intellectual such as André Neher is the exact opposite: “One thing that Judaism has which other spiritualities lack is innocence. We are innocent, and we feel even more deeply that we are innocent when we are accused. […] It is this innocence that we must be aware of at present, and that we must never deny, never, in any circumstance.”781 And it works: “You will understand nothing of anti-Semitism,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “if you fail to remember that the Jew, that object of so much hatred, is perfectly innocent, nay harmless” (Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946).782 Anti-Semitism is so universal and sneaky that it is there even when one does not see it: “In their great majority, Christians—or those recognized as such—are anti-Semites. For even in the best of them, the very ones who have engaged the most generous combat against Nazi anti-Semitism, it is easy to detect the traces of more or less unconscious anti-Semitism” (Jules Isaac, L’Enseignement du mépris, 1962).783 We can detect here what Yiddish writer and 1978 Nobel Prize nominee Isaac Bashevis Singer describes as a monomaniac tendency of the Jew: “When he gets an idea into his head it becomes so strong that he forgets about everything else. Let’s consider the Jew who fights anti-Semitism. He will find anti-Semitism everywhere, even on an empty island or in the Sahara. The obsessed person becomes funny because he cannot see the exception to the rule, or he creates nonexistent rules.”784 In the final analysis, this obsessive fear is only a side effect of chosenness, since the destiny of the chosen one is to be misunderstood and rejected. From the psychological point of view, chosenness leads directly to the persecution complex.
From Yahweh to Zion Page 50
