The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  The persona of Judas crystallizes but by no means initiates the millennial association, charged with both panic and contempt, between the Jew and money. The primal ambiguity of money—key to happiness, root of all evil, at once blessed and satanic—is virtually universal in social perceptions and symbolism. Even rationalized, money retains its demonic aura. The sensibility, the history of the Jew are taken to be inextricably inwoven with that of wealth, with Mammon and the Golden Calf, with Shylock and Rothschild. Those thirty pieces of silver, emblematic of Judas’s treason, modulate into the Christian enforcement on the Jew of the sin, of the corrosions of usury (so formidably chanted in Ezra Pound’s Usura canto). The Jew is compelled to “make money,” a loaded phrase. The yield is simultaneously precious and excremental, as psychoanalysis seeks to explain. Moneylender and alchemist, the Jew manipulates, masters, fructifies the occult yet also supreme rationale and functions of money as does no other ethnic community. With the instauration of modern capitalism, of investment finance and the money markets, literature will quicken atavistic fears into profane urgency: witness the role of the Jew in Balzac, in Trollope, in Zola’s L’Argent. On the analytic front, econometrics, the Nobel in economics are all but a Jewish reserve.

  Observe the deranged contradiction: Jew-hatred is directed at both the Bolshevik and the capitalist! The Jew is seen (justly) to play a leading part in utopian socialism, in the vengeful rejection of unequal riches and monetary values which gives to Marxism, to Marxism-Leninism their prophetic, messianic charisma. Their promise that “gold will be used for toilet seats.” On the other hand, Wall Street, the esoteric juggleries of high finance, the bourse are stigmatized as expressions of Jewish plutocracy. They are distinctive of the Jew as Marx, himself a Jew, proclaimed. How can anti-Semitism have it both ways? No defiance of logic, no schizophrenia takes us nearer the absurd, irrational, but also entrenched, visceral sources and substance of Jew-hatred than does this simultaneous mechanism. In the outpourings of libel and caricature, the Jew is both the “bloodthirsty Red” and the pinstriped mogul.

  Dispersed or confined to the ghetto, despised and subject to violent persecution, be it under Domitian, in the medieval Rhineland, in the Spain of the Inquisition, in the Russian pogroms and, apocalyptically, during the Shoah, the Jews have continued to exercise on the gentile world an unsettling, exasperating moral pressure. It is the blackmail of the ideal.

  I have already adverted to the overwhelming, counterintuitive, perhaps in some sense unnatural exactions which Mosaic monotheism would impose on human reflexes and feelings. Christian polytheism, the compromises engaging the “Son of Man,” the Man-God, have never effaced certain deep fissures and tensions within Christianity itself. The reproachful specter of genuine monotheism stalks the canonic multiplicities of Christian doctrine. It surfaces in such hybrids as strict Calvinism, Jansenism, and the Unitarian arrangement. It resounds in Pascal’s agonized appeal to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The refusal of the Jew to participate in such mythologies makes a hostage of Christianity “unto the end of time,” for there can be no Second Coming so long as the Jew does not enter freely into the ecclesia.

  Next came the uncompromising imperatives of Sinai and the Decalogue. Commandments out of common reach and the norm of human conduct. We are to cherish our neighbor more than ourselves. Smitten, we are to offer the other cheek. We are to forgive whatever injury is done to us. We must share our portion of worldly goods. Directly inspired by the Mosaic precedent, by the psalms and the prophets, Jesus is no more thoroughly the Jew than in his Sermon on the Mount. He affronts man—this is the right word—with behavioral criteria and ideals far beyond natural instincts and the resources of spirit in everyman. The Galilean propounds axioms of caritas, of mutual altruism, of disinterested love and agape, the key Pauline rubric, which only the sanctified, the “latter-day saints,” can hope to enact. Who can satisfy the Pascalian ordinance that “the self is hateful” rephrased in Levinas’s Talmudic exaltation of the primacy of “the other”? But in excess of our means these prescriptions plague us with their unattainable value. Perfection as blackmail. The necessary hypocrisies, the mundane bargains, the gymnastics of absolution and self-forgiveness by which women and men conduct their private and civic affairs are encoded by the most adroit public relations virtuoso in history: by Paul of Tarsus. From whose tactics of grace and dispensation the Jew-hatred in Christianity takes its lasting, theologically buttressed contagion.

  I have already referred to the third major indictment of average humanity: that formulated by utopian, messianic modes of socialism, especially Marxist. The abolition of private property, the promise of equality, the exchange not of money but of trust for trust promulgated in Karl Marx’s 1843 program are rooted in Judaic aspirations, in what one might call the left wing of the prophetic inheritance. The territorial, proprietary, privately oriented motivations of the “human animal,” la bête humaine, do not only counteract these Edenic prescriptions. They do not only inspire fear and insurgence. They bequeath a toxic residue of guilt. No one fuels more detestation than one whose exemplary ideals we acknowledge, inwardly, to be justified but feel ourselves incapable of matching. (I know that there are spare rooms in my privileged house, but do not share them.)

  The Mosaic summons, the witness of the seer from Nazareth, the exigencies of messianic socialism (as codified in certain fundamentalist kibbutzim)—three variants on the Judaic demands for perfection. On the didactic absolutism of altruistic merit, our instincts and pragmatic resources are found wanting. Hence millennia of resentment and enmity. All of which Adolf Hitler summarized succinctly in one of his reported table-talks: “The Jew has invented conscience.”

  And yet he endures. There are today more Jews thought to be alive on the planet than there were prior to the Shoah. If this is indeed so, it is a scandal (in the grave sense of Greek skandalon), an enormity difficult to grasp. Out of homicidal decimation, like no other in history, out of an explicit, systematic death sentence emerges not only a ghostly remnant of survivors but the contested land of Israel and the good fortune of North American Judaism. Jews have returned to Berlin. There is probably no way of gauging the psychic damage done, the scars left. The Jew, descendant of measureless hurt. He may harbor within him a covert derangement. But he is, and that existential banality defies likelihood and horror.

  Allow a simple thought-experiment. Take an ancient people with a complex language; with a coherent social-political fabric; an evolved ritual-religious practice; a favored rural and urban habitat; artifacts and art of high quality. What is left of the Etruscans? A handful of archaeological vestiges and sepulchral sites. Why no modern heirs to the Etruscans?

  The same effacement is true of countless historically attested civilizations and ethnic identities. Some, as in Central America, lasted a thousand years and left behind resplendent monuments, alphabets, cosmologies. The utter genius of ancient Greece, the power of imperial Rome, the aesthetic, political constructs of By­zantium enter into eclipse, then persist in the atrophy of the museum. Is there anything more instinct with death than the Elgin marbles?

  We bear witness to two exceptions only. To only two lineages of unbroken selfhood over more than 3,000 years. In the case of the Chinese, demography (vast numbers) and the absence of genocidal visitations from abroad have secured continuity.

  The case of the Jews is sui generis. It is that of a scattered, numerically limited people, victimized by recurrent persecution and, at the last, by a systematic industry of annulment (Stalinism conjoins Nazism). Dying, an American publicist posed the stark question: if you intuit another mass murder, would you choose not to have children or do everything practicable to bring about their exit from Judaism? Each Jewish parent must answer. If she and he reject the alternative, what ontological luxury are they enacting?

  Still, the Jew insists on being. With an unexamined, nonnegotiable tactlessness of soul. He is the anti-Hamlet par excellence: “not to be” is not an option. Suici
de is a blasphemy inflicted from, as it were, without (in mortal danger as at Masada, in medieval ghettos lit alight by the hounding mob).

  Is the ultimate source of Jew-hatred, of the enduring plague of anti-Semitism, the provocative wonder of Judaism’s persistence? Of the Jewish refusal of abdication from life? A refusal sustained against monstrous odds, in the face of constant oppression and the seductions of assimilation (precisely at the hour of danger, as for example during the Six-Day War, Jews, comfortably assimilated, have rallied to themselves). Why in God’s name—citing that phrase literally—are there still Jews? Is this the maddening anomaly, this thorn in the flesh of time, which many gentiles have found to be outrageous and inexplicable? Is the endeavor to eliminate the Jew, by outright violence or exclusion, an attempt to resolve this enigma? Simply: why is the world not Judenrein, a term which appears to date back to the turn of the twentieth century in the Linz bicycle club, “cleansed of Jews”? No Etruscans left, no Mayans.

  I have no confident answer. Only a tentative conjecture, an intuition, although perhaps not altogether “blameless.”

  The nucleus of Judaism is a pact with life, to which the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” a commandment so utterly alien to human nature and human history, is merely an inspired footnote.

  What are the origins of this contract—do its gravitational waves pulse in the myth of Genesis, in God’s solemn promise of survival to Noah and to Abraham? What negotiation counter to death underlies it? We do not know. How has this accord been transmitted? Modern biology dictates that no such transmission is genetically feasible. Nevertheless, Lamarckian proposals are beginning to reaffirm their pertinence. Sigmund Freud remained a convinced Lamarckian. It is difficult to dismiss the role, the potency of the life-pact in the composition, in the counterfactual destiny, of the Jew. Jewish orthodoxy and scripture remain neutral as to any afterlife. The sacred prevails here and now, the wager is on sunrise. (The primacy of the present tense is unmistakable in Hebrew syntax.)

  Only this pact, surpassing common vitality or optimism, can help explain the survival of the Jew across millennia of persecution and repeated decimation. After the purposed finality of the Holocaust. In play was the anomaly of what Ibsen called “the life-lie,” of the inextinguishable energies of the Jewish psyche, albeit damaged. How otherwise can we grasp the fact that Jews kept sane, kept resilient after the torment and eradication of millions in the death camps? After the slaughter of their children and the complicity in hatred or indifference of the vast majority of their fellow men? At the moment of his liberation, the radical refusenik, after a decade of incarceration, much of it in solitary, dances across the border line, mocking his guards! Dances as did David before the Ark. In celebration of the mystery of indestructible life that is Judaism.

  The incensed response to this mystery must have been initiated and deepened in the collective unconscious—an opaque but probably indispensable reality—of the gentile. At times, this unconscious finds manifest expression. For example in the mesmerizing legend of the Wandering Jew. An object of homicidal detestation and pursuit, Ahasverus wanders “like night from land to land.” He is untouchable, immune to the privilege of extinction.

  It is my conjecture that this immunity both exasperates and subconsciously terrifies non-Jews. The Jew has been around too long. Like a reproachful atavism, at once spectral and formidably alive. Alert to incipient disaster, he has learned to breathe underwater. This is not an accomplishment that makes friends.

  Is there any realistic “solution” (a word itself scarred, Endlösung in the glossary of the butchers)?

  An estimated 71 percent of Jews in the U.S.A. enter mixed marriages. It is very difficult to determine how many of such unions comport an abandonment of Jewish practices and remembrance. Obviously crucial is the upbringing of their children. Experts affirm that only 20 percent of the children of mixed marriages will be taught anything of their Jewish heritage. The great majority drift out of any Jewish observance and self-definition. In Israel itself, demography undermines Judaism. Later in our century Palestinian Arabs are expected to outnumber Jews. The format that remains could well be that of a retrenched community in Israel and of Orthodox clusters widely disseminated. Conceivably the future of Judaism now lies with their fanatical fruitfulness (some half-dozen offspring or more) in the paradox of a transnational ghetto. Much speaks against the end-game metamorphosis, including the wondrously renascent dynamics of the Hebrew language. Nonetheless, it is a possible epilogue.

  Would it terminate anti-Semitism?

  Detestation of the Jew has been of eminent value to Christendom. It has served as a katharsis purging Christian dogma and imaginings of otherwise intractable theological and sociological tensions. The obduracy of the Jew compels the adjournment of the Second Coming. Jewish legalism, its servile adherence to the letter, highlights the contrasting Christian commitment to the spirit. At every salient point the Jew is the adversary in a binary dialectic organic to Christianity. Ecumenical touches after genocide, the papal invitation to understanding and conciliation cannot efface the fundamental charge: the Jew is the deicide, the God-killer on Golgotha. He embodies the progeny of Judas. Thus there is in his sufferings a certain logic of retribution. Where would Christian eschatology be without his adverse lastingness? Yet at the same time it is this lastingness which is intolerable.

  Might the spread of atheism, notably in the West, inhibit the rejection of the Jew? Rigorous atheism, the discarding of supernaturalism and transcendent hope, are probably rare. They demand a consequent asceticism and self-governance of consciousness. Customarily these shade into innumerable nuances of indifference, of fitful inattention or downright amnesia. They extend from polemic negation, itself dogmatic, to mundane apathy. The anti-Semitism of the atheist is, strictly considered, an absurdity. It lacks all serious logic or resistance to Mosaic encroachments. Its motivations can be those of social snobbery or of political and professional rivalry. This is the Marxist-Leninist construct. It can, as in fascism and Nazism, enlist the idiocies of racism. But it lacks any central logic, any true engagement with the unalterable status of the “chosen” Jew. It is at once visceral and irrelevant. Proust is the unrivaled taxonomist of this complex. Evidence suggests that diverse modes of atheism, of God-boredom, are spreading in the monetary technological fabric of the developed world. As Laplace foretold, the hypothesis of any deity or supreme being is unnecessary in the regime of the exact and the applied sciences. The criteria of the fact, the rules of evidence, now saturate our unexamined private and social proceedings. In a post-theological order anti-Semitism may wither to embarrassing vulgarity, it may fade to mere triviality. Exclusion from the golf club. This, in turn, would chime with the ebbing of defensive apartheid in the assimilated Jew.

  The instauration of the State of Israel, that sad miracle, has made it difficult, almost sophistic, to discriminate between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. These meld in the panoply of Islamic hatreds. Islam has no quarrel with the faith of Abraham. The causus belli is the Jewish incursion into the Middle East. What, short of the abolition of Israel, could assuage Arab fury? Once again the fate of a Jewish handful endangers peace at large. Armageddon is located in the Holy Land. Orthodox dwellers do not even acknowledge the nation because its secular foundation lacks messianic license. In the diaspora divisions and hypocrisies abound. Numerous enlightened Jews find the chauvinism, the militarism, the humiliation of Palestinians, all of which are said to be essential to Israel’s security, repellent. Jewish intellectuals are prominent in attempts to boycott Israel. Others are parlor Zionists publicly and financially supportive but wholly disinclined to settle in Eretz Israel. In turn, the gentile will use anti-Zionism to legitimize, to mask the traditional reflexes and venom of anti-Semitism. The fog of mendacities thickens when Christian fundamentalists such as American Southern Baptists see in Israel a necessary prelude to their own soteriology (it is in Zion that Jesus will again “reveal himself”). None of these strategies lo
oks to be open to rational rebuttal. The mythologies of odium are legion and nonnegotiable.

  Add to this the somber footnote of Jewish self-hatred. It obtrudes even on the serenity of Spinoza. The Jew projects on himself the contempt, the misprisions, of the gentile anti-Semite. It is only when he accepts this devaluation, preaches Karl Marx, it is only when he liquidates his heritage, that he will pass out of the nightmare of his condition and blend into normalcy. Pride and self-tormenting ironies alternate in Heine’s ambivalence, in the pirouettes in and out of Judaism of Karl Kraus. Echoing Hegel, Wittgenstein denies all Jewish creativity; at best, the Jew is a talented mime, a critic and commentator parasitic in the cultural and aesthetic realms. Biology dooms him to inherent “femininity,” according to Weininger. Even circumcision is suspect. Witness the tragicomic turnings and twistings of Philip Roth.

  Are we now approaching the (inadmissible) center?

  The existence of Judaism is inextricably inwoven with that of Mosaic monotheism. Whether in worship or denial, in exultation or despair, in trust or in repentance, the Jew defines himself to himself and to others in terms of his dialogue with or silence toward (Entgegen schweigen) God. This incessant exchange (also silence is exchange) is enshrined in Torah and the Talmud. These are the daily bread of Jewish consciousness, more significant, as many rabbis have insisted, than any ritual. Rescind the God-concept, also where it is agonistic, and the Jew is no longer intelligible. He recedes into the pantheon art gallery of dead creeds (those Aztec divinities). Sever the Jew from Sinai and he is no more. No sociological, no psychological investigation can quantify the spectrum of faith or disbelief, of agnosticism or episodic recall, in individual Jewish men and women. To how many, under what domestic or public circumstance, is the invocation of the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” more than automatism or inherited good manners? Impossible to say. Let monotheism decay, make nonsense rhymes of prayer, reduce the rubric of “God’s chosen” to an infantile disorder, and the Jew no longer posits a provocation and object of opprobrium. Would the long nightmare then be over? Is such a mutation conceivable? On the geological and zoological time scale, in regard to the evolution and extinction of species, the more than five millennia claimed by the Jewish calendar are not even the blink of an eye. The phenomenology of the dinosaur dwarfs that of Hebraic scripture. Is the credo of Abraham immune to evanescence?