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Henry Ebel:
Where and when I grew up, my German‑Jewish father and Polish-Jewish mother made no bones about it. They didn’t even have to read David Riesman on “other‑direction” to instruct me in the most basic social commandments:
I. Thou shalt have no consistent or coherent “self.” II. All values are entirely mutable, and dependent on social circumstance. III. The anxieties you feel from moment to moment with respect to public opinion are therefore the sole lords of existence. IV. Their mandates must be unswervingly obeyed. V. The resulting sense of paranoid persecution – caused by so rigorous a suppression of the personal feelings – shall be consistently attributed to a failure to observe the preceding IV commandments. VI. It is alright to murder, VII. it is alright to commit adultery, VIII. it is alright to steal, IX. it is alright to bear false witness, X. and it is alright above all to be in a state of drooling, hostile covetousness, provided only that these actions and sentiments occur within a social framework which implies approval.
The whole point and
purpose of life, therefore, was Getting Away With It, to which primary
joy my parents sang hymns of truly religious intensity.
Since public
opinion was all that really mattered, there was no such thing as a “sin.” Which
outlook coexisted with a lifestyle dominated by an overpowering sense of
personal culpability.
Now, it is my
personal conviction that my parents were extreme – or perhaps not‑so‑extreme –
variations on the theme called Being Jewish. By this I mean that the anti‑social
theories they preached within our four walls bore little relation to their
actual practices, but were more in the nature of assignments that they
were handing out to their children, whose life‑task it was to in some way avenge
their own humiliations.
Since the children
would be the inheritors of both anti‑social theory and rigidly conformist
practice, they in turn would be tempted to use their own children as symbolic
receptacles for the violent hostility it was flatly forbidden to act out.
And so on and so on
through the generations, till at last the burden of so much symbolism would be
too much to bear, and a theater would be found – if not on the banks of the
Rhine or the Hudson, then on the banks of the Jordan – where the material could
finally be acted out.
But the theme
called Being Jewish deserves some additional psychohistorical exploration, as
you will realize when you note that the mere proposal to explore it has already
set up in you a spasm of resistance.
Let me try to
explain why you are feeling this way.
Ever since
Greco‑Roman times, those who maintain the “Jewish” identity have been in a state
of negative symbiosis with respect to the larger number, who do not. The
intensity of this negative symbiosis could be guessed at simply from a dry
recital of the most elementary data concerning the resulting persecutions.
In a negative
social symbiosis of any kind, there are really only two roles available to the
participants: (1) for the majority, a periodic expression of feeling so
obviously unjust as to require, once the deed is done, a particular form of
psychopathic amnesia; and (2) for the minority, a continuous suppression
of feeling, which serves to intensify fantasies of revenge that are never
therapeutically ventilated.
Once these two
roles have been set going, they establish what amounts to a stable or an
escalating dynamic. The majority being haunted by the memory of their past
victims, they must – as a form of ex post facto justification – focus
intently on every hint which implies that the surviving members of the minority
are entertaining revenge fantasies.
They must do this,
that is, to the extent and in the ways permitted by their psychopathic amnesia;
and much of this detective work will therefore take place at semi‑conscious or
unconscious levels of reasoning. In turn, mental activities of this kind will
lay the groundwork for a renewed bout of persecution once the accumulated
examples of the minority’s hostility have begun to outweigh the guilt felt about
the previous onslaught. And since psychopathic amnesia is a way of avoiding
the confrontation with one’s guilt, persecution always tends to recur much
sooner than anyone would have believed possible.
The reason that you
feel such resistance to a discussion of this subject can therefore be broken
down into two major sub‑categories:
(1) If you are not
Jewish, then you are acutely sensitive to the amount of guilt that has magically
accumulated after more than 2000 years of such maniac onslaughts, none of them
commensurate with any antecedent legal offense.
(2) If you are
Jewish, you feel equally threatened by (a) the fact that an appropriate
vengeance for such a quantity of injustice could only be the destruction of the
entire planet, and (b) the awareness that anger at such levels of intensity,
even if it remains unexpressed, could conceivably get you killed.
*
There is, however,
yet another psychohistorical aspect to Being Jewish which can be said to subsume
all those I have already named. To make it clear, I must first call your
attention to the fact that most of our ethical thinking takes place under the
rubric of a category called Reparation, and that Reparation, in turn, is
deeply connected with the areas called Order, Logic, System, and Justice.
For example, there
is a perennial human tendency to interpret a disaster as having a good side to
it, and a complementary tendency to insist that an apparent stroke of luck
includes a number of serious disadvantages: too much of anything is
experienced by the human mind as a threat to an unspoken axiom having to do with
balance – what we might call a form of double‑entry bookkeeping applied
to the moral realm, which lays the emotional basis for systems of law,
with their long lists of specific counter‑balancing (reparatory) punishments.
This profound vein
of moral reasoning has been coded into a great number of human myths which
teach, essentially, that even the most horrifying disasters are blessings in
disguise, and that the human being who actively gloats in his triumph is
standing on the brink of disaster.
As in the most
admired of classical, Shakespearean, and modern tragedies, we sense that the
universe is struggling through the medium of the protagonists to achieve
homeostasis in which “just deserts” are dispensed to all concerned – the proud
put down, the agonized victim rewarded.
This deep urge for
homeostatic balance will be found in the Oedipus Colonus, the
Bacchae of Euripides, the Oresteia (which terminates in a veritable
orgy of compensations), King Lear, and in virtually all of the work of
Ibsen – as well, of course, as the parables of Jesus and the whole of the
Divine Comedy.
The centrality of
the idea of Reparation in human thinking implies that an apparent
contradiction of the idea, especially one maintained for long periods of
time, will be experienced as commensurately threatening. Indeed, it will be
experienced as inconceivable, and the human mind, willy‑nilly, will
invent a reparatory fantasy even if it flies in the face of logic.
This, essentially,
is what the human race has done with the phenomenon called Being Jewish. And the
core of the fantasy is summed up in the idea of “Jewish blood.”
For those who
despise its least presence within the human body, “Jewish blood” is a
quintessential deadly poison. For those who insist that it is an ennobling
elixir, “Jewish blood” is equally noteworthy, and its bearers equally deserving
of attention.
Thus, “Jewish
blood” will be seen to partake simultaneously of all‑bad and all‑good qualities,
requiring that it either be exterminated or lovingly preserved.
Such qualities of
“specialness” will be familiar to the historian of religion from the institution
called sacrifice. On the one hand, sacrifice always has an apotropaic
overtone, in which what is being done to the sacrificial object is being averted
from the person or persons who are destroying it: hence the common practice of
sacrificing either to avert or overcome a disaster, or to thank God for an act
of healing or personal salvation.
The sacrificial
object is thus a victim, receiving the bad luck that its sacrificers have
been spared. On the other hand, that which is sacrificed must have real value –
must be something loved and desirable. Hence the detailed specifications of
Leviticus, which seek to exclude the use for sacrificial purposes of
anything in the least blemished and hence symbolically devalued.
The sacrificial
object is therefore both extremely “bad,” as a vehicle for our sins, and
extremely “good,” as an object we are normally reluctant to part with. It is
typically parted with, therefore, in an ecstasy of renunciation; and
where this blissful mood is lacking, as in the sacrifice of Cain, one is likely
to suspect that the sacrifice has not been “accepted.”
It may be objected
at this point that the parallel between the periodic sacrifice of Jews and the
former sacrifices of animals and produce is an inaccurate one. The all‑good and
all‑bad qualities of the animal sacrifice are being felt simultaneously by the
single individual doing the sacrificing. On the other hand, the all‑bad
qualities of “Jewish blood” are being experienced by the murderous anti‑Semite,
while its all‑good qualities are those being stressed by Jews and philo‑Semitic
non‑Jews.
This objection
loses validity, however, once we inquire into the actual dynamics of
persecution. For example, all students of the Holocaust have marvelled over the
extent to which the Nazis were willing to override even the most pressing
military considerations in order to make certain that they destroyed every
bearer of “Jewish blood” they could put their hands on. However paradoxical it
may seem, “Jewish blood” was exceptionally precious to them; the value, the
meaning they attached to it, can be gauged from the herculean efforts they made
to destroy it. Its negative value to them mirrored the positive value it had and
has for those who see its bearers, through all the centuries, as recipients of a
unique divine purpose.
Just as the Nazis
saw a “curse” inside the “blessing,” so it is possible to detect, inside the
“blessing,” something very much like a “curse.” Jewish humor, for example, as
much as the humor of Goebbels, puts much of its emphasis on “Jewish blood” as
the inheritance one cannot shake, as in the many jokes about Jews who rise to
high position and either wittingly – as a revenge for having to “pass” – or
unwittingly – as a punishment for having aspired in the first place – betray
their Jewishness.
The common
denominator in these dialectical patterns lies in the tabooed specialness
of “Jewish blood,” which serves to bring the history of the shedding of that
blood within the sphere of Reparation. This in turn serves to assure both Jew
and non‑Jew that Order has not been exterminated along with the Jewish victims.
Some consequences
of being taboo
Diurnal good
breeding prevents most people from actually telling you to your face that the
drop of “Jewish blood” in your veins is quite possibly your passport to a
horrible death. But my mother and father had undergone circumstances which made
it rather obvious that the red ichor in Jewish arteries is a potent historical
beverage – that it carries inside itself an intense negative valence based on
the fact that it has so often been shed with complete impunity.
My parents were
convinced that everybody wanted them dead – a “paranoid” point of view that
seemed quite syntonic with the realities of 1939‑1945 – and the “double bind”
described in the opening paragraphs of this essay was the natural result.
Now we can begin to
overcome some of our initial anxieties and to ask ourselves what is meant, at
the deeper levels, by Being Jewish.
Being Jewish means
never to be too surprised when they take your beautiful children and
murder them before your eyes just to cause you the maximum amount of pain.
Everything else is
just the same as it always was. The blue sky is full of fleecy white clouds. The
village church smiles in the distance. And there, in a mess of blood, is all
that’s left of your pride and joy, whose executioners leer at your distress. Nor
do the nations of the world ever become quite “civilized” enough to stop
generating delegate‑groups willing to enact that scene on their behalf.
Now your anxieties
are very high again. That is because you have been told the truth.
Which truth my
parents understood, because they had been forced to understand it.
Which truth you
find unbearable, because you know mainly the world of documents and
photographs, neither of which can, by definition, tell us the most important
things, all of which exist in the realm of the underlying philosophy.
My parents’
philosophy was one of catastrophic pessimism. The future seemed unbearably
threatening, the past a long series of missed opportunities, while the horrid
present, in which alone disaster can occur, was effectively sealed off from
consciousness by obedience to the mandates of others – compulsive social and
theological rituals flung in despair at the juggernaut called Death, which had
no use for them.
My parents were
just having the normal reaction to finding themselves hanging head‑down from a
hook in the slaughterhouse, whose employees make hilarious jokes while they cut
your throat. An awareness that could be brought under partial control – to the
point at which it did not instantly drive you mad – by creating the State
of Israel, to whose prickly bosom one can, if necessary, flee. Where they
actually have laws saying that it is absolutely forbidden to kill Jews.
Why Israelis can’t
seem to stop
Now comes the
really hard part.
Being Jewish, and
therefore utterly tabooed by the blood in your uniquely precious/horrible veins,
is obviously the world’s worst historical trauma. It means that you are
indelibly related to the ethnic group which the world has selected out to
embody, in allegorical form, the principle of complete rejection.
It means that under
normal social circumstances, there is an awareness hanging in the air which
whispers with a demonic ambiguity: “Jewish, eh? Why, under only slightly altered
historical conditions, that would make you an emaciated, grinning corpse.”
And at the
unconscious level, where there are no “woulds” – where every hypothesis is
experienced as an emotional reality – that means that Being Jewish is Being
Dead. It means that Good Times are when all the others are temporarily on
vacation from the role of executioner.
The stable negative
symbiosis between Jews and non‑Jews can now be summarized in the following
terms: For non‑Jews, it amounts to a line of reasoning that says:
“Since you have
been treated horribly, you deserve it. Running through your veins there is an
essence of non‑being – of culpable inauthenticity – that makes your annihilation
appropriate. You are ‘there’ in a certain sense, yet not ‘there’ in terms
of the deeper harmonies that give things and events their existential propriety.
Therefore your disappearance leaves no ghosts behind to haunt us; there is no
curse upon us for simply taking, and adapting to our own purposes, the artifacts
left behind when you have gone your way.”
To which there is a
standard Jewish reply:
“The fact that you
are saying those things implies pretty clearly that you are haunted. What
you have done to us shows that your virtuous pretensions are fraudulent and that
you, as a matter of fact, have no historical ‘standing’ at all. Given the fact
that you have annihilated your own significance by not feeling confident about
it – by having to persecute those who refuse to accept it – it seems perfectly
plausible that it is we rather than you who are right about the things that
really matter.”
In other words,
the roles of “Jew” and “non‑Jew” represent ongoing crises of confidence
for each other. When one rises, the other will be seen to decline; when one of
them falters, the alternative will seem – in an almost magical way – to be
gaining confidence in itself.
*
It is impossible to
understand this remarkable mechanism, however, without returning to its origins
in the Synoptic Gospels, which are summed up by the notorious reply the mob
gives to Pilate, in the Gospel of Matthew, when Pilate is reluctant to crucify
Jesus: “His blood be on us and on our children.”
The Gospels are
structured in the form of a historical wager, centered on the
question of whether Jesus was what he claimed to be or a complete fraud. And
this world‑historical bet is given its pungency by the obvious latitude for
belief or disbelief implied by the circumstances of Christ’s resurrection.
As the very early
Gospel of Mark makes clear, there was no one about when Jesus ostensibly rose
from the grave; even the women who first enter the tomb, only to find him gone,
react not with joy or faith but with terror.
Moreover, the
Gospel of Mark originally ended on just this note of doubt and uncertainty – all
the passages that carry more positive messages were added at some later time.
Thus, the Gospels
themselves set the stage for the subsequent malignant dialogue between Jew and
non‑Jew, in which the very being of the former represents a challenge to the
being of the latter; and vice versa. One or the other must be right; one role or
the other, runs the fantasy they both share, must be the authentic one (which
should not preclude the possibility that they are both wrong).
Historically,
therefore, Jew and non‑Jew represent dynamic tasks for each other. Each
is eternally proving something to its antagonist. And both look forward to the
future time when the proof will be, so to speak, final – a messianic conclusion
that will represent a definitive revelation as to which of the two gamblers made
the right choice.
Until that future
final moment is reached, each of the two parties is condemned, in a basic sense,
to keep “pushing;” both feel the implied pressure, on even the circumstances of
everyday life, of the drama that has historically set the terms of their
existence.
Nor does this apply
only to those who have taken an activist stance in religious matters.
Unconsciously, all of us are aware of our ethnicities – and of their historical
implications – at every moment. And where those implications have to do with the
very meaning of history, we can legitimately be seen as living out our
lives inside them.
This omnipresent
consciousness helps to explain, among other things, why anti‑Semitic persecution
can be renewed after seeming to go into almost complete abeyance. Renewed
persecution inevitably coincides with a renewed search for meaning in history;
and this search is so chronically a part of the Western character – for Jews as
well as non‑Jews – that the resumption of the persecutory mode is truly
inevitable.
*
Though this may all
seem very abstract, its practical consequences can be traced out, in an
extremely revealing way, in recent history and even in our daily newspapers.
All those who have
studied the Nazi movement are aware – cannot help but be aware – of its
apocalyptic dynamic, its inability to stop.
Nazism was a
goal‑ridden and distinctly messianic political event, and Hitler’s
speeches and table‑talk are riddled with observations that imply, or say
explicitly, that he regards himself as the one who will carry out the mandates
contained in the Gospels and in the history of Christianity.
One should not
allow oneself to be misled, here, by the fact that the Nazis, obviously with
Hitler’s sanction, showed occasional hostility to the established Christian
churches. Hitler’s contempt for Christian practice lay in the fact that it was
not Christian enough. He himself, from his own point of view, was the
only one to take seriously the idea of an apocalyptic conflict that could only
end with the establishment of a messianic kingdom, which in turn could only be
accomplished following the elimination of those whose very being suggested that
such a goal, under Christian auspices, was meaningless.
Hitler saw himself,
in other words, as both a servant and a reincarnation of Christ, as can
be seen by comparing Christ’s statement that “my words will never pass away”
with Hitler’s famous “Jeder meiner Wörter sind historisch.”
The defeat of the
Third Reich – given the extent to which much of the world shared in Hitler’s
fantasies – was therefore perceived as a defeat for a particular kind of
Christian meaning. Hitler had drawn so heavily on Christian theological
concepts that his downfall seemed to carry Christianity along with it. And
between 1945 and 1948, the world as a whole underwent a remarkable transition.
In 1944, an opinion
survey taken in the United States found that Americans regarded Jews as far more
of a threat to America than either the Germans or the Japanese, with whom they
only happened to be at war. In that year, too, the destruction of the Jews of
Hungary served to illustrate the extent to which the Allied powers approved of
Hitler’s anti‑Semitic program.
Only a few years
after Hitler’s defeat, however, there took place – with varying degrees of
cooperation from the Soviet Union, the United States, and the European powers –
the creation of the State of Israel. Underlying all the so‑called “political”
determinants of that event was an abrupt flow of sympathy with its historical,
messianic overtones – a counter‑messianism, in effect, that represented the
dialectical alternative to that which had gone temporarily bankrupt under
Hitler. For the first time since the Christianization of the Roman Empire, much
of the world seemed willing to place its bets on the Jewish side of the gambling
table.
As this implies,
the historical drama that has so obsessed the Western mind is far from over, for
it can end only with history itself. The fashionable anti‑Zionism of the late
60’s and early 70’s was already a sign that the failure of Zionist messianism
had inaugurated a new swing of the historical pendulum. Israel had turned out to
be “just another country,” and was therefore perceived – in the collective
fantasy – as having experienced a bankruptcy comparable to Hitler’s: hence the
gleeful New Left equation between Zionism and Nazism, whose emotional core
eluded those who so apopleptically denounced it.
At the magical
level that dominates our thinking – for which most of our rationality is a
compensation – power was flowing away from Being Jewish and back to the
alternative mode with which Being Jewish is incompatible. Reverend Moon was now
able to restate the claim that Jews carried a unique collective guilt for
having failed to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, and the claim did not prevent
him from making a substantial number of Jewish converts.
In Israel, in the
50’s and 60’s, an anti‑Zionist note was fashionable, and caused a good deal of
concern among the nation’s leaders. Younger Israelis did not want to hear about
the sufferings of the Jews and their own role as a dynamic compensation for it;
some of their comments to this effect even carried anti‑Semitic overtones.
In the late 60’s
and early 70’s, just as the Western nations began to withdraw from their
previous investment in Zionist messianism, this situation began to change.
Radical religious groups like the Gush Emunim appeared, laying claim to all the
territories settled by the Hebrews following the Exodus from Egypt. Regarded
initially as “kooks,” these groups achieved real political power following the
election of Menachem Begin. It seems doubtful that their settlement efforts on
the West Bank of the Jordan could be undone, even if Begin’s political opponents
return to power.
Zionism is back, in
other words, and in a form that carries sharper and more aggressive connotations
than the older variety. The messianic “failure” represented by the normalization
of the Israeli state has proven as much of a challenge to Jews as to non‑Jews.
The latter have reacted by a psychological withdrawal of their original
ideological investment; the former by reinventing Zionism in a form that
looks back to the original conquest of Canaan under Joshua.
As non‑Jews swing
away from the philo‑Semitic position that was popular in the 50’s and early
60’s, they hive off “sects” and “cults” like the Unification Church of Reverend
Moon, which suggest – once again – that Jews are culpable for having failed to
place their bet on the correct side of the table, and for continually suggesting
– by their very being – that others should join them in a wager directed against
the authenticity of Jesus.
No longer willing
to meet the New Testament on its own chronological ground, Jews reach back 1500
years further to the period when their own historical identity was first formed,
to the dramatic conflict in the course of which they imposed their will on the
various Canaanite groups – recast, now, as Arabs.
But nationalistic
reassertion of this kind is unlikely to gain the support of other nations. At
the same time, the character of the historical dialogue between the two parties
to the original wager has been such as to preclude the possibility of rational
discussion in a neutral middle‑ground. The “statements” by either side, whether
they take verbal or non‑verbal form, are typically overdetermined or are
experienced as overdetermined by those on the other side.
From the point of
view of those actually occupying various sites on the West Bank, criticism is
perceived as theological rather than political in its implications, as coming
from the world of satanic anti-Semitism, whose roots lie deep in Christianity
and in the Christian vision of Jews as inauthentic negations of God’s purpose.
From the point of
view of a growing number of people in the Western nations, the Israelis
squatting on the rocky hilltops of the West Bank, and commuting each day to
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, are bizarre and desperate people with whom empathy is
impossible – and whose tacit support by their government and their foreign
co‑religionists is opening the door to the archaic scenario of hatred and
persecution.
The result is a
steady “upping of the ante” by the Israelis, and an equally steady diminution of
the resistance to anti‑Semitism formed by many non‑Jews in the years following
1945.
The bet is still
on. Being Jewish is as dangerous a sport as ever.
"Being Jewish" was
originally published in the Journal of Psychohistor
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