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On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred
By Paul Reitter PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-4188-2
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE
Genealogical Imperatives
The best author will be the one who is ashamed of being a writer.
— FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
In the spring of 1931, Theodor Lessing set off from his home in Hanover to take his first and, as it would turn out, his only trip to the Middle East. The journey had been a long time in coming. A feminist, a socialist, and an anti-noise and anti-imperialism activist who earned his living mainly as a kind of philosophical feuilletonist, Lessing was, as well, a Zionist, and at the age of fifty-nine, he had been one for more than thirty years. To his delight, Lessing learned in Jerusalem that his work had preceded him there. A letter to his wife excitedly conveys the news: "Not far from the Wailing Wall, a Jew recognized me and addressed me by my name. He had just bought my 'Jewish self-hatred book' — all the bookstores in the city have it."
If Lessing was glad to see his latest monograph being sold in Jerusalem, he hardly seemed surprised, and why should he have been? After all, Jewish Self-Hatred was an undertaking that important Zionists had backed. Siegmund Kaznelson, the director of the Jüdischer Verlag (or Jewish Press), had made Lessing's study part of the press's new "Zionist book league" series. Robert Weltsch, a leader of the Zionist movement in Germany, had encouraged Kaznelson in this. Not that he had needed nudging: both men, and especially Kaznelson, thought that Jewish Self-Hatred would serve the Zionist cause extraordinarily well. Upon reading selections, Kaznelson spoke of the book as being a "Zionist propaganda coup," and of how it would be "sensational in the extreme." He predicted, moreover, that Lessing's work would "in its effects far surpass" whatever else he might opt to include in the "Zionist book league" venture.
To say that he was right isn't saying much, since infighting at the press soon killed the series. But Kaznelson and Weltsch also came close to the mark about the impact of Lessing's volume. If the book failed to create a sensation, it succeeded in causing a stir, quickly popularizing the catchy young term in its title: a product of the early interwar years, the concept "Jewish self- hatred" wasn't yet a decade old. Furthermore, with its mix of pathos-laden homily, colorful theory, and concise biography, Lessing's text won over a parade of Zionist readers. Writing in Self-Defense in 1930, Felix Weltsch, a cousin of Robert, gave this gushing appraisal: "The well-known philosopher" has "brought forth a deep-reaching psychology of the Jewish spirit," which "shows us how to find the way that leads out of negation and decline, and to healing and freedom." Kafka's friend Max Brod, whom Lessing had propitiated for years, would take the opportunity to flatter Lessing back, hailing Jewish Self-Hatred as a work of "genius." According to an anonymous reviewer for The Voice, another Zionist newspaper, Lessing deftly illuminated the "tragedy of the Jew who tries to flee from himself and his Jewishness." In the Jüdische Rundschau, perhaps the most respected organ of German Zionism, an unnamed author enthused over the "liberating force" of Lessing's words, as well as their ability to open up "new perspectives on a great Jewish future." Meanwhile, a less mainstream Zionist publication thanked Lessing for revealing — "with uncommon acumen" — the "deep psychic abyss that is Jewish self-hatred."
Anti-Zionists, on the other hand, tended to be harsh in their assessments, though they weren't the only ones to express scorn. Freud famously disliked Lessing's book, in which psychoanalysis figures as a consequence of Jewish self-hatred, but he stated his disdain curtly and informally. It was the newspaper of the integration-minded Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith that felt compelled to carry out a thorough public reckoning. Its upshot wasn't so much that Jewish self-hatred didn't exist or warrant scrutiny, as that with their antirationalist bent, Lessing's ideas about Jews and Judaism were misguided to the point of making little sense. Lessing had hardly gone out of his way to head off such doubts. To the contrary, quite a few passages in Jewish Self-Hatred read like attempts to speak the effusive language of Jewish renewal that Gershom Scholem dubbed "Buberdeutsch," after the Zionist philosopher Martin Buber (and his rhetorical excesses). Lessing's book proclaims, for example, that Jewish self-hatred won't abate until there are Jews who spend their time "praying before the trees and the clouds." Summing up his or her objections, the reviewer for the Central Association's newspaper dismisses such lines as absurdities. They have, according to the reviewer, nothing to offer the Jewish Geist, which should spend its time immersed in nothing other than Geist.
In an essay published in Morning, a magazine with ties to the Central Association, the Leipzig-based rabbi Felix Goldmann strikes a more respectful tone, stressing at the outset that Lessing's writings haven't received as much praise as they deserve. Goldmann also gives Lessing credit for drawing attention to the blight of Jewish self-hatred, whose toll of torment, he maintains, hasn't been emphasized enough. But in the end, Goldmann develops a sharp critique of Lessing's text. It seemed to him that if Lessing's focus was well founded, the execution of his analysis had gone badly awry. Lessing had done nothing less, in fact, than lose sight of one of his own suggestions about what the concept "Jewish self-hatred" should be taken to mean. For while all of them were troubled, the six assimilated intellectuals whom Lessing offers as his case studies didn't all display, as Goldmann puts it, "the hatred the renegade harbors for the community he's turned his back on." Hence the verdict: "Lessing's examples don't support his theory."
When we set up this reception as I have just done, namely, as a series of Zionist and anti-Zionist responses to an ardent, officially sanctioned Zionist work, outfitted with a fresh label for what its author treats as the given of Western Jewry's malaise, then the reception unfolds as we might expect it to. But if I had begun with an overview of more recent accounts of Lessing's book, and proceeded from there to survey the early debate about it, the tenor and the dimensions of the debate would be less self-evident. Indeed, they would likely come as a surprise. This isn't simply because over the past half-century Lessing's readers have been scholars, who have, naturally enough, transformed the meaning of his study by bringing to it their own questions, concepts, and interpretive strategies. Here the gap between early and later understandings also has to do with a tendency to misrepresent both the historical place of Lessing's signature usage and its explicit content, and the gap is therefore a problem, a problem that stems from a larger one. Despite our interest in how the notion "Jewish self-hatred" was born, we still don't have a persuasive genealogy of the term.
II
Why is that so? To begin with, "Jewish self-hatred" has a way of calling forth the kinds of polemical measures its critics decry, and this cycle has skewed inquiries into its past. Take the case of Allan Janik, the co-author of the widely read, well-received book Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973). Put off by how his fellow historians of ideas had worked with "Jewish self-hatred," Janik undertook to show "how thoroughly" the concept has been "tinged" with essentialism from the start, and how it has, as a result, led to bad exegesis. Certainly Janik had grounds for suspicion when he wrote the essay "Viennese Culture and the Jewish-Self-Hatred Hypothesis" (1987). Among contemporary scholars, Janik charged no less a personage than Peter Gay with misusing the category "Jewish self-hatred," and he did so with some justification.
Gay, to be sure, had framed the issue of Jewish self-contempt in a variety of ways. He had suggested that even the most vicious Jewish self-skewering could be well intentioned. What sometimes drove it, according to Gay, was less an urge to make other Jews suffer than the sense that if other Jews would just shape up, antisemites would have nothing to inveigh against, or be violent about — self-hatred as tough love, however misguided. Echoing W.E.B. Dubois and Isaiah Berlin, Gay had also put forth the point that self-directed bigotry among minorities is a natural, hard-to-avoid phenomenon, if not a desirable one. In Freud, Jews, and Other Germans (1978), Gay observes, "For like all minorities, Jews too incorporated at least some of the prejudices and stereotypes of the dominant majority around them." As if that sounded too vague and too abstract, Gay goes for concreteness and immediacy in his next sentence. He asks, "What Jew has not cringed at what he regards as the ostentatious behavior — loud voices, sharp clothing, flashing jewelry, sported by those who 'look Jewish' in a theatre lobby, a restaurant, a bus?" In addition to these normalizing sketches, Gay draws a thorough and far from unsympathetic portrait of his chief instance of Jewish self-hatred, the conductor Hermann Levi, who didn't so much feel ashamed of his fellow Jews, as subject himself to painful antisemitic razzing from Richard Wagner and his circle.
But where he makes an example of Gay, Janik focuses on Gay's handling of a different historical actor: the fin-siècle philosopher Otto Weininger. As he introduces Levi's outlook, Gay, in effect, dismisses Weininger's brief life and occasionally bizarre thought as cautionary tales that do little more than illustrate the "terrifying power of Selbsthaß." And while Gay himself is otherwise fairer, this move isn't a lonely aberration. Elsewhere, too, the concept "Jewish self-hatred" appears to have abetted in academic writing a not-so-scholarly rushing to judgment, with the judged most often being early twentieth-century German Jews whose rhetoric seems to mirror the antisemitic discourses of their day. Consider Jacques Le Rider's response to the Viennese firebrand Karl Kraus. Or more specifically, consider how in 1987, Le Rider, a leading theorist of Viennese modernism, dealt with a provocatively worded, yet also densely paradoxical essay by Kraus. In Le Rider's brusque determination, Kraus's "Heine and the Consequences" (1910) "can only really be understood as yet another symptom of jüdischer Selbsthaß."
Thus Janik had a point when he told scholars to apply the notion "Jewish self-hatred" more circumspectly, or not at all. He also had one when he reminded readers that Sex and Character (1903), which young Weininger finished just before he shot himself, and which would become the world's bestselling revised Ph.D. thesis, has more complexity than its often-cited low moments imply. Pronouncements like "there has never been a noble man of Jewish blood" and "women at least have faith in men, the Jew believes in nothing" are, as Janik stressed, largely confined to a single chapter in Weininger's book. But what finally matters for us is Janik's historical argument, and where Janik sets about trying to make it stick, he himself operates all too hastily. Beyond wrongly stating that Lessing "coined" the term "Jewish self-hatred," Janik hangs his whole theory of Lessing's fateful essentialism on an anachronistic interpretation of a misquotation.
Having repeatedly called Lessing's understanding of Jewish self-hatred "racist," and even characterized it as being "based upon a racism which is just as crude as anything the most vulgar Nazi ideologues might have asserted," Janik marshals a single line of text in support of his claims. The line reads, "Weininger hated his blood, and his blood was Jewish blood." Yet contrary to what Janik assumes, it was possible in Lessing's day to speak of "Jewish blood" without advancing Nazi-style racism. In the mouth of a Nazi, the phrase might have sent a chill down the spine. More often, however, "Jewish blood" still had "Jewish descent" as its primary meaning, as it did for, say, Walter Benjamin in 1931. Furthermore, if Lessing was unusually provocative in ascribing a biological component to Jewish identity — he insisted that Jews are more "Aryan" than Germans — he was also uncommonly direct in challenging the extreme biological determinism of the Nazis, who had him murdered in 1933. And in the end, Lessing saw Jewishness as a distinctive constellation of attributes that shared values and experiences had produced, for the most part. So when, in Jewish Self-Hatred, Lessing repudiates "racist antisemitism" only to mention "Jewish blood," he isn't necessarily contradicting himself.
Beyond all that, Lessing didn't actually write, "Weininger hated his blood." His phrasing, rather, is "Weininger hated blood," and the addition of the word "his" is no insignificant error. Transforming "hated blood" into "hated his blood" distorts Lessing's message, all the more so because of what Janik does with the change. Indeed, Janik leans on precisely the recast wording in emphasizing how much Lessing's conception of Jewish self-hatred relies on "racism." The idea is that, for Lessing, the term "Jewish self-hatred" signifies "the hatred of Jewish blood by a person of Jewish blood." But by the remark that gets lost, Lessing is proposing something very different. When he wants Jews to pray before the trees and the clouds, Lessing is making the case that Jews have become unhealthily estranged from, and hostile to, the messy, bloody world outside their mental abstractions; and he is doing likewise when he notes (or imagines) that Weininger "hated blood." Issues such as this one make up the thematic nub of Lessing's book, much more than Weininger's disparagement of Jews and Judaism does. It was these preoccupations that frustrated Goldmann, the rabbi in Leipzig. He opened Lessing's study hoping to gain insight into the psychology of "renegade" Jews who detest their own heritage, and he felt let down when Lessing failed to oblige him.
What proposition in intellectual history could be more damning than the claim: this concept rests on racism as bad as that of the least-refined Nazis? Yet Janik's standing as the most draconian critic of the concept "Jewish self-hatred" didn't last long. His genealogy is, in fact, quite a bit milder than some of its more recent counterparts. So it appears that "Jewish self-hatred" has become an even stronger magnet for invective. The main reason for this development is hard to miss. As Arab-Israeli relations have worsened over the past decade, the term "Jewish self-hatred" has been thrust back into prominence. "Back," because during the "American-Jewish Cold War" of the 1950s and 1960s, "Jewish self-hatred" served as a popular cudgel in exchanges about the boundaries of acceptable Jewish self-representation and self-criticism. Only those debates often turned on literature. Philip Roth's work, for example, played a key part in them. Today, "Jewish self-hatred" tends to be used in the political sector of the public sphere, and like so much of what is said there, it has gone viral.
Since 2000, the website http.masada2000.org has kept a list of "self-hating Israeli traitors," which includes politically moderate American Jews who believe that Israel is, to some degree, responsible for the severity of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The tag "Jewish self-hatred" figures centrally, moreover, in David Mamet's book The Wicked Son (2005); under that rubric, Mamet anathematizes (mostly unnamed) Jews "whose denunciations of Israel," in his opinion, "rise to the realm of race treason." In this general context, Rush Limbaugh, too, deployed the label "self-hating Jew," though he had a more specific target — George Soros. The same goes for Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister himself, whose objects of opprobrium in 2009 were Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod.
Thus a number of Jewish public figures and intellectuals have felt pressed, during the past decade, to rebut the charge that their criticisms of Israel stem from a self-destructive self-loathing. In a 2007 issue of the British newspaper The Guardian, for instance, Jacqueline Rose denies that Jewish self-hatred is what has prompted her to scrutinize and speak out against various aspects of Israel's political culture. But Rose did more than defend herself; she also went on the attack, campaigning against the "myth of Jewish self-hatred." The late historian Tony Judt did likewise. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Judt used that forum to call for a binational Israeli state, as well as to condemn Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens. And 2007 saw him censure his censurers, some of whom had tried to link his positions on Israel to Jewish self-hatred and "inner" antisemitism. Judt warned that when Jews (and non-Jews) who stay within the parameters of reasonable debate are made out to be antisemites, concepts on which many people rely lose their value. The risk, he admonished, is that every "reference to anti-Semitism" will come across as another "political defense of Israeli policy."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred by Paul Reitter. Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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