In the Spring issue of Azure magazine, there is a translation of a fascinating and thought provoking article from 2005 by A. B. Yehoshua titled An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism:
Editor’s note:
The following essay was originally published in the Hebrew journal Alpayim in 2005 and provoked an intense public debate. Its author, the renowned Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, undertook a demanding task: to decipher the most disturbing riddle of Jewish history, to analyze and describe the quintessence of antisemitism in its various historical and cultural incarnations. Yehoshua’s thesis disputes the general intellectual consensus on antisemitism, which denies that there is any single or unique root to the phenomenon. He asserts that it is the unique structure of Jewish identity which has given birth to the venomous reaction of antisemitism-and he offers a way out of this impasse. Yehoshua’s position has outraged many but also given them much to think about, AZURE is proud to present an English translation of this essay, which embodies Zionist thought in its most daring form.
The link was sent to me by Siggy, who shares my interest in understanding the psychopathology of anti-Semitism. Yehoshua's thesis is remarkable and fits well into the psychoanalytic understanding of paranoia, of which anti-Semitism is a subset. However, I suspect my reaction to the article will surprise Siggy, who is an expatriate Brit becoming more American by the day.
First, some explication of Yehoshua's article is in order. He starts from the position of exploring what it means to be a Jew and has a rather unusual take on the subject. Where most national and/or religious identities depend on shared language, ethnic/genetic origins, or geographic propinquity, Jews only in a very attenuated way share these traits. It is true that Ashkenazi (of Eastern European provenance) Jews share certain genetic traits, yet Sephardic Jews (with their genetic roots in the Middle East) are no less Jewish. Further, although there are significant hurdles to conversion, a Jewish convert who identifies as a Jew is considered no less a Jew than one born to the faith.
(It is also true that among some ultra-Orthodox Jews there is reluctance to accept Conservative or Reform conversions; this is currently a major issue being worked out in Israel. Of note, Israel is a Jewish state and the Orthodox Rabbinate runs the religious affairs, while at the same time the people insist on a secular political state. In this confrontation the ultra-Orthodox are likely to lose, even if they prevail in the short term.)
Ultimately, Yehoshua concludes that the quintessence of Jewish identity is a protean amalgam with indistinct borders. He quotes Sigmund Freud, a secular Jew who derided religion as superstition, but felt bound to the Jewish people nonetheless:
What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride…. But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction to Jewry and Jews irresistible-many obscure emotional forces [which] were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction.
Yehoshua correctly notes that the idea of a "common mental construction" is extremely powerful yet impossible to confine:
Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, states that the sense of identity and unity of every national community is also the product of spirit and imagination. But there is a vast quantitative and qualitative difference between the imaginative and mental effort the Jew must invest in order to build and maintain identity and the parallel effort among other nations. The Italian, Thai, or Finn, for example, does not require feats of imagination to fashion his identity; for that purpose, he draws on elements from his real environment. Territory, landscape, climate, historical sites with clear memories, a common language with all its cultural associations, and, of course, human interrelationships in the obligatory frameworks of ruling institutions, enable these other nations to maintain their identity simply and easily. The need for speculative, imaginative qualities is limited by the concrete components of reality. The Jew can imagine his country as a "land of milk and honey," since, for him, it has not been real for many generations; whereas the Saudi, for example, cannot do so, because he lives surrounded by desert. The Jew can entertain fantasies about his scattered people because he is unlikely to meet many of them, while for the people of other nations, imagination is curtailed by the actuality of their tangible human environment.
As a result, the Jew can easily change not only his place and his national context, language, and behavior, but also his national ideas and opinions. The structure of his identity does not depend on permanent, external elements (territory, language, and frameworks of communal life), but rather on the internal workings of identity, which transfer different elements from place to place and exchange them for others while willfully preserving some hidden "essence."
Because of the relatively inchoate nature of the "common mental construct", Jewishness becomes a creation of the imagination; perhaps that is one reason Jews are forever fascinated by identity.
Ultimately, a Jew’s identity is entirely in his own hands, to be annulled or revived by him (except during the Holocaust, and even then only part of the Jewish people was affected). By converting to one of the major religions which surround him, such as Islam or Christianity, which are not only accessible but also eager to embrace him, he can with relative ease cancel his Jewish identity without having to uproot himself or change his language and lifestyle. For members of other nations such a change is either impossible or subject to great difficulties. Throughout centuries of exile, many Jews were easily absorbed, changing their identity either by conversion or, like today, simply by assimilating. The number of Jews in the Second Temple period is estimated at four to five million, whereas at the beginning of the eighteenth century they numbered only one million, indicating the massive assimilation that continues until today. However, even after the Jew seemingly revoked his identity, he kept it in an "inner box," enabling him to return to it at will, sometimes with less difficulty than he had experienced in giving it up. Thus, the gentile is faced with something amorphous that possesses astonishing potential for change over the widest range of possibilities. The disappearance of the Jew is never final, and his presence is never certain.
Here is where Yehoshua introduces the element that makes Jewish identity so well suited for incorporation into the paranoia of the insecure poorly defended incipient anti-Semite:
This flexible virtual element that surrounds a very tough and very compacted nucleus of religion and nationhood makes it possible to spread the wings of Jewish identity to remote and unidentified boundaries. These wings of identity can be stretched very thin, enabling them at times to easily infiltrate the identities of other nations, who sometimes cannot determine what has entered them and certainly cannot be sure of their ability to digest it effectively; for these penetrative elements bear an unclear connection (is it religious? national? a mindset? an implicit principle?) to other Jewish elements that exist far beyond their borders.
We now come to the crucial point: The non-Jew’s ability to connect with the imagination and virtual capability of the Jew living alongside him. In his imagination, the non-Jew can tap into the mechanism of the Jew’s unidentified elements with relative ease and project his fantasies, fears, and wishes onto them--for better or, mainly, for worse. If the non-Jew also happens to have a weak and disturbed sense of identity, and perceives a real or imagined threat to it from that vague element alongside him and within him, he might be provoked to acts of madness and frenzy. The Jew becomes a text full of huge gaps that invites different readings with many nuances, all in keeping with the reader’s inner needs.
I do not know if Hitler actually uttered the shocking statement attributed to him: "We have to kill the Jew within us." This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit. As mentioned, this perception has prevailed ever since the beginning of the Babylonian Exile, when the Jews began the imaginary "transfer" of national elements to a bed of religious or other elements and back again, over generations. Therefore, when the antisemite--because of his own identity problems--becomes obsessed with the murderous idea that something has infiltrated him, he begins a saga of hatred that climaxes in rounding up the Jews, marking them with an actual physical sign (a tattooed number on a Jewish arm is a diabolic continuation of the yellow patch of medieval times), and then annihilation by gas.
The concept of "ego boundaries" is important for understanding paranoia. The infant's sense of him self as a separate individual from his mother involves a very long process of separation and individuation in which the infant moves from an amorphous infant-mother system in which the mother is experienced as an extension or part of the self, to a position where the mother is understood to be a separate person with her own mind and desires. The greatest part of the work of separation takes place int he first 18-24 mouths of life. Though many speak of the "terrible twos" as a particularly difficult period, in fact it is when the child first says "NO!" that we know they have begun to become a person. They have declared that their minds are independent of ours, they have their own desires, and though they may wish to please us, they more forcefully wish to please themselves. It is a wonderful time in which those of us lucky enough to take part watch a new individual come into being. It is the beginning of well established distinctions between the self and others. The ego has established its boundaries. We know what we feel and experience and can differentiate it from what others feel or experience.
[Margaret Mahler wrote extensively in the area of separation-individuation and I refer to her work in Intellectualization, Free Speech, & Unintended Consequences: Part I and provide some links. The section on Mahler's work is midway through the post.]
There are several points along the way from the symbiotic mother-child dyad to a fully formed, separate and mature young person, where development can go awry. Further, difficulties later in life can engender a regression which reactivates earlier conflicts and developmental hitches. When a person has had difficulties in the separation-individuation process and has less secure boundaries between himself and others, we speak of ego boundary deficits. It is seen most clearly with overtly paranoid patients who often believe others can read their minds. In more profound cases, they believe that others can insert thoughts into their minds. At the same time, unacceptable wishes, impulses, and fantasies must be rejected and are projected onto others. A classic case involves an insecure young man who has unacceptable homosexual impulses. His ego rejects such impulses (unconsciously), projects the impulses, and then re-experiences them as coming from someone else. "I am not gay. That man wants to have sex with me so I had better defend myself." This is one of the dynamics that underlies attacks on gay men and women and can exist in people who are not overtly psychotic or paranoid.
As described by Yehoshua, the kind of permeable identity that is characteristic of the Jew is particularly well suited to evoke anxiety in those less secure in their identity. To the anti-Semite, then, the Jew is powerful and devalued and always threatening to invade his mind and take him over. What else is the anti-Semitic fantasy of the Jew who controls the media and the banks and the government? It is a fantasy of secret invasion, of infiltration and penetration and control.
Yehoshua's essay is worth reading in full as he further explicates these ideas. I think his thesis has some explanatory power, though it is certainly incomplete and cannot negate or supersede many of the other points that have been raised over the years. However, along with my appreciation of his thesis, the thought occurred to me that it could also explain some significant current aspects of anti-Americanism, and I will address that topic in Part II of this discussion.
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