Father Frank's Rants - La Question Juive

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 315 11 August 2008

‘La Question Juive’

Reflexions sur la Question Juive. A pamphlet by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In a Kensington’s nice Oxfam shop, I chanced upon it. And quickly bought it. Weird title! Today only an anti-Semite would whisper of a ‘Jewish question’. But Sartre’s aims were the reverse. He wrote in favour of the Jews. And against anti-Semites. Unfortunately, his very argument smacks of anti-Semitism. J’accuse his flawed existentialist creed.

Black writer Richard Wright asserted that there was no black problem in the US, ‘only a white problem’. Similarly, Sartre affirmed that there was no Jewish problem in France, only a problem of anti-Semitism. ‘It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew…what have we made the Jews into?’

Anti-Semitism, in the sense of bigoted hatred of our innocent brothers in humanity, is abominable. That said, Sartre’s logic is bizarre. Does the anti-fascist make the fascist? The anti-communist the communist? Or even the Islamophobe the Muslim? Sure, one can set up Aunt Sallies. Travesty any group or ideology to whip up prejudice but that still does not in itself constitute their identity. Nor their definition.

Jean-Paul invokes Manichaeism. A religion in which two opposed, rival gods fight it out. Light against Darkness. Good versus evil. Anti-Semitism is like that, he affirms. It divides the world into two separate camps. Alas, Manichaeism is a perennial human tendency. Didn’t President Reagan call the old, clapped-out Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’? (Still, it was pretty bad, let us face it.) Bush Jr. also termed Iran, Syria and North Korea ‘an axis of evil’. Same language gets used today for the unseen, ubiquitous child-snatchers in our midst. Yet, good is not the creator or maker of evil. Ahriman, the evil god of Zoroastrianism, would vehemently deny that it was Ormuzd, the god of goodness, who constituted his being. And he’d be right. Why shouldn’t evil have his own, perverse integrity? I’d sympathise with Ahriman on that.

Gentile liberals too displease our philosopher. Such as democrats who advocate the same rights for all and who protest that there is no Jewish question. But they are still hostile to the Jew the extent that he ‘thinks of himself as a Jew’. Because liberals want Jews to assimilate, to lose their Jewishness. They reproach a Jewish person for merely considering himself a Jew, Sartre says. The democrat might explode: ‘Professor, what a caricature! Who are you making me into?’ He might also cite C.M. Doughty, the brilliant author of Arabia Deserta, answering an Arab who’d asked what the British thought of Jews: ‘We inquire not of a man’s religion, providing he is a good citizen.’ Sartre would pooh-pooh that, I figure. Interestingly, Doughty’s answer perfectly mirrors the Enlightenment’s take on religion: vis-à-vis the state, a private affair. Lenin held the same view. The Arab could well have wondered how one could possibly regard religion irrelevant to people’s life in Dar al Islam. I’d sympathise with him too.

Sartre’s argument hinges on the key existentialist notion of authenticity. For the Jew to be authentic is to live fully his condition as a Jew. Inauthentic is to deny it or to attempt to escape from it. ‘Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as a Jew – that is, in realising one’s Jewish condition…the inauthentic Jew flees Jewish reality…to be a Jew is to be thrown into the situation of a Jew…he cannot choose not to be a Jew.’ Amazing anti-Semitic language! Because it implies a kind of innate difference between Jew and non-Jew. As Sartre cared not a jot about religion, Jewish and Christian alike, the putative difference in question can only be behavioural. In fact, the behavioural differences between Jews and non-Jews are minimal. Even compared with what distinguishes, say, Japanese and British, they are insignificant. What could then count as authentically ‘realising one’s Jewish condition?’

Ronald Hayman, a biographer of Sartre, has pointed out an irony here. When Sartre was old, one of his closest disciples was Benny Levy, a fanatical Maoist. Later, Levy gave up Marxism, went to live in a Yeshivah and embraced Orthodox Judaism. Presumably he chose to be ‘authentic’. To live genuinely his condition as Jew. Well, why not? President Sarkozy is currently rumoured to be intending to return to his Jewish roots. Fair enough. If Blair quits Anglicanism for Catholicism, England’s ancient faith, why can’t Levy or Sarkozy embrace Judaism? Conclusions a progressive thinker like Sartre would no doubt baulk at. Revealed religion he abominated as much as anti-Semitism. He’d hardly approve of today’s resurgent fundamentalism. But, given his reliance of such vague and muddy category as authenticity, how could he object? Years ago a Turkish Islamist blew up several innocent people in Istanbul. It turned out he was an avid reader of Sartre. He too desired to be ‘authentic’, I suppose.

La Question Juive, written in 1944, strangely skips over the burning question of Zionism. Its author later struggled to keep a foot in both camps. To be fair to Israelis and Arabs alike. Aren’t they both Semites? But here the philosopher was too timid, even cowardly. He should have nailed his colours to the mast. He had extolled the raging revolutionary violence plugged by Franz Fanon in that savage anti-colonialist polemic, The Damned of the Earth. Palestinians were dismayed when he refused to apply the same logic to their plight. So both Semitic tribes got let down by the great philosemite.

The priest repudiates any talk of a ‘Jewish question’. Maybe the Church should declare anti-Semitism a heresy. This is not to deny the paradox powerfully highlighted by St Paul in his Letter to the Romans, chapters 9 to 11. The Apostle, of proud Hebrew stock, a Pharisee from the tribe of Benjamin, asks why Israel rejects, and the Gentiles accept the Gospel of Israel’s Messiah. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel at the Jabbok ford, St Paul struggles with that mystery. ‘All Israel will be saved’, he prophesies and sings out: ‘Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!’

Amen to that.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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