Portrait of the Antisemite
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
I
F .A MAN
attributes all or part of his own or the country's misfortunes
to the presence of Jewish elements in the French community, if he
proposes remedying this state of affairs by depriving the Jews of some
of their rights or by expelling or exterminating them, he is then said
to hold antisemitic
opinions.
This word
opinion
gives us food for thought. It is the word
which the mistress of the house uses to end a discussion that is be–
coming too embittered. It suggests that all judgments are of equal
value, thus reassuming and giving an inoffensive cast to thoughts
by assimilating them to tastes. There are
all
kinds of tastes in nature,
all opinions are permissible; tastes, ideas, opinions must not be dis–
cussed. In the name of democratic institutions, in the name of free–
dom of opinion, the antisemite claims the right to preach his anti–
Jewish crusade everywhere. At the same time, used as we are since
the Revolution to seeing each object in an analytical spirit, that is as
if
it were a whole which can be divided into its component parts, we
look at people and characters as if they were mosaics, every stone
of which coexists with the others without this coexistence affecting
its inherent nature. Thus an antisemitic opinion appears like a mole–
cule which can combine with any other set of molecules without
changing itself. A man can be a good father and a good husband, a
zealous citizen, cultured, philanthropic and an antisemite at the same
time. He may like to go fishing and he may like the pleasures of love,
he may be tolerant about religion, full of generous ideas about the
condition of the natives of Central Africa-and still despise the Jews.
If
he does not like them, people say, it is because his experience has
taught him that they are bad, because statistics have taught him that
they are dangerous, because certain historical factors have influenced
his judgment. Thus this opinion seems to be the result of external
causes and those who want to study it will neglect the antisemite
himself and make much of the percentage of Jews mobilized in 1914,
of the percentage of Jews who are bankers, industrialists, doctors,
