PORTRAIT OF THE ANTISEMITE
165
Thus this revulsion is not based on something physical, since you
could very well love a Jewess if you didn't know what race she
belonged to, but it reaches the body through the mind; it is an
involvement of the mind so deep, so complete, that it extends to the
physiological as in cases of hysteria.
This involvement is not provoked by experience. I have questioned
a hundred people about the reasons for their antisemitism. Most of
them limit themselves to enumerating the faults which are tradi–
tionally attributed to the Jew. "I hate them because they are selfish,
intriguing, hard to get rid of, oily, tactless, etc."-"But at least you
do go with some Jews?"-"Indeed not!" A painter said to me: "I'm
hostile to Jews because, with their critical habit of mind, they encour–
age our servants to become indisciplined." Here are some more precise
experiences. A young actor without talent asserted that the Jews
kept him from having a career in the theater by always giving him
servile jobs. A young woman said to me: "I've had terrible rows with
furriers, they've robbed me, they've burned the furs I entrusted to
them. Well, they were all Jews." But why did she choose to hate
Jews rather than furriers? Why Jews or furriers rather than such
and such a Jew or such and such a furrier? Because she had a pre–
disposition to antisemitism. A classmate of mine at the lycee told me
that J ews "irritated" him because of the thousand injustices which
"bejewed" social organizations committed in their favor. "A Jew got
a scholarship the year I missed it and you're not going to try to
make me believe that that fellow whose father came from Krakow
.or Lemberg understood one of Ronsard's poems or one of Virgil's
eclogues better than
I."
But he admitted the next moment that he
disdained the scholarship, that it was
all
a muddle and that he hadn't
prepared for the competition. Thus he had two systems of interpre–
tation to explain his failure, like an insane man who in his delirium
pretends to
be
the King of Hungary but when suddenly put to the
test admits that he is a shoemaker. His thinking moves on two planes
without the least difficulty. Better still, he will succeed in justifying
his past laziness by saying that it would have been too silly to prepare
for an examination in which Jews are passed in preference to good
Frenchmen. Moreover he was 27th on the final list. There were 26
before him, 12 of whom were accepted and 14 were not. Would he
have gotten any further if Jews had been excluded altogether? And
even if he had been the first of those who were not accepted, even
if by eliminating one of the successful candidates he could have had his
chance to be accepted, my classmate had to adopt in advance a
