PORTRAIT OF THE ANTISEMITE
169
consenting to mediocrity one is not necessarily humble, nor even
modest. It is just the opposite: there is a passionate pride in being
mediocre and antisemitism is an attempt to make mediocrity as such
a virtue, to create an elite of the mediocre. For the antisemite, intelli–
gence is Jewish, he can therefore disdain it in
all
tranquility, like all
other Jewish virtues: these are all ersatz qualities which the Jews use
to replace the well-balanced mediocrity which they will always lack.
The true Frenchman, rooted in his province, in his country, carried
along by a tradition of twenty centuries, having the advantage of
ancestral wisdom, guided by proved customs,
does not need
intelli–
ligence. The basis of his virtue is the assimilation of the qualities
which the work of a hundred generations has lent to objects which
surround him,
i.e)
property. But it goes without saying that this refers
to hereditary property and not to that which one buys for oneself.
The antisemite misunderstands the principle of the diverse forms of
modern. property: money, stocks, etc. These are abstractions, things
of reason which ally themselves to the abstract intelligence of the
Jew. A stock belongs to no one since it can belong to everyone and
then it is a sign of wealth, not a concrete piece of property. The anti–
semite can conceive of but one type of primitive and land-owning
appropriation, based on a veritable magical connection with posses–
sion, in which the object possessed and its possessor are linked by a
mystical participation; he is the poet of land-holding. It transfigures
the owner, endowing him with a particular and concrete sensitivity.
Of course, this sensitivity is not addressed to the eternal verities, to
universal values: the universal is Jewish since it has to do with the
intelligence. What this subtle sense will seize upon is just what the
intelligence cannot discern. In other words, the principle of antisemi–
tism is that concrete possession of a particular object magically conveys
its meaning. Maurras affmns this: a Jew will always be incapable
of understanding the following line of Racine:
"Dans !'Orient desert) quel devint mon ennui.))*
And why can I, mediocre I, understand what the most shrewd,
the most cultivated intelligence cannot seize? Because I
own
Racine.
Racine .is my language and my soil. Perhaps the Jew speaks a purer
French than I, perhaps he knows the grammar and syntax better than
I, perhaps he is even a writer: it doesn't matter. He has only spoken
this language for twenty years, and I have spoken it for two thousand
*
Racine's
Berenice.
