170
PARTISAN REVIEW
years. The correctness of his style is abstract, acquired; the mistakes
in French are in conformance with the greatness of the language.
Here we recognize the reasoning which Barres used against scholarship
students. Why be surprised? Aren't these Jews scholarship students?
I've done nothing to deserve my superiority and I also cannot lose
rank. It is bestowed once and for all: it is a
thing.
We begin to understand that antisemitism is not simply an
"opinion" about the Jews and that it involves the entire personality
of the antisemite. We are not done with him yet: for he does not
limit himself to furnishing moral and political directives. He is a
process of thought and a world-view all in himself. One would in
fact be unable to affirm what he affirms without implicitly referring
to certain intellectual principles. The Jew, he says, is entirely bad and
entirely Jewish; his virtues, if any, become vices simply because they
are
his
virtues, the work that comes from
his
hands necessarily bears
his
stigma: and if he builds a bridge, this bridge is bad because it is
Jewish from the first span to the last. The same act committed by a
Jew and by a Christian is by no means identical in the two cases.
The Jew renders execrable everything he touches. The first thing the
Germans did was to forbid Jews the use of swimming pools: it seemed
to them that if the body of a Jew plunged into this water, it would
be utterly tainted. The Jew literally sullies even the air he breathes.
If
we try to formulate in abstract propositions the principle referred
to, this is what we would get: the whole is more than and different
from the sum of all its parts; the whole determines the meaning
and the true nature of the parts of which it is composed. There is
not only one courageous virtue which might be indifferently a part
of the Jewish or the Christian character as oxygen combines to make
air either with azote or argon and combines with hydrogen to make
water: but each person, with
his
courage,
his
generosity,
his
own way
of thinking, of laughing, of eating and drinking, is an indivisible
totality. That is to say, the antisemite has chosen to resort to the
spirit of synthesis as a means of understanding the world. It is the
spirit of synthesis which allows him to see himself as forming an
indissoluble unity with France as a whole. It is in the name of syn–
thesis that he denounces the purely analytical and critical intelligence
of the Je . But we must point out that for some time both the right
and the left, both the traditionalists and the socialists, have brought
up synthetic principles in opposition to the spirit of analysis which
presided over the formation of the democratic bourgeoisie. The same
