PORTRAIT OF THE ANTISEMITE
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task therefore is purely negative: there is no question of building a
society but only of purifying the one that exists. Like the Good Knight,
the antisemite is sacred; but the Jew is also sacred in his own way:
sacred like the untouchables, like taboo natives. Thus the battle is
waged on a religious level and the. end of the struggle can only be
an act of sacred destruction. The advantages of this position are
multiple: first of all it favors sluggishness of mind. We have seen that
the antisemite understands nothing concerning modem society, and
he would be incapable of inventing a constructive plan; his action
cannot be put on the technical level, it remains basically emotional.
He prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amok of the
Malayans. His intellectual activity limits it:5elf to
interpretation;
in
historical events he seeks the sign of the presence of an evil power.
Whence these puerile and complicated inventions which render
him
comparable to the real paranoiac. The antisemite, moreover, canalizes
revolutionary thrusts toward the destruction of certain men, not insti–
tutions; an antisemitic mob would consider that it had done enough
if it had massacred a few Jews and burned a few synagogues.
It
therefore represents a safety-valve for the ruling classes which en–
courage it. ... But, above all, this naive dualism is eminently reas–
suring to the antisemite himself:
if
it is only a matter of getting rid
of Evil, it means that Good is already
assumed.
There is no reason
to seek it in anguish, to invent it,
to
debate it patiently when one
has found it, to prove it in action, to verify its consequences and
finally to saddle oneself with the responsibilities of the moral choice
thus made. It is not by chance that the great antisemitic uprisings
hide a kind of optimism: the antisemite has decided about evil so as
not to have to decide about the good. The more absorbed I become
in combatting Evil, the less I am tempted to question the Good....
When he has fulfilled his mission as the sacred destroyer, the Lost
Paradise will rebuild itself. For the time being the antisemite is
absorbed by so many duties that he has no time to think about it:
he is forever on the verge, he fights and each of his outbursts of
indignation is a pretext which distracts
him
from the anguished
search for the good.
But there is more to it and at this point we approach the domain
of psychoanalysis. Manicheanism masks a profound attraction to evil.
For the antisemite, evil is his lot, his "job." Others willl come later
who will be concerned with good, if need be. He is at the outpost
of society, he turns his back on the pure virtues which he defends;
he deals only with evil, his duty is to unmask it, to denounce it, to
