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PARTISAN REVIEW
prepares is the
death
of the Jew.
Of
course
all
the enemies of the
Jew do not overtly demand his death, but the measures which they
propose and which are all aimed at his debasement, his humiliation,
his banishment, are the prerequisites of this murder which they are
contemplating: they are symbolic murders. Only the antisemite has
a clear conscience: he is a criminal with a worthy motive. It is not
his
fault after
all
if his mission is to destroy evil with evil; the
true
France has relegated to him its powers of supreme justice. Of course
he does not have occasion to use them everyday, but make no mistake:
these sudden outbreaks of anger, these thunderous reproaches which
he hurls against "kikes," are so many death sentences. Popular aware–
ness divined this and invented the expression "Jew baiting." Thus
the antisemite has chosen to be a criminal-a
puret
criminal: here
again he evades responsibilities, he has censured
his
instinct for murder
but he has found a way of satisfying it without admitting it to
himself. He knows he is bad but since he is doing evil
for
tM.
sake
of good;
since a whole people is awaiting deliverance at his hands,
he considers himself
a:
sort of bad sacred bull. By a kind of inversion
of all values, examples of which we find in certain religions and, for
instance, in India, where there is sacred prostitution, it is to anger,
hate, pillage, murder and
all
forms of violence that the antisemite
accords respect and enthusiasm; and at the very moment he is drunk
with evil, he feels the lightness of heart and the peace afforded by a
clear conscience and the satisfaction of duty well done.
The portrait is finished.
If
many people who willingly admit
to hating the Jews do not recognize themselves, it is because they do
not detest the Jews. They do not love them either. They would not
do them the slightest harm but they would not raise their little fingers
to protect them from violence. They are not antisemites, they are
nothing, they are
no one;
and since in spite of everything, one must
appear to be something, they murmur, without thinking of evil,
without thinking at all, they go about repeating some formulas which
they have learned and which give them the right to enter certain
drawing rooms. Thus they know the delights of creating an ineffec–
tual ripple, of having their heads crammed with an enormous affir–
mation which appears to them all the more respectable because they
have borrowed it. Here antisemitism is but a justification; the futility
of these people is, moreover, such that they willingly abandon this
justification for any other one just as long as it be a "distinguished"
one. For antisemitism is
distinguished,
like all the manifestations of
an irrational collective soul tending to create a conservative and
