PORTRAIT OF THE ANTISEMITE
177
esoteric France. It seems to all these feather-brains that by repeating
at
will
that the Jew injures the country, they are performing one of
those initiation rites which allows them to feel themselves a part of
the centers of warmth and social energy; in this sense antisemitism
has retained something of the human sacrifice. It presents, too, a
serious advantage for those people who recognize their profound
instability and who are weary of it: it allows them to assume the
appearance of passion and, as is the rule since the advent of Roman–
ticism, to confuse passion with personality. These second-hand anti–
semites take on, without much cost to themselves, an aggressive per–
sonality. One of my friends often cites the example of an old cousin
who came to dine with
his
family and about whom they said with a
certain air: "Jules cannot abide the English." My friend cannot
remember ever hearing anything else about Cousin Jules. But that
was enough: there was a tacit agreement between Jules and his
family. They ostensibly avoided talking about the English in front
of him and
this
precaution gave
him
a semblance of existence in the
eyes of his relatives and at the same time gave them an agreeable
feeling of taking part in a sacred ceremony. And
if
someone, under
certain specific circumstances, after careful deliberation and as it were
inadvertently, made an allusion to Great Britain or its Dominions,
Uncle Jules pretended to go into a fury and felt himself come to life
for a moment. Everyone was happy. Many people are antisemites in
in
the same way as Uncle Jules was an Anglophobe, and of course
they have not the faintest idea what their attitude really implies.
Simple reflections, reeds bent in the wind, they would certainly never
have invented antisemitism
if
conscious antisemitism had not already
existed. But they are the ones who,
in
all indifference, insure the sur–
vival of antisemitism and carry it forward through the generations.
We can now understand
him.
He is a man who is afraid. Not
of the Jews of course, but of himself, of
his
conscience,
his
freedom,
of
his
instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitude, of change, of society
and the world; of everything except the Jews. He is a coward who
does not want to admit his cowardice to himself; a murderer who
represses and censures his penchant for murder without being able
to restrain it and who nevertheless does not dare to kill except in
effigy or in the anonymity of a mob; a malcontent who dares not
revolt for fear of the consequences of his rebellion. By adhering to
antisemitism, he is not only adopting an opinion, he is choosing himself
