Sidney Hook
REF
LEC TI 0 NSON THE JEW IS H QUE STI 0 N
Whatever Sartre's merit as a philosopher-not very con–
siderable, in my opinion-his writings reveal a depth of psychological
insight more rewarding than a library of tomes on scientific psychology.
Why, despite these psychological gifts, Sartre writes such bad novels
perhaps others can explain. Psychology, however, has its limitations
when applied to historical themes, and all Jewish questions, except
definitions of what constitutes a Jew, are historical. Sartre's "anti–
semite" and "Jew," authentic and inauthentic, are ideal psychological
types based not on what most Jews and antisemites are but on the kind
of Jews and antisemites literary people are interested in. In virtue
of his phenomenological approach, all Sartre needs is just a few
specimens to construct a timeless
essence
of Jewishness and anti–
semitism.
For all its historical limitations, Sartre's book,
Anti-Semite and
Jew,
*
is unquestionably one of the most brilliant psychological analyses
of the marginal Jew and the fanatical antisemite which has ever been
published. That he has independently discovered conclusions which
Kurt Lewin and Horace Kallen, who know infinitely more about the
subject than he, reached many years ago, only adds to the measure
of his achievement. Would only that he had kept to psychology. For
when Sartre does discuss social and political matters he lapses into the
most vulgar and sentimental kind of orthodox M.arxism. Antisemitism
is a "bourgeois" phenomenon-as if it were not found among peas–
ants, in feudal society, among the nobility. It is a mythical represen–
tation of the class struggle. "It could not
(sic!)
exist in a classless
society"-presumably by definition. Its presence in the Soviet Union
*
Schocken Books. $2.75.
