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(legally forbidden-to be sure) Sartre would probably explain as
the result of capitalist encirclement and the existence of those terrible
"cartels" which he regards as also responsible for the Marshall plan.*
In a curious way Sartre's book supplements the politically acute
and psychologically obtuse study Marx wrote on the Jews a century
ago. Marx argues against Bruno Bauer's demand that the German
Jews give up their Jewishness as a precondition of being regarded as
Germans and citizens. Sartre argues against French antisemites who
insist that the Jews can never really become French because they
can never cease being Jews. His answer is that the Jew can be just
as good a Frenchman as the Gentile, and that after the social revolu–
tion, the Jews may assimilate themselves willingly, and become au–
thentic Frenchmen. The naivete of Marx's solution-"The emanci–
pation of the Jews is the emancipation of society from Judaism"
(which is commerce)-is mitigated by his assumption that what dis–
tinguished the Jews would automatically evaporate in the strong sun
of the political enlightenment.** A century later, and after Hitler,
too, this naivete is a little too much.
Economic competition or distress exacerbates oppositions.
It
intensifies antisemitism but it does not create it.
It
explains why a
scapegoat is sought but not why one particular group is
always
the
scapegoat in the West whenever any profound social change or af–
fliction takes place. Is capitalism the common causal factor in Russian,
Polish, English and Spanish antisemitism?
Even the radical movement is infected with antisemitism-con–
scious and unconscious. At the time of the Stalin-Trotsky feud most
non-Jewish Stalinists used antisemitic arguments against the Trotsky–
ists. On the West Coast I was asked by a Stalinist why all the Trot-
*
The two countries of the world Sartre is most ignorant of are the U. S. and
the U.S.S.R. For the position of the Jews in the Soviet Union,
cf.
two note–
worthy articles, "The Soviet Partisans and the Jews" by Solomon M. Schwarz,
Modern Review,
Jan. 1949 and "Has Russia Solved the Jewish Problem?" by
Harry Schwartz,
Commentary,
Feb. 1948.
**
Marx did not understand that Jewish capitalism was what Max Weber
called "pariah" capitalism and that the Jews played no important role as a
group in capitalism
"as a process of production"
whose study became his life
work. He never returned to the theme of his essay "On the Jewish Question"
written when he was a young man of twenty-seven. In that essay he argues
for the emancipation of society not only from Judaism but from Christianity and
all other religions.
