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PARTISAN REVIEW
cularly when it burns with ambition for power or fame, is almost
invariably antisemitic.
But there is still another type of antisemite who is barely touched
by Sartre's psychological analysis. This is the antisemite who far from
being mediocre, has a touch of genius. He is not a sadist or moral
degenerate in the sense of Sartre's active antisemite. Nor does he
belong among the mindless ones who constitute the latter's mass base.
Yet he has provided a great deal of the ammunition for the vulgar
advocates of extermination and made antisemitism a respectable
sentiment in the salons, and among the literary hangers on of the
genteel tradition, who fancy themselves liberal because they make
exceptions for one "white haired boy" among the Jews they know.
What Sartre says applies to creatures like Hitler, Goebbels,
Rosenberg and their corresponding type in other countries, Drumont,
Mosley, Gerald Smith but not to figures like Schopenhauer, Wagner,
Diihring, Houston Chamberlain, Proudhon, Bourget, Maurras, Sorel,
Dostoyevsky, Henry Adams, Dreiser, Chesterton and Belloc-who, for
all
their gifts, have helped poison the little minds of Europe and
America, and prepared the way for the easy credulities which, while
dismissing the Protocols of Zion and the charges of ritual blood-murder,
murmur: "Mter all, there must
be
something in it." The sensibilities
of the Ezra Pounds are finer than those of the Himmlers, the stomachs
of the Celines are weaker than those of the Streichers but is the
objective meaning of their statements about the Jews so fundamen–
tally different? Yet their psychology is certainly not the same. Every
anti-semitic "genius" has a unique psychology. Even as social psy–
chologies the antisemitisms of Central European clericalism, anti–
Dreyfus French nationalism, German racialism, English snobbism,
must
be
distinguished. Perhaps the psychology is not so important as
that it has a common object.
A study of the literary history of the West reinforces the same
point, to be sure, in a gentler and much more indirect way. The
reasons are complex and vary somewhat from country to country but
it is undeniable that the role assigned to Jewish characters in litera–
ture has been unedifying when not actually odious. What seems
to
me more telling is that despite their tremendously rich imaginative
power, the depths of their compassion, and the range of their under–
standing, the great creative spirits in poetry, novel and drama have
