REFLECTIONS ON THE JEWISH QUESTION
471
never treated the tragic theme of Jewish experience in the modern
world
in
a manner befitting its universal human significance.
Tune and again Sartre tries to bring his analysis into line with
what he conceives the Marxist position to be by pressing into use a
series of sociological banalities. Having read in Communist literature
that the intellectual is more undisciplined (i.e. more inclined to ques–
tion Party Dogma) than the worker because he has not been educated
by the compulsions of the processes of production, Sartre believes
he can show why antisemitism is present in some classes and absent
in others. "Shaped by the daily influence of the materials he works
with, the workman sees society as the product of real forces acting
in accordance with rigorous laws." That is why workers and engin–
eers are not antisemites. One wonders how many workers and engin–
eers Sartre knows. In Germany and the United States the engineering
profession was probably the most antisemitic of all. And it is a myth
that the workers are more "disciplined" than the intellectuals. It is
only when the Communists have established job control that they can
keep the workers in line.
If
the behavior of the intellectuals in Western
Europe and the U.S., during the last fifteen years is studied, it will
be found that an amazingly large number of them jump to the crack
of the Communist whip on matters of belief with far greater enthu–
siam than the workers.
There is ample evidence to show that antisemitism is present
in every class in \Vestern society from top to bottom. There are, to
be sure, variations in the intensity of its expression but they perhaps
are more significantly correlated with
the number
of Jews which a
given group encounters than with the degree to which it deals directly
with the "material" world. Professor Philip Frank, a shrewd observer,
tells us that the German students who put up the greatest resistance
to Hitler were drawn from the faculties of pure science and philosophy
which specialize in "abstractions," and were not disciplined by direct
contact with the material world.
There is no one cause of antisemitism, or of any other mass
movement, but it is possible to find certain constant factors which are
present, in all its manifestations in diverse countries, conditions and
times. These indicate that antisemitism is not so much a bourgeois
phenomenon as a Christian phenomenon, that it is endemic to every
Christian culture, whose religions made the Jews the eternal villain
