REFLECTIONS ON THE JEWISH QUESTION
475
reason calls himself such or is called such in any community whose
practices take note of the distinction."
Let any Catholic Irishman or
Boston Brahmin or Southern aristocrat move into a community in
which he is unknown and pretend he is Jewish only to the extent of
saying
he is Jewish, and he will be treated like
all
other Jews indud–
ing those who do not
say
they are Jewish but whom the Gentile
community regards as Jews.
One may quarrel with the adequacy of the definition but not
with the facts which suggest it. There is no trait or dogma or prac–
tice common to all Jews who recognize themselves as such or who are
recognized as such by others. What they have in common is a condi–
tion or situation of exclusion from one or another pattern of social
life, an exclusion which ranges from minor annoying restrictions in
good historical weather to major discriminations in bad. What unifies
them is nothing positive but, by and large, a common historical con–
dition which, whether they like it or not or whether they like each
other or not, cancels out in the eyes of others their not inconsiderable
differences.
But what nonsense to say with Sartre that the Jew has been
"poisoned" by these restrictions and pressures to the point that he
lacks "a metaphysical sense" (would it were so!) and a feeling for
"the vital values." The leaders of positivism from Hume to Mach,
from Russell and Poincare to Carnap, have not been J ews, and not
a single great pragmatist-Peirce, Dewey, James and Schiller-is
Jewish. Sartre has to convert Bergson's anti-intellectualism into ra–
tionalism, and the intuitionism of Spinoza and Husserl into intellec–
tualism to make them fit his scheme. Yet every Jewish thinker of note
in Western Europe owes more to his non-Jewish contemporaries and
predecessors for his ideas than to his status, willing or unwilling, as
a Jew. And as for movements that are distinctively Jewish like Has–
sidism and Zionism, which
can
be explained by the social and cultural
pressures of Western Christendom, they are as far removed from ra–
tionalism as anything can be. Sartre is almost ready to agree with
the antisemite that the Jew as such has certain obnoxious traits but
mitigates the charge with the counter-impeachment: "You made him
so." No group of people so heterogeneously constituted, who have
so many assorted reasons for affirmatively or negatively expressing
their "Jewishness," can be pressed into one characterological type.
