Vol. 16 No. 5 1949 - page 481

REFLECTIONS ON THE JEWISH QUESTION
481
by unfortunate accident but as a human being by enlightened choice.
He usually looks to some form of universal democratic socialism in
the future where the differences between Jew and non-Jew will for–
ever disappear. This dream has its noble features, but it overlooks
the fact that human beings live as Jews and non-Jews here and now
and will continue to do so for a long time to come; that the dream
itself is based upon the acceptance of differences among men and
not on the hope of an undifferentiated unity; and that the microbes
of antisemitism infect even movements which do not officially allow
for its existence. The dream still has its uses as a guide in some ways
but not as a home.
If
it is pruned of its Utopianism and its failure to understand
that the ethics of democracy presupposes not an equality of sameness or
identity but an equality of differences, much of the universalist view
still has a large measure of validity which Sartre, for one, completely
ignores in his caricature of the attitude of the liberal and democrat
towards the Jews.
According to Sartre the man of democratic principle, although
a better person than the antisemite, is just as hostile to the Jew as a
Jew. He wants him to disappear into the abstract universal,
man,
and annihilate himself as a concrete, historical individual. Whereas
the antisemite "wishes to destroy the Jew as a man and leave nothing
in him but the Jew, the pariah, the untouchable," the democrat
"wishes to destroy him as a J ew and leave nothing in him but the
man, the abstract and universal subject of the rights of man and the
rights of the citizen." To the Jew, therefore, Sartre concludes, "there
may not be so much difference between the antisemite and democrat."
No, not much difference except between death and life, between
M ein K amp!
and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Liberty. Now
we know what surrealism in logic is! Because
the man
does not exist,
Sartre tells us with a gesture of rigorous thinking, therefore only par–
ticular kinds of men exist. But the sense in which
the man
does not
exist is precisely the sense in which
the French-man, the Ger-man, the
Jew, and
the
antisemite do not exist either. A sub-class is just as much
of an abstraction as a class. Only individuals exist. But whether they
should exist as Jews or Gentiles, as Catholics or Protestants or hu–
manists, as Italians or Americans, as existentialists or as philosophers
(in the etymological sense ) , should be, according to the democratic
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