IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
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throughout history in Western countries. In the post-Napoleonic era,
Jews briefly enjoyed the rights of citizenship, but they remained in some
ways an expendable population. It is perhaps a fundamental social neces–
sity in all societies to divide population into "we" and "they" cate–
gories, and "they" may be human beings to whom the rules do not fully
apply. Against
these,
criminal acts and atrocities may be committed with
impunity. Thus one does not necessarily suffer when "they," the expend–
ables, are killed . In rereading Dostoevsky's
Crime and Plmishment
re–
cently, I observed that the old woman, Raskolnikov's first victim because
she is a moneylender, is classed as a Jew. It is not so much
her
death that
troubles Raskolnikov, for she is marginally expendable. What does
burden his conscience is the murder of her innocent sister - a Christian
innocent or holy fool
(Yllrodivy).
I do give a lot of thought to the special and in some ways occult
place assigned to Jews. To me, this is of course more than theoretical
curiosity. My interpretation of the recent increase of hostility among
American blacks toward Jews is that the blacks have a clear reason for
dissociating themselves from these eternal expendables, for they see that in
making a common cause with Jews they would risk exchanging transi–
tory disadvantages for permanent ones. Jew-hatred, moreover, is never
wholly unpopular, and this is as clear to black demagogues as it was to
Germans, Russians, Frenchmen, Rumanians, and others in the past. The
demagogic instinct of a Farrakhan is to identify blacks with a higher
white stratum and leave the Jews at the bottom - human beings on
permanent reserve for inhuman treatment.
I have a very particular sympathy for what I see as distortions in
black life, a sympathy rooted in my lifelong familiarity with deformities
in Jews produced by their experiences in the Pale. I think often of an es–
say by Rebecca West in which she discusses the Jewishness of Kafka:
"Russia," she observes in an aside, "has succeeded in oppressing its Jews
until they have become nightmare figures which the Western Jew did
not like to recognize as brethren, since, isolated and terrorized, shut up
with their religion in a state of tension which revived all their primitive
fantasies, they became at once barbaric and pedantic." But what she sees
as a Russian deformation has existed in other forms for centuries in all
Christian countries. In them, the Jew has a mental place, unconscious or
preconscious. I am more and more inclined to see this as a spiritual
legacy. There are Christian hermetic philosophers like Robert Ambelain
and Valentin Tomberg who speak of the
egregore,
an artificial being gen–
erated by powerful spiritual currents, a collective delusion coming from
below but having a spiritual character; "an artificial being," says
Ambelain, "a product of fanaticism and enthusiasm." He sees this in the
