402
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ten Commandments to the Beatitudes, or as Christians like to say, "the
higher law," there is the implication that Judaism is a precursor
to
something superior?
Saul Bellow:
Let me say first of all that I don't speak as an expert; I'm
only a novelist. Novelists are fairly observant, shrewd people but they
don't have much theoretical foundation, don't care much about theo–
retical foundation. What I said yesterday was that Jew-hatred had be–
come what I referred to as an
egregore.
It's very like the term
/11
yth}
used
by Mr. Wistrich. But what I intended to say is that it had entered the
unconscious, so to speak, that it had become an inherited and almost in–
stinctive property and that it was a delusion. Of course Christianity has a
great deal to do with the organization and the spread of this. I'm no
scholar, but I have read enough to understand that when the Gospels
were written in Greek, under Greek influence, anywhere from sixty to
two hundred years after the death of Christ, they reflected already an at–
tempt to wrest a religion from the hands of the Jews and appropriate it
for very different objectives and very different views. So it's quite clear
that for a long time Christianity was the principal agency for spreading
Jew-hatred. I don't like the term "anti-Semitism" because I don't like
the term "Semitism," which is a German invention of the nineteenth
century by a certain journalist to shift the emphasis of Jew-hatred from
religion and to give it a secular foundation.
Question:
I attended last night's meeting, Mr. Bellow, and heard the
questions put
to
you regarding current black anti-Semitism, or Jew-ha–
tred. I got a strong feeling that you really felt uncomfortable handling
that question, that you wanted to duck it and hide. I felt that was the
wrong way to handle it. Am I incorrect in my attitudes?
Saul Bellow:
No, I wasn't trying
to
duck or hide anything. All I said
was that owing to certain developments in the mental life of the country
- I won't call it the intellectual life of the country - it had become
very, very difficult to discuss these questions publicly at all, and that there
was a taboo imposed upon free discussion, which I consider to be a very
dangerous thing. This taboo was extended by the newspapers and the
other media, by universities and by all kinds of pressures. So there is not
even a proper language for the discussion of these questions . What it
means is that free speech is being limited to the politically correct. This is
a real danger in a democratic society, because when you have what we
call free speech without debate, you have the beginning of demagogy,
and we're experiencing that demagogy right now. I've had enough
