GEORGE KONRAD
549
parts of a kind of virtual world Jewish community: they are related to each
other and to the Jews of Israel.
Being in the world is accompanied by the obligation to tolerate unusu–
alness. To unusualness and the accompanying discrimination, as a
challenge, several responses are possible-escape, mimicry, termination of
the distinction and with it, likely the most disadvantageous-discrimination.
Within this, a possible procedure is the redirection of anger against Jews
to another target, or rather to a particular group ofJews, the orthodox, the
recent immigrants, the not yet assimilated, the strange and the conspicuous,
the capitalists, or the communists, then to the dissidents of communist
regimes. These endeavours at disguise do not fool the real anti-Semite and
cannot successfully deflect genuine anti-Semitism, and what's more, they
are morally suspect.
For the most part, Jews speak the language of the country they inhab–
it, participate in its life, work for it; they are loyal citizens, even going
beyond a routine presence to a more deeply sympathetic identification.
However, they bring new elements into the discussion as well, the serious
and ironic forms of critical self-reflection, for example. Jews are passive in
the parlor game of hating the neighbors.
German Jews' hatred of the French, and French Jews' hatred of the
Germans was milder than that exhibited by the local majority. They were
cooler about sharing nationalist public sentiment, though there are
counter-examples in great numbers, but all together, they manifested an
amount of neutrality in conflicts they saw as artificially pumped up, all the
more so as there were Jews on the other side as well, possibly even rela–
tives. Why should a German Jew and a French Jew hate each other?
It is logical that the Jews were more interested in peace than others.
They accomodated nationalist rancor with extreme reluctance, whether
the hater was a great nation or a small one, for long-standing imperialist
hatreds were nurtured not only by great powers; smaller nations also did
their part in their own neighborhoods.
It is logical that a relatively high number of Jews participated in every
sort of pacifist organization, and that they took the international workers
movement in this direction, but the Bolshevik Jews' decision to break with
democratic constitutionalism was a perilous error, a suicidal mistake; they
undermined their own security by exchanging formal freedoms for an ide–
ological scheme they deemed substantive, essential, one which deified a
certain group of people and demonized the others. The abandonment of
the ghetto was made possible by enlightened liberalism, to turn on it was
betrayal and self-destructive stupidity.
