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A different impression, however, is created by another of her friends,
Gustav Thibon, who declares outright that she was an anti-Semite: "No
doubt [Weill owed this hardness of green fruit...to her racial origin; she
was indeed the daughter of. ..that 'stiff-necked' people whom the
prophets sought to unbend-and her passionate anti-Semitism is the
most striking evidence of her descent [!]. Is there anything more Jewish
[!] than the.. .feverish search for eternity in the time order wherein we
can recognize in the noblest representatives of this chosen and rebellious
race[ !] the ancient impatience for the Promised Land and a temporal
kingdom?"
(Simone Wei! As We Knew Her).
This passage, however,
sheds more light on Thibon's own penchant for racial stereotyping than
it does on Weil's relationship to Judaism.
Pace
Thibon, the basis of Weil's animadversions toward Judaism is
not her being "the daughter of that 'stiff-necked' people whom the
prophets sought to unbend," but rather her horror of "the collective."
"As collective, thought cannot exist as thought," she wrote in
Gravity
and Grace.
Her whole life she declined solidarity with the collective,
including her gender, her race, her religion, her nationality, her political
cause. In Judaism, however, she thought she saw an attempt literally to
"make a religion" out of the collective in the form of the "chosen peo–
ple." No wonder she set her face against it. Was she mistaken? Courtine–
Denamy cites approvingly Emmanuel Levinas, who writes that Weil
mistakenly attributes privilege to being "the chosen," whereas being cho–
sen in fact implies only responsibility. To Weil, however, being "chosen"
implies
separation
from the unfortunate who exist outside the chosen
group. As Bercher said, "the Jews she disliked were those who regarded
themselves as Jews before all else and so separated themselves from other
men."
Weil's horror of the separation implied by "the collective" extended
to the Catholic Church. As she wrote in "Hesitations Concerning Bap–
tism" : "Nothing gives me more pain than the idea of separating myself
from the immense and unfortunate multitude of unbelievers." Indeed,
"she reproached [the Catholic Church]," wrote Thibon, "for being at
the same time a social and totalitarian organism, modeled on imperial
Rome... .Her conscience rebelled against a spiritual power which pro–
claimed that there was no salvation outside the Church and which
anathematized those who rejected its authority. How many times did
she not tell me that Catholic totalitarianism was, in a sense, infinitely
worse than that of men like Hitler or Stalin, since it condemned all
refractory spirits to eternal torture whereas the tyranny of the dictators
did at least cease on death."
