A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  Until the arrival of the Germans in 1940, Irène’s knowledge of France had been limited to Paris, Biarritz—where her mother went for her annual intake of lovers—and the Riviera. Forced to go into hiding in rural Issy-l’Évêque, she discovered “the marvellously effective malice” of peasant life. In an appended passage to her novel Suite Française, written at a time when aware at last that she was on her own, she wrote: “Hatred + contempt = March 1942.…. What is this country doing to me?…. Let us consider it dispassionately, let us watch it lose its honor and its life blood.…. Everything that is done in France within a certain social class has only one motive: fear. Pierre Laval and the stench of carrion.” Sewing the yellow star onto her daughter Denise’s school clothes (two months after her baptized child’s First Communion) was Irène’s introduction to needlework.

  In those months of rural dread, Irène had time to discover that the Vichy myth of la France profonde was as fatuous as her trust in Parisian decency: “Everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbors, harvests his wheat, counts his money and doesn’t give a thought to the rest of the world.” Having spent twenty years anatomizing men on the make (and women on the prowl) in the smart world, Irène came abruptly to realize that there were selfish, callous operators pretty well everywhere.

  As for Irène’s “self-hatred,” who can doubt that the mercilessness directed at “her own people” concealed a wider, unspoken scorn? Her underlying topic was the interplay of emotion and callousness, the alternations of vanity and despair, in all the players of the world’s game. Imaginative impersonation is the mark of the authentic novelist; fiction is where the truth can be found; documentary is too often where it is confected. Irène could play male or female, be villain or dupe, candid or duplicitous. She moved the black and the white pieces with equal versatility. The insolence of her multiple impostures was a function of an isolation from which neither success nor marriage dispensed her. Those who notice, with glee, that Jew is often hard on Jew fail to read between the lines where it can be divined, by those with eyes to see, with what pitiless accuracy the conceit and cruelty of their enemies might one day be spelled out.

  Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (its title a perhaps conscious, scornful echo of Heidegger’s Being and Time, and arguably a greater Russian novel than War and Peace) was one of the earliest post-Holocaust works in which accuracy and imagination combine in an uncompromising account of what Communists and Nazis did to Jews, and to their own people. In it, the narrator’s mother, a doctor who has never thought of herself as a Jew, writes to the son whom she will never see again a letter in which she describes the strange sense of freedom she experienced as she marched into the fenced enclosure of the ghetto of Lodz, from which she would emerge only to be taken to her death.

  Fruit of the same period, Julien Benda’s Exercice d’un enterré vif (Juin 1940–Août 1944) is a segment of the vita of a Jew living like a ghost in a society where he must remain invisible or risk death. (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, about the black experience in America, made a bridge, now derelict, between black and Jewish experience as negligible pariahs.) Benda’s most famous prewar book, La Trahison des Clercs (1927), had denounced fellow-traveling intellectuals. Benda accused them, left and right, of replacing loyalty to facts with ideological pliancy. His own Jewishness was, in his view, irrelevant alike to his criticism and to his way of life. Integrity had no pedigree; veracity, no ideology. Benda’s call for the educated to tell the truth, rather than to bend to ideological cant, echoes Titus Flavius Josephus, who claimed to rise above partisanship in his account of The Jewish War and of himself.

  The Benda of his wartime isolation stands near the end of the road that leads from the fall of Jerusalem to the foundation of the State of Israel. The ultimate Diaspora Jew, he neither denied his origins nor, in his social and intellectual stance, attached importance to them. He treated his enforced eviction from eminence in Parisian literary circles with sour condescension: as if such things mattered! His home was pillaged and his library rifled by the Germans, but—playing the part of a cheerful Timon or a sporting Shylock—he refused to be bitter or dismayed. Like Spinoza, he sublimated pariahdom into a kind of liberation.

  Viewing austerity as luxury and solitude as distinction, Benda lacked Hannah Arendt’s ambition to be a luminous personage. Arthur Cohen’s 1983 novel An Admirable Woman is at once a tribute to her intellectual resilience and an involuntary satire on her self-righteousness. One of Arendt’s first subjects (and her abiding role model) was the Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, whose ruling ambition, on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was to pass as a great lady in Prussian society. She imagined that beauty, wealth and intelligence would enable her to transcend her Jewishness and be an untrammeled citizen of the world. Arendt’s attempts to provide a universal political logic, and morality, was of a piece with her heroine’s ambition, even as she deplored it. Both women made their mark in the great world but were in the end reconciled, more or less happily, with the irrevocable element of Jewishness in their personalities.

  Benda regarded public reputations and desire for the limelight with cool indifference. He declares, without careerist caution, that he cares little for pictorial art or imaginative literature and everything for truth. A zealot without a cause, Benda scorns religious scheme but cleaves to the dispassionate— “white,” as it were—propositions of science. It is as if he subscribed to Wittgenstein’s gnomic pronouncement, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Roughly speaking, all objects are colorless.” It can be construed, fancifully, to imply that the essential nature of things is monotone; all color is supplied by human perceptions. Buried alive, Julien Benda becomes a blanched aesthete, cleansed even of the Jewishness he acknowledges only, yet willingly, as a genealogical fact, of small weight except to crackpots or dunces. His severe morality entails a distrust of graven images, and their sensual persuasiveness. Rejection of the bitch goddess Success, and of her mascot the golden calf, disposed him to sublime austerity. He lived perforce and by choice in a blanched, nondenominational, one-man ghetto. His La France Byzantine, published promptly after the war, must have been written when he was “buried alive.” It denounces the opportunistic cowardice of “clerks” such as André Gide and Paul Valérydd in tailoring their sentiments to accommodate prevailing fashions during W. H. Auden’s “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s.

  During the Shoah, doctrinal divisions between Christians had a continuing echo. In wartime France, provincial Protestant communities absorbed and hid large numbers of fugitive Jews, despite the official pogroms sanctioned by the predominantly Roman Catholic état français. French Protestants, although indistinguishable, in civil law, from their Catholic fellow citizens, may have been prompted to help Jews by their own long memories of the persecution of the Huguenots by central authority.

  By contrast, Romek Marber remembers that Protestants in his native Poland “were in the main of German origin.” At the outbreak of war, in 1939, they “considered it prudent to stay indoors. Many emerged, only a few days later, wearing swastika arm bands and highly polished jackboots.”9 On the other hand, relations between Polish Jewish factions, in the worst days of their persecution by the Nazis, are said by Christopher R. Browning to have remained “extraordinarily supportive and harmonious,” whether they were “uprooted urban Jews from western Poland” or “beleaguered traditional Jews of south-central Poland.…. Snide or resentful comments about one another.… are totally absent from the postwar testimonies.”10

  It is hard to deny that, while Joseph may have offered little or no military advice or help, he was an objective ally of the Romans, if only in the hope of saving Jewish lives. His conduct as Titus’s Judaean contact somewhat prefigures that of Rudolf Kasztner’s when he negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in Budapest in 1944: Kasztner had the poker player’s nerve, the linguistic skills and the cunning charm to confront Eichmann without cringing. His fluent German and willful ch
utzpah enabled him to make a deal that saved a number of Jews from the transports in which hundreds of thousands of others were consigned to their deaths in Auschwitz and Treblinka. If Kasztner had not made his deal with Eichmann, in which money and jewelry played an alluring part, few, if any, of the almost seventeen hundred Jews he saved would have survived. Among them, however, were Kasztner himself and members of his family. Anyone who has read accounts of his negotiations with the Nazis would have to be a prig or a saint to regard him as a villain. For a while at least, he was a hero. If he had died in Auschwitz, he might have remained one. Budapest was his Jotapata.

  After the war, Kasztner became an official spokesman in the Israeli government. In 1953, he was accused in a pamphlet of having given unduly amiable references to a trio of SS officers accused of war crimes. Kasztner was confident of his vindication when the pamphlet’s author was sued for libel, but the trial turned, slowly, into an indictment of Kasztner himself. He had, the judge concluded, sold his soul to the devil by failing to warn those whom he could not save of what lay ahead. The verdict of the lower court was overturned, after a lengthy appeal, but Kasztner was a broken man, living in unmitigated loneliness. In 1957, he was shot by Zeev Eckstein and died twelve days later. The killing of Jews by Jews is a tradition without end. In 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—a hero of the wars against the Arabs and “the most secular Jew in Israel”—was murdered by a latter-day Zealot who regarded him as a traitor to Jewish exclusivism, a modern Hellenizer, as it were. The murders of both Kasztner and Rabin, by twentieth-century Sicarii, are instances of how the rage that cannot be visited on unreachable enemies can be displaced sideways onto other Jews.

  Hannah Arendt proved that she shared the routine Gentile distaste for nominal slipperinessee by “outing” Theodor Adorno for using his mother’s Latin-sounding name rather than the paternal Wiesengrund, which would have proclaimed his Jewish origins.ff Arendt pinned a yellow star on the philosopher, who, as it happened, was a scathing critic of her quondam lover Martin Heidegger. Adorno had a habit of asserting himself by the severity of his criticisms; he found time, as Paris was falling in 1940, to make caustic remarks about poor Walter Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire; “Jew” sought to dominate Jew even as the Nazis threatened to murder both of them.

  Gentiles have often found it difficult to deny the contributions and even the genius, in the common sense, of some Jews. Not infrequently, even when enlightened, they remain conscious that they are being tolerant, if not condescending. Leibniz’s attitude to “the Jew” Spinoza is a paradigm of the arrogant deference Bertrand Russell later showed to “my German genius,” as he mistakenly identified the young Austrian student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had just arrived at Cambridge. Russell’s somewhat ironic deference to the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus contrasts with the terse skepticism with which A. J. Ayer—a demi-juif issued, like Wittgenstein, from Europe’s haute juiverie—came to treat Russell’s quondam protégé and eventual nemesis, the mature author of Philosophical Investigations.11 If Russell had known that the young Wittgenstein was in truth an Austrian Jew, would he have greeted him as warmly? In his autobiography, Russell sneers at the Semitic origins of the American philosophers who, in the 1920s, welcomed him with guileless effusiveness.

  Wittgenstein’s reluctance to confess his ancestry, and his homosexuality, cannot be held to explain his early philosophical advocacy of reticence or his later, allegedly conservative, attitude to language, in which common usage was held to carry the essence of what things meant; but his skepticism about “private languages” and his uneasy acceptance of professorial eminencegg lie oddly alongside a possessive vanity with regard to his own ideas and status. One of his loudest quarrels was, as might be expected, with a Jewish disciple, Friedrich Waismann, whose emulation of him, in his published work, he read less as homage than as vulgar plagiarism.hh

  In early-twentieth-century Vienna, Karl Kraus had associated journalistic glibness in particular with feuilletons, the elegantly phrased, long-winded articles that were the speciality of Jewish feature writers and appeared regularly in the Neue Freie Presse, the leading Viennese newspaper. For Kraus, such think pieces suffered from “the French disease”; they were apt to dress harsh facts, about death and destruction, in a form tasty enough for bourgeois breakfasts.ii Paul Reitter points out that Gershom Scholem took a similar view: he found structural similarities between journalism and Musivstil, the quotation-oriented genre of medieval Jewish writing.12 Scholem concluded that when Jews become spiritually empty, or “perverted,” they turn to, and thrive in, unoriginal journalismjj (and, he might have added, if alive today, the trendier kinds of cross-disciplinary scholarship). On the same theme, Kraus insisted that there was a specific accent—he called it Mauscheln—that Jews could not eradicate when speaking German and that could be “heard,” so he jeered, at the time of the Dreyfus affair, even in their “gesticulating prose.”kk The assimilationist who tries to get away with it can, Kraus implied, always be “outed.” Is it unduly fanciful to guess that he was subconsciously pointing the finger at himself?ll Franz Kafka denounced the German of acculturated Jews as “the tortured appropriation of foreign property.”mm Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, wrote of the “reckless magnanimity” with which Jews allowed “host countries” to take credit for their work. As Nachmanides learned from Jaime I of Aragon, a Jew may use all his intelligence to play for a draw, but he should never hope to win.

  Karl Kraus crossed the line to become a Catholic and then crossed another (becoming “confessionless”) when he abandoned Catholicism for a spiritual one-man’s-land in which Die Fackel, the periodical he edited and filled with his own work, took no prisoners. Like Joseph ben Mattathias, Kraus thought his countrymen mad, and bad, to go to war. His greatest work, Die Letzen Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), was an immense collage of the grotesqueries of sentimental, high-flown wartime rhetoric juxtaposed with the bloody horror of actual combat in the Great War. It anticipated, and may have primed, Walter Benjamin’s idea of a masterwork that consisted of nothing but a collage—a mosaic, even—of quotations. Endorsing the exorbitant hyperbole of Kraus’s style, Benjamin said that the satirist’s “non-human characteristics make him.… a compelling ‘messenger of real humanism.’ ”13 George Steiner has contrived to find similar qualities in the rabidly anti-Semitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

  In English-language twentieth-century journalism, the grand manner distinguished the feuilletons and think pieces of commentators such as Walter Lippmann, in New York, and Bernard Levin, in London. In the 1950s, the young Levin derided British parliamentarians with unusual virulence, using the consciously reactionary pseudonym “Taper.” His prose often contrived to strike the mordant note to be found in The Letters of Junius or in the essays of the first Lord Halifax. His allusive archaism carried a tincture of self-mockery, but he was liberated by impersonating the grand manner of England’s Augustan Age. In 1959, he wrote in the Spectator that anti-Semitism was obsolete in England. It was a flight of wishful thinking, and Levin retracted it in the face of undeniable evidence about the Cambridge University “Appointments Board.”nn In his later career, Levin liked to prove his (syndicated) independence by milling away left and right. In the early 1960s, he described Charles Clore, a London property magnate, as a “Russian Jew.” By adopting the vocabulary that had once been the reserve of the prejudiced, he hoped to prove that to call someone a Jew was no longer abusive but simply descriptive. When young, Levin had stepped away from his Semitic shadow, but he resumed it in later years, while attacking racist malice in the Soviet Union. At the last, stricken by Alzheimer’s disease, Levin withdrew, with dignity, into the solitary confinement of his disease.

  In his long heyday as the leading thinker at the New York Times, Walter Lippmann effaced his Jewishness by a show of urbane righteousness. His notion of “the public philosophy” discounted the variety of domestic subcultures and proclaimed the need for common, civilized standards.1
4 In 1966, on the eve of retiring from his career as a pundit, he broke ostentatiously with President Lyndon Johnson because, Lippmann declared, the White House had willfully deceived him. Careful to have no trace of a Hebraic accent, he assumed the mantle of an Old Testament prophet, to whom this world’s rulers were more than somewhat answerable.

  a Far-fetched versions of the myth of Atlantis and dreams of its retrieval supplied the subject of Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s last book.

  b See Sumption, The Hundred Years War, vol. 3.

  c He was shot by a seventeen-year-old Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, whose parents had been evicted from their Lubeck house and forced, destitute, across the Polish border. Vom Rath was an anti-Nazi, under observation by the Gestapo, and homosexual. Like Jesus, he became a martyr for a cause he never advocated.

  d This rule supplies the “logic” behind the Iranian ayatollahs’ fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his “blasphemy” in The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989), a text almost certainly more often denounced than read.

  e Even He has been deconstructed by anthropologists, as a conflation of two gods, one of the sky, the other volcanic, whom the Hebrews put together and worshipped as One.

  f As the Christian festival of Palm Sunday celebrates, Christ’s entry into Jerusalem honors a prediction in Zecharaiah (9:9) that the Messiah would ride into the city “on an ass,” i.e., on quite a grand form of transport. Most people walked.

  g As a way of acquiring a faint odor of sanctity, kings and queens of England are institutionalized as heads of the Anglican Church. They also still bear the title of “Defenders of the Faith,” bestowed on Henry VIII by the Roman Catholic pope Clement VII, whose authority Henry later repudiated.