A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  h Christians appropriated this notion of divine chastisement to their own case. In Divided Houses, the third volume of his history of the Hundred Years’ War, Jonathan Sumption reports that when the last great crusading army was wiped out by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid at Nicopolis, Philippe de Mézières, its organizer, concluded that the “desconfiture lacrimable” (pathetic disaster) was God’s punishment of the chivalry of France for its moral failings. The Vichy government of France took much the same line after the humiliation of 1940 and made “redressement national” (national resurrection) the pious excuse for anti-Semitic legislation that exceeded anything that the Nazis had yet enacted. Charles Maurras, the monarchist intellectual who had long advocated the elimination of the Jews and whose Catholicism was too robust for the pope, termed the defeat a “divine surprise.” God had looked after His own.

  i A lover of Greek and Roman antiquities, Freud made the Carthaginian Hannibal his personal totem. The fetishization of the man who almost destroyed Rome stood in for the author whose The Future of an Illusion cast doubt on, in particular, Roman Catholicism, whose followers were prominent among Vienna’s anti-Semites. One of Freud’s papers makes much of an anonymous patient’s inadequate memory of Dido’s line in the Aeneid “Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor” (“Let some avenger arise from my bones”). Hannibal and Sigmund were Semitic allies under the skin.

  j Hitler’s preferred philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, wrote The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the flabbiest pseudo-intellectual testament of anti-Semitism; the work of Carl Schmitt was the best-argued. For Schmitt, see The Concept of the Political, translated by George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; expanded edition 2006, with an introduction by Tracy B. Strong).

  k The primacy of universalization is now applied to “human rights,” just as the ecologists’ quasi-deification of Gaia is a metastasis of monotheism. Where Spinoza offered the equivalence “Deus sive natura,” the Greens choose nature and make its presumed commandments the creed they claim to be unquestionable. As with the Stoics, the cosmos itself becomes a ubiquitous temple. Man is always trying to rebuild the Tower of Babel with the aid of a common, unaccented creed.

  l The promotion of Carl Jung to the status of favorite son, in order to advertise the cross-denominational nature of Freud’s “science,” generated an Oedipal drama that could only remind the “father” of psychoanalysis of how different small differences could be.

  m Béla Szabados (Wittgenstein Reads Weininger) says that Wittgenstein was indignant to discover that Sex and Character was lodged in a part of the Cambridge University Library inaccessible to undergraduates. He was, however, unsurprised when G. E. Moore failed to admire the book, but he maintained that it deserved to be taken seriously, even if it was wise to put a ~ (the logical symbol for negation) in front of Weininger’s whole thesis. There were, Wittgenstein implied, interesting ways of being wrong.

  n The positivists’ relegation of “morals” to matters of personal opinion was, by coincidence, much to the hedonistic taste of both Ayer and his maître-à-penser Bertrand Russell. The commandments of revealed religion were relegated to mere fetishes. Freud put his patients on the couch; modern philosophers have shown an aptitude for joining their pupils there.

  o A few Jews, mostly female and intimately linked with Nazi grandees, were granted honorary Aryan status, which allowed them to escape the Shoah. This, it could be said, was an extreme version of the Romanized status granted to Joseph ben Mattathias by the Flavians. The Nazis burned many books by Jews, but Hitler and Goebbels were admirers of the works of Edward Bernays (1891–1995), the German-born Jewish American pioneer of the mass-selling techniques that lay behind Hitler’s notion of the potency of “the Big Lie.”

  p In retrospect, the famous concluding line of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should keep silent,” could be said to acquire a Josephan ring: Wittgenstein’s reticence implies, without overt declaration, what its author really is.

  q “Philosophy,” Wittgenstein said, “leaves everything as it is.”

  r Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, p. 29. Kraus himself had inherited copious private means and, having made a rich marriage, was able to publish his own newspaper without making polite, or circulation-conscious, compromises.

  s Here, in a nutshell, is the abiding charge against Hannah Arendt: she deduced specific human behavior, especially that of Adolf Eichmann, from an a priori scheme of her own devising. Her (partial) observations of the Eichmann trial were literally prejudiced by her proprietary analysis of “totalitarianism.”

  t So-called therapeutic positivism made a bridge between Freud and the Vienna Circle by encouraging metaphysicians to “tell us more” until they cured their own “mental cramps.” There is no long record of successful cures.

  u Primo Levi nevertheless shows some contempt for an attractive young fellow inmate of Auschwitz, whom he calls only “Henri,” who crosses the moral line by making himself sexually available, and attractive, to his jailers. As an old man, “Henri” came out and wrote a book in which, with dignified force, he defended his actions in order to stay alive as beyond any kind of moral assessment. Since he had not betrayed anyone else, he owed no one any account of his tactics. Somewhat like Joseph ben Mattathias, he claimed that he did only what he had to do to beguile his captors, although he did not cite God’s will (or absence) in his defense.

  v Herzl’s notion of a communal solution to the existential angst of the Diaspora Jew is typically journalistic; agitprop was his medium. The artist in Schnitzler knew that a true writer had to endure his individuality, just as the doctor in Schnitzler knew that there was no cure for it, no Lourdes for Jews.

  w Did he smile wryly at the news of his daughter’s marriage to an Italian Fascist or did he greet it with the bitterness with which, in Jonathan Miller’s 1974 production, Shylock threw Jessica’s clothes on the floor on learning that his daughter had “married out”? Miller “outed” himself, to some degree, in the famous and witty line, in Beyond the Fringe, when he claimed that he was no more than Jewish: he didn’t, he explained, go the whole hog.

  x Schnitzler can be acquitted of criticizing Kraus to get his own back. At the outbreak of the Great War, Schnitzler was alone among Austrian celebrity writers in escaping Kraus’s scorn for those who yielded to war fever. Like Kraus, Schnitzler attributed public enthusiasm to “failure of the imagination”—as Josephus had the Jerusalem Jews’ appetite for war with Rome. See Timms, vol. 2, p. 300.

  y The divided self is not a Jewish monopoly, but the comedy particular to Jews is that they are torn between craving Gentile applause and despising themselves for the desire. Self-hatred can be the dark side of the self-esteem that dares not speak its name. Jews who have already achieved respectability (or imagined immunity from anti-Semitism) cannot be relied on to welcome less comely cousins. Yet Christian fathers, philosophers of history, politicians and ideologists regularly postulate conspiratorial unity among “the Jews.” Duplicity has then to be wished on them to account for their loud divisions, which are taken to be camouflage. To preserve their mythical status as a diabolical Other, all Jews, however superficially diverse, are depicted as essentially “the same.”

  z It was conducted with conspicuous malice by Teller, who sought to benefit from the climate of scarcely surreptitious anti-Semitism displayed by Senator McCarthy and his team, in which Roy Cohn, both a Jew and a crypto-homosexual, was a key player. See American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Ray Monk’s forthcoming biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (of which I have seen only a small section in a draft) promises fresh observations on his subject’s attitude to and relations with Jews and Jewishness.

  aa It is remarkable, though rarely remarked, that while several survivors of the camps are known to have committed suicide, often many years after the events they witnessed and the horrors they endured, there is no l
ong list of concentration camp guards or SS officials who found it impossible to live with the memories of their actions. It seems that it is more unendurable to have seen certain kinds of things than to have done them. Innocence, or impotence, can be harder to live with than guilt.

  bb Noam Chomsky, Jacqueline Rose, the late Harold Pinter and similar moral zealots tend to regard Israel, in particular, in the light of universal virtues that have nothing to do with the contingent circumstances of their advocates. Hence, it is claimed, there is no treachery when a Jew signs up to the humiliation and—with a proud and woeful nod—advocates the destruction of the State of Israel.

  cc Dorothy Parker, an archetypal Algonquin wit, said that she was, in truth, just one more smart Jewish girl who wanted to attract attention.

  dd See, for instance Valéry’s banal eulogy of Marshal Pétain on the latter’s election to the Académie Française, in 1931. Official obfuscation could hardly be more harmlessly or, for a purist such as Benda, more creepily displayed.

  ee Until very recently, applications for membership of country clubs and golf clubs, in Britain and the United States, routinely demanded that the candidate declare “name of father, if changed.”

  ff In fact, both his parents had converted to Christianity.

  gg The emblematic open-necked shirt announced that he was a man who disdained formal ties.

  hh As for himself, Wittgenstein said, “I don’t believe I have ever invented a single line of thinking. I have always taken over from someone else.…. What I invent are new similes.” But then modesty too has its ironies.

  ii Edward Timms, in Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (vol. 1), exemplifies how Kraus’s criticism of Jewish journalists could be couched in savage terms: “The blood they [the Jews] have was not siphoned from the body of a Christian, but rather from the human intellect.” This was written at a time when Leopold Hilsner, a Jewish shoemaker from Polna, had just been convicted of killing a Christian girl for her blood and was sitting in an Austrian jail. Kraus denounced “this hideous, inane feeling of Jewish solidarity [and] particularist narrowness.” In the latter regard and in modern dress, Jacqueline Rose seconds him.

  jj Jakob Wassermann, in Von Judentum (1913), denounced the Jewish “literatus” as a “concentrated cipher for the losses resulting from Jewish integration into modern western societies,” claiming that the Jew as an “Oriental,” in the mythic sense, can be a creator. The “literatus” (the journalist, in particular) is “the person who had been separated from myth,” hence the antipode of the creative Jew. (See Timms, Karl Kraus, vol. 2, p. 11.) By implication, Josephus stands at the head of the list of the “Occidentalized” transplants on whom Zionists can elect to heap ritual scorn. Self-loathers, it is said, produce only the perishable, and write in newspaper ink.

  kk The poetry of Jews was not spared his barbs: Kraus said of Heine that he had “loosened the corsets of the German language so that every little salesclerk could fondle her breasts.” (Timms, Karl Kraus, vol. 1, p. 97.)

  ll By deriding the style of (Jewish) journalistic reaction to the trials of Dreyfus, rather than concentrating on the innocence of the accused, Kraus himself exemplified what he detested in feuilletonists: the habit of reporting on the color and aura of an event rather than confronting the substantial issue. He was, however, more outspoken in 1922, after Walter Rathenau was assassinated and Kraus’s onetime inspiration and recent rival, Maximilian Harden, was almost beaten to death by right-wing thugs. However, Kraus could not resist remarking that Harden had been foolish not to watch out for his safety, despite the frequent threats: “Where a critic can make good use of bravery is [behind] a desk.” (Timms, Karl Kraus, vol. 1, p. 176.)

  mm At the end of The Trial, Josef K. is finally put to death “like a dog,” which sounds like putting down an unwanted stray, but the image recalls Otto Weininger’s equation of “dog” and “criminal.”

  nn Its “secretaries” kept files on those seeking employment after graduation. Their comments showed systematic and unguarded scorn for anyone who looked Jewish, even if he was “the refined kind.” This applied not only to students but also to potential employers who informed the board of possible vacancies.

  XIX

  IF LEO STRAUSS was right in saying that the language of the Jews was “strictly communal,” then the fact that Josephus used the first person singular was an immediate breach of faith. When “meaning in history, meaning of the past, and the writing of history” are linked in the Bible, the book and its reading are implicated in a social web with barbed limits. In the refashioned Judaism that survived the Second Temple, Yosef Yerushalmi says, “collective memory is transmitted more actively through ritual than through chronicle.”1 Tradition is repetitious, by definition, not progressive; it arrests the way of life which it prolongs. Its observers can have nothing to do with the “public happiness” that the Americanized Hannah Arendt advertised as the proper aim of a nondenominational, securalized society. Like so many German scholars who sentimentalized the daily life of ancient Greece, she was pleased to claim that the Greek polis (never Jerusalem) was the emblematic instance of happy times.a

  In the Middle Ages, the Jewish tendency to retreat into a timeless spiritual ghetto, with no active attempt to mesh with Gentile life, afforded Christian apologists a chance for fabrication and misrepresentation to which, for various reasons, there was no hot response. Failure to strike back looked like cowardice and a confession of guilt. Yet it is no more true that passivity and sufferance were always the Jewish reflex than that all of them went like sheep to their deaths in the Shoah.b

  Leo Strauss, who took competitive issue with Hannah Arendt,c was another modern mutation of Joseph ben Mattathias. He left Germany on the eve of the Nazi takeover, having been the star student of Carl Schmitt, a philosopher who had the ugly consistency never to disengage from his endorsement of National Socialism.d Once established in the American academic world, Strauss made duplicity the emblem of integrity. He did not ignore mass democracy, as Arendt did; he deplored it. Modernity was the destroyer of “all authoritative traditions of value” and was as good as “defection from the thinking of classical natural law.”2

  Strauss was a Pharisee, of a kind, who was also a Hellenist. He wished to revert not to the Torah but to Plato. The vitality of Western civilization came, in his view, from the unfinished, unfinishable play-off between theology and philosophy. Contradiction and dialogue were the fruitful issue of their unceasing rallies. Incompleteness was of the essence of any civilization worth living in. How can there be progress in what is taken to be perfect? “The Western tradition,” he said, “does not allow a final solution of the fundamental contradiction.…. As long as there will be a Western world, there will be theologians who distrust philosophers and.… philosophers who are annoyed by theologians. While rallying round the flag of the Western tradition, let us beware of the danger that we be charmed or bullied into a conformism which would be the inglorious end of it.”3

  Jürgen Gebhardt synopsizes the Straussian intellectual project as “a restitution of the historical [pre-Christian] form of Western civilisation.… the city of man set against the modern project of the universal and tyrannical state which aims to eliminate the city as well as Man.”4 It is in this sublime playground that Strauss and Josephus play tag. Uprooted intelligences, men not quite at home, albeit formally enfranchised, they were partial citizens who took it upon themselves to rise above private circumstances to survey what neither presumed to control. Strauss dared to be more prescriptive than Josephus; he lived under Franklin Roosevelt and his successors, not under Vespasian and the Flavians. Strauss and his peers, despite their differences, were products of “the coincidence of Jewish and European origins.” Their academic tilts are evidence of their having taken the high road out of the abyss on their way to engaging, in tenured security, with “the Jewish problem.”

  Walter Benjamin said that “writing history is only possible in the form of exploratory models.” He claimed
that there was “no longer.… a law connecting past and present. It is no more possible to explain the course of modern history conclusively by referring to constellations of the past than it is to preclude the incursion of something radically new in [the future].”e Gebhardt glosses this to mean that there can be no “evolutionary notion of progress or theory of linear decline.” Benjamin has become emblematic as a tragic figure, at once clairvoyant and blinkered, the diagnostician whose only kill-and-cure prescription for himself was the poison he took, in 1940, in that squat, charmless hotel in Portbou, on the Spanish side of the frontier between France and Spain.

  Arthur Koestler, another mutation of Josephus, said later that Benjamin was carrying fifty morphine tablets. He gave half to Koestler, who feared both the Gestapo and the Spanish Fascists, who had sentenced him to death, in Málaga, in the spring of 1937. He had been reprieved thanks to his precocious international fame. Having escaped from Portbou in 1940 (after a period of internment in France), Koestler had the energy and resources to get to England, where he wrote at least two important books, Scum of the Earth and Darkness at Noon, as well as the first account in English of the extermination of Europe’s Jews.f

  Koestler taught himself to write precise English, although its composition was always tortuous.g After the foundation of the State of Israel—which he celebrated, in his way, in his 1946 novel Thieves in the Night—Koestler advocated an abrupt end to the doubleness that was typical, in some eyes, of the Diaspora. Jews, he said, should now choose between immigration to the Jewish state and wholehearted assimilation with those among whom they lived (he chose to become a patriotic British subject). More razor-edged than practical, the proposal never considered the hyphenate solution, which has allowed all kinds of people—Jews, African-Americans, Hispanics, Irish—to celebrate ancestral allegiances and reconcile their complexity rather than to amputate them.