Jews & Uncle Jules

PORTRAIT OF THE ANTI-SEMITE (27 pp.) --Jean-Paul Sarfre, translated by Mary Guggenheim--Partisan Review Series (40-c-).

In this pamphlet, Novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, the leader of the French Existentialist movement, vigorously, often brilliantly, drags a shady topic into the light. He occasionally pushes a sound idea to a silly extreme, e.g.: readers are likely to feel that Author Sartre hits the nail square on the head when he says that the anti-Semite is normally a petty bourgeois who takes "passionate pride" in being "an average man . . . a mediocre person." But they will balk when Sartre goes on to say that "there is no example of an anti-Semite claiming individual superiority over the Jews," or that "there is no anti-Semitism among the workers."

To Sartre (who is not a Jew himself), anti-Semitism is sometimes the mediocre snob's means to a social end. ("Proust showed, for example, how anti-Dreyfusism brought the duke closer to his coachman . . ."). It also makes the French (or U.S.) Jew feel that no matter how hard he tries to be a real Frenchman (or American) he can never really be one--which makes the Gentile feel more like part of the nation's backbone himself.

The anti-Semite, says Sartre, allows the Jews "only as much free will as is necessary to bear the full responsibility of the crimes he commits, but not enough to be able to reform." But the Jew whom he hates so bitterly is simultaneously the man he most depends on, because if he were unable to pin the world's woes on the Jews he would be forced to examine his own failings.

Personality out of Prejudice. Author Sartre concludes his essay with a few sharp words directed at those who are merely "prejudiced" against Jews. Such "secondhand anti-Semites," he avers, tend to feel that way because they feel very little else: anti-Semitic prejudice "allows them to assume the appearance of passion."

"One of my friends often cites the example of an old [relative] who came to dine with his family and about whom they said with a certain air: 'Jules cannot abide the English. . . .'If someone . . . made an allusion to Great Britain or its Dominions, Uncle Jules pretended to go into a fury and felt himself come to life for a moment. Everyone was happy. Many people are anti-Semites in the same way as Uncle Jules was an Anjlophobe. . . . Simple reflections, reeds bent in the wind . . . they are the ones who, in all indifference, insure the survival of anti-Semitism . . . through the generations."

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