Der jüdische Selbsthass (Jewish Self-Hatred)

On the night of August thirtieth, nineteen thirty-three, a trio of Sudeten German Nazi sympathizers fired through the window of the upstairs study where Theodor Lessing was working, in the Villa Edelweiss, the house in Marienbad in which he had taken refuge, and Lessing, who had fled Germany in March and had attended the Zionist Congress in Prague that summer, died the next day, at sixty-one, with the reputation of having been one of the most hated men in Weimar Germany. Three years earlier, he had published Der jüdische Selbsthass, the book that gave modern shape to the idea of Jewish self-hatred and examined the cases of six unhappy Jews, among them Otto Weininger and Arthur Trebitsch, the two who had come to see in Judaism the source of the world’s evil and to feed, with the authority of those who spoke from within, the antisemitism directed at their own people. It was that book that put into circulation the label of the self-hating Jew, which we reach for with a frequency that ought to worry us whenever a Diaspora Jew criticizes Israel.

The label travelled across nearly a century and arrived intact, and ready for use, last October, when the Washington Post published a poll, conducted between September second and ninth among eight hundred and fifteen American Jews, in which sixty-one in every hundred said that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza and thirty-nine said that it had committed genocide, a share that rose to half among those aged eighteen to thirty-four. One of the respondents, Julia Seidman, a forty-two-year-old resident of Washington, told the paper that at the beginning Israel had had no choice, since no country could accept a threat of that size, and that two years on nothing could justify the suffering she was watching, which left her disgusted.

Before deciding what to do with Julia Seidman, the reader may want to know that, in the same questionnaire, ninety-four in every hundred said that Hamas had committed war crimes against Israelis, seventy-six said that Israel’s existence was vital to the future of the Jewish people, and fifty-eight said they felt some cultural or emotional bond with Israelis, which means, as a moment with a pencil will confirm, that at least fifteen in every hundred respondents accused Israel of genocide and declared it indispensable in the same conversation. We would prefer those fifteen to be easier to classify, because Lessing’s label, that of the self-hating Jew, occurs to us before we have finished reading the article, and because it has the enormous advantage of excusing whoever uses it from hearing the rest of the other person’s sentence.

There is no use pretending that we have never used it, or that we have always used it fairly, and when I tried to understand why it comes to us so quickly, I found the outline of a system we have assembled piece by piece, a system in which the foreigner who criticizes Israel is an antisemite, the Diaspora Jew who criticizes Israel hates himself, and the Israeli who criticizes Israel is a traitor, so that every messenger arrives disqualified by category before saying a word and we are excused from listening to any of them. As long as the accusers were almost all strangers, the system worked as a defense, but when the accuser is a Jew who calls Israel indispensable, or a woman who begins by granting that Israel had no choice and ends up sickened by the suffering in Gaza, the disqualification stops protecting anyone at all and begins to amputate a piece of the family we depend on, and it is in their presence, far more than in that of the hostile headlines arriving from so many capitals, that I begin to understand that something is wrong with our relationship with the world, because a system that cannot tell Julia Seidman from Otto Weininger can no longer tell anyone apart.

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the system grew out of real experience and that Weininger and Trebitsch still have successors, Jews who march alongside people who called October seventh an act of resistance and who deny the Jews the right to consider themselves a people, just as it would be naïve to ignore the fact that much of what is said about Israel in the world comes, I suspect, from people who would take no interest in Gaza if the soldiers were not Jewish. The reader who has spent the past few years going down to the shelter in the middle of the night is entitled to that suspicion, which is also mine, and no sensible person would ask us, after the loss of some twelve hundred people in a single day, to receive every accusation as the advice of a friend. Even those successors, however, when they multiply, as prayer groups calling themselves anti-Zionist have multiplied in the United States since the war began, say something about us and not only about themselves,

The trouble is that the label was cut to fit Weininger and Trebitsch, and it hangs very badly on a woman who grants Israel, before any criticism, that it had no choice, and even in Lessing’s own hands the phrase was never a weapon, because he treated that hatred as a historical and psychological phenomenon of Jewish life as a minority in the Diaspora, a wound before it was a fault, with the compassion that any serious diagnosis presupposes. Applied to thirty-nine in every hundred American Jews and to half of their young, the label ends up describing an entire population instead of a pathology, and when half the young people of a community receive the same diagnosis, the sensible doctor begins to suspect his own instrument.

There is a further irony that Lessing might have enjoyed had he been given the time, namely that the man who named the Jew who hates himself spent the last years of his life being treated by German patriots as the German who hated Germany, ever since he published, in nineteen twenty-five, an article against Hindenburg, the field marshal whom the country revered as a saint and who had once been his physician father’s patient, a piece that led nationalist students to besiege his lectures in Hanover until, the following year, the ministry removed him from them. Lessing knew, then, from his own experience, what happens when a wounded nation concludes that the critic within is more dangerous than the enemy without, and I draw no comparison with the Germany of that time when I say that the lesson holds for any people that feels itself besieged.

The reader will ask what is gained by listening to Jews who use, to describe the war, a word he considers a slander, and the most honest answer I have is that listening to them does not oblige us to adopt their vocabulary, much of which we would not sign our names to, but it does oblige us to admit that many of them said two things, as Julia Seidman said two, and that we wanted to hear only one. A country that can hear only the hostile half of its friends’ sentences ends up, over the years, surrounded by nothing but enemies, who at least have the virtue of saying only one thing, and loses along the way the only criticism that came from people who wanted it to last.

Lessing died without seeing the Jews become a majority anywhere in the world, and he would probably have found it strange that, with a country at last, we should have taken to using the label his book put into circulation against those who are troubled by what that country does.

I’m publishing a day after Yom Kippur, which, according to tradition, atones for our transgressions against heaven but not for those against our fellow human beings until we have asked those people themselves for forgiveness, and it seems to me that the task does not end with the blast of the shofar at the close of the fast.