[BRIEF NOTE] Two Sartre excerpts

[rfmcdonald]

The 1995 edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew has a lot of interesting nuggets. Take this one, for instance.

What [the anti-Semite] contemplates without intermission, that for which he has an intuition and almost a taste, is Evil. He can thus glut himself to the point of obsession with the recital of obscene or criminal actions which excite and satisfy his perverse leanings; but since at the same time he attributed them to those infamous Jews on whom he heaps his scorn, he satisfies himself without being compromised. In Berlin, I knew a Protestant in whom sexual desire took the form of indignation. The sight of women in bathing suits aroused him to fury; he willingly encouraged that fury, and passed his time at swimming pools. The anti-Semite is like that, and one of the elements of his hatred is a profound sexual attraction toward Jews (46).

Or, this one.

In a bourgeois society it is the constant movement of people, the collective currents, the styles, the customs, all these things, that in effect create values. The values of poems, of furniture, of houses, of landscapes derive in large part from the spontaneous condensations that fall on this objects like a light dew; they are strictly national and result from the normal functioning of a traditionalist and historical society. To be a Frenchman is not merely to have been born in France, to vote and pay taxes; it is above all to have the use and the sense of these values. And when a man shares in their creation, he is in some degree reassured about himself; he has a justification for existence through a sort of adhesion to the whole of society. To know how to appreciate a piece of Louis Seize furniture, the delicacy of a saying by Chamfort, a landscape of the Ile de France, a painting by Claude Lorraine, is to affirm and to feel that one belongs to French society; it is to renew a tacit social contract with all the members of that society. At one stroke the vague contingency of your existence vanishes and gives way to the necessity of an existence by right. Every Frenchman who is moved by reading Villon or by lo0looking at the Palace of Versailles becomes a public functionary and the subject of imprescriptible rights.

Now a Jew is a man who is refused access to these values on principle. No doubt the worker is in the same predicament, but his situation is different. He can disdainfully reject the values and the culture of the middle class; he can dream of substituting his own. The Jew, he theory, belongs to the very class of people who reject him; he shares their tastes and their way of life. He touches these values but he does not see them; they should be his and they are refused him. He is told that he is blind. Naturally that is false. Are we to believe that Bloch, Crémieux, Suarès, Schwob, Benda understand the great French masterpieces less well than a Christian grocer or a Christian policeman? Are we to believe that Max Jacob was less competency to handle our language than an "Aryan" municipal clerk? Proust, a half-Jew, did he understand Racine only halfway? As between the "Aryan" Chuquet, celebrated for his bad style, and the Jew Léon Bum, which one has understood Stendhal the better?

But it is of no importance that this is an erroneous notion; the fact is that it is a group error. The Jew must decide for himself whether it is true or false; indeed, he must prove it. And yet people will always reject the proof which he furnishes. He may go as far as he wants to understanding a work of art, a custom, a period, a style. What constitutes the truevalue of the object considered, a value accessible only to Frenchmen of the "real France," is exactly that which is beyond and which cannot be expressed in words. in vain may argue about his culture, his accomplishments: it is a Jewish culture; they are Jewish accomplishments. He is a Jew precisely in that he does not even suspect what ought to be understood. Thus an attempt is made to persuade him that the true sense of things must always escape him; there is formed around him an impalpable atmosphere, which is the genuine France, with its genuine values, its genuine tact, its genuine mortality, and he has no part in it. (80-82).