[BRIEF NOTE] Two Sartre excerpts

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).

[LINK] "Jewish icon's son deemed not Jewish"

This article was in the Sunday Star.

Joseph (Yossi) Fackenheim just wants to be an actor. A Shakespearean actor. Instead, the Toronto native is at the centre of a controversy over what it means to be Jewish, and he's reluctantly taking up his famous father's fight.

That's because an Israeli rabbinic court has ruled that, despite being raised Orthodox and having had a bar mitzvah, Fackenheim is not actually Jewish.

[. . .]

Because Joseph's mother was Christian at the time of his birth, he was converted to Judaism as a toddler in Toronto so he could be raised Jewish.

After the elder Fackenheim retired in 1984, the family moved to Israel.

But when Joseph was getting a divorce in Israel last summer, Orthodox Rabbi Yissachar Dov Hagar ruled that he was not Jewish.

In Israel, Orthodox rabbis have control of matters of faith and can rule that if a person is not observant enough after his or her conversion, the conversion was never sincere and is therefore invalid.

Hagar had questioned Fackenheim at length about how often he goes to synagogue, how well he keeps kosher and how he observes Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, with restrictions on food and activity.

Unsatisfied with the young man's answers, Hagar issued a retroactive ruling that Fackenheim was not Jewish and never had been.

"My parents converted me into Orthodox Judaism specifically so that I would not have these problems later on," Fackenheim says.

His case has since gained international attention, vaulting one of Judaism's biggest names into a growing controversy in Israel over what it means to be Jewish and placing Joseph with some 40,000 other disputed conversions.

"I have friends, converts in Israel, who live in fear," Fackenheim says. "It's the end of them."

Hagar refused to grant the younger Fackenheim's divorce, reasoning that because his marriage to a Jewish woman was never valid, no divorce was needed. That left Fackenheim and his ex-wife, Iris, in legal limbo: divorced civilly, but not divorced in the eyes of the faith.

The rabbi eventually relented, somewhat, by adding an attachment to the civil divorce papers referring to Fackenheim as "Yossi the convert" and stating the marriage was void.

While that allowed Fackenheim's ex-wife to get on with her life, it left him as officially a non-Jew unable to remarry within the faith. He is appealing the decision to the Israeli Supreme Court, and filed a letter of complaint to the court ombudsman.

"I don't need them to tell me I'm Jewish," he says. "I am Jewish."

1. One of the things that became clear as a result of the debate on same-sex marriage, in Canada as in other countries, is that state recognition of relationships speaks volumes about the society's acceptance of such relationships.

2. It's worth noting that Israel, a state founded by people fleeing vicious ethnic discrimination, has gone on to create a marriage regime including what amounts to anti-miscegenation marriage laws, with tinges of blood-purity principles besides.

3. Therefore, this regime seems to be fairly popular, additionally evidenced by the fact that it has survived intact since independence. Israel's certainly not alone in supporting bigoted marriage laws--South Africa did until recently, and the rest of the Middle East shares in this prejudice--but still, one would hope for better from a country that positions itself as a Western marcher state.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Muselmänner

While I'm cleaning out old links, I thought I'd point people to S. Parvez Manzoor's essay "Turning Jews into Muslims: The Untold Saga of the Muselmänner", hosted at The American Muslim. This essay examines at length the phenomenon of the Muselmann, a class of people detained in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany who were catastrophically dehumanized by their living conditions.

The most challenging work on the subject, however, is a recent study by the very incisive Italian thinker, Giorgio Agamben (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. (Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen), Zone Books, New York, 1999) that is a very intense philosophical reflection on the seminal moral issues of the Nazi death camp, the signification of testimony and the nature of speech and silence at the crossroads of humanity and inhumanity. It is the source of much information for this inquiry and may even serve for the Muslim reader as the most convenient access to the literature on this subject. It must be borne in mind, however, that Agamben is principally concerned with the most recalcitrant text of the Western ethics of our times and that his arcane reading of this text is no more than a secular refinement of the moral grammar of Judaeo-Christianity. For all the uncanny linguistic resemblance between them and the Muselmänner, Muslims are not part of this reflection. Be that as it may, here is how Agamben’s philosophical vision unmasks the Gestalt of the Muselmann: ‘At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit and an anthropological concept, the Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other. This is why the Muselmann’s “Third Realm” is the perfect cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments flooded.’ (p. 48)

Without doubt, Agamben’s moral reflection on Auschwitz, just as his philosophical thought in general, is worthy of the Muslim’s serious attention. Nevertheless an earnest Muslim encounter with Agamben’s philosophy, as with the moral-theological conundrums of Auschwitz, must await its proper moment. Here, we must continue our search for the image of the Muselmann, as found in the minds of the inmates of Auschwitz, and investigate its linguistic, semantic and cultural background. We must, in other words, carry on where Levi left off. To start with, the linguistic moorings of the term are the easiest to establish: these reproduce the German word for the Muslim, the singular form of which is der Muselmann, and the plural die Muselmänner. The non-Arabic form Musulman (orig. Musliman) however denotes quite simply the Persian plural of the Arabic Muslim and has been the standard term in Iran, Turkey, India and elsewhere. As such, it entered various European languages, and though it is now obsolete in English, it still denotes Muslims in German and French. An alternative suggestion, that Muselmann actually is a distortion of Muschelmann (lit. Mussel-man; a man folded and crouched, as in a shell) has not found much support among the scholars.

Obviously, the semantic significations of the word Muselmann are less certain and more conjectural, though these always abound with prejudicial and pejorative connotations. Here, for instance, is what Ryn and Koldzinski believe is the origin of this epithet: ‘They (the Muselmanns) became indifferent to everything happening around them. They excluded themselves from all relations to their environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion, without bending their knees. They shivered since their body temperature usually fell below 98.7 degrees. Seeing them from afar, one had the impression of seeing Arab praying. This image was the origin of the term used at Auschwitz for people dying of malnutrition: Muselmänner.’ (p. 94) (I have scrupulously avoided translating Muselmänner with ‘Muslims’, or removing other emblems – italics, citation marks – that suggest the alien context and usage of the term. Unfortunately, this is far from the case and even the most conscionable of scholars, Agamben included, do not always observe this simple linguistic distinction and thus fail to accord the minimum of courtesy both to the Muselmänner and to the Muslims.)

[. . .]

Writing more than fifty years after the event, the most sober, knowledgeable and philosophical of the commentators, Giorgio Agamben, has to concede: ‘The most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God. It is this meaning that lies at the origins of the legends concerning Islam’s supposed fatalism, legends which are found in European cultures starting with the Middle Ages (this deprecatory sense of the term is present in European languages, particularly in Italian).’ (p. 45). However, Agamben also notes that the particularly stark and persistent prejudices of the European soul that identify Islamic ‘submission’ with loss of will constitute a travesty of the Muslim’s faith. He accepts that ‘while the Muslims’ resignation consists in the conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even the smallest events, the Muselmann of Auschwitz is defined by a loss of will and consciousness.’ (Ibid.) Still, according to the accepted convention of the camp, only ‘those men who had long since lost any real will to survive …. were called “Moslems” – men of unconditional fatalism.’ (Kogon, Eugen: The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the Systems Behind Them. (Translated by Heinz Norden), Octagon Books, New York, 1979. p. 284.)

My thanks to heraclitus for pointing me in the direction of this concept.