20 SEPTEMBER 1968, Page 14

Sartre . on the Jews

A. J. AYER

Aden-Arabie Paul Nizan with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre translated by Joan Pink- ham (Monthly Review Press 50s) Anti-Semite and Jew Jean-Paul Sartre trans- lated by George J. Becher (Schocken Books New York/Bailey Bros 38s and 14s) Nizan's Aden-Arabie was written in the 1920s. It was his first book and his first expression in print of the revolt against bourgeois values which led him to place his faith in communism. Nizan was killed in battle in 1940, having broken publicly with the French Communist party, of which he had been a devoted member, on the occasion of the Nazi-Soviet pact. The French communists never forgave him and made every effort to blacken his memory. Hold- ing a strong position after the war in intellec- tual politics, they were able also to suppress his work. It was not until 1960 that Sartre, who was Nizan's contemporary and clotest friend at school and at the Ecole Normale, was able to persuade a publisher to reissue Aden-Arabie with a preface by himself which is in effect a memoir of Nizan and a defence of his charac- ter. This book now appears in English for the first time. The translation, unlike that of Sartre's book on anti-semitism, is somewhat heavy-handed. Fortunately, the interest both of Nizan's monograph and of Sartre's preface lies rather in their content than their style.

Aden-Arabie is ostensibly a travel-book. At the age of twenty, Nizan left the Ecole Nor- male for a year, to take up a tutoring job in Aden. The book, which runs to barely a hundred pages, is an account of this excursion. In fact, it says very little about Aden or Arabia. Such local colour as it gives us is mainly used to illustrate the author's view of life. The moral of the book is that travel, even to the legendary East, is no escape from the boredom and futility of the average man's exis- tence. It is not the key to freedom. The life of the successful businessman in Aden is as empty and unreal as that of his counterpart in Paris. The colonial officials, whether French or English, are as hollow a set of puppets as the professors at the Ecole Normale.

These are not very startling conclusions. What gives the book a certain topical interest is that Nizan's reactions foreshadow those of many of the participants in contemporary student revolts. Like them, he wants to find some meaning in life : like them, he rejects the values of the affluent or would-be affluent society: like them, he refuses to compromise : like them, he looks to revolution rather than reform. The main difference is that he was young at a time when it was still possible to believe that the way to promote the revolution, give meaning to one's life and still remain true to one's moral standards was to work within the Communist party. When he lost this illusion, he became very bitter. Sartre thinks that he probably should not have left the com- munists, and that if he had lived the Resistance would have restored him to their ranks. Even so, it is hard to envisage his remaining there. He seems to have had too much integrity for that.

A special factor in Nizan's case, according to Sartre, was that his father, a railway en- gineer, had made his way up from the working class. Sartre says that Nizan, who identified strongly with his father, thought of this as a betrayal and took the guilt upon himself. Most of Sartre's preface, indeed, is devoted to ex- plaining Nizan's character and behaviour in terms of his emulation of his father, in old age a solitary, disillusioned man, oppressed by the fear of death, and the conflict in him between his father's scientific positivism and his mother's narrow Catholic piety. Such theories are notoriously hard to check, but Sartre makes this sound plausible in relation to the evidence which he supplies.

In this preface, the existentialist note is not detectable. On the other hand, in Sartre's re- flections on the Jewish question, which were produced in the full tide of his commitment to existentialism, it is very much to the fore. Thus anti-semitism is represented not simply as the nurturing of a prejudice against a particular group of people, but as the choice of a way of life. It is 'a comprehensive attitude that one adopts not only towards Jews but towards men in general, towards history and society : it is at one and the same time a passion and a con- ception of the world.' The anti-semite is one who feeds on hatred, one who glories in his own mediocrity, one for whom property is measured not by the possession of goods but by attachment to the soil, one who fears intelli- gence, and denigrates it in favour of an intuition of the blood. The reasons which he may give for hating Jews are entirely specious. His hostility to them is not based on any rational assessment of their characteristics or provoked by any harm that they have actually dorie him. It is merely the indulgence of his passion. He needs the Jews not only to provide his aggres- siveness with an object but to secure his self- esteem. The mere fact of not being a Jew assures him of his own superiority.

Sartre was writing just after the war and his picture of the anti-semite is that of the rank- and-file nazi. It could indeed be a picture of any type of racialist. If he had been speaking about colour-prejudice, he could have said the same. The most valuable point which he brings out is that prejudice of this sort gives to its possessor a feeling of superiority which he need not do anything to earn. From this point of view, it is indifferent how the persecuted group is formed: all that is necessary is that its mem- bers be marked by some stigma, such as colour or Jewishness, of which it is impossible that they should divest themselves.

This is not, however, the whole story of anti- semitism. What is lacking in Sartre's essay is any serious attempt to account for its special features or to explain, on historical or other grounds, why it is more deeply rooted in cer- tain countries, and how its manifestations take different forms in different places and at different periods. Not all anti-semites conform to Sartre's nazi stereotype; and those who do conform to it may not in all cases be more than potential anti-semites. As so often with Sartre, the method is Cartesian. Deductions are made from first principles. We are not given any empirical evidence to convince us that the theory does justice to all the facts.

The same criticism can be made of what Sartre says about the Jews themselves. For him, a Jew is one who is so regarded. The charac- teristics which he attributes to Jews are characteristics which they derive from their being forced to belong to a persecuted group. The explanation for the fact that Jews tend to be rationalists is that reason conforms to uni- versal standards: this means that they are not barred by their Jewishness from access to any form of truth. They become rationalists 'in order to fight the particularist conceptions that set them apart.'• Sartre takes the same line with respect to 'the Jew's special relationship to money.' Historically the reason why Jews became usurers in the middle ages is that they were forbidden to engage in other professions; but this is not enough for Sartre. He argues that what attracts Jews to money is its power of purchase and this not so much because of any luxury that it enables them to enjoy as because 'property by purchase is an abstract and uni- versal form of proprietorship.' In a world in which value is defined by money, the Jew is not excluded.

In existentialist fashion, Sartre characterises those Jews who try in these ways to nullify their Jewishness as choosing to be inauthentic. He says that he does not intend his use of the word 'inauthentic' to carry any moral implica- tions, but he also makes it clear that he has more respect for Jews who choose to be authentic, that this is the attitude which he wishes them to adopt. This may sound reason- able, until we consider all that it implies. It is not just a matter of not being ashamed of one's Jewishness. The authentic Jew, for Sartre, is one who 'wills himself as a historic and damned creature.' He knows that he is one who stands apart, untouchable, scorned, proscribed, and it is as such that he asserts his being.' This is all very romantic, but it is also very silly. There is nothing especially genuine about glorifying in being a victim. To say, as Sartre does, that once a Jew freely consents to his condition the anti-semite cannot touch him is simply false. Martyrdom, by being accepted, does not cease to be martyrdom.

This being Sartre's position, it is not sur- prising that he has no solution for what he calls the Jewish problem, apart from the idea of creating an organisation of Gentiles to com- bat anti-semitism. He does not think that the Jews themselves can do anything much about it. In fact, there are two current solutions: Zionism, which leads to the Jew's becoming a member of a nation-state, on a level with other nation-states, and assimilation, which leads to his ceasing to 'stand apart' in the country of which he is a citizen. These solutions are complementary rather than incompatible. The relation of the assimilated Jew to Israel might come to resemble that of some Americans to the countries from which their ancestors emigrated.

Sartre has nothing to say about Zionism, beyond remarking that it creates difficulties for the majority of French Jews, who prefer to remain in France. Of assimilation, he says dogmatically that under present conditions it cannot be successful. But here again his Car- tesianism leads him astray. The factors which militate for or against assimilation are very complex. They are not the same in all coun- tries, or in the same country at different times. A great deal depends on the attitude of the Jews themselves: whether, for example, they are prepared to marry Gentiles. In fact, there are many cases in which assimilation has been successful, to the point where the Jewish strain in a family has ceased to be remarked. But this does not suit Sartre's book. His Jews, no less than his anti-semites, are bound to a stereotype. For all the intellectual brilliance of his essay, its argument is vitiated by his disdain of an em- pirical approach.