Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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in expecting someone both to retain the aesthetic feeling of his body and also to make the tumour welcome.31
Let us look more closely at these remarks. When both Wittgenstein and Hitler proclaim, in an eerily harmonious chorus, that Jews cannot but be regarded by a nation as a disease, neither, it seems to me, can be regarded as making an empirical claim. Rather, as David Nirenberg’s historical analysis of what he calls “anti-Judaism” would suggest, both are exploring the internal logical structure of a complex myth. Wittgenstein says at one point in the passage cited earlier that one cannot expect a nation to tolerate the diseased state constituted by the presence of Jews, because “it is only a nation by virtue of not disregarding such things.” Not merely does this fail as an observation capable of persuading by its conformity with empirical evidence; it is not even faintly sensible. Why should the Jews be regarded as the agents of a spiritual disease fatal to the integrity of a nation, or perhaps as constituting the disease itself, when no European nation possesses historically the cultural and spiritual integrity presumed by these remarks of Wittgenstein’s? Why do the French not regard the Basques or the Bretons, or the English the Welsh, or the Scots the Orcadians or the Hebrideans as carriers of a spiritual disease? Perhaps it is because, in Wittgenstein’s terms, the former do not constitute (or perhaps do not yet constitute) nations or “real nations”? But if that is Wittgenstein’s answer, then it becomes clear that we are dealing here at best with a pair of arbitrary redefinitions of the terms disease and nation. Neither the experience of the Jew as a sort of disease nor the nation that must, according to Wittgenstein, “experience” Jews in this way are, in short, empirical realities. Rather, they are merely correlative poles within the arbitrary structure of mutually defining notions that serve to constitute the metaphor of “the Jew” as a form of cultural disease: notions provided with the appearance of sense and reference, that is to say, not by their correspondence with anything real but merely by the conventionally established relationships in which they stand to one another.
THE “DISEASE” METAPHOR AND ITS MOTIVATION
The analogy between the healthy state and the healthy human person is a common enough trope of Western political philosophy. Plato begins it with the analogy between the city and the soul in book 4 of the Republic. Analogies between the organization of the state and that of the body are to be found throughout the subsequent history of Western thought, in Cicero, John of Salisbury, Hobbes, Herbert Spencer, and many others. The idea that the healthy state is analogous to the healthy body is commonplace in such thinking, and since the analogical “organs” of the state are necessarily made up of subsets of its citizens, it is also commonplace for the deranged state to be explained in terms of the moral derangement of the citizens who make up such groupings. In Hamlet, Marcellus’s “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is directly motivated by Claudius’s drunken revelry: the state is rotten not least because of the bodily vices of its present king.
In the bulk of such analogies, however, the individuals who constitute the disease of the state are in the full sense citizens of the state whose health their activities threaten. This is of course exceptionally true of Claudius, who, whatever his vices, is not merely a Dane but the Dane. Those citizens whose conduct threatens the health of the Platonic ideal city are Greeks and citizens like anybody else. When the Jews are, as Wittgenstein puts it, “experienced as a disease,” that is no longer the case. It is essential to the metaphor as a trope of antisemitism that the Jew, whatever his passport may say, is not a “real” citizen of the country that he affects as his own but an alien interloper.
This changes the whole force of the metaphor. It is no longer a matter, as it were, of an illness native to the body of the state: something analogous, say, to a failing heart valve or an ankle sprained through the foolhardiness of its owner. Rather, it is a matter of an invasion by some organism altogether alien to the body or institution it invades—as if the Jews were analogous to an infection of bacilli or trypanosomes in the bloodstream, or to rats in the walls of a hospital. T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” famously contains an expression of the latter image that many have found offensive: “The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot.”
That is, the function of the metaphor is no longer to dramatize the idea that some flaw native to the state needs to be set right. On the contrary, its function is to dramatize the idea that the state in itself is without flaw: or would be if it were not for the activities of people who, while they may seem to belong to it as citizens, are in fact wholly alien to it.
The third of the questions raised in the last section but one was, in effect, cui bono: who benefits or profits from spreading the message of political antisemitism? The answer suggested by the foregoing thoughts would seem to be, anyone who has a vested interest in representing the social problems and vices of the age, not as inherent in the societies they disfigure but rather as due to an alien infestation that as such is capable of cure, provided only that sufficiently vigorous measures are taken against it. And if one looks around for people who might satisfy that description, it is tempting to locate them within any ruling group with a vested interest in preventing popular discontent from impacting it or its members.
Certainly, such an analysis seems to fit the National Socialist Party in the period 1933–45. On the one hand, there is the need to project both the party and the Third Reich as the expression of everything that is healthy, strong, energetic, and masculine in the German volk. On the other hand, there is the equally pressing need to represent any acts of the party to which domestic objections might be raised, up to and including war, as measures made necessary by the need to protect the Aryan moral and spiritual purity of the nation against a malign alien force striving constantly to corrupt them: to wit, international Jewry and the world Jewish conspiracy. Hitler’s speeches abound in images of the Jews as disease: “All that which is for men a source of higher life … is for the Jew merely the means to an end, namely, the satisfaction of his lust for power and money. … His action will result in the tuberculosis of peoples.”32 “For hundreds of years, Germany was good enough to receive these elements [the Jews], although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical diseases.”33
National Socialism was, of course, only one among the many European movements, over the entire period separating us from the ancient world, that have based their claims to power upon a claim to possess a unique capacity to restore society to political, social, and spiritual health. All such movements share with Nazism the need to explain away tendencies in society (private property, for instance, or working-class unrest, or religious dissent) that on the one hand can be made to seem inconsistent with whatever notion of social health the movement in question exists to peddle but that on the other hand are far too deeply rooted in the fabric of everyday human life to suit the political and ideological convenience of the movement.
Therefore, if our analysis of the functions of the metaphor of the Jews as disease is correct, then we should expect the discourse of political antisemitism to appear tempting to any movement aiming at political, social, moral, or spiritual renovation, when that movement finds itself faced with the need to explain away, as externally imposed, social phenomena threatening to its program of redemption that are in fact wholly internal to the society it proposes to redeem.
And that, in fact, is what we find. We have already noted one such example, drawn from Nirenberg: Luther’s transition from seeing Protestant “Judaizers” as a threat to his own conception of reformation to seeing real Jews as the real source of that threat. In the case of the philosophes—Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, whose ideas led to the French Revolution—Nirenberg’s discussion is similarly suggestive. He notes that at a time when actual Jewish settlement in France was negligible, the terms Jews and Judaism occur with remarkable frequency in the discourse of the philosophes. Nirenberg suggests acutely that the idea of “Jews” and “Jewishness,” even in the absence of actual exemplars of either, served the philosophes as a means of conceptualizing the limits of their conception of Enlightenment. In the imagination of the philosophes, Nirenberg argues, the Jews, in their extraordinary resistance to conversion, and the strength of their commitment to what was seen as an antiquated and obscurantist superstition, represented the