Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

Hatred, to be sustained as an ongoing relationship, is always an attempt by the hater to deal with the humiliating and frustrating conditions of his own existence. The hater is attempting to resolve an internal conflict and requires the victim population to facilitate his displacement and rationalization. The only reason for examining victim populations is to find clues as to how they serve the unconscious machinations of the haters.

Still, the question remains in some minds whether there might not be legitimate grounds for hatred in which the victim shares responsibility. When we deal with group hatreds, we are often offered authentic grounds as rationalizations, particularly where there is a historic record of some barbaric action on the part of the victimized population. Time heals most of those wounds. Most Serbs did not spend their days obsessing about the genocidal assaults of the Croats in World War II. Even though a historic enmity had been established, both groups lived together as Yugoslavs. Of course hostilities remained, particularly since the atrocities were committed during the lifetime of the living generation. This hostility was readily capable of being revived in the power struggles that followed the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Savage acts of hatred erupted, but under the stimulus and exploitation of a ruling group that found ready usage for such hatred.

Lazare, treading lightly as a Jew in a virulently antisemitic France, started his study with the contributions that the Jews may have made to antisemitism, although he then followed with a broad historic indictment of the bigots. As a product of a bigoted society, he did buy into antisemitic generalizations, as would his fellow student of French antisemitism, Jean-Paul Sartre a half century later.68 Still, he assumed that something in the manner of Jews invites hatred.

Lazare asked: “Which virtues or which vices have earned for the Jew this universal enmity: Why was he ill-treated and hated alike and in turn by the Alexandrians, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and the Christian nations: Because, everywhere up to our own days the Jew was an unsociable being.”69

What did Lazare mean by this and what was the validity of his observation? He was observing correctly that the Jews in the Diaspora were a ubiquitous and generally unassimilated presence. Edward I in 1290 could make England the earliest Judenrein (Jew-free) country in Europe precisely because the Jews were a readily identifiable community within the larger one. They looked different and they behaved differently. One hardly would think to blame these thirteenth-century Jews for their “unsociability,” unless one understands the argument Lazare used when he defined the term.

“Unsociability” as used by Lazare means the failure to adapt to the culture of the majority, not unfriendliness or rejecting behavior. In that argument he found three roots for the refusal of most Jews to assimilate: First, Jews do not submit to the rules of the conqueror the way other subject populations have, where a clear line existed between their “religious teachings which had come from the gods, and their civil laws.”70

Judaism, unlike most other religions, is not simply a theological credo, but a set of civil laws that prescribe everyday rules for hygiene, morality, managing properties, conditions for worship and sacrifice. Obedience to these laws is not a choice but demanded by God. To maintain religious identity, the Jew must remain secularly isolated and distinguishably different, in conduct as well as appearance, from those around him or her.

Second, Lazare notes that Talmudic tradition sustains these civil injunctions through Halachic rule, the tradition insisting that observant Jews follow a prescribed code of conduct, thus resisting assimilation to the modes of the dominant civilization. To violate Talmudic tradition in any of its details is not stubbornness, it is a breach of covenant with the Lord.

Third, in the religious tradition of the landless Jews, the image of Jerusalem haunted them, demanding a return and making every other home and place a temporary one. Nothing is more destructive of grand theory than the working of time and history. Nineteenth-century France was the reality under which Lazare lived and set the conditions for his observations. Things changed in the twentieth century. The increasing pluralism of less homogeneous democracies such as the United States—while still not free of bigotry—offered latitude for diverse beliefs of an unparalleled nature. The emergence of Reform Judaism, born in nineteenth-century Germany, ironically, cast off many of the Talmudic codes of behavior, allowing for an extent of Jewish assimilation in the twentieth century not imaginable in the nineteenth. But to what avail? The new conditions allowed the German Jew to consider himself a German first and a Jew as a modifying subclass, that is, a Jewish German, but he would still be perceived by the Nazis as just another Jew who must be tortured and exterminated.

Later, the establishment of the state of Israel and the emergence of additional liberal forms of Judaism would completely destroy Lazare’s third argument. Modern Jews in droves abandoned the messianic vision. They do not see redemption of their souls as requiring their presence in Jerusalem. Most modern Jews, not followers of an orthodoxy, replaced the idea of messianic redemption with the liberal cultural idea of leading a moral life. Certainly this was the case with the German Jews, who felt the first blows of the Holocaust.

Still Lazare acutely appreciated the basic conditions that have made the Jews historic scapegoats. Judaism is not simply a religion, it is an identifiable culture, a people without a country. (True, the state of Israel would reinvent the Jewish state, but to what degree the Israeli culture is the culture of the Jew in the Diaspora is still an open and intriguing question.)

Gordon Allport, the brilliant American psychologist, wrote The Nature of Prejudice a half century ago. It remains the most profound book on the subject yet written. Still, in the post-Holocaust era, with