Well, now. I have a Jewish name, but there is many a Gentile Isaacs, so why not a Levin? I have a Jewish nose, though oddly enough, I cannot see its Jewishness in a mirror, only in a photograph. In any case, it is a meaningless test. The good Dr Morris Fishbein, who in the course of his researches into this subject undoubtedly measured more noses than any man has measured before or since, concluded that there was no such thing as a ‘Jewish’ nose, or that if there was, it was possessed by so many undoubted Aryans that there was no way of ensuring that the Jews would win – or lose – by a nose.
There are more persuasive, though still superficial, arguments. I like Jewish food, Jewish jokes, hold some traditionally Jewish beliefs, such as the respect for learning. (I can remember to this day the shock of incredulity I had at school when a non-Jewish friend told me that he had had a great struggle to be allowed to take up his scholarship. His uneducated father’s attitude – more common then than now – had been that ‘What was good enough for me is good enough for my son.’ This attitude was absolutely inconceivable in a Jewish home.)
None of this will provide any real evidence, though. I was brought up on Jewish food, and the fact that I enjoy it is only an index to the strength of early environmental influence. Jewish jokes appeal to me because of their underlying gallows-humour, which I like because I am at heart a melancholic. I still laugh when my sister tells the story of kreplach, not because the goyim can’t understand it, but because of its Thurberesque suggestion of the frailty of human happiness and the prevalence of unreason.
Of course, I am begging the question. I know perfectly well that I am a Jew; what I am really inquiring into is what this means to me. Let us start with religion. I rejected Judaism more or less as soon as I was old enough to have any understanding of what religion was about. All religions have their obsessions with form, ritual, observance. I don’t know whether I feel further from Judaism than from most religions because its particular observances – the dietary laws, for instance – seem to me sillier today than their equivalent in, say, Roman Catholicism; or whether the savage monotheism of Jehovah (or Nobodaddy) repels me. I think that there are parts of the Pentateuch that are about as nasty as anything I have ever read anywhere, but you might also say the same thing about St Paul.
Of course, one would have to be very dull of spirit not to find beautiful and fine some aspects of Judaism. A well-ordered Seder (the Passover- eve family service) is a very remarkable experience – but to me largely aesthetic. I have an uncontrollable revulsion at the sight of someone lighting a cigarette from a candle (some Jews who have long rejected Judaism feel sick at the sight of someone putting a pat of butter on a steak), because I was brought up to look upon a candle as a holy thing. I no longer believe consciously that it is a holy thing, but I do believe that it is a beautiful one and its use to light a cigarette seems to me vulgar and belittling. Such objective religious sympathies as I have are with the quietist faiths, like Buddhism, on the one hand, and with a straightforward message of salvation like Christianity, on the other. I am unable in fact to accept any of them, but can imagine myself a convert to several faiths; not Judaism, however.
Race, then. Aha. First, I accept what biology and anthropology tell me about race and its attendant oceans of nonsense. There are no innate superiorities or inferiorities; even if there were, there is no such thing as a separate Jewish race, though there may be a race of Semites. (The Jews in modern times have found their greatest antagonists in the Germans and the Arabs; with the former they have many of their most deeply ingrained characteristics in common, and with the latter their very race.) There’s something in this more than natural, if psychology could find it out. Besides, suppose there was a Jewish race, and I was of it; what would follow from that? There is a Negro race; membership of it implies that you are black, but need imply nothing else. So you may be a nice Jew or a nasty one, a clever or a foolish, a generous or a mean, a clubbable or a solitary. I can list my qualities and defects; more meaningfully, I can get a candid friend to do so. I can give myself marks down the list; but for the life of me I cannot see that, whatever the total, it adds up to anything I have in common with Mr Jack Solomons or Mr Ewen Montagu QC.
Which brings me to the only point at which there can any longer be room for doubt. The concept of race is too completely exploded to provide a fair test. Let us think not of race, but of psychology and characteristics. Have I anything in common with Mr Solomons or Mr Montagu? If so, what? And if I have not – which is what I believe – have I entirely dissolved any meaning in my own life, indeed any objective meaning at all, for the word Jew?
There is an interesting paragraph on this point by Bernard Berenson, though it seems to me to demonstrate the opposite of what he was arguing.
“A Jew is the product of being cooped up in a ghetto for over 1,200 years. His conditioning from within and without, the outer pressure driving more and more to defensive extremes, the inner clutching to rites, to practices, to values making for union and for safety, the struggle for food and survival, the lust for pre-eminence and power: all have ended in producing the Jew, regardless of what racial elements originally constituted him.”
Precisely; then the Jew is nothing but a conditioned reflex to a conditioned stimulus (who could have thought the behaviourists could help us here?). And although the idea seems capable of bearing the weight of a considerable structure of generalisation, it falls down as soon as you look at Israel. If a hardy, martial, fair-haired and blue-eyed people are now the heirs of Zion, surely the case for environment is proved? When Herzl’s trumpet finally felled the walls of the ghetto, Jewry won her greatest victory. Why, Israel even has her own anti-Semitism, in the discrimination of the Ashkenazim against their culturally more backward brethren from the East. Perhaps it will go like this, then. While the Jews of the Diaspora become more completely assimilated – the rate of intermarriage continues to grow, generation by generation – Israel will become more and more remote from any of the traditional concepts of Jewishness. She is still heavily influenced by theocracy; but the ultimately inevitable Kulturkampf must break the rabbinical power and turn Israel into a modern secular state.
This may mean that the last test of the Déracinés will become their attitude to Israel. I think I can clear myself here, even after the severest Positive Vetting. My attitude to Israel – admiration for the incredible achievements, hope that it will continue, combined with the strongest condemnation of her crime against her original Arab population and the campaign of lies waged ever since on the subject – does not mark me off in any way from a Gentile of similar political outlook. And the other obvious crude test – one’s attitude to the Final Solution – I claim to pass with marks above the average, insisting that the slaughter of Russians by Stalin in not much smaller numbers and for no less wicked and senseless reasons should be equally condemned.
And I cannot see that there are any valuable babies that I risk emptying out with the bath-water of my rejection of any concept of Jewishness. I can admire Spinoza or Disraeli or Menuhin just as much without my judgement being affected by any thought of their origins, and I have the additional advantage of being able to despise Ilya Ehrenburg without any reservations.
Has it come to this? Has an idea so old and tenacious, so provocative of generosity and malice, good and evil, responsible for such prodigious outpourings of words and deeds ceased to have any meaning at all? For me, it has. Yet I must face the last logical barrier, the same in effect as the first logical barrier that surrounds Christianity. How can such an idea have survived and conquered half the world, if it is not true? Similarly, how can Jewry have survived, how indeed can she have continued to attract the attention of anti-Semitism, if there is no such thing?
Only here am I conscious of any logical weakness in my position. For to an anti-Semite I could not bring myself to deny that I am a Jew, and I would not only not dream of changing my name, but think the less of the Courtenay-Cohens and Lipschitz-Logans for doing so. Yet time will surely take care of this problem, too (plus the fact that the antis have now got somebody else to pick on; not even Dr Fishbein can measure away the Negro’s blackness). The world now has no excuse for not knowing what anti-Semitism can lead to, and actually does, on the whole, show signs of amending its attitude accordingly.
And now it is the others who will be increasingly exposed as illogical. If you do not consider yourself Jewish enough to go to Israel, and not Judaistic enough to go to the synagogue, what is left but a vague necessity to belong? And this will disappear, or at any rate be dispersed, with further inter-marriage and assimilation; so, of course, will the superficialities attributable to upbringing and environment. The proprietor of my favourite Jewish restaurant tells me that a high, and growing, proportion of his customers are not Jewish. For my part, I reserve the right to go on laughing at the story of the kreplach while not particularly caring for the kreplach themselves.
[See also: From the NS archive: We helped them descend into hell]
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