On Anti-Semitism
Jacques
Maritain, who in the 1940's taught at Princeton University, was an
outstanding Roman Catholic philosopher. This article appeared in the
Journal Christianity and Crisis, October 6,
1941.
I
have already spoken of anti-Semitism many times. I never would have
thought that I would have to do so in connection with anti-Semitic laws
promulgated by a French government—which are a denial of the traditions
and the spirit of my country. I am well aware that these decrees have
been adopted under German pressure and through the machinations of
Laval. I also know that the French people by and large are astounded at
and disgusted with these laws. The fact remains, however, that the
Vichy leaders have enforced anti-Semitic laws in a more and more strict
and iniquitous fashion, depriving French Jews of every governmental and
cultural position, imposing upon them all kinds of restrictions with
regard to liberal and commercial professions, mercilessly striking many
of them who were wounded for their country during the present war, and
hypocritically trying to hide a bad conscience under a pseudonational
pathos in which religious and racial considerations are shamefully
mixed. A small part of the bourgeoisie and the country gentry, poisoned
by filthy newspapers, is letting itself be permeated by racist
baseness. Anti-Semitic German films are shown in movie-theaters even in
the unoccupied part of France, and we have been told that a Catholic
periodical was suspended for one month for having boldly protested
against such an action. Despite innumerable private testimonies of help
and solidarity given—often at great risk—to persecuted Jews, despite
innumerable touching signs of friendship and fidelity that dismissed
Jewish professors received from their students, no public protest has
been made by any educational body; and some new corporative
institutions, among the liberal professions, are willingly admitting a
kind of numerus clausus.
The psychic poisons
are more active than the physical ones; it is unfortunately inevitable
that, little by little, many souls should bow down. If the anti-Semitic
regulations and propaganda are to endure for some years, we may imagine
that many weak people will resign themselves to the worst. They will
think that, after all, the concentration camps are more comfortable for
their neighbors than the Jews say, and finally they will find
themselves perfectly able to look at or contribute to the destruction
of their friends, with the smile of a clear conscience (life must go
on!). I have firm confidence in the natural virtues and the moral
resistance of the common people of France. I know we must trust them;
yet it is not only in thinking of the Jews, but in thinking of my
country that I feel horrified by the anti-Semitic corruption of souls
that is being furthered in France by a leadership that still dares
speak of honor.
It is also for Christianity that
I fear. Perhaps the
danger is greater in countries that have not—not as yet—experienced
Nazi terrorism. We have been told that in some countries of South
America anti-Semitism is spreading among some sections of Catholic
youth and Catholic intellectuals, despite the teachings of the Pope and
the efforts of their own bishops. It is impossible to compromise with
anti-Semitism; it carries in itself, as in a living germ, all the
spiritual evil of Nazism. Anti-Semitism is the moral Fifth Column in
the Christian conscience.
"Spiritually we are Semites,"
Pius XI said.
"Anti-Semitism is unacceptable." I should like to emphasize in this
paper the spiritual aspect of this question.
May I point out that the most
impressive Christian
formulas concerning the spiritual essence of anti-Semitism may be found
in a book recently published by a Jewish writer who seems himself
strangely unaware of their profoundly Christian meaning. I do not know
whether Maurice Samuel shares even in Jewish piety; perhaps he is a
God-seeking soul deprived of any definite dogmas, believing himself to
be "freed" from any trust in divine revelation, of either the Old or
the New Covenant. The testimony that he brings appears all the more
significant because prophetic intuitions are all the more striking when
they pass through slumbering or stubborn prophets who perceive only in
an obscure way what they convey to us.
"We shall never understand," Mr.
Samuel says, "the
maniacal, world-wide seizure of anti-Semitism unless we transpose the
terms. It is of Christ that the Nazi-Fascists are afraid; it is in his
omnipotence that they believe; it is he that
they are determined madly to obliterate. But the names of Christ and
Christianity are too overwhelming, and the habit of submission to them
is too deeply ingrained after centuries and centuries of teaching.
Therefore they must, I repeat, make their assault on those who were
responsible for the birth and spread of Christianity. They must spit on
the Jews as the ‘Christ-killers’ because they long to spit on the Jews
as the Christ-givers." (Maurice Samuel, The Great Hatred. New
York, 1940)
The simple fact of feeling no
sympathy for the Jews
or being more sensitive to their faults than to their virtues is not
anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is fear, scorn and hatred of the Jewish
race or people, and a desire to subject them to discriminative
measures. There are many forms and degrees of anti-Semitism. Not to
speak of the demented forms we are facing at present, it can take the
form of a supercilious nationalist and aristocratic bias of pride and
prejudice; or a plain desire to rid oneself of competitors; or a
routine of vanity fair; or even an innocent verbal mania. In reality no
one is innocent. In each one the seed is hidden, more or less inert or
active, of that spiritual disease which today throughout the world is
bursting out into a homicidal, myth-making phobia, and the secret soul
of which is resentment against the Gospel: "Christophobia."
Leon Bloy said that the "veil" to
which Saint Paul
refers and which covers the eyes of Israel is now passing "from the
Jews to the Christians." This statement, which is harsh on the Gentiles
and on the Christian distorters of Christianity, helps us understand
something of the extensive and violent persecution of which the Jews
today are victims, and of the spiritual upheaval that has been going on
for years among many of them, denoting deep inward changes,
particularly in respect to the person of Christ.
The growing solicitude in
Israel’s heart for the
Just Man crucified through the error of the high priests is a symptom
of unquestionable importance. Today in America representative Jewish
writers like Sholem Asch and Waldo Frank are trying to reintegrate the
Gospel into the brotherhood of Israel. While not yet recognizing Jesus
as the Messiah, they do recognize him as the most pure Jewish figure in
human history. They themselves would be disturbed to be considered as
leaning toward Christianity. Yet while remaining closer than ever to
Judaism, they believe that the Gospel transcends the Old Testament and
consider it a divine flower issuing from the stem of the Patriarchs and
the Prophets. Never forgetful of the conflicts of history and of the
harsh treatment received by their people, the authors of Salvation
and of The New Discovery of America have
long known and loved mediæval Christianity and Catholic spiritual life.
They agree with Maurice Samuel that "Christophobia" is the spiritual
essence of the demoniacal racism of our pagan world. Many other signs
give evidence that Israel is beginning to open its eyes, whereas the
eyes of many self-styled Christians are blinded, darkened by the
exhalations of the old pagan blood suddenly, ferociously welling up
once more among Gentiles.
"Jesus Christ is in agony until
the end of the
world," said Pascal. Christ suffers in every innocent man who is
persecuted. His agony is heard in the cries of so many human beings
humiliated and tortured, in the suffering of all those images and
likenesses of God treated worse than beasts. He has taken all these
things upon himself, he has suffered every wound. "Fear not, my child,
I have already travelled that road. On each step of the abominable way
I have left for you a drop of my blood and the print of my mercy."
But in the mystical body of the
Church, the surplus
humanity that Christ finds in each of the members of this his body is
called upon, insofar as each is a part of the whole, to participate in
the work of this body, which is the redemption continued throughout
time. Through and in the passion of his mystical body, Christ continues
actively to perform the task for which he came; he acts as the Savior
and Redeemer of mankind.
Israel’s passion is not a
co-redemptive passion,
achieving for the eternal salvation of souls what is lacking (as
concerns application, not merits) in the Savior’s sufferings. It is
suffered for the goading on of the world’s temporal life. In itself, it
is the passion of a being caught up in the temporal destiny of the
world, which both irritates the world and seeks to emancipate it, and
on which the world avenges itself for the pangs of its history. This
does not mean that Christ is absent from the passion of Israel. Could
he forget his people, who are still loved because of their fathers and
to whom have been made promises without repentance? Jesus Christ
suffers in the passion of Israel. In striking Israel, the anti-Semites
strike him, insult him and spit on him. To persecute the house of
Israel is to persecute Christ, not in his mystical body as when the
Church is persecuted, but in his fleshly lineage and in his forgetful
people whom he ceaselessly loves and calls. In the passion of Israel,
Christ suffers and acts as the shepherd of Zion and the Messiah of
Israel, in order gradually to conform his people to him. If there are
any in the world today—but where are they ?—who give heed to the
meaning of the great racist persecutions and who try to understand this
meaning, they will see Israel as drawn along the road to Calvary, by
reason of that very vocation which I have indicated, and because the
slave merchants will not pardon Israel for the demands it and its
Christ have implanted in the heart of the world’s temporal life,
demands that will ever cry "no" to the tyranny of force. Despite itself
Israel is climbing Calvary, side by side with Christians—whose vocation
concerns the kingdom of God more than the temporal history of the
world; and these strange companions are at times surprised to find each
other mounting the same path. As in Marc Chagall’s beautiful painting,
the poor Jews, without understanding it, are swept along in the great
tempest of the Crucifixion, around Christ who is stretched
"Across the lost world
At the four corners of
the horizon
Fire and Flames
Poor Jews from
everywhere are walking
No one claims them
They have no place on
the earth
To rest—not a stone
The wandering Jews
Raïssa
Maritain, Chagall (Lettre de Nuit).
The central fact, which has its
deepest meaning for
the philosophy of history and for human destiny—and which no one seems
to take into account—is that the passion of Israel today is
taking on more and more distinctly the form of the Cross.
Christ crucified
extends his arms toward both Jews and Gentiles; he died, St. Paul says,
in order to reconcile the two peoples, and to break down the dividing
barrier of enmity between them. "For he is our peace, he that hath made
both one, and hath broken down the dividing barrier of enmity. He hath
brought to naught in his flesh the law of commandments framed in
decrees, that in himself he might create of the two one new man, and
make peace and reconcile both in one body to God through the cross,
slaying by means thereof their enmity." (St. Paul, Ephesians 2:14-16)
If the Jewish people did not hear
the call made to
them by the dying Christ, yet do they remain ever summoned. If the
Gentiles indeed heard the call, now racist paganism casts them away
from it and from him who is our peace. Anti-Semitic hatred is a
directly anti-Christic frenzy to make vain the blood of Jesus and to
make void his death. Agony now is the way of achieving that
reconciliation, that breaking down of the barrier of enmity—which the
madness of men prevented love from accomplishing, and the frustration
of which is the most refined torment in the sufferings of the Messiah—a
universal agony in the likeness of that of the Savior, both the agony
of the racked, abandoned Jews and of the racked, abandoned Christians
who live by faith. More than ever, the mystical body of Christ needs
the people of God. In the darkness of the present day, that moment
seems invisibly to be in preparation, however remote it still may be,
when their reintegration, as St. Thomas puts it, will "call back to
life the Gentiles, that is to say the lukewarm faithful, when ‘on
account of the progress of iniquity, the charity of a great number
shall have waxed cold’ (Matthew I4:I2)." (St.Thomas Aquinas, in ep. ad
Romanos, xi, lect. 2.)
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