The Religious Origins of Globalism

5,689 words

Translated by Greg Johnson

German translation here ^[2]

Translator’s Note:

What follows is my translation of Hervé Ryssen’s Mecanopolis interview, “Les origins religieuses du mondialisme,” February 24, 2009, http://www.mecanopolis.org/?p=4031 ^[3]. I wish to thank Mecanopolis for permission to translate this interview and Michael O’Meara for checking the translation.

 

 

Question: Hervé Ryssen, you have just published a book, Les Espérances planétariennes [Planetarian Hopes] which finally exposes the logic of globalism and its religious foundations.[1] For far too long, intellectuals of the nationalist movement have shied away from such controversial topics and avoided denouncing cosmopolitan propaganda. Could you first of all clarify the title of your book for our readers?

Hervé Ryssen: I examined the writings of Jewish intellectuals in order to understand their vision of the world. After having read dozens of political essays, novels, and narratives of all sorts, I noticed that the word “hope” appeared regularly in these texts. Of course for them it stands for expectations of a better world, the messiah, and the “promised land.” Let us recall that although the Christians have accepted their messiah, the Jews still await theirs. This messianic expectation is at the heart of the Hebraic religion and the Jewish mentality in general, including that of atheistic Jews. This is the fundamental point. As for the term “planetarian,” it is a neologism which simply means the desire for a world without borders.

My work is exclusively focused on Jewish intellectuals. Contrary to what most people think, using the word “Jew” is not yet against the law. I know that many in the nationalist milieu begin sweating at the simple mention of the word, probably because they fear hearing anti-Semitic remarks which are indeed strongly punished today. Personally, I am not afraid of this, since my work is exclusively based on researching Jewish sources. Let us say that I have a rational and I daresay completely dispassionate approach to the subject.

 

Question: One often hears Jews speak of the “promised land” and the “messiah,” but we have always misunderstood what these concepts mean. Isn’t the “promised land” the state of Israel?

 

Hervé Ryssen: Historically, it is indeed the land of Canaan, which Yahweh gave to Abraham, as one reads in Genesis, the first book of the Torah. But even before the destruction of the second Temple by the Roman legions of Titus and the dispersion of the Jews, many Jews already lived in the diaspora. There they remained until 1917, when the Balfour Declaration created a “Jewish homeland in Palestine,” and certain Jews thought that by recovering the “promised land,” messianic times were finally at hand. But it should not be forgotten that other Jews, far more numerous, thought at the same time that the promised land was located more to the North, in the immense Soviet Union where, after the revolution of October 1917, so many Jews appeared at the highest levels of power.

But if one reads slightly older texts, from the nineteenth century, it was France—the land of human rights—that raised Jewish hopes and constituted, in the eyes of Jews around the world, the “promised land.” Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, or Weimar Germany between the wars, could also be regarded as “promised lands,” since culture and finance, in particular, were very largely influenced by bankers, intellectuals, and artists of Jewish origin.

This hope always ends in cruel disillusion. The state of Israel is no “haven of peace,”[2] to say the least. As for Judeo-Bolshevik Russia, it turned against the Jews, who were evicted from power after the Second World War. The France of “human rights” is today in the process of Third-Worldization, and since 2001 some Jews have decided to flee this “anti-Semitic” country, where Jews increasingly suffer the anger of young Arabs. In short, for the Jews, it always seems to end badly, no matter where they go, no matter what they do.

For a long time, the “promised land” was incarnated in the American dream. In the 1880s, millions of Jews left Central Europe for the United States, where they hoped for a better life, far from the Cossacks, the pogroms, and the hated Tsar. But the most recent “promised land” was obviously Russia after the collapse of the USSR. In a few years, a handful of “oligarchs” had their hooks in most of the privatized Russian wealth. Best known among them, the billionaire Khodorkovski, sleeps today in the prisons of Vladimir Putin’s new Russia. Obviously, this new “promised land” did not work out either!

In short, one must understand that since leaving the ghetto, the Jews have never ceased changing “promised lands,” and their wandering always ends in disappointment. Only the United States still represents in their eyes this Eldorado and nourishes their hopes. But for how long?

 

Question: You speak of history and geography, but aren’t messianism and the idea of the promised land religious concepts instead?

 

Hervé Ryssen: Here we come back to the heart of the matter. If you talk with a rabbi in the rue des Rosiers, he will immediately tell you that the Jews aspire above all to the creation of a world of peace, a world in which all conflicts have disappeared, whether they are social conflicts or conflicts between races or nations. They seek to achieve this world of universal peace, since they identify it with Messianic times.

The authors are rather clear here. The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas writes: “One can group the promises of the prophets in two categories: political and social. The alienation which introduces arbitrary political power into every human enterprise will disappear; and social injustice, the hold of the rich on the poor, will disappear at the same time as political violence. . . .” As for the future world, Lévinas goes on to define it as “humanity united in a collective destiny.”[3]

In Le vrai visage du judaïsme [The True Face of Judaism], Jacob Kaplan, the Chief rabbi of the central Consistory, points out the famous passage which is one of the sources of the Jewish messianism: “the wolf will live with the lamb; the tiger will rest with the kid; the calf, lion cub, and ram will live together, and a young child will lead them” (Isaiah, 11: 6–9). Kaplan adds: “It is obviously an image of the relations which will be established between the nations, happy to maintain unity and concord between them.”[4]

In his book on messianism, David Banon confirms this vision of the world: “The Messianic era such as it was described by all the prophets consists of the suppression of political violence and social injustice.”[5]

The Hebraic prophecies thus promise the progression of humanity towards a unified world, and parallel to that, the suppression of social inequalities. Here one can see the ultimate sources of Marxism as well as the inspiration of our planetarian ideology at the beginning of third millennium, which, propagated by the media, has become the dream of so many of our fellow citizens. Here is the heart of the Jewish vision of the world. One must start here if one wants to understand the mental universe of the Jews. This is what explains why the Jews always mouth the word “peace.” Their “combat for peace” is ceaseless.

For example, in March 2000, Chirac inaugurated a “Wall for Peace” on the Champ de Mars, conceived by Clara Halter, the wife of the writer Marek Halter. It is a kind of hall of glass, where little Clara wrote the word “Peace” in 32 languages, to deride, one imagines, the cadets of the military academy just across the street. These works have a religious significance that very few goyim can detect.

One can thus argue that the concept of “promised land” means nothing less than a hope of planetary dimensions, where all the nations will have disappeared. It is just what the philosopher Edgar Morin tells us, when he writes: “We do not have the promised land, but we have an aspiration, a wish, a myth, a dream: to realize a global fatherland.”[6] And it is also what Jacques Attali speaks about in L’Homme nomade [Nomadic Man]: “to make the world a promised land.”[7] It is thus this unified, pacified world that will be the “promised land.” Sometimes these texts suggest that in the minds of certain intellectuals, the idea is taken in the literal sense: that it would be good if the whole Earth were promised to them! Which sometimes leads to behaviors that are a bit invasive . . .

Question: Judging by the policy of US President George W. Bush, it does not appear that his numerous Zionist advisers are promoting the world of “peace” about which you speak. How do you explain this?

 

Hervé Ryssen: It is undeniable that the leaders of the American Jewish community bear a good part of the blame for the war in Iraq. One would have to be blind not to see it; one would have to be insincere to deny it. Their political weight has been important in each successive US government since the beginning of the twentieth century. American nationalists like the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh denounced the pressures of the “Jewish lobby” (in the United States, it is a lobby among others) to push his strongly isolationist people into the war against Nazi Germany. Already in the 1920s, the manufacturer Henry Ford had grasped the magnitude of the problem and widely publicized it in a newspaper created for this purpose. One should also note that Madeleine “Albright” and the hawks of the American State Department threw their whole weight behind the war against Serbia in 1999. You are thus perfectly right to stress this contradiction between Messianic faith and its “worldly activities,” so to speak.

But people will state in all sincerity that these wars are works of “peace”! Just listen to  Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Prize for “Peace,” who was naturally an ultra-warmonger in 1991, when he agitated for war against Iraq: “It is not only a question of helping Kuwait,” he said then, “but of protecting the entire Arab world.” Thus all Westerners were to be mobilized against the “butcher of Baghdad,” guilty because he threatened the state of Israel: “Against war,” Elie Wiesel writes, “it is imperative to make war. Against destructive force employed against humanity, it is necessary to oppose a greater force, so that humanity can survive. For the sake of the safety of the civilized world, its right to peace, and not merely for the future of Israel. . . . A thirst for vengeance? No: a thirst for justice. And for peace.”[8]

Note that he does not hesitate to drape himself in the grand ideals of peace and love when it is a question of destroying his enemy. But of course it is out of the question that the Jewish state should itself do the military grunt work. It is the task of the West, which must be convinced by “sensitivity” campaigns, to oust the dictator. Once your enemy is vanquished, your tireless combat for democracy and “peace” can be revived whenever politically convenient. Indeed, after having crushed one’s enemies, one is always for “peace.”

Question: You speak about “democracy.” What kind of relationship can there be between a political system and Messianic faith? Is democracy necessary for the arrival of the Messiah?

 

Hervé Ryssen: Democracy was not always the war horse of planetarian hopes. For a long time, the Marxist ideal also played this role. It is well-known that Marx himself, and the great majority of the principal Marxist ideologues and leaders, were Jewish: Lenin had Jewish origins, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Ernest Mandel, etc., just as were almost all of the leaders of May ’68. It is no accident, and only low-level Communist militants don’t know it. Marxism aspires to the establishment of a perfect world, where religions, like nations, will have disappeared along with social conflicts. This schema, we note, fits perfectly within the messianic framework. The thought of Marx is ultimately only the secularization of traditional Jewish eschatology.

George Steiner sees Marxism from the perspective of the biblical prophecies: “Marxism,” he says, “is at bottom merely Judaism in a hurry. The Messiah was too long in coming or, more precisely, in not coming. It is man himself who will found the kingdom of justice, on this earth, here and now . . . preached Karl Marx in his manuscripts of 1844, where one recognizes the clear echo of the phraseology of the Psalms and the prophets.”[9]

Neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Trotsky believed in a God, and yet their Jewish origins appear in full light within the framework of Jewish messianism. Political Marxism was nevertheless marginalized in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fact is that, in the projects of planetary unification, democracy triumphed everywhere that Communism failed. It is obvious, however, that the extreme left continues to profit from all the media attention in Western society: because it represents the spearhead of the project of creating an egalitarian and multiracial society and channels the radical opposition aroused by the liberal system in a globalist direction. This mobilizing Utopia is always necessary for a despairing democratic system, which offers nothing to its youth but trips to the mall. Thus Marxism ultimately renders its best services when it is nested inside democracy. Marxism and democracy are two absolutely complementary and mutually indispensable forces in the project of constructing a global Empire. Without Communism, the opposition would take a nationalist form, which the system would not survive.

 

Question: After the failure of state Communism, have multiracial democracy and “human rights” become the arm of the “planetarian” forces?

 

Hervé Ryssen: The objective of the globalists is to destroy rooted, traditional cultures in order to create a uniform world. This aspiration to unity was expressed by the Hasidic philosopher Martin Buber, who does not seem to realize that he is giving us an exact definition of totalitarianism: “Everywhere,” he writes, “one will find [in Judaism] the aspiration towards unity. Towards unity within the individual. Towards unity between the members of a divided people, and between the nations. Towards the unity of man and all living things, towards the unity of God and of the world.”[10] To achieve this perfect world, it is thus necessary to mix, crush, dissolve all national resistances and ethnic or religious identities. “Unity” can be created only from human powder and the residues of great civilizations, and in this enterprise of destroying traditional civilizations, immigration plays a crucial role. Here the doctrines of “human rights” are a terribly effective weapon of war.

This is what grand rabbi Kaplan says: “The advent of an era that does not threaten mankind will depend largely on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. . . . Respect for this Declaration is an obligation so pressing that it is everyone’s duty to contribute to its universal and complete application.” All humanity must submit to it. This amounts to saying that “human rights” are the key to realizing the promises of Yahweh. Thus it is no accident that René Cassin, the inspirer of the 1948 declaration, was also the general secretary of the Alliance israélite universelle. In 1945, General de Gaulle appointed him the head of the Council of State. His body now rests in the Pantheon, in the temple of the great men of the republic.

Question: Is there unanimity among Jewish intellectuals on the question of immigration?

Hervé Ryssen: Jewish intellectuals can be liberals, Marxists, Zionists, religious believers, or atheists. But all these divergences do not at all invalidate the messianic foundation of their aspirations. And on immigration, I can assure you that they are unanimous. Here for example is what Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former leader of May ’68 and assistant mayor of Frankfurt says: “In Frankfurt on the Mainz, the population is more than 25 percent foreign, but one can say that Frankfurt would not crumble if one day it reaches a third.”[11]

This is perfectly in sync with the socialist Jacques Attali writing about Germany’s aging population: “It is indeed necessary that the naturalized foreign population reaches a third of the entire population, and half of that of the cities.”[12] One could, of course, encourage the German birthrate. But Jacques Attali does not consider it, because only a multiracial society guarantees the realization of the planetarian project. For France, Attali suggests the same solution: “It will also have to pursue the means to rejuvenate its population, by accepting  a large number from abroad.”[13]

A November 2005 report of the World Bank also encourages Russia to open its borders and to undertake a policy of large-scale immigration, which would be “one of the main conditions for stable economic growth” with an aging population. Let us note all the same that Paul Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, has never encouraged Arab immigration to Israel to support its aging population.

Remarks of this sort can be found among virtually all Jewish intellectuals, be they Marxists like Jacques Derrida, socialists like Guy Konopnicki, or liberals like Guy Sorman or Alain Minc. Moreover, they all show an annoying tendency to treat us like morons, by telling us that immigration, for example, has not increased for 20 years or that insecurity is not related to it anyway. With a straight face, Cohn-Bendit assures that “to stop racism, it would be best to further increase the number from abroad”! Their remarks on this subject are staggeringly brazen. For instance, Guy Sorman flatly claims that the France of yesteryear, with its dialects and patois, was altogether “more multicultural than it is it today.”[14] It is one example among many of this invincible brazenness, of which they are very proud, and which they call “chutzpah.”

The objective is to destroy the white world, and, in a more general way, all rooted societies. These intellectuals assure us that this is an inescapable development, and that consequently, there is no use opposing it. Note that in the Marxist schema, it was the classless society which was to be “inescapable.” According to Jean “Daniel”: “Nothing will stop the movement of impoverished populations towards an old and rich Occident. . . . This is why wisdom, reason, insists on preparing from now on to receive more and more immigrants.”[15] You must understand that they seek to prohibit the very idea of defending oneself. The unanimity of cosmopolitan discourse on this subject is really astonishing.

 

Question: One often hears that the Jews were regarded by the Nazis as an “inferior race.” Your research, I believe, tends to show that they regard themselves as “the superior race.” Please explain.

 

Hervé Ryssen: I can assure you that there is an immense pride in belonging to the “chosen people.” And among intellectuals this pride combines with a no less great contempt for the sedentary nations, which are considered quite definitely inferior. Remarks on this subject are innumerable.

For example Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote, in the first number of the journal Globe in 1985: “Of course we are resolutely cosmopolitan. Of course all that is earthy, bourrées, bagpipes, in short typically French or chauvinist, is foreign, even odious to us.” “Fatherlands of any kind and their processions of old-fashioned things” disgust him utterly: they are nothing but a “timid and exasperated retreat to the most impoverished identities.” “To speak patois, to dance bourrées, to march to the sound of bagpipes . . . such stupidity is nauseating.”[16]

The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas has also expressed his faith in the virtues of rootlessness and nomadism. For him, the greatest backwardness, undoubtedly, was represented by the pagan civilizations of antiquity: “Paganism,” he writes, “is the local spirit: a cruel and pitiless nationalism. A forest humanity, a pre-human humanity.” Certainly all that is unworthy of the genius of desert Bedouins: “It is in the arid desert where nothing is fixed, where the true spirit descended in a text to achieve itself universally. . . . Faith in the liberation of man can only be sustained by the collapse of sedentary civilizations, the crumbling away of the heavy layers of the past. . . . It is necessary to be underdeveloped to take up their cause and fight on their behalf for a place in the modern world.”[17]

It is not enough for these intellectuals to talk nonsense, to lull us with “human rights,” to bind us with repressive laws, and to inject us with alien cultural poisons. They also have to pour into our ears their contempt for our old cultures. But this contempt does not seem to fully satisfy their thirst for revenge. They must also insult us and spit in our faces: “ignoramuses, xenophobes, paranoiacs, morons, lunatics, etc.” That is what we are.

In La Vengeance des Nations [The Revenge of the Nations] (1990), Alain Minc, who explains to us the benefits of immigration, ensures us that it is “ignorance which feeds xenophobia,”[18] that it is thus necessary “to fight against the crazy xenophobes,” and be done with this “French paranoia.”[19] Toward this end, Alain Minc proposes systematically to favor immigrants over the native French, on the American model. As media sensation Michael Moore proclaims in his 2002 book Stupid White Men, in the United States it is no longer really necessary to treat stupid white men with kid gloves, since they do not understand anything that is happening to them.

And I will not recount the innumerable films in which the cosmopolitan scriptwriters take their revenge against Christian civilization and the white man in general. It seems obvious to me, regarding all this logorrhea, that these people hate us. It could not be any more obvious if they wore flashing neon signs on their heads.

Question: How do you explain this obvious lust for vengeance in [Jewish] religious texts that profess universal peace? What is the source of this vengefulness?

Hervé Ryssen: The spirit of revenge is found in quite a few texts. It appears in novels like Albert Cohen’s Frères humains [Human brothers] or Patrick Modiano’s La Place de l’Etoile [The Place of the Star].[20] The current American guru of Afrocentrism, Martin Bernal, who is “white,” also evokes this sentiment: “My goal is to reduce the intellectual arrogance of Europeans.” Now, if one plunges into the remote past, one realizes that these attitudes have traversed the centuries without so much as a wrinkle.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, for example, Rabbi Shlomo Molkho, who was regarded by many Jews as a messianic figure, wrote his very revealing prophetic visions in which one finds the idea of a “revenge against the gentiles” which will be achieved. He also assures us that “the foreigners will be broken” and that “the nations will tremble.”[21] Moshe Idel comments: “the poem of Molkho clearly refers to the advent of a double revenge: against Edom and Ishmael,” i.e., against Christendom and Islam, then he adds furthermore: “God reveals not only how to fight against Christianity . . . but still how to break the force of Christianity so that the Redemption occurs.”[22] Isn’t it clear?

One can find this type of delirious prophecy in many other Jewish historical characters, such as Isaac Abravanel, who was the chief of the Jewish community of Spain before the expulsion of 1492, and who became one of the mythical heroes of the Jews of Iberian origin. He also quite explicitly calls for the revenge of the people of Israel against Christendom and invited “all the nations to go to war against the land of Edom” (the vision of Obadia, in Genesis 20:13).[23]

For those who still wonder about the reasons for this secular hatred, here is a small explanation: “The day is close when the eternal will take revenge on all the nations that destroyed the First Temple and enslaved Israel in the exile. And with you also, Edom, as you made at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, you will know the sword and revenge (Obadia). . . . Any deliverance promised to Israel is associated with the fall of Edom” (Lamentations 4:22).[24]

This vengeful hatred, nursed for twenty centuries, was also expressed by the philosopher Jacob Talmon, who wrote in 1965: “The Jews have very old blood feuds to settle with the Christian West.”[25] Pierre Paraf, the former President of the LICA (League against Anti-Semitism), writes, in the voice of a character of his novel republished in 2000: “So many of our brothers marked by circumcision groan under the whip of the Christians. Glory to God! Jerusalem will reunite them one day; they will have their revenge!”[26] These people are tenacious in their resentment.

 

Question: We really are far from the cinematic stereotype of the “poor little persecuted Jew.” In the end, can one take seriously the widespread idea, or “prejudice,” that “the Jews want to dominate the world”?

Hervé Ryssen: I do not have any personal ideas on this subject, and I am content to analyze what is written. Consequently, I cannot say that it is a general disposition of all Jewish intellectuals. But this idea was expressed by some of them. The book on Abravanel confirms this interpretation, on the basis of biblical texts: “At the time of the Messiah,” he writes, “Samuel thought that all the nations would be subjects of Israel, in accordance with what is written: ‘His empire will extend from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth’” (Zechariah 9: 10, p. 181). “During the deliverance to come, a king of the house of David will reign” (p. 228). In fact “the great peace would reign on earth at the time of the King-Messiah” (p. 198). Here we have confirmation that Israel militates for “peace”!

Camille Marbo, in her novel Flammes juives [Jewish Flames] tells the story of young Moroccan Jews who leave their mellah[27] and settle in France in the 1920s.[28] One explicitly speaks about the “conquest of the world by Israel.”[29] One also finds such passages: “‘Israel must control the world,’ said Daniel. . . . ‘They fear us,’ repeated the old man Benatar, ‘because we are the race of the Prophets’”;[30] “The generation that will conquer Christendom is not here yet. You yourselves will lay the foundations, and your children will carry out the task. They will confound the Christians. Israel will lead the world as it must.”[31] There are many other texts on this subject.

Question: Isn’t the desire to found a world government one of the delusions of the “enlightened,” as Taguieff would say?

 

Hervé Ryssen: It is quite clear that all this is being done to make us disavow our roots, our traditions, our history, our families, and our fatherlands, in order to make us more receptive to the “open” society dear to cosmopolitan hearts and to the idea of a world government. Alain Finkielkraut insists on this point: “Evil,” he writes, “enters the world with fatherlands and patronyms [par les patries et par les patronymes].”[32] The postmodern man must cease “pursuing traces of the past in himself as in others.” His claim to fame “is to be cosmopolitan and to make war on parochialism.”[33] From there, one can finally admit the idea of a “planetary confederation,” as advocated by the sociologist Edgar “Morin” in all his books, or better yet, to work for the introduction of world government, as Jacques Attali expresses it: “After the installation of European continental institutions, perhaps the urgent need for a world government will appear.”[34] All that, obviously, will still not prevent the famous anti-fascist trapper Pierre-André Taguieff from being indignant at the wild imaginings of anti-Semites and to claim that the idea of world domination is an aberration or a “deception.”

Question: One cannot deny however that the Jews experienced atrocious persecutions down through the centuries. How do they themselves explain their misfortunes?

Hervé Ryssen: It is probably the most stunning question of all. On this point as well, the explanations are all concordant and are usually based on the theory of the “scapegoat”: in difficult times the government or the people turn against a specially designated victim who is charged with “all” faults “past, present, or future.”

Those who should be most concerned to understand anti-Semitism often express a total incomprehension of the phenomenon. Thus for Clara Malraux (the wife of the writer) anti-Semitic hatred “is less hard to bear when one knows that it is totally and absolutely unjustified and that, by this fact, the enemy is transformed into the enemy of humanity.”[35] The enemy of the Jews is the enemy of all humanity. This is also what Elie Wiesel means when he writes in volume 2 of his Memories: “Thus it is and cannot be otherwise: the enemy of the Jews is the enemy of humanity. . . . By killing the Jews, the killers undertook to assassinate all of humanity.”[36] Indeed, to kill a Jew who is, so to speak, innocent by nature, is inevitably to attack every innocent person and every other community. It is to define oneself as the enemy of humanity. But there is also another interpretation, more classical, which is based on the idea that the Jews alone are defined as humanity, the other nations deriving, according to a so-called formula of the Talmud, from “the seed of cattle.”

In his 2004 book Le Discours de la haine [Hate Speech], the philosopher André Glucksmann maintains that “hatred of the Jews is the enigma among all enigmas. . . . Jews are not at all the source of anti-Semitism; it is necessary to consider this passion in itself and by itself, as if the Jews whom it hounds . . . did not exist.”[37] You have to understand: “the Jew” is always innocent. These too are not isolated testimonies, and this attitude seems to be that of a majority of the Jewish intellectuals. Emmanuel Lévinas also expressed this opinion, just like another Jewish philosopher, Shmuel Trigano for whom the phenomenon of anti-Semitism “remained unexplained in spite of an immense library on the subject.”[38]

 

Question: One also often hears that anti-Semitism is a mental illness.

Hervé Ryssen: Since anti-Semitism is unexplained, and the Jews are innocent, logically the problem can come only from the goyim. Consider the testimony of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, philosopher of religion, found in the book entitled Portraits juifs [Jewish Portraits]: “It is a phenomenon which is historically incomprehensible. Anti-Semitism for me is not a problem of the Jews but of the goyim.”[39] In the first volume of his Mémoires, Elie Wiesel writes: “It is their problem, not ours.”[40]

The explanation of anti-Semitism as mental derangement is very frequently found in the writings of Jewish intellectuals. The 1995 book of Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine [Jewish Identity, Human Identity], takes up this idea: “The anti-Semite attributes to the Jew the intentions that he himself nourishes. . . . The psychopathological dimension of such a construction cannot be ignored. . . . The presented Jews are really projected Jews; the ‘Judaized’ image belongs to the delusions of anti-Semites.”[41]

The Russian writer Vassili Grossman expresses the same idea: “Anti-Semitism,” he says, “is the mirror of the defects of a man taken individually, of civil society, of official systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you yourself are guilty of. National Socialism, when it attributed to the Jewish people traits that it itself had invented, like racism, the will to dominate the world, or the cosmopolitan indifference to the German fatherland, had in fact given the Jews its own characteristics.”[42] In sum, in the Jews the anti-Semite rejects his own tares. On this level, it does indeed fall into the realm of psychotherapy. But it remains to be seen whether it is really the goyim who need it most!

 

 

Notes

[1] Hervé Ryssen, Les Espérances planétariennes (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2005).

[2] The etymology of “Jerusalem”—Ed.

[3] Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficile liberté [Difficult Freedom](Paris: Albin Michel, 1963), 85–86.

[4] Jacob Kaplan, Le vrai Visage du judaïsme [The True Face of Judaism] (Paris: Stock, 1987),

[5] David Banon, Le Messianisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 15–16.).

[6] Edgar Morin, Un nouveau commencement [A New Beginning] (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 9.

[7] Jacques Attali, L’Homme nomade [Nomadic Man] (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 34.

[8] Elie Wiesel, Mémoires 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 144, 146, 152.

[9] George Steiner, De la Bible à Kafka [From the Bible to Kafka] (Paris: Bayard, 2002).

[10] Martin Buber, Judaïsme (Paris: Verdier, 1982), 35.

[11] Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Xénophobies [Xenophobias] (Paris: Grasset, 1998), 14.

[12] Jacques Attali, Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle [Dictionary of the Twenty-First Century] (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

[13] Attali, L’Homme nomade, 436.

[14] Guy Sorman, En attendant les barbares [Waiting for the barbarians] (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 174–79.

[15] Le Nouvel Observateur, October 13, 2005.

[16] Bernard-Henri Lévy, L’Idéologie française [The French Ideology] (Paris: Grasset, 1981), 212–16.

[17] Lévinas, Difficile liberté, 299.

[18] Alain Minc, La Vengeance des Nations (Paris: Grasset, 1990), 154.

[19] Minc, La Vengeance des Nations, 208.

[20] Albert Cohen, Frères humains (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), Patrick Modiano, La Place de l’Etoile (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

[21] Moshe Idel, Messianisme et mystique [Messianism and Mysticism] (Paris: Cerf, 1994), 65–66.

[22] Idel, Messianisme et mystique, 48.

[23] Jean-Christophe Attias, Isaac Abravanel, la mémoire et l’espérance [Isaac Abravanel, memory and hope] (Paris: Cerf, 1992), 256.

[24] Attias, Isaac Abravanel, 276.

[25] J.-L. Talmon, Destin d’Israël [Destiny of Israel] (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1965, 1967), 18.

[26] Pierre Paraf, Quand Israël aima [When Israel Will Love] (Paris: Les belles letters, 2000), 19.

[27] A Moroccan Jewish ghetto—Ed.

[28] Camille Marbo, Flammes juives (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1936, 1999).

[29] Marbo, Flammes juives, 10.

[30] Marbo, Flammes juives, 18.

[31] Marbo, Flammes juives, 126.

[32] Alain Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue [Lost Humanity] (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 154.

[33] Alain Finkielkraut, Le Mécontemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 174–77.

[34] Attali, Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle.

[35] Clara Malraux, Rahel, Ma grande sœur . . . [Rahel, My big sister . . .] (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1980), 15.

[36] Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 72, 319.

[37] André Glucksmann, Le Discours de la haine (Paris: Plon, 2004), 73, 86, 88.

[38] Shmuel Trigano, L’Idéal démocratique… à l’épreuve de la shoah [The Democratic Ideal . . . the The Test of the Shoah] (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1999), 17.

[39] Herlinde Koelbl, Portraits juifs (Paris: L’Arche, 2003).

[40] Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. I (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 30, 31.

[41] Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995), 390–92.

[42] Vassili Grossman, Vie et destin [Life and Fate] (Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1960), 456–58.

TOQ, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2010).