PSYCHE OF THE ABUSED (Continued from p.4) various enthusiasms, and the allure of immersion in a politics much wider in scope and potential than any to which they had earlier had access, there was also, for a significant proportion of these Jews, the darker influence of the absorbed anti-Jewish bias. This can be seen particularly vividly in those who pursued the national cause with a special fervor as an alternative, rather than additional, identity to their Jewishness, and embraced it so intensely to prove to their compatriots they were more State citizen than Jew. It can be seen in the internationalists who have sympathized with other groups preserving their cultural and religious identity even as they became citizens of the world but who aggressively sought to shed their own cultural and religious identity, feeling them to be tainted in a way those of others were not. It can be seen in the socialists and communists who likewise sought aggressively to shed any Jewish identity and often reserved a special animus for their fellow Jews, variations on Marx's crude anti-Semitism, for supposedly being too wedded to the cash nexus and too averse to radical reforms. The judging of fellow Jews and Jewish institutions by a harsher standard than the judging of others, the placing of Jewish life in the dock of a kangaroo court, the detecting of a culpability among fellow Jews where none is or would be detected in similar circumstances among others, the reserving of a special impatience and distaste for things Jewish, are recurring notes in the biographies of many Jews and in Jewish social and political discourse. They are also particularly sensitive litmus tests for that mindset of seeking to soothe the ire and win the favor of the beast by absorbing anti-Semitic biases, seconding anti-Semitic indictments, and distancing oneself from things Jewish and/or advocating Jewish reform. Do these sorts of anti-Jewish bias among Jews always reflect such a mindset? Certainly one can conceive of an individual detaching himself from Jewish roots because of particular familial problems in his growing up and his association of those problems with his parents' Jewishness. He may subsequently be much harsher in his attitudes toward things Jewish than toward other religious or ethnic groups and their cultural accoutrements because of the former's inferred association with old personal grievances rather than because of some adoption of the larger society's anti-Jewish animus. It is not unusual to see, for example, Catholics who, because of grievances related to the Catholic homes in which they grew up, or to their experiences in Catholic schools, harbor an animus toward things Catholic that does not extend to the institutions or beliefs of other religions. But when personal grievances stemming from early experience with parents are translated into some resentment toward a larger target associated with home and parents, the comprehending of that larger target and its purported faults invariably reflects the indictments of

that target abroad in the wider society. Those, for example, who harbor grievances against home and parents and choose to see what they resent in their early experience as a product of their "middle class, bourgeois" upbringing inevitably form their comprehensions around the caricature-like indictments of the middle class and the bourgeois so popular among segments of our society. Similarly, those who harbor an animus toward things Jewish because of personal grievances concerning their growing up invariably incorporate elements of the larger society's animus toward things Jewish, the society's caricature of the "Jewish," in their grievances. The mindset is still that all would be set right if only this "Jewish" problem were resolved; a Jewish incorporating of the anti-Jewish indictments of the broader society. This absorption of the larger society's indictments is seen not only in alienated Jews but also in people who value their Jewish identity and their connections with the Jewish community, even people who dedicate themselves to promoting the welfare of the Jewish community. Among such people as well one often finds a predisposition to condemn fellow Jews for supposed shortcomings in a manner that contrasts sharply with their judgment of others, a manner that is often startling for its sheer unfairness, its echoes of anti-Jewish claims by hostile elements in the wider world, and its obvious suspension of any measured reasoning. Their doing so reflects again the wish to believe that missteps by Jews are the key to Jewish difficulties with the wider society and that the right steps will inexorably ameliorate those difficulties. The self-delusion in this tack of trying to assuage and win over the abusers by embracing the abusers' indictments is reflected in the obviously contradictory accusations levelled by the haters against the Jews and, consequently, the contradictory assessments of what There has been a strong impulse among Jews to blame themselves for communal traumas or to embrace the anti-Jewish indictments of the larger society... must be set right to undo the world's animus. Jew-hatred has, in profound ways, nothing to do with the characteristics of Jews at all, beyond their constituting the "Other." It has much more to do with the psychopathology of the haters and with political forces that converge with such psychopathology. Most prominent of these forces is the recurrent political expediency of proffering the public a scapegoat, of channeling and exploiting constituents' personal grievances, particularly in times of broad social stress, by identifying an Other as enemy and accruing political gain by leading a crusade against that Other. Jews have been indicted by the haters in the last two hundred years for totally contradictory "offenses" (Continued on p.6)

December 1996               - 5 -               Outpost