Condescension of the Arrogant
Gyp le décrit comme un personnage
inassimilable. Par avance, elle lui
refuse toute chance d’intégration….Elle ne condamne pas le Juif pour son passé,
(elle connait qu’il serait injuste de le teint pour responsable de la traîtrise
de Judas, mais pour le présent.[i]
Gyp describes him as an
unassimilable person. In advance, she
refuses him all chance for integration…She does not condemn the Jew for his
past (she know that it would be unjust to hold him responsible for Judas’s
betrayal, but for the present.
Here the woman who write romantic books with an anti-Semitic tincture,
the Countess de Mirabeau-Martel, speaks specifically of the editor of the
fashionable right-wing newspaper Le
Gaulois. For all his efforts to keep
away from his Jewish heritage and to assimilate into French high society, Gyp
can never accept him—though she will accept favors—and he, later in his own
career, will actually convert to Catholicism, hoping in the rising anti-Jewish
fever of the 1890s this move will break down the walls of prejudice. She does not blame the poor man for what his
ancestors did in betraying Jesus and rejecting Christ. She does, however, see him as a hopeless
parvenu, an intruder, and a pushy, incorrigible member of a race that ought to
know its place—and its place is not in France.
This is the anti-Semitism of pity, annoyance and superciliousness. If only the old fellow could accept how
miserable he looks, how uncivil are his manners, and how bothersome is wealth
when so many better people would know what to do with the money, the great
estates and the influence he has in business and politics.
Thus, another symptom or ploy of the anti-Semites which explains why
they hate comes in the form of condescension, couched in expressions of deep
concern for the poor little lost souls who have erred so grievously, and
deserve guidance and admonition..
Assuming the position of moral superiority and self-righteousness, the
speaker looks down on the poor self-deluded Jew and asks how it can be that a
people who suffered so much in the past under one form of persecution or another
can inflict even worse suffering on another people. Then he asks the Jew—or asks about the Jew,
since the anti-Semite cannot abide the presence of the person he hates, finds
him unpleasant to look at and suspects the very worst of him—why is it that you
or this people can have no sense of how they appear to others? You don’t seem
capable of reflecting on how horridly cruel you seem to others, to normal
people? For all your supposed
intellectual abilities, you are unaware, unconscious, numb to the feelings of
others? Why is that Jews are totally absorbed in themselves and in their
irrelevant and meticulous debates on trivial issues of Biblical and Talmudic
scholarship? They are like little children who cannot see past their own egos,.
With your ridiculous notion of being the Chosen People.
Translated into more historical and psychological terms, what these
charges are really saying is something like this: everything about myself that
I find so uncomfortable and disappointing exists in you and therefore you must
be the cause of my sense of inferiority; your arguments and your frames of
reference make no sense to me, they intimidate me and frighten me, and
therefore they must be wrong, outside of normal common sense. Or, if we look at the example of Edgar Degas
as a case in point, we find that, as Linda Nochlin puts it, he “was indeed an
extraordinary artist, a brilliant innovator, and one of the most important figures
in the artistic vanguard of the nineteenth century” but, when you come down to
it, “a perfectly ordinary anti-Semite.”[ii] Ashamed of his own family’s pretence at being
aristocratic and their inability to maintain the wealth to sustain the pose, as
well as their dubious claims to be purely French, Degas scapegoated the Jews
for his plight and blamed them for making other people his own condition was
like theirs. Harwood therefore concludes
by saying that “His art may have been motivated by aesthetic ideals, but his
anti-Semitism was driven by ignorance and insecurity.”
In other words, just as intellectual brilliance is no guarantee of moral
decency, so aesthetic and artistic principles cannot deter the artist or the
critic from making an ass of himself through his crass and gross behavior. On the one hand, then, would-be artists and
arbiters of taste, like Hitler, Goebbels and their ilk have pretentions of
refinement and sophistication in regard to the fine arts and demonstrate such
exquisite tastes by acts of theft and violence; so too, unfortunately, genuine connoisseurs,
highly educated art historians, museum directors and curators, and painters,
composers and ballet masters are to be found amongst the filthy riffraff and
guttersnipes of the Holocaust.
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