Professor David Peimer
Jean Paul Sartre’s book “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”

Professor David Peimer - Jean-Paul Sartre: Antisemite and Jew

- So, going to kick off with Jean-Paul Sartre today, looking specifically at his book, “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”, and then next week I’m going to do Edith Piaf, one of my great favourites of all time. So, Jean-Paul Sartre, not only in terms of French history, but in terms of philosophy, literature, culture, for me, an extraordinary contribution, and big impact naturally, when I was much younger, and I think for many people. And to try and get to grips with this guy, in some of his main ideas, I mean, I loved his novels and his plays he wrote, his philosophy. And then, choosing today to focus specifically on the one book, “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”, for obvious reasons, and looking to see, what is he really suggesting in this pretty short book that he wrote? But I think it’s a remarkable, what I would call, a remarkable series of provocations, where he provokes ideas for us to really think about. They, some of them are fairly well known. But the way he phrases, the way he puts it and thinks about it, is to me, quite original, and it’s certainly applicable for post Second World War, and still, I think, for our times today, as anti-Semitism, tragically grows more and more. So, to try and get to grips with his understanding of the book he wrote just before the end of the war, and then published just after the war. So as we all know, philosopher is famous for really writing on existentialism. You know, his magnum opus, as it were, “Being and Nothingness”, playwright, novelist, screenwriter… The other great book of his, “Existentialism is a Humanism”. But what’s often underestimated is his literary output, of the novels and the plays, and this book, for me, “Anti-Semite and the Jew”, is the one which, it still, as I say, it holds many fascinating, but provocative ideas. 1964, just want to capture a little bit of his life, before we go into the book specifically. 1964, he wins the Nobel Prize for literature.

Couple of other interesting facts, which I don’t know, how many know, but he was the first cousin of the Nobel Prize Laureate, Albert Schweitzer, you know, who we all know the story of Albert Schweitzer. First cousin. His father, Sartre’s father died when he was two years old, and Schweitzer’s father, who would be his uncle, really helped his own mother bring him up. So the connection between him and Schweitzer is quite strong. He meets Simone de Beauvoir in 1929, and we all know the great relationship they have together, intellectually, emotionally, sexually, their ideas, what they share, what they don’t share. 1933 and 34, he studies in Berlin. 1939, Sartre is called up to the French army, and he’s captured by the Germans, and made a prisoner of war in 1940. Then he escapes in April 1941. He, so he’s active in what’s going on, in the early parts of the war. He participated in the founding of an underground group. And he, and Simone de Beauvoir, and others initially were obsessed with killing, they really wanted to kill collaborators. They obviously saw what was going on, understood what was happening, and the desire to destroy, or to get rid of the collaborators is what freaked them the most. He went to get the support of Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, but they backed off. Sartre instead, then decided to use the pen and his ability with words and writing, and his ability to use his mind, instead of being in active resistance. What’s interesting is that, during the war, he also wrote “Being and Nothingness”, he wrote “The Flies”, he wrote the play “No Exit”.

I mean, the upward didn’t stop. And he got to understand, to really try and understand what the Germans were doing in France, even though this whole section is on France, there’s this period that we’re looking at, and what was the difference between the German soldiers in France, and the French, in relation to Jewish people and the Germans? He observes, as the German soldiers, in his words, presented themselves very politely to the French. He wrote that this, in his word, correctness, of the Germans, is precisely what caused a moral corruption in the French. We can debate it. Again, I see Sartre as a provocative thinker, a provocative, if you like, ideas creator, generator, which can be debated, you know. I mean, sure, this polite correctness, was that really the reason why there was, what he called, moral corruption amongst the French? You know, handing in the Jews, collaborating, so many of them collaborating with Vichy, Petain, and all the others that Julie and William have been speaking about so wonderfully. And he saw that this correctness of the Germans gave an excuse to the French, for their passivity, and worse. Their being informants, collaborators, torturers, killers, police. By September 1940, the German military intelligence, the Abwehr, had recruited 32,000 Frenchmen. Just by September 1940, they’ve barely conquered France, and they’ve already got over 30,000 working for German military intelligence so quickly. By 1942, the Paris , the Paris German Commandant, the office of the Paris German Commandant by 1942, so what are we talking, seven, eight months after the conquest of France?

Is getting one and a half thousand letters per day, sent by informants and collaborators. And those are just the official letters. Never mind what’s being sent all over. This is just to the official office in Paris. And with the occupation, the French often call the Germans The Others, this is all in Sartre’s book, “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”, which inspired the aphorism in his play, the play called “No Exit”, where he has the great aphorism, “Hell is other people.” He’s referring directly back to The Others, which is how the French called the German occupiers, conquerors. So he is looking in particular, at his on society, from the lens, or through the lens of, why did they collaborate so quickly? Why did they resist so minimally, certainly in the early days? Why were they so quick to inform? Why were they so quick to join the German military intelligence, and so on? How did the Germans perform and present themselves to get the French in so much? What else was happening under the thin veneer of so-called French civilization at the time that so many French came on board? This is all the beginnings in his book, “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”. Sartre contributes to a newspaper called “Combat”, which my personal, one of my personal writers I love, Albert Camus, was editor of. And Sartre is, and they were great friends at the time, and had been before the war. So Camus is editing “Combat”, clandestine newspaper, and he’s working with Camus, and Sartre is writing for it, underground newspaper, basically, for the resistance, but also for anybody in the underground in France.

1946, he published the book “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”, trying to understand the aetiology of hate, and trying to understand what specifically can we learn from the French experience of collaboration, informants, during the war against the Jews, and what can we learn about French society, and broader, what can we learn about, if you like, modern understanding, or 20th century understanding, in his terms, of Anti-Semitism and Jewish people? Interestingly, Camus said that Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote . And Camus, I mean these are little aphorisms, and clever phrases. Camus saw himself as a bit of both, resister and a writer, et cetera. Trying to be more physically active in the resistance, Camus. In 19, in the 60s, Sartre was arrested for civil disobedience by De Gaulle. But then De Gaulle released very quickly, and said that France, the great phrase I’m sure everybody knows, De Gaulle’s great phrase, “France does not arrest its Voltaire”. Philosopher, thinker, writer. One of the other great books that he wrote was “Nausea”, which I remember reading as a kid. And, such an impact on the understanding, together with Camus’, “The Outsider”, the beginnings of existentialism, what does it mean to live in a state of anxiety, and yet still act, in the age of anxiety, and yet still act? Anxiety, which he called a philosophical nausea. He also wrote “The Critique of Dialectical Reason”. I’m not going to go into that today. It’s a whole separate ballgame. And of course, Sartre’s involved with the far left, with the left, with Communists, et cetera, you know, much more than Camus and others. Don’t have time to get into that.

He wrote a book on Genet, who for me, is one of the most fascinatingly brilliant French playwrights post the Second World War. Genet was an habitual thief, he was homosexual, all of these things banned at the time in France after the war, he was imprisoned endlessly, and they tried to imprison him for life, for being a habitual petty thief. But he wrote these remarkable plays which are really about where the human personality has multiple identity as performer, where the core is fairly empty, but endless series of performances in society, in our contemporary, media obsessed age, I think we see this played out. Leaders, the politicians, the people all over. What matters more is the performance, how one is seen to be, rather than substance, content, and our leaders’ policies. So… And Genet’s plays are obsessed with everybody as a performer, the great play of his, “The Balcony” is set in a brothel where political, and business, and all the other leaders, military, are going to enact sexual fantasies, where they act out fantasy characters in their imagination, you know. And this is their turn on, literally. And then what happens, is that there’s a real revolution in the streets, and they come out, and they come out as , as the characters that they’ve created in the brothel. And those, they take, and everybody loves them, everybody in the streets loves those fictitious characters they’ve created for their own erotic fantasy. It’s so witty and satirical, and for me, brilliant. And Genet did a whole lot of other things that he wrote about as well. Okay, he writes a book on, a massive biography of Flaubert, you know, the great writer of “Madame Bovary” and others. So his output is so prodigious, it’s quite extraordinary as a writer. And at his funeral, they reckon over 50,000 Parisians who lined the streets. So, what’s some of his main ideas?

Because I’m going to focus on this book here, “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”, and this is a picture of him with Simone de Beauvoir, obviously at a very young age together. Sartre’s primary idea is that people are condemned to be free. And we’re playing with the dialect, and we’re also playing with a paradox, condemned to be free, that, and his idea is that we are born into anxiety whether we like it or not. And he means it in a philosophical sense, not just in an emotional way, but that it’s an age of anxiety. It’s, remember, he’s writing after the war, where everything is thrown into question. And obviously the Holocaust is the most grotesque, horrific event in human history. So what is he, you know, what is he really looking at here? How people are so traumatised and traumatic, in France, and in Europe for him. So that existentialism, if we live in an age of anxiety, we must still aim to be authentic, which means to live out our choice, make out our decisions, condemned to be free. We are condemned in a certain age, in a certain period, we have no choice. Our family, our society, the dominant beliefs. Whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s enlightenment, whatever, but within that, we have the freedom to make our own choice. Camus is far more on the line of, things are far more a sense of destiny than free choice, and way back to the Ancient Greeks, but also the distinction between Camus and Sartre. Sartre’s really a profound strong believer in this idea of free, of choice, at least to shape parts of our destiny in existentialism.

We are left alone, without excuse, is one of his great phrases in his philosophy. We are left alone, without excuse, we are alone. Authenticity is to exist with anguish in the age of anxiety, but we recognise ourselves as an author of our own meaning, and the inauthentic way of living is to run away from ourselves, to escape this profound, unnameable sense of anxiety, of anxious, of anguish, and to escape our responsibility for our own existence, so that within it, we have some choice, bottom line. Condemned to be free. We are alone, but we don’t have an excuse. So, of course it’s an idealistic doctrine, but it’s a provocative doctrine and philosophy to try and encourage action in life, personal and broader. From 1967, onwards, Sartre publicly supported Israel in the Six Day War, which is quite important, because many didn’t. And he later was quoted as saying, “I’m more Jewish than many Jews.” Of course, we know, the Simone de Beauvoir, the affairs, the prizes for his novels, everything else. Okay, so let’s get into the book, of the “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”. He starts by looking, as I said, at the idea of the collaborators, and what is a collaborator, and why was France, why did so many French inform, collaborate, join Vichy, join Petain and others? Only later, perhaps, many became part of The Resistance. And he looks at ancient times, Cicero, who lives obviously, before the birth of Christ. And Cicero spoke about the Odeum of Jewish gold. This is the great Roman philosopher, Cicero. Speaks about the Odeum of Jewish gold, money. But he also, Cicero observes, how Jewish people will stick together no matter what, when attacked. So this is going way back into ancient Roman times. He’s trying to understand Europe, and the Jewish role in Ancient, Old Europe if you like, or Ancient Europe, Roman times, and contemporary.

There isn’t a sense of, obviously there’s no attack on them in terms of religion, yeah, it’s just that it’s money, and it’s, but there’s a stubborn admiration for the Jewish stubbornness, to stick together and fight. He looks at the Roman historian, Tacitus. The Roman historian, Tacitus speaks about base and abominable Jewish customs. Well they would have spoken about any so-called, barbaric group, because everybody who wasn’t Roman was of course , barbarians. And they were all based and fairly abominable. Look at Caesar’s diaries, Cicero’s, and many other writers. So you know, that isn’t such a… A thing that’s very common to all the Roman colonies. He didn’t, Tacitus observed how the Romans didn’t like, how quite a few Romans had converted to Judaism, fascinating to read these ancient writers, and see the difference to post the Christian Europe in their writing. There’s the Roman satirists, who wrote some fantastic satires called “Juvenil”. They called the Jews drunken and rowdy, but an excitable bunch . So there was mild prejudice. But this was, I think, pretty common. They could have talked about any of the so-called barbarians, as I say, anybody belonging to any colony or province of Rome. There was a general contempt that the Romans exhibited towards all barbarians. Juvenile was just as contemptuous about the Greeks. And we need to remember that the Romans, you know, admired the Greeks, and adopted so many of their ideas. Greeks, and all foreigners, Juvenile writes, “I can’t stand the dregs who come from the land of Greece.”

So you know, it’s basically part of everybody else. It’s the beginning of the Christian era, that of course, everything changes. So Sartre first tries to identify this historically. Why were the Romans so different to, after, you know, he’s looking at France during and after the war in Europe. The ideas, again some of these ideas which will stimulate us today, then, so he’s writing in late 1944, after the liberation of Paris, this book, and the complicity of the French in deportations. He looks at in detail. And the early part of the book begins with a story that news of the camps and the horror of the atrocities begins to filter out. And he asks, and why were the French so involved and so in alliance, at least working with, collaborating with the Germans in deportations? One thing to be a collaborator and informant, it’s another thing to give deportations to the camps. And at the heart of Sartre’s main idea in the book, is the idea of the scapegoat. That every society needs scapegoats, and for the Romans there were the barbarians, they were inferior, they were all sorts of things. But the scapegoat, which is so much more extreme, and the scapegoat for the French, the Jewish, Jewish people. Scapegoats in Europe, the Jewish people. Not necessary other parts of the world, Africa or Asia, but he comes to the conclusion in the book, it’s the scapegoat philosophy. Why do people hate, dislike, or have disdain for Jewish people? And for him, he comes up with the phrase, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would have invented him.” What does this really mean? It means that the anti-Semite, that the French people needed to find some scapegoat.

Europe has to have a scapegoat. And the most convenient one, for obvious connection to religious reasons, killing of God, Christ, the days, so there’s that. And then of course, all the other things that we know. The Jews are responsible for Communism, they’re responsible for Capitalism, responsible for all the evils, moral decays of society, everything can be blamed on the Jews. Who really controls society? The Jews, everything can be put at the door of the convenient scapegoat. And to find the one group, or race, or ethnic, religious, whatever relationship, it’s convenient to have one in the society. So he’s linking the idea of scapegoat to this. The anti-Semite would invent him. In other words, French society would invent the scapegoat they wanted, now it’s a provocative idea, and I’m not saying I agree entirely. But I think it’s profound thinking. It shifts, it challenges the way I think, or we think, some of it. And I love to be challenged. And the Jew is the cause of all misfortune, that individual or the group feels. And instead of looking at themselves, of course, they will look elsewhere, project onto others, who is causing all their misfortune, scapegoat the Jews. Maybe in our times, it’s linked to the migrants, the immigrants, the foreigners coming in, the aliens, you know, coming on the boats, across the English Channel, coming through the borders, whatever. But internally, the scapegoat to blame, who controls the world? Money, Capitalism, Communism, any problem, blame. We have to find blame, part of human nature. Blame the other, and the other, internally, is the Jew. Or the one that is blamed the most. And he looks at the history.

And I know that Trudy, and others have been through the extraordinary history of Dreyfus, et cetera, in French society. So only looking at France, he was trying to understand such complicity in deportations. And most Jews were so highly assimilated, that he knew, certainly in Paris, that he was accustomed to. So such high assimilation, such friendship amongst Jewish and Christian, and whatever, peoples living at the time, and yet turning so quickly. You know, not only to be pro-Vichy, and pro the Germans, but helping in deportations. So what on earth had gone on in France so quickly? How did the hatred of the Jewish people in France just explode so quickly? And for him, it was less about religion, which we can debate, but less about the religious origins, and back to the idea of killing the Christian God. It was less about religion, but more about race and nation. Who is the anti-Semite? His obsession is looking at, for perspective from the anti-Semite eyes. And most of the individual’s problems, the country’s problems, came from the Jew. So the remedy, would be of course to deprive the Jew of their rights, and leading ultimately, to the most extreme as we know. What’s interesting is that he starts by looking and saying that what happened in Germany first was the banning of Jews early on anyway, from swimming pools, parks. So it’s a banning of the physical body, the body of the Jewish person is banned, or begins to be excised, internally excommunicated from the society. Why were the Germans obsessed first, with swimming pools, and you know, parks and so on? And we think about Apartheid, similar, but you know, sticking here to this, and he looks at physique, nose, clothing, the body, the hair. It’s the performance of quality of the body in the public, how the body is performed in the public.

And we see such echoes, I think, in contemporary society. The costuming and the body. Fantastic play by the Swiss playwright, Max Frisch, 1961, which is called “Andora”, its a remarkable play. And the play is about, this whole society is covered, face, arms, everything, and you have these officers going all around, sniffing out who’s a Jew and who isn’t. And they don’t even have to see. They can sniff, so the smell can tell them who’s a Jew. So it’s brought down to smell, to physicality, to body, to look, to physique, through the covering in the metaphor of the play, “Andora”. It’s a terrifyingly brilliant play, satire, and terrifying. And he goes on to say, “It’s not hard to hate,” Sartre in his book. If you really think about it, it’s so ancient. Obviously, hate, and not just dislike or disdain, but to reach the point of hate. But then he comes up with a fascinating interpretation, what is hate? Is hate just an emotion? Is it a passion? And he argues, no. Hate is a faith. Hate is a faith. So you cannot argue against it. You cannot debate it. You cannot even discuss it. Hate is a faith for the human nature. Now that’s a fascinatingly provocative idea for me, that when we can hate enough, no amount of rational, or discussion, or debate, or art can confront it, really. Because if it’s a faith, it’s not subject to debate, discussion, people believe or they don’t. People believe the sky is blue, the earth is flat, the earth is at the centre and the Sun revolves around the earth. Whatever, it’s a faith. And hate he locates as that. And that… The faith of hate has to link to an idea, the idea that the earth, sorry the Sun revolves around the earth, the earth is flat, whatever. And the faith is in the idea of the Jew. Can’t be questioned, doesn’t need to be questioned. Doesn’t need to ask anything.

Jews control, Jews are rich, Jews are duplicitous, Jews are this, et cetera, et cetera. Jews are Communist, Jews are Capitalist, whatever. It’s a faith. So, but at the same time, French people, he argues, gives… That the French society must give the scapegoats some virtue, not only pure evil and pure horrible, and hate, human psyche is a little bit more complex. So then, what are the virtues? And the French people he says, “Well see, the Jew is clever, knows business, has great scientific convention, is artistic, writes poetry.” So there’s a catch 22, either clever, or too clever, or too primitive in their physicality, you know. And so selfish, and self-obsessed, and et cetera, et cetera, so primitive in the physicalities and too clever by half. So catch 22. In his book, he talks about how the Jew can’t win. There’s no way, in his understanding. So the virtues that are given turn out to be vices, because they turn out to be dangerous to the Frenchmen, and the anti-Semite. The true Frenchman, in Sartre’s understanding of what happened during the war, and after in France, the true Frenchman saw himself as rooted in the land, in the cities, the history, the traditions of France. 20 centuries of ancestral wisdom, going way back to taking on Caesar, and all the rest of it in Gaul. Does not need intelligence. Does not need rationality, reason, to understand the faith of hate. And understanding the Jew in the paradox of the Jewish to be seen as virtues, but also vices. So, and in modern life as well, the Jew can understand stocks and shares, and securities, and money, and property, and control, and political power, the complexities of modern life, and at the same time be duplicitous, underhand, filthy, yeah, scheming and so on. Can’t win, caught in a catch.

So of course the Jew is inferior, and either Frenchman must be superior. But then, I also see the Jew as superior to me in some way, so you can see the catch. So can’t deal with it, have hate. Just shove it aside, blame it, scapegoat theory. And of course, societies have to have somebody at the bottom of the ladder, so everything goes there, and someone beneath. Then he goes onto another idea, and he talks about how, for the rich, they understand this of course, is nonsense. This of course, is ridiculous, it’s just ideology being played with, but for the rich, ah, we can exploit the anti-Semite. We can exploit all of these emotions for our own benefit, and rule the society. We can exploit the hate and blame at the Jew. Perfect scapegoat, that’s for the rich and the leaders. For the middle class, and the poor, well they need someone to hate for their situation. They’re poor, or they’re middle class wanting to go up the ladder, so who are they going to hate? Well instead of hating the rich and the upper class, they hate the Jew. Scapegoat theory, again. So the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. And the most fearful and threatened ultimately, in the French people, that he saw, was to argue that, it was also of course, change. And as always, in times of great change, and traumas and dramas, when the fault lines of a society crack open, is a nostalgia for a vague, mythically nonsense past, when so-called things were better, things were more secure, you know. So be French, and be proud. Where the Frenchman does not have to prove his worth. Where life is complicated, but we can make it simpler by getting the scapegoat theory. And in times of fast change, people get frightened, scared, they look for something to hold onto. Especially when the fault lines get cracked, and things come out of hate and prejudices, and discrimination.

Things are too complicated, so people need to make it simpler. And of course this can be exploited and manipulated very easily. And the Jew is the cause of this mystery. In ancient times that go way back, what caused the earthquakes, what caused the sudden thunderstorms, avalanches, floods, you know, the gods, some terrifying, all sorts of, you know, hundreds or thousands of gods up in the stars or in the earth, wherever they were. But in modern times, we can’t look at all those gods, because of course we don’t buy it for a second. We can find the scapegoat living next door. Much more convenient. So the modern, the idea of the sacrificial lamb, to pacify, you know, the gods in ancient times, all the strange mysteries of diseases, and many things happening in life, you can blame all those things which are invisible, or parts of nature, but in modern times you can’t, because you know it’s nonsense. So what happens, is to blame the neighbour who happens to be Jewish, and also their numbers are quite small. So all of this leads to the Jew becoming the enemy of the real French. Who’s trying to control us? And he explores this in the book, of how this was used in France, you know, as a part of the justification for the deportation, for the French being part of it. You know, Jews will not control us, which is the exactly the same chant of the Germans and in Charlottesville, and in many other places in the world. So, we must destroy what humans fear the most. The scapegoat theory, the Jew. The dragon, the monster, the shadow, in Jungian terms. You know, the evil in the night, the bogeyman, the Dracula, the Frankenstein. You know, all these evil monsters that come, and so on. Ancient times, was one thing, contemporary times, another.

And that leads of course, the ancient myth was the human need for sacrifice. Sacrifice a child, sacrifice the goat, the lamb, the sheep, whatever, to pacify, please don’t make more thunder, flood, rain, bring us rain for the crops, whatever. Contemporary times, that archetype sacrificial lamb becomes the name of the Jew. The anti-Semite can be exploited and used. And the need for hate as a faith can be turned towards the Jewish person. So… The projection for fears, anxieties, worries, all these things, and envy and so on, can be all put onto the scapegoat, in Sartre’s idea of the scapegoat theory. Then, fascinatingly, he goes onto the liberal. What about the good, the non-Jewish liberal, the Democrat? Who says everybody is equal, let’s love everybody, let’s care, or let’s not be prejudiced, let’s not be too horrible, discriminate, you know, the liberal, the liberal as you know them today. And Sartre has a fascinating idea that the liberal is blind to the realities of the world, can’t acknowledge the power of the anti-Semite. Why? Because ultimately, the liberal believes in the universal rights, human rights of man. That’s an extraordinary provocative idea to me. That the person in a society believes universal human rights, so everybody is equal, I will not discriminate against anybody, race, religion, gender, whatever, da-da-da-da-da-da. All of that is the liberal. And that’s a great thing, that’s a great advance for human society, and I’ll defend the Jew as a man. But he must belong to all humanity. I will defend the Jew I will not annihilate.

But only if he belongs to the universal declaration the universal sense of humanity. He is not special, he is not this, he is not that, he’s one of many. And he goes back to 1791, the debate, in the Constituent Assembly in Paris, just after the Revolution where Clermont-Tonnerre had this great phrase, “We will refuse everything to the Jew as a nation, but give everything to the Jew as individuals.” What a comment. It gets it in one sentence. “We will refuse everything to the Jew as a nation, but give everything to the Jew as individuals.” Long as you’re individuals, long as you are French. You can have your religion, da-da-da-da-da, but as a nation, forget it, you’re toast. Again, the catch 22. So for Sartre, the Democrat, the liberal, will defend the Jew as an individual with equal rights, but condemn him as part of the Jewish nation or race, or religion. A liberal lives naively, to quote Sartre. The “Assimilationist Jew”, he looks at, in the book as well, and he talks about, the more he tries to flee being Jewish, the more he tries to assimilate, the more he is trapped by the liberal, obviously he is trapped by the fascist, the nationalist, that’s obvious. But he believes in real assimilation. He believes he can be part of the host society and Jewish, and mix, mix and match. In fact he’s almost desperate to assimilate, to belong, to fit in, to be understandable. In France, to convert, to assimilate, buy land, become part of, adopt conservative, conventional views, whatever of the French nation, do everything to fit in, he understood, he saw this.

But he argues in the book, the more that Jewish people flee their Jewishness, the more they are seen as cowards by the anti-Semite, and confirm anti-Semite’s contempt. And so the anti-Semite makes the Jew what he will want to be. And stigmatises this minority group. He cannot grant the Jew a double identity, both being a Jew and a Frenchman. And he looks at Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, where Hitler asks the question, “Is the Jew a German? Is this a German?” The Frenchman, he says, cannot accept a double identity, both Jew and French. Both French and Jew. Not only, which comes first, chicken or the egg, but cannot accept, sees it as double identity, demands a singular identity of the Jew in particular. Some of the great phrases here, and I’ve mentioned some of the others, this is Sartre in the picture with De Beauvoir, and some of the intellectual writers of his time, the scapegoat’s idea, and then he goes on to say, “The liberal Democrat is a friend to the Jew. But he is a feeble protector,” in Sartre’s phrase. It’s a provocatively brilliant, provocative phrase for me. “He is a feeble protector.” Because, if you believe in the universal rights of human man, of mankind, everybody is equal to rights. Everybody has the same rights. But come down to the nation, what’s first? I can protect you as an an individual, but I cannot protect you as a nation within the nation. “He’s a feeble protector.” Because he believes, and this is such an irony that Sartre is trying to understand, philosophically, and historically, such an irony, and the great phrase from Tonnerre, 1791, “We will refuse everything to the Jew as a nation, but give everything the Jew as individuals.” Sometimes this makes me think that Western society, and wherever else, Middle East, wherever, certainly, cannot forgive the Jews the birth of Israel.

And I think that, for me, this of, and coming from the 1791 comment, cannot forgive the Jew, no longer victim, but fighter, and many other qualities, post the Holocaust. And throwing out a provocative idea, in the Sartrian spirit, shall we say . So there’s an endless series of, I would say, provocative and creative ideas that he goes into. And then of course, he looks at the sadist. And the sadist obviously thinks they have a pure heart, the killers, the ultimate aim, kill the monster. Kill the sacrificial lamb, we must sacrifice the lamb to appease the gods in ancient times, Roman, and pre Roman, and so on, to save our nation, and therefore we can be purified, we can be pure. That’s the meaning of the archetype of the sacrificial lamb, and the sacrifices of ancient times. But we can’t believe in it, as I said today, it’s got to be the neighbour, or the family down the street, who you know, I don’t know, light candles, or talked about a different god, or whatever, talk in a different way, or different beliefs, the Jewish person. But the Jew is no longer the masochists, which becomes difficult. So, we refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, within. And that’s the catch 22 for me, of the liberal Democratic perception, is this comment of Tonnerre, and the scapegoat idea. The feeble protector, what an extraordinarily interesting phrase, and highly provocative.

So the liberal Democrat sees groups more than individuals. Extraordinary. The fascist, the more extreme, the more nationalist, just has faith of hate, to hate the other, the scapegoat, the Jew. For the liberal Democrat, it’s more complex. He sees all, naively, as assimilated to being French, all immigrants. Let’s assimilate everybody, let’s everybody be French, but it’s naive, because the anti-Semite wants to destroy. The Jew is a man, and sees the Jew as a pariah on the host nation, and the liberal Democrat wants to destroy him as a Jew, and leave nothing but the man. Destroy him in connection to his nation and religion, whatever, but let him be a a man. Long as you fully accept being totally French, forget about your culture, your religion, whatever, et cetera, et cetera, you can be accepted. That’s the feeble protection offered. These are profoundly provocative ideas. It’s not only the extreme right-wing, or the right-wing of nationalism, obviously. But also the liberal Democrats. So the Jew is caught between the two, cannot win. The only win is to have your own place. So if we go back to the idea, I’m going to say it again, this is Sartre’s phrase, “The anti-Semite wants to destroy him as a man,” this is the more nationalist one, “And sees the Jew as the pariah on the host nation, therefore the scapegoat. The liberal Democrat wants to destroy him as a Jew, not a man, so that he is only a man in our society.” Complicated, catch 22, through and through. Is the Jew first a Frenchman, or first a Jew? The old discussion and debate. Who belongs, you know. Goes way back to Shylock, you know. Where is the Jew? Art thou an alien, art thou a citizen? These words are so often in Shakespeare’s play, in “The Merchant of Venice”. You know, is he an alien? Who is an alien, who is a citizen?

Who, you know… And those phrases being used all the time. And of course, the alien within, not just the alien at the border. Ultimately for Sartre, religion, race, or even nation doesn’t matter so much. But you try and live in a country of France, for him, which ultimately does not want you to belong to the club. And of course, he’s looking quite forensically at France. So he, eventually not the book, goes on to talk about, it’s not just religion and race, it’s the nation idea, that the Jew is a man, but he’s part of a different nation within our nation. So for the liberal, I’ll protect you as a man, but not your nation, as a nation. For the other anti-Semite, more nationalist, I need to destroy you as a nation, and as a man. Okay, so all of this he looks at, and then he looks at, why did so many of the French side with Petain, and Vichy. Why give the Jews to the Germans so quickly, so much? You know, this whole, this ideology of need to keep France united, the unity of France. So important. And therefore, anybody who’s not quite fully French, whatever that is, can be kicked out, can be destroyed. Little bit ill at ease, but there must be some sacrifices to keep the unity of France. This goes way back to ancient times. We must sacrifice whatever, children, people, or animals, to keep the unity, the purity, of the host nation. Fascinating. So he talks about, and he goes on to mention French soldiers, and other writers, and other things in the book. And you know, the language, et cetera.

And then of course, I’m reminded of Groucho’s great joke, which I’m sure everybody knows, but it’s worth repeating, when his eight year old daughter was barred from a club, where her friend was joining, and was barred from a swimming club, because they didn’t allow Jews, and Groucho says, “Well she’s only half Jewish. How about if she just goes into the water up to her waist?” A brilliant joke, which captures the whole thing. That’s the Jew remains a stranger, an intruder, tolerated sometimes. But in times of crisis, fault line, the outsider is not necessarily tolerated. So an outsider who wants to belong to the club, and is in this constant to and fro, in and out. And he sees this at the heart of the French society of the time. He looks at how many Jewish cabinet ministers, how many lawyers, and he goes through all the figures that Trudy and others have looked at really, much better than me. And so, the role of this, and the immigrant. He even talks briefly with Kafka, and the trial, like the hero in the novel. The Jew is on a long trial, like in Kafka’s book. His lawyers barely even know him, nobody knows the charge, he’s guilty without knowing he charge, guilty before even arrested. Judged guilty, simply by birth. And it does echo Kafka in the trial. Born guilty already, just because he exists, that’s enough. Back to Shylock, you realise, at the end of the great speech, the great speech of his, why all this, da-da-da, because I am a Jew, it hits him. In the end, that’s it. He cannot, ultimately, belong. And Shylock has to learn that in the whole play.

He knows that he’s not really part of it, but he’s in the Rialto, the stock exchange, and he’s lending, he’s other things, et cetera, the position, but ultimately, he will never get to belong to the real club. Scapegoat theory again. So all these ideas are inside his book, and hence it leads to of course, Jewish sense of irony, and many things which are fascinatingly, for me, discussed in the book here. Here’s the trial that Kafka mentions, a pic of Sartre, different age. Also talks about the idea of Antigone, and going back to the great ancient Greek ply by Sophocles, where Antigone is the niece of Creon. Creon is the king of the city of Thebes. Yeah, it’s Thebes. And Creon is the king. And his niece is Antigone. And Creon is killed. Antigone’s brother, his own nephew, because he disobeyed some very minor law. And the punishment is to dump the body outside the gates of the city. Nobody can bury it, denied a burial. Which is horrific in ancient Greek culture. You cannot just leave the body on the ground. Have to bury, and have the ceremony, et cetera. So Antigone sneaks out at night, past the guards, buries her brother, and then sneaks back in. Of course the guards realise, see everything else, and so on, Creon gets to realise, and brings Antigone before him. And says, “You disobeyed my law, I’m the king. You’re my niece.” And she says, “Well, I put my brother first. I have to bury him, I have to do what’s right, morally, emotionally, he’s my brother, he’s your niece, he’s your nephew.” Creon says, “But I’m the king, I’m not just your uncle. I have to follow the law of the land, which is that I am your king. I have to put you to death, Antigone, or exile you,” et cetera. And Antigone goes, and Creon goes on about, “Why do you have so much pride, why are you so stubborn?”

And Sartre links this fascinatingly. “You have too much pride for a person sunk in misfortune.” Fantastic phrase by Sophocles in the play. “You have too much pride for a person sunk in misfortune.” So, not only the ancient Greek idea, of you know, hubris and pride will bring you down, of course that’s part of it, and to link this, the pride of Jewish people, the pride in culture and history, and heritage, and religion, whatever, all that stuff, is also part of the catch 22, also part of the scapegoat theory. Because a small group with too much pride, got to put them down, they’re not better than us. You know, we’re the dominant, we’re the majority in the group, in France. So, there we have it. So, and then he goes on to talk about, after this, about Antigone, is that the only reason that the French let the Jew exist, even, is as a useful scapegoat. Very provocatively interesting phrase. Whether the liberal Democrat, or the obvious, nationalist anti-Semite, is a useful scapegoat. And for him, ultimately, in the book, he argues that the Jew, and then, he’s coming back to existentialist philosophy, what is it to live an authentic life. And it’s just a moral thing, it’s an authentic life, is a choice to be who one is. Condemned to be free, with free choice. Is one who ceases to run away from their origin.

Ceases to be ashamed of himself and his kind. And the moment he stops being passive, he takes the power and the virulence away from the anti-Semite. And the authentic Jew makes himself a Jew. Instead of only letting the other, the society, the Frenchman, label him, the Jew, as the scapegoat, the victim, because the scapegoat, by definition, is the victim. Set up by the people scapegoating those people. So that is the authenticity for Sartre. Linking it now, to his… Existentialism, condemned to be free, not to run away from it, but to live it. Proudly, with pride, of Antigone, even if the price is, uncle the king, will kill. The final irony for Sartre is that the state of Israel gives the establishment of a nation of Jews. And the final irony, in Sartre’s idea in the book, is that it gives the Frenchman even more proof that the Jewish person is out of place in France. You have your own nation, you have your own land. What do you need to be here for? And don’t forget, watching “Leopoldstadt”, the Tom Stoppard play, I’m sure, I’ve spoken about it before, and everybody knows, and in it, sorry, at the end of the play, and I was going to the toilet, and a couple of guys, you know, at the urinals are talking about the play. Black and white, English, and so on, you know, very English accents, and so on, and they were saying, “Well, I suppose if they want to have their own race and their own nation so much, they should have their land, they deserve their land.” That was the comment in the toilet, after seeing the play, “Leopoldstadt”. It was fascinating to hear three or four English guys, black and white, discussing this, and this was the key conclusion they came to.

They can have their land, was the phrase. So, he’s once upon a time, he reproached for the race, was reproached for religion, now he was reproached for nationhood. So he does not belong in France, he doesn’t need France. He can go live in his own land. So the terrible irony of history for the Frenchmen, is that Zionism itself can be harmful. And are harmful for the Jewish person who wants to stay in his original homeland. So the French Jew gets angry at the Zionist, and the Zionist gets angry at the French Jew . And the story of the ironies of history and culture, and all of these ideas of Sartre go on and on. As I say, it’s a book of fascinating provocations, philosophical, and for me, profoundly intelligent. There’s no easy answer, I don’t think. But I don’t think these ideas on anti-Semitism can be ignored. And there are so many ideas, of course. But I think he’s trying to, in a genuine way, and you feel it in the writing, it’s a genuine attempt to really pull together and understanding because of what’s happened in the 40s during the war, and why so many French collaborated with deportation, with informing on Jewish people, not only collaboration, and informant generally, in French society. This is the cafe where Sartre, and many of his buddies and friends, I’m sure many people know this, where they all used to hang out, and so on.

This is a picture of Mr. Sartre there. And one comment of his, from an interview, “If you are lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” So lots of aphorisms, that a lot of these intellectuals and writers play with, and they’re witty and clever, but showing a nuanced, paradoxical understanding of what’s really going on. And for me, it’s not only in this little bit of humour, but again, in the book, it’s such set of nuanced ideas that he tries to present, to get to grips with, and it’s important, because, not only because the Holocaust happened, but it’s important to understand, why is the hatred so deep, or the dislike, or the disdain, or the feeble protector, if he’s right in that phrase, or not, to understand the complexities of all different individuals in a society, for how they deal with an ancient minority group. Okay, let’s hold it there, and we can do some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Ah, Rose, we studied, oh okay, fantastic. It was hard to follow at the age of 17. Yeah, no, I can understand. So also, it was taken out of context. You know, these plays, they do relate to the context of Sartre during the war, and his position in the Resistance, and as a writer, and trying to understand the sudden cataclysmic change in France, let alone everywhere else.

Q: Herbert, what was the split between Camus and Sartre all about?

A: Philosophically, it was, for Sartre, in existentialism, existence precedes essence, which means that, yes, my essence is that I’m born and I live, but my existence gives me free choice. So the essence is more destiny, and existence is more free choice. Free choice comes before destiny. Or free choice can shape destiny. Or we can try. So philosophically, the phrase was, “Existence precedes essence.” For Camus, philosophically in existentialism, it was, “Essence precedes existence,” which is, destiny determines a little bit of free choice. If we have that. So there was a philosophical difference firstly. Secondly, there was a difference between what Camus saw as the armchair fighter. And he called Sartre the armchair fighter. Politically, historically, et cetera. And Sartre got furious with him at this. And they had a major fallout after that. They actually saw a play together, where that comment came out from Camus, which is a bit unfair, but nevertheless. Where Camus said that to Sartre, after seeing the “Picasso” play together. And there were other things as well. Sartre was very jealous, he said Camus was so handsome, so good looking, women were falling after, looking after, and falling for him, and he, Sartre, had to rely on his intelligence, his intellect, because of course, his looks were not anything like Camus’. And all these other things you find in the letters. And the correspondence between them. Can’t say ultimately, which or , this is theorised why they fell out. Never stopped respecting each other, but fell out as friends.

Q: Romaine. They show fear as a human motivator, how does Sartre see it, see that as a human condition for collaboration?

A: That’s fascinating. He sees it, I mean, and the fear is so great, setting of the Germans, partly, but also, it didn’t have to lead to being so willingly part of helping the deportation, or necessarily, of course his fear of being arrested, the Gestapo, and being tortured and interrogated, he revealed certain, you know, about the Resistance and other people. I think that’s very obvious that’s fear. For me, collaboration has many strands, and it goes from informing to betraying, to ultimately, helping with deportations. And ultimately being, some of the French joining the SS, joining the French army, I mean the German army.

Merner, anyone who watched the U.S. Congress last night saw proof, theatre over substance. Absolutely. I watched a bit of it on CNN last night as well . I managed to watch a bit here. And Matt Gaetz, and the others, they are exactly that, I agree. I think they, the five, or however many there were of the, those five, they want, they love the fire, they want to burn the house. They want the fire, I don’t mean literally the House, or the Capitol, but they love just being destructive and having fire. You know, there’s an addiction to the energy, the excitement, the entertainment of burning things up, of trashing things. And of course, in the media age, more than 15 minutes of fame. The more your name gets out, the more your image gets out, the more famous you become, the more money you make, the more books you write, the more, you know, you can even aspire to be a Senator, more and more, and more got the chain. So, I see it as, it’s performative, it’s about performance, it’s not about policy, or real difference between them or McCarthy, or whatever. And they get it from Trump, who’s the ultimate master. And P.T. Barnum, the performance is the mode, theatrical. The love of theatre over leadership and policy. Or seeing that as leadership.

Q: Clara. Please comment on the book “Camus, A Life by Olivia”…

A: Oh, sorry I don’t know that book. I’ll have to have a look at it, thank you. Thanks, Clara.

Hannah, today in America, they’re even blaming the Rothschilds for controlling the weather . Why am I not surprised? Exactly. You know, people have to find something to blame for the weather. That’s brilliant.

Nanette, I read Sartre as a teenager, and it stayed with me until older age, didn’t reread the books but I will. Great, I mean, maybe you have a look at this book. It’s a short book, and very readable. “The Anti-Semite and the Jew”, and of course, his great philosophical books and novels. Also the saying, regarding the Jews, alter stated… Not sure what that is. Depth…

Q: Tisha, did Sartre get the quote from Voltaire? If God did not exist?

A: No, I’m not sure what, which quote. Sorry Trish, I’ll have to clarify that.

Q: Margaret, do you not think that it was less an act of hate for the Jews that effected the French, so much as a call to instinct to save their own skin?

A: Absolutely. Was it hate, or was it more priority to save your own skin? Maybe. Great idea, Margaret. As I say, it’s a series of provocative ideas coming from, a really, for me, from a really original thinker.

Alfred and Yona, the aphorism that if Jews did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent, is a conscious echo of, oh yes, of, this is the quote you meant. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Yup, he’s playing with it, absolutely. Thank you for that.

Q: Margaret, so if hate is a faith, doesn’t that remove the emotion?

A: Well, this is a provocative idea of Sartre’s, he’s trying to distinguish between dislike, all the rest of it, disdain, to hating.

Q: Because why can you not reason with it? Why can you not discuss it even, if it doesn’t even go in?

A: If it’s a faith, it’s a belief, nothing’s going to change it, really. In Sartre’s idea.

Eileen, I’ve heard the Jews are blamed for Covid. Well, you see, his idea, at the heart of everything, is the scapegoat theory. So everything can be dumped at the door of the scapegoat.

Q: Bill, can society exist without a scapegoat?

A: Now there is a fascinating question, Bill. And I have to tell you, my honest opinion, no. Joan. This is a very complex , the Jews ultimate baddie. The church has a lot to answer for, and why can they not get it together? Yup. Well, they are protecting their own interest. Not only do they blame of course, Jews for the killing of Christ or the God, but… He, Sartre would argue, they fall into the scapegoat idea. The churches have to have a scapegoat to prove that they’re ultimately much better, and much more in touch with, you know, God, and all that.

Susan. After Sartre’s death, Simone de Beauvoir was a partner of Claude Lanzmann, who created a series of… Brilliant series that, Claude Lanzmann, it’s an amazing… It’s just a rigorous and powerful, thank you Susan.

Q: Robert, what did he explain? No anti-Semitism in the East, in like India, China, and Japan.

A: Yeah. Well there, he would argue that the scapegoat is not the Jewish person. The scapegoat can be seen as other small minority groups in India, China, Japan.

Q: But a whole lot of, sorry, Parisians, isn’t the link of Christianity, isn’t the link of the Jewish people there being a small minority group or, you know, with the whole history in the East? Catherine, was it the shock and shame of the rapid fall of France?

A: Yeah I think so. I think it’s a great phrase, the shock and shame of the rapid fall of France that unlocked , yes. Deep disappointment. Patriotic values are not as widely shared as they believed. Exactly. I think there was a total traumatic shock for the French. Six weeks! I mean, the Germans couldn’t get far in France, in four years of that horrific, grotesque war, the First World War. And six weeks. You know, they blitzed through the Ardennes, and they blitzed through, and conquered France! And the French, for a whole lot of reasons, militarily, and culturally, and so on… Were smashed. So the shock to the French psyche, if we understand it, must have been absolutely huge. I agree entirely, shock and shame.

Q: Why the picture of the Duke and Wallace Simpson?

A: I’m not sure there, okay. A picture of F.D.R. Oh, that was him and others visiting F.D.R., sorry. Margaret, thank you. Okay, thank you.

Louie. Please instances of anti-Semitism in the writings of Sartre. I can’t think of any specifically. But if you know, please tell me, or no. Rita, thank you.

Your PhD was on the discourse of hate speech? That’s amazing. Oh, well I’d love to hear your ideas, Rita, thank you.

Marian. German play by Max Frisch is available on YouTube. Oh, great. You read it in school in Switzerland. Oh, okay. It’s such a powerful play. And okay… Going on.

Q: And Romaine. Did he distinguish in faiths organised by hate versus love?

A: No he doesn’t in the book, he just goes into hate.

Barbara. Miracles . Thank you. Okay.

Julien. Jean Anouilh, version of “Antigone” after the war puts that dilemma in a modern context. Absolutely. It’s a wonderful play of Anouilh.

Q: James. Didn’t French collaborators also inform on other non Jewish Frenchmen for their own economic or social benefit?

A: Yes. They certainly did. But didn’t hesitate to inform… For me, it wasn’t only the informing, and the collaboration was the help with the deportations. That’s another step, almost, in a way.

Q: Janus. The early letter of “Leopoldstadt” was not saved. Ah yes, definitely, would I give again?

A: Sure. So, a fascinating play by Stoppard, which is linked of course, to his own life.

Susan, Trump is the biggest arsonist . “Burning Down the House”, isn’t there the song? Exactly.

Q: Ester, could you repeat the quote, going back to the French government to the Jews position to the nation?

A: I’m not sure which one, Ester. Perhaps if you want to email, then give me the French government, the time, or going back to just after the French Revolution. I’m not sure, it’ll be here, thank you.

Q: Adrien, what was Sartre’s attitude to Israel?

A: Well, he was very pro Israel. And he said Jewish people need a nation, you know. He understood it, because he understood, you know, the collaboration, the deportation, the informing, the but also the total destruction of European jury. He understood it, he saw it, yup.

Ratia, Camus and Sartre parted ways in the issue of Communism, mainly. Okay. Thank you for reminding me. Yeah, it was also that Camus saw Sartre as naive. But that’s right, about the Soviet Union, and Stalin, and post Stalin. He saw, Camus saw Sartre as very naive, that it was a totalitarian state, et cetera, where Sartre still had an idealistic perception of it. You’re right. And there was a conflict between the two of them about that. Because Camus was kicked out of the Communist Party, or he left, he wasn’t interested anymore. And he saw Sartre as naive, absolutely. Sartre saw things in terms of French Colonialism, north, south. And Camus, as an Algerian Frenchman saw things in terms of Europe itself, and not just in Colonial terms, but conflicts within Europe. You’re right.

Jack. When Israel acts in its own best interest like other countries, it’s criticised for not being better. Yeah, exactly, sadly.

Barbara, Steve Bannon is behind the hatred and the idea of burning, yeah, Bannon I think has read and understood, and I always say, you know, one must understand the mind of Steve Bannon, one must understand the mind of the collaborator and the, one must think and engage with these, because we need to understand the people who are articulating things which are hooking people at a time, and why, and how is it working? And Bannon I think, is smart, he understands, exactly. The power of burning, and hate, and all the phrases, swamp, and all that.

Rita, burn down, the Talking Heads! Thank you . That’s right, I forgot, it was Talking Heads. The poem, thanks. The song.

Richard. Love the ironic caricature of Sartre with the eternal squint. He turned his vision from liability to visionary. Ah, lovely phrase. Thank you very much.

So, thank you everybody, and hope you’re well. Have a great rest of the weekend.

And Emily, thanks for all your help as always. Professor David Peimer | Jean Paul Sartre’s Book, The Anti-Semite and the Jew | 06.26.21

- David, I haven’t seen you for a while, it’s great. All week.

• [David] Pardon?

• [Wendy] I said I haven’t seen you for a whole week.

• I know. It looks beautiful there. Are you in LA?

• I am in LA.

• [David] Oh, fantastic.

• It’s sunny.

• It’s beautiful, sunny blue skies in Liverpool.

• [Wendy] Oh, oh, wonderful. That’s incredible.

• It is stunning, stunning.

• [Wendy] Okay, great, so you had a good day.

• Yes. Lovely.

• [Wendy] Good, good.

• And you?

• [Wendy] So, today, we are looking forward to Jean Paul Sartre.

• Jean Paul Sartre, and his book on the Anti-Semite–

• [Wendy] I’m going to hand over to you right now, ‘cause I see it’s 9:32 past the hour. So, looking forward to hearing about this great man.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Thank you so much. Thanks, thanks Wendy. Okay, so hi everybody, and hope everybody’s well and able to begin enjoying some summer in the north, and then obviously, winter in SA and down south. So, I’m going to be looking at John Paul Sartre today, and excuse some of my translations from the French or some of my, when I mention some French words and specifically his book on the Anti-Semite and the Jew, only specifically at that book, and his understanding of the relationship between the anti-Semite and the Jew. And as a, obviously as a Frenchman and Christian, or Frenchman, at least atheist, but not Jewish, trying to really understand anti-Semitism.

And what I find fascinating and extraordinary is how much thought and the rigour and the depth of thought that Sartre tries to bring to understanding from the anti-Semite perspective, from the non-Jewish perspective, that key relationship. And I think that’s what is really fascinating. The other thing that’s really important is that he wrote this after the liberation of Paris in late 1944, when the Allies had obviously liberated Paris, most of France, and were going on to Germany. It was then published in 1946, the book.

But that context is crucial, because he’s writing it as the war has come to an end in Paris, at least for itself, and specifically looking at France, French Jews, French anti-Semites, and the French under occupation of the Nazis. And that context is so important, and he makes strong reference to it at the beginning of his book. He’s not trying to globalise in any way, that he’s speaking for all people, anyway, he’s speaking about this particular period. And what also interests me is, under occupation, speaking from a West European country, France in particular, it’s interesting and fascinating to see his insights, again, coming as a non-Jew to this relationship between the anti-Semite and the Jew, really trying, I think, to apply his brilliant mind to understanding it.

So just briefly to remind ourselves, just a couple of things about his bio. That’s when he lived, 1905 to 1980. So obviously the war is absolutely, the Second World War is absolutely central. One of the great philosophers, one of the giant minds of the 20th century. Also a playwright, wrote some brilliant plays, novelist, he wrote some screenplays in particular, one on “Freud’s Passion,” for John Huston. It wasn’t made in the end, but he wrote it. Some amazing novels, amazing plays. And the philosophy of course, of existentialism, that everybody knows.

It’s the two key philosophical books were “Being and Nothingness,” and “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” I’m not going to go into those obviously, 'cause we’re focusing on his key book here, the Anti Anti-Semite and the Jew, which is subtitled “An Aetiology of Hate.” He’s trying to understand hate of his times in the mid-'40s, and in relation to what he’d experienced in occupied France under occupation, obviously. And this phrase summarises the book, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” And this is what I’m going to try and delve into, and really understand what on Earth this guy’s talking about.

On the left is a picture of Sartre with Simone de Beauvoir, who was his great lover for most of both their lives. This is at the cemetery, at the memorial for the great French writer, Balzac, and that’s Simone De Beauvoir on the right, and Sartre on the left. A couple of other facts that are interesting about his bio is that he was the first cousin of the Nobel Prize winner, Albert Schweitzer, whom everybody knows, and Sartre’s father died when he was two, and his mother went to live with Charles Schweitzer, who was her cousin, to try help bring up the young boy because she was bereft, she didn’t have that much money, and so on.

So he grew up under the influence of Albert Schweitzer’s father, who had a strong influence in literature, philosophy, mathematics, music, et cetera. And he acknowledges the enormous influence that his uncle, in a sense, his cousin of his mother gave him. Then, Charles Schweizer helped his mother raise him, basically, for the first 10, 12, 10 years after his father died, the age of two, when he was two. Then he meets Simone de Beauvoir in 1929. They’re studying together. Then in 1933, the relationship starts soon after.

By the way, she’s not interested in him at all, in a relationship, platonic yes, but not relationship. He hunts, perseveres, and eventually they get together and they have this kind of on/off, but profound love and friendship and intellectual companionship and intellectual equals for the rest of their mutual lives, in this kind of open relationship, they called it. They each adopt a daughter later in life. They didn’t have children themselves, and their children, their adopted children, became their heirs in a sense, looking after their estate. 1933 to '34, he goes to study in Berlin.

Now that’s important, because he sees the beginning of Hitlerism in '33. Hitler comes to power early 1933, Hitler comes to power, and he’s there for those two years, '33 and '34. He sees what is to come. And although he is studying intense philosophy, Hegel, Rousseau, the great Western philosophers, he’s starting to see the reality of what’s going on and what’s coming in Europe. Then in 1939, Sartre is called up to the French Army, is captured by the Germans, made a prisoner of war in 1940. Then it’s not sure, we can’t get the exact truth. Either he escaped in April, 1941, or he was let out because he claimed health problems, poor eyesight, et cetera, and got back to Paris.

More evidence is on the escape side, without going into the details of how he escaped. And then he participated in the founding of an underground group when he got back to Paris. And he got back with Simon De Beauvoir, and they decided they wanted to kill collaborators, not only Nazi leaders, but he talks about it later. He wrote about it later, Sartre, that the hatred towards the collaborator was actually stronger than the hatred to the German for themselves, and for some of their intellectual friends, I imagine. He tried to get the support, they tried to get the support of Andre Gide and Andre Mulraux, excuse my pronunciation again, but Mulraux and Gide backed off. They couldn’t find support amongst other French intellectuals, writers, artists, et cetera, of their times, very little.

So they decided, Sartre decided to write, instead of being involved in active resistance. And during the war, he’s in Paris, and that’s when he wrote “Being and Nothingness,” the great foundation text of the philosophy of Existentialism. He also wrote “The Flies” and the great and remarkable play, “No Exit,” during the war. What he then wrote about after the war is fascinating, that the Germans were told to speak, most of them could speak French, who were actually in occupied France, or at least in Paris during the occupation. And the German soldiers were told mostly to present themselves very politely, speak French, if they could, to the local French. So it’s quite different from some of the Hollywood and other images of Nazis in France and all the rest of it.

Obviously there were the brutal, sadistic killers. But for the majority of the non-Jewish French, what was their real experience? And that’s always the lens that he’s trying to see this through, the lens of the anti-Semite French, the lens of the non-Jewish French in Paris, in France. And by the way, everything I’m saying is coming from Sartre. It’s not from other historical sources, and it’s not from others who obviously would’ve written about France or Paris at the time. These are all his perceptions that I’m just trying to share with everyone today.

Sartre wrote about that the German soldiers showed themselves to be very correct, very polite, spoke some French, and that he argues that this caused some moral corruption in many French people, Parisians, who used the so-called correct polite behaviour of the Germans as an excuse for passivity, or far worse, collaborate, betray, et cetera. Interestingly, Sartre notes that by 1940 September, that’s only a few months after the Germans finished the occupation of Paris, in 1940, September, the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, had already recruited 32,000 French collaborators or informers, Paris alone.

By 1942, the Paris German Commandant was getting 1,500 letters per day sent by French collaborators into the main Gestapo office in Paris. You can imagine in 10 days, that’s 15,000 letters, betrayals, to report on whoever. And these are obviously the non-Jewish Parisians and French that he’s talking about. Sartre continues that, under the occupation, the French often called the Germans “the Other.” And they spoke about, amongst themselves, how do you speak to a German soldier if he’s asking directions, this way or that way? Do you tell him politely, because he’s being so polite, and speaking French, don’t you?

Yeah, these are the ordinary everyday experiences that one doesn’t really get to see or hear of. And he’s trying to get inside the French, the majority of French psyches of the times, from his perspective in Paris. And this phrase that the Germans were “the Others,” that’s how they were called, words of hate and et cetera, they weren’t used, it was just “the Others.” Of course, I’m not talking about the Resistance, but at this time, the Resistance is still pretty small. And this inspired the aphorism of Sartre in his great play, “No Exit,” which is basically a play where a couple of characters are in a room and there’s no exit, there’s no door, they can’t get out, they’re stuck in, they don’t know, and what happens to them, as a metaphor for the contemporary zeitgeist.

Nobody knows what’s outside, who these people are. They’re just a couple of characters stuck in a room. And they’re either going to kill each other, they’re going to betray, they’re going to fall in love, all the things that happen, they don’t know how to get out, where they are, what to do, et cetera. Heavily influenced by Kafka, who he acknowledges. Then, and the great phrase, “Hell is other people.” That’s the phrase from the play that has gone down in theatrical folklore, as you know, one of the the great lines, “Hell is other people.” There’s no exit to the room.

Sartre also was a contributor to a newspaper called “Combat” during the war. And this was created by his great friend and the brilliant, for me, the brilliant writer, cultural thinker, philosopher, novelist, Albert Camus. And Camus’s writings, which belong to a separate talk, another time. Then he writes, as I said, “The Anti-Semite and the Jew: an Aetiology of Hate,” in late '44, and it’s published in '46 in France.

To jump, 'cause there was so many things in this guy’s life, but I’m not going to go into them. So many, and I’m sure many people know, as the public intellectual, how many things he was involved in from the left and the right, and communism in China and Soviet Union and America, Europe, so many things. But we don’t have time. Anyway, so this is in the early '60s. He’s arrested for civil disobedience and De Gaulle says, comes out with the well-known phrase, 'cause he releases him immediately, “France does not arrest its Voltaire.”

In other words, France does not arrest or imprison great artists, intellectuals, writers. And that has gone down in the artistic world, and I’m sure in a cultural context, hugely globally, which countries do, and so quickly. We don’t have to mention very current examples. He also wrote the brilliant novel he’d written before, “Nausea,” they’re all influenced by Kafka. “Nausea,” which is about the existential state of anxiety, but not as a passive experience, as an assertive experience, which I’ll come to in a moment.

The play, “No Exit,” the play “The Respectable Prostitute,” and many others besides his philosophical texts, many novels, plays, et cetera. He writes “Critique of Dialectical Reason,” remarkable philosophical book. You see the range of this guy’s mind, is what is endlessly fascinating, thus obviously a giant of the intellect of the century. He wrote a huge book on Genet, the brilliant French playwright, one of the greatest of the 20th century, and a huge three-part biography of Flaubert, the French novelist. I mean these are just some of the stuff.

At his funeral, when he died in 1980, at least 50,000 Parisians walked the streets following the coffin, 50,000 at least, for an intellectual, a writer, a playwright. Where else in the world might that happen? A philosopher. So I’m not going to go into too much more detail, just to say here that this phrase, which comes from his book, “The Anti-Semite and the Jew,” is my primary, is the focus of today. “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” How is the Jew seen from the anti-Semite perspective? And a couple of phrases I’m going to come onto, this, by the way, is in late 1945, where Sartre and some other journalists and French intellectuals met General George Marshall, the American Chief of Staff, Eisenhower’s boss, and they met him in America.

So the level of Sartre and the others already were so elevated that they could have a meeting at the end of '45 with the ultimate commander of all the American troops, and most of the Allied troops, George C. Marshall here, in a meeting. So I’m not going to go into his philosophy on existentialism, it’ll come out as I’m talking about the book, in a couple of phrases. One of the great phrases is, “We are condemned to be free,” which comes from his classic book on existentialism. Of course the critique is, is existentialism an idealistic doctrine, an idealistic philosophy, looking back at it now, in the 21st century, 'cause the main idea is that people are born without God, and therefore, they make their own existence. They are authors of their own script.

I’m really putting it crudely and briefly, and therefore responsible for our own actions and decisions. “We are left alone without excuse,” another of Sartre’s great phrases from his book. And we must, we have the challenge to be authentic or to live in what he called false consciousness, and be inauthentic. And authenticity is to live knowing that anguish is fundamental to 20th-century living. But we are still, as long as we recognise that we can then be the author of our own life, of our meaning, the inauthentic way to live is about running away from ourselves to escape the zeitgeist, the anguish, he called it, of modern life, and the responsibility to take for one’s own actions.

So it’s not just this passive anxiety, depression, existentialist sort of cliched notion. It’s about how to act. But with that, I’ve often quoted Scott Fitzgerald, the definition of intelligence is to be able to see both sides of the same story, but still act. And I think, there’s a link to this here. So condemned to be free, in the paradox of that phrase, is the idea, idealistic or not, that’s a separate debate. From the '40s, he’s incredibly supportive of Jews and Judaism, and in 1967, he goes to Israel and he much later in his life said, “I’m more Jewish than many Jews I know.” You know, half as a joke, serious. He was always completely pro-Jewish.

And he went to visit Israel and actually said that this country can become one of the greatest in human history. And he never lost it, for all his interactions with many from the left and elsewhere, anti-imperialism, pro Che Guevara, all sorts of other things. He never lost that absolute commitment to Jews and to Israel. Just to briefly mention, because I am talking about anti-Semitism, it’s interesting to briefly look at how ancient societies saw Jews. And a quick few quotes before I go into it, sorry. It gets the Nobel Prize for Literature, as you can see here, for literature, not philosophy. These are for his novels and his plays.

The great Roman thinker and politician, Cicero, who was also the richest Roman at the time, who lived from 106 to 43 BC, and he spoke about the odium of Jewish gold, and how the Jews always stick together. Then the Roman historian Tacitus, who lived around the similar but a bit later, spoke about how abominable and base the Jewish customs were. And he didn’t like Romans who converted to Judaism. And the Roman satirist, Juvenal, called Jews, “hey get so drunk all the time, they’re rowdy, argumentative, and loud, gesticulate so much.” This is Juvenal writing, more than 2000 years ago, the great Roman satirist and poet, and he goes on about how the Jews drink so much and get so drunk, and are rowdy.

But for them, this is mild prejudice, it was the same as all other groups they conquered. There was no distinction. And in fact, they had a bit of a sympathy in a way, 'cause the Romans spoke about all the others who were not Roman as barbarians, barbari, in Latin. And Juvenal, for example, wrote a whole tract on the Greeks, just as contemptuous about other foreigners and Greeks. He said, “I can’t stand the dregs who come from Greece,” and other kind of comments. Okay, so looking at the book itself, the book is written and why do I want to look at it? Because of the ideas it stimulates today and what resonates.

As I said, some I agree with some I don’t. The context I’ve mentioned, it’s the complicity of the French in the deportations in the '40s. It’s written after the liberation of France, and the camps and the horror of the atrocities are just beginning to filter through to Paris. And his primary focus is on why were the Jews made such a scapegoat, why were they blamed? How on Earth could this happen? And he’s looking at it in late '44 before most others, even thinking more, how could it happen? And the scapegoat is his primary obsession, therefore, who is the anti-Semite, what does he do? And I’m using “he” all the time because Sartre does when he’s written, but obviously he’s talking about people.

So he’s trying to, his main idea is to always look at people, and how people are situated in society. That’s his primary focus, which comes from his existentialist philosophy. The Jew is who the anti-Semite chooses him to be. The Jew is the cause of the misfortune that a person or group feels, and instead of looking at themselves, they seek a scapegoat to blame, look outside. And obviously, the Jew is responsible for the money, the capitalism, communism, any problem in society, blame the other who lives within our own culture, blame the Jew, he’s the easiest available.

Of course, again, he’s only speaking about France, the complexity in the deportations. Most Jews he knew were highly assimilated, that’s important to say. And he was speaking about them as well. And he wondered, how did this happen? How did this hatred, at least this indifference to the Jewish fate happen in his own society? So he is less obsessed about religion, but more about race and nation. He looked at what had happened in Germany, and because he’d been there in '33, '34, he saw it beginning and he said, well, most of the problems and the country’s problems were blamed on the Jews, so the remedy was to deprive Jews of their rights.

Then the remedy was to expel, finally exterminate. And it begins with, for him, with the questions of, well, how many Jews are bankers? How many Jews are lawyers? How many Jews are doctors, professors, soldiers, or own business in Germany? It happens in France as well. How many make movies? How many Jews are, this kind of quota, figure, obsession, statistic. And he talks about the beginnings of the anti-Semitism there, and to never ignore it. I’ve heard people say, how many Jews in the Cabinet, of whatever country, of this country or that country, how many Jews? Why, why should it be?

And it’s interesting that Sartre begins by talking about that, this statistical question. Why does one have to justify, why even obsess about it? Then he talks about the physique, the nose, the clothing, and of course the late play, which sums it up in 1961, by the fantastic Swiss playwright, Max Frisch, is called “Andorra,” which is about how the police and the ordinary people are trained to smell out the Jews. So in the play, you see lots of people who are covered, faces covered, bodies covered, you can’t see them at all. And you have all these ordinary people going around, sniffing out Jews on stage, it’s an amazing play. And the story happens because you can sniff out, you can smell a Jew.

And that’s the metaphor of the Jew is dirty, as cunning, as filthy, as clever. You know, the physical attributes, again, not only the nose. Interestingly, Sartre proposes that it’s not hard to hate. And I find that a fascinating idea, because hate becomes a faith. When hate is a faith, it’s not hard to hate. It’s not just a passion, it’s a faith. And if it is, he says, it means that one has faith, because one has faith in ideas, and the idea of a Jew, and you don’t need to question it, because it’s a faith. Even if you give the Jew virtues, he’s clever, he knows business, he can do science, he writes poetry, it’s a catch-22, because the more virtues the Jew has, the more he’s dangerous to the anti-Semite.

Who is the true Frenchman? The true Frenchman is rooted in the land, in the cities, in the traditions and history of France, has 20 centuries of ancestral wisdom. Doesn’t need the intelligence. He has the wisdom. Doesn’t need the intelligent Jew coming and telling him what to do. As the English might say, too clever by half. Modern life, Sartre suggests, is too abstract. Stocks and shares and money, property, business securities. How does it all work? Shorting the stock market. The ordinary person, it’s too complicated, it’s too complex. But the Jew knows, and the Jew knows the law, he knows the tax, he knows the money, the business: blame him.

And of course, if the Jew is inferior, I, the Frenchman, am superior. At least I always have somebody under me. You have to have somebody at the bottom of the ladder, and always someone beneath me. And for the rich, for the rich Frenchmen, Sartre says, well, they can exploit anti-Semitism so that the rage of the middle and working class is not against the rich, it’s against the Jew. For the middle and the poor, middle class and the poor, they need to hate somebody because of their situation. They always want to go up the ladder.

So it’s diverted towards hating the Jew. This is all part of the anti-Semite psyche that he talks about. The anti-Semite has the biggest fear, and the biggest threat is by change in society, big fast change. His nostalgia for some vague past, make our country great again, keep the unity of France again, get it no matter what, with the occupation. The vague nostalgia for the vague past, when things were better and more secure. Be French and proud. Where does he, where he does not need to prove his worth? It’s a place where social organisation is not complex, it’s simple, clear, it can be understood and lived in.

Fast change, not only technological, but fast cultural, military, other change, frightens people in a society. Property, money, also, all abstract as I’ve mentioned, it becomes a mystery, can’t really understand. And he sees the Jew as the cause of the mysteries he cannot understand. And the rich and the others, they all adore order, a naive nostalgia for the order, and he links it to the ancient small tribes threatened by wild animals or other tribes, whatever, for the mysteries you cannot understand. We retreat, threatened, and blame whatever is outside. And the Jew, of course is inside, but is the outsider. So the Jew is the enemy of the real Frenchman, and ultimately will want to control us, because he’s inside us. He’s not just an enemy come from the outside, the Germans, or wherever.

Remember the Charlottesville chants, “The Jews will not control us.” So the anti-Semite has to destroy what he fears most, the Jew, in all these different ways. And we link it to the dragon of childhood, the dragon of fairy tales and mythology. The monster out there, the monster within, the big boogeyman, the monster, the dragon, whatever, the shadow in Jungian terms, the evil in the night, the ultimate evil myth of what Sartre calls the pre-logical or primitive society, mediaeval and pre-Renaissance. He links it and says, of course it still exists, and very powerfully, and it’s played out in mythical terms at the Jew.

The other ancient myth that comes in is the need for human sacrifice. Human sacrifice, the sacrificial lamb, which goes way back to biblical, pre-biblical and mediaeval times, and so on. And that’s again, of the ancient tribes, of primal times, going way back. So all of this is part of the anti-Semite buttons that are pressed and the lens that he sees the Jews through. Then, the Jew becomes a canvas on which to paint all the fears, the worries, anxieties, and the blame, the scapegoat. The anti-Semite will not look at himself and project it onto this canvas, the Jew, as the other. And it’s worse, because the other is living within the host culture. And this way, the other, the anti-Semite, creates the Jew.

And it’s a fascinatingly challenging, and an intriguing perception, because it’s looking from trying to understand the mind of the anti-Semite in a profound way, and I know he is not going on about the deicide and the killing of Christ. He believes more in this approach of understanding. I’m not knocking the idea of the deicide. He does mention it, but this idea that the anti-Semite creates the Jew, Richard Wright, the great American, Black American, African American novelist, who wrote some incredible books, he spoke about, in America, he isn’t a Black problem, there’s a white problem.

The problem is the white perception of the Black, and Sartre quotes this from Richard Wright, trying to give another perception, coming from his existentialist philosophy. So then we go on to, okay, if you have the anti-Semite, then what about the liberal Democrat who’s not Jewish? What’s his position? How does he see the Jew? He’s blind, Sartre argues that he’s blind to the realities of the world. He can’t acknowledge the power of the anti-Semite. Why? Because he believes in the universal human rights of man. He will defend the Jew as a man, but must annihilate him as a Jew.

Now, some may say this is too simplistic and banal, but it’s really interesting, writing this in 1944. And it’s a provocative challenge to our thinking, which is what I really always have loved about Sartre’s writing. It endlessly provokes ideas and rethinking, at least in us. So he must annihilate him as a Jew, because the liberal Democrat belongs to all humanity. The Jew must belong to all humanity. He must be a human, a man, he cannot be a Jew, really. He’s a human, he’s a man. All have rights. Now, this is from 1791 that he quotes in the book, from this guy Clerment Tonnere, and please again, forgive my translation, my pronunciation. This is two, a couple of two years after the French Revolution, in the Constituent Assembly in Paris. “We will refuse everything to the Jew as a nation, but give everything to the Jews as individuals.”

And I think that phrase sums it all up, of the liberal Democrat of today, or in, let’s say of Sartre’s time, at least part of the 20th century, refused everything to the Jew as a nation, but gave everything to the Jews as individuals. Note the beginnings of anti-Semitism in this. That’s what he’s trying to argue here. Why? Would you say that about the Catholic? Would you say that about the Chinese, would you say, et cetera, et cetera, Protestant, the Christian and so on. The Chinese, the Pole, the catch-22. So for him, the liberal Democrats will defend the Jew as an individual with equal rights, but condemn him as being part of the Jewish nation or race, the birth of anti-Semitism amongst the liberal Democrat.

So he argues that the Jews have a friend in the liberal Democrat, but he’s a feeble protector. These are Sartre’s words, it’s the words of a novelist and a great thinker. So for him, the liberal democrat lives naively. And you can see how all of this is linked to the scapegoat idea. It’s about blaming again, not good enough, again, how do you live in the host society as the outsider, the Jew in this case, again, it’s easily available, accessible, as the scapegoat. Then he talks about the inauthentic Jew, and I mentioned earlier that the authentic person in the existentialist philosophy, which is where this is coming from, is the person who is not scared to look at his own anxiety, his own anguish, rather, it’s a better word. It’s not anxiety, it’s too pejorative.

His own anguish is his own death and other things obviously, which makes the human being have anguish. It’s natural in life, can look at it, own it, but still act and assert and write their own script, and take responsibility for being the author of their own future life. Not just blame the past, whatever it might be. Family, religion, race, whatever. So the better word for the authentic Jew, for Sartre, is also the assimilationist Jew. To try and understand that position. The more the assimilationist Jew, in Sartre’s mind, flees being religiously and all the rest of it, Jewish anyway, the more he is trapped, it’s captured in his play “No Exit,” Kafka, all the other examples he gives, the more he flees that he’s born, the more he is trapped.

Born as a Jew, try and flee it, still trapped. Shylock, finally at the end of “The Merchant of Venice,” once he’s been judged, condemned, all the rest, he says, we come back to the phrase, and why? “Because I am a Jew,” the only reason, and remember, he’s not the merchant in “The Merchant of Venice,” he’s the Jew, the merchant is Antonio. So it’s because of his birth over which he has no fault. He has no choice. I’m just trying to give Sartre’s perception again, I must repeat that. So, the more that the Jew believes in real assimilation, to be part of both the host society and a bit Jewish in the home, bit Jewish outside, et cetera, to assimilate, to belong, to fit.

Of course it’s understandable. I try to do that. We all do. Many people do, it’s of course completely understandable. It’s completely natural, not only for the Jew, for many minority groups in any culture, but in France, he noticed how the Jew for him was trying to, the more the people that he knew in France, more trying to convert, to hide or assimilate by land, adopt conservative or conventional French views of the host nation, would do whatever to fit in, the more was the flight.

So how does the anti-Semite see that flight of the Jew? The anti-Semite will see it as cowardice, and it’ll confirm the anti-Semite’s contempt for the Jew. Because again, the anti-Semite chooses who the Jew is. The anti-Semite defines who the Jew is in this host society. These are very provocative, stimulating ideas. The anti-Semite stigmatises, finds the available, vulnerable, in a minority group. It’s the other who frames the narrative of the Jew in his host country. Goebbels and the others push that to the extreme. The Jew was the rat, the flea on the rat, even, the extreme parasite on the host nation.

What’s fascinating is that the first thing that Sartre talks about in his book is that the first thing the Germans did was to ban Jews from swimming pools. First act against the Jews. Why? Because it’s the body again, go for the body first. The body of the Jew is dirty, poison. It can contaminate the the host nation bodies. We need a physical attribute in the stereotype, through the perception of the anti-Semite. The body swimming is going to contaminate the pool that bodies of other Germans, of others in the host society.

And hence, the physical attributes of the Black. You see it in football, the making of ape sounds and throwing bananas at Black footballers on the pitch, still happening. Chinese, slant eyes, whatever. It’s the physical attribute that is latched onto first by the anti, in this case the Jew, obviously the nose and hands movements that I’m using, and many other things. Then Sartre comes up with another extraordinary, he never stops with ideas. Every paragraph almost is another idea, that it is also fun to hate; why?

He’s talking about the French and the German in this case. Because to let loose, unleash the passion on the Jew, again, it’s the faith. It’s the faith that anti-Semite, the passion to hate. It’s not just a passion, it’s a faith, it’s a belief. Don’t need to question it. So he argues that, why is it fun? Because you can beat and torture the Jew, and he’ll be passive. He’s not going to fight back. It’s fun, do one, do the next, do the next, do the next. When has he been known to fight back? Of course, this is all him writing in '44, published in '46, before obviously, Israel. And I’m going to come to Israel and Zionism at the end of today’s talk, he does talk about, it’s fascinating.

And this is still 1944, the war hasn’t even finished, that he talks about Israel and the state, and Zionism. So the idea that it’s fun because the Jew is passive, can beat him, torture him, he’s not going to fight back. Yes, there’s a bit of legal fear. Yes, there’s a bit of, but the laws in France, over those several years, post the Dreyfus trial, the minimal, get away with most of it. So you know you can do it. I was watching yesterday the results of the George Floyd trial, and how a lot of the people outside were talking about, it’s a step forward because he is getting sentenced to more years, he’s a murderer, but he’s been convicted of murder.

It’s a few more years and it’s not only America, it’s anywhere in the world. And so it’s a step forward or not, the debate, how rigorous is the law applied? So it happens in many cultures. How rigorous is the law applied to who the other is, is othered by. Then he talks about the sadist, the anti-Semite is a sadist. Who is a sadist? A sadist, but in this case is a sadist who thinks he has a pure heart. Now that’s a fascinating difference. When we watch a lot of films of the Draculas and all the other, they may be sadistic, but they know it. That’s a huge difference.

They love to torture and kill and murder others, they enjoy it, but here, the sadist is the different kind. It’s the sadist who thinks he has a pure heart, looking at many of the Germans or the French collaborators. Why? Because the ultimate aim is to kill the monster, to kill the sacrificial lamb, why? Because the French nation must be saved. The German nation must be saved, the French nation, it must be saved, so it’s worth sacrificing some of these Jews because in the end, we need the unity of the French nation. The pure heart is justified of the sadist, of the anti-Semite.

Now he’s talking about France in his experience, in Paris under occupation. And then the Jew is framed as the masochist. Why? What is a masochist? Masochist is the man who we see as an object. We don’t see the person, the mind, the personality, the feeling, the heart. We just see an object: start with the swimming pool, we just see the body, the object. So from there, it’s not so hard to deny rights, to deny jobs, to deny, to expel, lead to the horror at the end. So the anti-Semite is a criminal with good cause in his own mind, to get rid of the evil in his own society, so he’s good. He’s getting rid of the evil.

He’s getting rid of the group that is threatening his own unity as a French person, his own sense of self and pride and greatness as a Frenchman. Make France great, make it unified. Some of the phrases. So the anti-Semite gets rid of evil in society, must have a good heart. He’s doing this for the good of society, for helping society, 'cause ultimately, the Jew will not control us. Charlottesville: “The Jew will not control us.” This is all written by Sartre in 1944.

Coming back to the liberal Democrats, I’ve mentioned this phrase. The Jews have a friend, the liberal Democrat, but he’s a feeble protector, sees everyone as equal, as I’ve mentioned, because of universal human rights, and Sartre speaks about it in his book. The liberal Democrats will say, yes, of course, sorry, the anti-Semite will say, “All Jews are rich,” and the liberal Democrat will say, “Well, I know some Jews are rich, some English who are rich, some Chinese who are rich,” that’s the way they would talk.

And it’s important to hear, because that means that the liberal Democrat sees only groups, not individuals. He sees naively everyone is being simulated to being French. All the immigrants can be assimilated to being French. The anti-Semite wants to destroy the Jew as a man, and sees the Jew as the pariah on the host nation. The liberal Democrat wants to destroy him as a Jew, and leave him with nothing or everything as a man. The anti-Semite wants to destroy him as a man, and needs to see him as a Jew in order to do that, the parasite. The liberal Democrat wants to destroy him as a Jew, so he can become a man, part of the universal family of liberal democracy and universal human values.

Highly contentious, I know, highly debatable, and easy to critique, I know, we all know, but it’s a provocative, stimulating idea. Nevertheless, it’s challenging, because he’s trying to see from the mindset of the non-Jew, of the anti-Semite and the liberal Democrat. So how can the Jew win the catch-22? Is he a Jew first, or a Frenchman second? Is he a Frenchman first, or a Jew? This is the endless conflict the Jew faces in his situation, in a society, in his existential situation in France. And of course, he throws in the religious angle, but from the anti-Semite perspective, from the non-Jew perspective, what Jews want to live in a society that adores the God you kill? Okay, which is thrown in.

He doesn’t want to, he doesn’t go much into religious and deicide, but it’s a provocative, stimulating phrase. Ultimately for Sartre though, it’s how the Jew existentially lives in the situation, in France. Then he goes on to argue, well, what keeps the Jews together is the hatred by the other. And I know lots of people who said, the constant hate, the constant contempt, the constant insecurity, uncertainty, brings Jews together. Do we agree? Do we disagree? Is it far too simplistic? Is it banal? Is it stupid? Open to debate, open to disagreement?

Part of what I think we are doing in Lockdown University is to stimulate with ideas, debates, controversies, highly controversial, and I understand it from Jews and non-Jews completely, but not many have written, tried to understand his depth from the non-Jewish perspective. Obviously, he talks about then in his book, that the host nations of Europe forgot that they created the Jew. They said the Jew could not have certain forms of work during mediaeval times, pre-medieval, post-medieval times, until the 1800s. Jews cannot have certain ways of work, modes of work, Jews cannot live in certain areas. Jews were expelled from England for a couple of hundred years, expelled from so many countries, Spanish Inquisition, et cetera.

So it’s the other who’s framing the Jew. They’re creating the Jew, the anti-Semitism, from Sartre’s perspective. So what keeps together the Jew is that endless hate, the longest hatred, as Robert Wistrich called it, brilliantly called it, what keeps the Jew together is that, for him. Why live in that society, that doesn’t want you, he argues. So most nations forgot all this, that they had created it, why? Because they wanted the Jew to leave or take his money. They created that the Jew could have usury, charge interest for money. They let him become money lenders and bankers and so on.

You know, the Jew didn’t create that. They did it out of survival necessity. They didn’t want, they were excluded from military, which is hugely important in Europe of any time, especially mediaeval, pre and post, 18, 19, 20th century, couldn’t be in the army, couldn’t be certain, many trades, many jobs, but could be a peddler, trader, banker, money. So what else could they do? And he says, what have we made the Jew into? How have we invented the Jew in France, 1940? He proposes that most French sided with Petain and the Vichy: give the Germans their Jews. It’s a pity and it’s sad, it’s unfortunate, but we need to keep France united.

Of course we’ll feel ill at ease. He’s talking about the French. We’ll feel ill at ease, but better to have some sacrifice, sacrificial lamb, to keep France. So give over the Jews for the mirage of a united France, ultimately. After the war, so in '45, immediately he asks the question, why was not much written about the gas chambers, Auschwitz Treblinka, the camps, in French newspapers, barely nothing, so much about other things, but barely nothing, endlessly about French liberation. Why? He wrote some pieces in newspapers and happened to mention this in his articles, the Jews, because he wrote about French soldiers, prisoners of war returning, why were they not mentioned?

And then he says, a couple of Jewish survivors had come to thank him and he was freaked: why? Nobody else came to thank him. Why thank, he’s just a journalist writing a few articles in a newspaper and happened to mention Jews, that they felt abandoned and lost. And how do we help? Nobody else was. And he’s freaked because what had happened to his own society to make the Jews feel so abandoned, so destroyed by his French society, that they thank him as a journalist after what they’ve gone through? Thank him for mentioning their word, the Jew. Why did they have to say it?

And if I may, then go on to Groucho, Groucho Marx, Groucho with his eight-year-old daughter, was barred from a club where her friend had brought her to swim, a swimming club, eight years old. But she was barred because they didn’t, the swimming club didn’t allow Jewish children or Jews, eight years old. And Groucho has the great line. “Well, she’s only half Jewish, so how about if she only goes in up to her waist?” Okay, so we see, I’m trying to bring together here, of course the ironic through Groucho, but an understanding from the perception of the outs of the anti-Semite, and doesn’t seem necessarily this is going to lead to other things, but Sartre suggests with a liberal Democrat, it can begin in these ways.

So the Jew remains a stranger, an intruder, an outsider who belongs, who wants to belong to the club, the society, to be at the heart of our French society. And even today we say, well, how many Jewish cabinet ministers did we have in France? How many lawyers were in Berlin at the time? How did the Germans start in '33, '34? How many lawyers were there? How many doctors in Berlin? Why even talk that way? Why even think that way? And Sartre suggests that the Jew in France continually has to prove that he’s more French than others. And if you don’t do more, if you don’t prove it, well you’re the dirty Jew.

You’re the immigrant scrounger taking from us, such an unstable situation, catch-22. Of course, then he gives the example of “The Trial,” and Kafka, the hero in the novel, the Jew is in a long trial but barely knows the charge, that he’s guilty already. He’s guilty because he exists, enough, guilty because he’s born. And that the Jew, he gives the metaphor of Kafka’s “The trial.” This is the story of the Jew. He’s guilty because he exists, because he’s born as Shylock, again, “Because I am a Jew.” The main thing, and I mentioned some of these traits and so on, then I want to go in here, from the scapegoat to here. The picture starts, this is about five, six years before he died in Paris, “The Child,” by Kafka.

This great phrase from “Antigone,” by Sophocles, “Antigone” is the play where Creon, the king, refuses his niece Antigone the right to bury her brother, because he has betrayed Creon the king. He’s done a horrible thing against the law, and he has to kill the brother and Antigone, and he dumps the body of Antigone’s brother outside the walls of the city. And Antigone goes outside the walls at night to retrieve the body of her brother and bury him. And that’s against the law of the Greek law of the time. And Creon, although he’s the king and he’s her uncle, he has to kill her, because she’s gone against the law.

But more, he accuses her of hubris. She’s gone against, she’s got too much pride in her. “You have too much pride for a person with such misfortune.” And this for him, this is also how the anti-Semite, even if one asserts as the Jew, too much pride, but, Sartre argues, the Antigone approach is the approach to take, even if they’re accused of too much pride, take it, and why? Because of the endless attack on being, and framing as the scapegoat. So rather to be authentic for Sartre, is to be assertive, take pride like Antigone, even if the suffering is martyrdom, or the suffering is fighting, whatever, it is being authentic, it is living authentically.

And the only way, the best way to attack those who are virulent and attack as anti-Semite is the best form of attack is to defend oneself, not run away, to become the inauthentic Jew, the one who flees, so assimilate, whatever, but attack rather than be passive in the face of the anti-Semitism, for this is all Sartre, because you’re going to be discarded as you’re going to be used as the scapegoat anyway. You’re going to, for him, the scapegoat is there anyway, in the anti-Semite, even the liberal Democrats’ narrative.

So the authentic Jew for him ceases to run away, maybe disliked, maybe uprooted, maybe end up being a martyr or a fighter, but will not run away, not be ashamed of his kind. And the moment he stops being passive, he takes the power and the virulence away from the other, who’s framing him as the Jew as the ultimate scapegoat. And in the final irony that Sartre talks about is the state of Israel, and he’s writing this in ‘44, good four years before the state of Israel is even a reality. He talks about Israel and the Zionism, 'cause he knew Zionists, of course, in Paris. The establishment of a nation of Jews creates another double identity and a double bind and creates another excuse for the anti-Semite, why?

It gives proof to the Frenchman that the Jew is out of place in France. The Frenchman will say, well, once we reproached him for his race, now obviously he does not belong here in France. Let him go to Jerusalem, let him have his state, let him go to Jerusalem. So Zionism becomes harmful to the Jew who wishes to remain in his original homeland. And so the French Jew will get angry at the Zionist, and the Zionist will get angry at the French Jew. It’s an endless paradox. Endless, ironic state. Jeremy Corbin, for those who know, one of the big claims, “Maybe Jews don’t understand the irony of the English,” he said.

The ultimate insult, the true mark of an anti-Semite. Because irony is the precise condition of the contradictory nature of being a Jew in society, when Sartre lived, in our times, in any time, it’s the exact core of the condition, hence, all the wit and humour of Groucho and so many others. Everybody, just us as people. So the story of irony continues, and Sartre ends by saying, “In France, anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it is our French problem.” So he’s always trying to see it through the lens of the anti-Semite, the lens of the anti-Jew, if you like. And again, that’s what I find fascinating, located in the idea of the scapegoat.

It’s endlessly fascinating, because it’s one of the most in-depth studies or attempts to try and understand the various ways that the mind of the anti-Semite is working and thinking without trying to be overphilosophical or overcomplicated, in a way. And then the final few images I want to show you, this is the great cafe where there were one or two others where Sartre and the intellectuals, and we all know the golden age of Paris, before the war where so many of the Black American, the white American, so many artists from South Africa, so many other artists, writers, intellectuals, flocked to France, the golden age of France before the war and then perhaps, after the war for a while as well.

It’s gathering from all the world, gathering in cafes like this. This is one of the great ones that Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir occupied. And then finally, it’s an image done shortly after he got the Nobel Prize for Literature. But this phrase from him, finally: “If you are lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” He never lost the understanding of irony and the ironic situation, the catch-22 of the Jewish condition as he saw it, understood through the French eyes of the majority French in his own society. Thanks very much everybody, really appreciate. I know it’s the beginning of summer, and hopefully good weather and good times.

• [Wendy] Thanks David. That was excellent.

• Thanks so much.

• Are you going to take questions?

• [David] Yeah, with pleasure.

• Thank you.

Q&A and Comments

Q: Irene, “Please say the name of the book again?” A: It’s this one here, “Anti-Semite and the Jew: An Aetiology of Hate,” exploration of hate, “Anti-Semite and the Jew,” you get it on Amazon or anywhere.

Amanda, “Didn’t he fall out with his friend Camus, 'cause Camus began to contradict,” yes. And Camus, there were other reasons politically. Camus accused him of being naive about some of the Stalinism, and what was going on with Stalin, and in Soviet Russia. But then when Camus was killed in a car crash in his early forties, he wrote this beautiful piece about Camus, his great friend, an amazing, I love Camus’s writing.

Eliza Hubbert, “And explain why there were so many French collaborators.” I think Judy and the other, as a great historian, I think, will probably know more than me. I’m just trying to understand more the notion of anti-Semitism during the occupation.

Q: Betty, “What do you think motivated him to really become such a philosemite?” A: I think that he was, maybe on a personal level, he was very friendly with many Jews, intellectuals, artists, many who had fled from Germany, et cetera, and Eastern Europe, had come to Paris. They never thought France would be conquered by the Germans, or Paris, at least. They never thought really, it would be conquered, I don’t think, underestimated the German army. I mean even Churchill was stunned when he heard the news that the French had lost the war in five weeks, so I think there were many he met and knew. And I think also, I don’t know from a philosophical understanding, perhaps, his uncle being Albert Schweitzer, I don’t know. It’s a very good question.

Amina, “I tried to find the answer, but I couldn’t find it, then I hope you’ll go into relationship with Camus.” Yeah, that would be great. Another whole lecture, thank you.

Q: Cheryl, “Percentage of Parisian population, collaborators?” A: I’m not sure, I’m just giving some of the facts that come out from Sartre in the moment, great question.

• David, let’s do that next week. So I’m trying to move you. Would you like to do that?

• Camus? If you want, with pleasure. Okay?

• Great, will follow up. Thank you. Thank you for that question.

• Sure. Christian anti-Semitism, yeah. Okay, thank you Rochelle.

Just a statement, even on Google read Disraeli, it says the first and only person, only Jewish prime minister, they don’t say to, was he a Protestant or was he a Catholic, whatever, exactly.

Ron, “You stated that Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, rather than philosophy,” yep. No there isn’t, you’re right, Ron, there isn’t a prize for philosophy, but he’s more known as a philosopher, I think, in the world generally. And I dunno how many know that he got the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novels and his plays.

Q: Are not most anti-Semites, also anti other minorities? A: Yes, David, I think he’s trying to draw a distinction between the anti-Semite and the different ways of people being anti-Semitic, the liberal Democrat and others can be under other anti minorities. I mean, he’s not really going into that in the book.

Simon, “You know that Sartre continually rethought his ideas,” yep, yep. And a fantastic interview with Benny Levy towards the end of his life. Okay, well he didn’t quite reject, Simon. I would disagree here. I think he rather developed some of the ideas, because he acknowledged that these were written in late '44, before the war had even ended. I mean the Allies had just liberated Paris in late '44. So it’s before Berlin had been taken. So I would slightly disagree here.

Q: Yvonne, “Did Simone De Beauvoir support?” A: Yes, as far as I know, yes.

Q: Yolandi, “Did Simone De Beauvoir share his attitude?” A: As far as I know, yes. I mean they were really so close, intellectual as well as emotional, sexual, companions. He might have to, he might have considered the Roman Jewish wars.

Q: Were the Jews a real scourge for the Romans? A: The Romans saw them as an obstinate, stubborn, difficult bunch, but they saw other tribes, other groups as well. They would’ve seen tribes, barbaric, more stubborn, but certainly Hannibal and the Carthaginians were far more, I mean they nearly destroyed Rome. The battle of Cannae. Another barbarea, other tribes, and Gaul.

I did not know the connection with Schweitzer. In my late teens, okay, great. Did the presentation.

Thank you, thanks, Margaret.

David, “If he escaped from a concen–” It wasn’t a concentration camp, it was a prisoner of war camp for French soldiers. And the idea, the argument is, that 'cause he had terrible eyesight, that he needed to go and see an ophthalmologist in the town, the French town nearby, and then escaped through that. That’s the story. I haven’t been able to prove it. Say it as someone who refused. Okay, perhaps, but also say it as somebody who sees the other as an object, not as a person.

David, “Today so much of the Western world is multicultural. How do we diverge in the multi,” I know this is the exact debate, David, of multiculturalism and pluralistic society, and the Jewish scapegoat, that is the moral question. Hit the nail on the head, and that’s what he’s been critiqued for, and he’s been attacked for, Sartre, because ultimately this would lead to a negation of multiculturalism. If the Jew can’t exist in a host society, then, and he can only exist as a scapegoat or in an anti-Semitic way, where’s the universal rights of man, equality, et cetera. So the critique is where’s the role of multiculturalism in that? And that, I think, is the fascinating intellectual debate, one of our debates of our times. Look at the anti-immigrant attack in Hungary, Poland, and England, part of Brexit, in America recently, still, elsewhere.

Francis, “There will always be that individual that finds it easy to put someone else to lift them,” exactly. “Always be those who feel the need to control,” great. And he writes about that education. Education and propaganda he talks about, 'cause of course propaganda was still huge in those times. But education, yes, but more than education, in addition rather what’s needed.

Monty, “If you sit on the bank, you’ll eventually see the body of your enemy come floating,” okay.

Q: Robin, “The Nazis had succeeded in the extermination, who would’ve been the next scapegoat?” A: He talks about that in the books, Robin, great point. He says that the anti-Semite hasn’t really thought through. Well what if all the Jews are exterminated? Who’s the scapegoat? He actually writes about that. Remember this is, again, late '44. Nobody else is even thinking of this.

Wilma, “I love Groucho.” Yeah, great. Okay, Clara, Thank you so much, David, you will not replace us,“ thank you. Okay, thanks, Clara.

Q: Suly, "Isn’t Sartre really identifying the origins of racism in general?” A: He’s trying to, in this book, because it’s specifically “The Anti-Semite and the Jew,” he’s trying to specifically here understand the anti-Semite in other books influenced by the great, the first brilliant post-colonial thinker, Frantz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth,” “Black Skin, White Masks,” et cetera. Brilliant books on colonialism, when he was friendly with Fanon and others. But this book is about anti-Semitism.

Joanne, thanks so much. Thank you Mona. Jack, thank you, Alan. Sharon, thanks, Suzanne. Yep. Thank you Adele. Thank you Debbie. Gary, thanks Mara, thanks Ron. Da-Da-Da. Thanks everybody here.

The Dreyfus affair, he would know only too well in France. Absolutely, and he links that in the book too. He’s trying to understand the mindset of the anti-Semite, not only in the military with the Dreyfus, but in other areas.

Joan, thank you so much. Stuart, Camus. Yep. Thanks Roberta Hilton, Jews, nation or not, Jew, nation, religion, race. The invention of the Jews. Yeah.

Okay, great, Ralph, “Did Sartre believe that the unification of Europe would solve–” Yes, he was so pro the unification of Europe and writes about it in the book, actually. He mentions it as well that one of the hopes could be the more unified Europe, to try and break some of the stigmatising, the narrative of the invention of the Jew and very pro-EU and NATO, obviously.

Ralph, “Did Sartre,” yeah. And then Veronica, a joke. “Sartre is arrested by the Germans. They shine the light into his eyes and ask, 'Who are you?’ Sartre replies, ‘Ah-ha, the most difficult question first.’” That’s brilliant, Veronica. Thank you.

Okay, I think that’s it. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Oh, hang on a few more. Thanks Francis. Fern. Mickey. Okay. I think that’s mostly it. Okay.

Thank you so much. So thanks everybody and thanks Judy and Lauren. Hi, and thank you and Wendy–

• [Wendy] Thanks David.

• Really appreciate you as always

• Excellent, thanks a million, take care. Enjoy the rest of the week, bye.

• Ciao.