GOATS AND MONKEYS
PORTRAIT OF THE ANTI-SEMITE. By Jean-Paul Sartre. Secker and Warburg and Lindsay Drummond, ARTRE adapts the dictum of Voltaire, applied to a different object, and declares that "if the Jew did aot exist, the anti-semite would invent ‘him." In this short, pungent book the role of the anti-semite in France is rigorously examined; this fruit of frustrated mediocrity* and an_ inferiority, craving always a perpetual reassurance at the expense of the innocent and the weak, is eyed with the cold glance of reason. The proud title of "true Frenchman" would have no value if all could claim it; to exclude from it a section of the people is to allow duke and apache, peasant and landowner, to share in an easily-won superiority, a feeling at once of equality and of aristrocracy. Although Sartre writes here with both lucidity and restraint, this book is intentionally polemical. He cannot easily bridle his indignation that any Frenchman should sink to imitate, even in a comparatively mild fashion, the grossest of the iniquities of Hitler. While he examines with a certain asperity the conduct of some Jews which has played into the hands of the anti-semite, he Pays generous tribute to the achievement of Jews in many fields, including their admirable part in the resistance during the German occupation.
Anti-semitism is a waste product of nationalism. It was probably inevitable that it should encourage Jews to seek a territorial nationality of their own, and no doubt equally inevitable that the anti-semite should then clamour against Zionism. Sartre sums up his argument, that an underprivileged class diminishes the privileges of all, in terms that can be applied to all countries: "No Frenchman will be secure as long as a Jew, not only in France, but in the world at large, need go in fear of his life." We are lucky in this country that this book can be viewed as academic; not so lucky that anywhere in the world men should seek scapegoats for their own sickness and cowardice. " The New Zealand writer Erik de Mauny has produced a graceful transla-
tion,
David
Hall
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 501, 28 January 1949, Page 10
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352GOATS AND MONKEYS New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 501, 28 January 1949, Page 10
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