2 XI 2007
Sartre notes in his Anti-Semite and the Jew that the traditional misconception of Jew as a misery species results from the creation of a vicious cycle. Jews, through their inability to assimilate into the Christian society, found themselves in the role of money lenders, one forbidden to Christians through Church dogma. Hence, the Jews have accumulated vast amounts of legal property overtime. Anti-Semites, poor and jealous or aristocratic and condescending, resolve that there ought to be something beyond legal property, or even meritocracy to make an individual whole: that it is they who possess the sense of a nation while the Jews, regardless of how much assimilated they are in the language and property of that nation, does not belong to that commonwealth beget by a common identity. Hence, driven to cultural isolation and identity isolation, the Jews ever stress the importance of their procession of legal property–for the notion of this idea create a sense of citizenship for the isolated Jew (127). The cycle, entirely social in construction, then, becomes vicious and ever-affirming an already dominant image. It creates a social situation that traps the Jew, conscious of his identity, to ever-reside in such an identity in a negative light. Indeed, the Jew “is social man par excellence, because his torment is social” (134).
From this logic, it is also demonstrated that the concept of the Jew is a social construction; a given formed not by the Jews themselves, but through the lens of the Anti-Semites. it is the Anti-Semites themselves who emphasized on this difference between the Christian and the Jew in order to protect their own sense of security, of citizenship. If not–if released from dealing with their Other–they themselves will feel their values diminished. No longer possessing a national identity exclusive to them, the Anti-Semites would realize that they have nothing more than the Jews; in fact, they don’t even have the money. Hence, Sartre sees the Jewish problem rather as an Anti-Semite one; it is this notion that created a different concept of the Jew, and must resolve internally to resolve the social tension between the Jews and the Christians. Perhaps a key to this solution is some form of “concrete liberalism” (140).
But interestingly enough, though, Sartre acknowledges that regardless of how the Anti-Semites act, the Jews are not to evade their responsibility in affirming their identity as the Jews: regardless of how assimilated into the host culture, “Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew” (136). By denying his identity, he is inauthentic; by solely relying on the Anti-Semites to resolve the problem, he is the same. The authentic Jew affirmatively wills and chooses his own identity.
This scenario, though dated to 1944 and peculiar to many of Sartre’s misconceptions (as his knowledge of the Jew remains incomplete: he was only familiar with Jews of lower or higher class whose indifference to orthodoxy and assimilation to the French culture were reinforced by their socioeconomic class), brings light to our situation. By our situation I actually refer to two different, but intrinsically similar case: first, that of we the Chinese emegre who live and study in a foreign country, and second, the situation of an ancient culture displaced by both modernization and an urge to reconnect to root severed by historical particularities. Regardless, in our situation we too, are like the Jews, severed from our home nation or rooted culture, to experience either a situational or cultural diaspora. Regardless of our identity as Chinese Americans who want to reinforce our status in this foreign nation through acquisition of wealth and stability in lower and higher middle class, through the same profession of business, medicine, and law, or our nation’s subscription to modernization and economic prosperity through the loss of its cultural memory, the situation remains very similar to the Jewish one, uprooted from Jewish orthodoxy, away from roots, and everywhere seeks to assimilate to the host culture through acquisition of legal properties or tools.
Of course, we do not have to deal with an “anti-Semite” in our situation; our enemies are largely ourselves: that part of disquietude in our souls calling for a complete synthesis, a final disregard of our peculiar situation at the present in place of nothing worthwhile, a melting port without either responsibility or self-knowledge. The burden to resolve this problem is up to the individual choice; nothing else can decide for him. We are not to forgo our yellow skin, our cultural background, and our sense of the root. The answer, then, is still up to us. We are to choose ourselves as the Chinese authentically.
But, the question is: dare we?
