Robert Fulford, National Post | NationalPost.com | July 23, 2011
Artwork: Self Hate by *Izabeth
Among the multitude of insults that float around my world, there's one I always find disturbing and a little mystifying: "Self-hating Jew."
It's been in the air for decades, but now appears more often than in the past. It shows up in letters from my readers and in casual conversations. On the Internet, we can find Steven Spielberg and Hannah Arendt, Jon Stewart and George Soros, all described as self-hating Jews, for various reasons. It was applied to the late Tony Judt, an otherwise much-admired historian, after he became a critic of Israeli policy. It occurs most often in discussions of Israel, but the term is at least a generation older than Israel itself.
The definition varies with the people using it, but generally it means a Jew who holds anti-Semitic beliefs or supports anti-Semitic causes (though many Jewish critics of Israel will argue that they are its best friends, urging it toward a higher moral position).
Among religious and ethnic insults, it has no obvious parallels. I've never heard anyone described as a "self-hating Roman Catholic," though many Roman Catholics are harsh judges of their Church. Is there such a thing as a self-hating Chinese? I've known Anglicans who make fun of their Church, but no one denounces them as self-hating Anglicans. Muslims may turn against Islam without being called anything similar.
As a disparaging term, it has an unusual effect. It sounds like the start of an argument, but it's more often the end of one. Those who use it believe that it settles the issue. Once the label is applied, the person using it believes the discussion has ended.
A non-Jew like me would feel both presumptuous and uncomfortable using it, but my curiosity about it has grown. In 1930, a German-Jewish philosopher, Theodor Lessing, popularized it with his book Jewish Self-hatred. He argued that a history of oppression and hatred had undermined Jewish self-esteem, causing some Jews to internalize hostile views of them. To Lessing, this explained why so many Jews had become enthusiastic Germans. They wanted no longer to be considered Jews. Since then, other Jews have been accused (usually by fellow Jews) of dreaming that they could set aside their Jewishness.
I believe I first heard it some five decades ago when I was speaking at a suburban Toronto synagogue, praising the novels of Mordecai Richler. After I gave my talk, the rabbi thanked me and then pointed out to the audience, as if adding a fact that I had somehow omitted, that Richler was a self-hating Jew. Then he closed the discussion and announced that coffee would be served.
On that occasion, there was no mention of Israel, for which Richler had shown no public interest. He acquired the self-hating label (like many American writers, notably Philip Roth) because his novels satirized Jewish characters and sometimes Jewish institutions. In later years, of course, many Jews came to see Richler's books (and Roth's) as in their own way a celebration of Jewish life, drawing its great value from an uninhibited sense of comedy.
But in their youth, Richler and Roth and many others were considered perverse: Why were they such critics of their own people? And why were they so good at it?
The answer is that the Jewish religion taught them how to do it. Just about every educated Jew comes into fairly close contact with the Talmudic tradition, which consists mainly of vigorously phrased disputes about religion and daily life.
In Jewish texts, controversy is not an event; it's everyone's daily bread. The Talmud began as a way of explaining the Torah, the Five Books of Moses in the Hebrew Bible, but it encouraged reasoned questions about every aspect of life. Articulate argument became the essence of Jewish thought. That made Jewish intellectual life exceptionally rigorous and helped Jews achieve spectacular success in literature, law and the sciences.
Jewish critics of Israel, like Jewish literary satirists, infuriate many of their fellow Jews not just for what they say but for the fact that they say it with such passion and energy. Harold Rosenberg, the great American art critic, wrote that for thousands of years, Jews over-produced intellectuals in their study halls. Since he was one of them, he could hardly resent this fact but he set it down to explain why Jewish life is so frequently rent by controversy. It's the Jewish way.
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