Jewish Self-Hate

Theodor Lessing

• Éditeur: Berghahn Books
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789209877
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Jewish Studies

A seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time.

The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept's origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing's 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß.

Written on the eve of Hitler's ascent to power, Lessing's hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside.

"The truthful translation by Peter Appelbaum, including Lessing's own footnotes, manages to make this book more readable than the German original. Two essays by Sander Gilman and Paul Reitter provide context and the wisdom of hindsight."—Frank Mecklenburg, Leo Baeck Institute

From the forward by Sander Gilman:
Theodor Lessing's (1872–1933) Jewish Self-Hatred (1930) is the classic study of the pitfalls (rather than the complexities) of acculturation. Growing out of his own experience as a middle-class, urban, marginally religious Jew in Imperial and then Weimar Germany, he used this study to reject the social integration of the Jews into Germany society, which had been his own experience, by tracking its most radical cases…. Lessing's case studies reflect the idea that assimilation (the radical end of acculturation) is by definition a doomed project, at least for Jews (no matter how defined) in the age of political antisemitism.

SIX LIFE STORIES

PAUL RÉE

Paul Rée, young, independent, and from a wealthy family, was a lover of arts and sciences. He arrived in clever, stately Basel in February 1874.¹ The honorable, orderly city must have appeared to him as if it were created for the unemotional intoxication of a free spirit. He bathed in the Rhine, took his customary daylong walks on the sunny river banks, and enjoyed company of worthy professors. There he found a friend, without whose universal impact we today hardly would have known of Rée’s existence.

Depiction of the life and work of Paul Rée is a bold undertaking. Apart from a 211-paragraph booklet, published posthumously by a reverent hand under the title “philosophy,” nothing of him remains for posterity. We know the outlines of his life, and many still alive remember how he looked, walked, and spoke. But he destroyed all his own letters, books, and diaries. He wanted to go through life with closed visor, which he died without having opened. He was a shy, reticent type, and his social development seems to have become gradually frozen in place.²

Those who saw him describe him as a beautiful, perfect being. He was tall, dark-skinned, clear-browed, with deep, thinking eyes. He was a masculine man, harmonic and balanced.

One of his acquaintances, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies,³ described Paul Rée as follows:

I knew and valued Rée as an unusually subtle, clever man. The quiet security of his tread, his calm, soft way of speaking, were impressive, and the better one knew him the more good-natured and gracious he appeared. He often turned his ironical humor against himself and others. He knew how to clothe petty malice in an engaging manner. Although at heart a modest man, he had great confidence in the rightness of his cause, because he considered himself one of the very small number of unbiased thinkers. He mulled tirelessly for months and years over certain specific, crucial problems. His wish was to stand outside life, the better to observe it. He was haunted by the wretchedness of man and invalidity of the belief that keeps him captive, ever and again making new captives of the apparently free. One is tempted to call Rée’s early and later aphorisms misanthropy, but they reflect much more pride of perception. Rée loved conversation but became perplexed easily and let his deep, animated eyes move back and forth as if doubting, helping himself out of embarrassment with a jesting phrase: “The art of conversation is difficult. When one speaks, others become bored. The same is true when one listens to oneself.” On the streets of a Catholic city such as Innsbruck, where we spent some time together, he was taken for a priest. Children crowded around to kiss his hand. His large, beardless, serious countenance, long black coat, measured tread, deep inner isolation, gloomy view of life, and rigidity of male individuality were all priest-like characteristics. In many ways he reminded me of Schopenhauer.⁴

Paul Rée was born on 21 November 1849, the second son of a rich landowner in the country estate Bartelshagen in Pomerania. His father’s family came from Hamburg, his mother Jenny Jonas from Schwerin. After initial lessons from private teachers the family moved to Schwerin where—with a few breaks in Berlin and a private school in Ludwigslust—Rée attended the Fridericianum Grammar School in Schwerin, where he passed his school-leaving examination on Michaelmas Day in 1868, and then traveled to Leipzig at his father’s request, to study law. In 1870 he performed his military duty as one-year volunteer. When war broke out, Rée was one of the first in the field and was wounded at Gravelotte.⁵ After returning from war, he took up his studies again but soon turned to philosophy under the influence of Schopenhauer. He turned to the still unusual concept that universities call “psychology”: in other words the philosophy founded in England by Bacon and Mill, which attempts to ascribe every phenomenon to a spiritual condition, said more accurately to laws and codes of conduct, of a world-foundational consciousness.⁶ For this philosophic thought, categories of logic and axioms of mathematics are derived from a science of biological substrata. Behind every truth lies a need for life—something “human, all too human.”

The worldly young scholar, whose first work was an anonymously written small volume called Psychologische Betrachtungen [Psychological observations], was favorably received by the conservative world of Basel professors. Three luminous spirits sat bent over their books in three neighboring houses. Johann Jakob Bachofen, Jakob Burckhardt, and Friedrich Nietzsche brooded simultaneously over the same riddle of metaphysical primal division. They used similar terms to describe their mythological formulas but did not know each other.⁷

The young Rée felt himself to be a mediator and facilitator and liked to call himself a botanist. He was a continuous visitor, a restless wanderer of landscapes and mountains, cities, people, libraries, museums, and churches. He listened and observed silently (like Nietzsche, he was a man of quiet, refined spirit), finding things slightly comical, slightly tragic, slightly contemptible. His was the life of a noble stranger who travels through life with loving eyes, happily accepting and disseminating, but never putting down roots or belonging.

“I have a new system,” he said. “I observe all life’s content, mainly human customs and ideals, their secret motivations and backgrounds. At the end of the day, our poor humanity lies at the basis of all spiritual realms. If a proposition is true, a good deed occurs, or an image appears beautiful, the unconscious processes in which the true, good, and beautiful are rooted do not have to be—in and of themselves—true, good, or beautiful.”

Paul Rée was a proponent of the philosophy that Nietzsche later called the philosophy of the morning or the gay science (the joyful wisdom), which he depicted in his books The Wanderer and His Shadow, Beyond Good and Evil, and Human, All Too Human. The thirty-year-old Nietzsche, who was five years younger than Rée, became his pupil.

The first meeting between the two philosophers caused happy, mutual astonishment. Nietzsche wrote to a friend: “We discovered that we were true kinsmen—the mutual enjoyment of our conversations was limitless.” Rée was working on his book on the origin of moral perceptions, while Nietzsche was a hopeless romantic, a “respectful, obedient dog,” under the spell of Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner.⁸ Nietzsche learned the art of the diamond-sharp, hair-splitting psychological scalpel from Rée, and in time the pupil surpassed the teacher. Rée perceived in the fledgling scholar of Greek language and literature the buoyant imagination, the creative ardor, that he himself lacked. This had a sobering effect on his otherwise sharp perception and made him feel poor and guilty during quiet hours of reflection. But, because both had virtuous and austere natures, they talked around each other for months. And when they finally began to complement one another, a tragic lightning bolt brought an end to their association in a flash.

Theirs was a fateful star-crossed friendship.⁹ Had it been possible to bridge the gap, who knows whether one would have descended into the night of madness and the other have committed suicide.¹⁰

During the short year that their friendship lasted¹¹ each believed that their dream of friendship had been fulfilled in someone who was both leader and example. Each loved the other more than himself. Nietzsche called this period the “period of my Rée-alism,” and Rée was prepared to become Nietzsche’s disciple and apostle. Nietzsche was the gentler of the two but made of cooler, Nordic stuff. Rée, warm and tender, had the more primitive, ardent nature. One had a more feminine, sensitive, but cold and me-oriented nature, the other was motherly, devoted, all too “altruistic.” Rée was more excitable, Nietzsche was sensitive and logical. Both were austere and withdrawn.

To a casual observer, Nietzsche seemed both taker and receiver. He called the masculine Rée his leader. But it sounded like mockery because Rée felt (even though later he didn’t wish to) that his more feminine friend would be stronger and more durable. He knew in advance what would occur: “the seed will grow gloriously, the sower soon will be forgotten.”

Two disparate yet related natures wanted to harmonize, but an evil demon stood between them, towering over the dam that eventually shattered their relationship.

An unspoken secret hovered over Rée, a trap that could not be released by contempt for the world or smiling humor.

He was a Jew, although it is doubtful whether Nietzsche was aware of this. Rée belonged to the wondrous kind of young Jews (very common in those pre-Zionist years) completely dissociated from their rites and heritage, guarding the consciousness of their Jewish origin like a secret affliction, a mark of Cain or disfiguring birthmark. On the other hand, they were too refined to endure the taint of their birth without effects on their psyche.

The well-bred young researcher shied away from any articulation of his Jewishness. He became perturbed when conversation turned to his open wound and broke his thick shield of silence only once, when he spoke to his beloved¹² of his origins. The outbreak of lament over his faulty birth was so harrowing and incomprehensible that, more than a generation after its revelation, she said that she had looked into an abyss, the like of which she never saw again.

This secret “self-torment” was the root cause of Paul Rée’s seminal role in development of European “psychology,” while under Nietzsche’s powerful influence. Before we consider Rée’s personal suffering, and pursue it to its awful demise, we must clarify the relationship between modern psychoanalysis and Jewish self-hate.

It is not my intention to assert that modern-day psychoanalysis is due solely to Jewish intelligence. However, it is clear that the concept of so-called psychoanalytic methodology inspired by Paul Rée via Nietzsche’s formulas, which has become part of our culture, has much in common with certain Jewish talents. Leaders of the schools of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and other psychoanalysts, whose methods have recently become all the rage, were not aware of their reliance on Nietzsche, nor on the schools of Herbart and later Theodor Lipps, who long before had grasped the entire conceptual framework of psychoanalysis.¹³ Modern psychoanalysis originated in certain circles of educated Western European Jewry. This connection cannot be coincidental; all we can do at this stage is to shed light on it.¹⁴

The tree blossoms! The flower exudes fragrance. The bird sings. Men love, write poetry, fantasize, pray. If we were to ask Nature why all this happens, it always would reply, “It is the result of overabundance of beautiful, strong rich life that constantly fulfills, devotes, perpetuates.”

The interpretive mind answers differently, inasmuch as the willing or thinking, evaluating, or judging mind always is linear and intentionally driven. Such a goal- and purpose-oriented life can answer the question “why?” only with “causality,” correlat...