286 Part III: Emigration Years
act of projection: self-hatred transferred to the Jews. The Jews them-
selves are perceived as a privileged minority who are able to lead a
good life without the constant effort of repressive work. ‘No matter
what the Jews themselves may be like, their image, as that of the
defeated people, has the features to which totalitarian domination must
be completely hostile: happiness without power, wages without work, a
home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are
hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them.’^70
Adorno and Horkheimer conclude that there is no such thing as
‘genuine anti-Semitism’, and ‘certainly no such thing as a born anti-
Semite’. On the contrary, ‘the victims are interchangeable... according
to circumstances – gypsies, Jews, Protestants, Catholics’ – and today’s
victim ‘may take the place of the murderers tomorrow, with the same
blind lust for blood, should they be invested with the title of the norm.’^71
It is a historical accident that the Jews in National Socialist Germany
‘are defined as the group which calls down upon itself, both in theory
and practice, the will to destroy that has been born of a false social
order.’^72 In addition, Adorno and Horkheimer propose religious motives
for anti-Semitism. They emphasize the envy felt by Christianity as
the religion of the Son reacting to the Jewish religion of the Father.
‘The adherents of the religion of the Father are hated by those who
support the religion of the Son – hated as those who know better. It
is the hostility to spirit of the spirit, grown obdurate in the conviction
of its own salvation.’^73 Adorno and Horkheimer do not attempt to
evade the question of how the madness of anti-Semitism is to be
eliminated. They call for nothing less than the abolition of domination:
‘Individual and social emancipation from domination is the counter-
movement to false projection, and no longer would Jews seek to appease
the evil senselessly visited upon them as upon all persecuted beings, be
they animals or men, by trying to placate it, and even identify with it.’^74
Adorno and Horkheimer thought of their critique of anti-Semitism as
containing some of the building blocks of an analysis of fascism^75 in which
psychoanalysis played a major part – as can be seen from the heavy
reliance on terms such as collective repression, projection and paranoia.
This recourse to Freudian terminology enabled the authors to forge
a link with the major project surrounding the studies on anti-Semitism
that was just taking shape at around this time and for which the institute
did finally manage to get the go-ahead in the course of 1943. The psycho-
analytically based discussions about hatred of the Jews would form a
frame of reference for what was by far and away the most important
segment of this larger project, namely the empirical study of hostility
to minorities and ethnic intolerance. To be sure, the psychoanalytical
ideas were themselves only to be used ‘in the context of an objectively
orientated critical theory of society’.^76
Not that this practical side of a number of arguments in the Dialectic
of Enlightenment was unimportant in Adorno’s eyes. On the contrary.