gas chambers at Lublin? Not a word. Not a line in the newspapers.
That is because we must not irritate the anti-Semites; more than ever, we
need unity” (Anti-Semite and Jew 71 ).
In terms of existential psychoanalysis, the anti-Semite needs someone
to hate in order to transfer his fear of his own freedom to another, to a
subhuman against whom as the “other” he can define himself and
justify his existence – a typically bourgeois trait in Sartre’s vocabulary.
In a paraphrase of Voltaire, he observes that “if the Jew did not exist,
the anti-Semite would invent him” (Anti-Semite and Jew 13 ). “Anti-
Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is
a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating
thunderbolt – anything except a man” (Anti-Semite and Jew 54 ).
In thenext chapterSartre addresses the “friend” of the Jew, the liberal
democrat. We now witness an application of the analytic/synthetic
distinction that Sartre has applied to class reasoning. The democrat is
a champion of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. A master of
Enlightenment (analytical) reason, the democrat is an assimilationist.
He offers the Jew the solace of abstract rights. In effect, he is counseling:
“You enjoy all the privileges of the French citizen. You should be
satisfied with the same rights as the rest of us. Just don’t be so...
Jewish!” The abstract democrat wishes to sacrifice the Jew to the man.
Sartre will elaborate this form of thought in the concluding chapter. It
constitutes a variation on a favorite theme: The bourgeois free-thinkers
of the Third Republic favor the privatization of religion, if not its total
abolition, in a secular state while maintaining a public morality that feeds
on religious belief.^29 Sartre will repeat this criticism in theCritique.
His position, articulated in the humanism lecture, is that a properly
existentialist ethic will be creative, freedom-oriented and basically rule-
free. He takes this to be the logical consequence of a “consistently
atheistic point of view” (EH 53 ).
Chapter three has caused the most furor among critics, chiefly
because of its description of the authentic and the inauthentic Jew.
(^29) “Existentialists are strongly opposed to a certain type of secular morality that seeks to
eliminate God as painlessly as possible...This is the gist of everything that we in France
call radicalism – nothing will have changed if God does not exist; we will encounter the same
standards of honesty, progress and humanism, and we will have turned God into an obsolete
hypothesis that will die out quietly on its own” (EH 27 – 28 ).
244 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation