“is expressed by the twofold ‘feeling’ of anguish and responsibility.
Anguish, abandonment, responsibility...constitute thequalityof our
consciousness in so far as this is pure and simple freedom” (BN 464 ).
Jewish authenticity consists in “making himself a Jew” in his own way
and not according to the stereotype or the abstract principles imposed
by others. In this sense, he joins other “authentic” individuals in the
existentialist company of self-creators. “At one stroke the Jew, like any
authentic man, escapes description” (Anti-Semite and Jew 137 ). He is as
unique as his concrete project.
Inauthenticity, on the contrary, is characterized asflight: from the
risks of one’s choices, the anguish of one’s ontological freedom and,
above all, from one’s situation. Given the unblinking eye of Sartrean
consciousness, the inauthentic Jew “is therefore acting in bad faith”
(Anti-Semite and Jew 99 ). Yet curiously, Sartre seems intent on excluding
the moral significance of both expressions, despite his use of each in an
obviously pejorative sense. Sartre describes various “ruses of flight,” one
of which, the rationalist habit of mind, the “passion for the universal,”
he designates “the royal road of flight” (Anti-Semite and Jew 110 ).
This is the road of the “intellectual” exhibited both by his professor at
the Sorbonne, Le ́on Brunschvicg, and by Henri Bergson, whose vital-
ism, Sartre believes masks a deep rationalism.
Toward the end of the chapter Sartre alludes to the social and political
dimensions of the Jew’s situation that personal authenticity has not
resolved but rather exacerbated. Here, it seems, we have faced him with
another painful choice, namely between Jerusalem (the emerging Zionist
movement) and France. “Thus the choice of authenticity appears to be a
moraldecision, bringing certainty to the Jew on the ethical level but in no
way serving as a solution on the social or political level: the situation of
the Jew is such that everything he does turns against him” (Anti-Semite
and Jew 141 ).
It is this dilemma that Sartre begins to face in his brief concluding
chapter. Admitting that he can only gesture in a direction that such a
“resolution” might take, he makes three important points. The first is
the introduction of what he callsconcrete liberalism. Unlike its abstract,
universalist version that ignores particularities as it does a kind of
violence to the Jew, the Black, the Arab in the name of “human nature,”
Sartre’s variety is more “dialectical” in nature, though he does not
employ the term. “This means, then, that the Jews – and likewise the
Reflections on the Jewish Question (Anti-Semite and Jew) 247