Toward the end of my adolescence I had had enough of being a Jew; or so I dared tell myself. It was, at first, not so much anger as it was impatience and irony. The details of my life in the ghetto which had so preoccupied me suddenly seemed laughable: “Lilliputian problems,” I noted in my diary at the time. “To be Jewish: above all, a narrow and constricted fate.” Why, when my life was just beginning, should I accept this limitation? Why should I forsake so many splendid adventures to remain vanquished among the vanquished? I wanted to taste every food, enjoy every pleasure; I would be proud of my body and sure of my mind; I would practice every sport and understand every philosophy.
Moreover, the entire world seemed to be inviting me to a marvelous wedding celebration. It was 1936. The Popular Front was in power in France: once again the French were giving all peoples an example of social justice. In Tunisia, where I lived, young left-wing Jews were rubbing elbows in joyous open-air meetings, miraculously tolerated by the police, with Arab peddlers, Sicilian bricklayers, and French railroad workers, one and all dazzled by these new feelings of brotherhood. In Spain, however, the war was beginning, never to end. Yet, in the evening, before disbanding, we cried out joyously: “No pasaran! The Fascists shall not pass!” Our worthy Spanish brothers could not lose our common battle for prosperity and liberty.
Even the general unleashing of the catastrophe a little later did not greatly upset me. On the contrary, I am ashamed to write, I recall its beginnings with a kind of happiness. During the first air raids we almost enjoyed jumping into the hastily-dug trenches. The world was animated by extraordinary historical stirrings: so these men with mythical names really existed—Indians, Japanese, Australians. . . . It was all proof that the world was infinitely rich, diverse, full of surprises and boundless promise. What importance could Jewishness—so fragile, so special, and so superficial—play amid the turmoil of my blood and of the universe?
Here it is important that I recapture the proper tone of this period. Today it is almost in bad taste to hide one's Jewishness. I have been told that in the United States being Jewish has ceased to be inconvenient. Jews proud-of-being-Jews are found even in Paris drawing rooms, which pleases me greatly and irritates me a little. Thus, a socially well-connected writer who, during a long career, never depicted a single Jewish character in any of his books, spoke calmly the other day to an interviewer about his Jewish origins. The publisher of a large French newspaper of moderate views dared reveal to his astonished readers that he was a Jew by birth. These are signs of peaceful times and I hope with all my heart that they last. For the moment, at any rate, there is no immediate danger in proclaiming oneself a Jew.
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Such has not always been the case. On the contrary, since the time of the French Revolution the most common reaction of Western middle-class Jews has always been to cover up, camouflage their Jewishness. Even after the publication of my last book, Portrait of a Jew, many well-meaning friends told me of their misgivings: I should not have labeled myself a Jewish writer! And, I might add, they were not completely wrong. What Jew, at some point in his life, has not been moved to regret or revolt at not being like others?
I am not trying to justify myself; I do not need to defend a period of my life which was but fleeting and from which I have completely recovered. Today I am perfectly opposed to self-rejection, to all disguises, to all these attitudes of self-torture. I can scarcely hide my irritation at the piteous and useless efforts of those dissimulating Jews. I simply wished to note that my rejection was not solely marked by flight and recantation. The Jew who denies his Jewishness is not always a cowardly and tricky chameleon deserving of nothing but derision and anger. In my opinion, this judgment is too sweeping and too easy. Among those who reject their Jewishness are to be found the worst and the best. The careful and the vanquished, yes, those who have chosen to play a lifelong game of hide-and-seek with their contemporaries in order to preserve their possessions and their well-being. But there were also authentic rebels who dared question their fate. There were at the same time the grotesquely bourgeois and men of sublime stature. Self-rejection can be a shabby trick, a final surrender, a plea for acceptance completely lacking in nobility. But it can also be a first step toward revolt, the first awakening gesture of the oppressed, the furious rejection of that which he has become in his servitude.
In short, at the time, I sought not so much to reject myself as to conquer the world. I rejected myself as a Jew because I was rejecting the place assigned to me, and in which my people were content to remain. I felt my Jewishness to be a collection of odious harassments and ridiculous rites. I sorted out my ideas into two main categories: on the Jewish side, a skein of outdated customs, with neither truthfulness nor effectiveness; on the other, a system of accusations and injustices. I thought I had to extricate myself from these absurd nets; and, of course, I felt capable of demolishing everything with a few heaves of my adolescent shoulders. When we graduated from the lycée at Tunis, many of us decided to cut ourselves off from the past, the ghetto and our native land, to breathe fresh air and set off on the most beautiful of adventures. I no longer wanted to be that invalid called a Jew, mostly because I wanted to be a man; and because I wanted to join with all men to reconquer the humanity which was denied me.
Why, then, did I not continue along this path? Why, at a certain point, did I once and for all abandon this attempt? Of course, the world, temporarily filled with a spirit of fraternity, had slipped away again, and it was preparing to show us its most atrocious side. But that was not the only reason; I am quite sure that the awful catastrophe which followed those years was not the determining factor. The Jewish destiny is such that one massacre more or less, as monstrous as it might be, only vindicates a history already full of gloom. Nor was it because of weariness or for moral reasons. It was because I slowly became convinced that this way out was a deception, a door painted on a brick wall. I had to admit that a simple negation of self did not exist; that I had to go much further or I would resolve nothing. The solution I had hit upon was abstract, illusory, and, in the final analysis, untenable.
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From time to time during my boyhood in Tunis some fine gentleman from France or Italy would come into my father's shop. Usually, it was only a matter of a small service: a stitch on his wife's pocketbook, a briefcase handle to replace, an extra hole for his belt. Then, as we were friendly and curious, he would sometimes talk with us. After a moment, having sized him up, my father would ask the fatal question, but backward, as a precaution in the improbable event of an embarrassing mistake:
“You are Christian, aren't you?”
This, if the signal was understood, translated into:
“You're a Jew, of course. . . .”
Invariably, the gentleman answered with one of those expressions which so delighted our artisans' milieu:
“I am of Jewish origin”; or, “My parents were Jews”; or, “I am a free thinker. . . .”
This we ourselves translated without the slightest hesitation. We called these delicately modest Jewish visitors the “of origins,” and after a while, like my father, I learned to ferret them out and, I admit, to feel contempt for them.
Later on, in Europe, when I had met dozens of these “of origins” I was already well prepared. I discovered that in Europe they bore another name: they called themselves, among themselves, Israelites. They were even successful in having themselves called Israelites by others, especially when the latter had reasons for wanting to please them. Their highest ambition was that no one might find anything to say about them at all; nor, moreover, about any Jew in the world. The Jews? What Jews? What are you talking about? They didn't see a thing. They spent their whole lives laboriously trying to make everyone believe in their non-existence. And, for a time, unfortunately all too fleeting for their own hopes, they could almost believe in their own success: they, at any rate, had nothing of what was generally understood as Jewish. They were respectable Israelites, not dirty Jews.
I am being sarcastic but I am sincerely more indulgent today. It was, after all, too difficult to be a Jew and everyone tried to remedy the fact as best he could. The only trouble was that these contortions were perfectly useless. The “of origins” played at being invisible, but everyone saw them except themselves: and yet, were even they really fooled?
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The unfortunate truth is that it has never been enough to affirm “I am not oppressed” in order to cease being oppressed. Neither in one's behavior or mental habits, nor in one's concrete existence. The story of the Jewish tailor is well-known: on arriving at the Paris station, a refugee from Poland, he declares to his wife:
“And now, wife! No more gefilte fish, no more goulash! We are going to assimilate. . . .”
Whereupon he proceeds directly to the Jewish section of Paris. The anecdote might have added that since most Parisian tailors were Jewish, and since these Jewish tailors were clustered together in a few streets, he could hardly do anything but join them. And that, worse still, his bad French was pronounced with a strong Yiddish accent, and that he needed the help of the Jewish community, etc. . . . In short, the Jewish fate cannot be reduced to words. So the Jewish fate is too difficult to live? Well, I make it vanish, I deny it: see, no more Jewish fate! But no one is deceived by the trick, and Jewish fate continues to stare the spectators in the face. In the final analysis they refused to give a name to their misfortune in the magical hope of seeing it thereby disappear.
Above all, what the tailor did not realize was that his game required two players: the Jew and the non-Jew. For its ultimate success the two partners had to accept the rules. Obstinacy on the one side was of no use so long as the other disdainfully refused to cooperate. I have been told that far from being humiliated or disheartened by this solitary comedy, the old French-Jewish families persevered to the death. In the concentration camps, in front of the crematory furnaces, the Franco-Israelites repeated, like Saint Paul: “I am French. I am a French citizen!” With this firm constancy they would finally win. They would baffle their executioners, and finally gain the esteem of their fellow citizens. What a triumph to earn at last a diploma such as this!
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Of course, I too have saddled a great many wrong horses, taken their lovely shadows for substance. Encamped on the pink clouds of the Universal, for a long while I passionately asserted that man, in his heart, was one, that all men were brothers, generous and equal. Down on earth, however, a real and difficult battle was in progress, whose blows I was hardly able to avoid and hardly ever able to return. These incidents are but transitory, I assured myself: the mistakes of a humanity which still had rough edges. All I had to do was to despise those savages: weren't they killing each other too?
I had convictions: one day the swords would be turned into plowshares, and this miraculous morality would be adopted by all, conquerors and conquered, oppressors and oppressed, and all human nature would shine forth as evidence of Justice and Love. But meanwhile? Meanwhile, it was only right that we take the first step, that we preach the example. We proudly proclaimed that we did not exist.
As Jews of the Left, we had at our disposal a method of reasoning which we used against any too-tenacious adversaries. It was a peeling-off tactic comparable to eating an artichoke. We started out with Stalin's definition of a nation: then we considered each trait mentioned in this definition. We asked ourselves: Do the Jews have a common language? Obviously not. Do they share a common territory? Not that either. Do they even have a religion? No! No! Most Jews can't even remember the names of the important prophets! The only trouble was that when the peeling was done, the Jew, unlike the artichoke, always found himself intact. It reminded me of the traditional discussion of the existence of the outside world, which so astonished and irritated me when I was a philosophy student—our professors, analyzing one by one the characteristics of what we saw and touched, and then concluding that the visible and tangible universe did not exist.
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“Oh, let me hear no more of Jews and Judaism and of myself as a Jew! Let me put an end to this inexhaustible torment!” says the hero of my novel, The Pillar of Salt, who certainly represents me to a great extent. And he goes to Argentina in the hope of starting a new life, this time anonymous. My Argentina was Europe, Paris to be exact, where it was only a matter of months before I discovered that one does not easily cease to be Jewish, and that self-rejection never solves anything. No mask, no compensatory tic could save me. The net result was, on the contrary, constant self-contraction, a veritable and painful distortion of the whole being which isolated me, signaled me out more surely than the accusation of others. In short, self-rejection, far from being the best response to the oppression, rapidly appeared to me one of the most characteristic traits of the oppressed. Far from being a free and courageous act, it was the expression of his non-liberty, of his barely-disguised submission to the accusation and the aggression. Complicity with the oppressor was not far off. Self-rejection was then perfectly useless as soon as the threat became clear.
Was it then necessary to accept oneself as a Jew? That attitude was attractive to me because it offered the possibility of pride, an impression of facing-up. I decided that henceforth I would tell others and myself: yes, I am Jewish—what of it? Yes, to some extent and on several points I am different from my fellow citizens, from other men. In the future, far from trying to pass over these differences, I would immediately recognize them—without provocation of course, but spontaneously. And I would even demand that others recognize them and take them into consideration, that they allow me to live as I please and as my nostalgia, my childhood memories, and my sympathies dictate.
But my real problem was that I had to cut myself off once and for all from the image of myself which had been imposed on me from birth by others and by my own people, and which had become second nature, without at the same time rejecting myself or my people, or scorning their universe, which was so largely my own. For if it is pernicious and stupid for a people, as it is for an individual, to extend its values to an absolute, to hang on desperately to its mythified past, it is just as destructive, and perhaps unworthy, to exhaust one's energies in a battle against oneself, to be ashamed of one's people, to despise their tradition, their culture, and their institutions. Thus, although I did want to abolish the condition imposed on me as a Jew, I did not wish to deny automatically every opportunity to the Jew which was in me. Or, to reverse the proposition: I wanted to accept myself as a Jew while rejecting conditions made by the others and imposed on my existence. Rather than assume the existence of a universal make-believe community of the human spirit, I decided to take for my starting-point this fact: my separate existence as a Jew. I might become impatient with this existence; I had the right to rebel, to question it. I knew that I might in turn be embarrassed: What is this existence? What is Jewishness? I willingly admitted that numerous problems were still extant; I saw perfectly well that the majority of Jews were ignorant of Judaism or barely conscious of their Jewishness; that one's Jewishness was certainly not convenient, badly adapted as it was to the world in which we live, its arteries hardened by its values and its institutions. But the fact of Jewishness remained, and the only thing for me to do was to recognize it as such and to try to understand it.
