To the Editor:
In his long and thoughtful review of my book, Warrant for Genocide [July], Walter Laqueur has overlooked or misapprehended three points which are absolutely central to my argument and, in my view, absolutely indispensable to a full understanding of the exterminatory kind of anti-Semitism:
- In Christendom—and only in Christendom—Jews as a collectivity easily attract the projections associated with the image of the bad parent, both because Judaism stands in a parental relation to Christianity and because the God of the Jews has the attributes of a father but not of a son, while the God of the Christians has both. Traditionally, insofar as Jews are imagined as the killers of Jesus, they are imagined chiefly as killers of the son. Thanks to these age-old associations, not only Rothschild in modern times but also the objectively helpless Jew of the Middle Ages was imagined as infinitely powerful as well as infinitely cruel. (See the medieval woodcut of a ritual murder reproduced in my book; above all, see Joshua Trachtenberg’s admirable The Devil and the Jews.)
- I never said that anti-Semitism as such is a paranoiac form of schizophrenia. What I said is that a body of Jew-killers behaves like a paranoiac in the grip of his delusion. And the medieval sources (they are summarized in my earlier book, The Pursuit of the Millennium) show that this was as true in 1096 and 1349 as in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- There is, nevertheless, a major difference between the modern myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the anti-Semitic demonology of earlier centuries. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some Jews have played an important part in European life as bankers, journalists, and radical politicians. This helped to create a new fantasy—of the Jew as the creator and master of the modern world. It is this identification of the Jew with the forces of modernity—superimposed on the older demonology—that finds expression in the Protocols, and that forms the principal theme of Warrant for Genocide.
As for the more general question of the relevance of psychoanalytical insights to the problem of exterminatory anti-Semitism: Nobody in his senses would suggest that the massive Jew-killings which punctuate European history from the 11th to the 20th century can be explained in psychoanalytical terms alone. In each case, social, economic, and political processes and situations must be examined in detail—how else can one understand why outbreaks occur when and where they do? Nevertheless in each case one finds a residue which still demands explanation. Why have ordinary, normal people, in situations of mass catastrophe, disorientation, and impotence, been so willing to believe in stories of ritual murder and well-poisoning, or, more recently, in fabrications such as the Protocols?
I suggest it is because in such situations very many people undergo a partial regression to infantile modes of thinking and feeling. And why, when a professional group of Jew-killers comes into being, is it both so absolute in its destructiveness and so terrified of its victims? I suggest it is because such groups always contain a proportion of fanatics, i.e., people whose imaginations are wholly dominated by fantasies stemming from early infancy. In both categories—the disoriented normal and the fanatical—the traditional stereotype of the Jew as omnipotent tyrant, with its unconscious Oedipal content, can exercise a deadly fascination.
Of course, as Walter Laqueur remarks, such hypotheses do not constitute “a new historical approach”—but then, who wants one? They do help one to understand certain facts that otherwise are incomprehensible—and surely that is something gained.
Norman Cohn
London, England
