(Do you think it will be
justified?
Adorno-T-Authoritarian-Personality-Harper-Bros-1950
"Think we're being selfish when we act that way, just as we accuse the Jews of being.
" She doesn't like to hear attacks on the Jews, but she wouldn't defend them by argument.
This seems to be both a function of her dislike for argumenta- tion as well as a certain attitude of noninvolvement in or detachment from the whole question of anti-Semitism.
The subjective mirroring of the conflict between stereotype and experience in reverse, resulting in rigidity of the supposed experience, is clearly exempli- fied in the statements of Ml2Joa, a middle scorer of the Maritime School group:
(What do you think of the problem of racial minorities? ) "Well, for the for- eigners coming in, it's quite a question. This is supposed to be a melting pot. But shouldn't let too many of them in. . . . And then the Negro problem. . . . I try to be liberal, but I was raised in a Jim Crow state. . . . I don't think I would ever fall in with giving the Negroes equal rights in every way. . . . And yet, foreigners, you have a natural dislike for them. Yet, all of us were once foreigners. . . . "
The anti-Semite's dilemma may be epitomized by quoting verbatim the following statements of the girl student soos, who is high on both theE and F scales, but low on PEC.
"I don't think there should be a Jewish problem. People should not be discrim- inated against, but judged on their individual merits. I don't like it to be called a problem. Certainly I'm against prejudice. Jews are aggressive, bad-mannered, clan- nish, intellectual, clean, overcrowd neighborhoods, noisy, and oversexed. I will admit that my opinion is not based on much contact, however; I hear these things all the time. There are very few Jewish students in my school, and I have already referred to my good contact with the one girl. "
Here the contradiction between judgment and experience is so striking that the existence of prejudice can be accounted for only by strong psychological urges.
G. PROSECUTOR AS JUDGE
In terms of ideology, the anti-Semite's conflict is between the current, culturally "approved" stereotypes of prejudice and the officially prevailing standards of democracy and human equality. Viewed psychologically, the conflict is between certain foreconscious or repressed id tendencies on the one hand and the superego, or its more or less externalized, conventional sub- stitute, on the other. It is hard to predict or even to explain satisfactorily, on the basis of our data, which way this conflict will be decided in each individ- ual case, though we may hypothesize that as soon as prejudice in any amount is allowed to enter a person's manifest ways of thinking, the scales weigh
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heavily in favor of an ever-increasing expansion of his prejudice. We are furthermore entitled to expect this result of the conflict in all cases where the potentially fascist personality syndrome is established. If the conflict within the individual has been decided against the Jews, the decision itself is almost without exception rationalized moralistically. It is as if the internal powers of prejudice, after the defeat of the countertendencies, would con- summate their victory by taking the opposing energies, which they have defeated, into their own service. The superego becomes the spokesman of the id, as it were-a dynamic configuration, incidentally, which is not altogether new to psychoanalysis. W e might call the urges expressing themselves in anti- Semitism the prosecutor, and conscience the judge, within the personality, and say that the two are fused. The Jews have to face, in the prejudiced personality, the parody of a trial. This is part of the psychological explana- tion of why the chances of the Jews making a successful defense against the prejudiced personality are so slim. It may be noted that the judiciary practice in Nazi Germany followed exactly the same pattern, that the Jews were never given a chance, in the Third Reich, to speak for their own cause, either in private law suits or collectively. It will be seen that the expropriation of the superego by the fascist character, with underlying unconscious guilt feelings which must be violently silenced at any price, contributes decisively to the transformation of "cultural discrimination" into an insatiably hostile attitude feeding upon destructive urges.
There is a clear index of the conquest of the superego by anti-Semitic ideology: the assertion that the responsibility for everything the Jews have to suffer, and more particularly, for the genocide committed by the Nazis, rests with the victims rather than with their persecutors. The anti-Semite avails himself of a cliche which seems to make this idea acceptable once and for all: that the Jews "brought it on themselves" no matter what "it" may be. Mzo7, the young man who marked every question on the questionnaire scale either +3 or -3 but averaged high on all three scales, is a good example of this pattern of rationalization, following the dubious logic of "where there is smoke there must be fire":
"I never understood why Hitler was so brutal toward them. There must have been some reason for it, something to provoke it. Some say he had to show his authority, but I doubt it. I suspect the Jews contributed a great deal to it. "
How the moralistic construct of Jewish responsibility leads to a complete reversal between victim and murderer is strikingly demonstrated by one subject, 5064, another one of the Los Angeles Boy Scout leaders and a butcher by trade. He scores high on both the E and F scale although lower on PEC. While still officially condemning the German atrocities, he makes a surprising suggestion:
"No American can approve of what the Nazis did to the Jews. I really hope that
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the Jews will do something about it before we come to any such position here. The solution is in the education, particularly of the minority. "
This type of mental perversion seems to utilize an idea taken from the stock of traditional liberalistic wisdom: God helps those who help themselves. The Jews are in jeopardy, therefore it is up to the Jews. In a cultural climate where success has come to be a major measuring rod for any value, the pre- carious situation of the Jews works as an argument against them. The affinity of this attitude and the "no pity for the poor" theme, to be discussed in the chapter on politics, can hardly be overlooked. The same line of thought occurs in the interview of another Boy Scout leader, the Austrian-born and somewhat over-Americanized 55-year-old 5044, who is consistently high on all scales:
"The Jews should take the lead rather than the Gentiles. After all, the Jews are the ones who may get into serious trouble. They shouldn't walk on other people's feet. "
While the Jews "bring it upon themselves," the Nazis' extermination policy is either justified or regarded as a Jewish . exaggeration itself, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The high-scoring man, M359, departmental man- ager for a leather company, is one of those who have "a large number of very close Jewish friends. " Despite this he is high on both the E and PEC scales, although lower on F. Nor does it prevent the following interview episode:
(Nazi treatment? ) "Unable to convince myself that the treatment was limited to Jews. This seems to me to be Jewish propaganda to solicit sympathy and help by overemphasizing their hardships, though I have no sympathy for the Nazi's treat- ment of peoples. "
The mercilessness accompanying the semi-apologetic attitude towards the Nazis can be seen in this subject's pseudorational statements on Palestine: while apparently wishing to "give the Jews a chance," he simultaneously excludes any prospects of success by referring to the Jews' supposedly unchangeably bad nature:
(Solution? ) "Sending them to Palestine is silly because it's not big enough. A good idea to have a country of their own, but big enough so that they can go ahead with their daily pursuits in a normal way, but the Jews would not be happy. They are only happy to have others work for them. "
The explanatory idea that the "Jews brought it upon themselves" is used as a rationalization for destructive wishes which otherwise would not be al- lowed to pass the censorship of the ego. In some cases this is disguised as a statement of fact; e. g. , by5o12, a 2 r-year-old discharged naval petty officer, who scores high on all scales:
"I don't want anything to do with them. They are a nuisance, but not a menace. They will get whatever they deserve as a result of their behavior. "
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The high-scoring woman Fzo;, however, who used to be a social welfare student but has changed to decorative art, lets the cat out of the bag:
"I don't blame the Nazis at all for what they did to the Jews. That sounds terrible, I know, but if the Jews acted the way they do here, I don't blame them. I've never had any bad personal experiences with Jews, it's just the way they act. Don't help your fellow man; that's their creed. "
Here the interrelation between death-wish and moralistic rationalization be- comes truly terrifying. Particularly noteworthy is the subject's underscoring of her own irrationality, in spite of her rationalization concerning the Jews' innate badness. Her confession that she never had any bad experiences with Jews high-lights an important aspect of the whole phenomenon of anti- Semitic extremism. It is the fantastic disproportion between the Jewish "guilt" -even as conceived by the anti-Semite himself-and the judgment that is pronounced. In previous sections the role played by the theme of "ex- change" in the mentality of the prejudiced person has been discussed. Fre- quently our high-scoring subjects complain that they never get their full share, that they are being exploited by everybody. This sense of victimiza-. tion goes hand in hand with very strong underlying possessive and appro- priative desires. Accordingly, when the subjects speak about the "justice" to be meted out to the Jews they express their own desire for an unjust state of affairs in which the exchange of equivalents has been replaced by distribution according to unmediated and irrational power relationships. This is expressed negatively towards the Jews: they should get more punishment-infinitely more-than they "deserve. " Ordinarily, it would never occur even to a very aggressive person that somebody who is bad-mannered or even a cheat should be punished by death. Where the Jews are concerned, however, the transition from accusations which are not only flimsy but unsubstantial even if they were true, to suggestions of the severest kinds of treatment seems to work quite smoothly. This is indicative of one of the most pernicious features of the potentially fascist character.
The logical property of stereotypes, that is, their all-comprehensiveness which allows for no deviations, is not only well adapted to meet certain re- quirements of the prejudiced outlook; it is, by itself, an expression of a psychological trait which probably could be fully understood only in connec- tion with the theory of paranoia and the paranoid "system" which always tends to include everything, to tolerate nothing which cannot be identified by the subject's formula. The extremely prejudiced person tends toward "psychological totalitarianism," something which seems to be almost a micro- cosmic image of the totalitarian state at which he aims. Nothing can be left untouched, as it were; everything must be made "equal" to the ego-ideal of a rigidly conceived and hypostatized ingroup. The outgroup, the chosen foe, represents an eternal challenge. As long as anything different survives, the
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fascist character feels threatened, no matter how weak the other being may be. It is as if the anti-Semite could not sleep quietly until he has trans- formed the whole world into the very same paranoid system by which he is beset: the Nazis went far beyond their official anti-Semitic program. This mechanism makes for the complete disproportion between "guilt" and pun- ishment. The extreme anti-Semite simply cannot stop. By a logic of his own, which is of an archaic nature, much closer to associational transitions than to discursive inferences, he reaches, after having started from relatively mild accusations, the wildest conclusions, tantamount in the last analysis to the pronouncement of death sentences against those whom he literally "can- not stand. " This mechanism was encountered in the "screened" interviews of the Labor Study where subjects frequently "talked themselves into anti- Semitism. " Our interview schedule, more strictly standardized, prevented us
from catching the latter phenomenon. Yet we have striking testimony of the disproportion between guilt and punishment in some of our cases. It is here that the "expropriation" of the suverego by the anti-Semite's punitive moralism obtains its full significance. This removes the last obstacle to psy- chological totalitarianism. There are no inhibitions left by which the associa- tional crescendo of destructive ideas could be checked. Hatred is reproduced and enhanced in an almost automatized, compulsive manner which is both utterly detached from the reality of the object and completely alien to the ego. It may be added that, viewed sociologically, the disproportion between guilt and punishment shows that to the extreme anti-Semite the whole idea of rational law has become a sham even though he dwells on orderliness and ! egalitarian niceties. He is ready to sacrifice his own ideology of equivalents as soon as he has the power to get the major share for himself. Psychologically, the idea of eternal Jewish guilt can be understood as a projection of the prejudiced person's own repressed guilt feelings; ideologically, it is a mere epiphenomenon, a rationalization in the strictest sense. In the extreme case, the psychological focal point is the wish to kill the object of his hatred. It is only afterwards that he looks for reasons why the Jews "must" be killed, and these reasons can never suffice fully to justify his extermination fantasies.
This, however, does not "cure" the anti-Semite, once he has succeeded in expropriating his conscience. The disproportion between the guilt and the punishment induces him, rather, to pursue his hatred beyond any limits and thus to prove to himself and to others that he must be right. This is the ulti- mate function of ideas such as "the Jews brought it upon themselves" or the more generalized formula "there mU:st be something to it. " The extreme anti- Semite silences the remnants of his own conscience by the extremeness of his attitude. He seems to terrorize himself even while he terrorizes others.
The sham trial of rationalizations put on by the prejudiced person some- times makes for a kind of defense of the Jews. But this psychological defense is all too reminiscent of the technique of the Nazi courts. It is permitted only
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in order to satisfy the formalized and hollow wish for legality, the empty shell of expropriated conscience. The defense must always remain impotent. What- ? ever good is said about the Jews sounds like an ironical or hypocritical varia- tion of standard blames. Thus, reference is frequently made to the mythical "good family life" of the Jews, a comment which, however thinly, veils the accusation of conspiratorial clannishness; and this is accompanied by in- sincere protestations of envy of these Jewish qualities, the implication being that the anti-Semitic subject gets the worst deal in life because his noble nature prevents him from the practice of connivance. Still another type of mock-defense can be observed in our interviews. It is the assertion that the
Jews are so clever; that they are "smarter" than the Gentiles, and that one has to admire them on this account. The mechanism at work here involves a double set of values which makes itself felt throughout contemporary cul- ture. On the one hand, there are the "ideals" of magnanimity, unselfishness, justice, and love to which one has to pay lip service. On the other hand, there are the standards of achievement, success, and status which one has to follow in one's actual life. This double set of values is applied to the Jews in reverse, as it were. They are praised for their supposed or actual living up to the standards which the anti-Semite himself actually follows and simul- taneously, they are condemned for their violation of the very same moral code of which he has successfully rid himself. The phraseology of conscience is used in order to take back the moral credit given to the chosen foe in order to appease one's own conscience. Even the praise apportioned to the Jews is used as supporting evidence for their pre-established guilt.
The point being developed here, as well as other features of the prejudiced mentality, is illustrated by the following description of 5039, a 27-year-old veteran student, high onE and middle on the other scales, who is described by the interviewer as a "rather egocentric person. "
In rebelling against his father's teachings, he has dissociated himself from the church, but nevertheless strongly identifies himself as a Gentile in contrast to the Jews. He explained this on the basis of having grown up in a neighborhood . . . where he was the only Gentile in a Jewish community and where he was made to feel that he was an "outsider. " He feels that there is a basic conflict in the religious teachings and upbringing of Christians as against Jews, which is largely responsible for the incompatibility of the two groups. He stated that the Christian religion stresses the pacifistic teaching of "turning the other cheek," thus causing youth to become "maladjusted and submissive," whereas the Jewish religion spurs youth to achievement and aggression, on the basis that "your fathers have suffered, therefore it is now up to you to prove yourself. " Therefore, he feels that a truly religious Christian is bound to be "outdone" by ambitious and aggressive Jews. . . . He did not seem aware that he was generalizing from his own particular experience and environment.
That the objectivity of these reflections about the supposedly realistic educa- tion instigated by Judaism is a mere fake and actually serves as a pretext for
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boundless hostility is shown . by this subject's answer to the specific question referring to Hitler's atrocities:
"Well, if I had been in Germany, I think I would have done the same. . . . I suppose I could have been a Nazi. . . . I think discipline is a good thing. . . . "
Whereas this subject's statements on Jewish smartness are overtly hostile, and limited to the imagined disadvantages of Gentiles in competition with Jews, the smartness idea is sometimes expressed with an air of mock humble- ness. An example is afforded by the high-scoring man M 104, a former engi- neering student who has changed to law:
He said "you hear that our country is run by Jewish capitalists, that Jewish capi- talists wield all the power here. If this is true, it means that our own people aren't smart enough. If our people know the way the Jews are, and can't do the same thing, more power to the Jews. If they know how the Jews work, they should be able to do it just as well. " He doesn't "want to admit that the others aren't as smart as the Jews, and that's what it would mean if this country is run by Jewish capital- ists. If they're smarter than we are, let them run it. "
But the magnanimous ending of the quotation has sinister implications. A tiny shift of emphasis suffices to transform it into the idea that the Jews, because of their sinister cleverness, run the country, that we have to get rid of them and that, since Jewish smartness makes constitutional procedures ineffective, this can be done only by violent means. That the idea of Jewish omnipotence through smartness is a mere projection becomes nowhere clearer than in the case of the consistently high-scoring woman Fzos. She is crippled as a result of infantile paralysis in early childhood. She consummates the idea of Jewish smartness-of the Jews "taking over the business affairs of the nation" -by the expectation of a bloody uprising of the Jews which is but a super- ficially veiled projection of her own wish for anti-Jewish pogroms:
"The white people have decided that we're the thing-the white vs. black and yellow. I think there's going to be a Jewish uprising after the war. I'm not against the Jews. Those I've had contact with were very nice. Of course, I've seen some I didn't like, too. (What didn't you like about them? ) They're loud and they seem to like attention. They're always trying to be at the top of something. I've heard stories about how they'll stab friends in the back, etc. , but I have still to see to believe. (Uprising? ) I think there will be bloodshed over it in this country.
(Do you think it will be justified? ) There's no doubt that they're taking over the busi- ness affairs of the nation. I don't think it's right that refugees should be taken care of the way they are. I think they should take care of their own problems. "
It is noteworthy that when coming into the open with the "bloodshed" idea, this subject does not state clearly whose blood is going to be spilled. While putting the blame for the riots she wishes for upon nonexistent Jewish rioters, she leaves it open that it will be the Jews, after all, who are going to be killed. There may be more to this, however. To extreme anti-Semites the idea of bloodshed seems to become independent, an end in itself as it were.
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On the deepest level, they do not differentiate so very strictly between sub- ject and object. The underlying destructive urge pertains both to the enemy and to oneself. Destructiveness is truly "totalitarian. "
As a summary of the structure of anti-Semitic extremism dealt with in this section, we present in some detail the comments on the Jews of the only interviewee who openly endorses the idea of genocide. This is soo6, a dentistry student and contractor who scores high throughout the question- naire. He suffers from color-blindness and from psychogenic sexual im- potence, determined, according to the interviewer, by a severe Oedipus com- plex. His radical wishes for the extermination of the Jews are probably con- ditioned by severe, early childhood traumata: projections of his own castra- tion fear. His exaggerated ingroup identification seems to be concomitant with an underlying feeling of weakness: he simply does not wish to become acquainted with what is different, apparently because he deems it dangerous.
He is a native-born American, and his grandfather was brought to this country at four. He has never been out of America, nor does he want to go out. Once he went to Tijuana and "that was enough. " He has great pride in being an American.
To him, the minorities are characterized, above all, by their potential strength: "The trouble with the Jews is that they are too strong. " The strength of the outgroups is expressed in symbols of potency-fertility and money:
"Of course, there is a problem. The Negroes produce so rapidly that they will populate the world, while the Jews get all of the money. "
As to the basis of his anti-Semitism, he has the following to say:
"I have never had any good experiences with them. " (This is qualified in a second interview where he remembers, as a college athlete, being taken on a private yacht to Catalina by Jews who were "very nice. ") They have invariably attempted to cheat him and his family in business and are in every way inconsiderate. He tells a long story which I was not able to get verbatim about buying a fur coat as a Christmas present for his mother, at which time the Jewish salesman misread the price tag, quoting a price $100 cheaper than it actually was. They closed the sale and he insisted on taking the coat after the salesman's error had been noticed. This gave him considerable satisfaction, and he said, "That was a case where I out-Jewed a Jew. "
His references to bad experiences are quite vague except in the case where he "out-Jewed the Jew"-another indication of the projective character of the "smartness" theme. The qualification in favor of the rich Jewish yacht owner shows the complication of anti-Semitism through class consciousness, particularly in cases of such strong upward social mobility as that found in this subject. It took even the Nazis some time to convince themselves, their followers, and the wealthiest Jewish groups that the latter should share the fate of poor cattle dealers and immigrants from Eastern Europe.
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The tenets of individualism are altered by this subject as follows:
"They should be treated, I suppose, like individuals; but after all, they are all alike. "
Of course, "everyone can tell a Jew. " The distinction between in- and out- group obtains an almost metaphysical weight: even the imaginary possibility of the disappearance of the dichotomy is excluded:
"I couldn't be a Jew. "
As to the relation between guilt and punishment and its outcome, he finds a formula which cannot be surpassed:
"I think what Hitler did to the Jews was all right. When I was having trouble with a competing contractor, I often thought, I wish Hitler would come here. No, I don't favor discrimination by legislation. I think the time will come when we will have to kill the bastards. "
H. THE MISFIT BOURGEOIS
Our analysis has led us to the extreme consequence of anti-Semitism, the overt wish for the extermination of the Jews. The extremist's superego has been transformed into an extrapunitive agency of unbridled aggression. We have seen that this consequence consummates the intrinsic irrationality of anti-Semitism by establishing a complete disproportion between the "guilt" and the punishment of the chosen victim. Anti-Semitism, however, does not exhaust itself in the old formula by which it is characterized in Lessing's Nathan der Weise, "tut nichts, der Jude wird verbrannt"-the Jew is going to be burnt anyway, no matter how things are, or what could be said in his favor. Irrational and merciless wholesale condemnation is kept alive by the maintenance of a small number of highly stereotyped reproaches of the Jews which, while largely irrational themselves, give a mock semblance of justification to the death sentence. By constructing the nature of the Jew as unalterably bad, as innately corrupt, any possibility of change and reconcilia- tion seems to be excluded. The more invariant the negative qualities of the Jew appear to be, the more they tend to leave open only one way of "solu- tion": the eradication of those who cannot improve. This pattern of quasi- natural incorrigibility is much more important to anti-Semites than is the content of the standard reproaches themselves, the latter being frequently quite harmless and essentially incompatible with the inferences to which they lead those who hate. While these reproaches are so widespread and well known that further evidence of their frequency and intensity is unnecessary, it is worthwhile to follow up some of their aspects which came out clearly in our interviews and which seem to throw some additional light on the phenomena concerned.
It is profitable to examine these reproaches from a sociological point of
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view. Our sample, in contrast to that of the Labor Study, was predominantly middle class. The San Quentin Group is the only striking exception, but its qualification of Lumpenproletariat as \vell as the prison situation, with its intrinsic emphasis on "official" moral values, makes it impossible to compare this group with the rest of the sample in terms of working-class identifica- tion. This identification is usually not very strong even among workers in this country. The general middle-class character of our sample colors the specific nature of the decisive accusations made against the Jews. If our basic hypothesis concerning the largely projective character of anti-Semitism is correct, the Jews are blamed, in social terms, for those properties which by their existence, sociologically ambiguous though it may be, impinge on sensitive spots in the class identification of the different prejudiced groups. To the true proletarian, the Jew is primarily the bourgeois. The working- man is likely to perceive the Jew, above all, as an agent of the economic sphere of the middle-man, as the executor of capitalist tendencies. The Jew is he who "presents the bill. "
To the anti-Semitic members of the middle classes, the imagery of the Jew seems to have a somewhat different structure. The middle classes them- selves experience to a certain degree the same threats to the economic basis of their existence which hang over the heads of the Jews. They are them- selves on the defensive and struggle desperately for the maintenance of their status. Hence, they accentuate just the opposite of what workingmen are likely to complain about, namely, that the Jews are not real bourgeois, that they do not really "belong. " By building up an image of the Jew out of traits which signify his failures in middle-class identification, the middle-class mem- ber is able subjectively to enhance the social status of his ingroup which is endangered by processes having nothing to do with ingroup-outgroup rela- tions. To the middle-class anti-Semite, the Jew is likely to be regarded as the misfit bourgeois, as it were, he who did not succeed in living up to the stand- ards of today's American civilization and who is a kind of obsolete and un- comfortable remnant of the past. The term "misfit" is actually applied to the Jew by some of our prejudiced subjects. The less the Jew qualifies as a legiti- mate member of the middle classes, the more easily can he be excluded from a group which, in the wake of monopolization, tends toward the numerus clausus anyway. If the usurper complex to be discussed in the section on politics and economics really belongs to an over-all pattern, the Jew func- tions, for the potentially fascist mentality, as the usurper par excellence. He is the peddler, impudently disguised as a respectable citizen and businessman.
The most characteristic anti-Jewish remarks appearing in our interviews fall within this frame of thinking, although motifs of a more "proletarian" anti-Semitism, such as the idea of the Jewish exploiter or of the Jews dodging hard manual labor, are not lacking. The division between proletarian and
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middle-class anti-Semitism sh~uld not be exaggerated. The traits ascribed to Jews by working men have often the aspect of the "misfit bourgeois" too. What appear to the worker as symptoms of capitalist exploitiveness can easily be transformed by the middle classes into the reproach of dishonesty, a flagrant violation of bourgeois ethics, one of the main tenets of which is, after all, the praise of good honest labor. The stereotypes here in question transcend the frontiers of the classes; it is only their function that changes, and hence the difference in emphasis.
The construct of the "misfit bourgeois" can easily be articulated according to three major groups of motifs: first, that of Jewish weakness and its psycho- logical correlates, second, the middle-class identification of the Jews as an overcompensation that has essentially failed, third, the intrinsic disloyalty of the Jews to the class with which they vainly attempt to identify themselves, a disloyalty which is viewed as an expression of their abortive identification and of their nature as an objectionable, isolated, and "clannish" ingroup. The first two of these objections may have some basis in reality. There is consid- erable evidence, e. g. , the recent studies by Anton Lourie, of Jewish masochism and its basis in religious psychology. The third objection seems to be predominantly projective and one of the major rationalizations of the wish to "get rid of the whole bunch. "
The idea of Jewish weakness is epitomized by F114, a woman consistently high on all scales, who is a surgical nurse of partly Jewish descent:
"I have a cousin who was in love with me and wanted to marry me. He was more Jewish than I. I loved him, but wouldn't marry him. I told him why-because he's Jewish. He is no~ married to a Gentile with two children. He's more anti-Semitic than I. That's true of so many Jews-like they were lame or hunchback. They hate it or resent it. "
It is perhaps characteristic that such overt statements on Jewish weakness are made frequently either by persons who are themselves being identified with the Jews or-with a more positive accent-by low-scoring subjects. The prejudiced individual, whose hatred is stimulated by weakness, rather tends to stress, on the surface, the strength of the Jews who "wield undue influ- ence" and "own everything. " An example of the low-scorer's attitude to- wards Jewish weakness is the statement of 5055, an otherwise thoroughly liberal man of 73 years who scored low on all the scales. He feels
"that this protective philosophy of the Jews has led to a situation where they do stimulate antagonism in other people. "
In cases of extreme low scorers the awareness of Jewish weakness sometimes leads to identification: they assume the role of Jews themselves, consciously in order to antagonize anti-Semitic acquaintances, unconsciously, possibly, in order to atone for anti-Semitism by at least figuratively suffering the same
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humiliations under which they know the Jews live. Here belongs the case of a zo-year-old, somewhat neurotic interior decorator, 5028, who is in open rebellion against his father but strongly attached to his mother:
The subject and his sister are alike in that they both admire Jewish people. He told of jokes that they had played upon some of their father's relatives who are extremely anti-Semitic by pretending that a great grandfather on the maternal side was Jewish. The subject explained that many persons in his mother's family "look a little Jewish because they have long noses. " The paternal cousin to whom they were talking "almost committed suicide" at the thought, The subject volun- teered the comment that perhaps one reason he likes Jews is that he "has never known any who were objectionable,"
To the prejudiced person, the imagery of Jewish weakness, combined as it is with the rationalization of strength, sometimes strikes a peculiar note, remarkable because of its close harmony with one of the standard themes of American fascist agitators. It is the image of the Jewish refugee who is de- picted simultaneously as strong ("He takes the jobs away from our American boys") and as weak ("He is a dirty outcast"). There is reason enough to believe that the second motive is the decisive one. The high-scoring man Mzo5 makes the following statement:
"A lot of Jewish immigrants are coming to this country. They get a soft life, and they take over. You can't deal with one, and a lot of them are awful dirty, though they have money. "
Aggressiveness against the refugees comes to the fore even in cases which are otherwise, according to the interviewer, only mildly aqti-Semitic. 5036 is a jazz musician, at the present time drawing unemployment insurance. He is high onE and F, although lower on PEC.
Although he denies any outgroup antagonisms, many of these are implicit and at the surface level. He is most vehement in his belief that refugees should not assume citizenship and should be sent home when time and conditions permit it.
The psychological determination of this subject's hatred of the refugee competitors can be inferred the more safely since he acknowledges that
"There is no doubt that the Jews are talented in music. "
He sets against this only the vague standard accusation:
"but they are so clannish and aggressive and loud that sometimes I can't stand them. " On several occasions he claims that the aggressiveness and selfish demands of Jews within smaller bands he had tried to organize caused their failure. "These Jews would never really get a feeling of pride in the organization. They would always leave you the minute they had a better offer; and in trying to meet offers they had, I went broke twice. " On the other hand, he says some Jews are undoubtedly out- standingly cultured people.
The refugees, as those who are objectively weak, are regularly blamed for
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having a domineering attitude and a drive for power. While there may be some basis for the objection of aggressiveness in certain institutionalized Jewish reaction formations, such as the Jewish habit of "pleading," this stere- otype helps at the same time to alleviate the anti-Semite's discomfort about violating the principle of democratic asylum: it is not he but the fugitives who are supposed to disregard the rules of hospitality. 5043, a middle-aged housewife with extremely high scores on all the scales, alleges that the Jews
are loud and often aggressive. (Here she gave an example of women at the market who push themselves forward. ) She specifically distinguishes between "refugees" and other Jews and feels that the "type we have been getting in the neighborhood lately" is definitely clannish, unintelligent, and generally undesirable.
The stereotype of Jewish aggressiveness shows a characteristic of anti- Semitic thinking which deserves closer investigation. It is the mixing, in allegations against the Jews, of crudely physical acts of aggression with hy- potheses of a more psychological nature. Just as the idea of "Jewish blood" ranges from the fear of "pollution of the race," where the term blood is used only figuratively, to the hysteria of bodily "poisoning" inflicted by Jewish blood donors, the imagery of aggressiveness ranges from the J{:ws using their elbows when standing in a queue to their allegedly ruthless business practices. This suggests the retrogressive, "mythological" feature of some anti-Semi- tism. Mental dispositions are translated into physical reality both in order to soothe the fear of the incomprehensible "alien mentality" and to add a sense of the real to that which is actually only projective. This retranslation prob- ably throws some light on the over-all insistence of the anti-Semite on Jewish physical traits.
5067 "is a portly, rather maternal-looking woman who looks all of her forty-eight years. " She was chosen as a mixed case with high E and PEC. She does not differentiate at all between the physical and the psychological aspect of Jewish "aggressiveness":
"I do not like their coercive aggression in business. They are not only aggressive, but they should also be segregated. They are always pushing people aside. I noticed nearly every time when there was pushing in the innumerable lines we had to wait in during the war, it was a Jew who started the pushing. I feel a real revulsion towards Jews. "
In other cases, the idea of aggressiveness is used in the exclusively social sense of "intrusiveness. " Sometimes one gets a glimpse into the mechanism behind this standard reproach. It probably has to do with the all-pervasive feeling of social isolation, which is overcompensated for in innumerable middle-class "social activities. " Against this background of emotion the Jews, as the classic agents of circulation, are perceived and probably envied as those who are not isolated, but have "contacts" everywhere. This idea is closely associated with that of clannishness, which also implies the imagery
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of some kind of togetherness from which the members of the real ingroup
pretend to be excluded. The aforementioned Fzos finds the formula: "They seem to know everybody; they pull strings; they are like a clan, more
united than any race. They have friends everywhere who can do the right thing. "
Finally, it should be mentioned that there is some evidence in our material that the basis of the stereotype "aggressiveness" lies in repressed sexuality. The Jews are supposed to be unencumbered by the standards of Puritan morality, and the more strictly one adheres oneself to these standards, the more eagerly are the supposed sex habits of the Jews depicted as sordid. What goes uncensored in the case of Jewish "rich food" becomes intolerable in the sphere of supposedly uninhibited and therefore repulsive sensuality. Some insight into this matter is afforded by the 42-year-old woman, Fzz8, a public health nurse-a person, incidentally, whose outgroup hatred is focused on organized labor rather than on minorities and whose score on A-S is middle, while she scores high on PEC and F.
She could not imagine herself marrying a Jew. She then proceeded to relate that actually she once had an opportunity to marry a Jew. One time, when she returned home for the su? mmer after being in New York for a while, she met a very intel- ligent lawyer who worked in the same office as her brother. He was very well- educated and knew languages. She had dates with him and saw quite a lot of him for three weeks, until one day he said to her, "There is one thing I want to tell you about myself. You have never met my family and I had not intended that you should meet them. However, there is one thing that I want to ask you, and that is whether you would object to marrying a Jew? " She said that it was as if she had been struck a great blow. He did not look Jewish, his name was not Jewish, and he even sang in the choir of her church, so that she never suspected that he was Jewish. She just sat there without saying a word-and that was his answer. She then went on to add that it was very bad for him, because all the girls staying in her boarding house then found out that he was Jewish and it also became known at his place of work and made things bad for him there. Subject saw him again ten years later and felt that he did look more Jewish, but added that that was perhaps because she now knew that he was Jewish. The thing that is most impossible to her in the idea of marrying a Jew is the thought of bearing Jewish children.
It is noteworthy that the resistance of this woman was brought about only by her knowledge of the man's Jewish descent, not by any of his own charac- teristics. It is hardly going too far to assume that the stereotype has re-enacted old childhood taboos against sexuality and that it was only afterwards that these were turned against the Jew as an individual. Primary attraction is the basis for subsequent repulsion.
The close relations of the ubiquitous idea of clannishness to the reproach of aggressiveness has become obvious in previous examples. Suffice it to say here that clannishness appears as the justification for excluding the aggressive "intruder": he always "remains a Jew" and wants to cheat those by whom he wishes to be accepted. At the same time, the idea of clannishness consum-
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mates the imagery of Jewish. togetherness, of a warm, family-like, archaic and very "ingroup-like" texture of the outgroup which seems to be denied to those who are thoroughly formed by American civilization and obey the rules of technological rationality.
The underlying attractiveness of the Jewish "clan" is accentuated by the statement of Mzo2, a subject scoring high on all scales:
"The Jewish kids I knew in high school were the sons and daughters of the prominent Jewish businessmen, and they were very clannish. It's hard to say what ought to be done about it. It doesn't seem to bother them what people think. That is a natural characteristic. It doesn't do any good to try to exclude them from busi- ness because some of them are the smartest businessmen we have. Most of them are out of Germany by now, and I suppose they'll get back. Some are very crafty about sticking together and getting ahead in business, getting capital. People in Germany will feel the need of Jewish businessmen and they will pool their capital and make a start there. (\Vhat about Jewish women? ) Some of them are very attractive, and some are very clannish. They are dominated by the men; it's all in their creed. "
The more patriarchal structure of the Jewish family, whether it be real or imagined, seems to work as an element of sexual attraction. Jewish women are supposed "to do everything for men"-just what the Gentile American girl is expected not to do. At the same time, however, the idea of sexual ful- fillment tends to diminish, in American culture, the social value of the women who offer this fulfillment. Here again, the praise of one Jewish quality is prone to tilt over into its opposite.
How the idea of clannishness can sometimes obtain features of an obses- sion laden with violent resentment is shown in the case of F113, a young woman who is high on the E scale but somewhat lower on F and PEC. She is an attractive, somewhat neurotic girl of z6, a subject from the Extension Class group. She resents both Jewish names and those who dared to change them. When speaking about Jewish acquaintances, she makes a point of their owning "a chain of burlesque houses," being rich as well as somewhat dis- reputable. In her statement about Jewish family life, it is remarkable how closely some observations which have a ring of truth are knit together with somewhat paranoid ideas about the selfishness determining the Jewish be- havior in question and with a harsh evaluation of it as a "guilt":
"The worst experience with them I had was when I was overseas operator in Hawaii a couple of years ago. I had to monitor all the calls that went to New York so I listened to just thousands of conversations. And ninety percent of them were rich Jews calling up their families. That is the only really good thing I can say for them-their devotion to their families. But all purely selfish. The money they spent-and the time-on just purely selfish calls. (Business calls? ) Well I worked mostly at night. But the other girls said it was the same people making business calls during the day. (How did you know they were Jews? ) Their voices and the th~ngsthey said. Selfish.
The subjective mirroring of the conflict between stereotype and experience in reverse, resulting in rigidity of the supposed experience, is clearly exempli- fied in the statements of Ml2Joa, a middle scorer of the Maritime School group:
(What do you think of the problem of racial minorities? ) "Well, for the for- eigners coming in, it's quite a question. This is supposed to be a melting pot. But shouldn't let too many of them in. . . . And then the Negro problem. . . . I try to be liberal, but I was raised in a Jim Crow state. . . . I don't think I would ever fall in with giving the Negroes equal rights in every way. . . . And yet, foreigners, you have a natural dislike for them. Yet, all of us were once foreigners. . . . "
The anti-Semite's dilemma may be epitomized by quoting verbatim the following statements of the girl student soos, who is high on both theE and F scales, but low on PEC.
"I don't think there should be a Jewish problem. People should not be discrim- inated against, but judged on their individual merits. I don't like it to be called a problem. Certainly I'm against prejudice. Jews are aggressive, bad-mannered, clan- nish, intellectual, clean, overcrowd neighborhoods, noisy, and oversexed. I will admit that my opinion is not based on much contact, however; I hear these things all the time. There are very few Jewish students in my school, and I have already referred to my good contact with the one girl. "
Here the contradiction between judgment and experience is so striking that the existence of prejudice can be accounted for only by strong psychological urges.
G. PROSECUTOR AS JUDGE
In terms of ideology, the anti-Semite's conflict is between the current, culturally "approved" stereotypes of prejudice and the officially prevailing standards of democracy and human equality. Viewed psychologically, the conflict is between certain foreconscious or repressed id tendencies on the one hand and the superego, or its more or less externalized, conventional sub- stitute, on the other. It is hard to predict or even to explain satisfactorily, on the basis of our data, which way this conflict will be decided in each individ- ual case, though we may hypothesize that as soon as prejudice in any amount is allowed to enter a person's manifest ways of thinking, the scales weigh
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heavily in favor of an ever-increasing expansion of his prejudice. We are furthermore entitled to expect this result of the conflict in all cases where the potentially fascist personality syndrome is established. If the conflict within the individual has been decided against the Jews, the decision itself is almost without exception rationalized moralistically. It is as if the internal powers of prejudice, after the defeat of the countertendencies, would con- summate their victory by taking the opposing energies, which they have defeated, into their own service. The superego becomes the spokesman of the id, as it were-a dynamic configuration, incidentally, which is not altogether new to psychoanalysis. W e might call the urges expressing themselves in anti- Semitism the prosecutor, and conscience the judge, within the personality, and say that the two are fused. The Jews have to face, in the prejudiced personality, the parody of a trial. This is part of the psychological explana- tion of why the chances of the Jews making a successful defense against the prejudiced personality are so slim. It may be noted that the judiciary practice in Nazi Germany followed exactly the same pattern, that the Jews were never given a chance, in the Third Reich, to speak for their own cause, either in private law suits or collectively. It will be seen that the expropriation of the superego by the fascist character, with underlying unconscious guilt feelings which must be violently silenced at any price, contributes decisively to the transformation of "cultural discrimination" into an insatiably hostile attitude feeding upon destructive urges.
There is a clear index of the conquest of the superego by anti-Semitic ideology: the assertion that the responsibility for everything the Jews have to suffer, and more particularly, for the genocide committed by the Nazis, rests with the victims rather than with their persecutors. The anti-Semite avails himself of a cliche which seems to make this idea acceptable once and for all: that the Jews "brought it on themselves" no matter what "it" may be. Mzo7, the young man who marked every question on the questionnaire scale either +3 or -3 but averaged high on all three scales, is a good example of this pattern of rationalization, following the dubious logic of "where there is smoke there must be fire":
"I never understood why Hitler was so brutal toward them. There must have been some reason for it, something to provoke it. Some say he had to show his authority, but I doubt it. I suspect the Jews contributed a great deal to it. "
How the moralistic construct of Jewish responsibility leads to a complete reversal between victim and murderer is strikingly demonstrated by one subject, 5064, another one of the Los Angeles Boy Scout leaders and a butcher by trade. He scores high on both the E and F scale although lower on PEC. While still officially condemning the German atrocities, he makes a surprising suggestion:
"No American can approve of what the Nazis did to the Jews. I really hope that
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the Jews will do something about it before we come to any such position here. The solution is in the education, particularly of the minority. "
This type of mental perversion seems to utilize an idea taken from the stock of traditional liberalistic wisdom: God helps those who help themselves. The Jews are in jeopardy, therefore it is up to the Jews. In a cultural climate where success has come to be a major measuring rod for any value, the pre- carious situation of the Jews works as an argument against them. The affinity of this attitude and the "no pity for the poor" theme, to be discussed in the chapter on politics, can hardly be overlooked. The same line of thought occurs in the interview of another Boy Scout leader, the Austrian-born and somewhat over-Americanized 55-year-old 5044, who is consistently high on all scales:
"The Jews should take the lead rather than the Gentiles. After all, the Jews are the ones who may get into serious trouble. They shouldn't walk on other people's feet. "
While the Jews "bring it upon themselves," the Nazis' extermination policy is either justified or regarded as a Jewish . exaggeration itself, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The high-scoring man, M359, departmental man- ager for a leather company, is one of those who have "a large number of very close Jewish friends. " Despite this he is high on both the E and PEC scales, although lower on F. Nor does it prevent the following interview episode:
(Nazi treatment? ) "Unable to convince myself that the treatment was limited to Jews. This seems to me to be Jewish propaganda to solicit sympathy and help by overemphasizing their hardships, though I have no sympathy for the Nazi's treat- ment of peoples. "
The mercilessness accompanying the semi-apologetic attitude towards the Nazis can be seen in this subject's pseudorational statements on Palestine: while apparently wishing to "give the Jews a chance," he simultaneously excludes any prospects of success by referring to the Jews' supposedly unchangeably bad nature:
(Solution? ) "Sending them to Palestine is silly because it's not big enough. A good idea to have a country of their own, but big enough so that they can go ahead with their daily pursuits in a normal way, but the Jews would not be happy. They are only happy to have others work for them. "
The explanatory idea that the "Jews brought it upon themselves" is used as a rationalization for destructive wishes which otherwise would not be al- lowed to pass the censorship of the ego. In some cases this is disguised as a statement of fact; e. g. , by5o12, a 2 r-year-old discharged naval petty officer, who scores high on all scales:
"I don't want anything to do with them. They are a nuisance, but not a menace. They will get whatever they deserve as a result of their behavior. "
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The high-scoring woman Fzo;, however, who used to be a social welfare student but has changed to decorative art, lets the cat out of the bag:
"I don't blame the Nazis at all for what they did to the Jews. That sounds terrible, I know, but if the Jews acted the way they do here, I don't blame them. I've never had any bad personal experiences with Jews, it's just the way they act. Don't help your fellow man; that's their creed. "
Here the interrelation between death-wish and moralistic rationalization be- comes truly terrifying. Particularly noteworthy is the subject's underscoring of her own irrationality, in spite of her rationalization concerning the Jews' innate badness. Her confession that she never had any bad experiences with Jews high-lights an important aspect of the whole phenomenon of anti- Semitic extremism. It is the fantastic disproportion between the Jewish "guilt" -even as conceived by the anti-Semite himself-and the judgment that is pronounced. In previous sections the role played by the theme of "ex- change" in the mentality of the prejudiced person has been discussed. Fre- quently our high-scoring subjects complain that they never get their full share, that they are being exploited by everybody. This sense of victimiza-. tion goes hand in hand with very strong underlying possessive and appro- priative desires. Accordingly, when the subjects speak about the "justice" to be meted out to the Jews they express their own desire for an unjust state of affairs in which the exchange of equivalents has been replaced by distribution according to unmediated and irrational power relationships. This is expressed negatively towards the Jews: they should get more punishment-infinitely more-than they "deserve. " Ordinarily, it would never occur even to a very aggressive person that somebody who is bad-mannered or even a cheat should be punished by death. Where the Jews are concerned, however, the transition from accusations which are not only flimsy but unsubstantial even if they were true, to suggestions of the severest kinds of treatment seems to work quite smoothly. This is indicative of one of the most pernicious features of the potentially fascist character.
The logical property of stereotypes, that is, their all-comprehensiveness which allows for no deviations, is not only well adapted to meet certain re- quirements of the prejudiced outlook; it is, by itself, an expression of a psychological trait which probably could be fully understood only in connec- tion with the theory of paranoia and the paranoid "system" which always tends to include everything, to tolerate nothing which cannot be identified by the subject's formula. The extremely prejudiced person tends toward "psychological totalitarianism," something which seems to be almost a micro- cosmic image of the totalitarian state at which he aims. Nothing can be left untouched, as it were; everything must be made "equal" to the ego-ideal of a rigidly conceived and hypostatized ingroup. The outgroup, the chosen foe, represents an eternal challenge. As long as anything different survives, the
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fascist character feels threatened, no matter how weak the other being may be. It is as if the anti-Semite could not sleep quietly until he has trans- formed the whole world into the very same paranoid system by which he is beset: the Nazis went far beyond their official anti-Semitic program. This mechanism makes for the complete disproportion between "guilt" and pun- ishment. The extreme anti-Semite simply cannot stop. By a logic of his own, which is of an archaic nature, much closer to associational transitions than to discursive inferences, he reaches, after having started from relatively mild accusations, the wildest conclusions, tantamount in the last analysis to the pronouncement of death sentences against those whom he literally "can- not stand. " This mechanism was encountered in the "screened" interviews of the Labor Study where subjects frequently "talked themselves into anti- Semitism. " Our interview schedule, more strictly standardized, prevented us
from catching the latter phenomenon. Yet we have striking testimony of the disproportion between guilt and punishment in some of our cases. It is here that the "expropriation" of the suverego by the anti-Semite's punitive moralism obtains its full significance. This removes the last obstacle to psy- chological totalitarianism. There are no inhibitions left by which the associa- tional crescendo of destructive ideas could be checked. Hatred is reproduced and enhanced in an almost automatized, compulsive manner which is both utterly detached from the reality of the object and completely alien to the ego. It may be added that, viewed sociologically, the disproportion between guilt and punishment shows that to the extreme anti-Semite the whole idea of rational law has become a sham even though he dwells on orderliness and ! egalitarian niceties. He is ready to sacrifice his own ideology of equivalents as soon as he has the power to get the major share for himself. Psychologically, the idea of eternal Jewish guilt can be understood as a projection of the prejudiced person's own repressed guilt feelings; ideologically, it is a mere epiphenomenon, a rationalization in the strictest sense. In the extreme case, the psychological focal point is the wish to kill the object of his hatred. It is only afterwards that he looks for reasons why the Jews "must" be killed, and these reasons can never suffice fully to justify his extermination fantasies.
This, however, does not "cure" the anti-Semite, once he has succeeded in expropriating his conscience. The disproportion between the guilt and the punishment induces him, rather, to pursue his hatred beyond any limits and thus to prove to himself and to others that he must be right. This is the ulti- mate function of ideas such as "the Jews brought it upon themselves" or the more generalized formula "there mU:st be something to it. " The extreme anti- Semite silences the remnants of his own conscience by the extremeness of his attitude. He seems to terrorize himself even while he terrorizes others.
The sham trial of rationalizations put on by the prejudiced person some- times makes for a kind of defense of the Jews. But this psychological defense is all too reminiscent of the technique of the Nazi courts. It is permitted only
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in order to satisfy the formalized and hollow wish for legality, the empty shell of expropriated conscience. The defense must always remain impotent. What- ? ever good is said about the Jews sounds like an ironical or hypocritical varia- tion of standard blames. Thus, reference is frequently made to the mythical "good family life" of the Jews, a comment which, however thinly, veils the accusation of conspiratorial clannishness; and this is accompanied by in- sincere protestations of envy of these Jewish qualities, the implication being that the anti-Semitic subject gets the worst deal in life because his noble nature prevents him from the practice of connivance. Still another type of mock-defense can be observed in our interviews. It is the assertion that the
Jews are so clever; that they are "smarter" than the Gentiles, and that one has to admire them on this account. The mechanism at work here involves a double set of values which makes itself felt throughout contemporary cul- ture. On the one hand, there are the "ideals" of magnanimity, unselfishness, justice, and love to which one has to pay lip service. On the other hand, there are the standards of achievement, success, and status which one has to follow in one's actual life. This double set of values is applied to the Jews in reverse, as it were. They are praised for their supposed or actual living up to the standards which the anti-Semite himself actually follows and simul- taneously, they are condemned for their violation of the very same moral code of which he has successfully rid himself. The phraseology of conscience is used in order to take back the moral credit given to the chosen foe in order to appease one's own conscience. Even the praise apportioned to the Jews is used as supporting evidence for their pre-established guilt.
The point being developed here, as well as other features of the prejudiced mentality, is illustrated by the following description of 5039, a 27-year-old veteran student, high onE and middle on the other scales, who is described by the interviewer as a "rather egocentric person. "
In rebelling against his father's teachings, he has dissociated himself from the church, but nevertheless strongly identifies himself as a Gentile in contrast to the Jews. He explained this on the basis of having grown up in a neighborhood . . . where he was the only Gentile in a Jewish community and where he was made to feel that he was an "outsider. " He feels that there is a basic conflict in the religious teachings and upbringing of Christians as against Jews, which is largely responsible for the incompatibility of the two groups. He stated that the Christian religion stresses the pacifistic teaching of "turning the other cheek," thus causing youth to become "maladjusted and submissive," whereas the Jewish religion spurs youth to achievement and aggression, on the basis that "your fathers have suffered, therefore it is now up to you to prove yourself. " Therefore, he feels that a truly religious Christian is bound to be "outdone" by ambitious and aggressive Jews. . . . He did not seem aware that he was generalizing from his own particular experience and environment.
That the objectivity of these reflections about the supposedly realistic educa- tion instigated by Judaism is a mere fake and actually serves as a pretext for
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boundless hostility is shown . by this subject's answer to the specific question referring to Hitler's atrocities:
"Well, if I had been in Germany, I think I would have done the same. . . . I suppose I could have been a Nazi. . . . I think discipline is a good thing. . . . "
Whereas this subject's statements on Jewish smartness are overtly hostile, and limited to the imagined disadvantages of Gentiles in competition with Jews, the smartness idea is sometimes expressed with an air of mock humble- ness. An example is afforded by the high-scoring man M 104, a former engi- neering student who has changed to law:
He said "you hear that our country is run by Jewish capitalists, that Jewish capi- talists wield all the power here. If this is true, it means that our own people aren't smart enough. If our people know the way the Jews are, and can't do the same thing, more power to the Jews. If they know how the Jews work, they should be able to do it just as well. " He doesn't "want to admit that the others aren't as smart as the Jews, and that's what it would mean if this country is run by Jewish capital- ists. If they're smarter than we are, let them run it. "
But the magnanimous ending of the quotation has sinister implications. A tiny shift of emphasis suffices to transform it into the idea that the Jews, because of their sinister cleverness, run the country, that we have to get rid of them and that, since Jewish smartness makes constitutional procedures ineffective, this can be done only by violent means. That the idea of Jewish omnipotence through smartness is a mere projection becomes nowhere clearer than in the case of the consistently high-scoring woman Fzos. She is crippled as a result of infantile paralysis in early childhood. She consummates the idea of Jewish smartness-of the Jews "taking over the business affairs of the nation" -by the expectation of a bloody uprising of the Jews which is but a super- ficially veiled projection of her own wish for anti-Jewish pogroms:
"The white people have decided that we're the thing-the white vs. black and yellow. I think there's going to be a Jewish uprising after the war. I'm not against the Jews. Those I've had contact with were very nice. Of course, I've seen some I didn't like, too. (What didn't you like about them? ) They're loud and they seem to like attention. They're always trying to be at the top of something. I've heard stories about how they'll stab friends in the back, etc. , but I have still to see to believe. (Uprising? ) I think there will be bloodshed over it in this country.
(Do you think it will be justified? ) There's no doubt that they're taking over the busi- ness affairs of the nation. I don't think it's right that refugees should be taken care of the way they are. I think they should take care of their own problems. "
It is noteworthy that when coming into the open with the "bloodshed" idea, this subject does not state clearly whose blood is going to be spilled. While putting the blame for the riots she wishes for upon nonexistent Jewish rioters, she leaves it open that it will be the Jews, after all, who are going to be killed. There may be more to this, however. To extreme anti-Semites the idea of bloodshed seems to become independent, an end in itself as it were.
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On the deepest level, they do not differentiate so very strictly between sub- ject and object. The underlying destructive urge pertains both to the enemy and to oneself. Destructiveness is truly "totalitarian. "
As a summary of the structure of anti-Semitic extremism dealt with in this section, we present in some detail the comments on the Jews of the only interviewee who openly endorses the idea of genocide. This is soo6, a dentistry student and contractor who scores high throughout the question- naire. He suffers from color-blindness and from psychogenic sexual im- potence, determined, according to the interviewer, by a severe Oedipus com- plex. His radical wishes for the extermination of the Jews are probably con- ditioned by severe, early childhood traumata: projections of his own castra- tion fear. His exaggerated ingroup identification seems to be concomitant with an underlying feeling of weakness: he simply does not wish to become acquainted with what is different, apparently because he deems it dangerous.
He is a native-born American, and his grandfather was brought to this country at four. He has never been out of America, nor does he want to go out. Once he went to Tijuana and "that was enough. " He has great pride in being an American.
To him, the minorities are characterized, above all, by their potential strength: "The trouble with the Jews is that they are too strong. " The strength of the outgroups is expressed in symbols of potency-fertility and money:
"Of course, there is a problem. The Negroes produce so rapidly that they will populate the world, while the Jews get all of the money. "
As to the basis of his anti-Semitism, he has the following to say:
"I have never had any good experiences with them. " (This is qualified in a second interview where he remembers, as a college athlete, being taken on a private yacht to Catalina by Jews who were "very nice. ") They have invariably attempted to cheat him and his family in business and are in every way inconsiderate. He tells a long story which I was not able to get verbatim about buying a fur coat as a Christmas present for his mother, at which time the Jewish salesman misread the price tag, quoting a price $100 cheaper than it actually was. They closed the sale and he insisted on taking the coat after the salesman's error had been noticed. This gave him considerable satisfaction, and he said, "That was a case where I out-Jewed a Jew. "
His references to bad experiences are quite vague except in the case where he "out-Jewed the Jew"-another indication of the projective character of the "smartness" theme. The qualification in favor of the rich Jewish yacht owner shows the complication of anti-Semitism through class consciousness, particularly in cases of such strong upward social mobility as that found in this subject. It took even the Nazis some time to convince themselves, their followers, and the wealthiest Jewish groups that the latter should share the fate of poor cattle dealers and immigrants from Eastern Europe.
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The tenets of individualism are altered by this subject as follows:
"They should be treated, I suppose, like individuals; but after all, they are all alike. "
Of course, "everyone can tell a Jew. " The distinction between in- and out- group obtains an almost metaphysical weight: even the imaginary possibility of the disappearance of the dichotomy is excluded:
"I couldn't be a Jew. "
As to the relation between guilt and punishment and its outcome, he finds a formula which cannot be surpassed:
"I think what Hitler did to the Jews was all right. When I was having trouble with a competing contractor, I often thought, I wish Hitler would come here. No, I don't favor discrimination by legislation. I think the time will come when we will have to kill the bastards. "
H. THE MISFIT BOURGEOIS
Our analysis has led us to the extreme consequence of anti-Semitism, the overt wish for the extermination of the Jews. The extremist's superego has been transformed into an extrapunitive agency of unbridled aggression. We have seen that this consequence consummates the intrinsic irrationality of anti-Semitism by establishing a complete disproportion between the "guilt" and the punishment of the chosen victim. Anti-Semitism, however, does not exhaust itself in the old formula by which it is characterized in Lessing's Nathan der Weise, "tut nichts, der Jude wird verbrannt"-the Jew is going to be burnt anyway, no matter how things are, or what could be said in his favor. Irrational and merciless wholesale condemnation is kept alive by the maintenance of a small number of highly stereotyped reproaches of the Jews which, while largely irrational themselves, give a mock semblance of justification to the death sentence. By constructing the nature of the Jew as unalterably bad, as innately corrupt, any possibility of change and reconcilia- tion seems to be excluded. The more invariant the negative qualities of the Jew appear to be, the more they tend to leave open only one way of "solu- tion": the eradication of those who cannot improve. This pattern of quasi- natural incorrigibility is much more important to anti-Semites than is the content of the standard reproaches themselves, the latter being frequently quite harmless and essentially incompatible with the inferences to which they lead those who hate. While these reproaches are so widespread and well known that further evidence of their frequency and intensity is unnecessary, it is worthwhile to follow up some of their aspects which came out clearly in our interviews and which seem to throw some additional light on the phenomena concerned.
It is profitable to examine these reproaches from a sociological point of
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view. Our sample, in contrast to that of the Labor Study, was predominantly middle class. The San Quentin Group is the only striking exception, but its qualification of Lumpenproletariat as \vell as the prison situation, with its intrinsic emphasis on "official" moral values, makes it impossible to compare this group with the rest of the sample in terms of working-class identifica- tion. This identification is usually not very strong even among workers in this country. The general middle-class character of our sample colors the specific nature of the decisive accusations made against the Jews. If our basic hypothesis concerning the largely projective character of anti-Semitism is correct, the Jews are blamed, in social terms, for those properties which by their existence, sociologically ambiguous though it may be, impinge on sensitive spots in the class identification of the different prejudiced groups. To the true proletarian, the Jew is primarily the bourgeois. The working- man is likely to perceive the Jew, above all, as an agent of the economic sphere of the middle-man, as the executor of capitalist tendencies. The Jew is he who "presents the bill. "
To the anti-Semitic members of the middle classes, the imagery of the Jew seems to have a somewhat different structure. The middle classes them- selves experience to a certain degree the same threats to the economic basis of their existence which hang over the heads of the Jews. They are them- selves on the defensive and struggle desperately for the maintenance of their status. Hence, they accentuate just the opposite of what workingmen are likely to complain about, namely, that the Jews are not real bourgeois, that they do not really "belong. " By building up an image of the Jew out of traits which signify his failures in middle-class identification, the middle-class mem- ber is able subjectively to enhance the social status of his ingroup which is endangered by processes having nothing to do with ingroup-outgroup rela- tions. To the middle-class anti-Semite, the Jew is likely to be regarded as the misfit bourgeois, as it were, he who did not succeed in living up to the stand- ards of today's American civilization and who is a kind of obsolete and un- comfortable remnant of the past. The term "misfit" is actually applied to the Jew by some of our prejudiced subjects. The less the Jew qualifies as a legiti- mate member of the middle classes, the more easily can he be excluded from a group which, in the wake of monopolization, tends toward the numerus clausus anyway. If the usurper complex to be discussed in the section on politics and economics really belongs to an over-all pattern, the Jew func- tions, for the potentially fascist mentality, as the usurper par excellence. He is the peddler, impudently disguised as a respectable citizen and businessman.
The most characteristic anti-Jewish remarks appearing in our interviews fall within this frame of thinking, although motifs of a more "proletarian" anti-Semitism, such as the idea of the Jewish exploiter or of the Jews dodging hard manual labor, are not lacking. The division between proletarian and
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middle-class anti-Semitism sh~uld not be exaggerated. The traits ascribed to Jews by working men have often the aspect of the "misfit bourgeois" too. What appear to the worker as symptoms of capitalist exploitiveness can easily be transformed by the middle classes into the reproach of dishonesty, a flagrant violation of bourgeois ethics, one of the main tenets of which is, after all, the praise of good honest labor. The stereotypes here in question transcend the frontiers of the classes; it is only their function that changes, and hence the difference in emphasis.
The construct of the "misfit bourgeois" can easily be articulated according to three major groups of motifs: first, that of Jewish weakness and its psycho- logical correlates, second, the middle-class identification of the Jews as an overcompensation that has essentially failed, third, the intrinsic disloyalty of the Jews to the class with which they vainly attempt to identify themselves, a disloyalty which is viewed as an expression of their abortive identification and of their nature as an objectionable, isolated, and "clannish" ingroup. The first two of these objections may have some basis in reality. There is consid- erable evidence, e. g. , the recent studies by Anton Lourie, of Jewish masochism and its basis in religious psychology. The third objection seems to be predominantly projective and one of the major rationalizations of the wish to "get rid of the whole bunch. "
The idea of Jewish weakness is epitomized by F114, a woman consistently high on all scales, who is a surgical nurse of partly Jewish descent:
"I have a cousin who was in love with me and wanted to marry me. He was more Jewish than I. I loved him, but wouldn't marry him. I told him why-because he's Jewish. He is no~ married to a Gentile with two children. He's more anti-Semitic than I. That's true of so many Jews-like they were lame or hunchback. They hate it or resent it. "
It is perhaps characteristic that such overt statements on Jewish weakness are made frequently either by persons who are themselves being identified with the Jews or-with a more positive accent-by low-scoring subjects. The prejudiced individual, whose hatred is stimulated by weakness, rather tends to stress, on the surface, the strength of the Jews who "wield undue influ- ence" and "own everything. " An example of the low-scorer's attitude to- wards Jewish weakness is the statement of 5055, an otherwise thoroughly liberal man of 73 years who scored low on all the scales. He feels
"that this protective philosophy of the Jews has led to a situation where they do stimulate antagonism in other people. "
In cases of extreme low scorers the awareness of Jewish weakness sometimes leads to identification: they assume the role of Jews themselves, consciously in order to antagonize anti-Semitic acquaintances, unconsciously, possibly, in order to atone for anti-Semitism by at least figuratively suffering the same
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humiliations under which they know the Jews live. Here belongs the case of a zo-year-old, somewhat neurotic interior decorator, 5028, who is in open rebellion against his father but strongly attached to his mother:
The subject and his sister are alike in that they both admire Jewish people. He told of jokes that they had played upon some of their father's relatives who are extremely anti-Semitic by pretending that a great grandfather on the maternal side was Jewish. The subject explained that many persons in his mother's family "look a little Jewish because they have long noses. " The paternal cousin to whom they were talking "almost committed suicide" at the thought, The subject volun- teered the comment that perhaps one reason he likes Jews is that he "has never known any who were objectionable,"
To the prejudiced person, the imagery of Jewish weakness, combined as it is with the rationalization of strength, sometimes strikes a peculiar note, remarkable because of its close harmony with one of the standard themes of American fascist agitators. It is the image of the Jewish refugee who is de- picted simultaneously as strong ("He takes the jobs away from our American boys") and as weak ("He is a dirty outcast"). There is reason enough to believe that the second motive is the decisive one. The high-scoring man Mzo5 makes the following statement:
"A lot of Jewish immigrants are coming to this country. They get a soft life, and they take over. You can't deal with one, and a lot of them are awful dirty, though they have money. "
Aggressiveness against the refugees comes to the fore even in cases which are otherwise, according to the interviewer, only mildly aqti-Semitic. 5036 is a jazz musician, at the present time drawing unemployment insurance. He is high onE and F, although lower on PEC.
Although he denies any outgroup antagonisms, many of these are implicit and at the surface level. He is most vehement in his belief that refugees should not assume citizenship and should be sent home when time and conditions permit it.
The psychological determination of this subject's hatred of the refugee competitors can be inferred the more safely since he acknowledges that
"There is no doubt that the Jews are talented in music. "
He sets against this only the vague standard accusation:
"but they are so clannish and aggressive and loud that sometimes I can't stand them. " On several occasions he claims that the aggressiveness and selfish demands of Jews within smaller bands he had tried to organize caused their failure. "These Jews would never really get a feeling of pride in the organization. They would always leave you the minute they had a better offer; and in trying to meet offers they had, I went broke twice. " On the other hand, he says some Jews are undoubtedly out- standingly cultured people.
The refugees, as those who are objectively weak, are regularly blamed for
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having a domineering attitude and a drive for power. While there may be some basis for the objection of aggressiveness in certain institutionalized Jewish reaction formations, such as the Jewish habit of "pleading," this stere- otype helps at the same time to alleviate the anti-Semite's discomfort about violating the principle of democratic asylum: it is not he but the fugitives who are supposed to disregard the rules of hospitality. 5043, a middle-aged housewife with extremely high scores on all the scales, alleges that the Jews
are loud and often aggressive. (Here she gave an example of women at the market who push themselves forward. ) She specifically distinguishes between "refugees" and other Jews and feels that the "type we have been getting in the neighborhood lately" is definitely clannish, unintelligent, and generally undesirable.
The stereotype of Jewish aggressiveness shows a characteristic of anti- Semitic thinking which deserves closer investigation. It is the mixing, in allegations against the Jews, of crudely physical acts of aggression with hy- potheses of a more psychological nature. Just as the idea of "Jewish blood" ranges from the fear of "pollution of the race," where the term blood is used only figuratively, to the hysteria of bodily "poisoning" inflicted by Jewish blood donors, the imagery of aggressiveness ranges from the J{:ws using their elbows when standing in a queue to their allegedly ruthless business practices. This suggests the retrogressive, "mythological" feature of some anti-Semi- tism. Mental dispositions are translated into physical reality both in order to soothe the fear of the incomprehensible "alien mentality" and to add a sense of the real to that which is actually only projective. This retranslation prob- ably throws some light on the over-all insistence of the anti-Semite on Jewish physical traits.
5067 "is a portly, rather maternal-looking woman who looks all of her forty-eight years. " She was chosen as a mixed case with high E and PEC. She does not differentiate at all between the physical and the psychological aspect of Jewish "aggressiveness":
"I do not like their coercive aggression in business. They are not only aggressive, but they should also be segregated. They are always pushing people aside. I noticed nearly every time when there was pushing in the innumerable lines we had to wait in during the war, it was a Jew who started the pushing. I feel a real revulsion towards Jews. "
In other cases, the idea of aggressiveness is used in the exclusively social sense of "intrusiveness. " Sometimes one gets a glimpse into the mechanism behind this standard reproach. It probably has to do with the all-pervasive feeling of social isolation, which is overcompensated for in innumerable middle-class "social activities. " Against this background of emotion the Jews, as the classic agents of circulation, are perceived and probably envied as those who are not isolated, but have "contacts" everywhere. This idea is closely associated with that of clannishness, which also implies the imagery
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of some kind of togetherness from which the members of the real ingroup
pretend to be excluded. The aforementioned Fzos finds the formula: "They seem to know everybody; they pull strings; they are like a clan, more
united than any race. They have friends everywhere who can do the right thing. "
Finally, it should be mentioned that there is some evidence in our material that the basis of the stereotype "aggressiveness" lies in repressed sexuality. The Jews are supposed to be unencumbered by the standards of Puritan morality, and the more strictly one adheres oneself to these standards, the more eagerly are the supposed sex habits of the Jews depicted as sordid. What goes uncensored in the case of Jewish "rich food" becomes intolerable in the sphere of supposedly uninhibited and therefore repulsive sensuality. Some insight into this matter is afforded by the 42-year-old woman, Fzz8, a public health nurse-a person, incidentally, whose outgroup hatred is focused on organized labor rather than on minorities and whose score on A-S is middle, while she scores high on PEC and F.
She could not imagine herself marrying a Jew. She then proceeded to relate that actually she once had an opportunity to marry a Jew. One time, when she returned home for the su? mmer after being in New York for a while, she met a very intel- ligent lawyer who worked in the same office as her brother. He was very well- educated and knew languages. She had dates with him and saw quite a lot of him for three weeks, until one day he said to her, "There is one thing I want to tell you about myself. You have never met my family and I had not intended that you should meet them. However, there is one thing that I want to ask you, and that is whether you would object to marrying a Jew? " She said that it was as if she had been struck a great blow. He did not look Jewish, his name was not Jewish, and he even sang in the choir of her church, so that she never suspected that he was Jewish. She just sat there without saying a word-and that was his answer. She then went on to add that it was very bad for him, because all the girls staying in her boarding house then found out that he was Jewish and it also became known at his place of work and made things bad for him there. Subject saw him again ten years later and felt that he did look more Jewish, but added that that was perhaps because she now knew that he was Jewish. The thing that is most impossible to her in the idea of marrying a Jew is the thought of bearing Jewish children.
It is noteworthy that the resistance of this woman was brought about only by her knowledge of the man's Jewish descent, not by any of his own charac- teristics. It is hardly going too far to assume that the stereotype has re-enacted old childhood taboos against sexuality and that it was only afterwards that these were turned against the Jew as an individual. Primary attraction is the basis for subsequent repulsion.
The close relations of the ubiquitous idea of clannishness to the reproach of aggressiveness has become obvious in previous examples. Suffice it to say here that clannishness appears as the justification for excluding the aggressive "intruder": he always "remains a Jew" and wants to cheat those by whom he wishes to be accepted. At the same time, the idea of clannishness consum-
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mates the imagery of Jewish. togetherness, of a warm, family-like, archaic and very "ingroup-like" texture of the outgroup which seems to be denied to those who are thoroughly formed by American civilization and obey the rules of technological rationality.
The underlying attractiveness of the Jewish "clan" is accentuated by the statement of Mzo2, a subject scoring high on all scales:
"The Jewish kids I knew in high school were the sons and daughters of the prominent Jewish businessmen, and they were very clannish. It's hard to say what ought to be done about it. It doesn't seem to bother them what people think. That is a natural characteristic. It doesn't do any good to try to exclude them from busi- ness because some of them are the smartest businessmen we have. Most of them are out of Germany by now, and I suppose they'll get back. Some are very crafty about sticking together and getting ahead in business, getting capital. People in Germany will feel the need of Jewish businessmen and they will pool their capital and make a start there. (\Vhat about Jewish women? ) Some of them are very attractive, and some are very clannish. They are dominated by the men; it's all in their creed. "
The more patriarchal structure of the Jewish family, whether it be real or imagined, seems to work as an element of sexual attraction. Jewish women are supposed "to do everything for men"-just what the Gentile American girl is expected not to do. At the same time, however, the idea of sexual ful- fillment tends to diminish, in American culture, the social value of the women who offer this fulfillment. Here again, the praise of one Jewish quality is prone to tilt over into its opposite.
How the idea of clannishness can sometimes obtain features of an obses- sion laden with violent resentment is shown in the case of F113, a young woman who is high on the E scale but somewhat lower on F and PEC. She is an attractive, somewhat neurotic girl of z6, a subject from the Extension Class group. She resents both Jewish names and those who dared to change them. When speaking about Jewish acquaintances, she makes a point of their owning "a chain of burlesque houses," being rich as well as somewhat dis- reputable. In her statement about Jewish family life, it is remarkable how closely some observations which have a ring of truth are knit together with somewhat paranoid ideas about the selfishness determining the Jewish be- havior in question and with a harsh evaluation of it as a "guilt":
"The worst experience with them I had was when I was overseas operator in Hawaii a couple of years ago. I had to monitor all the calls that went to New York so I listened to just thousands of conversations. And ninety percent of them were rich Jews calling up their families. That is the only really good thing I can say for them-their devotion to their families. But all purely selfish. The money they spent-and the time-on just purely selfish calls. (Business calls? ) Well I worked mostly at night. But the other girls said it was the same people making business calls during the day. (How did you know they were Jews? ) Their voices and the th~ngsthey said. Selfish.
