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140 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

Confronted by such a tide of aggression, this Jew will have
to take a stand. Here is all the ambiguity that Sartre describes.
Certain pages of Anti-Semite and Jew are the fi nest that I have
ever read. The fi nest, because the problem discussed in them grips
us in our guts. 45
The Jew, authentic or inauthentic, is struck down by the fi st
of the “salaud.” His situation is such that everything he does is
bound to turn against him. For naturally the Jew prefers himself,
and it happens that he forgets his Jewishness, or hides it, hides
himself from it. That is because he has then admitted the validity
of the Aryan system. There are Good and Evil. Evil is Jewish.
Everything Jewish is ugly. Let us no longer be Jews. I am no
longer a Jew. Down with the Jews. In such circumstances, these
are the most aggressive. Like that patient of Baruk who had a
persecution complex and who, seeing the doctor one day wearing
his yellow star, grabbed him by the lapel and shouted: “I, sir, am
a Frenchman.” Or this woman: “Making rounds in the ward of
my colleague, Dr. Daday, I encountered a Jewish patient who had
been the target of taunts and insults from her fellow-patients. A
non-Jewish patient had gone to her defense. The Jewish patient
thereupon turned on the woman who had defended the Jews,

45. I am thinking particularly of this passage:
Such then is this haunted man, condemned to make his choice of himself on the
basis of false problems and in a false situation, deprived of the metaphysical
sense by the hostility of the society that surrounds him, driven to a rationalism of
despair. His life is nothing but a long fl ight from others and from himself. He has
been alienated even from his own body; his emotional life has been cut in two;
he has been reduced to pursuing the impossible dream of universal brotherhood
in a world that rejects him.
Whose is the fault? It is our eyes that refl ect to him the unacceptable image that
he wishes to dissimulate. It is our words and our gestures—all our words and all
our gestures—our anti-Semitism, but equally our condescending liberalism—that
have poisoned him. It is we who constrain him to choose to be a Jew whether
through fl ight from himself or through self-assertion; it is we who force him
into the dilemma of Jewish authenticity or inauthenticity. . . . This species
that bears witness for essential humanity better than any other because it was
born of secondary reactions within the body of humanity—this quintessence
of man, disgraced, uprooted, destined from the start to either inauthenticity
or martyrdom. In this situation there is not one of us who is not totally guilty
and even criminal; the Jewish blood that the Nazis shed falls on all our heads.
(pp. 135–136.)

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