We have gotten suckered by hate.
I read Jean-Paul Sartre's essay on antisemitism in college, on my own. I took it to heart. Still, it was good to read Why Do People Embrace Hate? Sartre Has an Answer (JSTOR Daily).
However, Greenberg notes that Sartre’s real interest wasn’t in Jewish perspectives but in what makes a bigot. In fact, Sartre explicitly wrote that in other contexts the same scapegoating purpose could be served by Black or Asian people. Today, Greenberg writes, we might also substitute immigrants, Muslims, or members of the LGBTQ community.
Sartre viewed antisemitism as a solution for the fundamental human problems of anxiety and alienation. In particular, he focused on how “being-for-others”—existing with the awareness of others’ perceptions—creates tension through the risks of exposing one’s inadequacies. Because of this, anyone may become overwhelmed by a social world with many different perspectives and demands, and by the possibility of getting things wrong.
To Sartre, antisemites are people who suffer from this insecurity and fear and are unwilling to do the work of adapting to cultural change and learning new things. This leaves them vulnerable to propaganda offering simple answers. The antisemite also revels in the release of constraints imposed by living peacefully in society with others and finds comfort in joining crowds of people like them.
JSTOR Daily also published The Forgotten Untouchables of France, which illustrates the points about Sartre.
When it comes to the issue of difference, D. Hack Tuke in an 1880 issue of The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland noted that “I have been unable to obtain any evidence which marks the Cagots out as a people distinct from the surrounding inhabitants.” No marker of race, ethnicity, or religion differentiated them; aside from their inherited designation of Cagot, they were indistinguishable from the French and Spanish among whom they lived.
Regardless of the lack of justification, the effects of anti-Cagot bigotry were horrific. The nineteenth-century British novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, author of North and South, provided one of the few English-language sketches of the Cagots just as liberal reforms ensured that they functionally ceased to exist as a separate persecuted community. She recounts in her 1855 story “An Accursed Race” how, around 1700, a soldier in Brittany punished a Cagot who drew holy water from a prohibited font. She writes that the soldier “cut off… [the Cagot’s] hand, and hung it up, dripping with blood, as an offering to the patron saint of the church.”
Lurid though that particular anecdote may be, and others Gaskell provides—such as one in which rebelling Cagots murdered oppressive town officials and used their heads as balls in an impromptu game of soccer—their daily persecution was no less unjust for being more prosaic. Cagots were relegated to distinct ghettos in towns and villages, and were mandated to dress in a particular manner to announce their separate identity. All had to wear a badge featuring a red symbol in the shape of a duck’s foot. They were only allowed to marry within their own community, and when that restriction loosened, anyone from outside who married into the group was recategorized as a Cagot. They were also limited to certain professions, including carpentry, rope-making, masonry, and tiling.
We could do better, definitely should do better, but that is true of much of human nature. We cannot keep moralizing without taking action. It need not be anything massive, it need not come from a government program; change can come from each of us in the smallest of our daily activities.
sch 5/15
