What makes a person hate a particular group of people and support policies that harm them? Writing in 2020, comparative literature scholar Judith Greenberg looked at French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” in light of twenty-first-century American politics.
Sartre wrote the essay in 1944, as people around the world were learning the extent of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. He was also grappling with the continuing power of anti-Jewish sentiment in France at the time.
Greenberg takes issue with the way that Sartre understood Jews themselves. Ignoring Jewish religious belief, history, and culture, Sartre equated Jewish identity with legitimate fear of antisemitic violence. He claimed that “it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.”
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.
“When gathered among other like-minded people, they celebrate their resistance to difference and difficulty,” Greenberg writes. “In creating fear for the scapegoat, they displace their existential anxiety and bolster themselves with a false sense of superiority.”
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In dominating more vulnerable people, Sartre wrote, the antisemite chooses “to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others” and finds his identity in others’ reactions. Greenberg suggests that this resembles what we might call narcissism—though that’s a psychoanalytic term that Sartre would not have used.
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Sartre argued that antisemitism should have no place in universities or legitimate public discourse because it is an unreasoned “passion” rather than an idea that can be sensibly debated. He described how antisemites weaponize absurdity and “delight in acting in bad faith” to “intimidate and disconcert” those trying to counter them with reasoned arguments.
While acknowledging that antisemites may have good characteristics—a loving husband, a generous and conscientious citizen—Sartre claimed that their hatred ultimately defines them.
“A man who finds it entirely natural to denounce other men cannot have our conception of humanity,” he wrote. “He does not see even those whom he aids in the same light as we do.”
Greenberg suggests this remains a useful lens for looking at bigotry today.
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