Hatred of Jews: The outrageously bashful anti-Semite

Jean Améry was a victim of National Socialism. Austrian citizen, born in 1912; Resistance fighter in Belgium, deported to Auschwitz in January 1944. Liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. “Anyone who succumbs to torture can no longer feel at home in the world,” wrote the writer and essayist in 1965. 13 years later, in October 1978, he passed away at the age of 65.

Améry’s writings have been available in a nine-volume edition for around 20 years. The editor Irene Heidelberger-Leonard has published a separate chapter from this, the title of the volume is: “The New Anti-Semitism”. It is the title of an essay by Jean Améry from 1976.

“Will anti-Semitism become socially acceptable again?” Améry asked himself almost half a century ago, and he admitted with shock that after the industrial mass murder by Hitler’s bureaucrats, soldiers, doctors, accomplices and crowds of masterminds, he did not believe such a development was possible have held. Améry’s gaze is not directed at the “regular table anti-Semitism of the German and non-German philistines,” as he writes, but rather at those who indignantly reject this term, deny it and deny it. It is “today’s outrageously shameful anti-Semite” that can be found in the left-wing camp, of all places, to which Améry counts himself.

“What does the new anti-Semite say?” asks the essayist, getting to the core of his analysis. “Something extremely simple and, at a glance, obvious: He is not who he is made out to be, he is not an anti-Semite, but an anti-Zionist!” That means: advocate of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, critic of Israeli occupation policy, warning of expulsion of the “Arab-Palestinian people”.

Israel is claimed to be imperialist and colonialist in those circles. Yes, Améry admits, “the existence of the State of Israel” is “no more a state of law than any other, but no more a state of injustice than the state associations of the Christian and non-Christian world.” Améry then highlights the uniqueness of the State of Israel as a refuge. There is “an existential bond” to the state of Israel of every Jew.” He describes Israel as a “virtual asylum”; there there is “the possibility, the virtuality, of finding shelter: anyone who has ever wandered through the world as a homeless person will be able to understand this.”

But Améry also weighed heavily on the Arabs’ right to statehood. As early as 1969, he described the Israeli-Arab conflict as a “historical tragedy without precedent.” Seven years later, he believes that “the solution to the Palestinian question” is “only a technical one.” So doable. But the dangers are distributed extremely unevenly: “the Jewish state surrounded by so much hatred” would, if it collapsed, “leave its residents nothing as an heirloom except the butcher’s knife of the enemy who has already been trained to murder,” adds Améry. At the time, he had no idea how unfathomable a right-wing extremist government in Israel could be.

“Without a doubt, today’s devastation in Gaza,” writes editor Irene Heidelberger-Leonard in her foreword, “Israel’s response to Hamas’s terror, would have pushed him completely to the limits of his solidarity, all the more so since Netanyahu’s government has no perspective whatsoever leaves a two-state solution open.” And there are even voices in this right-wing extremist government that deny the Palestinians the right to exist, one might add.

At the beginning of September 1977, a year before his suicide, Améry wrote in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” under the heading “Limits of Solidarity”: “I urgently call on every Jew, if he wants to be human, to join me in the radical condemnation of the Ordeal as a system to match. Where barbarism begins, that is where existence itself must end.” He follows up with a desperate plea to reason: “Recognize that your freedom cannot be won against your Palestinian cousin, only with him – and may he still be from “You know nothing about freedom and want to grab your throat in a wild thirst for revenge.”

The editor describes Améry’s texts from the years 1969 to 1978 as “frighteningly current.” During this time, the essayist increasingly despairs of the left’s understanding of politics, to which he feels he belongs. He repeats his view again and again – and argues against the narrowing of views, one-eyedness, blindness, in short: against the “blindness to history and humanity” of the left. “In Israel, metaphorically speaking, everyone is the son, grandson, of someone who was gassed,” he wrote in 1969. “Israel is – but how can you make this clear to young people? – no country like any other: it is the place of refuge where survivors and persecuted people settled after a long journey in deep exhaustion.

The essays are painstaking mental work, in-depth argumentation including counter-arguments, gentle, humane, tentative. It is a torturous self-questioning, the opposite of what usually prevails in debate culture today. The booklet has been quickly put together by the editor, unfortunately without comments on the time-bound texts from the years 1969 to 1978. Background information and allusions are only accessible to readers with previous knowledge.

Jean Améry: The new anti-Semitism. Velcro cotta, 126 p., hardcover, €18.

“Recognize that your freedom cannot be won against your Palestinian cousin, only with him – and may he still know nothing about freedom at this hour and want to grab your throat in a wild thirst for revenge.”

Jean Améry