HAIFA, Israel — The images and colors of childhood sometimes determine later pictures of life. In my childhood, during the big Soviet holidays, an airship hovered over the city with four portraits on its huge body. One of the men portrayed in the portraits surpassed the other three in the amount of hair on his head and in his beard. He portrayed the big-headed founder of communism, Karl Marx.
This was the “low-worship of the West” for which Jews, prominent figures in literature and the arts, including my father and my mother’s sister, were condemned in the Soviet Union. The airship glorified the influence of the two Germans, Marx and Engels, on the two national leaders, Lenin and Stalin. And no one repressed Lenin’s and Stalin’s successors for their “low-worship of the West” in the form of two hairy and bearded foreigners, one of whom was a capitalist (Engels), and for the cult of foreigners they imposed on Soviet ideology. Four silhouettes of red idols hovered over the city of people and looked on from a bird’s eye view. And only the birds felt free in a city shackled in chains, among people who had nothing to lose but those chains.
The color of my life in the USSR was red, socialist, calling for transformation and correction of injustices. But in my life, socialism gradually changed color, turning from red to brown. Socialists, who, by definition, were supposed to be internationalists, proletarian internationalists, in the USSR turned into possessors of the only truth and pretenders to the “right,” “just” power over the world. The Soviet ruling internationalists were shedding the burden of internationalism and turning into national socialists, for they asserted the superiority of the “Soviet nation” over the rest of the world, while the Jews were perceived at times as an “anti-Soviet nation” and at times as an inferior citizen nation unfriendly to the Soviet Union. Apparently, turning red into brown, a self-perception of inferiority, and an unwillingness to accept it brought me to Israel.
I began to look back on my journey to Israel as I reached 40 years into my life in this country. The ancient Jews had to wander in the desert for 40 years to come out of slavery to freedom in the Promised Land. It took me 40 years to stop and look back. My journey to Israel began obscenely. In the beginning it was not peace, but war – the Six-Day War. Inspiring thoughts about repatriation, born on the wave of enthusiasm from the Israeli victory over the superior Arab enemy forces, were typical of Soviet Jews of my generation. But when the natives on arrival in Israel asked me why I had decided to repatriate, and I answered that it all began with the war, that my Jewish awakening was due to the Six-Day War, they recoiled in fright: how could war be a source of inspiration? How can truth be born in a frenzy of nationalism? They saw me as “enfant terrible!”
“Enfant terrible” means “terrible child” in French. In a more general sense, it may refer to a person who behaves contrary to the rules of society. When I went to Israel in 1979, I was in the minority: the majority were going to “wealthy” countries. In this sense I was also an “enfant terrible.” Soviet Jews leaving the USSR did not want to go to Israel. It was too small for them, too oriental, too cramped, too hot, too militant, too religious, too crowded with Jews. Kiev Jews wanted large scale, big opportunities, western prosperity, cool climate, they feared militarism and ideology. The question “Where are you going?” almost always meant which city in the United States. Maple Canada, fabulous Australia, exotic New Zealand were accepted. Most were in denial about Israel. The legitimate question became “Why are you going to Israel? After all, most go to other countries.” Jews, somewhere in the corners of their consciousness or perhaps subconscious or unconscious, have a longing for “norms,” a repulsion from their people, with whom so many things are associated that are out of the ordinary and far from always pleasant. At various times the desire to free oneself from the national burden has taken various, sometimes extreme forms among Jews.
Jewish self-hatred as a phenomenon became prominent with the flowering of Jewish emancipation. Karl Marx’s article Toward the Jewish Question is one of the clearest manifestations of the Jew’s identification with Judophobes. Marx believed that the main result of the emancipation of the Jews must be the emancipation of humanity from the Jews. In 1840, a blood libel was brought against a group of local Jews in Damascus. As is usual in such cases, the Damascus affair was accompanied by anti-Jewish demonstrations in many places. At this critical moment for the Jews, Ferdinand Lassalle, one of the founders of German Social Democracy, lashed out at his people: “Vile people, you deserve your fate. The worm under your feet tries to wriggle out, but you only grovel more. You do not know how to die, to destroy, you do not know what just vengeance means, you cannot die with your enemy, strike him down by dying. You were born to slavery.”
Time passed, and the phenomenon of Jew self-hatred came to literature. French Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky published her novel David Golder (1929). The Jews in this book looked and behaved as they were described by the ideologues of antisemitism in France and Germany. The phenomenon of Jewish self-loathing, vividly manifested in the ideas of the book Gender and Character by the baptized Jew, Austrian psychologist Otto Weininger, was analyzed by Theodor Lessing, professor at the Hanover University of Technology and German philosopher and publicist of Jewish origin, in his book Jewish Self-hatred (1930). Lessing argued that the “tragedy of Jewish exile” in the Diaspora had undermined national pride, dignity, and self-respect. In his view, antisemitism and slavish submission to the ideal of “Germanism” had created a psychology of self-hatred. He apparently borrowed the basic idea of the book from Weininger’s life and from one of his articles. In the article On Henrik Ibsen and his work Per Gynt, Weininger wrote of Nietzsche as an individual who felt a particular hatred for himself. Theodor Lessing borrowed the notion of “self-hatred” from this article to explain the psychic characteristics of certain figures of Jewish culture, including Weininger himself. Self-hatred is formed from a desire to look at oneself through the eyes of another, and the other is a Jew-hating anti-Semite. It results from alienation from one’s nation and a desire to win sympathy by denying it. Inward-looking aggression motivated, according to Lessing, both Weininger’s conversion from Judaism to Protestantism and his early death by suicide. Jewish self-hatred was the pathological result of the quest for “normality.”
Lessing hardly had time to read David Golder, which might have enriched his book with interesting material. Theodor Lessing was the “enfant terrible” in Germany: he dared to sharply criticize the popular favorite, German President Paul Hindenburg, eight years before this national hero brought the Nazis to power. Lessing predicted the Nazi victory with the help of Hindenburg. Hindenburg, who despised Hitler, believed that only “this guy Hitler” could bring order to a country in political chaos and appointed him chancellor. After the enthronement of “this guy,” Lessing fled to Czechoslovakia, where he was murdered by an assassin.
Jewish self-loathing was a manifestation of “auto-antisemitism,” which turned a Jew into the double of an antisemite. It was a neurotic reaction to the growing power of antisemitism and an expression of the fear of fighting it for spiritual national self-assertion. Merging with the environment, conformism proved more comfortable than the challenge of Jewishness. There is an expression in Yiddish: “it is hard to be Jewish” (שווער צו זיין א ייד, the title of a play based on a work by Sholom Aleichem). Einstein is credited with the statement, “We Jews have survived because cowards have abandoned us.” In the Middle Ages, Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (Ramban, or Nachmanides) had to have difficult and life-threatening debates with Jewish apostates whose hatred of Jews and Judaism was more fanatical than the hatred of Jewry on the part of their new Christian fellow believers. Psychologically, it was much easier for Jews to move to a foreign land than to live in their historic homeland.
The self-hatred began with the hatred and envy of the Christian population toward the Jews. The term “Jewish self-loathing,” coined by Lessing, became especially popular after the publication in 1986 of American historian Sander Gilman’s book of the same name. Gilman writes: “Jews see how the titular nation perceives them, and through cleavage they project their concerns onto other Jews for self-soothing. This projection is the creation of a dichotomy: “self-hating” Jews strive to make themselves “good” and in this sense outliers, Jews who are different from the stereotypical “bad” Jews. For German, French, and Austrian Jews, Eastern European Jews were “bad” Jews. A Jew’s self-hatred is a copying of the attitude of anti-Semites toward his people. The self-hating Jew is convinced of the inferiority of his nation’s culture and seeks to borrow someone else’s language, someone else’s art, someone else’s traditions.
Gilman continues: “The flip side of the coin is clear – Jewish mental development has been at the heart of antisemitic paranoia since the 16th century, when Luther claimed that Jewish doctors were so clever that they prepared a poison that could kill a Christian in less than a day.” Jewish self-hatred was provoked by the hatred of the dominant population of the host countries in which the Jews lived, toward them, and where they were considered a lower-ranking minority, the “others.” The self-hatred arose as a response to the pushing of the dominant Jewish nation to the margins of society. This feeling arises in Jews as a reaction to how the dominant nation sees them. They move away from belonging to their own people and artificially elevate themselves above their fellow tribesmen.
The Jews of Kiev did not know the history of their people very well and, in fact, were not interested in it. They were disconnected from the history of the nation and did not identify with the inferiority complexes characteristic of Diaspora Jews in the past. Although they were accepted in emigration by various Jewish communities in Western countries, membership in a Jewish community in a new country was more of an entrance ticket to the new, non-Jewish world. They did not go to the extremes of self-loathing, they sought the “golden mean”. It was a far cry from the Jewish state. Jewish immigrants almost instinctively recoiled from Israel, afraid to associate themselves strongly with Jewishness. They wanted softer and less defiant forms of affiliation with Jewry: it was one thing to be a member of the Jewish community in a new, free country of the West, another to move to Israel. The mechanism of rejection from Israel worked before my eyes; I hardly saw any future Israelis among those who left Kiev. Israel could not compete with Western countries. The assimilation of the Jews of Kiev, the long erosion of their Jewish consciousness under the pressure of state anti-Semitism, the national indifference – all these phenomena created in them a distrust and even a squeamishness toward Israel. Many times I heard the anti-Semitic argument of Jewish production against repatriation to Israel: nothing good can come from a country where so many Jews live. Twelve years later, the same anti-Israeli arguments were made by Jews leaving the USSR, and somewhat later from the post-Soviet republics, for Germany.
In a chord of farewell to the USSR, I felt like an “enfant terrible” in relation to the emigrants of my time because, unlike most, I refused to choose the United States, a country of “unlimited opportunity.” I chose a country of limited opportunity and unlimited dangers, a country with uncertain borders and certain enemies, a country of three seas and three deserts, standing at the crossroads of three continents, a country flowing with milk, honey and blood.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.