Dear
John,
At
the risk of venturing onto pseudoscientific terrain and boring others...
We
talked about the relationship amongst Jews, Italians and more broadly
Catholicism, and the history of prejudice against Jews, as well as the relative
strategies of these groups in the wider culture.
Its
true that Jews predominate in western thought (Freud, Einstein, Marx, I guess
Jesus, and the pantheon of Nobel Prize winners). Meanwhile, it has been a
Catholic country (e.g., France) that has produced the philosophic systems--structuralism,
existentialism, rationalism (e.g., the Enlightenment), and the philosophy (I
forget the name) associated with Rousseau. Why France has produced these
philosophies is unclear--possibly associated with the Jesuit hierarchical or
educational system or some other idiosyncrasy of time, place, opportunity, or
chance.
But
there is another, to me strange, bifurcation between the two groups in terms of
output. That concerns art. The heralded art from the last few centuries has
been Christian--not only from Florence, but also in the US. Pollack, Georgia
O'Keefe, Van Gogh, Dali, DeKoonig, Jasper Johns, Picasso, Miro, and even the
lowly Leroy Nieman are, as far as I can tell, Catholic. Essentially the
fifth floor of MOMA is Catholic. Photography
seems to be the one American art dominated by Jews, and much photography can be
considered really a variant of journalism.
Is
there a cognitive style difference between the two groups, an emphasis, a
difference in patronage systems or education that differentially encourage one
or another endeavor.
And
might some related quality enhance the prejudice against Jews. Does
scholarship, financial acumen, and verbal facility raise questions of
sophistry, trickery or manipulation? Is there a more linguistic, as opposed to
perceptual style of thinking that is encouraged. Is there some lesson in the
Zohar about the importance of language. Also, why so few Jewish athletes-a more
visual spatial activity. Just dumb questions I have thinking about...
Damon
On Saturday, December 15, 2018 07:11:54 PM CST,
Damon LaBarbera <dglabarbera@yahoo.com> wrote:
Following
this thread--one novelization of that is Mr. Sammler's Planet. Sammler is an
emigree--a somewhat aristocratic and educated person who spent time in the
concentration camp and lost an eye when hit, in a trench full of cadavers, with
the butt of gun. I think the original cover art had a pair of glasses with one
cracked. He lives in New York, reliant on the graces of his relatives who brought
him over. His old world manner contrasts with the tawdriness of everyday life
in the city. There are some comic intersections. A local radical--somewhat
stereotypically Jewish invites him to a rally at Columbia (the year is 68 or
so). Sammler's old world genteel socialism is violently attacked and harassed.
There is also a subplot involving HG Wells, whom Sammler cultivated back in
Europe. Anyway, the story is what happens AFTER the arrival--the modest,
somewhat alienated life of Jews displaced in middle age or older, worrying
about whether they will have enough money for their morning tea. The novel was
criticized some because of a dubious description of a black pickpocket which
some averred was racist.
A
question that you might know, John, is the effect on the incoming Jews on
American psychology. At that point, behaviorism reigned, with names like
Watson, Hull, Skinner, Spence, Guthrie, and Tolman out in California. The
humanists were also an Anglo bunch--Carl Rogers, Rollo May, etc. But within a
decade or so, psychoanalysts had a very strong foothold in the US. Somehow
there was a transformation at that time. What happened. Was it at the New
School in New York. Festinger, I believe, was American. How did that
transformation occur. How were Jews relieved in Academia. I was looking at an
old antique Columbia University yearbook from the teens and not a Jew to be
seen. Within a couple of decades they seemed to have penetrated and then
proliferated. How did that occur in psychology? What departments were instrumental?
Or was it via the public rather than academia that this "Jewish
Science" began to predominate--with popular books. Also, when in school,
did you notice any bifurcation between what was perceived as Anglo or Jewish.
Was behaviorism considered a sterile Anglo product like economics. Or at
that point did things seem more homegenized in the field.
Damon
Damon,
Thanks for these thoughts, especially on the hierarchy of
Catholic ethnicities in the United States—among American Jews, the hierarchy is
Sephardic (meaning in this context the ethnicity, Iberian, not the adherence to
Sephardic Jewish practice), then German, then Eastern European, on the basis of
the order of arrival on these shores—and on the role of Jesuitism in French
intellectual life. I had not considered that idea, but I think it makes
sense that Jesuitism would create an openness within hierarchy because of its
Pelagian and Erasmian theology, hence its emphasis on free will and reason
within spirituality. Within French Catholicism, there is the
counterexample of Pascal’s Jansenist, hence Augustinian and
quasi-Calvinist views, but I suspect that you are correct that the Jesuit
view predominated, given the historical importance of Descartes, who had a
Jesuit education. One of the great myths of history is that the Catholic
Church always opposed scientific and rational progress. We can find many
such currents in Catholic Church history, but we can find many important
countercurrents.
The phrase “filthy lucre” comes from 1 Timothy 3:3. I did
not know that until I looked it up. As an Anglican clergyman, Jonathan
Swift was of course familiar with the phrase, and Norman O. Brown, in his
brilliant psychoanalytic classic, Life Against Death, has a fascinating
study of Swift’s preoccupations with scatology. However, Brown’s chapter,
“Filthy Lucre,” is an analysis of the rise of capitalism that is highly
congruent with the Frankfurt School’s synthesis of Freud, Marx, Weber,
Nietzsche, and Hegel that constitutes my intellectual background.
As for the Holocaust, which means “burnt offering," or as
Jews now increasingly call it, the Shoah, which is Hebrew for “annihilation,”
nothing satisfactory can ever be said. I do want to clarify, for all who
do not routinely think about such things, that the Nazi genocide of the Jewish
population of Europe was a far broader event than its persecution of the
German-Jewish community of about 500,000. I would write more about this,
but then we would be moving from a discussion of the psychology of prejudice,
antisemitism, and racism to the actual implementation of these ideas, something
to which I do not want to expose this listserve, even though many of us on this
listserve are Jews. I merely want to point out that the historical experience
of German Jews, who had been emancipated early (1812), was very different from
that of the approximately 6 million or so Russian and Polish Jews, who were
emancipated much later (1917) and who were under no illusions as to what their
neighbors thought of them. I also do want to point out that more than half
of Germany’s Jewish population managed to leave that country prior to the start
of World War II in 1939 but that this escape would have proved fruitless unless
emigration was to Great Britain or the United States.
As you can see, it is commonly a Jewish last name. I
personally know no Auerbachs who are not Jewish, although I recently found a
pocket of Auerbachs in Eastern Iowa who clearly are not Members of the Tribe.
German colleagues in my psychoanalytic world have commented on my name
because there is an Auerbachs Keller, a restaurant in Leipzig that is mentioned
in Goethe’s Faust, but when I ask them whether they know any Auerbachs
in Germany, they usually tell me that they do not. They get my point
rather quickly. Jews of Central and Eastern European origin tend to have German
or Slavic last names because our ancestors were Yiddish speakers but, more
important, because the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (i.e., Prussia,
the Hapsburg Empire, Russia, etc.) in the 1700s and 1800s began requiring their
subjects to have last names. My family would like to think that we truly
are German, not East European, Jews—it’s a status thing—but no one can trace my
family past the Ukraine. When Americans comment on my German last name, I
start a personality assessment. I say, “It’s German, but I am not.”
Very few ask further about it, and most who do are satisfied with my
explanation that Prussia and Austria owned much of Eastern Europe until World
War I. The few who ask questions after that, especially when I was in
East Tennessee, are fellow Members of the Tribe hoping to identify other Jews.
Finally, no fair that your father is half-Jewish and
half-Italian. He gets to tell ethnic jokes about two groups, not just
one, with impunity.
John
My father in law is half Jewish, half Italian. If he can’t get
it wholesale, he steals it.
I think you are spot on in your views. There is a nice ambience
between the groups. But the antagonism against Italians pales of that against
that of Jews. I personally have never felt threatened or anxious that my
ancestry would in any way put me at risk, nor did I sense that any great
historical misdeeds had been done Italians. In fact, I hardly thought of my
background growing up—though once in a while there would be reminders. Why, for
example, were my elders rooting for boxer Nino Benvenuti in the Olympics.
I grew up amidst Catholics at parochial school, fifty or more in
a class. Italians were second in the hierarchy, with most of the popular kids,
team coaches, and local politicians Irish. On my Little League Team, every name
was Irish except mine and another. We might have been played in Dublin.
Catholics from other than Ireland or Italy were lower on the implicit caste
system. German, Polish, and Hispanic Catholics seemed to have less clout within
that particular New York dioceses. The Jewish kids were in the public school
system, so there was not much interaction.
Yes, Catholics are too numerous for any tyrant to exterminate,
and one can’t be too naïve to believe it would otherwise be imaginable,
given genocides elsewhere and with the American Indian.
You cite that Judaism in various epochs presented a challenge to
the prevailing religious orthodoxy which created conflict. I assume this is
true, but one of many factors. Also, you note that Jews in Germany trusted they
were secure. “The Berlin Stories”, by Christopher Isherwood, describes the
protagonist’s relationship with a refined German Jewish businessman (Isherwood
was gay), and gives a vignette of German Jewish family life, and the increasing
alarming depradations made against that society, with the family eventually
arrested. I have heard arguments (and counterarguments)that Jews were too
passive during the holocaust. Is this another reason for ongoing watchfulness?
I can see the obsessive compulsive formulation you describe as
profoundly descriptive of ongoing antisemitism. But isn’t the term you
use associated with Jonathan Swift—"filthy lucre”. Also the histrionic
underpinnings against blacks and Catholics make sense. A Lutheran once
gave me the stereotype on Catholics--partying and carousing all the time.
Catholicism does indeed have a hierarchical structure. There is
a layered hierarchy with a priest as intermediary with God. However, my
perception is somewhat different from yours, John. My perception is that this
hierarchy is not a source of misdirection and conservatism. For one, there is
going to be more emphasis on established authority, which includes a belief in
science. Hence you are going to get less of the freewheeling antiscientism that
is part of the conservative oppositional style. And if you want to look at the
fruits of the hierarchy, say, in France, with the Jesuits at the top, you have
the formulation of nearly ever modern philosophy—rationalism, structuralism
(Piaget, Lacan, Levi Straus), contractarianism, existentialism (Camus, Sartre),
Voltaire and the ideas of the enlightenment, and so forth. All those
formulations are coming out of a society where a structured hierarchy was in
place.
Your view, though, that Italians are pulled various directions
politically is correct. Given the emphasis on family life (la via vechia)
of Italians there is a chosen preference for safety—more conservative politics,
involvement with established institutions (e.g., high rates of military
service), and fewer of the riskier pursuits that might lead to scapegoating.
"Blood of my Blood" is a book that describes this phenomena. Its been
a possibly limiting strategy but safer. On the other hand, some well known
socialists have been Italian—e.g., Ignazio Silone, etc. There has been a drift
rightward over time, however.
As for "Immigration Act of 1924", that is a nice
little bit of arcania. The Sacco and Vanzetti case comes to mind as
an example of prejudice against Italians a little before.
Enjoy reading your opinions John--always so erudite. Also, isn't
Auerbach a German name.
Damon L
Damon,
Thanks for your thoughts here. Bigotry against
Italian-Americans is also a complex topic and of course one about which I know
fairly little, at least compared to my knowledge of antisemitism, but then this
would depend on whose ox is being gored. It is true that both Italians
and Jews were targets of the Immigration Act of 1924, a law motivated by the
racist and nativist tenor of the time, with its second rising of the Ku Klux
Klan, and intended to stop the influx of immigrants from non-English-speaking
and non-Protestant lands into the United States, but despite the obvious
cultural similarities between Italians and Jews (e.g., focus on family and
food, such that we used to say in New York that Italians are just Catholic Jews
and Jews are just non-Catholic Italians), there are important reasons for their
diverging social, cultural, and historical paths in the United States.
First, it must be understood that antisemitism is history’s
oldest hatred, predating the Christian Era but changing greatly with the
divergence of Judaism and Christianity in the First Century CE. The
psychology of antisemitism is complex but in my opinion has always involved the
dominant religious culture’s need to exterminate a religious minority that, by
its very existence, poses a threat to the dominant religious culture. In
the pagan world, Judaism presented the threat of monotheism. In the
Christian World, Judaism presents a threat because it is an older monotheism,
one that denies the need for salvation through Jesus. OTOH, Italians, as
Catholics, can be excluded from Protestant America, it being understood that there
are many Protestants whose faith would lead them to reject any form of social
exclusion, but Italians, as Catholics, do not pose a threat to Christian
dominance and are also too numerous to be exterminated. In consequence,
no matter where we go and no matter how successful we might become, Jews always
carry with us a sense of persecution, a belief that safety and security can
vanish at a moment’s notice. The last group of Jews who seem not to have
understood this were the Jews of Germany, who were perhaps the most assimilated
Jews in Europe prior to the rise of Hitler and many of whom paid with their
lives because they could not believe that the German populace would turn
against them. I can readily see how a fear of exclusion might figure
prominently in the cultural psychology of Italian Americans, but I doubt that a
sense of persecution or a fear of extermination would be present. Damon, if you
can enlighten me here, I would be indebted.
Second, as to the character of hatred directed against Jews, it
involves mostly obsessional preoccupations, and here I am indebted to the work
of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, historian, psychoanalyst, and biographer of Hannah
Arendt and Anna Freud. She notes that Jews are regarded as dirty
and as vermin, prejudices consistent with obsessional needs for cleanliness and
with the need to exterminate carriers of disease, or else are considered the
miserly and concerned with money, prejudices that are reaction formations
against fears of dirt and contamination. If anyone thinks this latter
point is a stretch, please consider the underlying meaning of the phrase
“filthy lucre” and also the way that the obsessional character structure links
cleanliness and miserliness. This particular understanding of
antisemitism also derives from the psychoanalytic Marxism of the Frankfurt
School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm), which focuses on the obsessional
structure of capitalism. Meanwhile, per Young-Bruehl, prejudice against
Catholics might include some of these more obsessional elements but are more
likely to resemble prejudices against Blacks in the use of
hysterical-histrionic defenses against fears of “excessive” sexuality and
disorderly behavior. Here, the relevant factor is that, in White
Protestant America, it again being noted that numerous Protestants have a faith
that could never allow such bigotry, certain groups are too numerous to be
exterminated, the other group in our society that was subject to extermination
being Native Americans, but are useful as a source of labor. Here there
is a need for society’s “lower orders” to breed in order to create this
plentiful and therefore cheap labor, combined with a fear that these groups
will breed too much, such that they will swamp the dominant group
demographically. This was one of the motive factors behind the eugenics
of movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I believe this same
fear underlies the rise of prejudice against Latinos, who are in the main also
Catholics, and other large immigrant groups.
Third, as to the political divergence between Italians and Jews
since the end of World War II, it is not surprising that until recently, when
the politics of ethnocultural exclusion reawakened, pitting monocultural rural
areas against diverse cities, White groups became more conservative as they
rose economically and moved to the suburbs to create White enclaves that, like
the various Levittowns, were made possible through federal housing laws that
made permissible, until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the exclusion of
African-Americans. The one exception to this trend would be Jews.
This is not to say that there is no racism among Jews, for surely there
is, but rather that Jews hold onto their liberal to left politics despite their
economic success, such that about 70 to 75 percent of the Jewish vote went to
Barack Obama, down from the 90 percent of the Jewish vote that went for FDR in
the 1930s but very different from the rest of the present-day White vote, which
has been majority Republican for some time now, especially among men.
So what are the causes of this divergence? I think the main
sources would be the Jewish sense of persecution, which creates our natural
sympathy or identification with all marginalized groups, combined with the
Jewish emphasis on justice, which is the main value taught in the Hebrew
Scriptures, and the lack of a central authority in Judaism, such that there is
no one running the show, except maybe our mothers. By contrast, in
Catholic ethnic groups, there is always a strong potential for social justice
values, as captured in Liberation Theology, and in John Kerry’s frequent
statement, “Faith without Works is dead,” but Catholic culture is much more
hierarchical than Jewish culture by virtue of the priesthood and the Papacy,
and in the matter of feminism, Jewish and Catholic teaching on abortion simply
are different. Thus, the dominant political pulls in Jewish culture are
leftward, with the exception of pro-Israeli nationalism, but among Catholic
ethnic groups, there appear to be multiple political pulls in diverging
directions, sometimes in the direction of justice and equality, sometimes in
the direction of order and hierarchy.
If I have gotten any of this wrong, or if I have offended anyone
through my ideas, I apologize for my insensitivity. I also stand willing to be
corrected and to learn.
John S. Auerbach, PhD
Thanks Damon. Thoughtful as always.
On 12/7/18 6:11 PM, Damon LaBarbera wrote:
I guess I am from that same era. I would look at noxious
political or personal beliefs along the same lines I would look at other
oddities of thought. I am not going to challenge outlandish or excessive (to
me) religious beliefs, belief in urban legends, comments about the New World
Order, perceptions that hurricanes or the World Trade Center were planned,
certainty that the Illuminati run the world, or moral lacunae the person may
have. If they have clinical relevance, of course, it may be useful to approach
very cautiously in a manner that does not set off defenses. Occasionally, a
client will have systematized thoughts acquired during a previous psychotic
episode that are resistant to change. Bigotry might be seen as one of many
peculiarities of thinking that are unproductive and personally jarring, but not
the immediate material of treatment.
Personally, I sometimes hear a remark stereotyping Italians. I
missed the era in the US where Italians were highly denigrated. If a client
makes a remark associating Italians with the mafia, it is annoying, but hardly
at a level that would prompt me to react. Also, Italians are partly to blame
for romanticizing this particular aspect of their new world history. I react
more strongly when I hear a client denigrating, without knowing it, people with
mental health problems. My wife is "crazy". You must deal with a lot
of "crazy" people. I may point out that crazy is not a particularly
useful term, and also note that my clientele is not, on the whole, less
successful than me in life. If I hear a racial mark, I may make a note that
this individual may come from a retrograde culture, or one where such comments
occur. The admissibility of airing such obnoxious comments likely limit that
culture's ability to move ahead in the modern world. Also, some innocent ageism
occurs when teens think I am likely to be computer illiterate.
One stereotype that I have is that there is a regional
difference in how prejudicial comments are reacted to. This may be my own
prejudice. I tend to think that Northerners are less likely to confront bigoted
attitudes, contrary to expectation. There is more exposure to different
subgroups, more of a history of having to accommodate to otherness, and a
strategy of minimizing/avoiding rather than maximizing conflict in the melting
pot. My perception is that Southerners on the whole are likely to be more
confrontive about differing attitudes and beliefs. It seems that some of the
most vociferous arguments against prejudice come from the South. I don't know,
just an impression.
Its curious how Jews time and again get targeted, and I've
wondered why. Traditionally the negative view is a sort of Merchant of Venice
caricature--a Rothschild facility with money and language. Whether it got worse
post war is a good question, though my impression is that that is when the
Jewish voice first began to be heard (Mailer, Roth, Bellow), including
description that of soldiering in the war. That also seems to be a time when
Jews began to dominate comedy.
Jews and Italians have much in common, including family
structure, and DNA. Possibly the Italian tendency towards conservatism (in
politics, for example) has removed them from some of the prejudice associated
with the Jews, seen as more incendiary intellectually. And even the
intellectual bent associated with Jews is probably somewhat threatening.
Possibly the venturing of Jews into foreign lands (the Diaspora?)also has
exposed them to more bigotry.
Damon L
I come from a different era. Work with them as they present to
you. Not up to us as psychologists to judge. Emphasize psychologist. If the
patient were an ax murderer or a mob hit man would you decline to see that
person?
