Dr. Auerbach often has wide-ranging knowledge of various things. We began posting on the subjects of racial and religious prejudice. I remarked (my remarks are in red print) to Dr. Auerbach in a post...
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. Thanks for your thoughts here. Damon L
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DamonThanks 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.John S. Auerbach, PhD
- John 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 playing 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 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 for my German last name, here is a Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auerbach_(surname)
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
Dear John,
At the risk of venturing onto pseudoscientific terrain...
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
Damon,
Thanks for this searching post. I have some thoughts in return.
First, of course there are great Jewish figures in visual art—e.g., Camille Pissarro, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Man Ray, Mark Rothko, Lucien Freud (of the Vienna Freuds), Frank Auerbach (no relation of mine)—but I suspect that Jewish contributions to the arts, per your thesis, are mainly in literature (too numerous to list, but including Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and some Nobel Prize winners) and music (e.g., Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, most Broadway composers, Carole King, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Joey and Tommy Ramone, etc.), arts that are linear and abstract, rather than plastic or visual. Meanwhile there are of course great Protestant visual artists, the greatest probably being Rembrandt, but a plausible case can me made that the Catholic world has “owned” painting since Giotto, and weren’t he and Leonardo and Michelangelo Italian?
Second, studies of IQ in Ashkenazi Jews suggest above average verbal and mathematical abilities but visual abilities that are only average.
But, third, per the Second Commandment’s prohibition on making images, Hebraic culture is verbal. Hellenic culture, the other source of Western civilization, is visual, starting with Plato’s ideas about Ideas or Forms, and was absorbed into Christianity, first through Saul of Tarsus, aka St. Paul, a Hellenized Jew and then through all the theologians, such as St. Augustine, who were influenced by Platonic thought in addition to the Hebraic sources that also had underlie Christianity.
So, in New York, I would not be surprised that Catholics “own” the MoMA and the Met (the museum, not the opera house), but that Jews “own” the NY Philharmonic, the Village Vanguard, and Broadway.
About the Broadway thing, check out this link from Spamalot
Best,
John
Sent from my iPhone
Damon,
One remaining thought on French education and thought: Of all the figures you mentioned, one does not quite belong to the Catholic tradition. That of course would be Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of structural anthropology and the son of Alsatian Jews. There are several other important Jewish contributors to French intellectual life, among them Émile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Roman Jakobson, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, but I am sure you are correct that the predominant historical lineage in French intellectual life is Catholic and heavily Jesuit.
John
John S. Auerbach, PhD
And a final last thought. In French psychoanalysis, there are Rudolf Löwenstein, who was the analyst of Jacques Lacan, and André Green, among many others.
That makes sense about Matthew Arnold and the Hebraic/Hellenic Distinction. I think Aldous and Julian Huxley were Matthew Arnold's grandchildren, and Huxley continued the theme along (along with
the themes of his other grandfather, TE Huxley). Huxley wrote about the bridge between the thought and experienced world, and our other bifurcations such as mind/body. Though blind, Huxley was preoccupied with sight, involving himself with experimental eye
treatments as well as psychedelic and visionary experience (i.e., Doors of Perception). He consorted with psychologist Timothy Leary (whom he thought very little of) and other progenitors of thinking at that time, nowadays morphed into some of the mindfulness
treatments.
Damon
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