‘Jewish Self-Hatred’? The Cases of Schnitzler and Canetti

Abstract

The concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ is controversial: hence the quotation marks and question mark in my title. If there is such a thing, however, its locus classicus must be the chapter ‘Das Judentum’ in Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903). Admittedly Weininger claims to be describing a spiritual tendency of which Jews furnish only the most dramatic illustration. This distinguishes his approach from that of Theodor Lessing, whose famous book Der jüdische Selbsthaβ (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1930) takes for granted that Jewishness, and consequently a propensity to self-hatred, are innate. Weininger undermines his claim, however, by the famous footnote acknowledging his own Jewish ancestry: if he were really describing a spiritual tendency, his own Jewish origins would be logically irrelevant. He undermines his claim further by trotting out many familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes. Jews are materialistic: they constantly seek to acquire movable property; they are attracted to scientific doctrines of materialism. They are not wicked but amoral, as incapable of morality as they are of nobility. There cannot be a Jewish ‘gentleman’, says Weininger, using the English word,¹ although soon afterwards he describes how much the shallow and materialistic English resemble the Jews. Jews have no character. They alternate between arrogance and obsequiousness. Indeed they have no self: a gathering of Jews is not a collection of individuals but ‘a single connected plasma spreading over a wide surface’ (p. 415); this image anticipates Nazi propaganda by representing the Jews as a non-human, alien growth.