Aggression and the Purpose of Antisemitism

Peter Gay, a historian of social history and psychoanalysis, wrote a remarkable book titled The Cultivation of Hatred (1993). Certainly, the very idea suggests an anomaly: Why should any person, group, or society want to cultivate hatred? Is this not the very emotion we would like to eradicate from our lives? Yet Gay suggested hatred was not just an emotion that erupted spontaneously in our society but rather that social organizations utilized hatred for very specific purposes. He indicated that hatred derives from aggression, an instinctual/psychological drive that is inherent in all humans and which demands expression in both negative and positive behavior.

The scars that aggression has left on the face of the past are indelible. Wars and rumors of war, class struggles, clashes between religious denominations or racial and ethnic groups, rivalries for place and power in politics and business, the hatreds generated by nationalism and imperialism, the ravages of crime, and the confrontations of private life from marital discord to family feuds—all of these and more offer pervasive testimony that aggression has supplied most of the fuel for historical action and historical change. The search for the origins, meanings, and implications of aggressiveness—threatening or adaptive—has always been, and must always be, a pressing preoccupation for local magistrates, social reformers, military planners, and political theorists.

That hatred is often viewed as a separate entity from aggression is a theoretical error. It arises from the aggressive drive and derives its qualitative characteristics both from this drive and the negative experiences in life. Whether we conceive of aggression from a Darwinian concept of “survival of the fittest” or a Freudian understanding that aggression is instinctual as well as psychological, we must understand how civilization has utilized and organized the pervasive nature of this aggressive drive. Societies recognized early on that to preserve human life, they had to control and structure the expression of aggression as it emerged in individual and group behavior, which may have been advantageous in the past.

Importantly, aggression does not always imply a negative quality. It is also a positive attribute in humanity’s functioning that accounts for our creative pursuits both in work and personal relationships. The tillers of soil, the artists, the cooks, the mothers, and the fathers all utilize this aggressive drive for the well-being of so-

Page 297

ciety and personal development. Yet, there also exists a negative aspect to this drive. A perusal of the daily papers or the news on TV is conclusive evidence: murders are committed daily; wars and destructive acts have abounded throughout history.

Civilization, if I may anthropomorphize, has long recognized that the force of aggression cannot be eradicated nor is individual or group control easily achieved. Issues of right and wrong succumb to revenge, and to kill one’s enemy often assumes a moral imperative. We may well ask why this aggressive drive that plays such havoc with the peaceful development of civilization cannot be better controlled. From the earliest history of humanity, aggression protected against personal destruction. As one of Freud’s basic bio-psychological drives, aggression serves as a protective, affective behavior without which humanity could not survive. Unfortunately, aggression holds within it the seeds of its own destruction. If to save oneself one had to kill the other, then the other became a constant source of danger to the self. Laws were devised whereby it was possible to both protect the individual or group and punish the predator. This was the very means by which civilization both controlled and still gave expression to aggression.

The destructive elements in the aggressive drive cannot be explained by an inherent bio-psychological premise alone; we must look to the nature of social interaction, economics, politics, and a wide range of social ideologies. I want to stress that society has devised many methods of organizing group attitudes to discharge aggression. One such device was to find a “convenient other.” As Gay (1993) pointed out, “Nothing seems more natural than the case which humans claim superiority over a collective Other” (p. 68). For many reasons, Jews have served the role of the “convenient other,” a legitimate rationale by society’s ethos, to protect its own cohesion. By dispersing aggression outward to the other, the stranger, society attempted to minimize internal strife. In essence, social organization has incorporated individual psychological mechanisms, specifically the mechanism of displacement.

Of course, I am again anthropomorphizing society. This mechanism of discharging aggression to the other is in no way limited to the unruly mob or the less educated. Our great hero of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, was as slanderous toward the Jews as the common person on the street. He stated, “In short we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people – Jews were the enemies of mankind” (Voltaire, 1824). Marx (1887), who was born a Jew and

Page 298

always seen as Jewish as a young radical, distorted the “Jewish” role in society and referred to them with venom. He rhetorically asked, “What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly God? Money” (p. 37). The diatribes against the Jews, the hatred, and the poisonous lies of the blood libel and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were spewed from the mouths of the educated, the Popes, the Church ministers, and the literati.

The essential issue that society has had to deal with at every facet of its development is to control aggression so that a unified group does not destroy itself. We know the danger inherent in all relationships; statistically, family members commit the greatest percentage of homicides against each other. We are also cognizant of the ease with which a particular society can erupt into class conflicts and civil warfare, which can also bring about the destruction of the group. What keeps a society intact is the cohesiveness of the population—in essence, group identification. This identification has many positive aspects: the capacity to accept a body of rules, inhibit destructive behaviors, and care for members of the population.

Furthermore, the concept of group identification helps us understand how aggression toward the other is permitted by the social order. We tend to love, to want to bond with the similar, and to reject that which appears different. We refer to this as “stranger anxiety.” The outsider threatens the group’s sense of identity. Having an enemy solidifies a group while simultaneously providing an outlet for any aggression. By banding against the stranger under the sanctification of society, the entire social structure is spared the plague of conscience.

I will again speak in anthropomorphic terms by suggesting that society operates with unconscious mechanisms. We are all aware that society does not have an unconscious. It has a history of written and oral traditions, as well as attitudes reflected in its legal system. Yet it behaves on two levels: the overt cognitive and rational, and an opposite state of which it is seemingly unaware. It is with this latter manner that it handles aggression and the mechanisms that infuse and diffuse this drive.

By exalting society with an unconscious process, I want to point to several other mechanisms that appear harmful to its well-being. The very idea of perceiving Jews as vermin has given socie-

Page 299

ties throughout history a sense of righteous killing. Hanging, burning, or exiling them without any sense of conscience are strange phenomena when the entire legacy of these societies signifies kindness, loving one’s neighbor, morality, justice, and the sanctity of human life. How can we understand this contradiction?

The psychological mechanism operating in this contradictory state is referred to as isolation, more commonly called splitting. We can mentally and emotionally keep apart ideas and behaviors that are in opposition to each other as well as act one way or the other without undue distress at their apparent contradiction. Not all behavior can be entirely consistent, and we can’t always evaluate every act or word and maintain optimal functioning. Thus, the mechanism of isolation makes possible behavior with the least amount of exertion. It serves to conserve energy. Even absolutely justified killing requires this mechanism to operate. One must split off from their conscience, which can emotionally destroy, debilitate, or inhibit functioning. We have corrupted this mechanism to permit murderous aggression. Thus, the Church Fathers and the Voltaires can act with impunity and not assail their conscience.

We recognize aspects of ourselves that we reject and project onto the other. Projection is a complex method by which we attempt to put into the other characteristics existing in ourselves. These can be good or bad qualities. In relation to antisemitism, Jews have been the repository of all the worst qualities of humanity. They have been called rapacious, selfish, a usurer, and other adjectives reflecting human abhorrence. The “convenient other” is closely allied by identification but is still a negative “other.” One may wonder if the common ancestry of the Christian religion having arisen from Judaism meant that it had to be maligned in order to separate from it. This separation, long since established, seems to contain the seeds of hatred without any present raison d’etre. Earlier, antisemitism in the separation process had served emotional and political purposes and was exploited to achieve its aims. The pattern persists because antisemitism continues to serve a psychological, political, and economic purpose. It continues to bolster the power of the Catholic Church and other political hierarchies.

Our minds require the ability to go from the general to the specific and back. You may query: What does this have to do with antisemitism? Well, the answer lies in the way we generalize specific characteristics of an individual. We tend to group people by their affiliation, race, religion, and nationality. In conjunction with

Page 300

identification, we tend to take characteristics from the specific and ascribe them to a group. If some Jews are nasty, usurious, or any other negative quality, then all Jews are. Generalization has been used in politics to control and sometimes destroy Jews.

That Jews have resisted assimilation throughout history is a rather remarkable feat. What has sustained this group identity in culture and religious beliefs? The Spanish Inquisition, the expulsions from many European countries, the Ghettos, and finally, the Holocaust, have all unleashed this destructive side of the aggressive drive against Jews, and yet, Jews have maintained their internal group cohesiveness. Is it the power of identification that maintains group cohesiveness, the power of the aggressive drive that protects the individual against destruction by the other, or rather, a combination of many factors?

In conclusion, I want to reiterate the role that the discharge of aggression, i.e., the aggressive drive in the form of hatred, has played in antisemitism, and how organized society has deliberately utilized this hatred as a displacement of hatred from within the group to the “other.” Various psychological mechanisms have been co-opted as vehicles for the discharge of aggression to the “other.” Individuals will always be driven by the aggressive drive that emerges in the form of hatred, rivalries, murderous wishes, and distortion of reality. It is the task of society to apply the laws of justice and reason that can exercise appropriate control over the destructive aspects of the aggressive drive. Unfortunately, society has not done an adequate job in either controlling wars or curtailing antisemitism.

Page 301