d.g. myers - jews without memory: sophie’s choice and the ideology of liberal anti-judaism

Jews Without Memory:Sophie’s Choice and theIdeology of LiberalAnti-JudaismD. G. Myers

1. Sophie’s Place

Sophie’s Choice has been ranked among the 100 best novelsof the twentieth century (Lewis E1). Though it is a striking effortto write a modern tragedy, its historical importance owes littleor nothing to its literary quality. William Styron’s novel was apioneering dissent on the Holocaust, a forceful challenge to pre-vailing opinion. Belonging to the second wave of Holocaust fic-tion in America, it was published in 1979, the same year as PhilipRoth’s Ghost Writer and Leslie Epstein’s King of the Jews. Justthe year before, NBC’s miniseries Holocaust reached an audienceof 120 million and Jimmy Carter also established the President’sCommission on the Holocaust, which would lead to the USHolocaust Memorial Museum. According to the museum’s his-torian, these highly public events of 1978 “signaled that the Hol-ocaust had moved not only from the periphery to the centerof American Jewish consciousness, but to the center of natio-nal consciousness as well” (Linenthal 12). If the term had notbeen corrupted by neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust, Sophie’sChoice—along with The Ghost Writer and The King of theJews—might appropriately be labeled revisionist accounts. To-gether they express irritation with the uncritical public receptionof the Holocaust, which propelled its movement to the heart ofthe culture in the late 1970s. Each novel sets out to epater lespietistes. Roth’s fantasy that Anne Frank survived the war to be-come a creative writing student in America dispels the aura ofsanctity surrounding Hitler’s most famous victim; Epstein’s por-trait of a ghetto dictator punctures the assumption that underthe Nazis every Jew was an innocent victim; and Styron’s novel

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about a Polish Catholic woman who survived Auschwitz only todie tragically in America puts under interrogation the claim thatthe Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish catastrophe. Styron aims toshow that some Christians (in his phrase) “suffered as much asany Jew” (237).1

Of these Sophie’s Choice is the most important, because itis the most explicitly ideological. Styron does not merely dissentfrom the orthodoxy of the “uniqueness thesis” (as it has cometo be known); he delivers an elenchus, a strong rereading of theHolocaust which goes beyond challenging the predominant viewto reverse it. Nor does Styron attack an ideology made of straw.The common opinion of most Jewish scholars and writers, in-cluding Yehuda Bauer, Arthur A. Cohen, Lucy S. Dawidowicz,Emil Fackenheim, Sir Martin Gilbert, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,Steven T. Katz, Lawrence L. Langer, Deborah E. Lipstadt, andCynthia Ozick, is that the Holocaust was unique.2 And in twoways. It was distinguished by the Nazi intention of totally eradi-cating the Jewish people, who were in this respect its unique vic-tims—the purpose and whole reason for the Holocaust—andhistorically it was without precedent, without sequel. As OttoFriedrich says in the preface to his Kingdom of Auschwitz (1994),the very title of which suggests the uniqueness of the death camp,it was “the worst that had ever happened” (viii). Styron vigor-ously criticizes Jewish scholars and writers for this “narrow” andspecifically Jewish interpretation. In its stead he advances a uni-versalist, even metaphysical interpretation, understanding theHolocaust as the embodiment of absolute evil, which threatenedhumanity as a whole. The Jews may have been (in his phrase)the “victims of victims,” but they were not the only victims ofNazi evil. To claim exclusive victimhood is to deny and even addto other peoples’ suffering. The lesson of the Holocaust is thatuniqueness is victimization, whether practiced by Germans orJews. To remember the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish catastro-phe is to be Jews without memory.

Although it is usually classified as a Holocaust novel, then,Sophie’s Choice is not about the Holocaust as such. Its subject isthe ideological representation of the Holocaust. That the tragicuniversalism it offers as an alternative to Jewish uniqueness isjust as ideological—that Styron appropriates the Holocaust forhis own ideological purposes or is even, as Edward Alexanderhas warned, “stealing the Holocaust from the Jews who were itsvictims” (195)—is beside the question. What Bakhtin calls the“free appropriation and assimilation of the word” is dialecticallyopposed to the discourse of political authority, which “demandsour unconditional allegiance” (343). Sophie’s Choice is an act of

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open political resistance. Small wonder that it anticipated—andperhaps even inspired—a more organized opposition to theuniqueness thesis. Following Styron’s lead, some scholars haverecently begun to concentrate fire upon it. The American Indianscholar Ward Churchill, the political scientist Norman G. Fin-kelstein, and the historians Albert S. Lindemann and Peter Nov-ick have all attacked it in recent books.3 This group of scholars—I very nearly called it a party—is united by its refusal to declareunconditional allegiance to the uniqueness thesis. The historianDavid E. Stannard speaks for the group when he associates thethesis with Holocaust denial, calling it “the hegemonic productof many years of strenuous intellectual labor by a handful ofJewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not allof their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivistidea.” Not only is the Jewish interpretation of the Holocaust “de-monstrably erroneous,” Stannard says, but what is worse, “thelarger thesis it fraudulently advances is racist and violence-provoking” (167). Here too Styron had anticipated the later op-position. In large measure Sophie’s Choice is a polemic againstthe Jewish hegemony. Styron’s Jews are represented as havingoverlooked or misunderstood the truth about the Holocaustfrom the first months after liberation down at least to the late1960s, when Jewish scholars and writers began to publish workthat the novel faults for failing to make more than “fleeting refer-ence to the vast multitudes of non-Jews . . . who were swallowedup in the apparatus of the camps” (237). An entire generation isindicted upon the charge of advancing the “racist and violence-provoking” ideology of Jewish exclusivism. The Jews standaccused of collective amnesia, effacing the memory of otherpeoples’ suffering.

Sophie’s place in American literary history is assured by itsearly and powerful account of the ideological positioning whichhas since become a necessary preamble to any discussion of theHolocaust. Styron’s novel makes the case both against Jewish ex-clusivism and for the universalism of oppression and suffering.And politically this is a Left-liberal perspective. When the Rightcriticizes Holocaust thinking, as in Gabriel Schoenfeld’s 1998 at-tack on “Holocaustology” in Commentary, it is more likely tocomplain that “the inescapable truth that simply to be Jewishwas to be marked for death” is being obscured by “cutting-edgescholarship” which emphasizes instead the victims’ gender (46).4

Although it is not scholarship, and though it does not emphasizethe title character’s gender, Sophie’s Choice is similar to recentfeminist thought in shifting attention away from the Jews andonto Hitler’s other victims. Some such shift is the defining char-

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acteristic of Left-liberal representations of the Holocaust, whetherthey are written by Jewish feminists or ideological opponents ofthe Jewish ideology, including Styron. And though his thinkingis derived from classical liberalism, Styron shares certain impor-tant presuppositions with the New Left. Among them is a disap-proval of Jewish exclusivism. Sophie’s Choice has the additionaladvantage, then, of representing a fundamental principle thatlinks the New Left to its origins in Enlightenment liberalism. Notonly is it one of the basic liberal texts in recent American litera-ture; it is perhaps the basic text on ethnic exclusivism.

In this essay I shall examine Sophie’s Choice under the as-pect of the Left-liberal case against Jewish exclusivism. Not towithhold my opinion, I shall argue that the case made by Styronand other writers entails a historical error, a naive hearkeningback to ideology that has been put in question forever by theHolocaust. I shall call this ideology liberal anti-Judaism.5 In op-posing Jewish exclusivism—in pleading for a more inclusive in-terpretation of the Holocaust—Styron and other opponents ofthe uniqueness thesis repeat the error of Enlightenment liberalism.Although they did not label it “racist and violence-provoking,”Enlightenment liberals also opposed Jewish exclusivism; for themit was superstitious, backward, and immoral, which amounts tothe same thing. Whether in the Enlightenment or the last yearsof the twentieth century, liberal anti-Judaism serves the power ofthe modern state by undermining the political autonomy of theJewish people and the unique history which constitutes them.Philosophical liberalism grasped that the Jews stood in the wayof modernity, but failed to see that they also checked the ex-pansionist ambitions of the modern state. State power requiresthe elimination of barriers to its spread; in clinging defiantlyto autonomous institutions and a unique history, the Jews werefundamentally opposed to it. Small wonder the Third Reichsought to eliminate them. Despite its analysis of the complic-ity between modernity and state power, the New Left has failedto appreciate the Jews’ oppositional role in modernity, whichreached a crisis in the Holocaust. Styron and other opponentsof Jewish exclusivism revert to an ideology which is deeply em-bedded in modernity. What is “racist and violence-provoking” isnot Jewish exclusivism but the demand that the Jews yield uptheir exclusivism. Enlightenment liberalism proposed to solve theJewish problem by having the Jews divest themselves of their ex-clusivism and assimilate to modern society, but when Hitler roseto power in 1933 he condemned all of the Jews without excep-tion, assimilated and exclusive alike. Styron and the New Leftnow propose that the Jews abandon the exclusivism of their col-


Whether in theEnlightenment or the lastyears of the twentiethcentury, liberal anti-Judaism serves the powerof the modern state byundermining the politicalautonomy of the Jewishpeople and the uniquehistory which constitutesthem.

lective memory of the Holocaust, charging that to remember it asa uniquely Jewish catastrophe is to be without memory of otherpeoples’ suffering. But if Holocaust commemoration appears tocreate Jews without memory, the real reason (as I shall try toshow) is that the ideology of liberal anti-Judaism constructs themas Jews without memory. And nowhere is the process by whichthis comes about more abundantly illustrated than in Sophie’sChoice.

2. Sophie’s Plan

Styron first announced his opposition to Jewish exclusivismin a New York Times op-ed piece five years before publishingSophie’s Choice. Commenting upon a June 1974 InternationalSymposium on the Holocaust held at New York’s Cathedral ofSt. John the Divine, Styron confessed that he was “puzzled” bythe “overwhelming emphasis on anti-Semitism and Christianguilt.”6 While allowing that “Jewish genocide was the main busi-ness of Auschwitz,” he went on to remind his readers that “atAuschwitz perished not only the Jews but at least one millionsouls who were not Jews.” It is essential to remember the hugenumber of non-Jewish dead, because to do otherwise is to take“a narrow view of the evil of Nazi totalitarianism,” which in turnis “to ignore the ecumenical nature of that evil.” The Nazis werefar worse than anti-Semitic. They were also “anti-Christian,” be-cause they were “anti-human. Anti-life.” The threat they posedto humanity “transcended” the threat they posed to the Jews(“Auschwitz” 303–04).

Styron founds his argument upon a statistical premise, al-though it is difficult to know where he got his figures. The mostrecent scholarly estimates are that at least 1.1 million were mur-dered at Auschwitz, about 90 percent of whom were Jews (seePiper). At the time Styron was writing, the “official” number,first established by a Soviet Extraordinary State Commission andthen engraved on a memorial at Birkenau, was four million. Oneof his primary sources for Sophie’s Choice—the memoirs of Ru-dolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz—brags of killing threemillion. The principal English-language histories available toStyron at the time—Gerald Reitlinger’s Final Solution (1953) andRaul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews (1961)—put thenumber much lower, between 800,000 and one million. None ofthese sources supports the claim that one million non-Jews per-ished at Auschwitz.

The minor premise—Styron’s contention that the martyrol-


ogy of Auschwitz is “ecumenical” rather than exclusively Jew-ish—is also open to challenge. Ozick immediately recognized asmuch, savaging her fellow novelist the next year in the Long Is-land University literary magazine Confrontation, although noton the ground of fact. Ozick accepted his death toll without com-ment, but ridiculed Styron’s observation that Auschwitz was anti-human. “[I]t is of course imperative to observe this,” she said,“because to assert that Auschwitz is ‘merely’ Jewish would ineffect raise doubts as to whether it is truly anti-human.” The uni-versalist interpretation emphasizes what all human beings havein common, while the exclusivist interpretation differentiates hu-man beings. But what all human beings have in common is theirbiology, and “if being a Jew is being only what is universal, thena Jew is no more than his organs . . . and then what matter cre-mation?” Human beings are differentiated by their culture—theideas, expressions, and loyalties they cultivate. But the Jew as “aculture-bearing creature” is “invisible” to Styron. He is troubledby the view that the Jews were the principal target of Nazi terrorbecause the word humanity is “more palatable” to him than theword Jew. Since both murderers and victims belonged to human-ity, however, the use of this word blots out “specifically who didspecifically what to specifically whom” (“Liberal’s Auschwitz”149–53).

Sophie’s Choice is Styron’s 500-page rebuttal. The novel re-vises and elaborates the interpretation of the Holocaust thatStyron had first advanced in the Times five years earlier. Aban-doning his earlier claim that “at Auschwitz perished not only theJews but at least one million souls who were not Jews,” Styronsets out to tell the story of one non-Jewish victim of Auschwitz.Sophie Zawistowska is a young Polish woman whose entire fam-ily, including her two children, was consumed by the Nazi fire.Styron’s very decision to write a Holocaust novel about a non-Jewish victim is a polemical thrust at the uniqueness thesis. “Al-though she was not Jewish,” he asserts in the novel, “[Sophie]had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the sameafflictions, and—as I think will be made plain—had in certainprofound ways suffered more than most” (237). As will be madeplain: with these words Styron announces the plan and motiveof his novel, which is to show that a Pole was just as much avictim of Auschwitz as any Jew. Sophie is his evidence for theecumenical nature of Nazi evil. Since he cannot produce evi-dence of one million victims of Auschwitz who were not Jews,however, and since the story of one Polish woman is not sufficientto prove that the Nazis’ genocidal hopes were pinned on more


than merely the Jews, Styron introduces a second and even moreunsettling exhibit: the Jews’ own ignorance of the reality ofAuschwitz and their willingness to lay claim to it to further theirown ideological goals. He contrasts Sophie’s experience with theclaims that are advanced on behalf of the Jews, because his ulti-mate purpose is not only to refute but also to exhibit the moraldanger of the view, as stated by Ozick, that the Jews were not“an instance of the Nazi slaughter,” but “the purpose and wholereason for it.”

3. Sophie’s Position

In the novel, Styron’s position on the Holocaust is mostexplicitly set forth by the “firebrand” Polish resistance fighterWanda, with the “transcendentally German surname, Muck-Horch von Kretschmann.” After her husband and father arearrested and deported to Sachsenhausen, Sophie takes refugewith Wanda, although she consistently rebuffs Wanda’s appealsto join the resistance “in the name of humanity” (401–02). Onenight after a poor dinner of soup and sausage, they are vis-ited by two leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who comefor some Luger automatics stolen from the SS. Wanda andthe Jews begin to discuss the war. She repeats something thathad been said to her by another leader of the uprising, whohad spoken to her of the Jews’ “precious heritage of suffering.”Wanda reacts contemptuously: “I despise the idea of suffer-ing being precious. In this war everyone suffers—Jews, Poles,Gypsies, Russians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, all the others. Everyone’sa victim. The Jews are also the victims of victims, that’s the maindifference. . . . The Nazis hate you the most . . . and you willsuffer the most by far, but they’re not going to stop with the Jews.Do you think when they finish with you Jews they’re goingto dust off their hands and stop murdering and make theirpeace with the world? You underestimate their evil if you havesuch a delusion. Because once they finish you off they’re go-ing to come and get me” (518–19). Wanda’s last sentences alludeto the well-known aphorism of Martin Niemoller, which encap-sules the universalist interpretation of the Holocaust in a mov-ing cadence: “First they came for the Jews. I was silent. I wasnot a Jew. Then they came for the Communists. I was silent.I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists.I was silent. I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me.There was no one left to speak for me” (qtd. in Encyclopedia


3: 1061).7 By transferring it from a Lutheran churchman no-torious for his anti-Semitic preaching to the mouth of a Pol-ish resistance fighter, Styron extracts Niemoller’s wisdom fromits history and conceals its uneasiness with the Jews.8 Other-wise his rewriting of Niemoller would have been repellent. Forin its insistent use of the second person, Wanda’s speech readslike a lecture to the Jews: you do not grasp the true nature ofthe Holocaust if you believe that extermination of the Jews wasthe purpose and whole reason for it. The Holocaust was notmerely anti-Semitic; it was utterly evil. Its aims were universaland its origin was metaphysical. It was not anti-Jewish; it wasantihuman, antilife. To the elegiac universalism of Niemoller’saphorism, in other words, Styron adds a scolding antiexclusiv-ism. By this means, Styron is able to position himself in the de-bate. He means to speak for “all the others,” all the non-Jews,for whom—if those like Ozick had their way—no one woulddare to speak.

Sophie’s Choice might be more accurately described as a ro-man a these than a historical novel, but among its theses is thatthe Jewish interpretation of history is fallacious. Styron is undersome obligation, then, to show that Sophie’s Choice is itselfgrounded upon historical fact. In the Times he had spoken of a“ravaged survivor,” a “once devoutly Catholic Polish girl [he]knew many years ago” (“Auschwitz” 304). Sophie Zawistowskais obviously meant to be this girl, and Sophie’s Choice the imagi-native recreation of her history. Moreover, the novel adopts theguise of autobiography—a kind of writing that belongs to histo-riography rather than memory (Collingwood 293). The openingpages promise fidelity to historical time and place. Rather thantacking on names afterward, Styron begins by invoking Manhat-tan and Brooklyn. He writes in the first person, which acts as aplight of his sincerity; his narrator specifies the date (1947) andhis age (22); he even describes the weather, that obdurate fact ofnature which is introduced into conversation and story to estab-lish the reality of the speaker’s circumstances. In addition tooffering a thinly veiled account of Styron’s literary beginnings,including the description of a first novel that unmistakablyevokes Lie Down in Darkness (1951), the narrator—Stingo, nolast name—takes pains to drop the clue that in a US MarineTraining Unit during the war (where “everything [was] alphabeti-cal”) he bunked with Pete Strohmyer and Chuckie Stutz, just asanyone surnamed Styron would have (239). Besides, readers whoknow much about Styron will know that in 1947 he likewise was22 and that his native state—just like the first-person narra-tor’s—is Virginia.


What is more, Stingo/Styron claims expertise on the subjectof the Holocaust. He refers to “entries into the historical ac-count” by Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Olga Lengyel, EugenKogon, Bruno Bettelheim, et al., and quotes a generous selectionof the literature, including Rudolf Hoss’s memoirs, George Stein-er’s critical essays, Richard Rubenstein’s post-Auschwitz theol-ogy, Jean-Francois Steiner’s fictionalized account of the Treblinkarevolt, and Hannah Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial. Itmay be a little surprising that, except for Hoss’s memoirs, noneof the sources that he quotes is a firsthand record. They seemnot to be cited for the reason that James E. Young says a Holo-caust novel usually introduces documentary sources—that is, “inorder to reinforce” its “documentary authority.” As Young goeson to point out, “the operative trope underpinning the documen-tary character” of much Holocaust fiction is “the rhetorical prin-ciple of testimony, not its actuality” (61). On this showing, it isSophie’s account of her experience in Auschwitz, confessed toStingo in long flashbacks, that secures the narrative authority ofSophie’s Choice. The reason for citing Holocaust literature ap-pears to be otherwise. The references establish the authority of thenarrator, investing Stingo/Styron with learning and distinguishinghim from those for whom Auschwitz is merely a catchword.

4. Against Jewish Exclusivism

The historicity and expertise are very much to the point,because the novel’s case against the Jewish interpretation of theHolocaust depends upon the claim that Jews are ignorant of thehistorical reality. Obsessed with what Sophie calls their “un-earned unhappiness” (141), with “examin[ing] their miserablelittle Jewish souls” (383), the Jews dissolve the Holocaust intothe collective memory of Jewish suffering, masking the sufferingof non-Jewish victims. Not that they are unique in this: “[P]eoplehere in America, despite all the published facts, the photographs,the newsreels, still did not seem to know what had happened,except in the most empty, superficial way. Buchenwald, Belsen,Dachau, Auschwitz—all stupid catchwords. This inability tocomprehend on any real level of awareness was another reasonwhy [Sophie] so rarely had spoken to anyone about it, totallyaside from the lacerating pain it caused her to dwell on that partof her past” (154). What differentiates the Jews from otherAmericans is their urge to interpret the Holocaust, to give itsome meaning, while not even trying to comprehend it on anyreal level of awareness. It is significant, then, that when Sophie


chooses to speak to someone about it at last, she confides herHolocaust experience not to her Jewish lover, but to Stingo. Herlover is more concerned about what the Holocaust means for hisfellow Jews than about what had happened to Sophie, who actu-ally went through it.

Throughout the novel the Jews are identified (and identifythemselves) with the “precious heritage of suffering.” Stingoclaims to “have from the very beginning responded warmly toJews”; he recalls with longing his “first love” Miriam Book-binder, “who even at the age of six wore in her lovely hoodedeyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of herrace . . .” (41). The mystical racialism here may be intended ironi-cally—a callow Gentile’s transgressive desire for the dark Au-trui—but Stingo never entirely abandons this view that discon-solation is the essence of being Jewish. Years later, the Jewscontinue to exercise a fascination over him. To save money afterlosing a job in publishing, Stingo relocates from Manhattan toBrooklyn. There he finds himself “more deep in the heart ofJewry” than if he had been “set down in Tel Aviv” (42).9 Takinga room in a garish pink boardinghouse run by Yetta Zimmer-man, he remarks upon the “Byzantine flavor” of the other resi-dents’ names—Nathan Landau, Lillian Grossman, Morris Fink,Sophie Zawistowska, Astrid Weinstein, Moishe Muskatblit—butit is he not they (or, rather, with one other exception it is he notthey) who dwells in a Byzantine diaspora. “[W]hat in God’s namewas I doing here,” he wonders, “in the unimaginable reaches ofBrooklyn, an ineffective and horny Calvinist among all theseJews?” (39). Thus Sophie’s Choice opens with an ideological anddemographic reversal. The Jews are the majority; a white South-erner takes up residence in their American capital, suddenlyfinding himself on the margins of the dominant ideology. Soonhe meets an articulate spokesman for that ideology, the loudestand perhaps most deserving claimant to the precious heritage—Sophie’s lover Nathan Landau, who lays siege to Stingo’s imagi-nation and sucks him toward the epicenter of the novel’s tragedy(62, 65). In their first conversation, arguing with Stingo aboutSouthern racism, Nathan shouts that a recent lynching in Geor-gia “is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Na-zis during the rule of Adolf Hitler!” “I say this as one whosepeople have suffered the death camps,” he explains—not as onewhose beloved has suffered the camps, but whose people has. “Asa Jew,” he says, “I regard myself as an authority on anguish andsuffering” (75).

Jewish identity, in short, is founded upon the claim to


suffering. And it is the authority inherent in such a claim thatmotivates and directs the Jewish interpretation of the Holocaust.Yet it is not at all clear that Nathan’s knowledge of the Holocaustis very deep or wide. Stingo accuses him of being blind to thetrue nature of evil (223). And even in that first conversation withStingo, Sophie chides him: “What do you know about concentra-tion camps, Nathan Landau? Nothing at all” (79). Although hehas nursed her back to health, completing the survival that liber-ation from Auschwitz had only begun, Nathan is not particularlyconcerned with Sophie’s experience: “[D]uring their first days to-gether he had scarcely seemed aware of the raw actuality of theexperience she had gone through, even though the by-productsof that experience—her malnutrition, her anemia, her vanishedteeth—had been his constant and devoted concern. Certainly hehad not been entirely unaware of the camps; perhaps, Sophiethought, the enormity of their existence had been for Nathan, asfor so many Americans, part of a drama too far away, too ab-stract, too foreign (and thus too hard to comprehend) to registerfully on the mind” (350).

The opposition between “raw actuality” and “abstractenormity” continues to affect Nathan’s comprehension even afterhe becomes obsessed with “the Nazi handiwork.” He interpretsthe Holocaust as a collective enormity for the Jews while con-sistently overlooking the actuality of Sophie’s experience. Afterseeing newsreel footage of the Warsaw ghetto in the late summeror early fall of 1946, he suddenly finds himself “in the grip of adelayed realization, as in one of the later phases of shock” andsearches out “everything available on the camps, on Nuremberg,on the war, on anti-Semitism and the slaughter of the EuropeanJews,” reading books like The Jew and Human Sacrifice by Her-mann Strack (1909), The New Poland and the Jews by SimonSegal (1938), and The Promise That Hitler Kept by Stefan Szende(1945). The first two titles in particular are telling. A Christiantheologian at the University of Berlin, Strack wrote his book todetail and refute the blood libel, “earn[ing] him, not praise as alover of truth, but condemnation as a lackey of the Jews” (Segel69). The New Poland and the Jews described the rise of the Sa-nacja regime in Poland in 1926, which “unleash[ed] such an anti-Semitic hue and cry that Poland before the war became the lead-ing anti-Semitic country in Europe, second to Germany alone”(Ringelblum 10). In other words, these two books reflect and re-inforce Nathan’s tendency to deny the “raw actuality” of theHolocaust and to displace it onto Jewish fears of totalizing anti-Semitism. Although Nathan begins to behave “like a soul quite


troubled and possessed,” his reaction to the Holocaust is out oftouch with its reality: “Wasn’t it possible, he asked Sophieonce—and, he added, speaking as a cellular biologist—that onthe level of human behavior the Nazi phenomenon was analo-gous to a huge and crucial colony of cells going morally berserk,creating the same kind of danger to the body of humanity asdoes a virulently malignant tumor in a single human body?”(351). The key here is Nathan’s assertion of expertise “as a cellu-lar biologist,” because of course he is nothing of the sort. As hisbrother Larry reveals to Stingo later, “Nathan is not a researchbiologist. He is not a bona-fide scientist, and he has no degree ofany kind. All that is a simple fabrication” (462). His interpreta-tion of the Holocaust—Nathan’s claim to be an authority onanguish and suffering—is based upon a fantasy.

The biological interpretation is a momentary distractionfrom the Jewish interpretation. Already “troubled and pos-sessed” by it, Nathan is pushed over the edge by ideologicalthunderings of what the Holocaust means for the Jews. This oc-curs at a party that he and Sophie attend on 16 October 1946,the night when 10 Nuremberg defendants are hanged. As theyget dressed for the party, a special radio bulletin informs themthat “in the prison at Nuremberg ex-Field Marshal HermannGoring had been discovered dead in his cell, a suicide.” Nathan,whose reckoning with “the recently bygone unspeakables” couldeasily turn into “a preoccupying rage,” is immediately trans-formed from “his exuberant, rollicking, outgoing self to a desper-ate soul riddled with anguish.” Sophie feels “a hovering and omi-nous discomfort at the bubbling-over of all the things on earthshe wanted to forget” (349). At the party Nathan joins a groupthat is crowded around the radio, listening to news reports of theNuremberg executions. Harold Schoenthal, a young philosophyprofessor at Brooklyn College, “very tortured and unhappy, veryconscious of being Jewish,” suddenly begins to address them.“Nuremberg is a farce,” he cries, “these hangings are a farce. Thisis only a token vengeance, a sideshow! . . . Nuremberg is an ob-scene diversion to give the appearance of justice while murderoushatred of the Jews still poisons the German people. It is the Ger-man people who should be themselves exterminated—they whoallowed these men to rule them and kill Jews. Not these . . .handful of carnival villains. . . . Are we going to allow thosepeople to grow rich and slaughter Jews again?” (357). Schoenthalis a fanatic, warning that the Holocaust was not the final solutionof the Jewish problem. It merely “prove[d] that Jews can neverbe safe anywhere. He almost shouted that word anywhere,” So-phie tells Stingo afterwards. “It was like listening to a very pow-


erful speaker,” she recalls. “I had heard he was supposed to keephis students hypnotized and I remember being fascinated as Iwatched and listened” (357). Of course, Schoenthal is not thefirst “hypnotic” speaker in this century to have called for theextermination of an entire people. The implication is clear. Inhis hyperconsciousness of being Jewish—perverted by a racialideology—Schoenthal is an avatar of Hitler.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider Schoenthal’s effect uponNathan. Listening to Schoenthal, he “was like—well, he was likesomeone who was hypnotized, Sophie recalls” (359). He hasfallen under the spell of Schoenthal’s anti-anti-Semitism, anideological representation of the Jewish experience. Early thenext morning, wired on amphetamines, Nathan drives Sophie toConnecticut, saying, “Schoenthal is right. If it can happen there,won’t it happen here? The Cossacks are coming! Here’s one Jew-boy who’s going to make tracks for the countryside” (360). Heidentifies Jewishness with a tense and suspicious watchfulness—a paranoid watchfulness—for violent hatred of the Jews.10 As hedrives, Nathan keeps repeating that “Schoenthal is one hundredpercent right . . .” (363). And suddenly he begins to call SophieIrma—for Irma Grese, the SS woman supervisor at Auschwitzwho was notorious for her cruelty. He begins to torture Sophiewith questions: “[W]hat did you do, baby, when they burned theghettos down?” (366). He is oblivious to her tears, the anguishhe is causing her. Outside Danbury he stops the car, leads Sophieinto the Connecticut woods, urinates on her, and then kicks herin the ribs with a “polished leather shoe,” saying, “dot vill teachyou . . . dirty Judinschwein!” (370).

The Jew who claims to be an authority on anguish andsuffering becomes the author of anguish and suffering. As Sophieobserves, Nathan knows nothing at all about the death camps.But she does know; she was there. His claim to authority onsuffering, then, is really the arrogation of another’s suffering. Heis able to demand with a sneer that Sophie “justify to his satisfac-tion the way in which she survived Auschwitz while ‘the others’(as he put it) perished” only because he is ignorant of the realextent to which she—and anyone—suffered there (336). As aconsequence, he becomes her torturer, the reincarnation of theSS in her life. If Nathan himself suffers, it is not at the hands ofNazis; he does not suffer by virtue of belonging to a “people[who] have suffered the death camps.” He suffers because he ismentally ill—a paranoid schizophrenic (463). One critic suggeststhat Nathan’s “madness reflects the human condition after theHolocaust” (Pearce 292). This is almost certainly the case, butthere is more to it than that. In the novel, schizophrenia is defined


as a double bind, an irrational contradiction. In a conversationoverheard by Sophie, Rudolf Hoss complains that the regime’spolicy toward the Jews—extracting slave labor from them whilealso seeking to exterminate them—is “giving us all schizophrenia. . .” (443). For Styron, this schizophrenia—not their aim of an-nihilating the Jewish people, but the Nazis’ development of a“new form of human society” based on the expendability of thevery people they were enslaving—is the genuinely unique charac-teristic of the Holocaust.11 And such slavery, such a new form ofhuman cruelty, requires neither Jews nor Nazis. Nathan is “givenschizophrenia” by something similar to what gave schizophreniato Hoss: namely, the irrational contradiction between paranoidJewish fears of violent hatred (which, according to Styron, is theideological basis of Jewish identity) while simultaneously lust-ing to inflict suffering upon Sophie. What Styron means to showis that Jewish historical ignorance, displaying itself as a self-righteous and exaggerated insistence upon the exclusive Jewishquality of suffering in the Holocaust, inflicts further suffering onthe real victims.

“It is surpassingly difficult,” Stingo/Styron reflects aftercoming across George Steiner’s Language and Silence in 1967,“for many Jews to see beyond the consecrated nature of the Na-zis’ genocidal fury,” and to make more than “fleeting referenceto the vast multitudes of non-Jews—the myriad Slavs and theGypsies—who were swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps,perishing just as surely as the Jews, though sometimes less me-thodically” (237). The failure to see the non-Jewish victims isinseparable from the Jewish effort to “consecrate” the Holocaustin collective memory. But to consecrate the Holocaust, then—toreduce it to a Jewish religious holiday, as an antagonist once putit in debate with me—is to treat the other victims as nonpersons,just as the Nazis had treated the Jews. And thus it is to be Jewswithout memory. The biblical commandment zakhor et asher-ashah l’ka-Amalek, “remember what Amalek did to you” (Deut.25.17), is forgotten when the victims are other than Jews. Exclu-sivism is the cause of further suffering.

5. Styron’s Universal Tragedy

In opposition to the Jewish consecration, Styron interpretsthe Holocaust as a universal human tragedy. Sophie suffers “asmuch as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions,” becauseNazi Germany’s victims were not afflicted for being Jews. Under


Hitler, everyone suffered—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians,Czechs, Yugoslavs, all the others. Vast multitudes of non-Jewswere also swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps, perishingjust as surely as the Jews. What then did the victims have in com-mon? They did not share an identity by virtue of belonging tothe same victimized people; they shared the same fate. One byone they were reduced to what Lawrence L. Langer has called“choiceless choice,” “where crucial decisions did not reflect op-tions between life and death, but between one form of abnormalresponse and another . . .” (Versions 72). Here Sophie is the rep-resentative, indeed sacrificial figure. When she makes the choiceto which the novel’s title refers—being a “Polack” and not a“Yid,” she is given the “privilege” of choosing which of her twochildren is to die in the gas chamber and which is to live—shehas no real choice, of course (529). She is given only the mon-strous illusion of choice. She is not a moral agent, choosing forherself among a range of options and by this means defining hercharacter; she is the creature of the SS officer who reduces her“choices” to two. It is meaningless to speak of “choice” in thiscontext. And that is Styron’s point. The Holocaust is not the onlysite of choiceless choice known to modernity; it may only be themost exemplary.

In Styron’s hands, the choiceless choice is a modern re-working of Aristotelian hamartia. It is not a moral defect, buta tragic affliction. Simone Weil is the quoted source: “Afflictionstamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust andeven the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically shouldproduce but does not” (158).12 Although each is stained by it,none of the principal characters in Sophie’s Choice is responsiblefor crime. They are stamped with an affliction not of their choos-ing. If Sophie does not choose to be afflicted with the guilt ofhaving sent one of her own children to the gas chamber, Nathandoes not choose to be a paranoid schizophrenic. He does not setout to become her torturer. His abuse of Sophie ends in theirmutual suicide; it is not so much unjust or cruel as it is tragic,symbolic, the compulsive repetition of a universal pattern intwentieth-century experience. Thinking back, Stingo says: “Now,after the passing of time in this bloody century, whenever therehas occurred any of those unimaginable deeds of violence thathave plundered our souls, my memory has turned back to Na-than . . . and his image has always seemed to foreshadow thesewretched unending years of madness, illusion, error, dream andstrife” (487). Nathan is tragically afflicted by a doctrine of Jewishexclusivism—a precious heritage of suffering—which is funda-


mentally racist and therefore provokes him to violence. He doesnot choose to be a Jew, and his acceptance of the Jews’ racistinheritance of exclusivism is a tragic mistake.

Styron makes this clear by drawing a parallel betweenSoutherners and the Jews. Southerners feel “a grander empathywith Jewish folk,” Stingo says, largely because of their deep Prot-estant intimacy with the Hebrew Scriptures, but also “becauseSoutherners have possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb”(41). Nathan disputes this grand empathy, comparing one ofthe “nastiest abettors” of Southern racism—Mississippi senatorTheodore Bilbo—to eliminationist anti-Semitism’s Fuhrer (223).For him racism is precisely what divides Southerner and Jew; heclaims a kinship with the victims of Southern racism. As it turnsout, though, Stingo is right. There is a grand empathy betweenhim and Nathan in any number of ways: they are both in lovewith the same woman; they are both sensitive to postwar culturalchanges, especially the new wave in American fiction; they areboth the heirs of traditions which identify them; they both dwellin a “lonely and outcast state” (12). And if the Southerner has“possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb,” Nathan possesses asacrificial lamb of his own—Sophie. No more than Nathan,though, does Stingo choose to be a Southerner. His inheritanceof the Southern legacy of slavery and racism is a tragic mistake.It might be argued that Stingo flees to New York to escape thecurse of the inheritance, but comes into it anyway. Styron literal-izes the inheritance, contriving to have Stingo live on the pro-ceeds of a slave sale. In the late 1850s, his great-grandfather hadsold a 16-year-old slave boy, significantly named Artiste, for $800in gold coins when the boy was falsely accused of making an“improper advance” at a white belle. Ninety years later, Stingo’sfather discovers the coins walled-up in a cellar. The money ispassed down to Stingo, who lives on it as a stipend while writinghis first novel (32–33). Only afterward does he recognize that it isthe token of a “guilt” which he must “shrive” (34). When Nathanaccuses him of complicity in the lynching of a young AfricanAmerican for ogling a white girl—“your refusal to admit respon-sibility in the death of Bobby Weed is the same as that of thoseGermans who disavowed the Nazi party even as they watchedblindly and unprotestingly as the thugs vandalized the syna-gogues and perpetrated the Kristallnacht,” he shouts—Stingofeels the accusation is “horrendously wrong,” yet finds he cannotanswer it (76). The reason it is wrong, by Styron’s lights, is thatthe inheritance of racism is not a matter of responsibility, be-cause it is not the product of choice. These are moral categories.And instead Styron holds that the inheritance of racism is a


“guilt” which must be “shriven”; it is, as the Greeks would say,a “pollution” that needs to be “purged”; it is a choiceless choice,a tragic mistake. These are the appropriate metaphysical catego-ries for interpreting the human fate. And therefore it is right tocall the deaths of Sophie and Nathan, as Stingo does, a “realtragedy” (556). Sophie’s Choice aims at a katharsis of the meta-physical evil that afflicted them no less than it has bloodied thisentire century.

Styron’s tragic universalism raises problems. To merge geno-cide, lynch-law racism, and the abuse of women into “this bloodycentury” with its “unimaginable deeds of violence that haveplundered our souls”—to conceive Nazism as an “evil” that was“going to come and get” the whole world—is to absolutize them.It is to remove them from the human experience and elevate themto a mystical realm where the forces of light and darkness dobattle eternally.13 As the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweigpoints out, this is “to posit a world radically different from theterrestrial,” and thus to distance evil from the human effort torepair the terrestrial world (Glatzer 39). If evil is absolute, whatsense is there in speaking of a human capacity to do good? Whenevil is extraterrestrialized in this way, it loses its power to disturb;it even loses its name. Small wonder, then, that Styron calls theSS officer who gives Sophie the choiceless choice Fritz Jemandvon Niemand—someone from no one—a good name, he re-marks, “for one who appeared to Sophie as if from nowhere andvanished likewise forever . . .” (526). This is how he means tocharacterize the Nazi evil: it had no particular source in Germanhistory nor in German ideology. It appeared as if from nowhereand vanished again—not forever, but merely to reappear underthe name of another people and ideology, perhaps even that ofthe Jews.

The tragic interpretation extracts the Holocaust from his-tory. To support his case that the Nazis’ victims were identifiednot by their Jewishness but by their affliction and that the Jewswere as capable as anyone of afflicting others, Styron must distortthe historical record at certain key points.14 To gain authority forhis poetics of affliction, he cites Simone Weil but ignores her anti-Judaism—like Hitler she believed that the Jews were a race, nota religion—and her death from voluntary starvation, which wasnothing like a choiceless choice.15 He conceals the fact (or doesnot know) that the universalizing of the Nazi threat was an in-vention of Communist Party discourse. In The Ashes of Six Mil-lion Jews, a book-length poem of 1946, for example, Fred Blairgives a close and graphic description of a mass execution ofJews—one of the first literary representations in the language.


The Communist Party’s chairman in Wisconsin and a memberof its national committee, Blair is also one of the first writers touse the term holocaust, although he warns not of a Jewish butof a “human holocaust.” After they have shot their victims anddumped them in a mass grave,

The executioners pour pitchAnd oil into the groaning ditch,And drive away the settling frostWith a fierce human holocaust. (17)

The phrase suits a universalizing ideology. The six million Jews,Blair writes, must “all witness be / To the degradation ofmankind / Under the bestial fascist mind” (12). Indeed, the poemis dedicated, not to the Jews whose death it records, but to “theWisconsin men who died in the immortal Abraham Lincoln Bri-gade fighting fascism in Spain.” Predictably, then, Blair’s messageis that we must “extirpate / The last mad breeder of race-hate,”which breeder is “bourgeois ‘culture,’” “bourgeois ‘justice,’” and“bourgeois ‘order.’” So Blair closes by praising “the Soviet landthat Lenin founded,” where “every nation, creed, and race / Findsa co-equal dwelling place. . . .” For only Sovietism can destroy“the social roots that could produce / The ashes of six millionJews” (21). This rosy vision hardly corresponds to the truthabout the Soviet Union’s campaign of official state anti-Semitism,which began with the murder of 500,000 to 600,000 Jews in theGreat Terror of the 1930s and ended with the extinction of Jew-ish Soviet culture.16

Universalism entails the suppression of inconvenient factsfor the sake of a utopian world in which all are one—for Weil,in Christ; for Blair, under Soviet rule; for Styron, where “loveflow[s] out on all living things” (560). And though the New Lefthas tried to substitute multiculturalism for universalism, it hasnot been able to abandon completely what the feminist philoso-pher Anne Phillips calls the “universal pretensions of politicalthought.” As Phillips herself says, speaking for one branch of theNew Left, “feminism cannot afford to situate itself for differenceand against universality, for the impulse that takes us beyond ourimmediate and specific difference is a vital necessity in any radi-cal transformation” (71). Where radical transformation is the fi-nal cause, ethnic identity is finally of no account, because whatis sought is the universal good—a good that transcends ethnicdifferences. “This line of thought,” the biblical scholar Jon D.Levenson points out, “has traditionally served powerfully to re-inforce an image of Judaism as separatist, exclusivistic, and chau-


vinistic, in contradistinction to Christianity”—or communism orliberalism for that matter—“which [are] thought to be integra-tionist, inclusive, and non-particularist” (215). From the Jew-ish side, things look rather different. Since the Roman Empireconquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E., the Jews have resisted “West-ern” claims to universality. As the feminist theologian Rose-mary Ruether observes, “The heart of the Jewish struggle was astruggle against a pseudo-universalism which assumed the cul-ture of the dominant group was a universal culture, the cultureof true civilization, against which all else was barbarism” (233).Under whatever name it chooses, universalism is the apology forideological domination. And whether it is inspired by fury at thebestial fascist mind that plans a human holocaust or fear andpity for the affliction that stamps the soul to its very depths, anyreinterpretation of the Holocaust as a universal threat which wasgoing to come for the whole world is a projection (and denial) ofimperialistic cultural ambitions. From this angle, the accusationof Jewish exclusivism can be seen more accurately as an effort tostigmatize and discredit resistance to the hegemony implicitwithin a universalizing ideology.

6. Liberal Anti-Judaism

Although Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Alasdair Mac-Intyre, and others have warned about the pseudo-universalizingtendency in Western traditions like liberalism, scholars on theLeft have not hesitated to condemn the Jewish interpretation ofthe Holocaust. I have already mentioned Stannard, who arguesthat not only is Jewish Holocaust study “demonstrably errone-ous,” but what is worse, “the larger thesis it fraudulently ad-vances is racist and violence-provoking” (167). And the liberalattack continues to mount. The “very idea of uniqueness is fatu-ous,” declares the historian Peter Novick. In the first full-lengthstudy of The Holocaust in American Life (1999), he accounts forthe cultural “obsession” by arguing that “Jews were intent onpermanent possession of the gold medal in the VictimizationOlympics. . . .” Encouraged to adopt “an essential victim iden-tity” and a phony exclusivism (“Holocaust possessiveness,” hecalls it), American Jews have turned inward and rightward, be-coming “parochial” in their concerns and deserting their long-standing commitment to “the more equal distribution of rewardswhich had been the aim of liberal social policies” (182–83, 191–97). Albert S. Lindemann agrees that the uniqueness thesis is“profoundly mistaken.” But he goes even farther. In Esau’s Tears


(1997), a major new history of anti-Semitism based upon theproposition that the “Jews have been as capable as any othergroup of provoking hostility” (xvii), Lindemann associates thethesis with “protoracist” Jewish ideas that have “contributed invague, often contradictory ways to modern racism,” which cul-minated in the Holocaust (74). Thus the Jews are partly respon-sible for their own mass murder—a hypothesis, he complains,that Jewish scholars have banned from historical inquiry (510).Norman G. Finkelstein, a specialist in Palestine studies, con-tends that Holocaust study is a propaganda enterprise. He callsit The Holocaust Industry (2000). Sharply distinguishing it from“the Nazi holocaust,” “the actual historical event” (3), Finkel-stein insists that the Holocaust is an “ideological representation,”a political machine designed to capitalize upon Jewish vic-timhood, which dates only from the Six-Day War in 1967. “Orga-nized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to de-flect criticism of Israel’s and its own morally indefensiblepolicies,” he concludes (149).

The particulars of the case may be new, but historicallyspeaking the Left has always been uncomfortable with singlingout the Jews. In his inaugural lecture to the French Academy, thehistorian Alain Besancon points out that “in the Soviet Unionunder the Communists, it was forbidden to single out the Jewsas objects of Nazi genocide; only undifferentiated ‘victims of fas-cism’ were recognized” (26). Besancon goes on to speculate thatthis prohibition “was intended to mask the regime’s own anti-Semitic policies,” but a more basic reason is that the Left opposesspecial consideration for the Jews on principle. Its historical atti-tude is summed up in two slogans that emerged from the Decem-ber 1789 debate over Jewish rights in the French House of Depu-ties: “The Jew is a man before he is a Jew.” And: “To the Jew asa citizen, everything; to the Jews as a people, nothing.”17 Theseprinciples are logical extensions of the Rights of Man, but theyare also—and historically they have operated as—a demand thatthe Jews abandon their Jewish exclusiveness (including their ex-clusively Jewish ideas) as the price of admission into full citizen-ship and social acceptance. “[T]he Jews were to be considered asindividual citizens in the modern nation-states of Western Eu-rope,” explains the social theorist Shmuel Trigano. “Accordingly,they had to give up the historical bonds they had formed overmany centuries and become abstract individuals whose Jew-ishness was no more than a private affair” (300).

What Enlightenment liberals conceived as civic bettermententailed both a reform of the Jews’ social habits, morals, andperhaps even religion, as well as an improvement of their politi-


cal status (see J. Katz 192). The Jews were simultaneously a signof the failure of civil society to that time, but also the crudestexample of “superstition” and “backwardness.” As Alain Fin-kielkraut observes in The Imaginary Jew (1994), “the MosaicLaw that had preserved them as a unique people and anti-Semitic myths were both subsumed under the category of preju-dice and superstition” (72). In his famous Essai of 1789, forexample, the Catholic Abbe Henri Gregoire called for emanci-pation of the Jews, but only on the condition that the organizedJewish community be broken up. The state must urge the Jews to“acquire enlightenment,” he said, because they are a people“sunk in the depths of grossest superstition and submerged in anocean of stupid beliefs.” At the same time, though, “[t]he Jewsare members of the universal family which is in the process ofcreating fraternity among all the peoples” (qtd. in Hertzberg336–37). Meanwhile, the conservative opponents of emancipa-tion warned that Jewish religious practices, which restricted theJews from eating with their fellow citizens or marrying them,were devices by which the Jews separated themselves from therest of society. “You will see that it is not I who exclude the Jews,”said the Jacobin deputy Jean Francois Reubell; “they excludethemselves” (qtd. in Hertzberg 355). The Jews’ obstinate clingingto the exclusivist rigor of their law—their insistence upon ritualpurity, dietary restrictions, and endogamy—was thus a politicalobstacle to full citizenship. Give up your exclusiveness, the liber-als promised the Jews, and emancipation will follow. The liberalprinciple “The Jew is a man before he is a Jew” became the as-similationist advice faites-vous oublier (make yourself inconspic-uous), which was the implicit social contract upon which theJews entered into their full legal rights (Hertzberg 343).

The ideal of the liberal state was to create a common set ofvalues, the grounds for a shared civic identity—what has cometo be called a civil religion—while allowing for individual andgroup differences. But what Enlightenment liberalism failed toaccount for was that in the name of emancipation it was merelyimposing a majoritarian ideology upon the Jews. In America, thecivil religion acquired a noticeably Protestant taste. In December1845, for instance, a Jewish merchant in Charleston, South Caro-lina, was arrested for selling a pair of gloves on Sunday in viola-tion of the city’s “blue” laws. Although his attorney pointed outthat the Fourth Commandment reads Six days shalt thy labor,and that by requiring Jews to observe the Christian sabbath inaddition to their own the state was forcing them to violate Jewishlaw, the arrest was upheld. The Charleston Sunday Times editori-alized in favor of the court’s decision: “Freedom of religion


means a mere abolition of religious disabilities. You are free toworship God in any manner you please; and this liberty of con-science cannot be violated. An ordinance for the better obser-vance of Sunday is a mere prohibition of public employment inthe way of labor, trade, and business. We cannot in this perceivehow liberty of conscience is to be invaded. It does not say to theHebrew, ‘You shall not keep holy the seventh day,’ but merelydeclares that you shall not disturb the Christian by business orlabor on his Sabbath” (Schappes 281). You shall not disturb theChristian—there in a phrase is the hidden majoritarian premisebehind emancipation. Religion is conceived as a private matter,a matter of worship, which is the Protestant conception of it.The Jews were offered freedom, but only at the cost of detachingthemselves from Jewish culture and religion. Jewishness came tobe identified with the Enlightenment values of individual free-dom and liberation from tradition; and the result, as the politicalscientist Steven B. Smith observes, “has been the transformationof Judaism from a body of revealed law into something like amodern cultural or political identity. The transformation of Jew-ishness, once considered a mark of God’s election, into a modernsociological category of group identity has raised powerful andprofound problems for the survival of Judaism in the secular lib-eral state” (202).

This is the heart of the problem. The hostility to Jewishexclusivism is a hostility to Jewishness as such, because the Jewsare defined by the exclusivist conviction that they are an autono-mous and chosen people.18 Liberalism is disturbed by the chau-vinism or even racism implicit in the very concept. And what itproposes instead is the ideal of impartial morality. Perhaps thebest contemporary example—certainly among the most influen-tial—is John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971), which argues thatdeliberative morality must occur behind a “veil of ignorance”(136–42). In Rawls’s argument, justice demands that people be-have as if they did not know their real circumstances, whetherthey are rich or poor, powerful or weak, well-connected or iso-lated—or Gentile or Jewish. The demand of modern secular lib-eralism, in other words, is that people divest themselves of theirhistorical identity as a prerequisite to justice. And if the Jewswish to belong to a just society, then—if they wish to be moral—they must give up the chauvinistic or even racist conception ofthemselves as a chosen people. In political terms they are ex-pected to abandon the idea of themselves as a distinct and auton-omous people, and assimilate into the majority. In theologicalterms they are asked to opt out of their covenant with the JewishGod, which is the basis of their election, and to embrace an im-


partial morality that excludes any preference for their own kind(“to the Jews as a people, nothing”). In short, they are to stopbeing Jews—except on the understanding that religious affilia-tion is an individual concern, a matter of private worship, whichis not the Jewish understanding. Even to worship as Jews, theymust adopt the Christian majority’s conception of themselves.They must not consecrate their own history in their own way, butmust acknowledge that they are racists if they do. And it is neverthought that these demands might be conversion and annihila-tion under different names.

7. Styron’s Contradictions

There is a contradiction here. Styron’s Jews, faulted for theirhistorical amnesia and exclusivist appropriation of the Holo-caust, are already thoroughly assimilated Jews. They are notmerely ignorant of the Holocaust (“What’s Owswitch?” says onecharacter in Sophie’s Choice [232]); they neither practice nor haveany familiarity with their own religious traditions. They do notobserve Jewish law; they do not recite Jewish prayers; they donot follow the Jewish calendar. Although Schoenthal is describedas “very conscious of being Jewish,” even his Jewishness is de-fined negatively—as a hypersensitivity to anti-Semitism ratherthan the positive commitment to anything. For Styron, breastsare Jewish: he says so three different times (130, 135, 137). Over-weight mothers are Jewish (178). Wearing a light scent of per-fume rather than being drenched in musk is “real Jewish class”(181). The neurotic temptress Leslie Lapidus is a “Jewish prin-cess,” as Stingo grasps later after “much study in Jewish sociol-ogy” (184). The only Jewish books which are mentioned are SaulBellow’s. Abraham, Moses, the Psalmist, and Daniel are to befound in “the Protestant/Jewish Bible” (41). In Stingo’s fantasiesof a Jewish home, the Torah and the Talmud lay open, “havingjust undergone pious scrutiny . . .” (177). But in reality, as hesubsequently discovers, they are nowhere to be found—a mea-sure of the extent to which Styron’s Jews have given up their reli-gion. Nathan’s “show-biz stories” are described as “profoundlyJewish” (470), but there is no Mishnah, no Gemara, no Midrash,no Zohar, no Maimonides, no Shulh.an Arukh, not even a pray-erbook or bentsher. Although their “parents had been OrthodoxJews,” neither Nathan nor his brother Larry “had been inside asynagogue for years” (555). Naturally, then, at Nathan’s funeralthe presiding clergyman is Unitarian, because “a rabbi seemedinappropriate” to Larry, the surviving son of Orthodox Jewish


parents (556). The Reverend DeWitt invokes Lincoln, Emerson,Dale Carnegie, Spinoza, Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud, andJesus of Nazareth—“once, in rather distant terms” (557). Stingofinds such invocations “fucking bullshit,” probably because theirgrab-bag quality identifies them as middlebrow, and at the grave-side he offers a poem by Emily Dickinson instead. To someoneraised in the Jewish tradition, who would have arranged an Or-thodox funeral for his parents, at which Psalms and El MaleyRah.amim would have been chanted, the cultural distance sepa-rating Emily Dickinson from Lincoln, Emerson, and even DaleCarnegie would have been difficult to appreciate.

For Styron, however, the distance is immense, because heamplifies minor differences in a tradition from which Jewish textsare excluded altogether. To gain admission to this tradition, theJews have historically been expected to abandon the textualstudy which has not only made them strange and unfamiliar tothe enlightened, but would have served as the basis for a critiqueof such enlightenment. Styron’s interpretation of the Holocaustdivests the Jewish victims of their Jewishness and assigns theirtragedy instead to the universal category of choiceless choice.But he does not see how such an interpretation robs the choicethat generations of European Jews had made—to remain faith-ful to their people and their God—of any meaning. Under Hit-ler, the Jews were rounded up, deported, enslaved, tortured, andmurdered not because they were “afflicted” in Weil’s sense, butbecause they were Jews—because they were the descendants ofJews who had chosen not to give up their religion. Unlike theEuropean Jews, Stingo does not choose to inherit the legacy ofslavery, Nathan does not choose to be a paranoid schizophrenic,Sophie does not choose to be afflicted with the guilt of havingmurdered her child. And unlike the European Jews, then, theyreally do (in Novick’s phrase) accept “an essential victim iden-tity.” Jewish religion, by contrast, transforms choiceless sufferinginto the choice zakharta ki eved hayiyta b’eretz Mitzrayim, “re-member that you were a slave in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 5.15),which forms the basis of the commandment not to oppress theother (e.g., Exod. 22.20), a commandment that is repeated 36times in the Torah—more than any other (T.b. Bava Metzia 59b).In other words, Jewish ethnicity does not function, as the leftistcritic Werner Sollors claims, to dissociate the Jews from “‘otherpeople,’ in particular ‘non-Jews’ (to render ‘goyim,’ the Hebrewword for Gentiles)” (288), but rather serves as the basis of politi-cal and ethical respect.19 And the source of Jewish ethnicity isJewish collective memory, which requires Jewish study.

The Jews of Sophie’s Choice are thoroughly assimilated. The


only respect in which they remain Jewish at all is in their exclusi-vist response to the Holocaust. Not merely in Styron’s novel,though, but in Europe prior to 1933 many Jews adhered to theliberal demand that they abandon their exclusivism. Yet whenHitler rose to power, he condemned the Jews as a whole, whetheror not they had abandoned their exclusivism. The liberalism thathad promised an end to anti-Semitism turned out to be empty.To the Left-liberal ideology of abstract citizenship the Holocauststands as an enduring challenge, because the Jews were roundedup and murdered as a distinct and autonomous people. Ausch-witz has forever reactualized the idea that liberalism has neverknown how to handle. It demonstrated a latent weakness on theleft: namely, an inability to recognize the Jews’ autonomy andunique history. This is a weakness that the Left-liberal critics ofJewish exclusivism have yet to grasp. Not only does Styron failto recognize the Jews as a people. He fails to understand thesense in which the Holocaust calls into question the Left-liberaldistaste for Jewish exclusivism. If the Jews are without memoryof other people’s suffering, it is because he has constructed themas assimilated Jews, Jews without memory; because first Enlight-enment liberalism and now the New Left would oblige them toabandon the sources of their collective memory.

Notes

1. Although it is not always the same as the hardback (see n. 13), I cite thepaperback edition from Vintage throughout this essay, because it is morereadily available.

2. See Bauer; Cohen 27–32; Dawidowicz 9–15, 119–20; Fackenheim 280–88;Gilbert 824–25; Goldhagen 406–15; Steven T. Katz; Langer, “Beyond Theod-icy: Jewish Victims and the Holocaust” (1995); Lipstadt 215–16; Ozick, “A Lib-eral’s Auschwitz” (1976).

3. The books referred to here are Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Geno-cide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (1998) and Nor-man G. Finkelstein, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and HistoricalTruth (1998). See also Lindemann, as well as Novick.

4. Schoenfeld singles out for criticism Robin Ruth Linden’s Making Stories,Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (1992), winner of theHelen Hooven Santmyer Prize in Women’s Studies; Carol Rittner and John K.Roth’s anthology of primary and secondary sources, Different Voices: Womenin the Holocaust (1993); and Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman’s collection ofpapers, Women in the Holocaust (1998). The phrase cutting-edge scholarship isOfer and Weitzman’s.


5. The term is usually advanced to distinguish racial anti-Semitism from reli-gious anti-Judaism; see Ruether 183–226; Langmuir 23–41; and von Kellen-bach 10–13. Oddly enough, Bernard Lazare introduced anti-Judaism to col-lapse the very distinction (8). While wishing to preserve the distinction, I followLazare in separating modern anti-Judaism from its religious origins, agreeingwith him that “anti-Judaism, from the seventeenth century on, is in all respectsquite different from the anti-Judaism of the preceding centuries. The social sidegets gradually the upperhand of the religious side, though this latter continuesto exist” (95). The anti-Judaism that I am describing in this essay is politicalrather than religious.

6. The proceedings of the International Symposium on the Holocaust arepublished in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust(1977), edited by Eva Fleischner. Styron uses the original spelling, anti-Semitism, and in my essay I will do the same to conform to American LiteraryHistory’s style. I would prefer antisemitism, though. The original spelling, in-vented in 1879 by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, implies there is some-thing called Semitism to which anti-Semites stand in principled opposition. Butthis is itself an anti-Semitic fantasy. Anti-Semitism does not depend for its exis-tence upon a Jewish ism nor even upon the Jews. It is self-generated and free-standing. Hence my preference for the spelling antisemitism. For more princi-pled opposition, I would reserve the term anti-Judaism.

7. Apparently the aphorism originated in speeches that Niemoller gave afterthe war, although he seems never to have published it anywhere. Thus it belongsto oral tradition. On the provenance of the aphorism, see Zerner.

8. On Niemoller’s anti-Semitic sermonizing, see Michael; Goldhagen 112–14.Even after becoming an outspoken opponent of the regime, Niemoller associ-ated the Nazi evil with the “eternal” crime of the Jews rather than seeing themas the Nazis’ principal victim. “The Jews are not the only ones who crucifiedChrist,” he reminded a large audience in March 1935 (qtd. in Friedman 434).His initial opposition was institutional rather than ideological. Together withDietrich Bonhoeffer, he founded the Pastors’ Emergency League on Christmas1933. The two men believed that by excluding converted Jews from the leader-ship of the Confessing Church, Hitler’s regime was interfering in church gover-nance, although Niemoller conceded that it was “unfortunate” that convertedJews should hold positions of importance within the church (see Friedman;Friedlander 45). Bonhoeffer, another Lutheran churchman who became fa-mous for his resistance to the Nazis (he was executed in Flossenburg), was alsoblinded to Nazi anti-Semitism by Christian theology (see Ruether 224).

9. To name Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem has cultural and political connota-tions. Although the Israeli Knesset declared in January 1950 that Jerusalemhad “always” been the capital of the Jewish nation (Sachar 434), in liberalthinking it remains an international city—a corpus separatum belonging not toIsrael but to the United Nations (Harsch 20). Tel Aviv, by contrast, holds thetitle of “the first Jewish city”; it represents the revival of Hebrew and the build-ing of a culture on the principle “everything Jewish.” Thus it is the capital ofthe Jewish ideology. According to Schor (who gathers a remarkable array oftexts to illustrate these points), “Tel Aviv is the tangible expression of a practi-


cal, militant brand of Zionism”; and as such, it tends to evoke “an antisemitismwhich probably many visitors bring with them, unconsciously seeking confir-mation of their prejudices” (161).

10. David Shapiro characterizes paranoia as a mode of cognition that is dis-tinguished by a rigid directedness of attention, a tense and hyperalert scanningfor evidence to confirm its suspicions. And the tension under which this alert-ness is maintained is such that it is easily set off (54–107).

11. See Sophie’s Choice 254–56. Here the Holocaust is analyzed in terms setforth by the death-of-God theologian Richard L. Rubenstein in The Cunningof History: The Holocaust and the American Future (1975), which Styron de-scribes as “one of the essential handbooks of the Nazi era.” This is perhaps thebest source to support a metaphysical interpretation of Nazi evil, since Ru-benstein’s “tragic theology” posits a separation between history and metaphys-ics, and this is what enables him to speak of the death of God. See Braiter-man 92–100.

12. Slightly misquoted from Weil, Waiting for God (1950). The original readslike this: “Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, itstamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement that crime logically should producebut actually does not” (121).

13. Peter J. Haas makes exactly this point at the start of his Morality afterAuschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (1988).

14. Link notes that in his “interest in showing the Jews . . . were not the onlyvictims of the SS,” Styron deviates from historical fact by having the professorsfrom the University of Cracow, including Sophie’s father and husband, mur-dered at Sachsenhausen; in truth, they were freed in March 1940 (137). Rosen-feld points out that, in order to suggest that “the most powerful persecutors ofthe Jews were other Jews,” Styron falsely identifies Hans Frank, the Nazi Gov-ernor General of occupied Poland, as “a Jew, mirabile Dictu . . .” (161). As faras I am aware, no one noticed when Styron quietly deleted this identificationfrom the paperback edition (249 in the first Random House edition [1979]; 271in the Vintage International [1992]).

15. On her anti-Judaism, see Nevin. Both Weil and Hitler denied that Judaismcould be considered a religion. “Their [the Jews’] whole existence is based onone single great lie,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (1925), “to wit, that they area religious community while actually they are a race . . .” (232). In The Needfor Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind (1949), Weilpremises that religious thought is genuine if and only if it is universal in itsappeal. “Such is not the case with Judaism,” she adds, “which is linked to aracial conception” (93). The observation about Weil’s death was offered by oneof the anonymous reviewers for ALH.

16. See Rapoport; Vaksberg. The phrases “campaign of official state antisem-itism” and “extinction of Jewish Soviet culture” belong to Vaksberg. Accordingto Rapoport, “The ratio of Jewish victims [in the Great Terror] was probablythe highest among all the Soviet nationalities” (54).


17. The first was advanced by Mirabeau, one of the principal spokesmen forthe Revolution; the second by Clermont-Tonnerre, leader of the nobility whounited with the Third Estate (see Hertzberg 358–59).

18. For the argument that the Jews are defined by being the chosen peoplesee Wyschogrod. Although Wyschogrod’s theology is anti-Maimonidean, Men-ahem Kellner has traced a similar account of definition by chosenness in Mai-monides. Norman Lamm has also argued, relying upon Maimonides, that aJew is defined by a dual relationship—a vertical relationship with God and ahorizontal relationship with the people of Israel. The doctrine of chosennesshas itself been challenged in Jewish thought, most notably by MordecaiKaplan, who dismissed it as an anachronism and found it incompatible withthe civil status of the modern Jew (see Judaism 22–24, 36–43; “Rejecting theChosen People Idea”). For a history of chosenness in American Jewishthought, including an examination of Kaplan, see Eisen. For a philosophicalattempt to distinguish “chosen people” from “master race,” see Novak.

19. See Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism 176–77, 223–25; “FromEthics to Exegesis” 110.

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d.g. myers - jews without memory: sophie’s choice and the ideology of liberal anti-judaism

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