Jews Without Memory

Sophie’s Choice and the Ideology of Liberal Anti-Judaism

by D. G. Myers

Originally published in American Literary History 13 (Fall 2001): 499-529. © 2001. All rights reserved.

1. Sophie’s place

Sophie’s Choice has been ranked among the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.1 But though it is a striking effort to write a modern tragedy, its historical importance owes little or nothing to its literary quality. William Styron’s novel was

William Styron

a pioneering dissent on the Holocaust, a forceful challenge to prevailing opinion. Belonging to the second wave of Holocaust fiction in America, it was published in 1979, the same year as Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer and Leslie Epstein’s King of the Jews. Just the year before, NBC’s miniseries Holocaust reached an audience of 120 million and Jimmy Carter also established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which would lead to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. According to the museum’s historian, these highly public events of 1978 "signaled that the Holocaust had moved not only from the periphery to the center of American Jewish consciousness, but to the center of national consciousness as well" (Linenthal 12). If the term had not been corrupted by neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust, Sophie’s Choice — along with The Ghost Writer and The King of the Jews — might appropriately be labeled revisionist accounts. Together they express irritation with the uncritical public reception of the Holocaust, which propelled its movement to the heart of the culture in the late seventies. Each novel sets out to épater les piétistes. Roth’s fantasy that Anne Frank survived the war to become a creative writing student in America dispells the aura of sanctity surrounding Hitler’s most famous victim; Epstein’s portrait of a ghetto dictator punctures the assumption that under the Nazis every Jew was an innocent victim; and Styron’s novel about the Polish Catholic woman who survived Auschwitz only to die tragically in America puts under interrogation the claim that the Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish catastrophe. Styron aims to show that some Christians (in his phrase) "suffered as much as any Jew."2

Of these Sophie’s Choice is the most important, because it is the most explicitly ideological. Styron does not merely dissent from the orthodoxy of the "uniqueness thesis" (as it has come to be known); he delivers an elenchus, a strong rereading of the Holocaust which goes beyond challenging the predominant view to reverse it. Nor does Styron attack an ideology made of straw. The common opinion of most Jewish scholars and writers, including 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, and Cynthia Ozick, is that the Holocaust was unique.3 And in two ways. It was distinguished by the Nazi intention of totally eradicating the Jewish people, who were in this respect its unique victims — the purpose and whole reason for the Holocaust — and historically it was without precedent, without sequel. As Otto Friedrich says in the preface to his Kingdom of Auschwitz, the very title of which suggests the uniqueness of the death camp, it was "the worst that had ever happened" (viii). Styron vigorously criticizes Jewish scholars and writers for this "narrow" and specifically Jewish interpretation. In its stead he advances a universalist, even metaphysical interpretation, understanding the Holocaust as the embodiment of absolute evil, which threatened humanity as a whole. The Jews may have been (in his phrase) the "victims of victims," but they were not the only victims of Nazi evil. To claim exclusive victimhood is to deny and even to add to other peoples’ suffering. The lesson of the Holocaust is that uniqueness is victimization, whether practiced by Germans or Jews. To remember the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish catastrophe 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 is the ideological representation of the Holocaust. That the tragic universalism it offers as an alternative to Jewish uniqueness is just as ideological — that Styron appropriates the Holocaust for his own ideological purposes or is even, as Edward Alexander has warned, "stealing the Holocaust from the Jews who were its victims" (195) — is beside the question. What Bakhtin calls the "free appropriation and assimilation of the word" is dialectically opposed to the discourse of political authority, which "demands our unconditional allegiance" (343). Sophie’s Choice is an act of open political resistance. Small wonder that it anticipated — and perhaps even inspired — a more organized opposition to the uniqueness thesis. Following Styron’s lead, some scholars have recently begun to concentrate fire upon it. The American Indian scholar Ward Churchill, the political scientist Norman G. Finkelstein, and the historians Albert S. Lindemann and Peter Novick have all attacked it in recent books.4 This group of scholars — I very nearly called it a party — is united by its refusal to declare unconditional allegiance to the uniqueness thesis. The historian David E. Stannard speaks for the group when he associates the thesis with Holocaust denial, calling it "the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labor by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea." Not only is the Jewish interpretation of the Holocaust "demonstrably erroneous," Stannard says, but what is worse, "the larger thesis it fraudulently advances is racist and violence-provoking" (167). Here too Styron had anticipated the later opposition. In large measure Sophie’s Choice is a polemic against the Jewish hegemony. Styron’s Jews are represented as having overlooked or misunderstood the truth about the Holocaust from the first months after liberation down at least to the late sixties, when Jewish scholars and writers began to publish work that the novel faults for failing to make more than "fleeting reference to the vast multitudes of non-Jews . . . who were swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps" (237). An entire generation is indicted upon the charge of advancing the "racist and violence-provoking" ideology of Jewish exclusivism. The Jews stand accused of collective amnesia, effacing the memory of other peoples’ suffering.

Sophie’s place in American literary history is assured by its early and powerful account of the ideological positioning which has since become a necessary preamble to any discussion of the Holocaust. Styron’s novel makes the case both against Jewish exclusivism and for the universalism of oppression and suffering. And politically this is a left-liberal perspective. When the right criticizes Holocaust thinking, as in Gabriel Schoenfeld’s 1998 attack on "Holocaustology" in Commentary, it is more likely to complain that "the inescapable truth that simply to be Jewish was to be marked for death" is being obscured by "cutting-edge scholarship" which emphasizes instead the victims’ gender (46).5 Although it is not scholarship, and though it does not emphasize the title character’s gender, Sophie’s Choice is similar to recent feminist thought in shifting attention away from the Jews and onto Hitler’s other victims. Some such shift is the defining characteristic of left-liberal representations of the Holocaust, whether they are written by Jewish feminists or ideological opponents of the Jewish ideology, including Styron. And though his thinking is derived from classical liberalism, Styron shares certain important presuppositions with the new left. Among them is a disapproval of Jewish exclusivism. Sophie’s Choice has the additional advantage, then, of representing a fundamental principle that links the new left to its origins in Enlightenment liberalism. Not only is it one of the basic liberal texts in recent American literature; it is perhaps the basic text on ethnic exclusivism.

In this essay I shall examine Sophie’s Choice under the aspect of the left-liberal case against Jewish exclusivism. Not to withhold my opinion, I shall argue that the case made by Styron and other writers entails a historical error, a naive hearkening back to ideology that has been put in question forever by the Holocaust. I shall call this ideology liberal anti-Judaism.6 In opposing Jewish exclusivism — in pleading for a more "inclusive" interpretation of the Holocaust — Styron and other opponents of the 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 them it was superstitious, backward, and immoral, which amounts to the same thing. Whether in the Enlightenment or the last years of the twentieth century, liberal anti-Judaism serves the power of the modern state by undermining the political autonomy of the Jewish people and the unique history which constitutes them. Philosophical liberalism grasped that the Jews stood in the way of modernity, but failed to see that they also checked the expansionist ambitions of the modern state. State power requires the elimination of barriers to its spread; in clinging defiantly to autonomous institutions and a unique history, the Jews were fundamentally opposed to it. Small wonder the Third Reich sought to eliminate them. Despite its analysis of the complicity between modernity and state power, the new left has failed to appreciate the Jews’ oppositional role in modernity, which reached a crisis in the Holocaust. Styron and other opponents of Jewish exclusivism revert to an ideology which is deeply embedded in modernity. What is "racist and violence-provoking" is not Jewish exclusivism but the demand that the Jews yield up their exclusivism. Enlightenment liberalism proposed to solve the Jewish problem by having the Jews divest themselves of their exclusivism and assimilate to modern society, but when Hitler rose to power in 1933 he condemned all of the Jews without exception, assimilated and exclusive alike. Styron and the new left now propose that the Jews abandon the exclusivism of their collective memory of the Holocaust, charging that to remember it as a uniquely Jewish catastrophe is to be without memory of other peoples’ suffering. But if Holocaust commemoration appears to create Jews without memory, the real reason (as I shall try to show) is that the ideology of liberal anti-Judaism constructs them as Jews without memory. And nowhere is the process by which this comes about more abundantly illustrated than in Sophie’s Choice.


2. Sophie’s plan

Styron first announced his opposition to Jewish exclusivism in a New York Times op-ed piece five years before publishing Sophie’s Choice. Commenting upon a June 1974 International Symposium on the Holocaust held at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Styron confessed that he was "puzzled" by the "overwhelming emphasis on anti-Semitism and Christian guilt."7 While allowing that "Jewish genocide was the main business of Auschwitz," he went on to remind his readers that "at Auschwitz perished not only the Jews but at least one million souls who were not Jews." It is essential to remember the huge number of non-Jewish dead, because to do otherwise is to take "a narrow view of the evil of Nazi totalitarianism," which in turn is "to ignore the ecumenical nature of that evil." The Nazis were far worse than antisemitic. They were also "anti-Christian," because they were "anti-human. Anti-life." The threat they posed to humanity "transcended" the threat they posed to the Jews ("Auschwitz" 303-04).

Styron founds his argument upon a statistical premise, although it is difficult to know where he got his figures. The most recent scholarly estimates are that at least 1.1 million were murdered at Auschwitz, about 90 percent of whom were Jews (see Piper). At the time Styron was writing, the "official" number, first established by a Soviet Extraordinary State Commission and then engraved on a memorial at Birkenau, was four million. One of his primary sources for Sophie’s Choice — the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz — brags of killing three million. The principal English-language histories available to Styron at the time — Gerald Reitlinger’s Final Solution (1953) and Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews (1961) — put the number much lower, between 800,000 and one million. None of these sources supports the claim that one million non-Jews perished at Auschwitz.

The minor premise — Styron’s contention that the martyrology of Auschwitz is "ecumenical" rather than exclusively Jewish — is also open to challenge. Cynthia Ozick immediately recognized as much, savaging her fellow novelist the next year in the Long Island University literary magazine Confrontation, although not on the ground of fact. Ozick

Cynthia Ozick

accepted his death toll without comment, 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 in effect raise doubts as to whether it is truly anti-human." The universalist interpretation emphasizes what all human beings have in common, while the exclusivist interpretation differentiates human beings. But what all human beings have in common is their biology, and "if being a Jew is being only what is universal, then a Jew is no more than his organs . . . and then what matter cremation?" Human beings are differentiated by their culture — the ideas, expressions, and loyalties they cultivate. But the Jew as "a culture-bearing creature" is "invisible" to Styron. He is troubled by the view that the Jews were the principal target of Nazi terror because the word humanity is "more palatable" to him than the word Jew. Since both murderers and victims belonged to humanity, however, the use of this word blots out "specifically who did specifically what to specifically whom" (149-53).

Sophie’s Choice is Styron’s 500-page rebuttal. The novel revises and elaborates the interpretation of the Holocaust that Styron had first advanced in the Times five years earlier. Abandoning his earlier claim that "at Auschwitz perished not only the Jews but at least one million souls who were not Jews," Styron sets out to tell the story of one non-Jewish victim of Auschwitz. Sophie Zawistowska is a young Polish woman whose entire family, including her two children, were 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. "Although she was not Jewish," he asserts in the novel, "[Sophie] had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions, and — as I think will be made plain — had in certain profound ways suffered more than most" (237). As will be made plain: with these words Styron announces the plan and motive of his novel, which is to show that a Pole was just as much a victim of Auschwitz as any Jew. Sophie is his evidence for the ecumenical nature of Nazi evil. Since he cannot produce evidence of one million victims of Auschwitz who were not Jews, however, and since the story of one Polish woman is not sufficient to prove that the Nazis’ genocidal hopes were pinned on more than merely the Jews, Styron introduces a second and even more unsettling exhibit: the Jews’ own ignorance of the reality of Auschwitz and their willingness to lay claim to it to further their own ideological goals. He contrasts Sophie’s experience with the claims that are advanced on behalf of the Jews, because his ultimate purpose is not only to refute but also to exhibit the moral danger of the view, as stated by Ozick, that the Jews were not "an instance of the Nazi slaughter," but "the purpose and whole reason for it."


 

3. Sophie’s position

In the novel, Styron’s position on the Holocaust is most explicitly set forth by the "firebrand" Polish resistance fighter Wanda with the "transcendentally German surname, Muck-Horch von Kretschmann." After her husband and father are arrested and deported to Sachsenhausen, Sophie takes refuge with Wanda, although she consistently rebuffs Wanda’s appeals to join the resistance "in the name of humanity" (401-02). One night after a poor dinner of soup and sausage, they are visited by two leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who come for some luger automatics stolen from the SS. Wanda and the Jews begin to discuss the war. She repeats something that had been said to her by another leader of the uprising, who had spoken to her of the Jews’ "precious heritage of suffering." Wanda reacts contemptuously:

I despise the idea of suffering being precious. In this war everyone suffers — Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, all the others. Everyone’s a victim. The Jews are also the victims of victims, that’s the main difference. . . . The Nazis hate you the most . . . and you will suffer 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 going to dust off their hands and stop murdering and make their peace with the world? You underestimate their evil if you have such a delusion. Because once they finish you off they’re going to come and get me. (518-19)

Wanda’s last sentences allude to the well-known aphorism of Martin Niemöller, which encapsules the universalist interpretation of the Holocaust in a moving cadence:

First they came for the Jews. I was silent. I was not 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.8

By transferring it from a Lutheran churchman notorious for his antisemitic preaching to the

Martin Niemöller

mouth of a Polish resistance fighter, Styron extracts Niemöller’s wisdom from its history and conceals its uneasiness with the Jews.9 Otherwise his rewriting of Niemöller would have been repellant. For in its insistent use of the second person, Wanda’s speech reads like a lecture to the Jews: you do not grasp the true nature of the Holocaust if you believe that extermination of the Jews was the purpose and whole reason for it. The Holocaust was not merely antisemitic; it was utterly evil. Its aims were universal and its origin was metaphysical. It was not anti-Jewish; it was anti-human, anti-life. To the elegiac universalism of Niemöller’s aphorism, in other words, Styron adds a scolding anti-exclusivism. By this means, Styron is able to position himself in the debate. He means to speak for "all the others," all the non-Jews, for whom — if those like Ozick had their way — no one would dare to speak.

Sophie’s Choice might be more accurately described as a roman a thèse than a historical novel, but among its theses is that the Jewish interpretation of history is fallacious. Styron is under some obligation, then, to show that Sophie’s Choice is itself grounded upon historical fact. In the Times he had spoken of a "ravaged survivor," a "once devoutly Catholic Polish girl [he] knew many years ago. . . ." Sophie Zawistowska is obviously meant to be this girl, and Sophie’s Choice the imaginative recreation of her history. Moreover, the novel adopts the guise of autobiography — a kind of writing that belongs to historiography rather than memory (Collingwood 293). The opening pages promise fidelity to historical time and place. Rather than tacking on names afterwards, Styron begins by invoking Manhattan and Brooklyn. He writes in the first person, which acts as a plight of his sincerity; his narrator specifies the date (1947) and his age (twenty-two); he even describes the weather, that obdurate fact of nature which is introduced into conversation and story to establish the reality of the speaker’s circumstances. In addition to offering a thinly veiled account of Styron’s literary beginnings, including the description of a first novel that unmistakably evokes Lie Down in Darkness, the narrator — Stingo, no last name — takes pains to drop the clue that in a U.S. Marine Training Unit during the war (where "everything [was] alphabetical") he bunked with Pete Strohmyer and Chuckie Stutz, just as anyone surnamed Styron would have (239). Besides, readers who know much about William Styron will know that in 1947 he likewise was twenty-two and that his native state — just like the first-person narrator’s — is Virginia.

What is more, Stingo/Styron claims expertise on the subject of the Holocaust. He refers to "entries into the historical account" by Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Olga Lengyel, Eugen Kogon, Bruno Bettelheim, et al., and quotes a generous selection of the literature, including Rudolf Höss’s memoirs, George Steiner’s critical essays, Richard Rubenstein’s post-Auschwitz theology, Jean-François Steiner’s fictionalized account of the Treblinka revolt, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. It may be a little surprising that, except for Höss’s memoirs, none of the sources that he quotes is a firsthand record. They seem not to be cited for the reason that James E. Young says a Holocaust novel usually introduces documentary sources — that is, "in order to reinforce" its "documentary authority." As Young goes on to point out, "[T]he operative trope underpinning the documentary character" of much Holocaust fiction is "the rhetorical principle of testimony, not its actuality" (61). On this showing, it is Sophie’s account of her experience in Auschwitz, confessed to Stingo in long flashbacks, that secures the narrative authority of Sophie’s Choice. The reason for citing Holocaust literature appears to be otherwise. The references establish the authority of the narrator, investing Stingo/Styron with learning and distinguishing him 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 the Holocaust depends upon the claim that Jews are ignorant of the historical reality. Obsessed with what Sophie calls their "unearned unhappiness," with "examin[ing] their miserable little Jewish souls" (141, 383), the Jews dissolve the Holocaust into the collective memory of Jewish suffering, masking the suffering of non-Jewish victims. Not that they are unique in this:

[P]eople here 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 to comprehend on any real level of awareness was another reason why [Sophie] so rarely had spoken to anyone about it, totally aside from the lacerating pain it caused her to dwell on that part of her past. (154)

What differentiates the Jews from other Americans is their urge to interpret the Holocaust, to give it some meaning, while not even trying to comprehend it on any real level of awareness. It is significant, then, that when Sophie chooses to speak to someone about it at last, she confides her Holocaust experience not to her Jewish lover, but to Stingo. Her lover is more concerned about what the Holocaust means for his fellow Jews than about what had happened to Sophie, who actually went through it.

Throughout the novel the Jews are identified (and identify themselves) with the "precious heritage of suffering." Stingo claims to "have from the very beginning responded warmly to Jews"; he recalls with longing his "first love" Miriam Bookbinder, "who even at the age of six wore in her lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race. . ." (41). The mystical racialism here may be intended ironically — a callow Gentile’s transgressive desire for the dark Autrui — but Stingo never entirely abandons this view that disconsolation is the essence of being Jewish. Years later, the Jews continue to exercise a fascination over him. To save money after losing a job in publishing, Stingo relocates from Manhattan to Brooklyn. There he finds himself "more deep in the

Purim in Tel Aviv, 1937

heart of Jewry" than if he had been "set down in Tel Aviv" (42).10 Taking a room in a garish pink boardinghouse run by Yetta Zimmerman, he remarks upon the "Byzantine flavor" of the other residents’ names — Nathan Landau, Lillian Grossman, Morris Fink, Sophie Zawistowska, Astrid Weinstein, Moishe Muskatblit — but it is he not they (or, rather, with one other exception it is he not they) who dwells in a Byzantine diaspora. "[W]hat in God’s name was I doing here," he wonders, "in the unimaginable reaches of Brooklyn, an ineffective and horny Calvinist among all these Jews?" (39). Thus Sophie’s Choice opens with an ideological and demographic reversal. The Jews are the majority; a white Southerner takes up residence in their American capital, suddenly finding himself on the margins of the dominant ideology. Soon he meets an articulate spokesman for that ideology, the loudest and perhaps most deserving claimant to the precious heritage — Sophie’s lover Nathan Landau, who lays siege to Stingo’s imagination and sucks him toward the epicenter of the novel’s tragedy (62, 65). In their first conversation, arguing with Stingo about Southern racism, Nathan shouts that a recent lynching in Georgia "is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler!" "I say this as one whose people have suffered the death camps," he explains — not as one whose beloved has suffered the camps, but whose people has. "As a Jew," he says, "I regard myself as an authority on anguish and suffering" (75).

Jewish identity, in short, is founded upon the claim to suffering. And it is the authority inherent in such a claim that motivates and directs the Jewish interpretation of the Holocaust. Yet it is not at all clear that Nathan’s knowledge of the Holocaust is very deep or wide. Stingo accuses him of being blind to the true nature of evil (223). And even in that first conversation with Stingo, Sophie chides him: "What do you know about concentration camps, Nathan Landau? Nothing at all" (79). Although he has nursed her back to health, completing the survival that liberation from Auschwitz had only begun, Nathan is not particularly concerned with Sophie’s experience:

[D]uring their first days together he had scarcely seemed aware of the raw actuality of the experience she had gone through, even though the by-products of that experience — her malnutrition, her anemia, her vanished teeth — had been his constant and devoted concern. Certainly he had not been entirely unaware of the camps; perhaps, Sophie thought, the enormity of their existence had been for Nathan, as for so many Americans, part of a drama too far away, too abstract, too foreign (and thus too hard to comprehend) to register fully on the mind. (350)

The opposition between "raw actuality" and "abstract enormity" continues to affect Nathan’s comprehension even after he becomes obsessed with "the Nazi handiwork." He interprets the Holocaust as a collective enormity for the Jews while consistently overlooking the actuality of Sophie’s experience. After seeing newsreel footage of the Warsaw ghetto in the late summer or early fall of 1946, he suddenly finds himself "in the grip of a delayed realization, as in one of the later phases of shock" and searches out "everything available on the camps, on Nuremberg, on the war, on anti-Semitism and the slaughter of the European Jews," reading books like The Jew and Human Sacrifice by Hermann Strack (1909), The New Poland and the Jews by Simon Segal (1938), and The Promise That Hitler Kept by Stefan Szende (1945). The first two titles in particular are telling. A Christian theologian at the University of Berlin, Strack wrote his book to detail and refute the blood libel, "earn[ing] him, not praise as a lover of truth, but condemnation as a lackey of the Jews" (Segel 69). The New Poland and the Jews described the rise of the Sanacja regime in Poland in 1926, which "unleash[ed] such an anti-Semitic hue and cry that Poland before the war became the leading anti-Semitic country in Europe, second to Germany alone" (Ringelblum 10). In other words, these two books reflect and reinforce Nathan’s tendency to deny the "raw actuality" of the Holocaust and to displace it into Jewish fears of totalizing antisemitism. Although Nathan begins to behave "like a soul quite troubled and possessed," his reaction to the Holocaust is out of touch with its reality:

Wasn’t it possible, he asked Sophie once — and, he added, speaking as a cellular biologist — that on the level of human behavior the Nazi phenomenon was analogous to a huge and crucial colony of cells going morally berserk, creating the same kind of danger to the body of humanity as does a virulently malignant tumor in a single human body? (351).

The key here is Nathan’s assertion of expertise "as a cellular biologist," because of course he is nothing of the sort. As his brother Larry reveals to Stingo later, "Nathan is not a research biologist. He is not a bona-fide scientist, and he has no degree of any kind. All that is a simple fabrication" (462). His interpretation of the Holocaust — Nathan’s claim to be an authority on anguish and suffering — is based upon a fantasy.

The biological interpretation is a momentary distraction from the Jewish interpretation. Already "troubled and possessed" by it, Nathan is pushed over the edge by ideological thunderings of what the Holocaust means for the Jews. This occurs at a party that he and Sophie attend on October 16, 1946, the night when ten Nuremberg defendants are hanged. As they get dressed for the party, a special radio bulletin informs them that "in the prison at Nuremberg ex-Field Marshal Hermann Göring had been discovered dead in his cell, a suicide." Nathan, whose reckoning with "the recently bygone unspeakables" could easily turn into "a preoccupying rage," is immediately transformed from "his exuberant, rollicking, outgoing self to a desperate soul riddled with anguish." Sophie feels "a hovering and ominous discomfort at the bubbling-over of all the things on earth she wanted to forget" (349). At the party Nathan joins a group that is crowded around the radio, listening to news reports of the Nuremberg executions. Harold Schoenthal, a young philosophy professor at Brooklyn College, "very tortured and unhappy, very conscious of being Jewish," suddenly begins to address them. "Nuremberg is a farce," he cries,

these hangings are a farce. This is only a token vengeance, a sideshow! . . . Nuremberg is an obscene diversion to give the appearance of justice while murderous hatred of the Jews still poisons the German people. It is the German people who should be themselves exterminated — they who allowed these men to rule them and kill Jews. Not these . . . handful of carnival villains. . . . Are we going to allow those people to grow rich and slaughter Jews again? (357)

Schoenthal is a fanatic, warning that the Holocaust was not the final solution of the Jewish problem. It merely "prove[d] that Jews can never be safe anywhere. He almost shouted that word anywhere," Sophie tells Stingo afterwards. "It was like listening to a very powerful speaker," she recalls. "I had heard he was supposed to keep his students hypnotized and I remember being fascinated as I watched and listened" (357). Of course, Schoenthal is not the first "hypnotic" speaker in this century to have called for the extermination of an entire people. The clear implication is that in his hyperconsciousness of being Jewish — perverted by a racial ideology — Schoenthal is an avatar of Hitler.

If this sounds far-fetched consider Schoenthal’s effect upon Nathan. Listening to Schoenthal, he "was like — well, he was like someone who was hypnotized, Sophie recalls" (359). He has fallen under the spell of Schoenthal’s anti-antisemitism, an ideological representation of the Jewish experience. Early the next morning, wired on amphetamines, Nathan drives Sophie to Connecticut, saying, "Schoenthal is right. If it can happen there, won’t it happen here? The Cossacks are coming! Here’s one Jewboy who’s going to make tracks for the countryside" (360). He identifies Jewishness with a tense and suspicious watchfulness — a paranoid watchfulness — for violent hatred of the Jews. As he drives, Nathan keeps repeating that "Schoenthal is one hundred percent right. . ." (363). And suddenly he begins to call Sophie Irma — for Irma Grese, the SS woman supervisor at Auschwitz who was notorious for her cruelty. He begins to torture Sophie with questions: "[W]hat did you do, baby, when they burned the ghettos down?" (366). He is oblivious to her tears, the anguish he is causing her. Outside Danbury he stops the car, leads Sophie into the Connecticut woods, urinates on her, and then kicks her in the ribs with a "polished leather shoe," saying, "dot vill teach you . . . dirty Jüdinschwein!" (370).

The Jew who claims to be an authority on anguish and suffering becomes the author of anguish and suffering. As Sophie observes, Nathan knows nothing at all about the death camps. But she does know; she was there. His claim to authority on suffering, then, is really the arrogation of another’s suffering. He is able to demand with a sneer that Sophie "justify to his satisfaction the way in which she survived Auschwitz while ‘the others’ (as he put it) perished" (336) only because he is ignorant of the real extent to which she — and anyone — suffered there. As a consequence, he becomes her torturer, the reincarnation of the ss in her life. If Nathan himself suffers, it is not at the hands of Nazis; he does not suffer by virtue of belonging to a "people [who] have suffered the death camps." He suffers because he is mentally ill — a paranoid schizophrenic (463). One critic suggests that Nathan’s "madness reflects the human condition after the Holocaust" (Pearce 292). This is almost certainly the case, but there is more to it than that. In the novel, schizophrenia is defined as a double bind, an irrational contradiction. In a conversation overheard by Sophie, Rudolf Höss complains that the regime’s policy toward the Jews — extracting slave labor from them while also seeking to exterminate them — is "giving us all schizophrenia. . ." (443). For Styron, this schizophrenia — not their aim of annihilating the Jewish people, but the Nazis’ development of a "new form of human society" based on the expendability of the very people they were enslaving — is the genuinely unique characteristic of the Holocaust.12 And such slavery, such a new form of human cruelty, requires neither Jews nor Nazis. Nathan is "given schizophrenia" by something similar to what gave schizophrenia to Höss: namely, the irrational contradiction between paranoid Jewish fears of violent hatred (which, according to Styron, is the ideological basis of Jewish identity) while simultaneously lusting to inflict suffering upon Sophie. What Styron means to show is that Jewish historical ignorance, displaying itself as a self-righteous and exaggerated insistence upon the exclusive Jewish quality of suffering in the Holocaust, inflicts further suffering on the real victims.

"It is surpassingly difficult," Stingo/Styron reflects after coming across George Steiner’s Language and Silence in 1967, "for many Jews to see beyond the consecrated nature of the Nazis’ genocidal fury," and to make more than "fleeting reference to the vast multitudes of non-Jews — the myriad Slavs and the Gypsies — who were swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps, perishing just as surely as the Jews, though sometimes less methodically" (237). The failure to see the non-Jewish victims is inseparable from the Jewish effort to "consecrate" the Holocaust in collective memory. But to consecrate the Holocaust, then — to reduce it to a Jewish religious holiday, as an antagonist once put it in debate with me — is to treat the other victims as non-persons, just as the Nazis had treated the Jews. And thus it is to be Jews without 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. Exclusivism is the cause of further suffering.

 

5. Styron’s universal tragedy

In opposition to the Jewish consecration, Styron interprets the Holocaust as a universal human tragedy. Sophie suffers "as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions," because Nazi 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-Jews were also swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps, perishing just as surely as the Jews. What then did the victims have in common? They did not share an identity by virtue of belonging to the same victimized people; they shared the same fate. One by one they were reduced to what Lawrence L. Langer has called "choiceless choice," "where crucial decisions did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of abnormal response and another. . ." (Versions 72). Here Sophie is the representative, indeed sacrificial figure. When she makes the choice to which the novel’s title refers — being a "Polack" and not a "Yid," she is given the "privilege" of choosing which of her two children is to die in the gas chamber and which is to live — she has no real choice, of course (529). She is given only the monstrous illusion of choice. She is not a moral agent, choosing for herself among a range of options and by this means defining her character; she is the creature of the SS officer who reduces her "choices" to two. It is meaningless to speak of "choice" in this context. And that is Styron’s point. The Holocaust is not the only site of choiceless choice known to modernity; it may only be the most exemplary.

In Styron’s hands, the choiceless choice is a modern reworking of Aristotelian hamartia. It is not a moral defect, but a tragic affliction. Simone Weil

Simone Weil

 is the quoted source: "Affliction stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but does not" (158).13 Although each is stained by it, none of the principal characters in Sophie’s Choice is responsible for crime. They are stamped with an affliction not of their choosing. If Sophie does not choose to be afflicted with the guilt of having sent one of her own children to the gas chamber, Nathan does not choose to be a paranoid schizophrenic. He does not set out to become her torturer. His abuse of Sophie ends in their mutual suicide; it is not so much unjust or cruel as it is tragic, symbolic, the compulsive repetition of a universal pattern in twentieth-century experience. Thinking back, Stingo says:

Now, after the passing of time in this bloody century, whenever there has occurred any of those unimaginable deeds of violence that have plundered our souls, my memory has turned back to Nathan . . . and his image has always seemed to foreshadow these wretched unending years of madness, illusion, error, dream and strife. (487)

Nathan is tragically afflicted by a doctrine of Jewish exclusivism — a precious heritage of suffering — which is fundamentally racist and therefore provokes him to violence. He does not choose to be a Jew, and his acceptance of the Jews’ racist inheritance of exclusivism is a tragic mistake.

Styron makes this clear by drawing a parallel between Southerners and the Jews. Southerners feel "a grander empathy with Jewish folk," Stingo says, largely because of their deep Protestant intimacy with the Hebrew Scriptures, but also "because Southerners have possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb" (41). Nathan disputes this grand empathy, comparing one of the "nastiest abettors" of Southern racism — Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo — to eliminationist antisemitism’s Führer (223). For him racism is precisely what divides Southerner and Jew; he claims a kinship with the victims of Southern racism. As it turns out, though, Stingo is right. There is a grand empathy between him and Nathan in any number of ways: they are both in love with the same woman; they are both sensitive to postwar cultural changes, especially the new wave in American fiction; they are both the heirs of traditions which identify them; they both dwell in a "lonely and outcast state" (12). And if the Southerner has "possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb," Nathan possesses a sacrificial lamb of his own — Sophie. No more than Nathan, though, does Stingo choose to be a Southerner. His inheritance of the Southern legacy of slavery and racism is a tragic mistake. It might be argued that Stingo flees to New York to escape the curse of the inheritance, but comes into it anyway. Styron literalizes the inheritance, contriving to have Stingo live on the proceeds of a slave sale. In the late 1850s, his great-grandfather had sold a sixteen-year-old slave boy, significantly named Artiste, for $800 in gold coins when the boy was falsely accused of making an "improper advance" at a white belle. Ninety years later, Stingo’s father discovers the coins walled-up in a cellar. The money is passed down to Stingo, who lives on it as a stipend while writing his first novel (32-33). Only afterwards does he recognize that it is the token of a "guilt" which he must "shrive" (34). When Nathan accuses him of complicity in the lynching of a young African American for ogling a white girl — "your refusal to admit responsibility in the death of Bobby Weed is the same as that of those Germans who disavowed the Nazi party even as they watched blindly and unprotestingly as the thugs vandalized the synagogues and perpetrated the Kristallnacht," he shouts — Stingo feels the accusation is "horrendously wrong," yet finds he cannot answer it (76). The reason it is wrong, by Styron’s lights, is that the inheritance of racism is not a matter of responsibility, because 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 categories for interpreting the human fate. And therefore it is right to call the deaths of Sophie and Nathan, as Stingo does, a "real tragedy" (556). Sophie’s Choice aims at a katharsis of the metaphysical evil that afflicted them no less than it has bloodied this entire century.

Styron’s tragic universalism raises problems. To merge genocide, lynch-law racism, and the abuse of women into "this bloody century" with its "unimaginable deeds of violence that have plundered 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 them to a mystical realm where the forces of light and darkness do battle eternally.14 As

Franz Rosenzweig

the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig points out, this is "to posit a world radically different from the terrestrial," and thus to distance evil from the human effort to repair the terrestrial world (Glatzer 39). If evil is absolute what sense is there in speaking of a human capacity to do good? When evil is extraterrestrialized in this way, it loses its power to disturb; it even loses its name. Small wonder, then, that Styron calls the SS officer who gives Sophie the choiceless choice Fritz Jemand von Niemand — someone from no one — a good name, he remarks, "for one who appeared to Sophie as if from nowhere and vanished likewise forever. . ." (526). This is how he means to characterize the Nazi evil: it had no particular source in German history nor in German ideology. It appeared as if from nowhere and vanished again — not forever, but merely to reappear under the name of another people and ideology, perhaps even that of the Jews.

The tragic interpretation extracts the Holocaust from history. To support his case that the Nazis’ victims were identified not by their Jewishness but by their affliction and that the Jews were as capable as anyone of afflicting others, Styron must distort the historical record at certain key points.15 To gain authority for his poetics of affliction, he cites Simone Weil but ignores her anti-Judaism — like Hitler she believed that the Jews were a race, not a religion — and her death from voluntary starvation, which was nothing like a choiceless choice.16 He conceals the fact (or does not know) that the universalizing of the Nazi threat was an invention of Communist Party discourse. In The Ashes of Six Million Jews, a book-length poem of 1946, for example, Fred Blair gives a close and graphic description of a mass execution of Jews — one of the first literary representations in the language. The Party’s chairman in Wisconsin and a member of its national committee, Blair is also one of the first writers to use the term holocaust, although he warns not of a Jewish but of a "human holocaust." After they have shot their victims and dumped them in a mass grave,

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

The phrase suits a universalizing ideology. The six million Jews, Blair writes, must "all witness be/ To the degradation of mankind/ Under the bestial fascist mind" (12). Indeed, the poem is dedicated, not to the Jews whose death it records, but to "the Wisconsin men who died in the immortal Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting fascism in Spain." Predictably, then, Blair’s message is 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 land that Lenin founded," where "every nation, creed, and race/ Finds a co-equal dwelling place. . . ." For only Sovietism can destroy "the social roots that could produce/ The ashes of six million Jews" (Blair 21). This rosy vision hardly corresponds to the truth about the Soviet Union’s campaign of official state antisemitism which began with the murder of 500,000 to 600,000 Jews in the Great Terror of the thirties and ended with the extinction of Jewish Soviet culture.17

Universalism entails the suppression of inconvenient facts for the sake of a utopian world in which all are one — for Weil, in Christ; for Blair, under Soviet rule; for Styron, where "love flow[s] out on all living things" (560). And though the new left has tried to substitute multiculturalism for universalism, it has not been able to abandon completely what the feminist philosopher Anne Phillips calls the "universal pretensions of political thought." As Phillips herself says, speaking for one branch of the new left,

[F]eminism cannot afford to situate itself for difference and against universality, for the impulse that takes us beyond our immediate and specific difference is a vital necessity in any radical transformation. (71)

Where radical transformation is the final cause, ethnic identity is finally of no account, because what is sought is the universal good — a good that transcends ethnic differences. "This line of thought," the biblical scholar Jon D. Levenson points out, "has

Jon D. Levenson

traditionally served powerfully to reinforce an image of Judaism as separatist, exclusivistic, and chauvinistic, in contradistinction to Christianity" — or Communism or liberalism for that matter — "which [are] thought to be integrationist, inclusive, and non-particularist" (215). From the Jewish side, things look rather different. Since the Roman Empire conquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E., the Jews have resisted "Western" claims to universality. As the feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether observes, "The heart of the Jewish struggle was a struggle against a pseudo-universalism which assumed the culture of the dominant group was a universal culture, the culture of true civilization, against which all else was barbarism" (233). Under whatever name it chooses, universalism is the apology for ideological domination. And whether it is inspired by fury at the "bestial fascist mind" that plans a "human holocaust" or fear and pity for the "affliction [that] stamps the soul to its very depths," any reinterpretation of the Holocaust as a universal threat which was going to come for the whole world is a projection (and denial) of imperialistic cultural ambitions. From this angle, the accusation of Jewish exclusivism can be seen more accurately as an effort to stigmatize and discredit resistance to the hegemony implicit within a universalizing ideology.

6. Liberal anti-Judaism

Although Foucault, Richard Rorty, Alasdair Macintyre, and others have warned about the pseudo-universalizing tendency in Western traditions like liberalism, scholars on the left have not hesitated to condemn the Jewish interpretation of the Holocaust. I have already mentioned David E. Stannard, who argues that not only is Jewish Holocaust study "demonstrably erroneous," but what is worse, "the larger thesis it fraudulently advances is racist and violence-provoking" (167). And the liberal attack continues to mount. The "very idea of uniqueness is fatuous," declares the historian Peter Novick. In the first full-length study of The Holocaust in American Life, he accounts for the cultural "obsession" by arguing that "Jews were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics. . . ." Encouraged to adopt "an essential victim identity" and a phony exclusivism ("Holocaust possessiveness," he calls it), American Jews have turned inward and rightward, becoming "parochial" in their concerns and deserting their longstanding commitment to "the more equal distribution of rewards which had been the aim of liberal social policies" (182-83, 191-97). Albert S. Lindemann agrees that the uniqueness thesis is "profoundly mistaken" (xvii). But he goes even farther. In Esau’s Tears, a major new history of antisemitism based upon the proposition that the "Jews have been as capable as any other group of provoking hostility," Lindemann associates the thesis with "protoracist" Jewish ideas that have "contributed in vague, often contradictory ways to modern racism," which culminated in the Holocaust (74). Thus the Jews are partly responsible 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, contends that Holocaust study is a propaganda enterprise. He calls it The Holocaust Industry (2000). Sharply distinguishing it from "the Nazi holocaust," "the actual historical event" (3), Finkelstein insists that the Holocaust is an "ideological representation," a political machine designed to capitalize upon Jewish victimhood, which dates only from the Six-Day War in 1967. "Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel’s and its own morally indefensible policies," he concludes (149).

The particulars of the case may be new, but historically speaking the left has always been uncomfortable with singling out the Jews. In his inaugural lecture to the French Academy, the historian Alain Besançon points out that "in the Soviet Union under the Communists, it was forbidden to single out the Jews as objects of Nazi genocide; only undifferentiated ‘victims of fascism’ were recognized" (26). Besançon goes on to speculate that this prohibition "was intended to mask the regime’s own anti-Semitic policies," but a more basic reason is that the left opposes special consideration for the Jews on principle. Its historical attitude is summed up in two slogans that emerged from the December 1789 debate over Jewish rights in the French house of deputies: "The Jew is a man before he is a Jew." And: "To the Jew as a citizen, everything; to the Jews as a people, nothing."18 These principles are logical extensions of the Rights of Man, but they are also — and historically they have operated as — a demand that the Jews abandon their Jewish exclusiveness (including their exclusively Jewish ideas) as the price of admission into full citizenship and social acceptance. "[T]he Jews were to be considered as individual

Shmuel Trigano

 citizens in the modern nation-states of Western Europe," explains the social theorist Shmuel Trigano. "Accordingly, they had to give up the historical bonds they had formed over many centuries and become abstract individuals whose Jewishness was no more than a private affair" (300).

What Enlightenment liberals conceived as "civic betterment" entailed both a reform of the Jews’ social habits, morals, and perhaps even religion, as well as an improvement of their political status (see Jacob Katz 192). The Jews were simultaneously a sign of the failure of civil society to that time, but also the crudest example of "superstition" and "backwardness." As Alain Finkielkraut observes in The Imaginary Jew, "[T]he Mosaic Law that had preserved them as a unique people and anti-Semitic myths were both subsumed under the category of prejudice and superstition" (72). In his famous Essai of 1789, for example, the Catholic Abbé Henri Grégoire called for emancipation of the Jews, but only on the condition that the organized Jewish 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 an ocean of stupid beliefs." At the same time, though, "[t]he Jews are members of the universal family which is in the process of creating fraternity among all the peoples" (qtd. in Hertzberg 336-37). Meanwhile, the conservative opponents of emancipation warned that Jewish religious practices, which restricted the Jews from eating with their fellow citizens or marrying them, were devices by which the Jews separated themselves from the rest of society. "You will see that it is not I who exclude the Jews," said the Jacobin deputy Jean François Reubell; "they exclude themselves" (qtd. in Hertzberg 355). The Jews’ obstinate clinging to the exclusivist rigor of their law — their insistence upon ritual purity, dietary restrictions, and endogamy — was thus a political obstacle to full citizenship. Give up your exclusiveness, the liberals promised the Jews, and emancipation will follow. The liberal principle "The Jew is a man before he is a Jew" became the assimilationist advice faites-vous oublier (make yourself inconspicuous), which was the implicit social contract upon which the Jews entered into their full legal rights (see Hertzberg 343).

The ideal of the liberal state was to create a common set of values, the grounds for a shared civic identity — what has come to be called a civil religion — while allowing for individual and group differences. But what Enlightenment liberalism failed to account for was that in the name of emancipation it was merely imposing a majoritarian ideology upon the Jews. In America, the civil religion acquired a noticeably Protestant taste. In December 1845, for instance, a Jewish merchant in Charleston, South Carolina, was arrested for selling a pair of gloves on Sunday in violation of the city’s "blue" laws. Although his attorney pointed out that the Fourth Commandment reads Six days shalt thy labor, and that by requiring Jews to observe the Christian sabbath in addition to their own the state was forcing them to violate Jewish law, the arrest was upheld. The Charleston Sunday Times editorialized in favor of the court’s decision:

Freedom of religion means a mere abolition of religious disabilities. You are free to worship God in any manner you please; and this liberty of conscience cannot be violated. An ordinance for the better observance of Sunday is a mere prohibition of public employment in the way of labor, trade, and business. We cannot in this perceive how liberty of conscience is to be invaded. It does not say to the Hebrew, "You shall not keep holy the seventh day," but merely declares that you shall not disturb the Christian by business or labor on his Sabbath. (Schappes 281)

You shall not disturb the Christian — there in a phrase is the hidden majoritarian premise behind 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 detaching themselves from Jewish culture and religion. Jewishness came to be identified with the Enlightenment values of individual freedom and liberation from tradition; and the result, as the political scientist Steven B. Smith observes,

has been the transformation of Judaism from a body of revealed law into something like a modern cultural or political identity. The transformation of Jewishness, once considered a mark of God’s election, into a modern sociological category of group identity has raised powerful and profound problems for the survival of Judaism in the secular liberal state. (202)

This is the heart of the problem. The hostility to Jewish exclusivism is a hostility to Jewishness as such, because the Jews are defined by the exclusivist conviction that they are an autonomous and chosen people.19 Liberalism is disturbed by the chauvinism or even racism implicit in the very concept. And what it proposes instead is the ideal of impartial morality. Perhaps the best contemporary example — certainly among the most influential — is John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, which argues that deliberative morality must occur behind a "veil of ignorance" (136-42). On Rawls’s argument, justice demands that people behave as if they did not know their real circumstances, whether they are rich or poor, powerful or weak, well-connected or isolated — or Gentile or Jewish. The demand of modern secular liberalism, in other words, is that people divest themselves of their historical identity as a prerequisite to justice. And if the Jews wish to belong to a just society, then — if they wish to be moral — they must give up the chauvinistic or even racist conception of themselves as a chosen people. In political terms they are expected to abandon the idea of themselves as a distinct and autonomous people, and assimilate into the majority. In theological terms they are asked to opt out of their covenant with the Jewish God, which is the basis of their election, and to embrace an impartial morality that excludes any preference for their own kind ("to the Jews as a people, nothing"). In short, they are to stop being Jews — except on the understanding that religious affiliation is an individual concern, a matter of private worship, which is not the Jewish understanding. Even to worship as Jews, they must adopt the Christian majority’s conception of themselves. They must not consecrate their own history in their own way, but must acknowledge that they are racists if they do. And it is never thought that these demands might be conversion and annihilation under different names.


 

7. Styron’s contradictions

There is a contradiction here. Styron’s Jews, faulted for their historical amnesia and exclusivist appropriation of the Holocaust, are already thoroughly assimilated Jews. They are not merely ignorant of the Holocaust ("What’s Owswitch?" says one character in Sophie’s Choice [232]); they neither practice nor have any familiarity with their own religious traditions. They do not observe Jewish law; they do not recite Jewish prayers; they do not follow the Jewish calendar. Although Schoenthal is described as "very conscious of being Jewish," even his Jewishness is defined negatively — as a hypersensitivity to antisemitism rather than the positive commitment to anything. For Styron, breasts are Jewish: he says so three different times (130, 135, 137). Overweight mothers are Jewish (178). Wearing a light scent of perfume rather than being drenched in musk is "real Jewish class" (181). The neurotic temptress Leslie Lapidus is a "Jewish princess," as Stingo grasps later after "much study in Jewish sociology" (184). The only Jewish books which are mentioned are Saul Bellow’s. Abraham, Moses, the Psalmist, and Daniel are to be found in "the Protestant/Jewish Bible" (41). In Stingo’s fantasies of a Jewish home, the Torah and the Talmud lay open, "having just undergone pious scrutiny. . ." (177). But in reality, as he subsequently discovers, they are nowhere to be found — a measure of the extent to which Styron’s Jews have given up their religion. Nathan’s "show-biz stories" are described as "profoundly Jewish" (470), but there is no Mishnah, no Gemara, no Midrash, no Zohar, no Maimonides, no Shulhan Arukh, not even a prayerbook or bentsher. Although their "parents had been Orthodox Jews," neither Nathan nor his brother Larry "had been inside a synagogue for years" (555). Naturally, then, at Nathan’s funeral the presiding clergyman is Unitarian, because "a rabbi seemed inappropriate" to Larry, the surviving son of Orthodox Jewish parents (556). The Reverend DeWitt invokes Lincoln, Emerson, Dale Carnegie, Spinoza, Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud, and Jesus of Nazareth — "once, in rather distant terms" (557). Stingo finds such invocations "fucking bullshit," probably because their grabbag quality identifies them as middlebrow, and at the graveside he offers a poem by Emily Dickinson instead. To someone raised in the Jewish tradition, who would have arranged an Orthodox funeral for his parents, at which Psalms and El Maley Rahamim would have been chanted, the cultural distance separating Emily Dickinson from Lincoln, Emerson, and even Dale Carnegie would have been difficult to appreciate.

For Styron, however, the distance is immense, because he amplifies minor differences in a tradition from which Jewish texts are excluded altogether. To gain admission to this tradition, the Jews have historically been expected to abandon the textual study which has not only made them strange and unfamiliar to the enlightened, but would have served as the basis for a critique of such enlightenment. Styron’s interpretation of the Holocaust divests the Jewish victims of their Jewishness and assigns their tragedy instead to the universal category of choiceless choice. But he does not see how such an interpretation robs the choice that generations of European Jews had made — to remain faithful to their people and their God — of any meaning. Under Hitler, the Jews were rounded up, deported, enslaved, tortured, and murdered not because they were "afflicted" in Simone Weil’s sense, but because they were Jews — because they were the descendants of Jews who had chosen not to give up their religion. Unlike the European Jews, Stingo does not choose to inherit the legacy of slavery, Nathan does not choose to be a paranoid schizophrenic, Sophie does not choose to be afflicted with the guilt of having murdered her child. And unlike the European Jews, then, they really do (in Peter Novick’s phrase) accept "an essential victim identity." Jewish religion, by contrast, transforms choiceless suffering into the choice zakharta ki eved hayiyta b’eretz Mitzrayim, "remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt" (Deut 5.15), which forms the basis of the commandment not to oppress the other (e.g. Exod 22.20), a commandment that is repeated thirty-six times in the Torah — more than any other (b. Bava Metzia 59b). In other words, Jewish ethnicity does not function, as the leftist critic Werner Sollors claims, to dissociate the Jews from "‘other people,’ in particular ‘non-Jews’ (to render ‘goyim,’ the Hebrew word for Gentiles)" (288), but rather serves as the basis of political and ethical respect.20 And the source of Jewish ethnicity is Jewish 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 exclusivist response to the Holocaust. Not merely in Styron’s novel, though, but in Europe prior to 1933 many Jews adhered to the liberal demand that they abandon their exclusivism. Yet when Hitler rose to power, he condemned the Jews as a whole, whether or not they had abandoned their exclusivism. The liberalism that had promised an end to antisemitism turned out to be empty. To the left-liberal ideology of abstract citizenship the Holocaust stands as an enduring challenge, because the Jews were rounded up and murdered as a distinct and autonomous people. Auschwitz has forever reactualized the idea that liberalism has never known how to handle. It demonstrated a latent weakness on the left: namely, an inability to recognize the Jews’ autonomy and unique history. This is a weakness that the left-liberal critics of Jewish exclusivism have yet to grasp. Not only does Styron fail to recognize the Jews as a people. He fails to understand the sense in which the Holocaust calls into question the left-liberal distaste for Jewish exclusivism. If the Jews are without memory of other people’s suffering, it is because he has constructed them as assimilated Jews, Jews without memory; because first Enlightenment liberalism and now the new left would oblige them to abandon the sources of their collective memory.



Notes

1. New York Times, July 20, 1998, E1. Earlier versions of this paper–or portions of it–were read before the Modern Language Association in December 1997 and the Association for Jewish Studies in December 1998. For help in writing it I am indebted to Robert A. Gahl Jr., Rabbi William G. Hamilton, Paul M. Hedeen, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Robert R. Shandley, Richard E. Sherwin, Ruth R. Wisse, Wendy I. Zierler, and the anonymous reviewers for American Literary History. Back to Text

2. Although it is not always the same as the hardback (see n. 13 below), I cite the paperback edition from Vintage International throughout this essay, because it is more readily available. Back to Text

3. See Bauer; Cohen 27-32; Dawidowicz, Holocaust and the Historians 9-15, 119-20; Fackenheim, To Mend the World 280-88; Gilbert 824-25; Goldhagen 406-15; Steven T. Katz; Langer, "Beyond Theodicy"; Lipstadt 215-16; Ozick, "Liberal’s Auschwitz." Back to Text

4. The books referred to here are Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 1998); Norman G. Finkelstein, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Holt, 1998); Lindemann; Novick. Back to Text

5. Schoenfeld singles out for criticism Robin Ruth Linden’s Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1992), winner of the Helen Hooven Santmyer Prize in Women's Studies; Carol Rittner and John K. Roth’s anthology of primary and secondary sources, Different Voices: Women in the Holocaust (New York: Paragon, 1993); and Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman’s collection of papers, Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998). The phrase "cutting-edge scholarship" is Ofer and Weitzman’s. Back to Text

6. The term is usually advanced to distinguish racial antisemitism from religious anti-Judaism (see Ruether 183-226; Langmuir 23-41; von Kellenbach 10-13). Oddly enough, Bernard Lazare introduced anti-Judaism to collapse the very distinction (8). While wishing to preserve the distinction, I follow Lazare in separating modern anti-Judaism from its religious origins, agreeing with him that "anti-Judaism, from the seventeenth century on, is in all respects quite different from the anti-Judaism of the preceding centuries. The social side gets gradually the upperhand of the religious side, though this latter continues to exist" (95). The anti-Judaism that I am describing in this essay is political rather than religious. Back to Text

7. The proceedings of the International Symposium on the Holocaust were published in Fleischner. Although Styron uses the original spelling, I shall insist upon antisemitism except when quoting. The original spelling, invented in 1879 by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, implies there is something called "Semitism" to which antisemites stand in principled opposition. But this is itself an antisemitic fantasy. Antisemitism does not depend for its existence upon a Jewish ism nor even upon the Jews. It is self-generated and freestanding. Hence the spelling antisemitism. For a more principled opposition I reserve the term anti-Judaism. Back to Text

8. Apparently the aphorism originated in speeches that Niemöller gave after the war, although he seems never to have published it anywhere. Thus it belongs to oral tradition. The version here is quoted from Encyclopedia of the Holocaust 3: 1061. On the provenance of the aphorism see Zerner. I am grateful to Richard Pierard for this reference. Back to Text

9. On Niemöller’s antisemitic sermonizing see Michael; Goldhagen 112-14. Even after becoming an outspoken opponent of the regime, Niemöller associated the Nazi evil with the "eternal" crime of the Jews rather than seeing them as the Nazis’ principal victim. "The Jews are not the only ones who crucified Christ," he reminded a large audience in March 1935 (qtd. in Friedman 434). His initial opposition was institutional rather than ideological. Together with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he founded the Pastors’ Emergency League on Christmas 1933. The two men believed that by excluding converted Jews from the leadership of the Confessing Church, Hitler’s regime was interfering in church governance, although Niemöller conceded that it was "unfortunate" that converted Jews should hold positions of importance within the church (see Friedman; Friedländer 45). Bonhoeffer, another Lutheran churchman who became famous for his resistance to the Nazis (he was executed in Flossenbürg), was also blinded to Nazi antisemitism by Christian theology (see Ruether 224). Back to Text

10. To name Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem has cultural and political connotations. Although the Israeli Knesset declared in January 1950 that Jerusalem had "always" been the capital of the Jewish nation (Sachar 434), in liberal thinking it remains an international city–a corpus separatum belonging not to Israel but to the United Nations (Harsch 20). Tel Aviv, by contrast, holds the title of "the first Jewish city"; it represents the revival of Hebrew and the building of a culture on the principle "everything Jewish." Thus it is the capital of the Jewish ideology. According to Schör (who gathers a remarkable array of texts to illustrate these points), "Tel Aviv is the tangible expression of a practical, militant brand of Zionism"; and as such, it tends to evoke "an antisemitism which probably many visitors bring with them, unconsciously seeking confirmation of their prejudices" (161). Back to Text

11. Shapiro characterizes paranoia as a mode of cognition that is distinguished by a rigid directedness of attention, a tense and hyperalert scanning for evidence to confirm its suspicions. And the tension under which this alertness is maintained is such that it is easily set off (see Shapiro 54-107). Back to Text

12. See Sophie’s Choice 254-56. Here the Holocaust is analyzed in terms set forth by the death-of-God theologian Richard L. Rubenstein in The Cunning of History, which Styron describes as "one of the essential handbooks of the Nazi era. . . ." This is perhaps the best source to support a metaphysical interpretation of Nazi evil, since Rubenstein’s "tragic theology" posits a separation between history and metaphysics, and this is what enables him to speak of the death of God (see Braiterman 92-100). Back to Text

13. Slightly misquoted from Weil, Waiting for God. The original reads like this: "Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps 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 produce but actually does not" (121). Back to Text

14. Haas makes exactly this point at the start of his Morality after Auschwitz. Back to Text

15. Link notes that in his "interest in showing the Jews . . . were not the only victims of the ss," Styron deviates from historical fact by having the professors from the University of Cracow, including Sophie’s father and husband, murdered at Sachsenhausen; in truth, they were freed in March 1940 (137n). Rosenfeld points out that, in order to suggest that "the most powerful persecutors of the Jews were other Jews," Styron falsely identifies Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of occupied Poland, as "a Jew, mirabile Dictu. . ." (161). As far as I am aware, no one noticed when Styron quietly deleted this identification from the paperback edition (249 in the first Random House edition [1979]; 271 in the Vintage International [1992]). Back to Text

16. On her anti-Judaism, see Nevin. Both Weil and Hitler denied that Judaism could be considered a religion. "Their [the Jews’] whole existence is based on one single great lie," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race. . ." (232). In The Need for Roots, Weil premises that religious thought is genuine if and only if it is universal in its appeal. "Such is not the case with Judaism," she adds, "which is linked to a racial conception" (93). The observation about Weil’s death was offered by one of the anonymous reviewers for ALH. Back to Text

17. See Rapoport; Vaksberg. The phrases "campaign of official state antisemitism" and "extinction of Jewish Soviet culture" belong to Vaksberg. According to Rapoport, "The ratio of Jewish victims [in the Great Terror] was probably the highest among all the Soviet nationalities" (54). Back to Text

18. The first was advanced by Mirabeau, one of the principal spokesmen for the revolution; the second by Clermont-Tonnerre, leader of the nobility who united with the Third Estate (see Hertzberg 358-59). Back to Text

19. For the argument that the Jews are defined by being the chosen people see Wyschogrod. Although Wyschogrod’s theology is anti-Maimonidean, Kellner has traced a similar account of definition by chosenness in Maimonides. Lamm has also argued, relying upon Maimonides, that a Jew is defined by a dual relationship–a vertical relationship with God and a horizontal relationship with the people of Israel. The doctrine of chosenness has itself been challenged in Jewish thought, most notably by Mordecai Kaplan, who dismissed it as an anachronism and found it incompatible with the civil status of the modern Jew (see Judaism as a Civilization 22-24, 36-43; "Rejecting the Chosen People Idea"). For a history of chosenness in American Jewish thought, including an examination of Kaplan, see Eisen. For a philosophical attempt to distinguish "chosen people" from "master race," see Novak. Back to Text

20. See Levinas, Difficult Freedom 176-77, 223-25; "From Ethics to Exegesis" 110. Back to Text



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