Inventing the Enemy: Essays Read Free

Metro on a hot evening—cheap scent concealing animal odours. People in Russia soak themselves in scent, whether they have had a bath or not, but mostly when they have not . . .
Tatiana was still cheerfully reviewing the situation when the bedroom door opened and “the Klebb woman” appeared . . . wearing a semi-transparent nightgown in orange crêpe de chine . . . One dimpled knee, like a yellowish coconut, appeared thrust forward between the half-open folds of the nightgown in the classic stance of the modeller . . . Rosa Klebb had taken off her spectacles and her naked face was now thick with mascara and rouge and lipstick . . .
She patted the couch beside her.
“Turn out the top light, my dear. The switch is by the door. Then come and sit beside me. We must get to know each other better.” (chapter 9)
     
    The Jew has been described as monstrous and smelly since at least the birth of Christianity, given that he is modeled on the Antichrist, the archenemy, the foe not only of man but of God:
     
This is how he looks: his head is like a burning flame, his right eye is bloodshot, his left is a cat-like green and has two pupils, his eyelids are white, his lower lip is large, his right femur is weak, his feet large, his thumb flat and elongated. (
Syriac Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
fifth century, volume 1, part 4)
     
The Antichrist will be born from the Jewish people . . . from the union between a father and a mother, like other men, and not, as some say, from a virgin . . . At the beginning of his conception the devil will enter the mother’s uterus, by virtue of the devil he will be nurtured in the mother’s womb, and the power of the devil will always be with him. (Adso of Montier-en-Der,
Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist,
tenth century)
     
He will have two flaming eyes, ears like those of a donkey, the nose and mouth of a lion, so that he will set men to acts of most criminal folly amid the fires and most shameful voices of contradiction, making them deny God, spreading into their senses the most horrible fetor, mutilating the institutions of the church with the most ferocious greed; sneering with an enormous grimace and showing horrible teeth of iron. (Hildegard of Bingen,
Liber scivias,
twelfth century, volume 3, part 1, section 14)
     
    If the Antichrist comes from the Jewish people, his model must inevitably reflect the image of the Jew, whether in terms of popular anti-Semitism, theological anti-Semitism, or the bourgeois anti-Semitism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Let us start with his face:
     
They generally have a bluish face, hooked nose, deep-set eyes, protruding chin, and strongly pronounced constrictor muscles around the lips . . . Jews are also prone to diseases which indicate a corruption of the blood, such as leprosy in the past and now scurvy, which is akin to it, scrofula, bleeding . . . It is said that Jews always have bad breath . . . Others attribute these effects to the frequent use of strong-smelling vegetables such as onion and garlic . . . Yet others say it is goose meat, to which they are very partial, that makes them dark and melancholic, given that this food is thickly coated with sticky sugar. (Baptiste-Henri Grégoire,
Essai sur la régénération physique, morale, et politique des juifs,
1788)
     
    Later, the composer Richard Wagner was to complicate the picture with his considerations of voice and manner:
     
There is something foreign about the outward aspect of the Jew that makes this nationality supremely repugnant; instinctively we wish to have nothing in common with a man who looks like that . . . It is impossible to imagine the representation of an antique or modern stage-character by a Jew, be it as hero or lover, without feeling instinctively that there is something incongruous, indeed ridiculous, in such a performance . . . But what repels us above all else is the particular tone with which the Jew speaks . . .