Yesterday, I was reading Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, when I stumbled across a reference that sent me tumbling down an afternoon’s worth, or warren, of rabbit holes.

In no particular order…

1. In February 1945, as Germany slowly dawned to its likely defeat in the Second World War, two of its representative intellectuals, Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, launched the strangest, even by their standards, musing of the mind.

Jünger kicked it off. Responding to a condolence card from Schmitt, Jünger stoically itemizes his losses over the last two years: his father, his son (killed during the war), and his hometown. With an unruffled melancholy, he registers the death and destruction that has occurred and is likely to come in the remaining months of the war. He reports on the massive if futile mobilization of all sectors of the population against the final onslaught of the Allies. He’s reading a lot about shipwrecks.

Then comes a most peculiar afterthought:

PS: One should now also read again in Flavius Josephus, the tenacity of the Jews in the siege of Jerusalem is extraordinary. One of the experiences of this time is that there is no return to paganism, to the ancestral bond. There is only a choice between the Old and the New Testament – any attack on the New benefits the Old. This is one reason for the tremendous spread of Jewish morality, apart from the fact that this morality has now become free and virulent through the extermination of the Jews to whom it was bound. There is something ghostly about the way the blinded will leads itself ad absurdum.

I’m not sure how to make sense of what is going on here, particularly Jünger’s claim that Jewish morality “has now become free and virulent through the extermination of the Jews to whom it was bound.” Is he speaking of the destruction of ancient Jewry or of contemporary Jewry? If the former, what does he mean by Jewish morality becoming “free and virulent” after the destruction of the Jews? He might mean what Nietzsche meant: namely, that despite the triumph of Christianity over Judaism, the Jews had the last laugh in foisting upon the world a slave religion of priests, which found its modern expression in the forces of democracy and socialism. But Jünger seems to foreclose that interpretation by insisting on the importance of the New Testament’s continuing battle against the Old.

Perhaps he’s referring to the destruction of contemporary Jewry? Set aside his casual and chilling acknowledgment that the Jews of Europe are being exterminated as he writes. How is it that he sees their morality triumphing? Is it the Red Army’s advances that he is referring to? Or the Americans’? Or is it some Moishe Postone-style invocation of Nazi antisemitism/anticapitalism, where the material Jewish body is eliminated, but its spirit of abstraction rises up in triumph nonetheless?

Or is he moving back and forth between historical registers, conflating the attempt to destroy the Jews of the ancient world with the extermination of the Jews in the contemporary European world, and their resistance to both attempts? Which prompt him to think about how Jewish morality can triumph despite the elimination of the Jews, so that in his current moment, that of 1945, it’s important to recognize that there is no going back to some older morality, i.e., German nationalism, that is lost to history, but instead, Germans must stand for Christianity as the field of battle against a renewed Soviet/Jewish experiment?

Who knows?

2. Not to be outdone in the weirdness department, Schmitt, the supposed icy realist of the two, replies to Jünger thus:

What you say about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments is obviously true and is the key to what is happening to us today. At the end of one of Bruno Bauer’s anti-Jewish writings from 1853, “Das Judentum in der Fremde” (“Judaism in foreign lands”), it literally says: ‘”But after all, God also created the Jews, and if we kill them all, we will all take their place.”

Again, we have that confusion between the ancient and the contemporary world, and the vagueness of the reference to “what is happening to us today.” What is the subject of that statement? What in fact does Schmitt think is happening to him and Jünger? And then that weird Bauer quote, which I can’t make sense of, as Schmitt applies it to the contemporary context.

Then, without a pause, Schmitt turns to the topic of some excellent wine he once had in Andalusia, which makes him think that Edgar Allan Poe mistook the wine for sherry, which gave him the much discussed libation in The Cask of Amontillado.

3. Schmitt’s reference to the Bauer essay brings me back to the Jonathan Israel book, which set me off on this whole expedition in the first place. Israel had quoted from that Bauer essay. Bauer was a nineteenth-century Germany philosopher and theologian, who once had been close to Marx and other left-wing Hegelians. By the time he writes this essay, he has long since broken with Marx, launching himself on a career as a rancid anti-Semite.

It’s in this essay that Bauer formulates an idea of the Jews as Europe’s “white Negro.” He uses that exact phrase.

I had thought Norman Mailer invented that phrase in his essay of the same name. In fact, a quick search of the ever reliable internet, powered by the genius minds of AI, claims that the OED attributes its first use to Mailer.

But that’s not true. Nor does the OED even say it’s true. Nineteenth-century antisemites got to the phrase first, and it seems others used it, too, in other contexts, long before that.

But the Bauer connection did make me wonder whether and where Mailer might have first heard the phrase, prior to his writing the essay. Could he have gotten it from Bauer, who was engaged in the most virulent debates about the Jewish Question in the nineteenth century? Mailer, of course, uses the phrase in a completely different way, referring to the white hipster, but given the correspondences between Jews, jazz and other Black music, and hipsters, I wonder if there is something vaguely nineteenth-century and European about Mailer’s invocation of the phrase in the twentieth-century America.