Madoc Cairns on a new book on Simone Weil:
Wallace’s subjects attempt to frame Weil’s antisemitism as an exception: a lacuna in her universal empathy, to be explained rather than understood; a psychological quirk, cultural inertia; a darkness (Gordon posits) impervious to interpretation. Wallace echoes one modern apologia: Weil lacked exposure to scholarly peers, who, sharing her concerns, reached different conclusions. But the same could be said of Weil’s eccentric reading of the classics: within her “Greek tradition”, Plato was crowned the “father of occidental mysticism”; Aristotle, by contrast, found no place at all. So too her account of medieval Languedoc as a fusion of ancient Egypt, the Athenian Golden Age and a repristinate – if suspiciously Weilian – Christianity of pacific, cultured humanism. So too the work these misreadings inspired. To excuse her errors is to excise her insights. Dismiss Weil’s idiosyncrasies and you dismiss Weil.
Recognize them, though, and Weil becomes unrecognizable. One exemplum: her disaffection with the Church and her attacks on Judaism are hard to disentwine. Her interpretation of Christianity was one systematically expurgated of Jewish influence. Athens displaced Jerusalem, with the Gospels reread as the “last and most marvellous account of Greek genius”, and Dionysus and Osiris recast as “in a certain sense, Christ Himself”. In Weil’s schema, radically Hellenistic and radically universalizing, non-Christian spiritualities have a place. Judaism – an exclusive revelation, for a people apart – has none.
Here’s what I said in The Year of Our Lord 1943 about Weil’s Judenhass:
The greatest blot on Weil’s thought and character is her extreme antisemitism. Many of her statements about Jews are indistinguishable from the utterances of Hitler. Of the history of Israel, Weil wrote that “from Abraham onwards,” and only “excepting some of the prophets,” “everything becomes sullied and foul, as if to demonstrate quite clearly: Look! There it is, evil!” Even the courageous resistance of the Jews to Roman tyranny is, bizarrely, portrayed by her as a vice: “The religion of Israel was not noble enough to be fragile.” Her comment on the idea that the Jews are the Chosen People of God: “A people chosen for its blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.”
Weil’s hatred of Judaism centered on the idea of the Chosen People — which is to say, it bears a close kinship to her repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church’s practices of exclusion.
By “practices of exclusion” I mean Baptism — those baptized are “inside,” others “outside” — and limitations on the reception of Holy Communion. Weil hated every such distinction with a furious hatred. It’s hard to say whether Weil’s antisemitism develops from her rejection of what she calls the “spiritual totalitarianism” of the Roman Catholic Church, or the other way around. She was a very strange person and it is often impossible to discover the roots of her various absolutisms.
