La Rhétorique De La Haine: La Fabrique De L'antisémitisme Par Les Mots Et Les Images by Dominique Serre-Floersheim (review)

Language and iconography in the service of hate. Will analyzing them enable us to explain the "incomprehensible" antisemitism and to understand how it functioned and spread all over Europe? Citing a corpus of writers primarily from Voltaire through the anti-Semites of the l940s, this study shows how, through repetition and allusion, Jews become fluid creatures, between human and animal, making it easy to assimilate them to insects. A frequent image expressing the danger Jews pose is "l'araignée—animal noir, antipathique, discret autant que tenace, qui file sans bruit sa toile—laquelle va se refermer comme un piège sur ceux qui s'y laisseront prendre" (127), here supported by a brief reference to a Maupassant text. Since Jews apparently seek to rule the world and use money as "le principal rouage de cette stratégie" (55), it becomes easy to see them as parasites forever multiplying, who need to be isolated and eventually eliminated before they can destroy French civilization and humankind itself. The development of such arguments, often implicit rather than clearly noted, is studied in detail by the author, but she insists that more important than the oft-repeated ideas is the way the authors express them. Thus she studies the portrait, showing the sickly, hook-nosed, bushy-bearded Jew, whose circumcision seemingly has taken from him "à la fois la virilité et même l'appartenance à l'espèce humaine" (105). She shows the comic as a way of engaging the audience with the message. Laughter, along with frequent use of oral style in writing, helps establish a complicity between writer and reader, making opprobrium for Jews seem the natural way to react. A rhetorical choice to achieve a similar effect is the use of the generalizing infinitive, so that a Jew's actions are described as eternally repeated. In illustrations, the choice of blackness as the dominating color evokes pessimism about the decline of civilization, while suggesting that the demonic and diabolical Jew is responsible for this decline. And of course it is always "le or les Juif(s)," with the definite article, which reminds us of the lack of individuality of Jews, who are all the same, indelibly marked by their eternal Jewishness. Serre-Floersheim avows that most of her authors are mediocre, with Céline, the most frequently cited, as a notable exception. Indeed, in the last sections of the book, with selections and analyses of seven writers as well as of antisemitic postcards from many countries, Céline's work stands out for its inventive verve, exclamatory punctuation, and for the fervent profusion of his words. An indication, among many, that as Serre-Floersheim sadly notes in her conclusion, "les mots n'ont rien d'anodin, les mots peuvent tuer" (220). A lesson for our time, from a study of a hatred that is not yet past.