The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

New solutions were necessary, and they were found, as man always finds the solutions he needs, as the so-called democratic countries too would have found them, if they had needed them. But then why, you might ask today, the Jews? What do the Jews have in common with your lunatics, your criminals, your contagious? Yet it’s not hard to see that, historically, the Jews constituted themselves as a “problem,” by wanting to remain apart at all costs. Didn’t the first writings against the Jews, those of the Greeks of Alexandria, long before Christ and theological anti-Semitism, accuse them of being an asocial people, of violating the laws of hospitality, the main foundation and political principle of the ancient world, in the name of their food prohibitions, which prevented them from eating at other people’s houses or from receiving them as guests, from being hosts? Then, of course, there was the religious question. I am not seeking here, as some might think, to make the Jews responsible for their catastrophe; I’m simply trying to say that a certain aspect of European history, unfortunate according to some, inevitable according to others, has made it so that even in our days, in times of crisis, it is natural to turn against the Jews, and that if you become involved in a reshaping of society through violence, sooner or later the Jews will end up on the receiving end—sooner, in our case, later, in the Soviets’—and that this is not entirely by chance.