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%%C H A P T E R X V I
\settitle{Prejudice in the Interview Material}{T.\ W.\ Adorno}
{Chapter XVI from {\em The Authoritarian Personality}\\
(1950)}

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\subsection*{A. Introduction}

Our study grew out of specific investigations into anti-Semitism.
As our work advanced, however, the emphasis gradually shifted. We
came to regard it as our main task not to analyze anti-Semitism or
any other anti-minority prejudice as a socio-psychological phenomenon
{\em per se},\footnote{{\em per se}: by or in itself or themselves; intrinsically.} 
but rather to examine the relation of anti-minority
prejudice to broader ideological and characterological patterns.
Thus anti-Semitism gradually all but disappeared as a topic of our
questionnaire and in our interview schedule it was only one among
many topics which had to be covered.

Another investigation, carried through parallel to our research and
partly by the same staff members of the Institute of Social Research,
i.e., the study on anti-Semitism within labor (57b), concentrated
on the question of anti-Semitism, but at the same time was concerned
with socio-psychological issues akin to those presented in the present
volume. While the bulk of the material to be discussed in this
chapter is taken from the section on prejudice of the Berkeley
interviews, an attempt was made to utilize, at least in a supplementary
form, some of the ideas of the Labor Study as hypotheses for further
investigation. This was done as a part of the work carried out in
Los Angeles.  In collaboration with J.\ F.\ Brown and F.\ Pollock
we drew up an additional section of the interview schedule devoted
to specific questions about Jews.  These questions were derived for
the most part from the material gathered through the ``screened
interviews" of the Labor Study. The aim of this new section of the
interview schedule was to see if it was possible to establish certain
differential patterns within the general structure of prejudice.

The list of questions follows. Not all of these questions were put
to every subject, nor was the exact wording of the questions always
the same, but most of the ground marked off by the questions was
covered in each case.
%%6o6	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY 

\bigskip
\centerline{\em List of Questions Pertaining to Jews}
\begin{Itemize}
\item
Do you think there is a Jewish problem? If yes, in what sense? Do you care 
about it?
\item
Have you had any experience with Jews? What kind? Do you remember 
names of persons involved and other specific data?
\item If not, on what is your opinion based?
\item
Did you {\em have} any contrary experiences (or hear about such experiences) 
with Jewish individuals?
\item If you had --- would it change your opinion? If not, why not?
\item Can you tell a Jew from other people? How?
\item What do you know about the Jewish religion?
\item
Are there Christians that are as bad as Jews? Is their percentage as high or 
higher than the percentage of bad Jews?
\item How do Jews behave at work? What about the alleged Jewish industriousness?
\item
Is it true that the Jews have an undue influence in movies, radio, literature, 
and universities?
\item
If yes --- what is particularly bad about it? What should be done about it?
\item
Is it true that the Jews have an undue influence in business, politics, labor, 
etc.?
\item If yes --- what kind of an influence? Should something be done to curb it?
\item What did the Nazis do to the German Jews? What do you think about it? 
\item Is there such a problem here? What would you do to solve it?
\item
What do you blame them most for? Are they: aggressive, bad-mannered; 
controlling the banks; black marketeers; cheating; Christ killers; 
clannish; Communists; corrupting; dirty; draft dodgers; exploiters; hiding 
their identity; too intellectual; Internationalists; overcrowding many 
jobs; lazy; controlling movies; money-minded; noisy; overassimilative; 
overbearing; oversexed; looking for privileges; quarrelsome; running the 
country; too smart; spoiling nice neighborhoods; owning too many 
stores; undisciplined; unethical against Gentiles; upstarts; shunning hard 
manual labor; forming a world conspiracy?
\item Do you favor social discrimination or special legislation?
\item Shall a Jew be treated as an individual or as a member of a group? 
\item How do your suggestions go along with constitutional rights?
\item Do you object to personal contacts with individual Jews?
\item Do you consider Jews more as a nuisance or more as a menace? 
\item Could you imagine yourself marrying a Jew?
\item Do you like to discuss the Jewish issue?
\item What would you do if you were a Jew?
\item Can a Jew ever become a real American?
\end{Itemize}

The additional interview material taught us more about prevailing
overt patterns of anti-Semitism than about its inner dynamics. It
is probably fair to say that the detailed questions proved most
helpful in understanding the phenomena of psychological {\em conflict}
in prejudicethe problems characterized in Chapter V\footnote{Chapter
V: The Measurement of Implicit Antidemocratic Trends in {\em The
Authoritarian Personality}}
as
``pseudo-democratism." Another significant observation has to do
with the reactions of our interviewees to the list of ``bad Jewish
traits" presented to them. Most answers to this list read
``all-inclusive,"
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	607
that is to say, very little differentiation takes place. The
prejudiced subjects tend to subscribe to any reproach against the
Jews, provided they do not have to produce these objections themselves
but rather find them pre-established, as if they were commonly
accepted. This observation could be interpreted in different ways.
Either it may be indicative of the ``inner consistency" of anti-Semitic
ideology, or it may testify to the mental rigidity of our high
scorers, and this apart from the fact that the method of multiple
choice may itself make for automatic reactions. Although our
questionnaire studies gave evidence of marked consistency within
anti-Semitic ideology, it would hardly be enough to account for the
all-inclusiveness of the present responses. It seems that one must
think in terms of automatization,\footnote{{\em automatization}: the
act of making things automatic or habitual.} 
though it is impossible to say
conclusively whether this is due to the ``high" mentality or to the
shortcomings of our procedure. In all probability, the presentation
of extreme anti-Semitic statements as if they were no longer
disreputable but rather something which can be sensibly discussed,
works as a kind of antidote for the superego\footnote{{\em superego}:
the part of a person's mind that acts as a self-critical conscience,
reflecting social standards learned from parents and teachers.}
and may stimulate
imitation even in cases where the individual's ``own" reactions would
be less violent. This consideration may throw some light upon the
phenomenon of the whole German people tolerating the most extreme
anti-Semitic measures, although it is highly to be doubted that the
individuals themselves were more anti-Semitic than our high-scoring
subjects. A pragmatic inference to be drawn from this hypothesis
would be that, in so far as possible, pseudorational discussions
of anti-Semitism should be avoided. One might refute factual
anti-Semitic statements or explain the dynamics responsible for
anti-Semitism, but he should not enter the sphere of the ``Jewish
problem." As things stand now, the acknowledgment of a ``Jewish
problem," after the European genocide, suggests, however subtly,
that there might have been some justification for what the Nazis
did.

The whole material on ideology has been taken from 63 Los Angeles
interviews in addition to the pertinent sections of those gathered
in Berkeley (see Chapter IX\footnote{Chapter IX: 
Comprehensive Scores and Summary of Interview Results
in {\em The Authoritarian Personality}}).

It should be stressed that once again the {\em subjective} aspect is in
the foreground. The selection of our sample excluded an investigation
into the role played by the ``object" --- that is to say, the Jews
--- in the formation of prejudice. We do not deny that the object
plays a role, but we devote our attention to the forms of reaction
directed towards the Jew, not to the basis of these reactions within
the ``object." This is due to a hypothesis with which we started and
which has been given strong support in Chapter III,\footnote{Chapter
III: The Study of Anti-Semitic Ideology
in {\em The
Authoritarian Personality}}
namely, that
anti-Semitic prejudice has little to do with the qualities of those
against whom it is directed. Our interest is centered in the
high-scoring subjects.  

In organizing the present chapter, we start with the general
assumption that the --- largely unconscious --- hostility resulting
from frustration and repression and socially diverted from its true
object, {\em needs} a substitute object
%6o8	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
through which it may obtain a realistic aspect and thus dodge, as
it were, more radical manifestations of a blocking of the subject's
relationship to reality, e.g., psychosis. This ``object" of unconscious
destructiveness, far from being a superficial ``scapegoat," must
have certain characteristics in order to fulfill its role. It must
be tangible enough; and yet not {\em too} tangible lest it be
exploded by its own realism.  It must have a sufficient historical
backing and appear as an indisputable element of tradition. It must
be defined in rigid and well-known stereotypes. Finally, the object
must possess features, or at least be capable of being perceived
and interpreted in terms of features, which harmonize with the
destructive tendencies of the prejudiced subject. Some of these
features, such as ``clannishness" aid rationalization; others, such
as the expression of weakness or masochism, provide psychologically
adequate stimuli for destructiveness. There can be hardly any doubt
that all these requirements are fulfilled by the phenomenon of the
Jew. This is not to say that Jews {\em must} draw hatred upon themselves,
or that there is an absolute historical necessity which makes them,
rather than others, the ideal target of social aggressiveness.
Suffice it to say that they {\em can} perform this function in the
psychological households of many people. The problem of the
``uniqueness" of the Jewish phenomenon and hence of anti-Semitism
could be approached only by recourse to a theory which is beyond
the scope of this study. Such a theory would neither enumerate a
diversity of ``factors" nor single out a specific one as ``the" cause
but rather develop a unified framework within which all the ``elements"
are linked together consistently.  This would amount to nothing
less than a theory of modern society as a whole.

We shall first give some evidence of the ``functional" character of
anti-Semitism, that is to say, its relative independence of the
object. Then we shall point out the problem of {\em cui
bono}\footnote{{\em cui bono}: Who stands, or stood, to gain (from a
crime, and so might have been responsible for it)? (Latin)}:
anti-Semitism as a device for effortless ``orientation" in a cold,
alienated, and largely ununderstandable world.  As a parallel to
our analysis of political and economic ideologies, it will be shown
that this ``orientation" is achieved by stereotypy\footnote{{\em
stereotypy}: The persistent repetition of an act, 
for no obvious purpose.}. 
The gap between this
stereotypy on the one hand and real experience and the still-accepted
standards of democracy on the other, leads to a {\em conflict}
situation, something which is clearly set forth in a number of our
interviews. We then take what appears to be the resolution of this
conflict: the underlying anti-Semitism of our cultural climate,
keyed to the prejudiced person's own conscious or preconscious
wishes, proves in the more extreme cases to be stronger than either
conscience or official democratic values. This leads up to the
evidence of the destructive character of anti-Semitic reactions.
As remnants of the conflict, there remain traces of sympathy for,
or rather ``appreciation" of, certain Jewish traits which, however,
when viewed more closely, also show negative implications.

Some more specific observations about the structure of anti-Jewish
prejudice will be added. Their focal point is the differentiation
of anti-Semitism
%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	609
according to the subject's own social identifications. This survey
of anti-Semitic features and dynamics will then be supplemented by
a few remarks on the attitudes of low-scoring subjects. Finally,
we shall offer some evidence of the broader social significance of
anti-Semitism: its intrinsic denial of the principles of American
democracy.

\subsection*{B. The ``Functional" Character of Anti-Semitism}

The psychological dynamisms that ``call for" the anti-Semitic outlet
--- most essentially, we believe, the ambivalence of authoritarian
and rebellious trends --- have been analyzed in detail in other
sections of this book.  Here we limit ourselves to some extreme but
concrete evidence of the fact that anti-Semitism is not so much
dependent upon the nature of the object as upon the subject's own
psychological wants and needs.

There are a number of cases in which the ``functional" character of
prejudice is obvious. Here we find subjects who are prejudiced {\em per
se}, but with whom it is relatively accidental against what group
their prejudice is directed.  We content ourselves with two examples.
{\em 5051} is a generally high-scoring man, one of a few Boy Scout leaders.
He has strong, though unconscious, fascist leanings. Although
anti-Semitic, he tries to mitigate his bias by certain semirational
qualifications. Here, the following statement occurs:


\begin{Quote}
``Sometimes we hear that the average Jew is smarter in business than
the average white man. I do not believe this. I would hate to believe
it. What the Jews should learn is to educate their bad individuals
to be more cooperative and agreeable.  Actually there is more
underhandedness amongst Armenians than there is amongst Jews, but
the Armenians aren't nearly as conspicuous and noisy. Mind you, I
have known some Jews whom I consider my equal in every way and I
like very much."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
This is somewhat reminiscent of Poe's famous story about the double
murder in the Rue Morgue where the savage cries of an orangutan
are mistaken by bystanders as words of all kinds of different foreign
languages, to wit, languages particularly strange to each of the
listeners who happen to be foreigners themselves. The primary hostile
reaction is directed against foreigners {\em per se},
who are perceived
as ``uncanny." This infantile fear of the strange is only subsequently
``filled up" with the imagery of a specific group, stereotyped and
handy for this purpose. The Jews are favorite stand-ins for the
child's ``bad man." The transference of unconscious fear to the
particular object, however, the latter being of a secondary nature
only, always maintains an aspect of accidentalness. Thus, as soon
as other factors interfere, the aggression may be deflected, at
least in part, from the Jews and to another group, preferably one
of still greater social distance. Pseudodemocratic ideology and the
professed desire to promote militantly what he conceives to be
American ideals are marked in our Boy Scout leader, {\em 5051}, and he
considers himself not conservative but ``predominantly liberal";
hence he tempers his anti-Semitism and anti-Negroism by referring
to a third group. He summons
%610	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
the Armenians in order to prove that he is not ``prejudiced," but
at the same time his formulation is such that the usual anti-Semitic
stereotypes can easily be maintained. Even his
exoneration\footnote{{\em exoneration}: the act of absolving (someone)
from blame for  a fault or wrongdoing, esp.\ after due consideration
of the case.}
of the
Jews with regard to their supposed ``smartness" is actually a device
for the glorification of the ingroup: he hates to think that ``we
are less smart than they." While anti-Semitism is functional with
regard to the object choice on a more superficial level, its deeper
determinants still seem to be much more rigid.

An extreme case of what might be called ``mobile" prejudice is {\em
M1225a},
of the Maritime School group. Though his questionnaire scores are
only medium, the interview shows strong traces of a ``manipulative"
anti-Semite.  The beginning of the minorities section of his interview
is as follows:


\begin{Quote}
(What do you think of the race-minority problem?) ``I definitely
think there is a problem. I'd probably be prejudiced there. Like
the Negro situation. They could act more human \ldots\ It would be
less of a problem."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
His aggression is absorbed by the Negroes, in the ``idiosyncratic"
manner that can otherwise be observed among extreme anti-Semites,
all of whose aggression appears to be directed against Jews.


\begin{Quote}
``I wouldn't sail on a ship if I had to sail with a Negro. To me,
they have an offensive smell. Course, the Chinese say we smell like
sheep." 
\end{Quote}


\noindent
It may be mentioned that a subject of the Labor Study, a
Negro woman, complained about the smell of the Jews. The present
subject concentrates on the Negroes, exonerating the Jews, though
in an equivocal way: 


\begin{Quote}
(What about the Jewish problem?) ``I don't believe there is much of
a problem there. They're too smart to have a problem. Well, they
are good business men.  (Too much influence?) I believe they have
a lot of influence. (In what areas?) Well, motion picture industry.
(Do they abuse it?) Well, the thing you hear an awful lot about is
help the Jews, help the Jews. But you never hear anything about
helping other races or nationalities. (Do they abuse their influence
in the movies?) If they do, they do it in such a way that it is not
offensive."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Here again, anti-Semitic stereotypy is maintained descriptively
whereas the shift of actual hatred to the Negroes --- which cannot
be accounted for by the course of the interview --- affects the
superimposed value judgments. The twist with regard to the term
``problem" should be noted. By denying the existence of a ``Jewish
problem," he consciously takes sides with the unbiased. By interpreting
the word, however, as meaning ``having difficulties," and emphasizing
that the Jews are ``too smart to {\em have} a problem," he expresses
unwittingly his own rejection. In accordance with his ``smartness"
theory, his pro-Jewish statements have a rationalistic ring clearly
indicative of the subject's ambivalence: all race hatred is ``envy"
but he leaves little doubt that in his mind there is some reason
for this envy, e.g., his acceptance of the myth that the Jews
controlled German industry.

This interview points to a way in which our picture of ethnocentrism may
%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	61I
be differentiated. Although the correlation between anti-Semitism
and anti-Negroism is undoubtedly high, a fact which stands out in
our interviews as well as in our questionnaire studies (cf.\ Chapter
IV\footnote{Chapter IV: The Study of Ethonocentric Ideology
in {\em The Authoritarian Personality}}), 
this is not to say that prejudice is a single compact mass.
Readiness to accept statements hostile to minority groups may well
be conceived as a more or less unitary\footnote{{\em unitary}: uniform.}
trait, but when, in the
interview situation, subjects are allowed to express themselves
spontaneously it is not uncommon for one minority more than the
others to appear, for the moment at least, as an object of special
hatred. This phenomenon may be elucidated\footnote{{\em elucidate}:
make (something) clear; explain; clarify.}
by reference to persecution
mania which, as has been pointed out frequently, has many structural
features in common with anti-Semitism. While the paranoid is beset
by an over-all hatred, he nevertheless tends to ``pick" his enemy,
to molest certain individuals who draw his attention upon themselves:
he falls, as it were, negatively in love. Something similar may
hold good for the potentially fascist character. As soon as he has
achieved a specific and concrete counter-cathexis,\footnote{{\em
cathexis}: the concentration of mental energy on one particular
person, idea, or object (esp.\ to an unhealthy degree).} 
which is indispensable
to his fabrication of a social pseudoreality, he may ``canalize" his
otherwise free-floating aggressiveness and then leave alone other
potential objects of persecution. Naturally, these processes come
to the fore in the dialectics of the interview rather than in the
scales, which hardly allow the subject freely to ``express" himself.

It may be added that subjects in our sample find numerous other
substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks. The
latter, like the Armenians, are liberally endowed with traits
otherwise associated with the imagery of the Jew.

One more aspect of the ``functional" character of anti-Semitism
should be mentioned. We encountered quite frequently members of
other minority groups, with strong ``conformist" tendencies, who
were outspokenly anti-Semitic. Hardly any traces of solidarity among
the different outgroups could be found. The pattern is rather one
of ``shifting the onus" of defamation of other groups in order to
put one's own social status in a better light. An example is {\em
5023}, a ``psychoneurotic with anxiety state," Mexican by birth:


\begin{Quote}
Being an American of Mexican ancestry, he identifies with the white
race and feels ``we are superior people." He particularly dislikes
the Negroes and completely dislikes Jews. He feels that they are
all alike and wants as little as possible to do with them. Full of
contradiction as this subject is, it is not surprising to find that
he would marry a Jewess if he really loved her. On the other hand
he would control both Negroes and Jews and ``keep them in their
place."
\end{Quote}

{\em 5068} is regarded by the interviewer as representing a ``pattern
probably quite frequent in second-generation Americans who describe
themselves as Italian-Americans." His prejudice is of the
politico-fascist brand, distinctly colored by paranoid fantasies:


\begin{Quote}
He is of pure Italian extraction and naturalized here at the time of 
the first World
%612	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
War. He is very proud of this extraction and for a long time in the
early days of Mussolini was active in Italian-American organizations.
He still feels that the war against Italy was very unfortunate.
Concerning the other minorities he is quite prejudiced. The Mexicans
he feels are enough like the Italians so that if they were educated
enough it would be all right. At the present time, however, he feels
that they need much education. He believes that the California
Japanese were more than correctly handled and that those about whom
there is no question should be gradually allowed back. He described
the Negro situation as a tough one. He believes there should be
definite laws particularly with regard to racial intermarriage and
that the color line should also be drawn ``regarding where people
can live." ``Despite what they say, the Southern Negroes are really
the happiest ones." ``The trouble with Jews is that they are all
Communists and for this reason dangerous." His own relations with
them have only been fair. In his business relations he says they
are ``chiselers" and ``stick together." Concerning a solution to this
problem, he says, ``The Jews should actually educate their own. The
way the Jews stick together shows that they actually have more
prejudice against the Gentiles than the Gentiles have against them."
He illustrates this with a long story which I was not able to get
in detail about some acquaintance of his who married into a Jewish
family and was not allowed to eat off the same dishes with them.
\end{Quote}

We may mention, furthermore, {\em 5052}, an anti-Semitic man of Spanish-Negro
descent, with strong homosexual tendencies. He is a nightclub
entertainer, and the interviewer summarizes his impression in the
statement that this man wants to say, ``I am not a Negro, I am an
entertainer." Here the element of social identification in an outcast
is clearly responsible for his prejudice.

Finally, reference should be made to a curiosity, the interview of
a Turk, otherwise not evaluated because of his somewhat subnormal
intelligence. He indulged in violent anti-Semitic diatribes until
it came out near the end of the interview that he was Jewish himself.
The whole complex of anti-Semitism among minority groups, and among
Jews themselves, offers serious problems and deserves a study of
its own. Even the casual observations provided by our sample suffice
to corroborate the suspicion that those who suffer from social
pressure may frequently tend to transfer this pressure onto others
rather than to join hands with their fellow victims.

\subsection*{C. The Imaginary Foe}

Our examples of the ``functional" character of anti-Semitism, and
of the relative ease by which prejudice can be switched from one
object to another, point in one direction: the hypothesis that
prejudice, according to its intrinsic content, is but superficially,
if at all, related to the specific nature of its object. We shall
now give more direct support for this hypothesis, the relation of
which to clinical categories such as stereotypy, incapacity to have
``experience," projectivity, and power fantasies is not far to seek.
This support is supplied by statements which are either plainly
self-contradictory or incompatible with facts and of a manifestly
imaginary character. Since the
%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	613
usual ``self-contradictions" of the anti-Semite can, however,
frequently be explained on the basis that they involve different
layers of reality and different psychological urges which are still
reconcilable in the over-all {\em ``Weltanschauung"}\footnote{{\em
Weltanschauung}: (German.) A particular philosophy or view of life; the
worldview of an individual or group.} 
of the anti-Semite,
we concern ourselves here mainly with evidence of imaginary constructs.
The fantasies with which we shall deal are so well known from
everyday life that their significance for the structure of anti-Semitism
can be taken for granted. They are merely highlighted by our research.
One might say that these fantasies occur whenever stereotypes ``run
wild," that is to say, make themselves completely independent from
interaction with reality. When these ``emancipated" stereotypes are
forcibly brought back into relation with reality, blatant distortions
appear. The content of the examples of stereotyped fantasy which
we collected has to do predominantly with ideas of excessive power
attributed to the chosen foe. The disproportion between the relative
social weakness of the object and its supposed sinister omnipotence
is by itself evidence that the projective mechanism is at work.

We shall first give some examples of omnipotence fantasies projected
upon a whole outgroup abstractly, as it were, and then show how the
application of such ideas to factual experience comes close to
paranoid delusion.

{\em 5054}, a middle-aged woman with fairly high scores on all the scales,
who is greatly concerned with herself and characterized by a
``domineering" manner, claims that she has always tried ``to see the
other side" and even to ``fight prejudice on every side." She derives
her feelings of tolerance from the contrast with her husband whom
she characterized as extremely anti-Jewish (he hates all Jews and
makes no exceptions) whereas she is willing to make exceptions. Her
actual attitude is described as follows:


\begin{Quote}
She would not subscribe to a ``racist theory," but does not think
that the Jews will change much, but rather that they will tend to
become ``more aggressive." She also believes that ``they will eventually
run the country, whether we like it or not."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The usual stereotype of undue Jewish influence in politics and
economy is inflated to the assertion of threatening over-all
domination. It is easy to guess that the countermeasures which such
subjects have in mind are no less totalitarian than their persecution
ideas, even if they do not dare to say so in so many words.

Similar is case {\em 5061a}, chosen as a mixed case (she is high-middle
on E, but low on F and PEC), but actually, as proved by the interview,
markedly ethnocentric. In her statement, the vividness of the
fantasies about the almighty Jew seems to be equaled by the intensity
of her vindictiveness.


\begin{Quote}
``My relations with the Jews have been anything but pleasant." When
asked to be more specific it was impossible for her to name individual
incidents. She described them, however, as ``pushing everybody about,
aggressive, clannish, money-minded. \ldots\ The
%614	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Jews are practically taking over the country. They are getting into
everything. It is not that they are smarter, but they work so hard
to get control.  They are all alike." When asked if she did not
feel that there were variations in the Jewish temperament as in any
other, she said, ``No, I don't think so. I think there is something
that makes them all stick together and try to hold on to everything.
I have Jewish friends and I have tried not to treat them antagonistically,
but sooner or later they have also turned out to be aggressive and
obnoxious. \ldots\ I think the percentage of very bad Jews is very
much greater than the percentage of bad Gentiles. \ldots\ My husband
feels exactly the same way on this whole problem. As a matter of
fact, I don't go as far as he does. He didn't like many things about
Hitler, but he did feel that Hitler did a good job on the Jews. He
feels that we will come in this country to a place where we have
to do something about it."
\end{Quote}

Sometimes the projective aspect of the fantasies of Jewish domination
comes into the open. Those whose half-conscious wishes culminate
in the idea of the abolition of democracy and the rule of the strong,
call those anti-democratic whose only hope lies in the maintenance
of democratic rights.  {\em 5018} is a 32-year-old ex-marine gunnery
sergeant who scores high on all the scales. He is suspected by the
interviewer of being ``somewhat paranoid." He knows ``one cannot
consider Jews a race, but they are all alike. They have too much
power but I guess it's really our fault." This is followed up by
the statement:


\begin{Quote}
He would handle the Jews by outlawing them from business domination.
He thinks that all others who feel the same could get into business
and compete with them and perhaps overcome them, but adds, ``it would
be better to ship them to Palestine and let them gyp one another.
I have had some experiences with them and a few were good soldiers
but not very many." The respondent went on to imply that lax
democratic methods cannot solve the problem because ``they won't
cooperate in a democracy."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The implicitly antidemocratic feelings of this subject are evidenced
by his speaking derogatorily about lax democratic methods: his
blaming the Jews for lack of democratic cooperation is manifestly
a rationalization.  

One more aspect of unrealistic imagery of the Jew should at least
be mentioned. It is the contention that the Jews ``are everywhere."
Omnipresence sometimes displaces omnipotence, perhaps because no
actual ``Jewish rule" can be pretended to exist, so that the
image-ridden subject has to seek a different outlet for his power
fantasy in ideas of dangerous, mysterious ubiquity\footnote{{\em
ubiquitous}: present, appearing, or found everywhere.}. 
This is fused
with another psychological element. To the highly prejudiced subject
the idea of the total right of the ingroup, and of its tolerating
nothing which does not strictly ``belong," is all-pervasive. This
is projected upon the Jews. Whereas the high scorer apparently
cannot stand any ``intruder" --- ultimately nothing that is not
strictly like himself --- he sees this totality of presence in those
whom he hates and whom he feels justified in exterminating because
one otherwise ``could not get rid of them." The
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	615
following example shows the idea of Jewish omnipresence applied to
personal experience, thus revealing its proximity to delusion.

{\em 6070}, a 40-year-old woman, is high-middle on the E scale and
particularly vehement about the Jews:


\begin{Quote}
``I don't like Jews. The Jew is always crying. They are taking our
country over from us. They are aggressive. They suffer from every
lust. Last summer I met the famous musician X, and before I really
knew him he wanted me to sign an affidavit to help bring his family
into this country. Finally I had to flatly refuse and told him I
want no more Jews here. Roosevelt started bringing the Jews into
the government, and that is the chief cause of our difficulties
today. The Jews arranged it so they were discriminated for in the
draft. I favor a legislative discrimination against the Jews along
American, not Hitler lines. Everybody knows that the Jews are back
of the Communists. This X person almost drove me nuts. I had made
the mistake of inviting him to be my guest at my beach club. He
arrived with ten other Jews who were uninvited. They always cause
trouble. If one gets in a place, he brings two more and those two
bring two more."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
This quotation is remarkable for more reasons than that it exemplifies
the ``Jews are everywhere" complex. It is the expression of Jewish
{\em weakness} --- that they are ``always crying" --- which is perverted
into ubiquity. The refugee, forced to leave his country, appears
as he who {\em wants} to intrude and to expand over the whole earth, and
it is hardly too far-fetched to assume that this imagery is at least
partly derived from the fact of persecution itself.  Moreover, the
quotation gives evidence of a certain ambivalence of the extreme
anti-Semite which points in the direction of ``negatively falling
in love." This woman had {\em invited} the celebrity to her club, doubtless
attracted by his fame, but used the contact, once it had been
established, merely in order to personalize her aggressiveness.

Another example of the merging of semipsychotic idiosyncrasies and
wild anti-Jewish imagery is the 26-year-old woman, {\em 5004}. She scores
high on the F scale and high-middle on E and PEC. Asked about Jewish
religion, she produces an answer which partakes of the age-old image
of ``uncanniness." ``I know very little, but I would be afraid to go
into a synagogue." This has to be evaluated in relation to her
statement about Nazi atrocities:


\begin{Quote}
``I am not particularly sorry because of what the Germans did to the
Jews. I feel Jews would do the same type of thing to me."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The persecution fantasy of what the Jews {\em might} do to her, is used,
in authentic paranoid style, as a justification of the genocide
committed by the Nazis.

Our last two examples refer to the distortions that occur when
experience is viewed through the lens of congealed stereotypy. {\em
M732c}
of the Veterans Group, who scores generally high on the scales,
shows this pattern of distorted experience with regard to both
Negroes and Jews. As to the former:
%616	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY


\begin{Quote}
``You never see a Negro driving (an ordinary car of which subject
mentions a number of examples) but only a Cadillac or a Packard.
\ldots\ They always dress gaudy. They have that tendency to show
off. \ldots\ Since the Negro has that feeling that he isn't up to
par, he's always trying to show off. \ldots\ Even though he can't
afford it, he will buy an expensive car just to make a show. \ldots"
Subject mentions that the brightest girl in a class at subject's
school happens to be a Negro and he explains her outstandingness
in the class in terms of Negro overcompensation for what he seems
to be implying is her inherent inferiority.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The assertion about the Negro's Cadillac speaks for itself. As to
the story about the student, it indicates in personalized terms the
aspect of inescapability inherent in hostile stereotypy. To the
prejudiced, the Negro is ``dull"; if he meets, however, one of
outstanding achievement, it is supposed to be mere overcompensation,
the exception that proves the rule. No matter what the Negro is or
does, he is condemned.

As to the ``Jewish problem":


\begin{Quote}
``As far as being good and shrewd businessmen, that's about all I
have to say about {\em them}. They're {\em white} people, that's one thing.
\ldots\ Of course, they have the Jewish instinct, whatever that is.
\ldots\ I've heard they have a business nose. \ldots\ I imagine the
Jewish people are more 
{\em obsequious}\footnote{{\em obsequious}: obedient or attentive to
an excessive or servile degree.}. \ldots\ For example, {\em somehow} a
Jewish barber will entice you to come to {\em his} chair." Subject
elaborates here a definite fantasy of some mysterious influence by
Jews. \ldots\ ``They're mighty shrewd businessmen, and you don't
have much chance" (competing with Jews).
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The story about the barber seems to be a retrogression towards early
infantile, magical patterns of thinking.

{\em F359}, a 48-year-old accountant in a government department, is,
according to the interviewer, a cultured and educated woman. This,
however, does not keep her from paranoid story-telling as soon as
the critical area of race relations, which serves as a kind of
free-for-all, is entered. (She is in the high quartile on E, though
low on both F and PEC.) Her distortions refer both to Negroes and
to Jews:


\begin{Quote}
Subject considers this a very serious problem and she thinks that
it is going to get worse. The Negroes are going to get worse. She
experienced a riot in Washington; there was shooting; street-car
windows were broken, and when a white would get into the Negro
section of the car, the shooting would start. The white man would
have to lie on the floor. She did not dare to go out at night. One
day the Negroes were having a procession and some of them started
pushing her off the sidewalk.  When she asked them not to push,
they looked so insolent that she thought they would start a riot,
and her companion said, ``Let's get out of here or we will start a
riot." A friend of hers told her that she had asked her maid to
work on a Thursday, but the maid had refused because she said it
was ``push and shove" day --- the day they shoved the whites off the
sidewalk. Another friend of hers in Los Angeles told her not to let
her maid use her vacuum cleaner because they tamper with it in such
a way as to cause it to tear your rugs. One day she caught the maid
using a file on her vacuum cleaner and asked her what she was doing.
The maid replied, ``Oh, I'm just trying to fix this thing." They
just want to get revenge on whites.  One cannot give them equal
rights yet, they are not ready for it; we will have to
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	617
educate them first. Subject would not want to sit next to a Negro
in a theatre or restaurant. She cited the case of a drugstore man
who addressed a Negro janitor, a cleaner, as ``Mr." You just can't
do that to them or they will say, ``Ah'm as good as white folks."
(Outcome?) ``I think there will be trouble." She expects riots and
bloodshed.

\hskip 1em
( Jews?) ``Well, they are to blame too, I think. They just cannot
do business straight, they have to be underhanded --- truth has no
meaning for them in business." (What has been your personal
experience?) She cited the case of a friend who is interested in
photography and bought some second-hand cameras from pawn shops.
One day when he was in one, a woman came in with a set of false
teeth. She was told that they were not worth anything (there was
some gold in them). Finally, the Jew gave her a few dollars for
them. As soon as she had gone out, he turned to the man and said,
``She didn't know it, but see that platinum under here?" In other
words the teeth were worth many times what he gave for them. Subject's
friend did not get gypped because he knew them and called their
bluff.
\end{Quote}

It is often advocated as the best means of improving intercultural
relations that as many personal contacts as possible be established
between the different groups. While the value of such contacts in
some cases of anti-Semitism is to be acknowledged, the material
presented in this section argues for certain qualifications, at
least in the case of the more extreme patterns of prejudice. There
is no simple gap between experience and stereotypy. Stereotypy is
a device for looking at things comfortably; since, however, it feeds
on deep-lying unconscious sources, the distortions which occur are
not to be corrected merely by taking a {\em real} look. Rather,
experience itself is predetermined by stereotypy. The persons whose
interviews on minority issues have just been discussed share one
decisive trait. Even if brought together with minority group members
as different from the stereotype as possible, they will perceive
them through the glasses of stereotypy, and will hold against them
whatever they are and do. Since this tendency is by no means confined
to people who are actually ``cranky" (rather, the whole complex of
the Jew is a kind of recognized red-light district of legitimatized
psychotic distortions), this inaccessibility to experience may not
be limited to people of the kind discussed here, but may well operate
in much milder cases. This should be taken into account by any
well-planned policy of defense.  Optimism with regard to the hygienic
effects of personal contacts should be discarded. One cannot ``correct"
stereotypy by experience; he has to reconstitute the capacity for
{\em having} experiences in order to prevent the growth of ideas
which are malignant in the most literal, clinical sense.

%% Arun
\subsection*{D. Anti-Semitism For What?}

It is a basic hypothesis of psychoanalysis that symptoms ``make
sense" in so far as they fulfill a specific function within the
individual's psychological economy --- that they are to be regarded,
as a rule, as vicarious wish-fulfillments of, or as defenses against,
repressed urges. Our previous discussion
%% 618	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
has shown the irrational aspect of anti-Semitic attitudes and
opinions.  Since their content is irreconcilable with reality, we
are certainly entitled to call them symptoms. But they are symptoms
which can hardly be explained by the mechanisms of
neurosis\footnote{{\em neurosis}: a relatively mild mental illness
that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress
(depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a
radical loss of touch with reality.}; 
and
at the same time, the anti-Semitic individual as such, the potentially
fascist character, is certainly not a psychotic{{\em psychosis}: a
severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired
that contact is lost with external reality.}. 
The ultimate
theoretical explanation of an entirely irrational symptom which
nevertheless does not appear to affect the ``normality" of those who
show the symptom is beyond the scope of the present research.
However, we feel justified in asking the question: {\em cui bono}? What
purposes within the lives of our subjects are served by anti-Semitic
ways of thinking? A final answer could be provided only by going
back to the primary causes for the establishment and freezing of
stereotypes. An approach to such an answer has been set forth in
earlier chapters. Here, we limit ourselves to a level closer to the
surface of the ego and ask: what does anti-Semitism ``give" to the
subject within the concrete configurations of his adult experience?

Some of the functions of prejudice may doubtless be called rational.
One does not need to conjure up deeper motivations in order to
understand the attitude of the farmer who wants to get hold of the
property of his Japanese neighbor. One may also call rational the
attitude of those who aim at a fascist dictatorship and accept
prejudice as part of an over-all platform, though in this case the
question of rationality becomes complicated, since neither the goal
of such a dictatorship seems to be rational in terms of the
individual's interest, nor can the wholesale automatized acceptance
of a ready-made formula be called rational either. What we are
interested in, for the moment, however, is a problem of a somewhat
different order. What good does accrue to the actual adjustment of
otherwise ``sensible" persons when they subscribe to ideas which
have no basis in reality and which we ordinarily associate with
maladjustment?

In order to provide a provisional answer to this question, we may
anticipate one of the conclusions from our consideration of the
political and economic sections of the interview 
(Chapter XVII\footnote{%
Chapter XVII: (add name of chapter here)
in {\em The Authoritarian Personality}}):
the all-pervasive ignorance and confusion of our subjects when it
comes to social matters beyond the range of their most immediate
experience. The objectification of social processes, their obedience
to intrinsic supra-individual laws, seems to result in an intellectual
alienation of the individual from society. This alienation is
experienced by the individual as disorientation, with concomitant
fear and uncertainty. As will be seen, political stereotypy and
personalization can be understood as devices for overcoming this
uncomfortable state of affairs.  Images of the politician and of
the bureaucrat can be understood as signposts of orientation and
as projections of the fears created by disorientation. Similar
functions seem to be performed by the ``irrational" imagery of the
Jew. He is, for the highly prejudiced subject, extremely stereotyped;
at the same time, he is more personalized than any other bogey in
so far as he is not defined 
%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL 619 
by a profession or by his role in social life, but by his human
existence as such. For these reasons, as well as for historical
ones, he is much better qualified for the psychological function
of the ``bad man" than the bureaucrats or politicians, who, incidentally,
are often but handy substitutes for the real object of hatred, the
Jew.  The latter's alienness seems to provide the handiest formula
for dealing with the alienation of society. Charging the Jews with
all existing evils seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like
a searchlight and to allow for quick and all-comprising orientation.
The less anti-Jewish imagery is related to actual experience and
the more it is kept ``pure," as it were, from contamination by
reality, the less it seems to be exposed to disturbance by the
dialectics of experience, which it keeps away through its own
rigidity. It is the Great Panacea\footnote{{\em panacea}: a solution
or remedy for all difficulties or diseases.}, 
providing at once intellectual
equilibrium, countercathexis, and a canalization of wishes for a
``change."

Anti-Semitic writers and agitators from Chamberlain\footnote{%
Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855--1927): British writer whose book
{\em The Foundations of the 19th Century} strongly influenced the
racial theories of the Nazi party.}
to Rosenberg\footnote{Alfred Rosenberg (1893--1946): Main author of
key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution
of the Jews.} 
and Hitler have always maintained that the existence of the Jews
is the {\em key} to everything. By talking with individuals of fascist
leanings, one can learn the psychological implications of this ``key"
idea. Their more-or-less cryptic hints frequently reveal a kind of
sinister pride; they speak as if they were ``in the know" and had
solved a riddle otherwise unsolved by mankind (no matter how often
their solution has been already expressed). They raise literally
or figuratively their forefinger, sometimes with a smile of superior
indulgence; they know the answer for everything and present to their
partners in discussion the absolute security of those who have cut
off the contacts by which any modification of their formula may
occur. Probably it is this delusion-like security which casts its
spell over those who feel insecure. By his very ignorance or confusion
or semi-erudition the anti-Semite can often conquer the position
of a profound wizard. The more primitive his drastic formulae are,
due to their stereotypy, the more appealing they are at the same
time, since they reduce the complicated to the elementary, no matter
how the logic of this reduction may work. The superiority thus
gained does not remain on the intellectual level. Since the clich\'e
regularly makes the outgroup bad and the ingroup good, the anti-Semitic
pattern of orientation offers emotional, narcissistic\footnote{{\em
narcissism}: self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the
self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a
feature of mental disorder.}
gratifications
which tend to break down the barriers of rational self-criticism.

It is these psychological instruments upon which fascist agitators
play incessantly. They would hardly do so if there were no
susceptibility for spurious\footnote{{\em spurious}: (of a line of
reasoning) apparently but not actually valid.}
orientation among their listeners and
readers. Here we are concerned only with the evidence for such
susceptibility among people who are by no means overt fascist
followers. We limit ourselves to three nerve points of the
pseudocognitive lure of anti-Semitism: the idea that the Jews are
a ``problem," the assertion that they are all alike, and the claim
that Jews can be recognized as such without exception.

The contention that the Jews, or the Negroes, are a ``problem" is 
regularly
%% 621	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
found in our interviews with prejudiced subjects. We may quote one
example picked at random and then briefly discuss the theoretical
implications of the ``problem" idea.

The prelaw student, {\em 105}, when asked, ``What about other groups?" states:


\begin{Quote}
``Well, the Jews are a ticklish problem --- not the whole race; there
are both good and bad. But there are more bad than good."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The term ``problem" is taken over from the sphere of science and is
used to give the impression of searching, responsible deliberation.
By referring to a problem, one implicitly claims personal aloofness
from the matter in question --- a kind of detachment and higher
objectivity. This, of course, is an excellent rationalization for
prejudice. It serves to give the impression that one's attitudes
are not motivated subjectively but have resulted from hard thinking
and mature experience. The subject who makes use of this device
maintains a discursive attitude in the interview; he qualifies,
quasi-empirically\footnote{{\em empirical}: based on, concerned with,
or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure
logic.}, 
what he has to say, and is ready to admit
exceptions. Yet these qualifications and exceptions only scratch
the surface. As soon as the existence of a ``Jewish problem" is
admitted, anti-Semitism has won its first surreptitious victory.
This is made possible by the equivocal\footnote{{\em equivocal}: open
to more than one interpretation; ambiguous.}
nature of the term itself;
it can be both a neutral issue of analysis and, as indicated by the
everyday use of the term ``problematic" for a dubious character, a
negative entity. There is no doubt that the relations between Jews
and non-Jews do present a problem in the objective sense of the
term, but when ``the Jewish problem" is referred to, the emphasis
is subtly shifted. While the veneer of objectivity is maintained,
the implication is that the {\em Jews} are the problem, a problem, that
is, to the rest of society. It is but one step from this position
to the implicit notion that this problem has to be dealt with
according to its own special requirements, i.e., the problematic
nature of the Jews, and that this will naturally lead outside the
bounds of democratic procedure. Moreover, the ``problem" calls for
a {\em solution}. As soon as the Jews themselves are stamped as this
problem, they are transformed into objects, not only to ``judges"
of superior insight but also to the perpetrators of {\em an action}; far
from being regarded as subjects, they are treated as terms of a
mathematical equation. To call for a ``solution of the Jewish problem"
results in their being reduced to ``material" for manipulation.

It should be added that the ``problem" idea, which made deep inroads
into public opinion through Nazi propaganda and the Nazi example,
is also to be found in the interviews of low-scoring subjects. Here,
however, it assumes regularly the aspect of a {\em protest}. Unprejudiced
subjects try to restore the objective, ``sociological" meaning of
the term, generally insisting on the fact that the so-called ``Jewish
problem" is actually the problem of the non-Jews. However, the very
use of the term may be partially indicative, even with unprejudiced
persons, of a certain ambivalence or at least indifference, as in
the case of {\em 5047}, who scored low on the E scale but high on F and
PEC.


\begin{Quote}
``Yes, I think there is a so-called Jewish problem and a Negro
problem, but essentially
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	62I
I believe that it is really a majority problem." He felt that there
was a need for more education of the ignorant masses and for improving
economic conditions so that there would not be a necessity for
seeking a scapegoat. Generally, his understanding of the problems
seemed to be quite sound, and he expressed disagreement with
anti-Semitism and discrimination against Negroes. However, the
manner in which he approached the matter and his tendency to treat
it as a purely academic problem seemed to indicate that he was not
thoroughly convinced of his statements and was merely using verbal
clich\'es.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The term ``problem" itself seems to suggest a too na\"ive idea of
common sense justice, following the pattern of democratic compromise
in areas where decisions should be made only according to the merits
of the case. The man who speaks about the ``problem" is easily tempted
to say that there are two sides to every problem, with the comfortable
consequence that the Jews {\em must} have done something wrong, if they
were exterminated. This pattern of conformist ``sensibleness" lends
itself very easily to the defense of various kinds of irrationality.

The statement that the Jews are all alike not only dispenses with
all disturbing factors but also, by its sweep, gives to the judge
the grandiose air of a person who sees the whole without allowing
himself to be deflected by petty details --- an intellectual leader.
At the same time, the ``all alike" idea rationalizes the glance at
the individual case as a mere specimen of some generality which can
be taken care of by general measures which are the more radical,
since they call for no exceptions. We give but one example of a
case where traces of ``knowing better" still survive although the
``all alike" idea leads up to the wildest fantasies. {\em F116} is middle
on the E scale, but when the question of the Jews is raised:


\begin{Quote}
(Jews?) ``Now this is where I really do have strong feeling. I am
not very proud of it. I don't think it is good to be so prejudiced
but I can't help it. (What do you dislike about Jews?) Everything.
I can't say one good thing for them. (Are there any exceptions?)
No, I have never met one single one that was an exception. I used
to hope I would. It isn't pleasant to feel the way I do. I would
be just as nice and civil as I could, but it would end the same
way. They cheat, take advantage. (Is it possible that you know some
Jewish people and like them without knowing they are Jews?) Oh no,
I don't think any Jew can hide it. I always know them. (How do they
look?) Attractive. Very well dressed. And as though they knew exactly
what they wanted. (How well have you known Jews?) Well, I never
knew any in childhood. In fact, I never knew one until we moved to
San Francisco, 10 years ago.  He was our landlord. It was terrible.
I had a lovely home in Denver and I hated to leave. And here I was
stuck in an ugly apartment and he did everything to make it worse.
If the rent was due on Sunday, he was there bright and early. After
that I knew lots of them. I had Jewish bosses. There are Jews in
the bank. They are everywhere --- always in the money. My next-door
neighbor is a Jew. I decided to be civil. After all, I can't move
now and I might as well be neighborly. They borrow our lawn mower.
They {\em say} it is because you can't buy one during the war. But of
course lawn mowers cost money. We had a party last week and they
called the police. I called her the next day because I suspected
them. She said she did it so I asked if she didn't think she should
have called me first. She said a man was singing in the yard and
woke her baby and she got so upset she called the police. I asked her
%%622	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
if she realized that her baby screamed for 3 months after she brought
him home from the hospital. Ever since then she has been just
grovelling and I hate that even worse."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
``Knowing better" is mentioned not infrequently by high scorers:
they realize they ``should" not think that way, but stick to their
prejudice under a kind of compulsion which is apparently stronger
than the moral and rational counteragencies available to them. In
addition to this phenomenon, there is hardly any aspect of the
anti-Semitic syndrome discussed in this chapter which could not be
illustrated by this quotation from a truly ``all-out," totalitarian
anti-Semite. She omits nothing. Her insatiability is indicative of
the tremendous libidinous\footnote{{\em libidinous}: showing excessive
sexual drive; lustful. From {\em libido}: (From Psychoanalysis) the
energy of the sexual drive as a component of the life instinct.}
energy she has invested in her Jewish
complex. Acting out her anti-Semitism obviously works with her as
a wish-fulfillment, both with regard to aggressiveness and with
regard to the desire for intellectual superiority as indicated by
her cooperation in the present study ``in the interests of science."
Her personal attitude partakes of that sinister contempt shown by
those who feel themselves to be ``in the know" with respect to all
kinds of dark secrets.

Her most characteristic attitude is one of pessimism --- she dismisses
many matters with a downward glance, a shrug of the shoulders, and
a sigh.

The idea of the ``Jew spotter" was introduced in the Labor Study,
where it proved to be the most discriminating item. We used it only
in a supplementary way, in work with the Los Angeles sample, but
there can be no doubt that people who are extreme on A--S will
regularly allege that they can recognize Jews at once. This is the
most drastic expression of the ``orientation" mechanism which we
have seen to be so essential a feature of the prejudiced outlook.
At the same time, it can frequently be observed that the actual
variety of Jews, which could hardly escape notice, leads to a high
amount of vagueness with regard to the criteria according to which
Jews might be spotted; this vagueness does not, however, interfere
with the definiteness of the spotter's claim. One example for this
configuration will suffice. It is interesting because of the strange
mixture of fantasy and real observation.

{\em 5039}, a 27-year-old student at the University of Southern California
and a war veteran, who scores high on E:


\begin{Quote}
``Yes, I think I can \ldots\ of course, you can't always, I know.
But usually they have different features: larger nose, and I think
differently shaped faces, more narrow, and different mannerisms.
\ldots\ But mainly they talk too much and they have different
attitudes.  Almost always they will counter a question with another
question (gives examples from school); they are freer with criticism;
tend to talk in big terms and generally more aggressive --- at least
I notice that immediately. \ldots "
\end{Quote}

\subsection*{E. Two Kinds of Jews}

The stereotypes just discussed have been interpreted as means for
pseudo-orientation in an estranged world, and at the same time as
devices for ``mastering"
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	623
this world by being able completely to pigeonhole its negative
aspects.  The ``problematizing" attitude puts the resentful person
in the position of one who is rationally discriminating; the assertion
that all the Jews are alike transposes the ``problem" into the realm
of systematic and complete knowledge, without a ``loophole," as it
were; the pretension of being able unfailingly to recognize Jews
raises the claim that the subject is actually the judge in matters
where the judgment is supposed to have been pronounced once and for
all. In addition, there is another stereotype of ``orientation" which
deserves closer attention because it shows most clearly the
``topographical"\footnote{{\em topographical}: relating to or
representing the physical distribution of parts or features on the
surface of or within an organ or organism.} 
function and because it crops up spontaneously with
great frequency in the interview material. It is even more indicative
of the ``pseudorational" element in anti-Semitic prejudice than is
the manner of speaking about the ``Jewish problem." We refer to the
standard division of Jews into two groups, the good ones and the
bad ones, a division frequently expressed in terms of the ``white"
Jews and the ``kikes." It may be objected that this division cannot
be taken as an index of subjective attitudes, since it has its basis
in the object itself, namely, the different degrees of Jewish
assimilation. We shall be able to demonstrate that this objection
does not hold true and that we have to cope with an attitudinal
pattern largely independent of the structure of the minority group
to which it is applied.

It has been established in previous chapters that the mentality of
the prejudiced subject is characterized by thinking in terms of
rigidly contrasting ingroups and outgroups. In the stereotype here
under consideration, this dichotomy is projected upon the outgroups
themselves, or at least upon one particular outgroup. This is partly
due no doubt to the automatization of black and white thinking which
tends to ``cut in two" whatever is being considered. It is also due
to the desire to maintain an air of objectivity while expressing
one's hostilities, and perhaps even to a mental reservation of the
prejudiced person who does not want to deliver himself completely
to ways of thinking which he still regards as ``forbidden." The ``two
kinds" stereotype thus has to be viewed as a compromise between
antagonistic tendencies within the prejudiced person himself. This
would lead to the supposition that people who make this division
are rarely {\em extreme} high scorers; a supposition which seems to be
largely borne out by our data. In terms of our ``orientation" theory
we should expect that the ``two kinds" idea serves as a makeshift
for bridging the gap between general stereotypy and personal
experience.  Thus, the ``good" outgroup members would be those whom
the subject personally knows, whereas the ``bad" ones would be those
at a greater social distance --- a distinction obviously related
to the differences between assimilated and non-assimilated sectors
of the outgroup. This again is at least partly corroborated, though
it will be seen that the ``two kinds" idea is in many respects so
vague and abstract that it does not even coincide with the division
between the known and the unknown. As a device for overcoming
stereotypy
%% 624	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
the ``two kinds" concept is spurious because it is thoroughly
stereotyped itself.

{\em 5007}, who scores high on all the scales, comments as follows:


\begin{Quote}
``Most of the Jews I have known have been white Jews, and they are
very charming people. Jews are aggressive, clannish, overcrowd nice
neighborhoods, and are money-minded. At least the `non-white Jews.'
My experiences have been of two sorts. Some Jews are amongst the
most charming and educated people I know. Other experiences have
been less friendly. On the whole, I think Jews in the professions
are all right, but in commerce they seem to be quite objectionable."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Here it can be seen clearly how the over-all stereotypy, as suggested
by the list of ``objectionable Jewish traits," struggles with the
stereotype of a dichotomy, which in this case represents the more
humanitarian trend. It is conceived in terms of acquaintances 
vs.\ others, but this is complicated by a second division, that between
``professional" Jews (supposedly of higher education and morality)
and ``business" Jews, who are charged with being ruthless money-makers
and cheats.

This, however, is not the classical form of the ``two kinds" idea.
The latter is expressed, rather, by the above-mentioned Boy Scout
leader, {\em 5051}, the man who brings the Armenians into play:


\begin{Quote}
``Now take the Jews. There are good and bad amongst all races. We
know that, and we know that Jews are a religion, not a race; but
the trouble is that there are two types of Jews. There are the white
Jews and the kikes. My pet theory is that the white Jews hate the
kikes just as much as we do. I even knew a good Jew who ran a store
and threw some kikes out, calling them kikes and saying he didn't
want their business."
\end{Quote}

Research on anti-Semitism among Jews would probably corroborate
this ``pet" idea. In Germany at least, the
``autochthonous"\footnote{{\em autochthonous}: indigenous rather than
descended from migrants or colonists. (Said of an inhabitant of a
place.)} 
Jews used
to discriminate heavily against refugees and immigrants from the
East and often enough comforted themselves with the idea that the
Nazi policies were directed merely against the ``{\em
Ostjuden\footnote{{\em Ostjuden}: East-jews (German).}}."
Distinctions
of this sort seem to promote gradual persecution of Jews, group by
group, with the aid of the smooth rationalization that only those
are to be excluded who do not belong anyway.  It is a structural
element of anti-Semitic persecution that it starts with limited
objectives, but goes on and on without being stopped. It is through
this structure that the ``two kinds" stereotype assumes its sinister
aspect. The division between ``whites" and ``kikes," arbitrary and
unjust in itself, invariably turns against the so-called ``whites"
who become the ``kikes" of tomorrow.

Evidence of the independence of the division from its object is
offered by the all-around high scorer, {\em M1229m}, of the Maritime
School group, who divides the Jews in a manner employed by other
Southerners with regard to the Negroes. Here a certain break between
general race prejudice and a relative freedom of more personal
attitudes and experiences seems to exist.
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	625


\begin{Quote}
(Jewish problem?) ``Not a terrific problem. I get along with them.
Jews in the South are different from those in the North. Not so
grasping in the South. (Daughter marrying a Jew?) O.K.; no problem.
Large number of Jewish families in Galveston. No prejudice against
Jews in Texas."
\end{Quote}

This making of private exceptions is sometimes, as by the mildly 
anti-Semitic radio writer {\em 5003}, expressed as follows:

``He doesn't know about Jews. `Some of my best friends are Jews.' "
In spite of the innumerable jokes, both European and American, about
the ``some of my best friends" clich\'e, it survives tenaciously.
Apparently it combines felicitously the merits of ``human interest"
--- supposedly personal experience --- with a bow to the superego
which does not seriously impede the underlying hostility.

Occasionally the concessions made to personal acquaintances are
explained by the interspersion of racial theories, and thus a mildly
paranoid touch is added. An example is the generally ``high" woman,
{\em F109}:


\begin{Quote}
Father Scotch-Irish, mother English-Irish. Subject is not identified
with any of these. ``I have an age-old feeling against Jews, some
against Negroes. Jews stick together, are out for money; they gyp
you. Jews are in big businesses. It seems they will be running the
country before long. I know some people of Jewish descent who are
very nice, but they're not full-blooded Jews. Jews have large noses,
are slight in stature, little sly Jews. The women have dark hair,
dark eyes, are sort of loud."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
This girl student, by the way, to whom the ``education" idea is
all-important, is among those who show traces of bad conscience.


\begin{Quote}
Subject knows she's prejudiced; she thinks she needs educating too,
by working with people of different races.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The intrinsic weakness of the ``best friend" idea, which simulates
human experience without truly expressing it, comes into the open
in the following quotation, where the line between the friend and
the ``kikes" is drawn in such a way that even the ``friend" is not
fully admitted.


\begin{Quote}
(Jews?) ``There are Jews and Jews. I have a very good girl friend
who is a Jew --- never enters into our relationship except that she
is in a Jewish sorority. (Would you want her in your sorority?)
Well \ldots\ (pause) \ldots\ I don't think I'd have any objections. (Would
you let in all Jewish girls?) No. One Jew is alright but you get a
whole mob and \ldots ! (What happens?) They get into anything and
they'll control it --- they'll group together for their own interests
--- the kike Jew is as dishonest as they come. Find them on Fillmore
Street in San Francisco. I have had no experience with kike Jews.
I think that's created in my family. Father feels strongly against
them --- I don't know why. (Nazis?) That's unnecessary --- they
have a right to exist --- no reason for excluding them as long as
they don't try to overstep the rights of others. I knew a lot of
Jews in high school. They kept pretty much to themselves. Don't
think I'm echoing. I would like Jews as long as they don't reflect
typical Jewish qualities. Typical Jewish nose, mouth, voice. The
presence of a
%626	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Jew creates feelings of tension. Squeaky voice, long, pointed nose.
Couldn't name anti-Semitic groups in this country but think they
exist."
\end{Quote}

Particular attention should be called to the statement of this girl,
described by the interviewer as being ``tight all over," that the
presence of a Jew creates feelings of tension. There is reason to
believe that this is a common experience. It would hardly suffice
to attribute this uneasiness solely to repressed guilt feelings,
or to the effect of some ``strangeness" as such. At least the concrete
aspects of this strangeness in social contacts needs further
elucidation. We venture the hypothesis that it is due to a certain
discomfort and uneasiness on the Jew's own part in non-Jewish
company, and on a certain antagonism of the Jews, deeply rooted in
history, against ``genial" conviviality and harmless abandonment of
oneself in order to enjoy the moment. Since this may be one concrete
factor making for anti-Semitism, independent of traditional stereotypy,
this whole complex should be followed up most carefully in future
research.

As to the evidence for our assertion that the ``two kinds" idea is
not object-bound but rather a structural psychological pattern, we
limit ourselves to two examples. The student nurse, {\em 5013}, whose
scale scores are generally high:


\begin{Quote}
Feels towards the Japanese and the Mexicans and Negroes very much
as she does toward the Jews. In all cases she holds to a sort of
bifurcation\footnote{{\em bifurcation}: the division of something into
two branches or parts.}
theory, that is, that there are good Japanese and that
they should be allowed to return to California, but there are bad
ones and they should not. The Mexicans also fall into two groups,
as do the Negroes. When it is pointed out to her that people of her
own extraction probably also fall into good and bad groups, she
admits this but feels that the line between the good and the bad
is not as great in her case. She feels that the Negro problem is
probably of greater importance than the other minorities but says
that she speaks at the hospital to the colored nurses and doctors.
At this point she related a long anecdote about taking care of a
female Negro patient who had told her that the Negroes had brought
their problems on themselves by aspiring to equality with the whites.
She feels that this was a very wise Negress and agrees with her.
\end{Quote}

In the case of Southerners, the ``two kinds" idea is frequently
applied to the Negroes, those in the South being praised, and those
who went away being denounced for demanding an equality to which
they were not entitled. In so far as the Southern ``white man's
nigger" is more subservient and a better object of exploitation in
the eyes of these subjects, this attitude, with its patriarchal and
feudalistic rationalizations, can be called semi-realistic. But the
construct of ``two kinds of Negroes" often results in quite a different
connotation, as in the case of {\em F340a}. She is high on F and PEC and
middle on E.


\begin{Quote}
``The Negroes are getting so arrogant now, they come to the employment
office and say they don't like this kind of a job and that kind of
a job. However, there are some who are employed at the employment
office and they are very nice and intelligent. There are nice ones
and bad ones among us. The Negroes who have
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	627
always lived in Oakland are all right; they don't know what to do
with all those who are coming in from the South either. They all
carry knives; if you do something they don't like, they `will get
even with you, they will slice you up.' "
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Here, the ``two kinds" idea results in plain persecution fantasies. 

\subsection*{F. The Anti-Semite's Dilemma}

If anti-Semitism is a ``symptom" which fulfills an ``economic" function
within the subject's psychology, one is led to postulate that this
symptom is not simply ``there," as a mere expression of what the
subject happens to be, but that it is the outcome of a conflict.
It owes its very irrationality to psychological dynamics which force
the individual, at least in certain areas, to abandon the reality
principle\footnote{{\em reality principle}: (Psychoanalysis) the ego's
control of the pleasure-seeking activity of the id in order to meet
the demands of the external world.}. 
The conception of prejudice as a symptom resulting from
a conflict has been elucidated in earlier chapters. Here, we are
concerned not so much with the clinical evidence of conflict
determinants as with the traces of conflict within the phenomenon
of anti-Semitism itself.  Some evidence bearing on this point has
already been presented in the last sections. The ``problem" idea as
well as the dichotomy applied to the outgroup represent a kind of
compromise between underlying urges and hostile stereotypes on the
one hand, and the demands of conscience and the weight of concrete
experience on the other. The subject who ``discusses" the Jews usually
wants to maintain some sense of proportion, at least formally, even
though the content of his rational considerations is spurious and
his supposed insight itself is warped by the very same instinctual
urges which it is called upon to check.

The standard form under which conflict appears in statements of
high-scoring subjects is, as indicated above, ``I shouldn't, but\ldots "
This formula is the result of a remarkable displacement. It
has been pointed out that the anti-Semite is torn between negative
stereotypy and personal experiences which contradict this 
stereotypy.\footnote{%
The most drastic evidence for this hypothesis is, of course, the
habit of differentiating between those Jews with whom the subject
is acquainted, and who are ``good," and the rest of them, who are
the ``kikes." In certain cases this contradiction is both concretized
and cleared up etiologically\footnote{%
{\em etiology}: the investigation or attribution of the cause or
reason for something, often expresseed in terms of historical or
mythical explanation.}. 
We refer here to case {\em 5057}, discussed
in detail in Chapter XIX, (Arun: Add chapter title here)
where the subject's bias is practically
explained by himself as the outcome of resentment aroused by a
childhood experience with a Jewish delicatessen man. (Footnote by
Adorno)}
As soon as the subject reflects, however, upon his own attitude,
the relation between stereotypy and experience appears in reverse.
He regards tolerance as the general law, as the stereotype as it
were, and personalizes his own stereotyped hostility, presenting
it as the inescapable result either of experience or of idiosyncrasies
which are stronger than he is himself. This can be accounted for
partly by the officially prevailing democratic ideology which stamps
prejudice as something wrong. It has also to be considered that the
superego, being constituted as the psychological agency of society
within the individual, regularly assumes an aspect of universality
which easily appears to the subject, driven by wishes for
%% 628	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
instinctual gratification, as ``rigid law." This, however, hardly
tells the whole story. The discrepancy between experience and
stereotype is put into the service of the prejudiced attitude. The
prejudiced subject is dimly aware that the content of the stereotype
is imaginary and that his own experience represents truth. Yet, for
deeper psychological reasons, he wants to stick to the stereotype.
This he achieves by transforming the latter into an expression of
his personality and the antistereotypical elements into an abstract
obligation. This displacement is enhanced by his innermost conviction
that the supposed stereotypes of tolerance are not so strong socially
as he pretends. He realizes that while he appears to rebel against
the slogans of democracy and equality, for reasons that are strictly
personal, he is actually backed by powerful social trends. And yet
he will claim, at the same time, that he acts as a sincere and
independent person who does not care what others think. Moreover,
he relies on the idea that one's own feelings are always stronger
than conventions, that he simply has to follow them, and that his
prejudice is a kind of fatality which cannot be changed. This seems
to be a common pattern by which the anti-Semite's conflict situation
is rationalized in a way favorable to prejudice.

This pattern manifests itself objectively in a characteristic
contradiction: that between general pretensions of being unbiased,
and prejudiced statements as soon as specific issues are raised.
{\em 5056}, a 29-year-old housewife, with high scores on all the scales,


\begin{Quote}
Stated that she and her husband have no particular dislike for {\em
any}
group of people. (This statement is interesting when contrasted
with her very high E-score, and with the statements which follow.)
``The Negro, however, should be kept with his own people. I would
not want my niece marrying a Negro, and I would not want Negro
neighbors." To subject there is quite a Negro problem --- ``it is
probably the most important minority problem." She prefers ``the way
things are in the South; the Negroes seem so happy down there.
Actually, they should have a separate state. This doesn't mean that
we should snub them. The separate state would be very good, because,
although we should govern them, they could run it themselves."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The underlying conflict could not be expressed more authentically
than in the contradiction contained in the last statement. The
subject tries to display an unbiased attitude toward Jews:


\begin{Quote}
It is interesting to note that she objected rather strongly to
discussing the Jews and the Negroes in the same context and protested
when they were presented contiguously in the interview. ``I would
just as soon have Jews around --- in fact, I have some Jewish
friends. Some are overbearing, but then some Gentiles are overbearing
too."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
But as soon as it comes to her ``personal" attitude, she falls for
the stereotype and resolves the conflict by an aloofness which
amounts for all practical purposes to an endorsement of anti-Semitism:

%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	629


\begin{Quote}
When asked about Jewish traits, she first mentioned ``the Jewish
nose." In addition, she believes Jews have a certain set of personality
traits all their own, which will never change. ``They want to argue
all the time; some are greedy (though some aren't, in fact, some
are generous); they talk with their hands and are dramatic in their
speech." She believes the dislike of the Jews is increasing, to
which trend she objects. ``Think we're being selfish when we act
that way, just as we accuse the Jews of being." She doesn't like
to hear attacks on the Jews, but she wouldn't defend them by argument.
This seems to be both a function of her dislike for argumentation
as well as a certain attitude of non-involvement in or detachment
from the whole question of anti-Semitism.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The subjective mirroring of the conflict between stereotype and
experience in reverse, resulting in rigidity of the supposed
experience, is clearly exemplified in the statements of {\em M1230a}, a
middle scorer of the Maritime School group:


\begin{Quote}
(What do you think of the problem of racial minorities?) ``Well, for
the foreigners coming in, it's quite a question. This is supposed
to be a melting pot. But shouldn't let too many of them in. \ldots\
And then the Negro problem. \ldots\ I try to be liberal, but I was
raised in a Jim Crow\footnote{{\em Jim Crow}: the former practice of
segregating black people in the US; apartheid.}
state. \ldots\ I don't think I would ever fall
in with giving the Negroes equal rights in every way. \ldots\ And
yet, foreigners, you have a natural dislike for them. Yet, all of
us were once foreigners. \ldots "
\end{Quote}

The anti-Semite's dilemma may be epitomized by quoting verbatim the
following statements of the girl student {\em 5005}, who is high on both
the E and F scales, but low on PEC.


\begin{Quote}
``I don't think there should be a Jewish problem. People should not
be discriminated against, but judged on their individual merits. I
don't like it to be called a problem. Certainly I'm against prejudice.
Jews are aggressive, bad-mannered, clannish, intellectual, clean,
overcrowd neighborhoods, noisy, and oversexed. I will admit that
my opinion is not based on much contact, however; I hear these
things all the time. There are very few Jewish students in my school,
and I have already referred to my good contact with the one girl."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Here the contradiction between judgment and experience is so striking
that the existence of prejudice can be accounted for only by strong
psychological urges.

\subsection*{G. Prosecutor As Judge}

In terms of ideology, the anti-Semite's conflict is between the
current, culturally ``approved" stereotypes of prejudice and the
officially prevailing standards of democracy and human equality.
Viewed psychologically, the conflict is between certain foreconscious
or repressed id\footnote{{\em id}: (Psychoanalysis) the part of the
mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are
manifest. {\sc ORIGIN} 1920s: from Latin, literally `that,'
translating German {\em es} (meaning `it').  The term was first used
in this sense by Frued, following use in a similar sense by his
contemporary, Georg Groddeck.} 
tendencies on the one hand and the superego, or its
more or less externalized, conventional substitute, on the other.
It is hard to predict or even to explain satisfactorily, on the
basis of our data, which way this conflict will be decided in each
individual case, though we may hypothesize that as soon as prejudice
in any amount is allowed to enter a person's manifest ways of
thinking, the scales weigh
%% 63o	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
heavily in favor of an ever-increasing expansion of his prejudice.
We are furthermore entitled to expect this result of the conflict
in all cases where the potentially fascist personality syndrome is
established. If the conflict within the individual has been decided
{\em against} the Jews, the decision itself is almost without exception
rationalized moralistically. It is as if the internal powers of
prejudice, after the defeat of the countertendencies, would consummate
their victory by taking the opposing energies, which they have
defeated, into their own service. The superego becomes the spokesman
of the id, as it were --- a dynamic configuration, incidentally,
which is not altogether new to psychoanalysis. We might call the
urges expressing themselves in anti-Semitism the prosecutor, and
conscience the judge, within the personality, and say that the two
are fused. The Jews have to face, in the prejudiced personality,
the parody of a trial. This is part of the psychological explanation
of why the chances of the Jews making a successful defense against
the prejudiced personality are so slim. It may be noted that the
judiciary practice in Nazi Germany followed exactly the same pattern,
that the Jews were never given a chance, in the Third Reich, to
speak for their own cause, either in private law suits or collectively.
It will be seen that the expropriation of the superego by the fascist
character, with underlying unconscious guilt feelings which must
be violently silenced at any price, contributes decisively to the
transformation of ``cultural discrimination" into an insatiably
hostile attitude feeding upon destructive urges.

There is a clear index of the conquest of the superego by anti-Semitic
ideology: the assertion that the responsibility for everything the
Jews have to suffer, and more particularly, for the genocide committed
by the Nazis, rests with the victims rather than with their
persecutors. The anti-Semite avails himself of a clich\'e which seems
to make this idea acceptable once and for all: that the Jews ``brought
it on themselves" no matter what ``it" may be. {\em M107}, the young man
who marked every question on the questionnaire scale either +3 or
--3 but averaged high on all three scales, is a good example of this
pattern of rationalization, following the dubious logic of ``where
there is smoke there must be fire":


\begin{Quote}
``I never understood why Hitler was so brutal toward them. There
must have been some reason for it, something to provoke it. Some
say he had to show his authority, but I doubt it. I suspect the
Jews contributed a great deal to it."
\end{Quote}

How the moralistic construct of Jewish responsibility leads to a
complete reversal between victim and murderer is strikingly
demonstrated by one subject, {\em 5064}, another one of the Los Angeles
Boy Scout leaders and a butcher by trade. He scores high on both
the E and F scale although lower on PEC. While still officially
condemning the German atrocities, he makes a surprising suggestion:


\begin{Quote}
``No American can approve of what the Nazis did to the Jews. I really 
hope that
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	631
the Jews will do something about it before we come to any such
position here. The solution is in the education, particularly of
the minority."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
This type of mental perversion seems to utilize an idea taken from
the stock of traditional liberalistic wisdom: God helps those who
help themselves.  The Jews are in jeopardy, therefore it is up to
the Jews. In a cultural climate where success has come to be a major
measuring rod for any value, the precarious situation of the Jews
works as an argument against them. The affinity of this attitude
and the ``no pity for the poor" theme, to be discussed in the chapter
on politics, can hardly be overlooked. The same line of thought
occurs in the interview of another Boy Scout leader, the Austrian-born
and somewhat over-Americanized 55-year-old {\em 5044}, who is consistently
high on all scales:


\begin{Quote}
``The Jews should take the lead rather than the Gentiles. After all,
the Jews are the ones who may get into serious trouble. They shouldn't
walk on other people's feet."
\end{Quote}

While the Jews ``bring it upon themselves," the Nazis' extermination
policy is either justified or regarded as a Jewish exaggeration
itself, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The high-scoring
man, {\em M359}, departmental manager for a leather company, is one of
those who have ``a large number of very close Jewish friends." Despite
this he is high on both the E and PEC scales, although lower on F.
Nor does it prevent the following interview episode:


\begin{Quote}
(Nazi treatment?) ``Unable to convince myself that the treatment was
limited to Jews. This seems to me to be Jewish propaganda to solicit
sympathy and help by overemphasizing their hardships, though I have
no sympathy for the Nazi's treatment of {\em peoples}."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The mercilessness accompanying the semi-apologetic attitude towards
the Nazis can be seen in this subject's pseudorational statements
on Palestine: while apparently wishing to ``give the Jews a chance,"
he simultaneously excludes any prospects of success by referring
to the Jews' supposedly unchangeably bad nature:


\begin{Quote}
(Solution?) ``Sending them to Palestine is silly because it's not
big enough. A good idea to have a country of their own, but big
enough so that they can go ahead with their daily pursuits in a
normal way, but the Jews would not be happy. They are only happy
to have others work for them."
\end{Quote}

The explanatory idea that the ``Jews brought it upon themselves" is
used as a rationalization for destructive wishes which otherwise
would not be allowed to pass the censorship of the ego. In some
cases this is disguised as a statement of fact; e.g., by {\em 5012}, a
21-year-old discharged naval petty officer, who scores high on all
scales:


\begin{Quote}
``I don't want anything to do with them. They are a nuisance, but
not a menace.  They will get whatever they deserve as a result of
their behavior."
\end{Quote}

%%63 2	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY


\noindent
The high-scoring woman {\em F103}, however, who used to be a social welfare
student but has changed to decorative art, lets the cat out of the
bag:


\begin{Quote}
``I don't blame the Nazis at all for what they did to the Jews. That
sounds terrible, I know, but if the Jews acted the way they do here,
I don't blame them. I've never had any bad personal experiences
with Jews, it's just the way they act. Don't help your fellow man;
that's their creed."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Here the interrelation between death-wish\footnote{{\em death
instinct}: (Psychoanalysis) an innate desire for self-annihilation,
thought to be manifest in the conservative and regressive tendency of
the psyche to reduce tension. Compare with {\sc Life Instinct.}}
and moralistic rationalization
becomes truly terrifying. Particularly noteworthy is the subject's
underscoring of her own irrationality, in spite of her rationalization
concerning the Jews' innate badness. Her confession that she never
had any bad experiences with Jews high-lights an important aspect
of the whole phenomenon of anti-Semitic extremism. It is the fantastic
disproportion between the Jewish ``guilt" --- even as conceived by
the anti-Semite himself --- and the judgment that is pronounced.
In previous sections, the role played by the theme of ``exchange"
in the mentality of the prejudiced person has been discussed.
Frequently our high-scoring subjects complain that they never get
their full share, that they are being exploited by everybody. This
sense of victimization goes hand in hand with very strong underlying
possessive and appropriative desires.  Accordingly, when the subjects
speak about the ``justice" to be meted out to the Jews they express
their own desire for an unjust state of affairs in which the exchange
of equivalents has been replaced by distribution according to
unmediated and irrational power relationships. This is expressed
negatively towards the Jews: they should get {\em more} punishment
--- infinitely more --- than they ``deserve." Ordinarily, it would
never occur even to a very aggressive person that somebody who is
bad-mannered or even a cheat should be punished by death.  Where
the Jews are concerned, however, the transition from accusations
which are not only flimsy but unsubstantial even if they were true,
to suggestions of the severest kinds of treatment seems to work
quite smoothly.  This is indicative of one of the most pernicious
features of the potentially fascist character.

The logical property of stereotypes, that is, their all-comprehensiveness
which allows for no deviations, is not only well adapted to meet
certain requirements of the prejudiced outlook; it is, by itself,
an expression of a psychological trait which probably could be fully
understood only in connection with the theory of paranoia and the
paranoid ``system" which always tends to include everything, to
tolerate nothing which cannot be identified by the subject's formula.
The extremely prejudiced person tends toward ``psychological
totalitarianism," something which seems to be almost a microcosmic
image of the totalitarian state at which he aims. Nothing can be
left untouched, as it were; everything must be made ``equal" to the
ego-ideal\footnote{{\em ego-ideal}: (Psychoanalysis) (in Freudian
theory) the part of the mind that imposes on itself concepts of ideal
behaviour developed from parental and social standards.} 
of a rigidly conceived and hypostatized\footnote{{\em hypostatized}:
treat or represent (something abstract) as a concrete reality.}
ingroup. The
outgroup, the chosen foe, represents an eternal challenge. As long
as anything different survives, the
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	633
fascist character feels threatened, no matter how weak the other
being may be. It is as if the anti-Semite could not sleep quietly
until he has transformed the whole world into the very same paranoid
system by which he is beset: the Nazis went far beyond their official
anti-Semitic program. This mechanism makes for the complete
disproportion between ``guilt" and punishment. The extreme anti-Semite
simply cannot stop. By a logic of his own, which is of an archaic
nature, much closer to associational transitions than to discursive
inferences, he reaches, after having started from relatively mild
accusations, the wildest conclusions, tantamount in the last analysis
to the pronouncement of death sentences against those whom he
literally ``cannot stand." This mechanism was encountered in the
``screened" interviews of the Labor Study where subjects frequently
``talked themselves into anti-Semitism." Our interview schedule,
more strictly standardized, prevented us from catching the latter
phenomenon. Yet we have striking testimony of the disproportion
between guilt and punishment in some of our cases. It is here that
the ``expropriation" of the superego by the anti-Semite's punitive
moralism obtains its full significance. This removes the last
obstacle to psychological totalitarianism.  There are no inhibitions
left by which the associational crescendo of destructive ideas could
be checked. Hatred is reproduced and enhanced in an almost automatized,
compulsive manner which is both utterly detached from the reality
of the object and completely alien to the ego. It may be added that,
viewed sociologically, the disproportion between guilt and punishment
shows that to the extreme anti-Semite the whole idea of rational
law has become a sham even though he dwells on orderliness and
legalitarian niceties. He is ready to sacrifice his own ideology
of equivalents as soon as he has the power to get the major share
for himself. Psychologically, the idea of eternal Jewish guilt can
be understood as a projection of the prejudiced person's own repressed
guilt feelings; ideologically, it is a mere
epiphenomenon\footnote{{\em epiphenomenon}: a secondary effect or
byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process.}, 
a
rationalization in the strictest sense. In the extreme case, the
psychological focal point is the wish to kill the object of his
hatred. It is only afterwards that he looks for reasons why the
Jews ``must" be killed, and these reasons can never suffice fully
to justify his extermination fantasies.  This, however, does not
``cure" the anti-Semite, once he has succeeded in expropriating his
conscience. The disproportion between the guilt and the punishment
induces him, rather, to pursue his hatred beyond any limits and
thus to prove to himself and to others that he {\em must} be right. This
is the ultimate function of ideas such as ``the Jews brought it upon
themselves" or the more generalized formula ``there must be something
to it." The extreme anti-Semite silences the remnants of his own
conscience by the extremeness of his attitude. He seems to terrorize
himself even while he terrorizes others.

The sham trial of rationalizations put on by the prejudiced person
sometimes makes for a kind of defense of the Jews. But this
psychological defense is all too reminiscent of the technique of
the Nazi courts. It is permitted only
%% 634	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
in order to satisfy the formalized and hollow wish for legality,
the empty shell of expropriated conscience. The defense must always
remain impotent.  Whatever good is said about the Jews sounds like
an ironical or hypocritical variation of standard blames. Thus,
reference is frequently made to the mythical ``good family life" of
the Jews, a comment which, however thinly, veils the accusation of
conspiratorial clannishness; and this is accompanied by insincere
protestations of envy of these Jewish qualities, the implication
being that the anti-Semitic subject gets the worst deal in life
because his noble nature prevents him from the practice of connivance.
Still another type of mock-defense can be observed in our interviews.
It is the assertion that the Jews are so clever; that they are
``smarter" than the Gentiles, and that one has to admire them on
this account. The mechanism at work here involves a double set of
values which makes itself felt throughout contemporary culture. On
the one hand, there are the ``ideals" of magnanimity, unselfishness,
justice, and love to which one has to pay lip service. On the other
hand, there are the standards of achievement, success, and status
which one has to follow in one's actual life. This double set of
values is applied to the Jews in reverse, as it were. They are
praised for their supposed or actual living up to the standards
which the anti-Semite himself actually follows and simultaneously,
they are condemned for their violation of the very same moral code
of which he has successfully rid himself. The phraseology of
conscience is used in order to take back the moral credit given to
the chosen foe in order to appease one's own conscience. Even the
praise apportioned to the Jews is used as supporting evidence for
their pre-established guilt.

The point being developed here, as well as other features of the
prejudiced mentality, is illustrated by the following description
of {\em 5039}, a 27-year-old veteran student, high on E and middle on the
other scales, who is described by the interviewer as a ``rather
egocentric person."


\begin{Quote}
In rebelling against his father's teachings, he has dissociated
himself from the church, but nevertheless strongly identifies himself
as a Gentile in contrast to the Jews. He explained this on the basis
of having grown up in a neighborhood \ldots\  where he was the only
Gentile in a Jewish community and where he was made to feel that
he was an ``outsider." He feels that there is a basic conflict in
the religious teachings and upbringing of Christians as against
Jews, which is largely responsible for the incompatibility of the
two groups. He stated that the Christian religion stresses the
pacifistic teaching of ``turning the other cheek," thus causing youth
to become ``maladjusted and submissive," whereas the Jewish religion
spurs youth to achievement and aggression, on the basis that ``your
fathers have suffered, therefore it is now up to you to prove
yourself." Therefore, he feels that a truly religious Christian is
bound to be ``outdone" by ambitious and aggressive Jews. \ldots\ He
did not seem aware that he was generalizing from his own particular
experience and environment.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
That the objectivity of these reflections about the supposedly
realistic education instigated by Judaism is a mere fake and actually
serves as a pretext for
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	635
boundless hostility is shown by this subject's answer to the specific
question referring to Hitler's atrocities:


\begin{Quote}
``Well, if I had been in Germany, I think I would have done the 
same. \ldots\ I suppose I could have been a Nazi. \ldots\ I think 
discipline is a good thing. \ldots "
\end{Quote}

Whereas this subject's statements on Jewish smartness are overtly
hostile, and limited to the imagined disadvantages of Gentiles in
competition with Jews, the smartness idea is sometimes expressed
with an air of mock humbleness. An example is afforded by the
high-scoring man {\em M104}, a former engineering student who has changed
to law:


\begin{Quote}
He said ``you hear that our country is run by Jewish capitalists,
that Jewish capitalists wield all the power here. If this is true,
it means that our own people aren't smart enough. If our people
know the way the Jews are, and can't do the same thing, more power
to the Jews. If they know how the Jews work, they should be able
to do it just as well." He doesn't ``want to admit that the others
aren't as smart as the Jews, and that's what it would mean if this
country is run by Jewish capitalists. If they're smarter than we
are, let them run it."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
But the magnanimous ending of the quotation has sinister implications.
A tiny shift of emphasis suffices to transform it into the idea
that the Jews, because of their sinister cleverness, run the country,
that we have to get rid of them and that, since Jewish smartness
makes constitutional procedures ineffective, this can be done only
by violent means. That the idea of Jewish omnipotence through
smartness is a mere projection becomes nowhere clearer than in the
case of the consistently high-scoring woman {\em F105}. She is crippled
as a result of infantile paralysis in early childhood. She consummates
the idea of Jewish smartness --- of the Jews ``taking over the
business affairs of the nation" --- by the expectation of a bloody
uprising of the Jews which is but a superficially veiled projection
of her own wish for anti-Jewish pogroms:


\begin{Quote}
``The white people have decided that we're the thing --- the white
vs.\ black and yellow. I think there's going to be a Jewish uprising
after the war. I'm not against the Jews. Those I've had contact
with were very nice. Of course, I've seen some I didn't like, too.
(What didn't you like about them?) They're loud and they seem to
like attention. They're always trying to be at the top of something.
I've heard stories about how they'll stab friends in the back, etc.,
but I have still to see to believe. (Uprising?) I think there will
be bloodshed over it in this country. (Do you think it will be
justified?) There's no doubt that they're taking over the business
affairs of the nation. I don't think it's right that refugees should
be taken care of the way they are. I think they should take care
of their own problems."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
It is noteworthy that when coming into the open with the ``bloodshed"
idea, this subject does not state clearly whose blood is going to
be spilled. While putting the blame for the riots she wishes for
upon nonexistent Jewish rioters, she leaves it open that it will
be the Jews, after all, who are going to be killed. There may be
more to this, however. To extreme anti-Semites the idea of bloodshed
seems to become independent, an end in itself as it were.
%% 636	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
On the deepest level, they do not differentiate so very strictly
between subject and object. The underlying destructive urge pertains
both to the enemy and to oneself. Destructiveness is truly
``totalitarian."

As a summary of the structure of anti-Semitic extremism dealt with
in this section, we present in some detail the comments on the Jews
of the only interviewee who openly endorses the idea of genocide.
This is {\em 5006}, a dentistry student and contractor who scores high
throughout the questionnaire. He suffers from color-blindness and
from psychogenic\footnote{{\em psychogenic}: having a psychological
origin or cause rather than a physical one.} 
sexual impotence, determined, according to the
interviewer, by a severe Oedipus complex\footnote{{\em Oedipus
complex}: (in Freudian theory) the complex of emotions aroused in a
young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual
desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a wish to exclude the
parent of the same sex.}. 
His radical wishes for
the extermination of the Jews are probably conditioned by severe,
early childhood traumata: projections of his own castration
fear\footnote{{\em castration fear (or ``complex")}: (in Freudian
theory) an unconscious anxiety arising during spychosexual
development, represented in males as a fear that the penis will be
removed by the father in response to sexual interest in the mother,
and in females as a compulsion to demonstrate that they have an
adequate symbolic equivalent of the penis, whose absence is blamed on
the mother.}.
His exaggerated ingroup identification seems to be
concomitant\footnote{{\em concomitant}: a phenomenon that naturally
accompanies or follows something.} 
with
an underlying feeling of weakness: he simply does not wish to become
acquainted with what is different, apparently because he deems it
dangerous.


\begin{Quote}
He is a native-born American, and his grandfather was brought to
this country at four. He has never been out of America, nor does
he want to go out. Once he went to Tijuana and ``that was enough."
He has great pride in being an American.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
To him, the minorities are characterized, above all, by their
potential strength: ``The trouble with the Jews is that they are too
strong." The strength of the outgroups is expressed in symbols of
potency --- fertility and money:


\begin{Quote}
``Of course, there is a problem. The Negroes produce so rapidly that
they will populate the world, while the Jews get all of the money."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
As to the basis of his anti-Semitism, he has the following to say:


\begin{Quote}
``I have never had any good experiences with them." (This is qualified
in a second interview where he remembers, as a college athlete,
being taken on a private yacht to Catalina by Jews who were ``very
nice.") They have invariably attempted to cheat him and his family
in business and are in every way inconsiderate. He tells a long
story which I was not able to get verbatim about buying a fur coat
as a Christmas present for his mother, at which time the Jewish
salesman misread the price tag, quoting a price \$100 cheaper than
it actually was. They closed the sale and he insisted on taking the
coat after the salesman's error had been noticed. This gave him
considerable satisfaction, and he said, ``That was a case where I
out-Jewed a Jew."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
His references to bad experiences are quite vague except in the
case where he ``out-Jewed the Jew" --- another indication of the
projective character of the ``smartness" theme. The qualification
in favor of the rich Jewish yacht owner shows the complication of
anti-Semitism through class consciousness, particularly in cases
of such strong upward social mobility as that found in this subject.
It took even the Nazis some time to convince themselves, their
followers, and the wealthiest Jewish groups that the latter should
share the fate of poor cattle dealers and immigrants from Eastern
Europe.

%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW -MATERIAL	637

The tenets of individualism are altered by this subject as follows:


\begin{Quote}
``They should be treated, I suppose, like individuals; but after
all, they are all alike."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Of course, ``everyone can tell a Jew." The distinction between 
in- and out-group obtains an almost metaphysical weight: even the
imaginary possibility of the disappearance of the dichotomy is
excluded:


\begin{Quote}
``I couldn't be a Jew."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
As to the relation between guilt and punishment and its outcome,
he finds a formula which cannot be surpassed:


\begin{Quote}
``I think what Hitler did to the Jews was all right. When I was
having trouble with a competing contractor, I often thought, I wish
Hitler would come here. No, I don't favor discrimination by
legislation. I think the time will come when we will have to kill
the bastards."
\end{Quote}

\columnbreak
\subsection*{H. The Misfit Bourgeois}

Our analysis has led us to the extreme consequence of anti-Semitism,
the overt wish for the extermination of the Jews. The extremist's
superego has been transformed into an extrapunitive\footnote{{\em
punitive}: inflicting or intended as punishment.} 
agency of
unbridled aggression. We have seen that this consequence consummates
the intrinsic irrationality of anti-Semitism by establishing a
complete disproportion between the ``guilt" and the punishment of
the chosen victim. Anti-Semitism, however, does not exhaust itself
in the old formula by which it is characterized in Lessing's {\em Nathan
der Weise},\footnote{Gotthod Ephraim Lessing (1729--1781): prominent
German writer of the Enlightenment era. {\em Nathan der Weise} (Nathan
the Wise) is cited as the first ideological idea drama.}
``{\em tut nichts, der Jude wird verbrannt}" --- the Jew is
going to be burnt anyway, no matter how things are, or what could
be said in his favor. Irrational and merciless wholesale condemnation
is kept alive by the maintenance of a small number of highly
stereotyped reproaches of the Jews which, while largely irrational
themselves, give a mock semblance of justification to the death
sentence. By constructing the nature of the Jew as unalterably bad,
as innately corrupt, any possibility of change and reconciliation
seems to be excluded. The more invariant the negative qualities of
the Jew appear to be, the more they tend to leave open only one way
of ``solution": the eradication of those who cannot improve. This
pattern of {\em quasi-natural} incorrigibility\footnote{{\em
incorrigible}: (of a person or their tendencies) not able to be
corrected, improved, or reformed.} 
is much more important to
anti-Semites than is the content of the standard reproaches themselves,
the latter being frequently quite harmless and essentially incompatible
with the inferences to which they lead those who hate. While these
reproaches are so widespread and well known that further evidence
of their frequency and intensity is unnecessary, it is worthwhile
to follow up some of their aspects which came out clearly in our
interviews and which seem to throw some additional light on the
phenomena concerned.

It is profitable to examine these reproaches from a sociological
point of
%% 638	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
view. Our sample, in contrast to that of the Labor Study, was
predominantly middle class. The San Quentin Group is the only
striking exception, but its qualification of 
{\em Lumpenproletariat}\footnote{{\em Lumpenproletariat}: the
unorganized and unpolitical lower orders of society who are not
interested in revolutionary advancement. (Marxist terminology)}
as well as the prison situation, with its intrinsic emphasis on
``official" moral values, makes it impossible to compare this group
with the rest of the sample in terms of working-class identification.
This identification is usually not very strong even among workers
in this country. The general middle-class character of our sample
colors the specific nature of the decisive accusations made against
the Jews. If our basic hypothesis concerning the largely projective
character of anti-Semitism is correct, the Jews are blamed, in
social terms, for those properties which by their existence,
sociologically ambiguous though it may be, impinge on sensitive
spots in the class identification of the different prejudiced groups.
To the true proletarian, the Jew is primarily the bourgeois. The
working-man is likely to perceive the Jew, above all, as an agent
of the economic sphere of the middle-man, as the executor of
capitalist tendencies. The Jew is he who ``presents the bill."

To the anti-Semitic members of the middle classes, the imagery of
the Jew seems to have a somewhat different structure. The middle
classes themselves experience to a certain degree the same threats
to the economic basis of their existence which hang over the heads
of the Jews. They are themselves on the defensive and struggle
desperately for the maintenance of their status. Hence, they
accentuate just the opposite of what workingmen are likely to
complain about, namely, that the Jews are not real bourgeois, that
they do not really ``belong." By building up an image of the Jew out
of traits which signify his failures in middle-class identification,
the middle-class member is able subjectively to enhance the social
status of his ingroup which is endangered by processes having nothing
to do with ingroup-outgroup relations. To the middle-class anti-Semite,
the Jew is likely to be regarded as the {\em misfit} bourgeois, as it
were, he who did not succeed in living up to the standards of today's
American civilization and who is a kind of obsolete and uncomfortable
remnant of the past. The term ``misfit" is actually applied to the
Jew by some of our prejudiced subjects. The less the Jew qualifies
as a legitimate member of the middle classes, the more easily can
he be excluded from a group which, in the wake of monopolization,
tends toward the {\em numerus clausus}\footnote{{\em  numerus clausus}:
a fixed maximum number of entrants admissible to an academic
institution.}
anyway. If the usurper complex (to
be discussed in the section on politics and economics) really belongs
to an over-all pattern, the Jew functions, for the potentially
fascist mentality, as the usurper {\em par excellence}\footnote{{\em
par excellence}: better or more than all others of the same kind.}. 
He is the peddler,
impudently disguised as a respectable citizen and businessman.

The most characteristic anti-Jewish remarks appearing in our
interviews fall within this frame of thinking, although motifs of
a more ``proletarian" anti-Semitism, such as the idea of the Jewish
exploiter or of the Jews dodging hard manual labor, are not lacking.
The division between proletarian and
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	639
middle-class anti-Semitism should not be exaggerated. The traits
ascribed to Jews by working men have often the aspect of the ``misfit
bourgeois" too.  What appear to the worker as symptoms of capitalist
exploitiveness can easily be transformed by the middle classes into
the reproach of dishonesty, a flagrant violation of bourgeois ethics,
one of the main tenets of which is, after all, the praise of good
honest labor. The stereotypes here in question transcend the frontiers
of the classes; it is only their function that changes, and hence
the difference in emphasis.

The construct of the ``misfit bourgeois" can easily be articulated
according to three major groups of motifs: first, that of Jewish
weakness and its psychological correlates, second, the middle-class
identification of the Jews as an overcompensation that has essentially
failed, third, the intrinsic disloyalty of the Jews to the class
with which they vainly attempt to identify themselves, a disloyalty
which is viewed as an expression of their abortive identification
and of their nature as an objectionable, isolated, and ``clannish"
ingroup. The first two of these objections may have some basis in
reality. There is considerable evidence (e.g., the recent studies
by Anton Lourie,\footnote{Lourie, Anton. ``The Jew as a Psychological
Type." in {\em American Imago}, VI (June, 1949), xi8--55.})
of Jewish masochism and its basis in religious
psychology. The third objection seems to be predominantly projective
and one of the major rationalizations of the wish to ``get rid of
the whole bunch."

The idea of Jewish weakness is epitomized by {\em F114}, a woman
consistently high on all scales, who is a surgical nurse of partly
Jewish descent:


\begin{Quote}
``I have a cousin who was in love with me and wanted to marry me.
He was more Jewish than I. I loved him, but wouldn't marry him. I
told him why --- because he's Jewish. He is now married to a Gentile
with two children. He's more anti-Semitic than I. That's true of
so many Jews --- like they were lame or hunchback. They hate it or
resent it."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
It is perhaps characteristic that such overt statements on Jewish
weakness are made frequently either by persons who are themselves
being identified with the Jews or --- with a more positive accent
--- by low-scoring subjects. The prejudiced individual, whose hatred
is stimulated by weakness, rather tends to stress, on the surface,
the strength of the Jews who ``wield undue influence" and ``own
everything." An example of the low-scorer's attitude towards Jewish
weakness is the statement of {\em 5055}, an otherwise thoroughly liberal
man of 73 years who scored low on all the scales. He feels


\begin{Quote}

\noindent
``that this protective philosophy of the Jews has led to a situation
where they do stimulate antagonism in other people."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
In cases of extreme low scorers the awareness of Jewish weakness
sometimes leads to identification: they assume the role of Jews
themselves, consciously in order to antagonize anti-Semitic
acquaintances, unconsciously, possibly, in order to atone for
anti-Semitism by at least figuratively suffering the same
%% 640	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
humiliations under which they know the Jews live. Here belongs the
case of a 20-year-old, somewhat neurotic interior decorator, {\em 5028},
who is in open rebellion against his father but strongly attached
to his mother:


\begin{Quote}
The subject and his sister are alike in that they both admire Jewish
people. He told of jokes that they had played upon some of their
father's relatives who are extremely anti-Semitic by pretending
that a great-grandfather on the maternal side was Jewish. The subject
explained that many persons in his mother's family ``look a little
Jewish because they have long noses." The paternal cousin to whom
they were talking ``almost committed suicide" at the thought. The
subject volunteered the comment that perhaps one reason he likes
Jews is that he ``has never known any who were objectionable."
\end{Quote}

To the prejudiced person, the imagery of Jewish weakness, combined
as it is with the rationalization of strength, sometimes strikes a
peculiar note, remarkable because of its close harmony with one of
the standard themes of American fascist agitators. It is the image
of the Jewish refugee who is depicted simultaneously as strong (``He
takes the jobs away from our American boys") and as weak (``He is a
dirty outcast"). There is reason enough to believe that the second
motive is the decisive one. The high-scoring man {\em M105} makes the
following statement:


\begin{Quote}
``A lot of Jewish immigrants are coming to this country. They get a
soft life, and they take over. You can't deal with one, and a lot
of them are awful dirty, though they have money."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Aggressiveness against the refugees comes to the fore even in cases
which are otherwise, according to the interviewer, only mildly
anti-Semitic. {\em 5036} is a jazz musician, at the present time drawing
unemployment insurance. He is high on E and F, although lower on
PEC.


\begin{Quote}
Although he denies any outgroup antagonisms, many of these are
implicit and at the surface level. He is most vehement in his belief
that refugees should not assume citizenship and should be sent home
when time and conditions permit it.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The psychological determination of this subject's hatred of the refugee 
competitors can be inferred the more safely since he acknowledges that


\begin{Quote}
``There is no doubt that the Jews are talented in music." 
\end{Quote}


\noindent
He sets against this only the vague standard accusation:


\begin{Quote}

\noindent
``but they are so clannish and aggressive and loud that sometimes I
can't stand them." On several occasions he claims that the
aggressiveness and selfish demands of Jews within smaller bands he
had tried to organize caused their failure. ``These Jews would never
really get a feeling of pride in the organization. They would always
leave you the minute they had a better offer; and in trying to meet
offers they had, I went broke twice." On the other hand, he says
some Jews are undoubtedly outstandingly cultured people.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The refugees, as those who are objectively weak, are regularly blamed for
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	641
having a domineering attitude and a drive for power. While there
may be some basis for the objection of aggressiveness in certain
institutionalized Jewish reaction formations, such as the Jewish
habit of ``pleading," this stereotype helps at the same time to
alleviate the anti-Semite's discomfort about violating the principle
of democratic asylum: it is not he but the fugitives who are supposed
to disregard the rules of hospitality. {\em 5043}, a middle-aged housewife
with extremely high scores on all the scales, alleges that the Jews


\begin{Quote} 

\noindent
are loud and often aggressive. (Here she gave an example of women
at the market who push themselves forward.) She specifically
distinguishes between ``refugees" and other Jews and feels that the
``type we have been getting in the neighborhood lately" is definitely
clannish, unintelligent, and generally undesirable.
\end{Quote}

The stereotype of Jewish aggressiveness shows a characteristic of
anti-Semitic thinking which deserves closer investigation. It is
the mixing, in allegations against the Jews, of crudely physical
acts of aggression with hypotheses of a more psychological nature.
Just as the idea of ``Jewish blood" ranges from the fear of ``pollution
of the race," where the term blood is used only figuratively, to
the hysteria of bodily ``poisoning" inflicted by Jewish blood donors,
the imagery of aggressiveness ranges from the Jews using their
elbows when standing in a queue to their allegedly ruthless business
practices.  This suggests the retrogressive, ``mythological" feature
of some anti-Semitism. Mental dispositions are translated into
physical reality both in order to soothe the fear of the incomprehensible
``alien mentality" and to add a sense of the real to that which is
actually only projective. This retranslation probably throws some
light on the over-all insistence of the anti-Semite on Jewish
physical traits.

{\em 5067} ``is a portly, rather maternal-looking woman who looks all of her 
forty-eight years." She was chosen as a mixed case with high E and PEC. 
She does not differentiate at all between the physical and the psychological 
aspect of Jewish ``aggressiveness":


\begin{Quote}
``I do not like their coercive aggression in business. They are not
only aggressive, but they should also be segregated. They are always
pushing people aside. I noticed nearly every time when there was
pushing in the innumerable lines we had to wait in during the war,
it was a Jew who started the pushing. I feel a real revulsion towards
Jews."
\end{Quote}

In other cases, the idea of aggressiveness is used in the exclusively
social sense of ``intrusiveness." Sometimes one gets a glimpse into
the mechanism behind this standard reproach. It probably has to do
with the all-pervasive feeling of social isolation, which is
overcompensated for in innumerable middle-class ``social activities."
Against this background of emotion the Jews, as the classic agents
of circulation, are perceived and probably envied as those who are
not isolated, but have ``contacts" everywhere. This idea is closely
associated with that of clannishness, which also implies the imagery
%% 642	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
of some kind of togetherness from which the members of the real
ingroup pretend to be excluded. The aforementioned {\em F105} finds the
formula:


\begin{Quote}
``They seem to know everybody; they pull strings; they are like a
clan, more united than any race. They have friends everywhere who
can do the right thing."
\end{Quote}

Finally, it should be mentioned that there is some evidence in our
material that the basis of the stereotype ``aggressiveness" lies in
repressed sexuality.  The Jews are supposed to be unencumbered by
the standards of Puritan morality, and the more strictly one adheres
oneself to these standards, the more eagerly are the supposed sex
habits of the Jews depicted as sordid. What goes uncensored in the
case of Jewish ``rich food" becomes intolerable in the sphere of
supposedly uninhibited and therefore repulsive sensuality.  Some
insight into this matter is afforded by the 42-year-old woman, {\em
F118},
a public health nurse --- a person, incidentally, whose outgroup
hatred is focused on organized labor rather than on minorities and
whose score on A--S is middle, while she scores high on PEC and F.


\begin{Quote}
She could not imagine herself marrying a Jew. She then proceeded
to relate that actually she once had an opportunity to marry a Jew.
One time, when she returned home for the summer after being in New
York for a while, she met a very intelligent lawyer who worked in
the same office as her brother. He was very well-educated and knew
languages. She had dates with him and saw quite a lot of him for
three weeks, until one day he said to her, ``There is one thing I
want to tell you about myself. You have never met my family and I
had not intended that you should meet them. However, there is one
thing that I want to ask you, and that is whether you would object
to marrying a Jew?`` She said that it was as if she had been struck
a great blow. He did not look Jewish, his name was not Jewish, and
he even sang in the choir of her church, so that she never suspected
that he was Jewish. She just sat there without saying a word ---
and that was his answer. She then went on to add that it was very
bad for him, because all the girls staying in her boarding house
then found out that he was Jewish and it also became known at his
place of work and made things bad for him there. Subject saw him
again ten years later and felt that he did look more Jewish, but
added that that was perhaps because she now knew that he was Jewish.
The thing that is most impossible to her in the idea of marrying a
Jew is the thought of bearing {\em Jewish children}.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
It is noteworthy that the resistance of this woman was brought about
only by her knowledge of the man's Jewish descent, not by any of
his own characteristics. It is hardly going too far to assume that
the stereotype has re-enacted old childhood taboos against sexuality
and that it was only afterwards that these were turned against the
Jew as an individual. Primary attraction is the basis for subsequent
repulsion.

The close relations of the ubiquitous idea of clannishness to the
reproach of aggressiveness has become obvious in previous examples.
Suffice it to say here that clannishness appears as the justification
for excluding the aggressive ``intruder": he always ``remains a Jew"
and wants to cheat those by whom he wishes to be accepted. At the
same time, the idea of clannishness consummates
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	643
the imagery of Jewish togetherness, of a warm, family-like, archaic
and very ``ingroup-like" texture of the outgroup which seems to be
denied to those who are thoroughly formed by American civilization
and obey the rules of technological rationality.

The underlying attractiveness of the Jewish ``clan" is accentuated
by the statement of {\em M102}, a subject scoring high on all scales:


\begin{Quote}
``The Jewish kids I knew in high school were the sons and daughters
of the prominent Jewish businessmen, and they were very clannish.
It's hard to say what ought to be done about it. It doesn't seem
to bother them what people think. That is a natural characteristic.
It doesn't do any good to try to exclude them from business because
some of them are the smartest businessmen we have. Most of them are
out of Germany by now, and I suppose they'll get back. Some are
very crafty about sticking together and getting ahead in business,
getting capital. People in Germany will feel the need of Jewish
businessmen and they will pool their capital and make a start there.
(What about Jewish women?) Some of them are very attractive, and
some are very clannish. They are dominated by the men; it's all in
their creed."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The more patriarchal structure of the Jewish family, whether it be
real or imagined, seems to work as an element of sexual attraction.
Jewish women are supposed ``to do everything for men" --- just what
the Gentile American girl is expected not to do. At the same time,
however, the idea of sexual fulfillment tends to diminish, in
American culture, the social value of the women who offer this
fulfillment. Here again, the praise of one Jewish quality is prone
to tilt over into its opposite.

How the idea of clannishness can sometimes obtain features of an
obsession laden with violent resentment is shown in the case of
{\em F113}, a young woman who is high on the E scale but somewhat lower
on F and PEC. She is an attractive, somewhat neurotic girl of 26,
a subject from the Extension Class group. She resents both Jewish
names and those who dared to change them. When speaking about Jewish
acquaintances, she makes a point of their owning ``a chain of burlesque
houses," being rich as well as somewhat disreputable. In her statement
about Jewish family life, it is remarkable how closely some
observations which have a ring of truth are knit together with
somewhat paranoid ideas about the selfishness determining the Jewish
behavior in question and with a harsh evaluation of it as a ``guilt":


\begin{Quote}
``The worst experience with them I had was when I was overseas
operator in Hawaii a couple of years ago. I had to monitor all the
calls that went to New York so I listened to just thousands of
conversations. And ninety percent of them were rich Jews calling
up their families. That is the only really good thing I can say for
them --- their devotion to their families. But all purely selfish.
The money they spent --- and the time --- on just purely selfish
calls. (Business calls?) Well I worked mostly at night. But the
other girls said it was the same people making business calls during
the day. (How did you know they were Jews?) Their voices and the
things they said. Selfish. (Could there have been Jews you didn't
recognize?) I don't think so. You get so you always know a Jewish
voice."
\end{Quote}

%% 644	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

\subsection*{I. Observations On Low-Scoring Subjects}

Throughout this chapter, we have concentrated on the phenomena of
anti-Semitism and their structural interconnections. We have abstained
from a detailed discussion of the minority attitudes of the
non-anti-Semite and of the anti-anti-Semite. Obviously, it is more
difficult and less promising to analyze the absence of highly
specific opinions and attitudes than it is to deal with their
existence. We have been able, it seems, in the study as a whole to
draw a fairly complete picture of the low scorers, ranging from
surface ideology to characterological determinants. Their general
tendency to be disinterested in so-called racial questions, however,
limits the supply of pertinent information.  Moreover, the pragmatic
aspect of our study naturally requires a closer scrutiny of the
danger zone than of areas which can be discounted as a potential
for fascism. By and large, the attitudes of the high scorers suffice
to define, {\em e contrario},\footnote{{\em  e contrario}: out of
contrary (Italian).} the attitudes of the ``lows" which are, in
many respects, set polemically against the anti-Semitic imagery
prevailing in our cultural climate.

Yet a number of observations concerning the low scorers may be
allowed, not only in order to round out the picture, but also because
the low scorers, in their responses to questions about minorities,
go beyond a simple negation of the prejudiced person's opinions and
attitudes, and throw some additional light upon the nonfascist
character.

An over-all characteristic of the low scorer's attitude towards
Jews is emphatic rationality. This has a double aspect. On the one
%%% arun: find "intraceptiveness" --- introspectiveness?
hand, the general tendency towards introspectiveness so characteristic
of low scorers expresses itself specifically in the racial area
through self-reflection: anti-Semitism presents itself to the low
scorers as the problem of the anti-Semite, not of the Jew. On the
other hand, racial problems and minority traits are viewed within
historical and sociological perspective and thus seen to be open
to rational insight and change, instead of being hypostatized in a
rigidly irrational manner.

An example of self-reflection in racial matters is {\em M910}, a
student-minister, consistently low on all scales, who has strong
intellectual leanings and, like most low scorers, a tendency toward
hesitation, doubt, and qualifications of his own opinions. He traces
back prejudice, in a plain-spoken though somewhat primitive manner,
to the difficulties of the minority haters, not to the object of
their hatred:


\begin{Quote}
(What do you feel are the causes of prejudice?) ``Probably the largest
reason is the insecurity or fear of insecurity that the person has
himself. The people in my community who have talked loudest about
the Japs are the ones who have since taken over (the properties
left by the Japanese) \ldots\  and they're afraid they'll come back
\ldots\ and they're afraid of them as competitors because they work
harder. \ldots\ (You feel it's mainly an economic conflict?) Well,
it isn't altogether economic,
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	645
and I don't think it will be solved on an economic basis. \ldots\ All
people have some kind of insecurity. It may be pretty well concealed,
and they may not know what it is, and it may not have anything to
do with the Japanese, but they'll take it out on them. People are
funny (laughs) and are cruel. (What ought to be done to combat
prejudice?) I think one thing that could be done --- kinda
regimentation, is to get the facts, it would help, though it wouldn't
solve the problem \ldots\ e.g., that there is no necessity for
separating Negro and white blood in blood banks, and there are a
lot of people who think that the Japanese are a treacherous race,
and that it's transmitted through heredity. \ldots\ Of course, a lot
of it is irrational."
\end{Quote}

As to the emphasis on dynamic factors versus supposedly innate
qualities, the most striking illustration is provided by {\em M203}, a
thoroughly liberal teacher, head of the English department in a
junior college. He, too, is low on all scales. His whole philosophy
is positivistic,\footnote{{\em positivistic}: A philosophical system
that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be
scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical
proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism.}
with a strong interest in semantics, though he
does not ``think they should make a panacea out of semantics." His
general outlook on minority problems is summarized by his statement
on the Japanese:


\begin{Quote}
``If the Germans were changed in one generation by the Nazis, then
the Japanese can be changed in a democratic way in one or two
generations. Anybody can become anything under the proper conditions."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Consequently, when discussing anti-Semitism, he chooses as an
explanation a historical element, the maliciously superimposed
Jewish names. The arbitrariness of the selection of this specific
factor can probably be accounted for by the inter\-viewee's semanticist
hobby:


\begin{Quote}
``Anti-Semitism is a little different. Semites are not so easily
identified. I guess their name is about the main thing. For instance,
from your name I guess you're Jewish though I wouldn't know to look
at you. Are you?" (Yes.) (Subject is quite open about these things.
The only sign of inhibition was that it was hard for him to use the
word ``Jew" as he preferred the word ``Semite" at first, but later
he used the word ``Jew" also.)
\end{Quote}


\noindent
This subject's readiness to discuss the interviewer's Jewishness
is significant.  To him, the word Jew is not a magic word, nor is
being Jewish a disgrace: thus he does not feel inhibited about
mentioning it in relation to the person with whom he is talking.
It is hard to imagine that a high scorer would casually discuss the
origins of an interviewer except on occasions when he feels on the
defensive and wants to hurt the other fellow: ``You are a Jew yourself,
aren't you?"

The rationality of the unprejudiced subjects expresses itself, above
all, in their rejection of anti-minority stereotypes. Frequently,
this rejection is of a conscious, articulate nature: they take the
concept of individuality seriously.  We refer again to {\em M910}. His
utterance shows a definite sense of proportion even in his rejection
of stereotypy: he does not deny the existence of physical racial
characteristics, but regards them as nonessential:


\begin{Quote}
``Well, I wouldn't be tricked into making a statement about any 
people as a
%%646	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
group. The Japanese I've known I've liked very well. I know there
are some Japanese who aren't so nice. \ldots\ We had a Japanese girl
stand up with us at the altar and a Chinese girl too \ldots\ in 1942
when there was some pretty tense feeling. (Do you feel that any
racial group has certain distinguishing characteristics?) No, not
at all.  Of course you have biological characteristics, the height
of the bridge of the nose or pigmentation."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
A similar line is followed in the Los Angeles interview {\em 5030}, of a
33-year-old Stanford graduate who served for four years in the navy,
finally becoming a Lieutenant Commander. His scores on all scales
are low. He is judged by the interviewer to be an extremely astute,
successful individual:


\begin{Quote}
``The Negroes, Jews, and all minority groups are having a very
difficult time. I think many people dislike them because of their
physical characteristics. They are really in a very bad spot. Such
things as the FEPC\footnote{Fair Employment Practices Committee:
Signed by President Roosevelt on June 25, 1941, banning racial
discrimination in any defense industry receiving federal contracts.} 
help a lot and I favor both state and national
laws concerning this issue. So many people are not willing to admit
that many Negroes are intelligent, superior, and capable individuals.
Their environment has held them back as a race. I have had both
good and bad experiences with members of these groups but have never
considered the people as belonging to a certain race or religion.
I always take them for what they are worth as individuals.  Yesterday
I had a nice experience. There is a girl in one of my classes who
is part Negro. She is a very superior and capable individual and I
am sure the most intelligent member of the class. I have often
thought I would like to visit with her but a suitable opportunity
has never presented itself. Yesterday I, after much hesitation and
fumbling, invited her to have a cup of coffee with me. Her acceptance
was much more gracious than my invitation and we had a nice visit.
I think the reason for my hesitation was simply a fear of what other
people might think. I once had a Jewish roommate and he was the
best roommate I have ever had."
\end{Quote}

An extreme example of fully conscious anti-stereotypy is {\em 5046}, an
executive secretary in the movie industry, in her late thirties,
actively engaged in the labor movement. Her questionnaire scores
are low for all scales. If some of her formulations suggest a ``ticket
low,"\footnote{%
See the ``rigid low scorer" in Chapter XIX of {\em The Authoritarian
Personality}. (Note by Adorno)}
it should be kept in mind that her rejection of stereotypy
even prevents her from building up automatically a pro-Jewish
stereotype. She is no ``Jew lover," but seems truly to appraise
people as individuals. As a matter of fact, she has just severed a
relationship with a Jewish man:


\begin{Quote}
When the interviewer began questioning subject on the Jewish problem,
it became apparent immediately that she ``knew all the answers." She
stated: ``Yes, there is a problem \ldots\ but I don't think we should
call it a Jewish problem; it really is a Christian problem \ldots\
question of educating the Gentiles who practice anti-Semitism."
When given the check list, she laughed and said: ``Of course, one
can't generalize \ldots\ these are the stereotypes used by the
anti-Semites to blame the Jews for certain faults \ldots\ I don't
think one should label any group like this \ldots\ it is dangerous,
especially in regard to the Jews, because one has to evaluate the
individual on his or her own merits." None of the other questions
brought out even a trace of anti-Semitism, and throughout, her
answers indicated a consistent, almost
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	647
militant stand {\em against} anti-Semitism. She feels that anti-Semitism
is one of the most dangerous trends in this country and feels that
the only solution must be sought through widespread education along
liberal lines and through extensive intermarriage. She feels rather
optimistic about the process of assimilation, although she is quite
alarmed about the increase of anti-Semitism during recent years.
Hitler's race theory and persecution of the Jews should be combatted
on every front, in whatever form it may appear. She stated: ``I have
also known some Jewish people whom I decidedly did not like, and
some of them were quite aggressive, but I would never generalize
that therefore `all Jews' were aggressive \ldots\ if only we could
make people see that {\em some} people are aggressive for certain reasons,
usually because of insecurity, and Jews are not aggressive because
they are Jews."
\end{Quote}

As pointed out in great detail in the chapters on the personality
aspects of the interview material, the low scorers' rationality,
their rejection of projective imagery and automatized judgment,
does not involve as a rule emotional coldness and detachment.
Although they are more rational than the ``highs" in so far as their
judgment seems to be less determined by repressed unconscious factors, 
they are simultaneously less blocked in positive 
cathexes\footnote{{\em cathexes}: The concentration or accumulation of
mental energy in a particular channel.} and in
the expression of them. This refers not only to their general
psychological make-up but also to their specific minority attitudes.
The prejudiced person discusses the Jews as an ``object" while he
actually hates; the unprejudiced person displays sympathy even when
he pretends simply to judge objectively. The link between this
sympathy and rationality is the idea of {\em justice}, which has come to
work, in certain people, spontaneously, almost as if it were
instinctual. To the low scorer, racial discrimination violates the
basic principle of the equality of all men. In the name of human
rights he tends to identify himself with those who are discriminated
against and who thus appeal to his own spontaneous feeling of
solidarity with the oppressed.

Here are a few examples of this specific configuration. {\em M113}, a
``religious low scorer" whose F scale shows higher trends and whose
PEC scale was still higher:


\begin{Quote} 
(Minority problem?) ``In a speech the other day in Public Speaking
I said that democracy is mainly respect for minority groups." (Vague,
little verbalized ideas.) ``They have gotten a dirty deal, as most
minorities do."
\end{Quote}

Similarly, in {\em M320}, a consistently low-scoring student of landscape 
architecture, protest
against unfairness works as a ``rationalization" for emotional 
identification which otherwise might not be allowed to come into the open.


\begin{Quote}
``I'm very much pro-Negro, myself. I think I'm in favor of almost
any minority that's discriminated against unfairly. \ldots\ (What
about the Jewish problem?) I don't see why it should be a problem
at all. I think that in Europe the Jews should be allowed to live
and have their businesses, etc., the same as anyone else."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Or the young woman {\em F129}, also low on all scales, a somewhat high-strung
person who, according to the interviewer, is moved by any disturbing
subject --- including race prejudice --- to tears and flushes:

%% 648	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY


\begin{Quote}
(And how do you feel about Jews?) ``Why, I don't feel any way about
them except upset at the way they are treated. There are good and
bad in all races but I am inclined to be even more tolerant about
the shortcomings of people who are always persecuted and criticized.
(Could you have married a Jew?) Why of course, if I had fallen in
love with one. (Why do you think Jews are persecuted?) I don't know
except some people have to hate."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
There are indications that the low scorers' affect-laden sense of
justice is not a mere surface ideology, or a means of narcissistic
gratification in one's own humanitarianism, but that it has a real
basis within the personality and is only presented afterwards, as
it were, in theoretical terms. The sympathy for the underdog leads
towards action, towards attempts to correct in concrete, individual
situations what is felt to be general unfairness. A pertinent case
was {\em 5030} (see p.\ 646). We give one further illustration: {\em
F126}, who
is low on E and PEC and only slightly higher on F. She is a
good-looking young woman, ``very articulate and whimsical, with
much charm and humor." She studies journalism and says that her
real desire is to do ``creative writing":


\begin{Quote}
``I remember when I was in junior high, there was only one Jewish
boy in our class. We were always having parties and affairs and he
was left out. At first I didn't even understand why. He was a very
nice boy, smart, and good-looking. But they left him out because
he was a Jew. Well, I made it my business to be his special friend,
not only invited him to my parties, but paid particular attention
to him.  That was one time it was really good to be one of the
leading kids. The others began to treat him the same way, and he
was just one of the crowd from then on. I never have been able to
stand to see anyone be mean to anyone else. The same at the shipyards.
I always made it a point to get acquainted with Negroes and Jews.
They talked frankly with me, too, and I certainly found out what
some of their problems are. Whenever I could, I would bring it into
a story, too. Not directly about race prejudice, but nice stories
about Negroes for instance. People have so many wrong ideas. I
sometimes think it is just hopeless."
\end{Quote}

The general attitude of the low scorers towards the Jews profoundly
affects their evaluation of so-called Jewish traits. It has been
said above (pp.\ 612 ff.) that high scorers perceive the Jew altogether
differently: their psychological make-up functions as a frame of
reference even for their supposedly ``immediate," everyday experiences.
Something similar applies, in reverse, to the unprejudiced. Yet the
diffuseness and inarticulateness of the objective ``Jewish traits,"
complex as they are, is reflected by the low scorers' attitude no
less than by the various projections of the high scorers. There is
universal sympathy among the unprejudiced subjects, but no unanimity.
Sometimes they try to {\em explain} Jewish traits; sometimes they simply
deny their existence; sometimes they take an emphatically positive,
admiring stand towards those traits.

The explanatory method is applied to the most widespread idea of a
Jewish trait, that of clannishness, by {\em M202}, a 35-year-old construction
engineer, with the lowest possible score on E, but with certain
deviations from the usual
%%PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	649
picture of the low scorer with regard to PEC and also to F --- a
person who, according to the interviewer, ``is conservative but not
fascist."


\begin{Quote} 
In response to a question about how he would characterize the Jews,
subject replied that they were a close-knit family with certain
inborn characteristics like any other racial group. For instance,
the Germans ``must always be right," the English --- here the
interviewer interrupted, pointing out that she wished to know what
he thought of the Jews. He replied that the Jews had not been
accepted in a certain society and that this had led to their becoming
a very close-knit family. The reason for this is that they have
certain characteristics. On being asked to be more specific, his
reply was they have a tendency to sharp dealing. Of course he doesn't
blame them because he would probably do the same if he had the
chance and if he were smart enough.
\end{Quote}


\noindent
In this case, the wish to ``explain," frequently an instrument for
rationalizations, seems to mediate between broad-mindedness on the
one hand and powerful anti-minority stereotypes, which are still
there below the surface, on the other. As a matter of fact, the
pro-Jewish apologies of the subject are followed by a rather
unfriendly story about a supposed conspiracy among three Jewish
bidders for a vast quantity of scrap-iron. The guess that the
explanatory attitude may sometimes cover up ambivalence seems to
be corroborated by {\em M310}, an assistant manager for an advertising
agency, who scored low on all scales. Nevertheless, his theorizing
presupposes the acceptance of the stereotype of Jewish money-mindedness:


\begin{Quote}
(Characteristic Jewish traits?) ``Well, I think it is true that Jews,
as a group, are more concerned with money. \ldots\ Perhaps because
persecuted for so long. \ldots\  It's some small security in a money
economy, that is, a money culture. Some security to be able to
defend themselves with money. I also think they are better than
average Gentiles at making money because forced to be usurers during
the Middle Ages, etc."
\end{Quote}

Subjects whose scores are at the lowest extreme often tend simply
to {\em deny} the existence of any Jewish traits, sometimes with a violence
that seems to be due more to the impact of their own conscience
than to an objective appraisal of the minority members. Here
``neurotic" traits, which are often found in extremely unprejudiced
subjects, may easily enter the picture. The vehicle by which they
try to argue away Jewish traits is insight into the mechanisms of
projectivity and stereotypy, i.e., into the subjective factors
making for anti-Semitism.

{\em M112}, a ``quiet, reserved, well-mannered sophomore of 18 years,"
whose scale scores are all low, simply subscribes to the ``envy"
theory:


\begin{Quote}
(Jews?) ``Not an educational problem in this case. People just
prejudiced. Want to keep them out of good positions, etc. People
make up wild stories, like that the Jews have too much money, control
the country, etc.; it's just to keep them back.  (Your contacts?)
No Negroes in my school. Jews were like anyone else. I'd never know
they were Jewish if they hadn't told me."
\end{Quote}

%% 650	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

{\em 5041} (whose scale scores are all low), a 59-year-old housewife who
had studied to be a professional pianist, combines the denial of
Jewish traits with reference to bygone ages and with the rejection
of resentful generalizations:


\begin{Quote}
``I think there is a Jewish problem --- but I don't think that they are
different \ldots\  not that there is anything inherent in them that
they should be set apart or treated differently. \ldots\ There are
historical reasons for their persecution \ldots\ it is not their
fault. Well, you can't apply any of these traits to the Jews as a
group. Jews are not a race. \ldots\ These terms might apply to some
individuals, to Christians as well as Jews \ldots\ you have some
aggressive people, but they are not aggressive because they are
Jewish \ldots\ it's usually something that the other person does not
like \ldots\ say they appear to be more intellectual and some succeed,
outdoing others, this causes resentment, and then they are called
aggressive. \ldots "
\end{Quote}

An extreme of denial is achieved by the ``easy-going" low scorer,
{\em M1206a}, of the Maritime School Group, who ``is a highly introspective
person and shows much inhibition against rejecting another person
or group, even on the basis of principles founded in reality." His
scores on all the scales are low:


\begin{Quote}
(Most characteristic traits of Negroes?) ``Well, I don't think there
is such a thing. They have the same traits the white men have. \ldots\
I don't believe any nationality has any characteristics. \ldots "
\end{Quote}


\noindent
Sometimes the intense emotions behind the denial of Jewish traits
find a somewhat irrational expression. {\em F125} (low on E and F, but
high on PEC) is a student who would like to become a drama teacher
and who finds ``the movies very stereotyped." Her indignation was
stirred up by our own study.


\begin{Quote}
``I was mad at some questions in your questionnaire, especially about
the Jewish atmosphere. The Irish people and other national groups
give an atmosphere to the place in which they live, but only the
Jewish atmosphere is stamped as something bad. I don't find that
the ways of living of the Jews are different at all."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
If the prejudiced subjects, for reasons of general conformity and
in order to obtain ``social confirmation," frequently stress that
practically everybody is anti-Semitic, some low scorers go so far
as not only to deny the existence of Jewish traits, but even of
anti-Semitism. A case in point is the somewhat muddle-headed {\em
M115},
characterized as a typical conventional and conservative fraternity
man who, however, is within the low quartile on the F scale though
in the middle quartile on E and in the high quartile on PEC:


\begin{Quote}
(What about the Jewish problem?) ``There's not much persecution now
in the United States. There shouldn't be any. The only reason for
persecuting the Jew is that he is smarter than the next guy, as far
as I can see."
\end{Quote}

As to the appreciation of the specific qualities of Jews and of
other minorities, we content ourselves with two examples which may
throw light on significant areas. {\em F128}, a 17-year-old girl, is low
on F and PEC but slightly
%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	651
higher on E. She is studying social work and is interested in child
welfare, but not ``in any kind of a career":


\begin{Quote}
``I guess I have had a better education than many people. We have
entertained Negroes in our home as long as I can remember. I have
known all sorts of people --- lots of them very eccentric people
--- in music and art groups. The first good friends I ever had were
Jewish boys and girls. I don't know why some people hate Negroes
and Jews. With Jewish people perhaps they are a little afraid,
because lots of Jews are smarter than other people."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The interesting element of this statement is contained in the word
``eccentric." It refers to what is ``different," to what is branded
as slightly abnormal by standards of conformity, but which expresses
individualization, the development of human traits which have not
been preformed, as it were, by the social machinery of contemporary
civilization. To this subject, the very ``alienness" of minorities
with respect to the rigid patterns of the highly organized mass
society of today, represents the human, which she otherwise might
feel to be lacking among the ``right people." The Jewish ``failure"
to become completely absorbed by the American cultural climate
presents itself to this subject as a merit, as a triumph of autonomy
and resistance against the leveling impact of the ``melting pot."

{\em 5050}, a radio news commentator with progressive political affiliations,
who is low on all three scales, denies the existence of Jewish
traits but emphasizes a point rarely acknowledged: the patience of
the minorities in the face of persecution. His praise of this
attitude actually contains a critical element which may, by the
implication of cowardice, be indicative of some hidden hostility.
He blames the minorities for political reasons because they do not
take a more energetic stand against American reaction:


\begin{Quote}
He tries at all times to show that there are no so-called ``Jewish
traits," and that people such as described by Budd Schulberg in
``What Makes Sammy Run" can and do occur quite as frequently among
Gentiles. Then he usually points to a man like Rankin or Bilbo as
an example of an obnoxious ``Gentile." ``I admire both the Negro and
the Jewish people for their great patience in swallowing discrimination
\ldots\ if I were in their shoes, I would start a really militant
fight against the oppressors." He still feels that too many Jews
and Negroes are too apathetic and rather let the other fellow do
the fighting. \ldots\ he feels that had the Jews been more alert,
Hitler might have been stopped, or at least prevented from perpetrating
the extreme atrocities. Again and again he stated that all forms
of discrimination can and must be wiped out by {\em direct political
action}.
\end{Quote}

One last characteristic of the unprejudiced attitude toward minority
questions should be mentioned: the absence of fatalism. Not only
do unprejudiced subjects, in the realm of their conscious convictions,
appear to be set against ideas such as those of the inevitability
of human badness or the perennial nature of any character traits,
but on a deeper level, as suggested in Chapter X, 
they
appear to be relatively free of destructive
%% 652	THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
urges and punitive fantasies. They look at things in a historical
and sociological way rather than hypostatizing the existent as
something ultimately given.  This point of view expresses itself
also in their concept of the future relationships between majority
and minority. {\em 5008}, low on E, in the middle quartile on F, and high
on PEC, is a middle-aged woman who worked as a ghost writer, then
as a literary agent, and is now employed as secretary to a radio
show. In keeping with the low scorers' rejection of stereotypy, she
sees the solution of the problem of anti-Semitism, however na\"ively,
in the establishment of personal contacts.


\begin{Quote}
She holds nothing but good wishes for the intelligent immigrants
and refugees who have come here recently, but feels that many of
them have been undesirable.  Concerning Negroes she reports that
as a Republican she believes their position should be very much
bettered, but says this is a difficult problem. Concerning Jews she
says, ``Before I went to work, I probably had a slight anti-Jewish
feeling," but in several positions she has worked with and for Jews,
and found them very charming, intelligent, and interesting people.
She thinks the racial problem most in need of solution is that of
anti-Semitism, and feels that if more ``anti-Semites would mingle
with Jews the way I have" it could be avoided. She believes in the
FEPC and thinks that socioeconomic discrimination should be outlawed.
When it was pointed out that this is a more New Deal type of political
notion, she simply said, ``Well, it can't all be bad."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
This attitude, which stresses human spontaneity and freedom of
action rather than rigid, authoritarian laws of nature, does not,
however, lead toward ``official optimism." The unprejudiced subjects'
sensitivity to the suffering of human beings, their compassion,
makes them keenly aware of the dangers of racial persecution. It
is the high scorer who would say, ``It can't happen here," thus
apparently detaching himself from the ``objective" course of history
with which he actually identifies himself; the low scorer knows
that it could happen, but wants to do something about it.

{\em 5058}, low on all three scales, is a 29-year-old veteran of upper
middle-class background whose main identification lies with ``liberals"
and ``intellectuals."


\begin{Quote}
He is very concerned about the problem of minority groups in this
country. ``I do a lot of talking about it --- hoping to reduce
prejudice and to encourage tolerance.  In fact, I feel so concerned
about this thing I would almost be willing to set myself up in
Pershing Square. I tried to do a little crusading in the Navy but
without much success." Subject is very pessimistic about the
possibility of a solution to the ``minority problem" which seems to
stem largely from his failure to modify the opinions of the people
with whom he has argued. He feels that dislike of the Jews is
increasing because he has heard more talk against them lately. ``Of
course that might be because I am exposed to it more lately, both
while I was in the Navy and in my present job." He does not feel
that the Jews have too much influence in this country, nor does he
believe that the Jews are a political force in America. He is certain
that they did their part in the war effort. When asked about
``basically Jewish traits," he was not able to respond since to him
this term means practically nothing. ``Jews are all so different
from each other that we cannot speak of there being something
`basically Jewish' about them."
\end{Quote}

%% PREJUDICE IN INTERVIEW MATERIAL	653

\columnbreak
\subsection*{J. Conclusion}

It has often been said that anti-Semitism works as the spearhead
of anti-democratic forces. The phrase sounds a bit hackneyed and
apologetic: the minority most immediately threatened seems to make
an all-too-eager attempt to enlist the support of the majority by
claiming that it is the latter's interest and not their own which
really finds itself in jeopardy today. Looking back, however, at
the material surveyed in this, and other, chapters, it has to be
recognized that a link between anti-Semitism and antidemocratic
feeling exists. True, those who wish to exterminate the Jews do
not, as is sometimes claimed, wish to exterminate afterwards the
Irish or the Protestants. But the limitation of human rights which
is consummated in their idea of a special treatment of the Jews,
not only logically implies the ultimate abolition of the democratic
form of government and, hence, of the legal protection of the
individual, but it is frequently associated quite consciously, by
high-scoring interviewees, with overt antidemocratic ideas. We
conclude this chapter with two examples of what appear to be the
inescapable antidemocratic consequences of anti-Semitism. {\em M106}, a
man high on the E, F, and PEC scales, still pretends to be democratic;
but it is not difficult to infer what is in the back of his mind:


\begin{Quote}
``Hitler's plan --- well, Hitler carried things just a little too
far. There was some justification --- some are bad, but not all.
But Hitler went on the idea that a rotten apple in the barrel will
spoil all the rest of them." He doesn't approve of ruthless
persecution. ``If Hitler had handled the Jews as a minority group,
had segregated them and set certain standards for them to live by,
there would be less trouble for Hitler now. (Same problem in this
country now?) Same problem, but it's handled much better because
we're a democratic country."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
While the suggestion that a minority be segregated is incompatible
with the basic concepts of the same ``democratic country" of which
the subject professes to be proud, the metaphor of the rotten apple
in the barrel conjures up the imagery of ``evil germs" which is
associated with appalling regularity with the dream of an effective
germicide.

Perversion of a so-called democrat is manifested in {\em 5019}, another
man whose scale scores are all high. He is a 20-year-old laborer,
characterized above all, by his blind, authoritarian acceptance of
his humble position in life.  At the same time, he ``dislikes timid
people" and has ``great admiration for real leaders":


\begin{Quote}
Respondent believes that the ``laws of democracy should favor white,
Gentile people," yet he ``would not openly persecute Jews in the way
the Hitler program treated them."
\end{Quote}


\noindent
The reservation of the second sentence is disavowed by the momentum of 
the convictions expressed in the first one.

\end{multicols}
\end{document}