A Reader on Reading

In Perón’s Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges was one of the few intellectuals to speak out against the Nazis. As early as April 1934, in answer to an accusation by the editors of the nationalist magazine Crisol (that he “maliciously hid his Jewish ancestry”), Borges published a short text, “I, a Jew,” in which he acknowledged that he often delighted in imagining himself a Jew, but that, alas, he had not been able to trace a single Jewish ancestor in the past two hundred years of his family history. Though he had never felt it necessary to defend his belief in the importance and value of the Jewish culture which had fed his own literature (the stories of the Bible, the wisdom of the Talmud, the scholarship of Gershom Scholem, the nightmares of Gustav Meyrink and Kafka, the poetry of Heinrich Heine, the legend of the Golem, the mysteries of the Kabbalah), he mocked the antisemites who obsessively sought Jewish roots in all their enemies. “Statistically speaking,” Borges mused, “the Jews were very few. What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who discovers everywhere descendants of the inhabitants of San Juan [one of the least populated of the Argentinean provinces]? Our inquisitors seek Hebrews, never Phoenicians, Numidians, Scythians, Babylonians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphlagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Libyans, Cyclops, or Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, Babylon, Carthage, Memphis have never succeeded in giving birth to one single grandfather; it was only to the tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that such a gift was granted.”

Neither did he condemn German Kultur. In an article published on 24 March 1939 in El Hogar (a popular Argentinean family weekly), Borges reviewed a book by a certain Louis Golding, ominously called The Jewish Problem. Borges agreed with Golding’s attack on antisemitism, but he disagreed with the author’s tactics. Antisemites, Borges said, “seek (absurdly) to deny Jewish contributions to the culture of Germany; Golding seeks (absurdly) to limit the culture of Germany to Jewish contributions alone. He declares racism to be absurd, but, with an almost servile symmetry, he does nothing more than oppose Jewish racism to Nazi racism. He constantly moves from a necessary defense to an unnecessary onslaught. Unnecessary, because Israel’s virtues do not require the demerits of Germany. Unnecessary and imprudent, because this is somehow equivalent to accepting the thesis of the enemy, that postulates a radical difference between a Jew and a non-Jew.” A year later, shortly after Germany’s invasion of Denmark, Borges transcribed a dialogue with an Argentinean Germanophile. For Borges, his interlocutor is a contradiction: rather than a lover of Germany (of whose culture he knows nothing), he is merely a hater of England. He is also an antisemite: that is to say, he wants to expel from Argentina the Slavo-Germanic community whose members boast names of German origin (Rosenblatt, Grünberg, Nierenstein) and speak a German dialect, Yiddish.

But beyond mockery, Borges thought that Jewish culture carried, metaphysically, a symbolic weight. He felt that Hitler was engaged in a purpose that was ultimately impossible—the annihilation of Jewish culture — because Jewish culture (Borges believed) stood essentially for the culture of humanity; if that were so, then Hitler’s wish to eliminate the Jews was merely part of a cosmic machinery set up to prove in aeternum the Jews’ survival. “Nazism suffers from unreality,” he wrote in “A Comment of August 23, 1944,” the day of the liberation of Paris. “It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall hazard this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated.” Two years later, in the short story “Deutsches Requiem” (a sort of precursor to Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillants), a Nazi officer attempts to explain himself and his deeds: “The world was dying of its Judaism and of that sickness of Judaism which is the faith of Jesus; we taught it violence and the faith of the sword. That sword will now kill us, and we are comparable to the sorcerer who weaves a maze in which he is forced to roam until the end of his days, or to David who pronounces judgment on a stranger and condemns him to death, and then hears the revelation: You are that man.” At that point, the Nazi officer utters these powerful words of his own damnation: “If victory and injustice and happiness be not for Germany, let them be for other nations. Let Heaven exist, even if our place be Hell.”