Psychocultural Reflections on André Suarès' Jewish-ness

Suarès's Jewish ancestry becomes the source of the problem of his identification. His ressentiment as a Jew, and failure to be accepted like any other Frenchman, resulted in a psychological crisis, and emerges as the key to his life, thought, and entire work. To resolve feelings of victimization in his psyche, he turned to the world of culture, particularly as embodied in France. But his own unjust treatment by French society, together with the racist and anti-Semitic atmosphere that prevailed during his lifetime, heightened his intolerance of all social, ethnic and religious prejudices, and injustices. Moreover, his humanistic morality and belief in human brotherhood made it impossible for him to accept uncritically the persecutions of Jews. Troubled by the injustices of the Dreyfus Affair and inhumanity of the Hitlerian period, he gave evidence in his writings of his solidarity with his kinsmen. In his own sense of discrimination, he projected the notion of Otherness. The ontological aspects of his Jewishness raise the much broader question of cultural identity. (SDB)