The Self-Hating Jew

I rarely respect any truth claims within this epithet while I simultaneously respect the slur’s utility.
“Self-hating Jew” is a loyalty-enforcement epithet doing the work every durable coalition needs done, and the tell is that every group has one. Blacks have “Uncle Tom” and “sellout,” Latinos have “coconut,” Asians have “banana,” Cubans have “gusano,” Muslims have “coconut” and “native informant,” the American right has “RINO” and “un-American,” the left has “class traitor,” Catholics had “bad Catholic,” and the Soviets had “rootless cosmopolitan,” which is the same accusation running in reverse, a Jew insufficiently loyal to the bigger coalition. The universality is the diagnosis. A word that exists in every coalition’s arsenal is coalition equipment, and its function is to raise the price of defection by reclassifying a member’s priority-ordering as a pathology. That is the move: you did not weigh your commitments and rank the group second, you are sick, you hate yourself. The pathology framing forecloses the possibility the accusation cannot afford to admit, that a sane, self-respecting member looked at his group’s interests and something else, open society, class, humanity, truth, God, and ranked the group lower. Coalitions can argue with a ranking. They cannot argue with a diagnosis, so they prefer to issue one.
The term has a referent, which is what gives the epithet its cover. Otto Weininger (1880-1903), the Viennese Jew who wrote a book absorbing the antisemitism of his culture into a metaphysics of Jewish inferiority and shot himself at twenty-three, was the case Theodor Lessing (1872-1933) built the concept around in his 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß, which coined the phrase. Internalized contempt exists; the psychological literature on internalized stigma documents versions of it in every marked group. But the distance between Weininger and a Jew who funds causes his coalition dislikes is the entire distance between pathology and priority, and the epithet’s job is to collapse it.
George Soros is a test case because he is legible without the diagnosis. His sacred is on the record: Karl Popper‘s (1902-1994) open society, absorbed as a student at LSE, funded for forty years at the scale of a mid-sized state, from Solidarity-era dissidents through post-Soviet universities to American criminal-justice reform.
His Jewishness is a fact of his biography, a Budapest adolescence survived under false papers in 1944; his priority-ordering is universalist, and he has said versions of this plainly, that he does not put tribal allegiance first. In the vocabulary of this thread, his roster is the open-society coalition and his positions track it with ordinary fidelity, including positions that cut against Israeli governments and Jewish communal consensus. That is not self-hatred; it is membership in a different alliance, and it should be analyzed exactly as we analyzed Haykel’s portfolio or the Bundist’s, whose brother was the Polish machinist and whose enemy was the Jewish factory owner. Nobody needs a psychiatric theory of the Bund. Nobody needs one for Soros.
What makes his case diagnostic rather than merely illustrative is that he is prosecuted from both directions in the two vocabularies this thread has mapped, simultaneously. The Jewish nationalist right indicts him as a Jew who betrays Jews, deploying the loyalty epithet. The antisemitic right indicts him as the Jew, the puppet-master financing migration and disorder, deploying the Drumont-Rothschild trope in its current cut, and the imagery in the campaigns against him, the octopus, the strings, the borders dissolving, is the recycled fingerprint the earlier essay identified as the hatred’s constant. One man, too Jewish for one prosecutor and not Jewish enough for the other, is the cruelest-joke pattern from the essay compressed into a single defendant, and it confirms the finding: neither indictment is about him. Each is a coalition speaking its own maintenance language, and he is the address at which the languages happen to intersect.
The general rule, stated without protection for anyone: a group has a legitimate interest in loyalty and a legitimate gripe against members who work against it, and it is entitled to say so in the plain language of interests, he opposes what we want, he strengthens our rivals, we should fight him. What it is not entitled to, or rather what an honest observer should refuse to ratify, is the upgrade from opposition to pathology, because the upgrade is a lie about where the disagreement lives. Jews who rank universalism above the tribe, Whites who rank it above theirs, Blacks who break with the civil-rights consensus, Muslims who leave the faith and criticize it, all face the same machinery, and the machinery deserves the same name in every case. The accusation of self-hatred is what a coalition says when it has lost the argument about rankings and would rather hold the argument about your soul.