Dr. med. James Kirsch
Olivaer Platz 3
Berlin W.15
[Summer 1931]
The Jewish Image of the World Since time immemorial primitive peoples have commonly believed that it is impossible to conquer a foreign land, because those who occupy a foreign land will then be taken over by the gods of that land.
The settlement of America by white people provides ample evidence that the primitives' belief is true.
Even though the whites in America did not absorb Indian blood to any extent worth mentioning, specific Indian traits are evident in the appearance, bearing, and physiognomy of present-day Americans.
Just as one and the same plant has different characteristics, depending on its habitat, so with human beings.
Thus, we would do better to say, not that the inhabitants of North America exhibit Indian traits, but that when the Europeans were transplanted to America, the change of habitat bestowed on them a different physiognomy.
Just as with physique, the psychology of the white population of North America shows a specifically American-Indian character.
Their concept of excellence, their heroic ideal, is emphatically Indian.
Only think of their rough training combats and boxing, the songs of a Walt Whitman, and more besides unimaginable for Europeans.
The gods of that country have taken possession of them.
This has been the experience of every conquering people, every people which has had to live on foreign soil for extended periods.
Only one people proves to be an exception to this rule: the Jews.
Through all lands they took their god with them, the god they conceived in the desert.
The desert is a vast, desolate region, without plants, with very few animals.
In rare and isolated places, oases exist.
To experience the desert is to know its vastness, its distant horizon, with the fata morgana, the wind, the storm.
Israel's god is a god of the wind, not originating from the earth, and from the very beginning he was grasped in spiritual form, as the Everlasting: I will be who I will be!
As the Everlasting in Becoming, or as Becoming in the Everlasting, God, detached from all qualities, is the creative principle, in contrast to the gods of the earth, the material principle.
They had to be plural, if the divine showed itself as subject to quality of any kind.
For the Jewish people, God is the energetic principle before it divides into its polarities.
The soul of the Jew was bound up with this single-singular principle; his soul was not permitted to open itself to the land where he traveled.
The Jew's bride, the Jew's anima was Israel, the Jewish people, the Sabbath, the Torah.
His emotional character, his psychic disposition was defined by the Sabbath.
The Jew's homeland is the Torah, and the only content of his soul is God.
And yet deep in every Jew is the yearning for oasis, for the earth.
He longs to be like all other peoples, yet this cannot be.
Therein lies the paradox of Jewish psychology.
It is a human being's eternally impossible attempt to direct the soul away from the earth, to adapt collective energy and its specific formation to his soul, and to tum the Eternally Becoming into the only content of this soul.
Such attempts must almost always fail.
Then if money, socialism, or the belly take the place of God, the Jew turns away from his eternal task; he becomes inauthentic and his psychology a fraud.
It is then that the earth-born peoples perceive him as harboring hand-grenades in his unconscious.
This is the deepest ground for anti-Semitism.
On the other hand, if the Jew lives according to his proper dynamic psychology, he is the salt of the earth.
Theocracy is the basis of his endurance. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Pages 15-16
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