An open letter to a woman who approached me in a bar.
Anti-Semite.
“You love gold. You love gold. You are a Jew and you love
gold more than anything. You are not a man. You are a Jew.”
I have Polish blood and a German name. How do you think that
happened?
Have you read Frankenstein?
Most people would say that it’s a story about a man who creates a monster. I
would nuance, however, that it’s a story about a man who turns a creature into a
monster. The man is called Victor, and the monster is called a monster because
Victor decides to see it that way. In the story, the night that Victor encounters the
creature, he has a nightmare about it. When he wakes up, he believes it to be a
monster. Being so viscerally controlled by his fear of this other being, Victor
becomes blind to the creature’s humanity. This is why the creature, in Victor’s
eyes, is a monster. Victor’s fault is that he allows himself to perpetuate a
cycle of demonization, pushing the creature farther and farther away from
humanity.
A meta-analysis of this story begs the questions: How does monstrosity come to be, and what is
it actually?
My answer to the first question is that Victor’s experience
is too frequently taken to a very large scale: when someone has a nightmare, he
will describe it to another person, and the second person will have a similar
nightmare and share it with a third person, and so on. In this way, the same
nightmare can spread across an enormous group of people and such a group will
share the same idea of monstrosity.
My answer to the second question is that monstrosity is a fiction
manifested in the eyes of the beholder. It occurs as the effect of fear forces a
person to see something that it is not, which rebounds on itself. For the convenience
of the following thought experiment, I will discuss two fictitious characters:
Sam and Dave. If Sam has reason to doubt Dave, he will begin to think of Dave
as a collection of his own doubts, rather than the person Dave actually is. As
Doubt is a concept which often leans towards negative, Sam will begin to
dehumanize and eventually demonize Dave. You must keep in mind that no matter
how Sam feels about Dave, Dave remains static: he is the same person whether
Sam doubts him or not. For the purposes of this letter, let’s assume that
Frankenstein’s creature was also a static character. It was in Frankenstein’s
imagination that the creature was a monster. Furthermore, Frankenstein’s
imagination created his reality. Similarly, Sam’s thoughts create his reality: Dave
is no longer a person, but a thing to be doubted, nay, Dave is the concept of
doubt.
Who, then, creates the more profound reality? It was
certainly not Mary Shelly’s creature who dictated his stature as a monster; it
was those around him.
For literally thousands
of years, society has persecuted Jews for the same reason. Jews represent the other in a population. Just as Sam
grows to see Dave as a notion of adversity, so too is the other seen as a dehumanized concept rather than a people. When
society strips the other’s humanity,
it begins to see the other as
monstrous. Although the other itself
has not changed at all, it is nonetheless a true monster as far as society’s
reality dictates. It follows suit to say that even though a Jew is just a man,
he is seen as– and deeply believed to be– a monster.
So, to the anti-Semite who approached me at that bar,
I say that I am only what you choose to see me as. I will also remind you that
every hundred years or so, you beat and torture and murder us until finally you
chase us out of every area in which we try to build a home. We adapt. We
survive and carry our things on our backs to new places when we need to. We
become immigrants. From generation to generation, we seem to have been a
nomadic people, always running. Every time we arrive some place new, we have
foreign accents and foreign traditions which only perpetuates our otherness, which then provokes your
demonization. When Victor had his nightmare about the creature, his mind created
the monster; when you have your nightmares about an other, you create your own monsters.
