Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

And instead of thanking God for creating man in His image, and truly with the divine magnanimity that we praise in Him, in all possible colours, people deny Him by the very fact that they say He did not create everyone in His image. We do not know the colour of Adam, the first human. Since, however, in the history of creation not only does every word have its obvious meaning but also every omission, we must assume that Adam’s skin colour would have been mentioned if God had intended to give a preference to any particular one. But we do not speak of the colour of the first man from whom we are all descended any more than we speak of his mother tongue, his race or his nationality. Rather, we assume that he, who was the founder of mankind, contained within himself the source of all languages, all races, all peoples and all the variations of skin colour. And Adam was the crown of creation. God Himself took a full five long days to make him, and these were not our short human days, from sun-up to sun-down, but vast in extent, according to the time reckoning of eternity not of the calendar. It is a hardly comprehensible honour that God bestowed upon us in devoting such a long period of thought to us. Many differences distinguish we humans from the animals. But the most important is that God gave Himself five days to create man and that He breathed His breath into him alone — just humans, not humans of one or another colour. This is the only permissible pride we may feel that cannot be called a sin. But it is a double sin that we commit when we pervert our just pride at being people into a vile pride at being white, black, brown or red people. And as it is already deemed as disgraceful in our everyday world when an unworthy fellow denies his grandfather, so should it be a mortal sin and branded as such when a man denies Adam, the ancestor of us all. Thus one denies God Himself with whom our first bond is that He animated Adam with His divine breath.

God created man in his own image. We therefore blaspheme Him when we mock or disparage the hooked nose of the Jew, the slanted eyes of the Mongol or the large lips of the African. Since they are all human beings, each particular feature and each particular colour of every human race is to be found in the sublime and unfathomable countenance of God. Whoever insults the Jew’s nose or the African’s lips or the Mongol’s eyes or the white man’s pallor therefore insults the nose, the lips, the eyes and the colour of God. He also defames His breath, which was breathed into the first man. For in this breath were contained all the virtues of all future people. Within it were the wondrous singing voice of the African, the subtlety and also the fervour of the Mongol, the nobility of the Indian, the intelligence of the Jew — and so forth.

In the Commission on Colours I saw, however, that not only were the powerful arrogant towards the powerless but that the latter defended themselves with an equal arrogance towards the powerful. And because at this time white men happen to be more powerful than men of other colours, those among them who were still conscientious were striving for the emancipation of the coloured peoples. The Antichrist, however, was already living among both. And he led the coloured peoples, who were not yet freed, who were still enslaved by the whites, to mimic their morals and vices and pretensions. And so the brown and black and yellow men all lived apart, ate and drank apart. The brown men were proud of their brownness, the black of their blackness and the yellow of their yellowness. It was obvious that they did not regard themselves first and foremost as people, but rather as coloured people. They also demanded in all their speeches and uprisings not so much the liberties that truly characterize human dignity as the unworthy ones that power usurps as its prerogative. What they demanded, and what they ever repeated, was ‘We want to be masters in our own country.’ Yes, they wanted to be masters, nothing else. And in their own country. Instead of saying ‘We want to be people in all the countries of the world,’ they said that they wanted to be masters in their own countries. And I thereby recognized that the Antichrist was in control among them also.

I said this to one of them, a man with kind eyes and an agreeable voice. He came from India. He replied: ‘Since you came to us with violence and trickery and brought us your alcohol and syphilis, but we didn’t come to you with trickery and violence, to defend ourselves we must speak with the words that you have taught us and fight with the weapons that you use.’

To which I answered that he had spoken much foolishness in two phrases but that that he had revealed his great folly mainly through the use of a couple of little words — namely ‘your’ and ‘you’. Since I had unfortunately not seen his country I couldn’t object to his regarding mine as he regarded his own. I also looked upon his country as I looked upon mine. If, perhaps, I were to bring some disease or other evil into his country I could no doubt assume that there were other diseases and evils that were common and native to that place. For we are all a mixture of virtue and sin. And it was precisely because all men were comprised in the same way of virtue and sin, strength and weakness, goodness and malice, disease and health, that I couldn’t comprehend why every country should be jealous of exactly those frailties, evils and diseases that it imagined were special and peculiar to itself. As far as I was concerned, at that moment, as we conversed one man to another, was he, I asked him, speaking with me or with my skin colour? For he used the plural pronoun when speaking to me, although I was only one person.

At this, he replied that he had become used to it because it was the people of my colour who had begun by addressing people of his colour in this way, saying ‘you’ and ‘your’ to them.

‘Let us assume,’ I said to him, ‘that there was a certain town, and in this town lived a great many murderers. Would you therefore address each citizen of the town as “you murderers” or say “among you murderers”? And,’ said I further, ‘I have read that in your country live many wise men. Am I to address everyone in your country as “you wise men”?’

‘I have seldom met anyone of your type,’ he said, thinking to compliment me.

With this I recognized him and told him that he seemed to be the twin brother of my employer — the wise Master of a Thousand Tongues. And then I said bluntly: ‘The Antichrist walks in your country also. And that is worse than syphilis.’

He seemed not to understand. He said nothing. As, however, he was concerned to reconcile me he searched, very much as the Antichrist would, not for a subject that we might both like but for one that he thought I would hate. And he said: ‘The worst are the half-breeds.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘the worst are those who would think and say such a thing. For we are all people, and when people come together with each other it is natural and the will of God that everything should happen between them that can occur between human beings. They can speak to one another, they can hate one another, they can love one another and they can sleep with one another. Love between a red man and a yellow woman is natural. For if nature didn’t wish this love to exist it would prevent them from bearing fruit. Since children spring from such a love these children are neither better nor worse than any others. When, however, two women or two men of the same colour love each other, this process goes against nature, even though people must obey the particular ways of their own bodies. There certainly exist within creation many phenomena that are subject not to the general laws of creation but to others of a special and remarkable kind. We have no right to condemn them. Neither do we have the right to see them as natural. That would be as if those who were born blind were considered to have the same sight as those who are not blind, merely because it is Nature itself that made them blind and not an accident. In this world, however, where the Antichrist blinds even those who can see, it comes to pass that people say: “An unnatural love between two white men is better and nobler than a natural love between a white man and a yellow woman.” And this is a twofold sin. For the infirm must bear their infirmities humbly, and a cripple cannot direct how the healthy should run. I know a man who has sexual intercourse with goats, but won’t give his hand to a Chinese man.’ Another person who heard me speak thusly came to me and said he could understand everything that I was thinking. For, although he came from a distant land, namely Japan, he was also in the service of a Master of a Thousand Tongues. And, like myself, he went everywhere that there was unrest in the world.