By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel –Otto Weininger was born on April 3, 1880, in Vienna, in the family of a successful Jewish jeweler. His mother was engaged in the upbringing of her children – there were seven of them. After attending elementary school and graduating from high school in July 1898, Weininger entered the University of Vienna in October of the same year, where he graduated with honors with a doctoral dissertation on bisexuality (1902).
While preparing his dissertation, he met Freud, from whom he learned of the innovative ideas on bisexuality developed by Freud’s friend otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess and used by Weininger in his research. Shortly after defending his dissertation, Weininger was baptized into Protestantism.
In June 1903 the Viennese publisher Braumüller & Co published his book Sex and Character, which was an attempt to present sexual relations in a new light. Returning to Vienna, he spent the last five days with his parents. On October 3, he took a room in the house at Schwarzspanierstraße 15, where Beethoven, his musical idol, had died. On October 4, Weininger mortally wounded himself with a gunshot to the chest. He died in a Vienna hospital and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Vienna.
The book Sex and Character was very popular: from 1903 to 1933 it was published 28 times. In 1933 it was banned by the National Socialists, not because they did not like its content, but because the author was Jewish. But Weininger was the only “non-Aryan” whose books were not burned in Nazi Germany. Freud admired his “serious, handsome face, on which the stamp of genius was clearly visible.” The Swedish writer August Strindberg praised him as a “valiant, courageous fighter.” Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev called Weininger a “genius young man.” The Austrian-British Jewish philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called Weininger one of the ten thinkers who had a decisive influence on him. In a letter to the English philosopher Georg Edward Moore, Wittgenstein remarked that “he [Weininger] was fantastic, but he was great and fantastic.”
Sex and Character asserts that all human beings are composed of a mixture of masculine and feminine matter. “Masculine” is active, productive, conscious, moral and logical, while ‘feminine’ is passive, unproductive, unconscious, amoral and illogical. In this book, Weininger emerges not only as a misogynist but also as an antisemite: “Just as women have no real dignity, so Jews have no what is meant by the word ‘gentleman.’ The real Jew fails in this innate upbringing by which some people respect their individuality and respect the individuality of others. […] Jews do not live as free, self-governing individuals, choosing between virtue and vice in the Aryan manner.”
Weininger found that the type of Jew coincides in almost everything with the type of woman. For Weininger, renouncing Jewishness meant overcoming the woman in himself. In his book The History of Anti-Semitism, French historian Leo Poliakov wrote: “For five hundred pages, the book analyzes the moral and intellectual inferiority of women: it concludes with an even harsher verdict on the Jews, with the only difference being that a woman at least believed in something, namely a man, whereas a Jew was completely devoid of faith.”
In Sex and Character, Weininger described his hatred of Jews in himself and in others: “Whoever hates the Jewish essence hates it above all in himself. The fact that he ruthlessly persecutes everything Jewish in another person is an attempt to free himself from it in this way, […] a man hates only the one who evokes unpleasant memories of himself.”
Weininger urged Jews to fight against themselves. Just before his death, he wrote: “I kill myself so that I will not be able to kill others.” He was 23 years old. Stefan Zweig, who attended university with Weininger, describes his depressed personality: “He always looked as if he had just stepped off a train after a thirty-hour ride: dirty, tired, wrinkled; always walking with a detached look, a kind of crooked gait, as if he were holding on to an invisible wall, and the same crookedness of his lips under his liquid mustache.”
Through his book, Otto Weininger became one of the most famous antisemites in the world. Hitler said of Weininger, “He was the only Jew worthy of life.” What Weininger hated about Jews was their isolation and isolation from other nations. He believed that such aspirations lead to the degeneration of Jewry: “In the physical degeneration of modern Jewry, not the least role has been played by the fact that in the Jews, far more often than anywhere else in the world, marriages are contracted not for love, but through intermediaries.” He wrote: “The Jew is formless matter, a being without soul, without individuality. Nothing, zero. A moral chaos. The Jew believes neither in himself nor in law and order.”
This was the manifestation of Jewish self-hatred analyzed by Theodor Lessing, professor at the Hannover Higher Technical School, philosopher and publicist of Jewish origin, in his book Jewish Self-Hatred (1930). The author apparently took the basic idea of the book from Weininger’s life and from one of his articles.
In an article On Henrik Ibsen and his work Per Gynt, Weininger wrote about Nietzsche as an individual who had a particular self-hatred. Lessing adopted the concept of “self-hatred” (Selbsthass) from this article to explain the psychic peculiarities of many Jewish cultural figures, including Weininger himself. Weininger proves the validity of his Jewish self-hatred by appealing to antisemitism: “Anti-Semitism itself will prove my point. […] Thus explains the fact that the fiercest anti-Semites are to be found among the Jews themselves.”
Jewish self-hatred is a neurotic reaction to external antisemitism in which Jews have accepted, propagated, or even exaggerated the basic tenets of antisemitism. The inwardly directed aggressiveness of the personality motivated, according to Lessing, both Weininger’s conversion from Judaism to Protestantism and his early demise.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books