Why Dostoevsky Loved Humanity and Hated the Jews

Call it the Dostoevsky problem, although it concerns more than Dostoevsky. On the one hand, he was the great writer of compassion for all who suffer. On the other, he became, toward the end of his life, an extreme anti-Semite. So the first question is: how was it possible for these two impulses to cohere in the same consciousness, and how did Dostoevsky reconcile them? The second is: how and why did he become such an anti-Semite, apparently in 1876, when he had never been especially concerned with Jews and a decade earlier had advocated equal rights for them?

The Dostoevsky problem raises issues that have bothered me since my college years and that have acquired new urgency recently. What makes people hold horrendous beliefs? How could so many well-educated people have embraced anti-Semitic ideology? The usual answers beg the question. We are told: they were anti-Semitic because they were filled with hate, which reminds me of the character in Molière who explains that poppy makes people sleepy because it has a soporific principle. Or: they are afflicted with “virulent” anti-Semitism, as if some pathogen outside their control had commandeered their will. (Virulence is, in biology, a pathogen’s ability to damage a host cell.) That explanation seems like an updated version of demonic possession.

Trying to understand Soviet interrogators who tortured prisoners they knew to be innocent, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points out that no one (or almost no one) thinks of himself as evil. In their own eyes, such people are doing good. He mentions the wife of an interrogator who was proud of his ability to get confessions: a night with her husband, she boasted, and they all come around. I grew up among American Communists and wondered how otherwise decent people, who knew what Stalin had done, could support him. Members of my own generation had nice things to say about “the chairman” at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Today, it’s students devoted to social justice who support Hamas.