Ned Beau­man is the author of Boxer,Beetle. It was short­list­ed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize upon its ini­tial UK release last year, and has recent­ly been praised by the New York Times as ​‘fun­ny, raw and stylish’.

In 1893 the Ger­man writer Oscar Paniz­za pub­lished a sto­ry called ​“The Oper­at­ed Jew,” a syn­op­sis of which reads like a racial­ly charged David Cro­nen­berg film: a young Jew­ish doc­tor sub­mits to a seri­ous of painful sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dures to con­ceal his her­itage, cul­mi­nat­ing with a blood trans­fu­sion from pure Ayran vir­gins, but just before his wed­ding to a blonde Ger­man woman, the oper­a­tions lose their hold and he melts into a pud­dle on the floor. That same decade, the Zion­ist Theodor Her­zl began using the term ​‘anti-Semi­te of Jew­ish ori­gin’, which would soon be sim­pli­fied to ​‘self-hat­ing Jew’.

These days you don’t very often hear ​‘self-hat­ing Jew’ from lev­el-head­ed peo­ple, but to a nov­el­ist, a self-hat­ing any­thing is inher­ent­ly juicy mate­r­i­al, and ​“The Oper­at­ed Jew,” if it had been writ­ten by a Jew­ish author, would prob­a­bly now be a major text in Jew­ish Studies.

Most of us are already famil­iar with the sto­ry of Dan Bur­ros, the Jew­ish Ku Klux Klan mem­ber whose sto­ry was the basis for the 2001 Ryan Gosling film The Believ­er. But my own favourite ​‘self-hat­ing Jew’ is the Ger­man-Jew­ish schol­ar Oscar Levy. ​‘We who have posed as the sav­iours of the world, we, who have even boast­ed of hav­ing giv­en it ​“the” Sav­iour, we are to-day noth­ing else but the world’s seduc­ers, its destroy­ers, its incen­di­aries, its exe­cu­tion­ers,’ wrote Levy in 1920. ​‘We who have promised to lead you to a new Heav­en, we have final­ly suc­ceed­ed in land­ing you into a new Hell.’ As a result of the storm of pub­lic­i­ty over this arti­cle, Levy was kicked out of his adopt­ed home of Great Britain, even as the anti-Semit­ic news­pa­per The Hid­den Hand or Jew­ry Über Alles praised him as ​‘the most coura­geous and hon­est Jew living.’

But as Dan Stone explains in his book Breed­ing Super­man, Levy’s anti-Semi­tism was of a com­plex kind. Levy was one of the first trans­la­tors of Niet­zsche into Eng­lish, and like Niet­zsche, he didn’t acknowl­edge much of a dis­tinc­tion between Jews and Chris­tians: both were equal­ly at fault for the dis­mal state of the world, although it hap­pened to be the Jews who’d helped to begin that decline.

And the Jews could still do some­thing about it. ​‘Yes, there is hope, my friend,’ he wrote, ​‘for we are still here, our last word is not yet spo­ken, our last deed is not yet done, our last rev­o­lu­tion is not yet made.’ As Stone sum­maris­es his posi­tion: ​‘The Jews, the under­min­ers of west­ern civil­i­sa­tion, are the only peo­ple able to res­cue that civil­i­sa­tion from fur­ther dete­ri­o­ra­tion. Self-hatred is yet self-aggran­dis­e­ment.’ To antic­i­pate Levy in The Oper­at­ed Jew, per­haps Paniz­za would have had to write some­thing clos­er to The Strange Case of Doc­tor Jekyll and Mr Hyde – with his young doc­tor as a pen­i­tent by day but also a rev­o­lu­tion­ary by night.

Ned Beau­man was born in Lon­don and cur­rent­ly lives in New York. His debut nov­el Boxer,Beetle (Blooms­bury) was short­list­ed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize upon its ini­tial UK release last year, and has recent­ly been praised by the New York Times as ​‘fun­ny, raw and stylish’.