Revisiting the Jewish Question by Élisabeth Roudinesco

By Élisabeth Roudinesco

Author note: Translated by means of Andrew Brown
Publish yr note: First released December sixteenth 2013
------------------------

What does it suggest to be Jewish? what's an anti-Semite? Why does the enigmatic id of the lads who based the 1st monotheistic faith arouse such passions?

We have to go back to the Jewish query. we want, first, to tell apart among the anti-Judaism of medieval instances, which persecuted the Jews, and the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, which emancipated them whereas being serious in their faith. it's a mistake to confuse the 2 and notice every body from Voltaire to Hitler as anti-Semitic within the related method. Then we have to specialize in the improvement of anti-Semitism in Europe, particularly Vienna and Paris, the place the Zionist proposal used to be born. ultimately, we have to examine the reception of Zionism either within the Arab nations and in the Diaspora.

Re-examining the Jewish query within the gentle of those differences and investigations, Roudinesco indicates that there's a everlasting rigidity among the figures of the 'universal Jew' and the 'territorial Jew'. Freud and Jung break up in part over this factor, which received further depth after the production of the nation of Israel in 1948 and the Eichmann trial in 1961. ultimately, Roudinesco turns to the Holocaust deniers, who began to recommend that the Jews had invented the genocide that came about their humans, and to the expanding variety of highbrow and literary figures who've been accused of anti-Semitism.

This thorough re-assessment of the Jewish query can be of curiosity to scholars and students of contemporary heritage and modern notion and to a large readership attracted to anti-Semitism and the historical past of the Jews.

Show description

By Élisabeth Roudinesco

Author note: Translated by means of Andrew Brown
Publish yr note: First released December sixteenth 2013
------------------------

What does it suggest to be Jewish? what's an anti-Semite? Why does the enigmatic id of the lads who based the 1st monotheistic faith arouse such passions?

We have to go back to the Jewish query. we want, first, to tell apart among the anti-Judaism of medieval instances, which persecuted the Jews, and the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, which emancipated them whereas being serious in their faith. it's a mistake to confuse the 2 and notice every body from Voltaire to Hitler as anti-Semitic within the related method. Then we have to specialize in the improvement of anti-Semitism in Europe, particularly Vienna and Paris, the place the Zionist proposal used to be born. ultimately, we have to examine the reception of Zionism either within the Arab nations and in the Diaspora.

Re-examining the Jewish query within the gentle of those differences and investigations, Roudinesco indicates that there's a everlasting rigidity among the figures of the 'universal Jew' and the 'territorial Jew'. Freud and Jung break up in part over this factor, which received further depth after the production of the nation of Israel in 1948 and the Eichmann trial in 1961. ultimately, Roudinesco turns to the Holocaust deniers, who began to recommend that the Jews had invented the genocide that came about their humans, and to the expanding variety of highbrow and literary figures who've been accused of anti-Semitism.

This thorough re-assessment of the Jewish query can be of curiosity to scholars and students of contemporary heritage and modern notion and to a large readership attracted to anti-Semitism and the historical past of the Jews.

Show description

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A Prussian patriot, an admirer of Voltaire and d’Holbach, he had not found it difficult to renounce his Jewishness since he considered his conversion as a step towards civilization and a liberation from all Jewish prejudice. As for the son, who was a complete atheist, his dream was to rid mankind of all religion, that ‘opium of the people’. Our First Parents 21 Some writers, such as Pierre-André Taguieff, have unhesitatingly drawn on the private correspondence of the founder of communism to make him seem even more criminal and to misread the true meaning of his hostility to Judaism.

Thus, nationalism became a doctrine that ran counter to the original ideal of which it had been the bearer. ‘The Constitution of 1795’, de Maistre wrote in 1796, ‘like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc. [. ’3 In the bourgeois France of the second half of the nineteenth century, which now scorned socialism, Valmy, and the uprisings of the starving, the term thus assumed a new significance.

But, in order for it to make its appearance, a radical paradigm shift would be necessary. 2 The Shadow of the Camps and the Smoke of the Ovens The word ‘nation’ initially expressed all the aspirations of the peoples of Europe to be self-determining, but it turned into its opposite when the patriotic ideal inspired by the Enlightenment spirit became transformed into a communitarian project based on attachment to the soil. This was how the term ‘nationalism’, derived from ‘nation’ and invented in 1797 by the Abbé Augustin de Barruel, a sworn enemy of the Jacobins, as a way of referring pejoratively to the patriotic ideal seen as a ‘masonic plot’,1 eventually became – forty years later – a doctrine based on chauvinism, the exclusion of otherness, and the primacy of the collective over individuality.

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