Revisiting the Jewish Question E-Book

Elisabeth Roudinesco

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 525

Beschreibung

What does it mean to be Jewish? What is an anti-Semite? Why does the enigmatic identity of the men who founded the first monotheistic religion arouse such passions? We need to return to the Jewish question. We need, first, to distinguish between the anti-Judaism of medieval times, which persecuted the Jews, and the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, which emancipated them while being critical of their religion. It is a mistake to confuse the two and see everyone from Voltaire to Hitler as anti-Semitic in the same way. Then we need to focus on the development of anti-Semitism in Europe, especially Vienna and Paris, where the Zionist idea was born. Finally, we need to investigate the reception of Zionism both in the Arab countries and within the Diaspora. Re-examining the Jewish question in the light of these distinctions and investigations, Roudinesco shows that there is a permanent tension between the figures of the 'universal Jew' and the 'territorial Jew'. Freud and Jung split partly over this issue, which gained added intensity after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Eichmann trial in 1961. Finally, Roudinesco turns to the Holocaust deniers, who started to suggest that the Jews had invented the genocide that befell their people, and to the increasing number of intellectual and literary figures who have been accused of anti-Semitism. This thorough re-examination of the Jewish question will be of interest to students and scholars of modern history and contemporary thought and to a wide readership interested in anti-Semitism and the history of the Jews.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

Introduction

1: Our First Parents

2: The Shadow of the Camps and the Smoke of the Ovens

3: Promised Land, Conquered Land

4: Universal Jew, Territorial Jew

5: Genocide between Memory and Negation

6: A Great and Destructive Madness

7: Inquisitorial Figures

Index

First published in French as Retour sur la question juive © Éditions Albin Michel, 2009

This English edition © Polity Press, 2013

This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme (www.frenchbooknews.com).

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Acknowledgements

My thanks go to all those who have helped me, in one way or another, to write this book: Laure Adler, Jacques-Martin Berne, Stephane Bou, Mireille Chauveinc, Raphaël Enthoven, Liliane Kandel, Guido Liebermann, Arno Mayer, Maurice Olender, Benoît Peeters, and Michel Rotfus.

Thanks to Dominique Bourel for reading the proofs.

And thanks, of course, to Olivier Bétourné for all his support.

Things have been said about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contradictory to history. How can the persecutions they have suffered at the hands of different peoples be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate by granting the Jews imprescriptible human rights which no human power could ever take from them. Faults are still imputed to them, prejudices, a sectarian spirit and selfish interests. […] But to what can we really impute these faults but our own injustices? After having excluded them from every honour, even from the rights to public esteem, we have left them with nothing but lucrative speculations. Let us deliver them to happiness, to the homeland, to virtue, by granting them the dignity of men and citizens; let us hope that it can never be a policy, whatever people say, to condemn to degradation and oppression a multitude of men who live among us.

Maximilien de Robespierre, 23 December 1789

That Céline was a writer given to delirium is not what makes me dislike him. Rather it is the fact that this delirium expressed itself as anti-Semitism; the delirium here can excuse nothing. All anti-Semitism is finally a delirium, and anti-Semitism, be it delirious, remains the capital error.

Maurice Blanchot, 1966

Introduction

‘Nazis, that's what you are! You drive the Jews out of their homes – you're worse than the Arabs.’1

This accusation was uttered in December 2008 by some young fundamentalist Jews settled in Hebron, in the West Bank, who had never experienced genocide: it was aimed at other Jews, soldiers of the Israeli Army (Tzahal) who had been given orders to evacuate their compatriots, and who had also never experienced genocide.

‘Nazis worse than Arabs’: these words symbolize the passion that has been spreading unstoppably across the planet ever since the Israeli–Palestinian conflict became the main issue in every intellectual and political debate on the international scene.

At the heart of these debates – and against a background of killings, massacres, and insults – we find extremist Jews reviling other Jews by calling them ‘worse than Arabs’. This shows how much they hate the Arabs, and not just the Palestinians, but all Arabs – in other words, the Arab-Islamic world as a whole, and even those who are not Arabs but who claim a stake in Islam in all its varieties:2 Jordanians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Iranians, inhabitants of the Maghreb, etc. So they are racist Jews: in these words, they are comparing what they call Arabs – i.e., both Muslims and Islamists – with Nazis, except that the Arabs are not so bad. But the same Jews identify other Jews with people worse than Arabs, i.e., with the worst assassins in history, those genocidal killers responsible for what, in Hebrew, they call the Shoah, the catastrophe – the extermination of the Jews of Europe – that was such a decisive factor in the foundation of the State of Israel.3

If you cross the walls, the barbed wire, the borders, you will inevitably encounter the same passion, kindled by extremists who, though they may not represent public opinion as a whole, are just as influential. From Lebanon to Iran, and from Algeria to Egypt, the Jews are often, in one place or another, called Nazis, or seen as the exterminators of the Palestinian people. And the more Jews as a whole are here viewed as perpetrators of post-colonial genocide, as followers of American imperialism, or as Islamophobes,4 the more people find inspiration in a literature that has sprung from the tradition of European anti-Semitism: ‘The Jews’, they say, ‘are the descendants of monkeys and pigs.’ And: ‘America has been corrupted by the Jews; the brains of America have been mutilated by those of the Jews. Homosexuality has been spread by the Jew Jean-Paul Sartre. The calamities that befall the world, the bestial tendencies, the lust and the abominable intercourse with animals come from the Jew Freud, just as the propagation of atheism comes from the Jew Marx.’5

In that world, people eagerly read Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Mythical Foundations of Israeli Policy;6 they deny the existence of the gas chambers and denounce alleged Jewish plans to take over the world. It's all thrown into the brew: the Jacobins, the supporters of liberal capitalism, communists, freemasons – all are presented as agents of the Jews, witness for example the Twenty-Second Article of the Charter of Hamas, which marks a real step backwards compared with that of the PLO:7

The enemies [the Jews] have been scheming for a long time, and they have consolidated their schemes, in order to achieve what they have achieved. […] [Their] wealth [permitted them to] take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. […] They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B'nai B'rith and the like. […] They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein.8

If we turn now to the heart of Europe, especially to France, we see that the same insults erupt with equal vehemence. Many essayists, writers, philosophers, sociologists, and journalists support the Israeli cause while heaping insults on the defenders of the Palestinian cause, while the latter insult them back – and both sides endlessly call each other ‘Nazis’, ‘Holocaust deniers’, ‘anti-Semites’, and ‘racists’. On the one side are the sworn opponents of the ‘Shoah business’ or ‘Holocaust industry’, the ‘genocidal Zionist state’, ‘national-secularism’, ‘collaborators’ ‘Judaeolaters’ and ‘Ziojews’ (Zionist Jews). On the other, we have the fierce critics of ‘collabo-leftist-Islamo-fascist-Nazis’.9

In short, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict – experienced as a structural split tearing the Jews and the Arab-Islamic world apart, but also as a rift within the Jewishness of the Jews or as a break between the Western world and the world of its former colonies – now lies at the centre of all debates between intellectuals, whether they are aware of it or not.

And it is easy to understand why. Ever since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis – a tragic event underlying a new organization of the world from which sprang the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the State of Israel in Palestine – the notions of genocide and crime against humanity have become applicable to every country in the world. As a consequence, and gradually, the so-called Western discourse of universalism has been seriously undermined. Since the most civilized nations in Europe had given birth to the greatest of barbarities – to Auschwitz – it was now possible for all the peoples humiliated by colonialism or the various forms of capitalist exploitation, as well as for all minorities oppressed on grounds of their sex, the colour of their skin, or their identity, to criticize so-called universal values of freedom and equality. After all, in the name of these values, Western states had committed the worst crimes and continued to rule the world while perpetrating crimes and misdemeanours that went completely against the principles of the Declaration of Rights that they themselves had enacted.

What we are thus witnessing is a new quarrel over universals. Whether we take an interest in anti-globalization, in the history of colonialism and post-colonialism, of so-called ethnic minorities and minorities of ‘identity’; whether we focus on the construction or deconstruction of definitions of gender or sex (homosexuality, heterosexuality); whether we highlight the need to study the phenomenon of religion or the desacralization of the world; or whether we take the side of history as memory or ‘memorial history’ [l'histoire mémorielle] versus scholarly history [l'histoire savante], we always start with reference to the question of the extermination of the Jews, insofar as it is a foundational moment in all possible thinking about conflicts over identity. Hence the exacerbation of anti-Semitism and racism we are witnessing, accompanied by a new type of thinking about being Jewish.

As a result of the secular structures of its institutions, France for a long time seemed to be exempt from this type of conflict, to such an extent that Ashkenazi Jews living in Germany, Russia, or Eastern Europe used to dream of it: happy as God in France, they said. If God did actually live there, he would not be disturbed by prayers, rituals, blessings, and requests to interpret delicate questions of diet. Surrounded by unbelievers, God too would be able to relax when evening fell, just like thousands of Parisians in their favourite cafés. There are few things more agreeable, more civilized, than a tranquil café table outside at dusk.

But times have changed: the French model of secularism has been questioned, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has become a major issue in civil society, and – with the appearance of claims relating to identity and religion – the French Republic has encountered new difficulties in assimilating immigrants from its former colonies. It even seems to have fallen prey, recently, to the mania for evaluating things by their origins – a mania which, in spite of politics, encourages human beings to be categorized in accordance with so-called ethnic and sexual criteria, or on the basis of the ‘community’ to which they ‘belong’. This mania for gauging people is, in the last analysis, perhaps just a return of the repressed, since the country in which human rights were born, and the first country to have emancipated the Jews (in 1791), was also the origin, around 1850, of the first anti-Semitic theories and, in 1940, betrayed its own ideal with the establishment of the Vichy regime.

Revisiting the Jewish question, then, means reviewing the different ways of being Jewish in the modern world ever since, at the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism triggered a revolution in Jewish consciousness. But this will be a historical, critical, dispassionate review, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. It will aim at giving a final answer to this question: who is anti-Semitic and who is not? How can we contribute serenely to freeing the intellectual debate from the follies, hatreds, and insults that are voiced around these questions?

In the first chapter, ‘Our First Parents’, a clear distinction is drawn between mediaeval (persecuting) anti-Judaism and the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment (emancipatory and hostile to religious obscurantism): some people today would seek to identify the second form with the first in order to discredit it more definitively – they are all anti-Semitic, it is claimed, from Voltaire to Hitler. In the second chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Camps and the Smoke of the Ovens’, I examine the stages in the formation of European anti-Semitism, which took a political form in France (from Ernest Renan to Édouard Drumont) and a racial form in Germany with Ernst Haeckel. ‘Promised Land, Conquered Land’ then takes the reader to Vienna where the Zionist idea was born, conceived by its founders (Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau) as a self-decolonization, by the Arab world as a colonialist plan, and by the Jews of the diaspora as a new factor of division: one idea, three reactions, each of them as legitimate as the others.

In ‘Universal Jew, Territorial Jew’, this conflict over legitimacy is embodied in a celebrated debate between Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. ‘Genocide between Memory and Negation’ examines the conditions in which 1948 saw the establishment of a State of Jews (Israel) in Palestine. The foundation of Israel responded to the need both to set up a Jewish memory of the Shoah and to judge Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Over his trial, two great figures of modern Jewishness [judéité] (Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem) clashed, while in Europe the idea started to spread, beneath the surface, that the genocide was an invention of the Jews. En route, I analyse the positions adopted by various intellectuals on the question of life after Auschwitz, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Maurice Blanchot, via Theodor Adorno, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Jacques Lacan: what should be said, done, and thought, how can Jewish identity be redefined?

‘A great and destructive madness’: this is how I present Holocaust denial, a ‘logical’ discourse constructed as the utterance of an insane truth that falsifies the (real) truth and to which Noam Chomsky, the linguist of meaningless structures, gave his weighty authority. The last chapter, ‘Inquisitorial Figures’, focuses on the trials for anti-Semitism brought by certain revisionists of history with the sole aim of muddying the waters and reducing the debate on the Jewish question to a conflict over legitimacy, mapped onto an axis of good and evil.

Notes

1 Stéphane Amar, ‘Cette maison est à nous, ce pays appartient au peuple d'Israël', Libération, 6 December 2008.

2 Islam is the third monotheistic religion, founded in the seventh century by Muhammad. It derives from Judaism and acknowledges the authority of its prophets, of Abraham and Moses, so it is labelled an Abrahamic religion. Judaism is a religion of Halakha, Islam a religion of sharia: in both cases, the law handed down by God regulates the believer's life: law, worship, ethics, and social behaviour. The word ‘Muslim’ designates those who profess Islam. The word ‘Islamic’ refers to Islam as a religion. Islamism is a political doctrine that sprang up in the twentieth century, and so-called radical Islamism is a more intense form of Islamism that aims to establish, in the name of God's law, a theologico-political regime to take over from pre-existing secular states. But Islam, like other religions, also refers to a whole culture. ‘Fundamentalism’, in Christianity, designates the strict adherence to a doctrine. (In French there are two terms, ‘intégrisme’ and ‘fondamentalisme’, the former referring to Protestantism, the latter to Catholicism, but they have both been extended to Judaism and to Islam.)

3 In French, the word ‘Juif’ is written with a capital letter to designate Jews in the sense of ‘Judéité’ (who together comprise a people) while ‘juif’ in lower case designates Jews in the sense of ‘Judaïté’(those who practise the Jewish religion, or Judaism, similar to Christians or Muslims).

4 The neologism ‘Islamophobia’ designates a defamation of Islam and is seen as a form of racism, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which no breach of God's rights is admissible in law, regards this type of remark as a case of blasphemy. Islamophobia, Judaeophobia, Christianophobia, and their opposites, Judaeophilia, Islamophilia, Christianophilia, and philosemitism are ambiguous neologisms – to be used with caution.

5 Cf. ‘Les racines de l'antisémitisme arabe’, press cuttings, Courrier international, February–March–April 2009, special number, pp. 12 and 13. And remarks made in 2009 against Zionism and its ‘accomplices’ by the Egyptian ulema Alla Said and then broadcast on the Al-Rahma television channel, 2 January 2009.

6 The Protocols are a document fabricated in 1903 by an agent of the Russian secret police, Matvei Golovinski (1865–1920), and designed to prove the existence of an alleged plot fomented by a group of Jewish sages bent on exterminating Christianity. See Roger Garaudy, The mythical foundations of Israeli policy (London: Studies Forum International, 1997): this is available online at: https://ia700308.us.archive.org/19/items/TheFoundingMythsOfIsraeliPolitics/RGfounding.pdf (accessed 8 January 2013). (There is only one French edition of Mein Kampf, published in 1934.)

7 PLO: Palestine Liberation Organization, whose (secular) charter, enacted in 1964, was declared ‘null and void’ in 1989 by Yasser Arafat, who in 1959 had founded Fatah, the main organization for national resistance to the State of Israel. In this declaration, Arafat recognized the existence of this state. Hamas: Islamic resistance movement, an offshoot of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (who deny the right of the State of Israel to exist).

8 The founding text of the Charter of Hamas: it can be found online at, e.g., www.thejerusalemfund.org/www.thejerusalemfund.org/carryover/documents/charter.html (accessed 16 September 2012). See also Charles Enderlin, Le grand aveuglement: Israël et l'irrésistible ascension de l'islam radical (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009).

9 Torrents of insults of this kind, with the inventing of neologisms playing a key part, are poured forth on the Internet the whole time.

1

Our First Parents

As Hannah Arendt eloquently points out, we must avoid confusing anti-Semitism, the racist ideology that spread from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, with anti-Judaism, which developed in the West once Christianity had become the state religion under Emperor Theodosius at the end of the fourth century. It was in this period – in other words, over forty years after the Council of Nicaea (summoned in 325 by Emperor Constantine) – that Christianity finally transformed itself into an official religion imposed by the secular power: Jesus had announced the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church. The pagans, who had previously been the persecutors of the first Christians, were now persecuted in their turn, just as survivals of Graeco-Latin culture were eradicated: the Olympic Games were banned, and homosexuals were put to death – at that time they were labelled ‘sodomites’ and were already regarded as perverts because they represented an attack on the laws of procreation.

The Christian anti-Judaism which then spread throughout Europe – until the age of the Enlightenment – rested on the same principles, with one difference: for Christian monarchs, Judaism was far from being a form of paganism. So the Jew was neither the enemy from outside, nor the barbarian from beyond the frontiers, nor the infidel (the Muslim), nor the heretic (the Albigensian, the Cathar), nor the other, foreign to himself. He was the enemy within, placed at the heart of a genealogy – the first parent, according to the Christian tradition – since he gave birth to Christianity: the founder of the new religion was Jewish.

The Jew as bearer of Judaism was thus all the more hateful as he was simultaneously inside and outside. He was inside because he existed within the Christian world, but outside because he did not recognize the true faith and lived in a different community from that of the Christians. If Christianity was to become the only universal monotheistic religion – and Christ to cease being a bearer of the Jewish name – it still needed to be rid of its Jewish origin, which was now deemed insidious. The sexual theme of the treacherous, perverse Jew, with unnatural morals (it was claimed that Jewish women slept with goats), was ubiquitous in the anti-Jewish persecutions of the mediaeval period, and this is why the figure of the Jew was often associated with that of the sodomite and the committer of incest.

Evidence for this can be found in the astonishing legend of the Jewish curse, repeated by Jacobus de Voragine around 1260, which turned Judas into an equivalent of Oedipus, destroying the genos (dynasty) of the Labdacids and thus the family order too, and combining incest with parricide. Here is the story in outline: Ciborea, pregnant with Reuben, dreamt that she would give birth to an accursed child, sullied by vice, who would bring about the ruin of the Jewish people. After the birth of this son, called Judas, she got rid of him, putting him into a basket on the open seas. But the frail vessel was shipwrecked on an island whose queen was barren: she adopted the child. When he grew up and learned that he was not the son of his parents, Judas fled to Jerusalem and entered the service of Pilate. One day, the latter came to taste the apples in a neighbouring garden: Judas hurried across and quarrelled with the owner, unaware that it was Reuben. He killed him, and Pilate bequeathed on him Reuben's wife and his belongings. When he discovered that he had killed his father and married his mother, Judas went over to Jesus and became his disciple. But he later betrayed him and hanged himself.1

In short, throughout the long history of the mediaeval world, the Jew was simultaneously devil and sorcerer, his father's murderer and his mother's husband; but he was also both sexes in one. Furthermore, he was often described as an animal, embodying a highly particular duality of male and female: he was a union of male scorpion and female sow. In the order of humankind, he abolished the difference of the sexes and the generations, being incestuous and double-sexed (masculine/feminine), and, in the order of animal existence, he disregarded the barrier between different species, indulging in unnatural copulation. A master of poisons, of usury and knowledge, lustful and gluttonous, he was thus the incarnation of absolute horror.

The Jews were denounced as deicides until the Council of Trent:2 in Europe they formed a ‘community’ that was assigned to no particular territory: a community at once visible and invisible, a wandering community. Confined to practising trades from which Christians were debarred, the Jews were accused of all sorts of repellent activit­ies linked to their status as transgressors of sexual difference and the separation between species: bestiality, ritual murder, incest, child stealing, profanation of the host, consumption of human blood, polluting the waters, exploiting lepers for their own purposes, spreading the plague, laying all sorts of plots. But especially, and for the same reason, they were regarded as holding the three great powers proper to humanity as such: the power of finance, the power of intellect, and a perverse power over sexuality. So it then became necessary, in order to reduce the power attributed to them, to force them either to convert or to accept a continual humiliation: ‘Talmud-burning’, wearing elbow caps, yellow hats, or badges of infamy, and confinement within Jewish ghettoes – or ‘jewries’ [‘juiveries’] – under strict surveillance.3

This anti-Judaism – which aimed not to exterminate the Jews but to convert them, to persecute them, or to expel them – was not a form of anti-Semitism in the modern sense, since it occurred at a time in human history when it was God – not human beings – who governed the world.

The Christian anti-Judaism of the mediaeval period actually presupposed the principle of divine sovereignty – of a single God (monotheism) – while anti-Semitism, which saw the Jew as the specimen of a ‘race’, and no longer as a partner in a divine covenant (even one that was decried), rested on a transformation of the religious Jew into a Jew-by-identity, the bearer of a stigma – in other words, a ‘remainder’: Jewishness.

Embodied up to the eighteenth century by divine right monarchs as supported by the Roman Catholic Church,4 the God of the Christians decided the future of the world, while the God of the Jews, invisible and unrepresentable, continued to promise his people the coming of a Messiah and a return to the Promised Land. For as long as the West remained Christian, Jews and Christians had one and the same God, even though the relationship between the two groups and this one God was not identical.

For while Christianity is a religion of individual and collective faith, represented by a Church – and even more by the Roman Catholic Church – Judaism is a religion of belonging, accompanied by a cult of memory, of a thinking comprised by glosses and commentaries and obedience to ancestral rites affecting clothing, the body (circumcision), food (kashrut), and behaviour (Sabbath). It is based on the primacy of an original and endlessly renewed alliance (or testament) between God and his chosen people.

In other words, the Jewish religion is different from the two monotheisms to which it has given birth. Ever since they have existed, the Jews have designated themselves not simply as Jewish – in other words, as observing a religion called Judaism – but as a mythical people and a nation, springing from the Kingdom of Israel and then Judaea (Zion), with Jerusalem as its holy city. Consequently, according to the Jewish law (Halakha), every Jew remains a member of his people, even when he has ceased to practise his Judaism and even when he rejects his Jewishness by converting. And when a non-Jew converts to Judaism he becomes Jewish for all eternity, whether he wants this or not.

To be Jewish, then, is not like being a Christian since, even when he abandons his religion, a Jew continues to be part of the Jewish people and thus the history of his people: such is his Jewishness, his identity as a godless Jew, as opposed to the Jewishness of those who remain religious. This idea was never taken up by any other religion: according to Jewish law, you remain Jewish (in the sense of Jewishness) even when you have stopped being Jewish (in the sense of Judaism). And you are a Jew once and for all, without any possibility of changing, either by descent through the mother or by conversion.

The German satirist and journalist Ludwig Börne, who converted to Lutheranism in 1818 and then settled in France, the native land of human rights and the emancipation of the Jews, summed up the principle of this always suspect and forever fraught identity: ‘Some reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon me for it, but all think of it.’5

And this people, ever since its mythic origins, has been characterized by the cult of its own memory. It never stops remembering catastrophes (Shoah) that have always been visited upon it by God, each time condemning it to exile and scattering (diaspora or galut), and thus the loss of its territory and its holy places: Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple built by Solomon, the Jews were taken off into captivity in Babylon, they returned from captivity, they rebuilt the Second Temple that was then destroyed by Titus – and of which only a wall of cries and lamentations (the Wailing Wall) would remain – and they were persecuted by the Romans, who renamed Judaea Palaestina,6 and then by the Christians.

The history of the Jewish people is the history of eternal suffering, of profound misfortune, and of boundless lamentation that finds expression, throughout the expulsions and the massacres, in the dream – which can never be realized without some catastrophe – of a return to the Promised Land: ‘The Everlasting will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to another. He will make your heart restless, your eyes languishing, your soul suffering.’ Until the rise of Zionism, a result of the desacralization of the European world, the Jewish people would remain the people of memory, of looking back, perpetually awaiting an entry into history.

And when the new religion (Christianity) was proclaimed, a religion to which Judaism had given birth and which in a sense subsumed it, the Jews then had to fix the oral Law (Torah), in Jerusalem and in Babylon, in texts and commentaries (Mishnah and Gemara), so that Judaism would become an orthodox corpus of unified rules (the Talmud). Remember the land that is always promised (Eretz Israel) by Yahweh to the ancient Hebrews, the people of the Bible, wandering and nomadic; remember the land that is always lost and regained; remember the Everlasting and his uniqueness; remember Noah, the father of the ark and the covenant, Abraham, the common ancestor of the three monotheisms,7 and Moses, the founder of the law; remember what remains of the Jew when the Jewish people is scattered and when the Jew is no longer altogether Jewish. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’: such is the complex fate of the Jews.

In this regard, Jewish mysticism has always borne a certain messianism of return and withdrawal, since the redemption promised by God can come about only in two ways: either by a spiritual regeneration leading to internal exile or by a concrete and collective break that finds expression in departing for the Holy Land, a land that can be granted by God only through the voice of a new Messiah.

This indeed was the choice made by Sabbatai Zevi, who, under the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the seventeenth century, proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. After inflicting severe mortifications on himself, and having swung several times from a state of melancholia to a state of exultation, he defied Jewish law and was subjected to a herem.8 With the help of his disciple Nathan of Gaza, abandoning the attempt to imbue himself spiritually with God's intimate presence, he so roused the Jewish communities of the East that he convinced them to work towards the rebirth of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. He was imprisoned, and agreed to convert to Islam before being exiled to Dulcigno in 1676, abandoned by the faithful.9

At the end of a magnificent study of the main currents in Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem describes how, in its final phase, Hasidism, which had followed Sabbateanism, eventually transformed its theoretical search, and indeed its mystical quest, into an inexhaustible source of narratives: everything has become history, he says – in other words, history as memory. And he relates this anecdote, borrowed from a Hebrew storyteller (Maggid):

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer – and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the ‘Maggid’ of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers – and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed, and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.10

Even beyond the world of Hasidism, this anecdote bears witness to the sense of belonging and identity experienced by the Jews and defined as a ‘remainder’ and as a ‘remember!’, making the return to the Holy Land at once possible and impossible.

Jacques Le Goff relates how Louis IX, in the middle of the thirteenth century, behaved towards the enemies of the faith: heretics, infidels, and Jews. He regarded the first group as the worst since they had practised the faith and then denied it, thereby becoming traitors, felons, and apostates, ‘infected by the stain of perversity’. He advised burning them or expelling them from his kingdom. He viewed the second group as enemies ‘full of filth’, but they did have a soul as they belonged to a religion. As for the Jews, ‘hateful and filled with venom’, he proposed that they be enslaved forever, turned into pariahs and outsiders ‘subjected to the yoke of slavery’.

However, from this point of view, the Jewish religion was regarded neither as a heresy (Albigensian or Cathar) nor as the religion of the external enemy (the Saracens). It was recognized and familiar since it had given rise to the Christian religion. So the Jews needed to be protected as well as controlled. And if only they accepted conversion, they would be reincorporated within Christianity. ‘How are we to describe Saint Louis's attitude towards the Jews?’ asks Jacques Le Goff.

We currently have two terms at our disposal: anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. The first concerns religion exclusively and, whatever the importance of religion in Jewish society and Saint Louis's behaviour towards it, it is inadequate. The set of problems concerned by this behaviour goes beyond the strictly religious context and activates feelings of hatred and a desire to exclude that go beyond hostility to the Jewish religion. But ‘anti-Semitism’ is inadequate and anachronistic. There is nothing racial about Saint Louis's attitude and ideas. Not before the nineteenth century did pseudo-scientific racial theories foster racist and anti-Semitic mentalities and sensibilities. The only term I can think of to describe Saint Louis's behaviour is ‘anti-Jewish’. But this anti-Jewish conception, practice and policy paved the way for later anti-Semitism. Saint Louis is a stage on the path of Christian, western and French anti-Semitism.11

This is an excellent lesson in method. There are actually two ways of discussing the Jewish question. The first consists in accumulating facts and events and smoothing over differences, while the second emphasizes changing paradigms and breaks, and prevents us from projecting our own beliefs onto the past and interpreting utterances in an opportunistic way. The conclusion should never precede the evidence.

In other words, in order to discuss the Jewish question, we should favour neither the fiction of a Jewish historiography that presents an apologetic vision of victims persecuted since the dawn of time by murderous villains who always remain the same, nor the fiction of an anti-Jewish historiography resting on the claim that there is a Jewish plot whose conspirators aim to take over the world. Rather, we need to show – so as to go beyond them – how these two representations fuel each other, whenever new debates on Jewishness and anti-Semitism arise.

In virtue of this method, in which I will forebear from inventing a genealogy of the plot against the Jews (the symmetrical opposite of the mythology of the plot ascribed to the Jews), I will be claiming that, while the persecution of the Jews is ancient and proven, it has varied from one period to the next, just as the Jews have not remained self-identical throughout their history.

In this spirit, I will also suggest that we can call the history of the persecution of the Jews a ‘history of anti-Semitism’, though only on condition that the word ‘anti-Semitism’, as defined at the moment of its coining in 1879 and its massive spread as a racial ideology and a political movement, cannot be retrospectively applied to Christian anti-Judaism, and even less – as we shall see – to the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment period.

In other words, the term ‘anti-Judaism’ comes with several paradigmatic variants that change with the period under study. Thus, Saint Louis's policy went beyond mere mediaeval anti-Judaism and targeted the Jew behind the Jew, without this being made explicit, and without this anti-Jewish policy being a form of anti-Semitism. The anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, on the other hand, did not rise from any anti-Jewish policy but from a desire, shared by both Jews and non-Jews, to reform the status of Judaism as well as the status of the life of Jews in society.

Conversely, I will be claiming that, these days, the language of anti-Semitism also finds utterance, to various degrees and sometimes unconsciously, in almost all discourses of Christian, Islamic, or atheist anti-Judaism. This stems from the fact that anti-Semitism eventually incorporated, in its very definition, the main signifiers of hatred of the Jews. This is why the word can be kept as a generic term that enables us to designate every form of anti-Jewish discourse.

One episode of the history of Christian anti-Judaism – that of limpieza de sangre – shows that, at the end of the fifteenth century, which to some extent marks the end of the Middle Ages, the theme of race was present in Spain in the designation of certain people who were deemed to be repellent: these included converts, whether Jews or Muslims (Marranos and Moriscos respectively), and the descendants of lepers. Encouraged to convert, the Jews of the Iberian peninsula, or Sephardim, were actually suspected of secretly continuing with their former practices while making a show of their new faith. In this way they were, as heretics, subject to punishment by the Inquisition. And, as they were powerful in society, the ‘old Christians’, said to be ‘of pure stock’, labelled them as impure, or as ‘pigs’ (marranos).

Hence the appearance of ‘statutes on purity of blood’ that authorized converts, by means of various documents – certificates of baptism, production of proof that one's parents were converts, etc. – to become Christians. Of course, reference to purity of blood, in ancien régime societies, was based on lineage and heredity, and not on biological race in the sense of the nineteenth century. But ultimately, the idea that an identity could be based on a definite stigma, even after a spiritual commitment that might have made it possible to escape from distinctive signs (yellow hat or elbow cap), was a clear indication that the status of the convert was itself suspect: a declaration of faith was not enough to turn a Jew – or indeed a Muslim – into a real Christian. Whatever the degree of their sincerity or lack of it, new Christians were definitely, in the eyes of other Christians, nothing but imposters or apostates. Hence the discriminatory laws that would be laid down over two centuries.12 These did not prevent the great expulsion of 1492: the Alhambra Decree drove 150,000 Sephardic Jews into exile – in other countries in Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire – while 50,000 others became Christians without ever managing to ensure for themselves full and entire membership of the Catholic community.

The Marranos were in a dreadful situation. As converted Jews, they were both new Christians and new Jews. In Spain and Portugal, forced to convert, they secretly practised their faith. But, if they emigrated, they had to convert (back) to Judaism, while other Jews continued to suspect them of still being ex-Christians, culturally speaking. In this respect, Marranism can be defined structurally as a passing or transition between two existences.13 The Marrano subject was forever a convert, and everywhere an outsider, divided against himself and a prisoner of his past as well as of his future: he was a Jew to the Christians and a Christian to the Jews. This proved a real opportunity either for fomenting rebellious ideas about faith, religion, and dogma or else for turning out real dogma-driven fanatics.

It was in Amsterdam, that unique melting pot of the mid-seventeenth century, that Spinozan deism, later to turn into atheism, gained a foothold. Baruch de Spinoza was born a Jew and never converted: he was the product of the Marrano community which had fled the Iberian peninsula in order to escape the Inquisition. In 1656, though he had not as yet published anything, he argued against the immortality of the soul and the divine status of the scriptures, thereby denying the fundamental principles of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Indeed, he was almost killed by a fanatic. To avoid scandal, the parnassim14 offered him all sorts of compromise positions: ‘If Spinoza had so wished’, writes Henry Méchoulan, ‘he could have retired to some nearby village, with a small pension granted by the community, or he might even have been able to continue the outward practice of a faith he had now lost. But Spinoza refused all compromise. By breaking away from the religion of his fathers, Spinoza was endeavouring to act on behalf of universality.’15

Because he refused to countenance any pretence, Spinoza was himself enacting a break that would lead him to Spinozism. In other words, he was ratifying his own exclusion (herem), marking this as a precondition for the future development of his doctrine. This is why his herem implied a deliberate non-return (shamatta), on both sides in the dispute. On the judges' side, this herem was garnished with violent curses that are found in the formulation of no other herem of that period:

After the judgement of the Angels, and with that of the Saints, we excommunicate, expel and curse and damn Baruch d'Espinoza […] with the consent of this holy congregation […] in front of the holy scrolls […]. Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up […]. The Lord will not pardon him […] the Lord will destroy his name from under the heavens […] We order that nobody should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or come within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.16

It thus becomes clear why Spinoza later, in his philosophical works, attacked the Jewish religion so violently, emphasizing the way the universal hatred which the Jews aroused stemmed partly from the way they distinguished themselves from other peoples by their attachment to rites aimed at their own preservation. In so doing, he was criticizing nothing other than the intolerance and hatred which the Jews demonstrated in their ‘execration’ of those who dared to question their dogmas.

And, through this judgement, Spinoza was ultimately denouncing the forms of religious intolerance proper to theocratic states, also showing that the sons of Israel (the Hebrews) had invented an authentic democracy which had then decayed. Taking a new look at the argument of complaint, lamentation, and catastrophe – as Voltaire, Marx, Freud, and many others would do after him – he drew the conclusion that, as a result of their scattering and their characteristic way of living apart from other people, the Jews had brought down the hatred of other nations on their own heads – which, indeed, had enabled them to survive as a people. And, as Rousseau would do, he conjectured that the Jews might one day return to Israel: ‘If the foundations of their religion have not emasculated their minds they may even, if occasion offers, so changeable are human affairs, raise up their empire afresh, and [that] God may a second time elect them.’17

In short, contrary to what is claimed these days by certain inquisitorial spirits hostile to the Enlightenment, Spinoza was very far from anti-Semitic – after all, David Ben Gurion proposed, in the middle of the 1950s, that the State of Israel solemnly annul his excommunication.18 But his suggestion was not followed up.

As everyone knows, the spirit of the Enlightenment emerged with the Renaissance when the old representation of a cosmos dominated by divine power collapsed. Once, in the wake of Galileo, the heliocentric system had succeeded the geocentric system, God could no longer wield the same power over men. Human beings were thus condemned to thinking of themselves as responsible for their own destinies and for ruling their fellows. This marked the beginning of the critique of religious obscurantism in Europe, from Spinoza to Voltaire, via Kant, Montesquieu, Diderot, and d'Holbach. From now on, the point was to enlighten the world rather than helping to make it darker, to turn man into a creature of reason able to use his judgement freely in order to reject belief and false knowledge.

In the eighteenth century, as the philosophes continued to question religious obscurantism, enforced conversion also, of course, ceased to be perceived as a solution to the integration of the Jews. Only emancipation and then the voluntary membership of another order of the world – that of human, secular citizenship – now appeared as a possible way for the Jews to emerge from the confinement and victimization that had made them the obstinate enemies of the child to which they had given birth.

Hence the growth, especially in Germany, the home of the Lutheran reform, of a great movement, the Haskalah, which aimed to reform Judaism and make it more of a humanism, based on the use of reason (Aufklärung) and not just on submission and exclusion. That way, the Jews could, as Moses Mendelssohn, founding father of the Jewish Enlightenment, proclaimed, be both ‘Jews and Germans’ – and not ‘Jews in private and Germans outside’.19 They would not live as members of two mutually exclusive communities but would have two clearly defined and positive identities, one based on a more internalized faith void of any external signs (dietary rituals, various restrictions) and the other on the land where they were born: ‘Conform yourselves to the morals and conditions of the land in which you have been placed, but hold steadfastly to the religion of your fathers. Bear both burdens as best you can.’20

In France, in order for the Enlightenment programme to be realized, people strove to go a step further and emerge from the ‘burden of two identities’: all that counted was human beings as subjects of law [sujets de droit] in their universality, freed from the grip of religion and community and thus authorized to worship as they saw fit.21

By the same token, the genealogy characteristic of the former monarchical order needed to be overthrown, and Christianity viewed no longer as the fulfilment of an emancipatory messianism able to overcome Judaism – by conversion, persecution, or expulsion – but, on the contrary, as an expression of the highest degree of intolerance towards all other forms of thought and thus towards the other religion, the ‘mother religion’, that of the ‘first parent’. ‘Judaism and Christianity’, Diderot would say, ‘are two enemy religions; the one labours to build itself on the ruins of the other; it is impossible to sing the eloquent praises of any religion that works towards the destruction of the religion one believes and professes.’22 This reversal obviously meant it was possible to criticize the obscurantism of the first religion as much as that of the second. Diderot immediately added:

We must not expect to find among the Jews any correctness in their ideas, any exactness in their arguments, or any precision in their style, in a word any of what must characterize a healthy philosophy. On the contrary, what we find among them is a chaotic mixture of principles of reason and of revelation, an affected and often impenetrable obscurity, principles which lead to fanaticism, a blind respect for the authority of the learned and for antiquity – in a word, all the defects that indicate an ignorant and superstitious nation.23

While emancipation led in Germany to the creation of a ‘Judaeo-German’ humanism,24 in France it entailed the invention of a secular humanism, universalist in scope: the subject of human rights would be a subject – i.e., a citizen – only by being de-Judaized if he were Jewish, and de-Christianized if Christian. But he could just as much be Jewish, Christian, or whatever he wanted, so long as this was in private.

There were several tendencies running through the French Enlightenment, but overall the philosophes agreed on one point. They all thought, to different degrees, that the Jews would cease to be attached to a religion of tyranny and superstition when the persecution to which they were prey came to an end, and when religions – always mutually hostile – no longer governed the world and were finally subjected to the rule of reason. No more bloody wars between Protestants and Catholics, no more St Bartholomew's Day massacres, no more deaths at the stake or witchcraft trials, no more heretics or infidels: whether or not God was accessible, whether he really existed or was a human invention, he must no longer be used to divide them from one another.

Some targeted the Bible, and denounced the ancient Hebrews rather than the Jews of their own age; others, however, outlined a new future for the Jews.

Among those who embarked on the first path, d'Holbach was the most violent – and the most atheistic. He described the God of the Hebrews as a barbarian and his followers as superstitious priests, brigands, thieves, and murderers.25 Voltaire was the most ironic, but also the most blasphemous, resorting as he did to the tones of the satirical pamphleteer: ‘We find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.’26

Voltaire did, then, lambast the Jews for submitting to the mother religion, but he claimed to love the Jewish people and to feel compassion for the Jews because they had suffered persecution. Thus, after blaspheming the Hebrew religion, he attacked not merely what he regarded as so many sects – Papists, Calvinists, Nominalists, Thomists, Molinists, and Jansenists – but Christianity in particular, the ‘most absurd and bloody’ religion. And, making a rather sly joke, he recommended to everyone the religion of Muhammad, as ‘simpler, without a clergy, without any mystery. In this religion, they did not worship a Jew who loathed Jews; they did not succumb to the raving blasphemy of saying that three gods make one god; finally, they did not eat the one they worshipped and they did not turn their creator into excrement.’

Among those who adopted the second perspective, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the most visionary about the possible destiny of the Jews, and Montesquieu the most rigorous in his treatment of the relation between persecutors and persecuted.

Unlike his contemporaries, Rousseau thought that emancipation and equality, even though necessary, were not sufficient to solve the question of the singular status of the Jewish people. They would need, he said, to have a state of their own: ‘I shall never believe that I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities, where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say.’27

As for Montesquieu, he claimed that there was a Jewish problem only because those who persecuted the Jews had a problem with the mother religion:

Among Christians, just as happens among us, they display for their religion an invincible, obstinate loyalty which borders on fanaticism. The Jewish religion is an ancient tree, from which have sprung two branches that cover the whole earth: Mohammedanism and Christianity; or rather, it is a mother who bore two daughters who have wounded her in a thousand places: for in matters of religion, those who are closest are the bitterest enemies. But whatever cruel treatment the Jewish religion may have received from its progeny, it does not cease to take pride in having brought them into the world; it uses both of them to embrace the whole world, while at the same time embracing all the ages by virtue of its venerable life-span.28

In November 1791, after vehement debates that had occupied the Constituent Assembly since September 1789, French Jews of every tendency became citizens, free to worship in their own way and to enjoy every other liberty.

Rabaud Saint-Etienne launched the first salvo: ‘I demand liberty for all those peoples who are still proscribed, wandering and homeless, across the face of the earth, those peoples doomed to humiliation: the Jews.’

The same proposal was supported by Abbé Grégoire, then by the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, and then by Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Barnave, while the more reactionary deputies protested. Several members of the Constituent Assembly went on to propose that Turks, Muslims, and men from all ‘sects’ should be given the same rights. Later still, another deputy, Regnault, requested that anyone speaking against the Jews should be given an official reprimand: such an action would comprise an attack on the Constitution itself.

On 13 November 1791, Louis XVI, who had been favourable to the emancipation of the Jews, ratified the law declaring them to be French citizens. The Enlightenment had led to this significant decision.

Given all this, it is clearly wrong-headed to describe the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment as anti-Semitism when the former, unlike its equivalent in the ancien régime, never aimed to eliminate, exclude, or persecute the Jews, but rather to denounce the misdemeanours committed by the three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam (‘Mohammedanism’)29 – as well the archaic and hateful way of life of those who practised them.30 In regard to the Jews, the great slogan of the new age was their possible ‘regeneration’. This demand would be taken up by the founders of Zionism: invent a new Jew, freed from prayers, rituals, circumcision, and dietary constraints. No longer hate the Jews, but love the Jews, sometimes in spite of the Jews themselves – love them so much that you wished for them a better destiny than that of victims caught up in a spiral of rejection, persecution, and stigmatization.

To love the Jews, then, meant wishing them to be men before being Jews: free men, and no longer subjects alienated by their traditions. And this wish was one to which the Jews themselves would subscribe, so as no longer to arouse hatred or, in return, to be haunted by the catastrophe of being Jewish: ‘The people of Israel’, as Theodor Lessing was to say in 1930, ‘is the first, perhaps the only one, to have sought within itself for the guilty origin of its sorrows. In the depths of every Jewish soul lies hidden this same tendency to conceive all misfortune as a punishment.’31

Certain French thinkers – philosophers and historians – convinced themselves, at the beginning of the 1970s, that the Enlightenment, in Germany and France, had merely been the original melting pot of the two totalitarianisms, Nazi and Stalinist. Since then, it has become commonplace to turn Marx, like Spinoza, Voltaire, and Hegel before him, into one of the founding fathers of anti-Semitism.32 And, by the same token, it is claimed that the Revolution of 1789, despite having emancipated the Jews, was simply all the more odious as it led to all later bloodbaths: the Terror, the Napoleonic epic, Bolshevism, Stalinism, the ‘Final Solution’, and, finally, Islamist terrorism. As a result, all the subversive or radical thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century who dared to write on the works of Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud have been criticized for supporting this abominable heritage. No one can be surprised, of course, that within such a context the bicentenary of this same revolution, deemed to be so hateful, was in 1989 celebrated under the sign of counter-revolution: Joseph de Maistre rather than Robespierre.33

While it is perfectly legitimate to show, for example, that the spirit of emancipation is quite able to turn into its opposite, and while it is consistent to point to the contradictions within the ideals of democracy and the Rights of Man and bring out their dark sides,34 it is difficult to accept without demur the idea that the Gulag and genocide were already lurking in Marx and thus in Robespierre, and thus in Voltaire and Rousseau, and thus in Spinoza – in short, that anti-Semitism is to be found where, in fact, it is not.

And yet it is in virtue of this logic that a short forty-page article published in 1843 in response to two others by Bruno Bauer, and devoted to the question of Jewish emancipation in Germany, has become a sort of racialist manifesto harbouring genocidal designs. It has even been claimed, in the name of psychoanalysis, that Marx was merely a ‘latent homosexual’, ‘anti-Marxist’, and ‘criminal’, with a desire to eliminate the Jews so as to cope better with the failing of a father guilty of having converted to Protestantism in order to exercise the profession of a lawyer.35 This, it must be admitted, is a fascinating way of claiming to be more Marxist than Marx while at the same time stigmatizing homosexuality.

It is known that Karl Marx's father, Heschel Levy, son of the rabbi Marx Levy, had been baptized in Trier in 1824, under the name Heinrich Marx, six years after the birth of his son. 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’.

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. And they have found what they were looking for. Marx, as fond of the art of the virulent pamphlet as Voltaire, mocked friends and enemies alike: a ‘backward’ Russian, an ‘idiotic’ Pole, a ‘brainless’ Frenchman, etc. As for the Jews, his co-religionists, he was inclined to attach the most malicious nicknames and adjectives to them: ‘stock-exchange Jew’, ‘Jew Süss of Egypt’, ‘cursed Jew’, Jewish pig’, ‘windbag of a Jew’, ‘greasy Jew’, ‘Slavonic Jew’, ‘nigger Jew’, etc. And, when it came to Ferdinand Lassalle, his companion, he indulged in a hail of invective. But Lassalle made no bones about his hatred for the people of the Bible – his own people. And he lambasted the Jews in the same way that Marx did, and as Karl Kraus, the great Viennese journalist, would later do.36

It is all perfectly clear: the refusal to be Jewish, the dislike for the biblical narrative (so full of stories of murder), the rejection of rituals deemed to be grotesque and alienating: these were the main components in a ‘Jewish self-hatred’ through which, in the nineteenth century – and in Vienna far more than elsewhere37 – the biting humour of the de-Judaized Jews was displayed, as they turned against themselves the hatred which they aroused among others. And for the German-speaking Jews, the Ashkenazi heirs of the Haskalah who no longer believed in the chosen people, or in Judaism, or in any promised land, this self-execration was the last stage in the catastrophe: ‘I hate Jews’, said Lassalle, ‘and I hate journalists. Unfortunately I'm both.’38