Review of Elad Lapidot, Jews Out of The Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism. Albany: SUNY Press (2020). vii+331pp. US$95.00. ISBN 9781438480466
In 1946, in a pamphlet entitled Réflexions sur la question juive, and in a later English translation, Anti-Semite and Jew1, Jean-Paul Sartre advanced the surprising thesis that there are, in reality, no Jews. There are indeed Frenchmen who believe themselves to be remotely and in part descended from ancient Hebrews, some of whom display a sentimental attachment to that supposed connection. But what binds these French people together into a collective supposedly foreign to French society — “the Jews”– is merely the refusal of other French people, guided by antisemitic sentiment (which Sartre considers irrational), to permit them to assimilate. As a French Wikipedia page neatly puts it, C’est le regard d’autrui qui fait du Juif un Juif (“It is the gaze of others that makes the Jew a Jew”).
The implications of this claim are startling. When I encounter a Frenchman of dual nationality long resident in England, I do not imagine myself to be encountering a strangely deluded Englishman, prevented from realizing that to be the sole nationality to which he has any right to lay claim solely by the prejudice of bigoted neighbors, who fail to recognize his odd accent as a mere speech impediment. On the contrary, I take myself to be shaking hands with someone who is in part a representative of another nation, another people; with all the rich and strange potentialities of Otherness that that entails.
Yet Sartre makes it quite clear that what he is advancing is indeed a version of this extraordinary thesis.
. . .we have shown that the Jews have neither community of interests nor community of beliefs. They do not have the same fatherland; they have no history. The sole tie that binds them is the hostility and disdain of the societies which surround them.2
Sartre here betrays a radical lack of interest in any history that is not the history of a geographically located state, and in any cultural ties of community that do not take the form, either of (presumably either national or class) “interests,” or of “beliefs.” In effect, there is nothing to be known — or at any rate, nothing worth knowing — about Jews and Jewishness. That is why, for Sartre, antisemitism is to be rejected: it is to be rejected as mere superstition because there is simply nothing in reality for it to refer to.
Elad Lapidot, in this remarkable book, sets out to show how the conviction that “the signifier “Jew”” is devoid “of any epistemic value, any concept and content” (p,17) is by no means specific to Sartre, but has been, and remains, central to post-war discussion of antisemitism and the Shoah, at least within the tradition of thought that philosophers within the Empiricist or Analytic tradition dominant in Anglophone philosophy departments call “Continental” philosophy; meaning by that the tradition that takes its root from Kant and Rousseau and develops, by way of Hegel, to include such recent developments as Husserlian and existential phenomenology, Heidegger, Adorno, and beyond.
“Anti-anti-Semitism” (introduced with the same meaning in 2006 by Jonathan Judaken, in Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question3) is the term Lapidot employs for the conviction of the epistemic vacuity of the concept Jew. According to him, it takes various forms, depending on the exigencies of particular debates and the concerns of specific writers. But in all these forms, Lapidot suggests, its deployment entails a range of internal strains and ambiguities
which, at crucial moments brings it close, in respect of its own proclaimed anti-anti-Semitic intentions, to a critical attitude towards Jews, making visible a certain complicity or entente with anti-Semitism itself.” [p. 51]
Lapidot begins by examining the terms of the anguished debates that took place over the overtly antisemitic passages in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, published by Klostermann Verlag in 2015. In these passages, brief enough for Lapidot to cite them here in full, Heidegger identifies the Jewish “race”, whose defining essence he asserts to be “empty rationality and calculative capacity”, with the forces bringing about, in the modern world, as he sees it, “the overpowering of life by machination . . . [that] . . . pursues with such planning . . . a complete deracialising of peoples through their being clamped into an equally built and equally tailored instituting of all beings. One with the deracializing is a self-alienation of the peoples — the loss of history, i.e., the loss of the domains of decision regarding being.” In a later passage, Heidegger argues that the Antichrist will necessarily be a Jew, a view that he shared with a Victorian clerical predecessor, Cardinal Manning4.
As Lapidot shows, with examples, subsequent debate over these passages, whether hostile or defensive towards Heidegger, “most often seems to hold the mutual exclusion of philosophy and anti-Semitism as self-evident” [p.33]. The passages are dismissed as private and personal opinions, or as Nazi propaganda of which Heidegger was the “victim,” or in other ways excluded from the philosophical canon. In any event, as Marion Heinz puts it, “there can be no anti-Semitic philosophy.”5 Lapidot remains unpersuaded by this. As he puts it — and the quietly unassuming tone in which he chooses to raise volcanically disturbing questions in one of the major pleasures of this book —
the way of anti-anti-Semitism is ambiguous, and may also lead to the opposite of the desired direction. For this reason I find it essential to insist on asking the explicit question: why is anti-Semitism excluded from philosophy? Or better: what in anti-Semitism excludes it from philosophy? Or yet better: what in anti-Semitism, as understood by the current discourse, excluded it from philosophy. [p.33]
One way of effecting this exclusion is to distinguish, by means of scare-quotes; between, on the one hand, “the Jews”, by which the anti-Semite is indeed presumed to understand “a collective, a set of individuals joined by some form of common generality”[p.39], but a “common generality” invented by the anti-Semite himself out of whole cloth — and on the other hand real Jews: Jews as they can be seen to exist by, presumably, the common light of day. Are “real Jews,” for their part, united by any general cultural characteristics that philosophy might reasonably and appropriately examine? On the whole, contributors to the debate over the Black Notebooks tend to agree with Peter Trawney that “nowadays should also be designated as anti-Semitic whatever is meant to characterise the Jews as “the Jews.”6 Trawney suggests that “For us today the use of such collective concepts has become problematic,”7 extending the scare-quotes marking this “problem” to such expressions as “the Protestants,” “the Catholics,” “the English People,” “the Russians, and so on,” Lapidot [p.40], characteristically, wonders who, precisely, this “we” might include, and whether those included might themselves fall under a “collective concept,” or whether “we today” might be “defined as the collective that rejects all collectivity, at least conceptually? But what does seem clear is that for those included in Trawney’s “we today,” whoever they may be, there is nothing both conceptually formulable and specifically Jewish in character that binds individual Jews into a collectivity. “Anti-anti-semitism as it expresses itself in the current Heidegger controversy,” concludes Lapidot, is grounded in “‘a certain perception of the Jews’ as something, a collective being, with respect to which no philosophically relevant statements may be made, namely as something that lies outside of thought.” [p.33, my emphasis]. A further chapter traces this current understanding of Jewishness not only back to Sartre, but to closely related themes in Adorno and Horkheimer.
However, even if “the Jews” as the anti-Semite perceives them are a pure fantasy, having no basis in anything worth calling knowledge of “real Jews, ” that can hardly be the end of the matter. Questions remain, in particular the following two: “In what terms, for purposes of rational enquiry, is the reality of “real Jews” to be understood?” and “Why the Jews? What brings it about that the Jews, of all people, are the people of whom the anti-Semite’s supposedly baseless fantasies are predicated?”
An examination of influential responses to these questions leads Lapidot to define a second type of anti-anti-Semitic position, which he associates with the work of Hanna Arendt and Alain Badiou. This second position admits that the Jewish collectivity is not a mere figment of the anti-Semitic mind, but constitutes “an independent collective historical agent.” [p.148], But it understands the constitution of this collectivity — what holds it together as a collectivity — not in terms of anything specifically Jewish, such as (Lapidot’s preference) the Talmudic tradition, but in terms of notions derived from — indeed, central to — the European tradition of anti-Semitism itself.
The negation of Jewish episteme is now carried out . . . not psychologically (Jewish episteme is a figment of the anti-Semitic mind) but conceptually (Jewish episteme is based on the same fundamental notions — particularism, racism, identitarianism — as anti-Semitic thought.”)[p.148]
One result of this is that writers in this tradition, having committed themselves to representing Jewish identity in terms of concerns central to anti-Semitic thought, have no means of resisting the conclusion that the nature of the Jewish community is itself partly responsible for antisemitism.
In Arendt, as Lapidot reads her, these tendencies result from her concern to ground the origins of antisemitism historically, rather than conceptually, in what she thinks of as “factual realities characteristic of Jewish-Gentile relations.”8 “In Arendt’s narrative,” as Lapidot interprets it,
“Jews play the essentially negative political role of outsiders, who are entirely defined by their unjustified–i.e., nonpolitical — exclusion from the sociopolitical order. It is this epistemo-political negativity that stands at the basis of Arendt’s famous analysis of the Jews as “pariahs,” whose isolation qualified them to function as abstract social elements — bankers and intellectuals — that were required for the emergence of the nation-state.”[p.113]
Lapidot’s point, I take it, is that by thus defining what it is to be a (“real”, or “factual”) Jew in terms of the historical roles Arendt understands Jews to have played in relation to what is, precisely, non-Jewish in Western, and more specifically German, culture, Arendt’s analysis renders it conceptually impossible for hostility to certain aspects of Western culture — the banks, certain forms of intellectuality — in which at least some of the leading players have certainly been Jews — not to express itself as hostility to Jews in their essential nature, and thus to Jews in general. This in turn makes it conceptually impossible, on her analysis, for antisemitism not to be in part explicable in terms of the essential nature of the Jewish community, given that Jewishness, as she sees it, is incapable of any informative characterization in its own terms, in Jewish terms, that is, and can therefore only be understood, much in the manner of Sartre, in its relationship to what is not; in effect, as what has been — gratuitously — excluded from, placed essentially outside, Western culture.
Lapidot sees the French philosopher and polemicist Alain Badiou as a more recent figure in the same tradition. He presents Badiou as denying, to the name “Jew” any specifically Jewish content, analysing it, instead, purely from the standpoint of what Badiou sees as its roles in contemporary French political debate, in which he sees it as functioning primarily as a tool of right-wing attempts to deny justice and recognition to Muslim immigrants, and to whitewash the “crimes” of Israel.
For Badiou, since Jews are just a particular group of people, the name “Jew” ultimately designates nothing more than a person’s adherence to this group. Badiou is aware of Jewish intellectual tradition. Nonetheless, this tradition or episteme he conceives generically as “religion,” which according to him is “incompatible” with “the tradition of Enlightenment” and “contemporary universalism” and amounts to no more than “an identitary norm.” [p.127]
French Jews are therefore, for Badiou, as for Sartre, merely Frenchmen, with nothing exceptional about them save their attachment to an “identitary trope”; in effect, an illusion of identity founded in religious fantasy. Moreover, their “sanctification” as morally exceptional is, as he sees it, entirely the work of Nazism. It is Nazi antisemitism, in other words (of which, of course, Badiou makes clear his disapproval) that has transformed ordinary Frenchmen and women into a supposedly morally exceptional group, concern over whose fate can be made to serve the purposes of French right-wing polemic. In effect, for Badiou, the Jew is the creation of the Nazi.
It was above all the Nazis who, before anyone else . . . drew all the consequences from making the signifier ‘Jew’ into a radical exception.9
The question arises, of course, why the Nazis should have selected the Jews for this role in their thinking in the first place, and why it should have proved so easy to represent them as “a radical exception.” Lapidot explores the elements of Badiou’s position that respond to these questions through an examination of the latter’s essay on St. Paul10 as the founder of what was to become, as Badiou sees things, first for Christianity and later for the Enlightenment and “Modernity” in general, the ideal of universalism. For Badiou, as Lapidot reads him, the ideal of Enlightenment, dependent as it is on a notion of truth as universally valid, valid for everyone, stands in essential opposition to the particularity of historic human communities. Judaism, as Badiou outlines its essence, in what Lapidot terms “a summary Jewish theology”[p.134] of profoundly Pauline tendency, rests on the concept of Law “as the constituting principle of particular collectives” [p.134]. But the Jews were not “Just another particularity operating under its own particular law. Rather, vis à vis the universal Christian event, “the Jews raise the question of the law”[Badiou, Saint Paul, 28]. Judaism, in other words, represents both the negation of universalism and, through the denial by Paul of the validity of the Jewish law, the unique point of origin of the concept of universality central to Modernity. In short, the Nazis saw the Jews as exceptional to the (for Badiou, fraudulently) universal order they were attempting to establish, because in view of the historic relationship in which “the Jews” (the “real Jews”, now, presumably) stand to Modernity they just are, objectively, exceptional. But if Badiou is right, Lapidot points out, their exceptionalism is of a kind which must in logic make them, for him, the root of every kind of negative, particularizing, tendency in politics, including Nazism (which for Badiou represents a particularism disguised as universalism) — for which, just as in Ahrendt’s analysis, “the Jews” cannot, therefore, escape partial responsibility.
What makes Jews exceptional is that “The Jewish discourse is a discourse of the exception” [Badiou, Saint Paul, 41]. The “Jew” names the paradigm, the very thought of particular identity as universal exception. “Jew” names the universal non-universal and as such is the name of the name, the particular, proper, the non-category of all proper names, and consequently of all negative politics — all the way (can this conclusion be avoided?) to Nazism. [Lapidot p.135]
Lapidot distinguishes a third variant of anti-anti semitism, which he associates with the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. For Nancy, according to Lapidot what the Nazis perceived as threatening in Jewish culture lay in its rejection of idols, of myth in all its forms, and thus to all the forms of mythic political self-affirmation that Nancy sees as central to Western culture, in favor of the subordination of self-founding individual projects to an ethical order brought into being, not by individual force of Will, but by a Law diffused though the community. In a curious way, Lapidot notes, Nancy’s thought forges an alliance between Jewishness and a post-modernism whose supporters see it as similarly hostile to what they see as the insistent egotism and self-magnification of a Western world self-imagined viv-à-vis other cultures as the site of a definitively “higher” civilization. Despite that, Lapidot contends.,
Nancy’s text remains within the anti-anti-Semitic discourse and even consummates it, because . . . it subscribes to a perception of Jewish alterity that is essentially negative. It signals nothing beyond the West . . .but draws its entire meaning not from overcoming or modifying but from interrupting the Western project, which for, Nancy . . . would mean interrupting the project of the project. Jewish being would be the project of no project. [p.171-2]
Central to anti-anti-semitism from Adorno to Nancy by way of Sartre, Arendt and Badiou, according to Lapidot, is the idea that antisemitism is founded in pure illusion; that the antisemite’s imaginings entirely lack contact with reality. Lapidot challenges this claim in Part II of the book, while at the same time arguing for the existence of a “fundamental affinity, and so a certain complicity” [p.1] between anti-anti-semitism and “the criticised object, anti-semtism itself.” [p.1]. At the heart of this latter claim is Lapidot’s insistence that “anti-anti-Semitism does not criticise anti-Semitism for judging Jews negatively, but for perceiving Jewish being . . . as carrying any specific idea, concept, logic, or episteme, and thus as a possible object of judgment.”[p.182, my italics.]
In pursuit of these two goals, Part II offers a shrewdly argued conceptual genealogy of anti-Semitism from Renan to Hitler by way of Bauer, Marx and Marr. Lapidot takes the common thread in this genealogy to be the idea that the emancipation of the Jews brought about by the French Revolution was a central event, not only in the history of the Jews but in the history of Europe.
For the philologist and historian Ernst Renan (1823-92), for instance, that event marks the triumph of Modernity over its opposite. Renan was the inventor of the idea that the spirit of a race expresses itself primarily in its language, and that from a linguistic standpoint the superiority of the Indo-European to the Semitic-speaking peoples was evident.
“I am the first to acknowledge that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, represents in fact an inferior combination of human nature.” 11
The superiority consists, for Renan, in the superior spirituality displayed by Indo-European languages, in contrast to the overriding concern with the concrete and sensual that he believed himself to have found in the Semitic tongues. “Renan’s philological analyses of the Semitic languages lead him to the conclusion that, in contrast to the Indo-European language, the Semitic languages are poor in abstraction and syntax, and ill-suited for metaphysics, philosophy, or purely intellectual speculation, but are rather of a “physical and sensual character.” [p.207]
Renan distinguished sharply between “race” and “spirit.” “Race” is the physical, genetic identity of a people. Spirit is the cultural ethos associated with a racial identity. Renan sees human progress — of which the Indo-European race is the vanguard — as the gradual transcendence of race by spirit. Renan’s vision
could be read as the eschatological principle of modern political thought, the triumph of man over race, of humanism over racism: “There will come a day when races will no longer exist, which means that there will only be man.”12 [p.199]
The Jews are of particular interest to this eschatology because, unlike the Muslims. who Renan thinks have preserved the spirit of the Semitic race (a spirit deeply alien to the Indo-European spirit), the Jews, whose
. . .historical identity is understood [by Renan] as a form of organic self-preservation, indeed a racial, biological instinct. [p.221],
are held by Renan to represent the Semitic race in its purely physical, bodily aspect.
It is thus that in Renan’s historiography the Jews, who have preserved Semitism not just in spirit but in their proper bodies, become the very site of the modern event, the abolishment of flesh in spirit, of race in the nation — of the Jew in the French. . . . This is the main point, which builds the passage from scientific to political anti-Semitism: the conversion of the Jews, not to Christianity but to Europe, namely the events of emancipation and assimilation, constitute the consummation of civilization in the modern European, the supersession of Semitic race spirit in the Semitic body: “How many Israelites today,” says Renan, who descend directly from the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, possess nothing of the Semitic character, and are no more than modern men, driven and assimilated by this great force, superior to races and destructuve of local origins, called civilisation.”13 [p.221]
As Lapidot drily concludes, “the Jewish body is the site for the epistemo-political event of modernity” [p.222]
With the philosopher, theologian and historian Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), this sense of the centrality of the Jews to the nature and destiny of Europe crystallizes into “the Jewish Question.”
If the cause of the Jews has become popular, it is not due to the merit of its advocates, but can only be explained thus, that the people sense [das Volk ahnet] the connection between the emancipation of the Jews and the development of our overall condition.14
What is crucial to “our overall condition” is the outcome of the turn to “modernity”, or as Bauer prefers to put it, “enlightenment” (Aufklärung). Bauer
perceives this epistemo-political event eschatologically . . . insofar as it means, for Renan as for Bauer, the disappearance, or forgetfulness, of all collective, political differences, all distinctions between peoples, for the sake of the common “human essence” as the sole principle of the modern European polity, the state. [p.228-229].
This, as Lapidot notes, makes the solution to the Jewish Question obvious.
The solution to the Jewish Question is the dissolution of the Jewish Question, which means the disappearance of the Jews. Emancipation, the emergence of the modern state, means that the Jews “may stop being Jews” and —- here the deep ambivalence of freedom in the form of “emancipation clearly shows itself — “must stop being Jews” (22, my emphasis). 15
Lapidot offers a summary of Bauer’s detailed reasoning for this claim which reveals both its profound debt to Hegel, and the looseness of its attachment to the formal rules of the Hegelian dialectic.
. . .what [Bauer’s reasoning] seems to imply, at least with respect to the Jews, is a negation that is no longer dialectical, no longer negation-preservation-elevation, no longer Aufhebung, but a non-dialectical negation, an utter Verneinung. Judaism should not be converted, but negated. In other words, Jewish emancipation would not lie in Christianity, but in secular anti-Judaism, which could be at least one description of anti-Semitism.16
A further element of later anti-semitism in Bauer’s thought is to be found, Lapidot suggests [237], in the element of morally culpable “seeming” or “hypocrisy” Bauer identifies in unassimilated Jews continuing to live as — and to appear to be — citizens of the modern state “like everyone else.”
For Bauer as for Renan, the “Jewish Question” is primarily a question of religion. For Marx, as for Sartre or Badiou, all religion is fantasy and illusion. The “real Jew” for Marx is therefore defined by the “everyday”, practical relations –essentially the economic relations — in which he held Jews to stand to the non-Jewish world represented by the modern state. Marx’s rhetoric on this topic is familiar to most of us: “What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his worldly God? Money.”17 But for Marx, as Lapidot points out [247], these characteristics, far from bring uniquely Jewish, have become the defining characteristics of bourgeois society. From that thought, taken in conjunction with Renan’s concerns about the ease with which Jews can appear to be ordinary citizens, it is no doubt, as Lapidot suggests, a very short step to the central concerns of modern European antisemitism from Marr to Hitler. But if the central concern of modern antisemitisn has been, as Lapidot argues, the so- called “Jewish Question,” then the central doctrine of post-war “anti-anti-Semitism”, that antisemitism addresses a concept of “the Jew” having no contact whatsoever with reality, is simply mistaken.
The Jewish Question has arisen from and concerns what is known as the emancipation of the Jews, the event in which Jews were to become part of the modern European polity. . . in contrast to Renan, however, and similarly to Marx, anti-Semitism is defined by a fundamental skepsis regarding the precise nature and meaning of the Jewish event of modernity. The emancipation and assimilation of the Jews, in this discourse, rather than signifying the ultimate triumph of human civilization, signified its downfall. . . the disappearance of the Jews by the effect of assimilation would not arise from the absence of the Jews, but rather from their omnipresence.”18
Renan, Bauer, Marx — and, it must be said many others, including Kant and Voltaire — all advanced versions of the idea that Judaism, or more generally the “being” of the Jews, however that is conceived by these writers, is somehow the “negation” or opposite of fully enlightened human consciousness. But whereas for Renan and others the emancipation and assimilation of the Jews represented the ultimate triumph of Enlightenment, for Marx the opposite is true: it is Jewish values, as Marx perceived them, that have come to dominate Europe. That idea then becomes the foundation of the political publicist Wilhelm Marr’s The Triumph of Judaism over Germanism: Considered from a Non-Confessional Standpoint (1879). The rest is familiar enough.
In summarizing the gist of Lapidot’s complex argument, I have hardly done justice to the richness and subtlety of his detailed discussions of individual writers and topics. It is a book deserving careful study. Nevertheless, the above sketch is perhaps enough to fuel some critical reflections. One thing that is puzzling, both about anti-Semitism and about anti-anti-Semitism, as Lapidot describes them, is the obsessive concern of both parties with the total assimilation of the Jews. Proto-anti-Semites like Renan or Bauer regard it as of the highest importance that assimilation should not merely involve the acceptance of Jews as ordinary members of civil society as Jews, but rather should bring about the (total) ceasing of Jews to be Jews. In a somewhat similar vein, anti-anti-Semites of the type of Sartre or Badiou, or some of the participants in the debate of the Black Notebooks, take the main error of antisemitism not to consist, not in thinking wrongly or negatively of Jews, but rather in imagining that the designation “Jew” designates anything, or at least, anything worth talking or enquiring about. In effect, the latter party holds, on Lapidot’s shrewdly argued account, not that the desired total disappearance of the Jews has actually taken place, nor, by implication, that there was anything wrong about demanding it, but merely that there was never any need for it in the first place, since “the Jew” is entirely the creation of anti-Semitism.
At the same time, both anti-Semites and anti-anti-Semites display a magisterial indifference to the perfectly sensible question of what the name “Jew” might mean to Jews themselves. In an Epilogue Lapidot addresses this reluctance on both sides to think about Jewishness as something with a moral, literary and intellectual content, as something, in other words, proper to thought.
Anti-Semitism fought Jewish thought not in thought, not by refuting it, but by denying it the status of thought, by treating it as race, which is only refuted by extermination. . . . Rejecting, condemning, fighting the extermination, anti-anti-Semitism does not open new ways of perceiving or receiving Jewish thought, but wipes out one of the only remaining traces that there ever has been Jewish thought, by denying anti-Semitism itself the status of thought . . . the effacement effaced, a forgetting of the forgetting.” [p,285, my emphasis]
The restoration of Jewish thought, Lapidot suggests, requires a return to serious consideration of the Talmud, and the book ends with a brief survey of contemporary work in philosophy and literary theory that Lapidot thinks moves in this direction, and with a concluding suggestion that any attempt to “think Talmud beyond Greco-Judeo-Christian thought” though it might choose to contemplate it as literature, “would have to contemplate just as fundamentally the performative mode of language that we call law.” [p.303]
Some questions, inevitably, remain unanswered. What could conceivably justify, or even render remotely plausible, the belief in the centrality of “the Jews” to the fate of European civilization? How did so many substantial European intellectual figures of the past three centuries come to be infected with the extraordinary collection of obsessions and bizarre contortions of thought explored in Lapidot’s book? Why is it the Jews that have so obsessed European minds, and not some other group? As I have suggested elsewhere19, the answer may lie simply in the extraordinary, millennia-long survival of Judaism, in the face of continual and extraordinary episodes of persecution, as a unique, living, continually re-argued and augmented response to the demands of life, and of the Jewish people themselves, however dispersed, not indeed as a “state” or a “nation” in the senses of these terms developed in post-Enlightenment Europe, but as a people. Europe over the past two millennia has come under the domination of a series of movements promising the general reform and redemption of society, including Christianity, the Enlightenment in its revolutionary phase, Marxism and Fascism. From the Seventeenth Century onwards, such movements have been essentially the creation of committed coteries of intellectuals. Such movements tend to be “universalist” not merely in their pretensions but in their practical politics. Not only do their proposals sketch out in theory New Orders addressed to all mankind (or failing that, to all Europeans, or failing that to all Frenchmen or all Germans); they require universal acceptance, or at least universal acquiescence, if theory is to be converted into political reality. To any such movement, the celebrated “particularism” of the Jews will inevitably be felt as a thorn in the flesh. The problem is that, while individual Jews can always be found to embrace whatever New Order may be currently calling the political shots, neither cajolements, nor persecutions of the most brutal kind can, it seems, ever induce the Jews to come over wholesale to the new order, and simply disappear as a distinct culture and an organized community. To intellectuals of the type of Renan, Bauer or Marx, men self-imagined as constituting the vanguard of vast political and cultural upheavals, the millennial indifference of the bulk of Jews to such developments in the non-Jewish world can easily begin as an irritation and end as an obsession. It is perhaps to such obsessions that we should look for an explanation of the otherwise inexplicable belief in the centrality of this tiny people to the political destiny of Europe.
The reasons for the ability of the core Jewish community to endure, and to re-emerge, still there, still Jewish, after the collapse of whatever intellectually heralded New Order may have briefly agitated the world, are doubtless to be sought, as Lapidot insists, in the inner nature of Judaism, massively influenced as that has been through the processes of Halakhic argument recorded in the Talmud. But it is hardly to be expected that men of the stamp of Renan, Bauer or Marx, or for that matter their “anti-anti-Semitic” opponents, should look there for an answer. The first group already dispose of explanations, ones more congenial to the movements they represent, for the Jewish power to survive. For the Men of the Enlightenment, Jewish fanaticism and superstition provided a satisfying explanation; for Marx, Jewish financial acumen and power over money were sufficient to explain Jewish survival.
The second group, perhaps equally embarrassed, and for many of the same reasons, has found, as Lapidot shows, an even simpler solution in the shape of arguments — arguments, as is often the case in philosophy, as plausible as they are specious — pretending to show that the name “Jew,” once thought to designate something real, is in reality an empty word.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question Juive. Paris: Morihien (1946); Anti-Semite and Jew. Paris: Schocken Books(1948). ↩︎
- Sartre, Antisemite and Jew, 91. ↩︎
- Judaken, Jonathan, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemtism and the Politics of the French Intellectual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (2006). ↩︎
- Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians, London: Folio Society (1979), 110 ↩︎
- Heinz, Marion, and Sidonie Kellerer, eds. Martin Heideggers “Schwartze Hefte,” Eine philosophische-politische Debatte. Berlin: Suhrkamp (2016), 27; cited at Lapidot, 32. ↩︎
- Trawney, Peter, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. ↩︎
- Trawney, 27 ↩︎
- Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism. NY: Harcourt Brace (1979), xvi; cited at Lapidot, 112. ↩︎
- Badiou, Alain, Polemics, 163-164, cited in Lapidot, 129 ↩︎
- Badiou, Alain, Saint Paul. La fondation de l’universalisme. Paris: PUF (1997); Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, tr. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stamford University Press (2003) ↩︎
- Renan, Ernest, Semitic Languages, 4, cited in Lapidot, 211. ↩︎
- Renan, Nouvelles considérations, 102. ↩︎
- Renan, Semitic Peoples, xv-xvi. ↩︎
- Bauer, The Jewish Question, 1; cited in Lapidot, 228. ↩︎
- Lapidot, 229. ↩︎
- Lapidot 236. ↩︎
- Marx, Karl, On the Jewish Question, 372, cited in Lapidot, 245. ↩︎
- Lapidot, 256 ↩︎
- Bernard Harrison, Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion. Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2020). See especially Chapters 4 and 5. ↩︎