Revisiting the Jewish Question (ePub)

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.