The analysis of the complex reasons of the negative emotional tendencies that strike Jews, developed by Sartre in his Réflexions sur la question juive of 1946, appears of great interest, at least for two main reasons. On the one hand, because the silence about the theme of extermination, that characterizes the pages of this essay, makes of Sartre the ideal type of the European intellectual of the post-war period, unable to catch the rupture represented by the Jewish genocide. Sartre, therefore, represents the difficulty in understanding, unlike a few rare “smoke detectors” made, for example Arendt and Adorno, the historical caesura represented by Auschwitz, that obliged us to reconsider the very concept of civility, and after which, as Adorno wrote, to write a poem after that would have been an act of barbarism. Thanks to his work, he gave us back, even if unconsciously, that cultural climate which characterized Europe during the immediate postwar period, a period marked by the incomprehension of the epochal importance of extermination. Secondly, the analysis contained in the Réflexions are worthy of interest especially because of their ability in painting a faithful picture of anti-Semitism and, in particular, of the anti-Semite. In these pages, perfectly portrayed is the phenomenology of anti-Semitic racism, in which not only the traditional explicative models usually used in the historic analysis of anti-Jewish prejudice, such as the “scapegoat” or the “collective identification” are confirmed. Reflexions over anti-Semitism are paradigmatic of the more general mechanics concerning the disclaiming of otherness. That is what makes of the Réflexions sur la question juive a text of great modernity.

Go to whole essay