Guedj situates his analysis in the short term—that is, the interwar years (in which he includes a section on the Weimar Republic and Nazism’s initial emergence in 1923, which triggered anxieties that quickly tapered off in the second half of the 1920s)—and the medium term—namely, French Jews’ cultural representations of Germans. As Johann Chapoutot observes in the preface, the Jews were forced “to examine their age-old history from the standpoint of the brutal shock of Nazi violence.” Guedj connects French Jewish thinking about Nazism with Biblical references to the past or the messianic future that are characterized by vulnerability and danger. In chapter 4, which is metaphorically entitled “The Lock and the Keys,” Guedj shows how French Jewish intellectuals with an inclination to messianism (Raymond Aron, Jean-Richard Bloch, Emmanuel Levinas) were, in the 1930s, incapable of analyzing Nazism as a religion that might change history’s course and reverse the direction of modern European civilization.
Author: Emmanuel Droit
Published at: 2025-07-01 21:06:29
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