Between Redemption and Perdition: Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Identity

by Robert S. Wistrich

A leading historian in the field of Jewish studies, Robert S. Wistrich focuses here on the challenge to Jewish identity posed by the conflicting forces of enlightenment, emancipation, modern political antisemitism, and secular ideologies like Zionism, nationalism, and socialism. At the heart of his discussion stands the intense, tortured, and ultimately tragic encounter of Jews with Germans and Austrians. He also deals at length with the new problems of Jewish cultural and political identity posed by the existence of the state of Israel and its embattled position among the nations. In the of his analysis Professor Wistrich looks at the tragedy of assimilation in central Europe, with the optimistic dream of Enlightenment and Bildung coming to a climax in the nightmare of racial antisemitism and the Holocaust. He explores the ambivalent relationship of the Jews with the European Left, showing how many Jewish intellectuals found a new political home in radical and socialist movements, though these movements often retained negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism and exhibited a fierce opposition to the maintenance of any separate Jewish identity. Professor Wistrich goes on to describe the role of Zionism, and examines the more recent challenges to its legitimacy. He also gives a perceptive account of modern myths of the Jew, and considers the challenge that contemporary antisemitism poses to Israel and the Jewish people as a whole. Exploring the current antagonistic trends in France, Britain, West Germany, the USSR, and the Middle East, Wistrich demonstrates convincingly how the Jewish world remains suspended in the gray zone between messianic hopes of redemption and the ongoing trauma of possible extinction. To confront this challenge without surrendering to violence and fanaticism is, he believes, one of the great tasks facing Jews and Gentiles alike in the closing years of the twentieth century.

283 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1990

About the author

See Robert Wistrich

Robert Solomon Wistrich (Hebrew: רוברט ויסטריך) was a scholar of antisemitism, considered one of the world's foremost authorities on antisemitism.

The Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was also the head of the university's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA). Wistrich considered antisemitism "the longest hatred" and viewed anti-Zionism as its latest incarnation.

Robert Wistrich was born in Lenger, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on April 7, 1945. His parents were leftist Polish Jews who had moved to Lviv in 1940 in order to escape from the Germans; however, they discovered that Soviet-style totalitarianism was little better than Nazism. In 1942 they moved to Kazakhstan, where Wistrich's father was imprisoned twice by the NKVD. After World War II, the Wistrichs returned to Poland. Later, finding the post-war environment in Poland to be dangerously anti-Semitic, the family moved to France and then to England. Wistrich grew up in England, where he went to Kilburn Grammar School, where in Wistrich's words, he was taught by "Walter Isaacson, a refugee from Nazi Germany who first taught me how to think independently" His parents later returned to Poland under a repatriation agreement between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile.

In December 1962, aged 17, Wistrich won an Open Scholarship to study history at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1966 he graduated with a BA (Hons) from the University of Cambridge, which was raised to a MA degree in 1969. At Cambridge, he founded Circuit, a literary and arts magazine that he co-edited between 1966 and 1969. Between 1969 and 1970, during a study year in Israel, he became the youngest ever literary editor of New Outlook, a left-wing monthly in Tel Aviv, founded by Martin Buber. Wistrich received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974.