Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century

by Tony Judt

this incorporation of Jews into the meaning of European history was only possible precisely because they were gone. On the scale of what once was, there really are not many Jews in Europe, and very few who would contest their role in Europe’s new mnemonic ethics. Nor, come to that, are there many Jews left to make a significant contribution to European intellectual or cultural life, at least not in the way they used to before 1938. In fact, such Jews as there are in Europe today constitute a contradiction: if the message that the Jewish people have left behind required their destruction and expulsion, their presence only tends to confuse matters. This leads to a positive—but only conditionally positive—European attitude towards Israel. The meaning of the State of Israel for Europeans is bound up with the Holocaust: it points to a lost messiah from whose legacy we have at least been able to draw a new, secular morality. But the actually existing Jews in Israel disrupt this narrative. They cause trouble. It would be better—so goes this thinking—if they did not cause so much trouble and allow us Europeans to interpret them in peace—hence the focus upon Israel’s misdemeanors among European commentators. Here, as you may see, I am defending Israel.