While good for Jewish security, the decline in antisemitism posed a challenge to Jewish continuity. Could Jewish identity survive and thrive in such an open society? French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre argued in his 1946 essay “The Antisemite and the Jew” that the Jew would not exist but for the antisemite. “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him,” he wrote.16 While most Jews would deny Sartre’s assertion, and insist that Jews possess
