The End of Jewish Modernity Quotes

“enemy: the”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Today, anti-Semitism remains a distinctive feature of the nationalisms of eastern Europe, where Islam is almost non-existent and the turn of 1989 gave new life to the old demons (still present, even where there are no Jews), but it has almost disappeared from the discourse of the west European far right (which often proclaims its sympathies for Israel).”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“In this perspective, Islamophobia follows completely in the line of what we can call the anti-Jewish archive, using this term in the sense of Foucault’s early writings, not for a library, a body of documents and texts, but as the regulating mode of a discursive practice: ‘the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’, ‘the general system of the formation and transformation of statements’.30 Conceived in this way, anti-Semitism is a repertoire of stereotypes, images, places, representations, stigmas and reflexes conveying a perception and a reading of the real that are condensed and codified into a stable and continuous discourse.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“The singular cocktail of xenophobia, individualism, defence of the rights of women and proclaimed homosexuality that Pim Fortuyn concocted in the Netherlands in 2002 was the key to a lasting electoral success. Similar features also characterize other political movements in northern Europe, such as the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the Danish Popular Party and the Swedish far right.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“built up over four decades of ‘real socialism’. In this part of the continent they claim their filiation with the dictatorships of the 1930s, like Jobbik in Hungary, which has taken up the legacy of the ‘arrowed cross’ and cultivates the memory of Admiral Horthy; they exhume an old revanchist and expansionist mythology, as with the Greater Romania Party or the Croat Party of the Right (HSP), which continues the Ustachi movement of Ante Pavelic. In western Europe, however, fascism is practically non-existent as an organized political force, at least in those countries that were its historic birthplace. In”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“The integration of the Shoah into Europe’s historical awareness made this discourse intolerable. Anti-Semitism is no longer acceptable in the nationalist and conservative right-wing parties that were its guardians for so long.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Anti-Semitism as prejudice and social practice, however, remains, yet it is the object of a general condemnation both in civil society and in state institutions.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“we can separate ideological anti-Semitism – the golden age of which ran from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, from Drumont to Hitler – from anti-Semitism as a diffuse prejudice, the source of a more or less declared hostility, not necessarily bound up with discriminatory practices, of which some vestiges still persist today.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“developing in symbiosis with colonialism and nationalism, modern racism reached its apogee in the last century, when the combination of fascism and anti-Semitism had an exterminatory epilogue in Nazi Germany. Once this abscess had been burst, after the Second World War – as we saw in the first chapter – anti-Semitism underwent a decline, while racism metamorphosed, abandoning its hierarchical and ‘racialist’ orientation (in the old model of Gobineau, Chamberlain, Vacher de Lapouge or Lombroso) and becoming differentialist and culturalist. In other words, it slipped from ‘racial science’ into ethnocentrism.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“other words, she seems to ignore the fact that political participation presupposes access to culture and information, mastery of the tools of reflection, a certain availability of time and, above all, the satisfaction of socially determined needs.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“But she does not indicate how to construct this reign of liberty. In her eyes, the path to follow is not that of social emancipation, as she explains in her essay on revolution, in which, echoing Burke – and this time without irony62 – she contrasts the American Revolution, aiming at liberty, with the French Revolution, ineluctably drifting towards despotism because of its quest for the ‘happiness of the people’.63 Reviewing Arendt’s essay, Eric Hobsbawm does not hide his sceptical amazement in the face of a ‘metaphysical and normative’ conception of revolution analysed as a de-historicized phenomenon and deprived of a social subject.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Based on an ‘agonal’ conception of action, Arendt’s republicanism shows a great distrust of any kind of political representation, thus accentuating the libertarian dimension of her thought while distancing it from partisan commitment. The commodity reification of the public sphere and the decline in the legislative power – in a world where information belongs to the great communications monopolies and where parliaments simply ratify laws elaborated by the executive power, giving rise to a kind of permanent state of exception – give Arendt’s political theory anti-conformist or even subversive features.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“to German culture, and the path of this cultural assimilation was Bildung, the ideal of education and self-improvement set by Humboldt in the age of Aufklärung.55 In the United States, German Jews had discovered a multi-ethnic and multicultural nation in which being American meant adhering to the Constitution.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“His organizational and administrative talents in a criminal activity were accompanied by an astonishing ‘inability to think’.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“the Enlightenment, no one was prepared to see totalitarianism as a product of Western civilization and a paroxysmic expression of its own contradictions. Only a few were able to grasp Hannah Arendt’s most fertile intuitions. The genetic relationship that linked Nazism to imperialism and nineteenth-century colonialism remains still today a historical workshop largely unexplored.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“London, at the same time, Isaac Deutscher distinguished between ‘heretics’ and ‘renegades’ (communists who became anti-Stalinist and those who became anti-communist), in a definition that sought not to cast anathemas but rather to describe a psychological attitude and a mental habitus.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“into European historical consciousness had a cathartic effect by banishing anti-Semitism from the state apparatus, the public sphere and cultural institutions.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“The Holocaust put an end to an age in which, to use the words of Eric Hobsbawm, Jews underwent an explosion of creativity, like boiling water lifting the lid of a saucepan.82 But the end of pariah Judaism also meant the end of the stage in the history of critical thought in the Western world.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“anti-communism in the 1950s, this aspiration shifted to the defence of the ‘free world’, then, from the 1990s, to the unconditional defence of Israel.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“the deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon official Abram Shulsky, the Middle East presidential adviser Elliot Abrams and the strategist of the war on Iraq, Richard Perle.68”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“In short, the neoconservative Jewish intelligentsia transformed universalism into Occidentalism.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“liberty and the homeland of the Jews. Athenian democracy had shifted to Washington, and ancient Judaism had taken a secular form in the state of Israel.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Among the consequences of the decline of anti-Semitism was the reconciliation between Jews and the political right.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“the presence of a lively anti-Semitism, particularly in France. Its origin lay with the ‘state Jews’, an elite almost absent in Germany or Austria, but particularly flourishing in Britain, France and Italy. Under the Third Republic, hundreds of Jews reached the summits of French public service: prefects, generals, state counsellors, deputies, senators and ministers, not to mention a large number of scholars and scientists admitted to the most prestigious cultural institutions such as the Collège de France.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Calvinist Holland saw them as Jews, while Jews saw them as Christians. They studied Hebrew, spoke Spanish or Portuguese, wrote in Latin and lived in a cosmopolitan world. They saw Judaism not as a closed world but rather as a laboratory and a crossroads of experiences. Out of this background, Spinoza elaborated a philosophy of immanence that went beyond both Judaism and Christianity. Inevitably, this champion of the Enlightenment was accused of heresy and banished from the Jewish community.17 The messianic hope was then rethought in a secular perspective of political emancipation (Menasseh ben Israel), reformulated as subversive apostasy (Sabbati Tsvi) or as a ‘messianism of reason’ (Spinoza).”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“the ‘non-Jewish Jew’. The implosion of the traditional”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“The notion of the ‘non-Jewish Jew’, formulated by Isaac Deutscher in 1958 to outline the profile of the intellectual who breaks with his inherited religion and culture, has now become a metaphor for Jewish modernity. The most”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“intellectual specialization. Jews embodied the market economy from the Middle Ages on, and managed the affairs of European courts long before the advent of finance capitalism. They experienced exile and learned to live in a diaspora several centuries before the concept of ‘globalization’ appeared in our vocabulary. Commerce, banking, law, textual interpretation and cultural mediation always organized their existence. Emancipation propelled them to the centre of modernity, as an elite of ‘Mercurians’ (foreign and mobile, producers of concepts) in a world of ‘Apollonians’ (sedentary warriors, producers of goods).”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Between 1933 and 1938, a great exodus of German Jews began, far greater in its extent than that of the Spanish Jews after 1492 or that of the Huguenots after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. More than 450,000 Jews left central Europe as it came under Nazi rule.37 The whole of German-Jewish culture was exiled”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“of German-Jewish writers as ‘a marvellous nationality that they claimed when reminded of their Jewish origin, which somewhat resembles those modern passports that grant the bearer the right of sojourn in every country expect the one that issued it’.27”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity