Anti-Semite and Jew

Anti-Semite and Jew
Cover of the French edition
AuthorJean-Paul Sartre
Original titleRéflexions sur la question juive
TranslatorGeorge J. Becker
LanguageFrench
SubjectAntisemitism
PublisherEditions Morihien
Publication date
1946
Publication placeFrance
Published in English
1948
Media typePrint
Pages153
ISBN0-8052-1047-4

Anti-Semite and Jew (French: Réflexions sur la question juive, "Reflections on the Jewish Question") is an essay about antisemitism written by Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after the Liberation of Paris from German occupation in 1944. The first part of the essay, "The Portrait of the Antisemite", was published in December 1945 in Les Temps modernes. The full text was then published in 1946.

The essay analyzes four characterisations and their interactions: The antisemite, the democrat, the authentic Jew, and the inauthentic Jew. It explains the etiology of hate by analyzing antisemitic hate. According to Sartre, antisemitism (and hate more broadly) is, among other things, a way by which the middle class lay claim to the nation in which they reside, and an oversimplified conception of the world in which the antisemite sees "not a conflict of interests but the damage an evil power causes society."

The essay deals not with racist hatred of living Jews, but with Judaism and imaginary Jews as a category of fantasy projected in the thought of the antisemite, a phenomenon described as antijudaism by intellectual historian David Nirenberg in citing this essay and its salient observation that "if the Jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent him."[1]

  1. ^ Nirenberg, David (2013). Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 4, 465, 475. ISBN 978-0-393-34791-3.

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