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27 - Theories on the Causes of Antisemitism

from Part III - The Modern Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

By
Bruno Chaouat
Edited by
Steven Katz
Steven Katz
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

This chapter explores different attempts at understanding antisemitism and engages with philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytical theories.

Keywords

mythantisemitismconspiracy theorySigmund Freud
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism , pp. 497 - 516
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Further Reading

Cassirer, E., “Judaism and the Modern Political Myths,” Contemporary Jewish Record 8.2 (April 1944), 115–126. An essay that underscores the Nazi revival of paganism and myth and rejects Judaism and the Jews as bearers of an abstract ethics.Google Scholar
Consonni, M., and Liska, W., eds., Sartre, Jews, and the Other: Rethinking Antisemitism, Race, and Gender (Munich, 2020). An edited volume on the relevance of Sartre for understanding not only antisemitism but also other forms of prejudice such as sexism and racism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freud, S., Moses and Monotheism (New York, 1967). Freud’s last book, written while in exile in London. A testimony to his ambivalence toward Judaism, a work of free-wheeling speculation, and an analysis of collective trauma and repression.Google Scholar
Goodrick-Clarke, N., The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (London, 1992). A major contribution to the study of some irrational, religious roots of Nazi ideology.Google Scholar
Landes, R., and Katz, S. T., eds., The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York, 2011). An edited volume that surveys the history of the Franco-Russian forgery and a reflection on the social and intellectual mechanisms of conspiracy theories.Google Scholar
Lyotard, J.-F., The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1999). A close reading of Paul of Tarsus that suggests that anti-Judaism is rooted at the core of the Christian tradition.Google Scholar
Nancy, J.-L., and Lacoue-Labarthe, P., “The Nazi Myth,” Critical Inquiry 16.2 (Winter 1990), 291–312. An original revisiting of Cassirer’s analysis of Nazism in terms of myth, with a psychoanalytic twist based on the theory of narcissism.Google Scholar
Nirenberg, D., Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013). A major contribution to the understanding of Western civilization from antiquity to modernity based on the West’s vexed relation to Judaism.Google Scholar
Sartre, J.-P., Anti-Semite and Jew (New York, 1948). The first postwar philosophical attempt at grasping the logic of antisemitism and establishing the portrait of the antisemite.Google Scholar
Taguieff, P.-A., Rising from the Muck: The New Antisemitism in Europe (Chicago, IL, 2004). The first major contribution to the understanding of the return to an older paradigm; the core hypothesis of the book is that from the beginning of the third millennium we have seen the rise of an antisemitism in the name of antiracism and antinationalism.Google Scholar

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