Anti-Semite and Jew
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.
Cover of the French edition | |
| Author | Jean-Paul Sartre |
|---|---|
| Original title | Réflexions sur la question juive |
| Translator | George J. Becker |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Antisemitism |
| Publisher | Editions Morihien |
Publication date | 1946 |
Published in English | 1948 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 153 |
| ISBN | 0-8052-1047-4 |
| Part of a series on |
| Antisemitism |
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The essay analyzes four characterisations and their interactions: The anti-Semite, 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 anti-semite, 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."