In Reflections on the Jewish Question, Sartre defines the Jew as a kind of product of the anti-Semitic gaze and recognizes the impact that this gaze of the other has had on the construction of Jewish identity in history. How do scholars and texts of tradition interpret the anti-Semitic rage of which Jews are subjected and which chronically invades others? Is there a Jewish reflection on the anti-Semitic question? Where to look for the genesis of anti-Semitic hatred in the texts of Jewish tradition? Delphine Horvilleur attempts to answer these questions in this book, through the exegesis of extensive rabbinic literature and Jewish legends, to establish the fundamental distinctions between anti-Semitism and other racisms.
In this way, he arrives at an ancient truth about that hatred: Jews are reproached for not being like others, and therefore embody an insoluble and threatening strangeness. Jewish identity is always a matter of separation: when the other embodies lack and impossible wholeness, I hate him for threatening my integrity.
Throughout her analysis, the author observes that anti-Jewish fury seems to constantly mutate and reincarnate from time to time in very different contexts. Thus, the recurring motifs of antisemitism are revitalized in the contemporary discourses of the extreme right and the extreme left. Faced with this, rabbinic literature seeks to offer Jews the possibility of becoming actors in their history in the face of what could still happen. In this way, Reflections on the anti-Semitic question becomes an unavoidable reference that provides tools of resistance in times of hatred and rejection.