Quotes from Enzo Traverso

Edward Said y Theodor W. Adorno, que eran refinados musicólogos, dedicaron páginas muy interesantes al contrapunto y la disonancia, una escritura musical y una forma estética fundadas sobre el contraste más que sobre la armonía tonal.[1] Son excelentes metáforas para definir el papel del intelectual.

The account of the Nakba (catastrophe) given by the refugees has been confirmed by documents preserved in Israeli archives. There

execution of civilians, collective rape of women. The Israeli general staff, moreover, used the Hebrew word tihur, meaning 'cleaning' or 'purification', more than 40 years before the concept of 'ethnic cleansing' was coined at the time of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.14

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

the 'non-Jewish Jew'. The implosion of the traditional

The Jewish anomaly thus

If Judeophobia has a millennial trajectory, anti-Semitism was born in the second half of the historical sequence noted above (1850–1950).

Anti-Semitism was thus one of the keys of a 'reactionary modernism' based on a synthesis of modern rationality and technology with the conservative values of the anti-Enlightenment

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.

In short, the neoconservative Jewish intelligentsia transformed universalism into Occidentalism.

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.

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

brief, German Jews were prisoners of what George L. Mosse analysed as an insurmountable contradiction between Bildung and Sittlichkeit, the former being increasingly Judaized, while the latter remained ever unattainable, even by individuals as rich and powerful as the banker Gerson Bleichröder or the industrialist Walther Rathenau.

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

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.

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).

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.

into European historical consciousness had a cathartic effect by banishing anti-Semitism from the state apparatus, the public sphere and cultural institutions.

Even as a political religion, therefore, Zionism is a phenomenon sui generis. It effects a fusion between the secularization of an old messianism (the return to Eretz Israel) and the sacralization of the memory of a profane historical experience (the extermination of six million Jews).

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.

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.

On the eve of the Second World War, almost ten million Jews had lived in Europe; by the mid 1990s less than two million remained.3 After the war, Jewry practically ceased to exist in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and Austria, the countries that had been its main centres.

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

frame Jewish modernity. After having been its cradle, Europe became its tomb and its heir.