Quotes from Enzo Traverso

His organizational and administrative talents in a criminal activity were accompanied by an astonishing 'inability to think'.

This small digression shows that fascism has not only been transnational or transatlantic,5 but also transhistorical. Collective memory establishes a link between a concept and its public use, which usually exceeds its purely historiographical dimension. In this perspective, fascism (much like other concepts in our political lexicon) could be seen as a transhistorical concept able to transcend the age that engendered it.

Now emancipated, they became members of a political entity that transcended the borders of the religious community built around the synagogue; they ceased to be an external element, whether stigmatized or tolerated, persecuted or enjoying 'privileges' within society. Before this major turn they led a life apart, despite the generalized lack of political rights – their condition was certainly better than that of enserfed peasants.

the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) appeared half a century later than in Berlin, Vienna or Paris, and took on a national form: secularization and modernization gave birth to a Jewish nation whose pillars were the Yiddish language and culture.

Between 1880 and the Great War, some fifteen million emigrants arrived in the United States from southern and eastern Europe, Italy and the Balkans, the Habsburg and tsarist empires. Jews made up more than 10 per cent of this enormous mass, fleeing both anti-Semitic persecution and the social dislocation of the ghetto, with intensive industrialization and urbanization threatening the old structure of Jewish small trade.

Anti-Semitism as prejudice and social practice, however, remains, yet it is the object of a general condemnation both in civil society and in state institutions.

The integration of the Shoah into Europe's historical awareness made this discourse intolerable. Anti-Semitism is no longer acceptable in the nationalist and conservative right-wing parties that were its guardians for so long.

born from the treaty of Versailles in the wake of the collapse of the empires. In these states, Jews embodied modernity and polarized the rejection of conservative forces. In France, they became the target of legitimists and nationalists opposed to the Third Republic; in Italy, of Catholics horrified by the Piedmont monarchy that had led the peninsular's unification; in Germany, of conservatives who sought to preserve the Christian character of the Prussian monarchy. After

to German culture, and the path of this cultural assimilation was Bildung, the ideal of education and self-improvement set by Humboldt in the age of Aufklärung.55 In the United States, German Jews had discovered a multi-ethnic and multicultural nation in which being American meant adhering to the Constitution.

Six out of eight members of the first politburo of the Bolshevik Party created in November 1917 – Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Krestinsky, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Andrei Bubnov, and Grigori Sokolnikov – were killed by Stalin between 1936 and 1941; only Lenin and Stalin himself died natural deaths.

other words, she seems to ignore the fact that political participation presupposes access to culture and information, mastery of the tools of reflection, a certain availability of time and, above all, the satisfaction of socially determined needs.