End of Jewish Modernity

Jewish modernity lasted from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, from the debates that prepared the Emancipation to the Holocaust. It was an intellectual, literary, scientific and aesthetic explosion of creativity that took place in Europe over the course of two centuries. Nevertheless, this golden age of modern culture exhausted its trajectory. After being a vehicle for critical thought in the Western world, the Jews shifted, through a kind of paradoxical reversal, to the side of domination. Intellectuals were called to order and radicals became reasonable, often turning conservative. Anti-Semitism ceased to permeate European national cultures and was replaced by islamophobia, the dominant form of racism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Transformed into a "civil religion" of our liberal democracies, the memory of the Holocaust changed the old "pariah-people" into a respectable, distinguished minority whose historical legacy allows the liberal West to measure its ethical virtues. In this provocative book, Enzo Traverso analyzes this historical metamorphosis. His appraisal does not condemn or justify, but rather meditates on a closed experience in order to save its precious heritage, a heritage threatened by both conservative apology and sterile posthumous idealization.