SARTRE (Jean-Paul).
Réflexions sur la Question Juive.
At the time of its publication, Sartre’s Réflexions was one of the first philosophical engagements with the Holocaust. In a Europe that had been tragically torn apart by the horrors of Nazism and their aftermath, it was especially urgent to engage and interpret the ideology of antisemitism. It was also a time when non-Jews and numerous Jews began to conceptualise Jewish existence in a new way.
Sartre’s analysis, based on existentialist phenomenology and Marxist hermeneutics, led him to seek the reasons for antisemitism in a cultural or racial bias rather than it being, as claimed by the Frankfurt School, a proof of the failure of the Enlightenment at the social and cultural level. Sartre was among the few intellectuals of the time who had the courage to condemn himself and others for indifference, self-interest, conscious collaboration, and vicious prejudice, each of which had nurtured and supported the concise but effective ideology of antisemitism that had led to the extermination of the Jews.
The colophon on p. [199] notes that the book was printed in an edition of 3,000 copies - the first 120 of which were numbered. But just below this - in a six-line, hand-written declaration - the printer states that this is copy 1 of 10 that were printed on Alfa paper ‘to serve as a model for the final printing.’
