Author Description

A leading historian in the field of Jewish studies, Robert S. Wistrich focuses here on the challenge to Jewish identity posed by the conflicting forces of enlightenment, emancipation, modern political antisemitism, and secular ideologies like Zionism, nationalism, and socialism. At the heart of his discussion stands the intense, tortured, and ultimately tragic encounter of Jews with Germans and Austrians. He also deals at length with the new problems of Jewish cultural and political identity posed by the existence of the state of Israel and its embattled position among the nations. In the of his analysis Professor Wistrich looks at the tragedy of assimilation in central Europe, with the optimistic dream of Enlightenment and Bildung coming to a climax in the nightmare of racial antisemitism and the Holocaust. He explores the ambivalent relationship of the Jews with the European Left, showing how many Jewish intellectuals found a new political home in radical and socialist movements, though these movements often retained negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism and exhibited a fierce opposition to the maintenance of any separate Jewish identity. Professor Wistrich goes on to describe the role of Zionism, and examines the more recent challenges to its legitimacy. He also gives a perceptive account of modern myths of the Jew, and considers the challenge that contemporary antisemitism poses to Israel and the Jewish people as a whole. Exploring the current antagonistic trends in France, Britain, West Germany, the USSR, and the Middle East, Wistrich demonstrates convincingly how the Jewish world remains suspended in the gray zone between messianic hopes of redemption and the ongoing trauma of possible extinction. To confront this challenge without surrendering to violence and fanaticism is, he believes, one of the great tasks facing Jews and Gentiles alike in the closing years of the twentieth century.