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France’s relationship between religion, culture, and intellectual life has been organized around laïcité, the radical secularism institutionalized after the Revolution and consolidated in the Third Republic’s education laws of the 1880s. French public universities were not Christian institutions in the way Oxford and Cambridge were. They were explicitly secular institutions committed to universal republican values, which meant that the formal cultural barrier facing Jewish academics was different in character from the Anglican formation that shaped English universities or the WASP Protestant atmosphere of American elite institutions.
This created a paradox. France was simultaneously the country of the Dreyfus Affair, which exposed the depth of Catholic antisemitism in French civil and military culture, and the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had emancipated Jews earlier than any other European nation in 1791. The Jewish intellectual in France faced a specific version of the assimilation dilemma. The Republic offered genuine inclusion on universalist grounds but that inclusion required complete absorption into a French identity that was culturally specific even when it claimed to be universal. To be fully French was to be fully republican and fully secular, which meant leaving behind not just religious practice but any form of particularist identity. The French universalism was more demanding in its way than the American variety because it was more consistently and ideologically articulated. America’s universalism was pragmatic and somewhat hypocritical. France’s universalism was principled and therefore more unforgiving of deviation.
The result for Jewish intellectuals in French literary and cultural life was a pattern of assimilation even more thorough than what Klingenstein documents in America. The Jewish scholars who entered French academic life did not typically enter as identifiable Jews in any meaningful sense. They entered as Frenchmen who happened to be of Jewish origin, and the distinction between those two things was everything. Henri Bergson is the paradigmatic case. He was one of the most celebrated French intellectuals of the early twentieth century, a philosopher whose work on time, memory, and consciousness had enormous influence on French literary culture and on figures like Proust. Bergson was of Jewish origin but his work had no discernible Jewish content and he presented himself entirely within the framework of French philosophical tradition. His Jewishness became relevant only when the Vichy regime stripped him of his honors and he was offered exemption on account of his fame, which he refused, choosing to register as a Jew and die in the conditions imposed on Jews generally. The Jewishness that had been invisible in his intellectual life became visible only in his death.
Marcel Proust is the literary figure whose relationship to Jewish identity in French culture is complex and illuminating. Proust was half Jewish, his mother was a Bloch from a distinguished Jewish family, and his engagement with the Dreyfus Affair in In Search of Lost Time is one of the most sustained literary explorations of French Jewish identity and French antisemitism in the period. But Proust’s relationship to his own Jewishness was characteristically ambivalent in ways that reflect the specific French configuration. He was baptized Catholic, moved entirely in aristocratic and largely Catholic social circles, and his literary project was in many ways an attempt to render the aristocratic French world he had been allowed to enter, partly by virtue of his social gifts and partly by virtue of his mother’s wealth, with the total comprehension of the sympathetic outsider. The Jewish critic’s gift of defamiliarization is present in Proust, but it is present in a characteristically French form, as the ability to see the aristocratic world with both love and irony, with both the insider’s intimacy and the outsider’s clarity, rather than as an explicitly Jewish critical perspective.
The Dreyfus Affair is essential context for understanding what was at stake in the French case and how it differs from the American and British situations. The Affair exposed that French universalism was not as complete as its official ideology claimed, that the Republic’s promise of equal citizenship for Jews was conditional in ways that could be withdrawn when national security and military honor seemed to require it. The Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the shadow of the Affair, and even more those who came of age in the shadow of Vichy, carried a specific historical wound that shaped their intellectual formation in ways that had no precise equivalent in America or Britain. The American Jewish intellectual’s fear was exclusion and marginalization. The French Jewish intellectual’s fear was something darker and more intimate, the discovery that the Republic whose universalist promise he had fully embraced and for which he had abandoned his particularity could at any moment designate him as essentially other, as something that French universalism could not finally absorb.
This produced a specific French Jewish intellectual type that is different from both the American and British equivalents. The French Jewish intellectual tended to engage with universalist frameworks not as an assimilation strategy, as Novick suggests the American Jewish historians did, but as a genuine philosophical commitment that was simultaneously an expression of Jewish values and a form of self-protection. The universalism was real and the stake in it was existential. But the existential stake was different from the American stake. The American Jewish intellectual adopted universalism to gain entry to institutions that would otherwise exclude him. The French Jewish intellectual adopted universalism because the alternative, a particularist Jewish identity in a country that had demonstrated it could turn against its Jews without warning, felt genuinely more dangerous.
The figure of Emmanuel Levinas is the most philosophically important case. Levinas was a Lithuanian Jew who came to France to study philosophy and became the most important French philosopher of the Other, of alterity, of the ethical demand that the face of the other person makes on us. His philosophy is deeply rooted in Jewish sources, in Talmudic tradition, in the Hebrew Bible’s ethics of the stranger and the widow, but he presented it within the framework of phenomenological philosophy derived from Husserl and Heidegger. This is the Jewish intellectual contribution in its most refined form. The specifically Jewish moral grammar, the prophetic tradition’s insistence on the ethical priority of the vulnerable other, translated into the universal language of European philosophy. The translation is genuine rather than merely strategic. Levinas is not performing universalism to gain institutional access. He is doing philosophy that genuinely believes in the universal applicability of insights rooted in a particular tradition. But the specific insights, the centrality of the face, the infinity of the ethical demand, the priority of the other over the self, are recognizably continuous with specifically Jewish sources even in their universal philosophical form.
Jacques Derrida is the most influential French Jewish intellectual in the literary critical tradition specifically and his relationship to Jewish identity is characteristically complex in ways that illuminate the French configuration. Derrida was an Algerian Sephardic Jew who was stripped of his French citizenship by Vichy’s racial laws as a child and who spent his life in France as someone whose relationship to French culture was simultaneously intimate and haunted. His deconstructive project, the systematic interrogation of the binary oppositions that structure Western metaphysics, the demonstration that every claim to pure presence conceals a constitutive absence, every claim to pure identity conceals a dependence on the other it excludes, has Jewish intellectual DNA. The sensitivity to what official discourse excludes and conceals, the awareness that the center depends on a margin it cannot acknowledge, the comfort with permanent undecidability that the Talmudic tradition institutionalized as a feature of legitimate inquiry, all of these are recognizably Jewish contributions even when they are presented in the language of Heideggerian and Saussurean philosophy.
Derrida’s essay Circumfession, a meditation on his Jewish identity written alongside a commentary on Augustine’s Confessions, is one of the most honest engagements with the Jewish intellectual’s relationship to the Christian literary tradition available anywhere in the critical literature. It is honest precisely because it refuses to choose between inhabitation and distance, between the Jewish formation that shaped his sensibility and the Christian and Greek traditions that provided his intellectual framework. The text performs its own undecidability in a way that is philosophically serious rather than merely evasive. Derrida cannot fully inhabit the Augustine he is reading because Augustine’s Christian formation is not his formation. He can circle it, deconstruct it, find in it resources that Augustine did not intend, but he cannot receive it in Lewis’s sense. The deconstruction is the distancing mechanism at its most philosophically sophisticated.
The Sartre case is important because Sartre was not Jewish but his engagement with Jewish identity, in his 1946 essay Anti-Semite and Jew, shaped how Jewish identity was understood in postwar French intellectual culture in ways that had significant consequences for Jewish literary and cultural scholarship. Sartre argued that Jewish identity was essentially a creation of antisemitism, that the Jew was defined not by any positive content of his own tradition but by the antisemite’s gaze. This argument, which was intended as a defense of Jews and a critique of antisemitism, was deeply problematic from a Jewish perspective because it denied the positive content of Jewish tradition entirely. It was the secular universalist argument taken to its logical conclusion, the Jew as pure victim of an external definition rather than as the bearer of a specific and valuable tradition. The French Jewish intellectuals who came of age under the influence of Sartrean existentialism had to negotiate this framework, accepting its anti-antisemitism while resisting its denial of Jewish substantive identity. This negotiation shaped French Jewish intellectual culture in the 1950s and 1960s in ways that had no precise American equivalent.
The postwar generation of French Jewish intellectuals who engaged most seriously with literary and cultural questions, figures like Raymond Aron, Claude Lanzmann, and later Alain Finkielkraut, represent a different trajectory from both the American assimilationist pattern and the British Steiner pattern. They were formed by the catastrophe of the Holocaust and by the Algerian war and by the events of May 1968 in ways that made the question of Jewish particularity and its relationship to French universalism unavoidable. Finkielkraut’s The Imaginary Jew, published in 1980, is the French equivalent of Edward Alexander’s critique of Klingenstein, an insider’s honest accounting of what was lost when French Jewish intellectuals converted their Jewish identity into a purely symbolic resource, a badge of victimhood and moral authority, without the substance of actual Jewish formation and practice. Finkielkraut argues that his generation had become imaginary Jews, people who claimed the moral authority of Jewish suffering without the actual formation that would make that claim substantive. This is the French version of Klingenstein’s acknowledgment at the end of her book that the integration of Jews into literary academia was accompanied by the almost complete loss of their cultural heritage.
The relationship between French Jewish intellectuals and French literature specifically, as opposed to philosophy and cultural theory, is somewhat harder to trace because French literary culture in the twentieth century was organized around different institutional structures than American or British literary culture. The grandes écoles, the Académie française, the literary prizes, the publishing houses, all had their own specific gatekeeping arrangements that were different from the university English department model. Jewish entry into French literary life came partly through journalism and the literary press rather than through the academy, and figures like the critic and novelist Albert Cohen, the philosopher and novelist Romain Gary who was born Roman Kacew, and the novelist Patrick Modiano represent a French Jewish literary tradition that engaged with French culture and French identity in ways that were explicitly rather than implicitly shaped by Jewish experience.
Patrick Modiano’s entire literary project is organized around memory, loss, and the recovery of disappeared lives, which maps directly onto the tradition of Zachor, of memory as moral obligation. Modiano’s novels obsessively reconstruct the Paris of the Occupation, recovering the lives of people who were erased by the Nazi genocide and by the French collaboration with it. His is a specifically Jewish form of literary engagement with French culture and French identity, one that insists on recovering what official French memory preferred to forget. The Nobel committee recognized in 2014 that this project was among the most important contributions to European literary culture of the postwar period, which is a recognition that the specifically Jewish moral grammar, the obligation to remember the disappeared, had produced literary achievement that the universal standards of the institution could honor without being able to fully account for what produced it.
What the French case adds to the American and British cases is several things. It demonstrates that the pattern of Jewish intellectual contribution and Jewish assimilation cost operated across very different institutional configurations, suggesting that the underlying forces were not specific to any particular national context but reflected something more fundamental about the relationship between a diaspora intellectual tradition of great depth and sophistication and the dominant literary traditions of the cultures in which that diaspora lived. It also demonstrates that the specific form the contribution took varied significantly with the institutional context. The American Jewish critics contributed most visibly to debates about canon formation, ideological criticism, and the social function of literature. The British Jewish critics contributed most visibly to questions about culture and barbarism, about the relationship between literary cultivation and moral responsibility. The French Jewish intellectuals contributed most visibly to philosophy of the other, to the ethics of memory, and to the literary recovery of disappeared lives. Each contribution reflects the specific historical wound that the specific national configuration inflicted on Jewish intellectual life in that country, and each is recognizably continuous with the specifically Jewish moral grammar even when it is presented in a different national and intellectual idiom.
The deepest difference between the French case and the American and British cases is the role of the Holocaust and Vichy. American Jewish intellectuals carried the memory of exclusion and the fear of pogrom. British Jewish intellectuals like Steiner carried the philosophical question of how high culture and barbarism could coexist. French Jewish intellectuals carried the specific and intimate wound of collaboration, of the French state’s active participation in the deportation of its own Jewish citizens. That wound produced a specific form of intellectual engagement with French culture that was simultaneously more loving and more suspicious than either the American or British equivalent, more loving because France had genuinely offered the promise of full inclusion, more suspicious because France had demonstrated that the promise could be revoked. The French Jewish intellectual’s relationship to French literary culture is therefore perhaps the most complex and the most emotionally layered of the three cases, and it produced some of the most philosophically serious engagement with questions of identity, memory, tradition, and loss that the twentieth century generated anywhere.
Germany is the most tragic version of the story and it needs to be told with that weight fully acknowledged, because what happened is not just a variation on the American, British, and French patterns but a catastrophic terminus that illuminates everything that came before it and everything that followed.
Start with the institutional background. German universities in the nineteenth century were the most prestigious and most intellectually productive in the world. The research university as a form was invented in Germany, the PhD as a credential was a German creation, and the idea of Wissenschaft, rigorous systematic scholarship as a vocation, was a specifically German intellectual achievement. The German university system was also, until emancipation, formally closed to Jews in ways that varied by state and period but that were generally more restrictive than the equivalent French situation while being organized around different principles than the Anglican formation that governed Oxford and Cambridge.
Jewish emancipation in the German states came gradually through the nineteenth century and was consolidated after the unification of Germany in 1871. The period between emancipation and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 saw an extraordinary flowering of Jewish intellectual life in Germany that had no precise parallel in any other country. The proportion of Jews in German academic, cultural, and intellectual life was vastly disproportionate to their percentage of the population, which was less than one percent. In medicine, law, journalism, publishing, banking, and the arts, Jewish participation was so visible that it became a subject of intense political controversy. In the universities the picture was more complicated because formal academic positions, particularly full professorships, remained difficult for Jews to obtain even after emancipation, and conversion to Christianity was often a practical prerequisite for advancement in ways that were more explicit than the informal pressures in America or Britain.
The German literary and cultural tradition that Jewish intellectuals were entering was organized around the concept of Bildung, the cultivation of the self through engagement with great literature, philosophy, and art. Bildung was simultaneously an aesthetic ideal, a moral ideal, and a social credential. The cultivated German who had internalized Goethe, Schiller, Kant, and Beethoven was a specific human type whose formation gave him access to the highest levels of German cultural life. This ideal was in some ways more accessible to Jewish intellectuals than the Anglican formation required by Oxford and Cambridge, because Bildung was nominally universal in a way that Anglican formation was not. You did not need to be baptized to read Goethe. You did not need to attend a Protestant church to appreciate Beethoven. The universalist dimension of the Bildung ideal was genuine and it genuinely attracted Jewish intellectuals who saw in it a path to full cultural citizenship.
The result was one of the most intense and productive cases of intellectual symbiosis in modern history. German Jews embraced Bildung with an enthusiasm and depth that often exceeded that of non-Jewish Germans, partly because it offered genuine cultural inclusion and partly because the Jewish tradition’s own emphasis on textual engagement, on the cultivation of the mind through serious reading and interpretation, made the Bildung ideal feel continuous with something already deeply embedded in Jewish culture. Heinrich Heine is the paradigmatic early case. Heine was among the greatest German lyric poets of the nineteenth century, a figure whose command of the German literary tradition was complete and whose contribution to it was lasting. His relationship to his own Jewishness was agonized and ambivalent in ways that directly anticipate the American pattern Klingenstein documents. He converted to Christianity in 1825, describing baptism as the ticket of admission to European culture, a phrase that captures the assimilation bargain with unusual honesty. But his conversion did not produce acceptance. He remained a target of German nationalist and antisemitic hostility throughout his life and died in Paris, where the ticket he had purchased turned out to be valid for a different train than he had expected to board.
The academic literary tradition specifically saw significant Jewish entry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though full professorships remained harder to obtain than positions in the parallel American or French systems. The figures who matter most are not primarily professors of German literature but the broader group of cultural critics, philologists, literary historians, and theorists whose work shaped how German literature was understood in the early twentieth century.
Georg Simmel is an essential figure even though he worked primarily in sociology and philosophy rather than literary criticism proper. His career illustrates the limits of Jewish entry into German academic life with painful precision. He was one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers in Germany in the early twentieth century, his essays on money, on the stranger, on metropolitan experience, on the sociology of culture, were read and admired across Europe. He was also blocked from a full professorship for decades, partly through explicit antisemitism among the academic gatekeepers who evaluated his work. His essay on the stranger, written in 1908, is perhaps the most precise sociological description. The stranger is the person who comes today and stays tomorrow, who is near and far simultaneously, who is a member of the group in some respects and outside it in others, whose relationship to the group is shaped precisely by his simultaneous belonging and non-belonging. That essay is the Jewish intellectual experience theorized at the highest level of abstraction, and it has shaped sociological and literary thinking about marginality, outsiderness, and the gifts of the in-between position ever since.
Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish literary critic, cultural theorist, and philosopher whose work combined Talmudic textual intensity with Marxist historical materialism and a messianic theological sensibility that drew on both Jewish and Christian sources simultaneously. His criticism is perhaps the most extreme case available of the Jewish intellectual contribution to the reading of a literary tradition from a position of outsideness that is simultaneously intimate and alienated.
His essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities is a stunning demonstration of what the hermeneutics of survival looks like applied to a canonical German text. Benjamin reads Goethe’s novel with an intensity and a willingness to follow its implications to their most uncomfortable conclusions that contemporary German critics had been unwilling to risk. He finds in the novel not the celebration of Goethean humanism that the tradition had constructed around it but a tragic meditation on the relationship between myth, fate, and the possibility of redemption that is structurally closer to the Jewish messianic tradition than to the Olympian serenity that Goethe’s canonical image projected. This is the outsider seeing what the insider has been too comfortable to name, but performed with a philosophical and theological depth that the American equivalent rarely matched.
Benjamin’s essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is the most widely read and most influential piece of German Jewish literary and cultural criticism, and its Jewish intellectual DNA is visible throughout even though it presents itself in Marxist rather than Jewish terms. Its central concern, the relationship between authentic presence and reproducible copy, between the aura of the original and the democratization that reproduction enables, is deeply continuous with the Jewish tradition’s concern with the relationship between original revelation and its transmission across generations, between the authority of the source and the inevitability of interpretation and translation. The anxiety about what is lost when the original is reproduced, when the unique presence of the artwork is dissolved into its copies, is recognizably the anxiety of a tradition that has always been concerned with the gap between the original moment of revelation at Sinai and the chain of transmission that brings that revelation into the present.
His unfinished masterwork, the Arcades Project, is an attempt to read the nineteenth century through its material remains, its covered shopping passages, its commodity culture, its dream images, its architectural debris. It is simultaneously a Marxist analysis of capitalist modernity and a specifically Jewish act of memory, a zachor applied to the secular world of commodity culture. Benjamin is remembering the nineteenth century in the way the tradition commands remembering, attending to the overlooked and the marginalized, recovering what official culture preferred to forget, finding in the trash of history the fragments that might illuminate the present. The method is recognizably continuous with memory as moral obligation, even though the object of memory is secular and the framework is Marxist rather than explicitly Jewish.
Benjamin’s death is inseparable from the meaning of his work. He fled Germany after 1933, worked in Paris through the 1930s, and died in 1940 on the Spanish border when his escape route was closed and he chose suicide rather than capture. He spent the last years of his life writing in the Bibliothèque nationale, surrounded by the cultural inheritance of a civilization that was simultaneously destroying him and providing him with the materials for his analysis of its self-destruction. The historical irony is almost too painful to contemplate directly. The Jewish intellectual who had devoted his life to reading the tradition of German and European culture with greater depth and honesty than most of its native custodians was killed by that culture while trying to escape it. His manuscripts survived because his friend Georges Bataille hid them in the Bibliothèque nationale. His work was recovered and published after the war largely through the efforts of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, both of whom were Jewish exiles from the Germany that had killed Benjamin.
Arendt and Adorno represent the next generation and the aftermath of the catastrophe.
Hannah Arendt was formed in the German philosophical and literary tradition with complete seriousness. Her doctoral dissertation was on Augustine. Her thinking was shaped throughout her life by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Jaspers. She read German literature with genuine love and deep formation. Her essays on Kafka, on Heine, on Rahel Varnhagen, the early nineteenth century Jewish salon hostess whose biography she wrote, are among the most sensitive and precise literary critical essays of the twentieth century.
Her relationship to Heidegger, who had been her teacher and her lover and who joined the Nazi party in 1933, is the most extreme version of the custodianship problem. Heidegger was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and also a committed Nazi whose membership in the party and whose active support for the regime during the early years of the Third Reich was genuine rather than merely opportunistic. Arendt’s lifelong engagement with his thought, her insistence that the philosophical greatness and the political catastrophe could not be simply identified with each other, her willingness to resume contact with him after the war and to defend aspects of his philosophical project while condemning his political choices, represents the most honest and the most painful engagement with the question of how a tradition can be both magnificent and catastrophically corrupted.
Her answer, worked out across her career, was essentially that the tradition’s catastrophic failure was part of what needed to be understood and transmitted. You could not simply excise the dark passages and celebrate the illuminated ones. The tradition had to be read in the light of its failure, the failure had to be understood as something the tradition had made possible rather than something entirely external to it, and the task of the critic was to recover what was genuinely valuable while holding in full view what the tradition had enabled. This is a form of custodianship that is possible only from the outside, only from the position of someone who loved the tradition and was simultaneously its victim, who could neither simply embrace it nor simply reject it. Arendt’s critical method is the distancing mechanism transformed by catastrophe into something more honest and more philosophically demanding than either full inhabitation or full rejection could produce.
Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, written in American exile during the war and its immediate aftermath, is subtitled Reflections on a Damaged Life and it is perhaps the most precise literary and philosophical document of what it means to have been formed by a tradition that then attempted to destroy you. Its form, aphorisms rather than systematic argument, reflects the impossibility of systematic thought after Auschwitz. Its content, a sustained meditation on the damage that administered modernity does to individual experience, draws equally on the German philosophical tradition and on the Jewish moral grammar that the tradition had tried to eradicate.
His essay on cultural criticism and society, which contains the famous statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, is the most extreme version of the question about what happens when custodians experience the tradition as directed at their elimination. Adorno’s point is not simply that the Holocaust was bad and that this makes cheerful poetry inappropriate. It is that the entire tradition of German Bildung, the cultivation of the self through high culture, had been exposed as compatible with genocide in a way that could not be explained away without fundamentally revising the tradition’s understanding of what it was and what it did. The cultivated German who loved Goethe and attended Beethoven concerts and appreciated Schiller’s idealism had built the death camps. That fact required a rethinking of the entire tradition of cultural cultivation that was more radical than anything the American or British literary establishments had been forced to confront.
The Frankfurt School as a whole, Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and their colleagues, represents the most systematic Jewish intellectual engagement with the German cultural tradition and its relationship to its own catastrophic failure. Their critical theory, the attempt to combine Marxist social analysis with Freudian depth psychology and a Hegelian dialectical method, drew on multiple traditions simultaneously in a way that was characteristic of the Jewish intellectual position across national contexts. They were inside the German philosophical tradition with genuine formation and genuine commitment. They were outside it as Jews who had experienced what the tradition was capable of enabling. The combination produced a form of critical theory that was simultaneously the most sophisticated product of the German intellectual tradition and its most searching internal critique.
Their influence on American literary and cultural criticism after their emigration is a significant part of the story. The Frankfurt School arrived in America as refugees and their critical theory was gradually absorbed into American academic culture in ways that shaped the theoretical turn in literary criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. The specifically German Jewish intellectual formation, catastrophically interrupted by the Holocaust, was partially transmitted to American literary culture through this route, adding another layer to the Jewish intellectual contribution to American literary academia that Klingenstein documents without fully accounting for its European origins.
The most important thing the German case adds is the demonstration of what happens when the custodianship question is resolved not through gradual assimilation and transformation but through violent exclusion followed by genocide. The German Jewish intellectuals who had most deeply inhabited the German literary and philosophical tradition, who had brought to it precisely the gifts this analysis identified, were killed or driven into exile. The tradition that remained was the tradition stripped of those contributions, and what the Nazis built in the place of the Jewish critical tradition was a form of literary and cultural scholarship organized around blood and soil and racial essence that was the precise negation of everything the Jewish intellectuals had contributed. The outsider’s gifts of defamiliarization, of reading against the grain of power, of moral seriousness rooted in accountability, of comfort with interpretive plurality, were replaced by an insider’s ideology of pure identity, of the tradition as the exclusive property of a racially defined community, of criticism as the celebration of what the tradition already was rather than the interrogation of what it concealed.
The postwar German literary academy therefore faced a custodianship problem of a completely different order from the American, British, or French cases. It was not the question of what was lost when outsiders entered the tradition. It was the question of how the tradition could be resumed at all after it had been complicit in genocide, after its most distinguished scholars had in many cases either supported the regime or remained silent, after the Jewish critics who had been among its most productive members had been murdered or exiled. The postwar German academy’s engagement with this question was, to put it charitably, uneven and often inadequate. The de-Nazification of German universities was superficial in many respects and the reckoning with what German literary scholarship had done and failed to do during the Third Reich was slow, painful, and in many cases still incomplete.
The Jewish critics who returned to Germany after the war, or who engaged with German literary culture from exile, brought a specific kind of knowledge that the non-Jewish German academy could not produce from within. They knew what the tradition was capable of because they had experienced it from the outside during its worst moment. They could read the tradition with both love and clear eyes in a way that those who had been too comfortable inside it during the catastrophe could not easily manage. Paul Celan is the most extreme case. Celan was a Romanian Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust, lost his parents in the camps, and chose to write in German, the language of his murderers, for the rest of his life. His Todesfuge, the Death Fugue, is perhaps the most important poem written in German in the twentieth century, and it is written from a position of complete outsideness to the tradition combined with complete formation in it. He knew German poetry with the depth of someone who had loved it before it tried to kill him, and he wrote from that position with a precision and a moral intensity that no comfortable insider could have achieved. His suicide in Paris in 1970 is part of the meaning of the work, the final evidence that the tradition could not hold him even though he had given everything to it.
What the German case ultimately demonstrates is the stakes of the custodianship question at their highest and most terrible. The question of who guards a tradition’s sacred objects is not merely an academic or institutional question. It is a question about what the tradition is for, who it belongs to, and what it does to those who are excluded from it or who encounter it as a threat. The German Jewish intellectuals brought to the German literary and philosophical tradition Jewish gifts we have identified across other national contexts. The tradition responded by attempting to destroy them. What survived, in the work of Benjamin and Arendt and Adorno and Celan, is the most honest and most philosophically serious engagement with the relationship between literary culture and human catastrophe that the twentieth century produced. It was produced from a position of outsideness so extreme that the distancing mechanism was no longer a choice but a necessity of survival, and from a depth of formation so complete that the distance and the love were simultaneously present in everything these writers produced. That combination is not available to comfortable insiders. It is not available to comfortable outsiders either. It is available only to those who have been formed by a tradition and then experienced what that tradition is capable of, and who have found the moral and intellectual resources to continue engaging with it honestly after that experience. The specifically Jewish moral grammar, the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power, the hermeneutics of survival, the tradition of memory as moral obligation, all of these were essential to making that engagement possible. And the loss of those custodians, through murder and exile, was a loss to the German literary tradition that cannot be recovered because what was lost was not just individual talent but an entire formation and an entire perspective that the tradition needed to see.
The Russian Empire had the largest Jewish population in the world, concentrated in the Pale of Settlement, the western territories where Jews were legally required to reside. The restrictions on Jewish life in the Russian Empire were more comprehensive and more brutally enforced than anywhere else in Europe. Jews were excluded from universities by quota, the numerus clausus introduced in 1887 limited Jewish enrollment to between three and ten percent depending on the region, well below their proportion of the urban educated population. They were excluded from most professions, from permanent residence in most Russian cities, and from participation in Russian cultural life at the highest levels. The violence against Jewish communities, the pogroms of 1881 to 1884 and 1903 to 1906, was state-tolerated and in some cases state-organized. The Russian Empire’s relationship to its Jewish population was the most hostile of any major European state in the pre-war period.
The result was that Russian Jewish intellectual life before the revolution developed largely outside the Russian university system and largely in languages other than Russian. The great tradition of Eastern European Jewish intellectual life, the Yiddish literary tradition, the Hebrew revival, the development of modern Jewish political movements including Zionism and the Bund, all took place in a context of systematic exclusion from Russian cultural institutions. The Jewish intellectuals who did enter Russian literary and intellectual life did so by navigating around the restrictions, often through conversion, often through emigration to western universities and then return, always under conditions of extreme precariousness.
The few who managed entry into Russian literary life before the revolution were therefore exceptional cases whose negotiation of the restrictions illuminates the broader pattern. Boris Pasternak’s father Leonid was a painter who had converted and achieved a degree of entry into Russian artistic life. The young Boris grew up in a household that was simultaneously formed by Russian literary culture at the highest level, Tolstoy was a family friend, and shaped by the specific anxieties of the converted Jew whose entry into Russian cultural life was conditional and potentially revocable. This double formation is directly visible in Doctor Zhivago, whose engagement with Russian history, Russian Christianity, and Jewish identity is simultaneously more intimate and more complex than any non-Jewish Russian writer’s engagement with the same material could have been.
Osip Mandelstam was a Jewish poet who became one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, whose formation in the Russian literary tradition through Acmeism and his deep engagement with Pushkin, Dante, and the entire European lyric tradition was complete and genuine, and whose relationship to his own Jewishness was agonized and productive in ways that directly parallel the patterns my analysis has identified elsewhere. His essay on the Noise of Time, an autobiographical meditation on his formation in St Petersburg Jewish intellectual culture, is one of the most precise accounts available of what it means to enter a tradition that is not originally yours and to make it genuinely your own through an act of love that is simultaneously an act of transformation. He describes his relationship to Russian poetry as a kind of conversion, not a renunciation of origin but a genuine taking on of a new formation that coexists uneasily with the original one.
Under Stalin, he was arrested twice, the second time fatally, largely because of his poem attacking Stalin, the Epigram, which circulated in manuscript and for which he paid with his life in a transit camp in 1938. The Jewish poet who had most completely inhabited the Russian literary tradition, who had brought to it precisely the gifts my analysis identifies, the hermeneutics of survival, the moral seriousness rooted in accountability, the willingness to speak truth to power that the prophetic tradition cultivated, was destroyed by the Soviet state. His widow Nadezhda preserved his poetry by memorizing it, an act that is a form of the Jewish zachor, the obligation of memory that my analysis identified as a specifically Jewish contribution to literary culture. Her memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, are among the most important documents of Russian literary life in the Soviet period, and they are written from the position of the custodian who preserved what the state attempted to destroy.
Now the communist revolution and what it changed. The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 formally abolished all legal restrictions based on religion or ethnicity. The numerus clausus was eliminated. Jews could in principle enter universities, professions, and institutions on equal terms with non-Jews. In practice the early Soviet period saw an extraordinary and rapid entry of Jews into positions of cultural, intellectual, and political authority that had no parallel in the speed or scale of Jewish integration in any other country. Jews played disproportionate roles in the revolutionary movement, in the Bolshevik party leadership, in the Cheka and its successors, in the early Soviet cultural institutions, in publishing and journalism and the arts. This was not accidental. It reflected the specific historical position of Russian Jews, who had been systematically excluded from the old order and who therefore had strong reasons to support a movement that promised to dissolve the barriers that had confined them.
In literary and cultural life specifically the early Soviet period saw an explosion of Jewish participation and Jewish creativity that was genuinely remarkable. The Russian formalists, whose critical methods transformed literary scholarship internationally, included significant Jewish participation. The Jewish literary critics who entered Russian literary institutions in the 1920s brought precisely the gifts my analysis has identified, the comfort with interpretive plurality rooted in Talmudic tradition, the sensitivity to the gap between official discourse and social reality developed through centuries of reading between the lines of hostile cultures, the moral seriousness rooted in the prophetic tradition, the outsider’s gift of defamiliarization applied to a tradition they had entered from outside.
Viktor Shklovsky is the central figure in Russian formalism and his Jewish background is relevant to understanding his critical method. His concept of ostranenie, defamiliarization or making strange, is precisely the intellectual operation my analysis identified as a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture. The idea that the function of art is to disrupt habitual perception, to make the familiar strange, to restore the experience of seeing to things that habit has made invisible, is the outsider’s perception theorized as a universal aesthetic principle. Shklovsky was inside Russian literary culture with genuine formation and genuine love for the tradition. He was also shaped by a position of historical outsideness that gave him the angle of vision to see what habitual insiders could not see. The theory emerged from the intersection of those two positions in a way that is recognizably continuous with the Jewish intellectual contribution my analysis has been tracing across other national contexts.
The Bakhtin circle is more complicated because Mikhail Bakhtin was not Jewish but several of his closest intellectual collaborators were, and the questions his work addresses, the relationship between official and unofficial discourse, between the authoritative word and the internally persuasive word, between monologic and dialogic forms of thought, between carnival and official culture, are questions that the Jewish intellectual position generates naturally. Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, the coexistence of multiple social languages within a single text, each carrying its own value system and its own social position, is remarkably continuous with the Talmudic institutionalization of permanent interpretive plurality. Whether this reflects direct Jewish influence or a more diffuse intellectual environment shaped by Jewish participation is difficult to determine with precision, but the structural continuity is striking.
The 1920s also saw significant Jewish participation in Soviet literary institutions and literary debates. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, RAPP, had significant Jewish leadership and Jewish participation, though the debates within it were organized around class rather than ethnic categories. The literary magazines and publishing houses of the early Soviet period had substantial Jewish editorial presence. The translation industry, which was crucial for the Soviet project of making world literature accessible, drew heavily on Jewish translators whose multilingualism, rooted in the historical experience of living between languages, made them essential to the enterprise.
The situation began to change in the late 1920s and accelerated dramatically in the 1930s. Stalin’s consolidation of power brought with it a specifically Russian nationalist dimension that sat uneasily with the internationalism that had characterized the early Soviet period and that had made Jewish participation in Soviet cultural life possible and productive. The campaign against cosmopolitanism, which intensified in the late 1940s and reached its peak with the Doctors’ Plot of 1952 to 1953, was explicitly antisemitic in its targeting even when it used the language of class and ideology rather than race. Jewish cultural institutions were systematically destroyed. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and its leadership was murdered. Yiddish language cultural life was eliminated. Jewish intellectuals in all fields were vulnerable to denunciation as rootless cosmopolitans, a phrase whose antisemitic content was transparent even when its antisemitism was officially denied.
The effect on Russian literary scholarship specifically was to create a two-phase pattern that has no precise equivalent in the American, British, French, or German cases. In the first phase, the 1920s and early 1930s, Jewish participation in Russian literary scholarship was substantial, productive, and shaped by the specific gifts my analysis has identified. In the second phase, from the mid-1930s onward and intensifying after the war, Jewish participation was systematically suppressed, Jewish scholars were vulnerable to denunciation and arrest, and the specifically Jewish intellectual contributions were either eliminated or forced underground.
The figure who most clearly embodies both phases and the transition between them is Boris Eikhenbaum, a leading Russian formalist. Eikhenbaum was Jewish and his critical work in the 1920s on Tolstoy, on Gogol, on the theory of the short story, was among the most important literary scholarship produced anywhere in the world in that period. His formalist method, like Shklovsky’s, brought the outsider’s analytical precision to the Russian literary tradition in ways that illuminated features of the texts that insider criticism had been too habituated to see. His later career under Stalin was a progressively narrowing experience of constraint, self-censorship, and eventually near-silence. The gifts he had brought were no longer welcome. The critical independence that the Jewish intellectual formation had cultivated was precisely what the Stalinist cultural system could not tolerate.
The case of Solomon Volkov is illuminating in a different way. Volkov was a musicologist rather than a literary scholar but his project, the compilation and publication of Shostakovich’s memoirs in Testimony, is directly relevant to my analysis. Testimony records Shostakovich’s account of his own life and work under Stalin in terms that are far more honest and far more critical of the Soviet regime than anything that could have been published openly. Whether the account is entirely authentic has been debated. The pattern of concealment and preservation under hostile conditions, reading between the lines of official discourse, maintaining the authentic account against the falsified one, is recognizably continuous with the hermeneutics of survival that two millennia of diaspora experience had cultivated.
The underground literary culture that flourished in the Soviet period despite state suppression drew significantly on Jewish participation. The samizdat tradition, the circulation of censored texts in handwritten or typed copies, is a form of the Jewish manuscript tradition, the preservation and transmission of texts outside official institutional channels. Many of the most important samizdat texts were produced or preserved by Jewish intellectuals whose formation had given them both the motivation and the practical tradition for this kind of underground transmission. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s preservation of her husband’s poetry by memorization is the most famous example but it is part of a broader pattern.
The dissident intellectual movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which challenged Soviet cultural orthodoxy from within, had significant Jewish participation. Joseph Brodsky, who was Jewish, was tried in 1964 for social parasitism, his crime being that he wrote poetry without official authorization, and his trial transcript, preserved and circulated by Frida Vigdorova, herself Jewish, became one of the most important documents of Soviet cultural repression. Brodsky’s subsequent expulsion from the Soviet Union and his career in the West as a poet and essayist brought specifically Russian Jewish literary formation into English language literary culture in ways that enriched both. His Nobel lecture of 1987 is among the most serious engagements with the relationship between poetry and freedom, between literary culture and political authority, that the twentieth century produced, and its moral seriousness is recognizably continuous with the specifically Jewish formation that my analysis has been tracing.
The relationship between Russian formalism and the broader development of literary theory internationally is the most important contribution of the Soviet Jewish case to the overall picture. Russian formalism, substantially shaped by Jewish intellectual participation, became one of the primary sources of the theoretical revolution in literary studies that transformed Western literary academia from the 1960s onward. Through the mediation of figures like Roman Jakobson, who was Jewish and who emigrated to Czechoslovakia and then to America where he became a central figure at Harvard and MIT, the formalist methods developed in the specific context of Russian Jewish intellectual engagement with Russian literary tradition were transmitted into American and European literary scholarship and combined there with French structuralism and psychoanalytic theory to produce the theoretical apparatus that my analysis has been examining.
This means that the specifically Jewish intellectual contribution to literary scholarship has a more complex genealogy than the American narrative alone suggests. The defamiliarization that my analysis identified as a distinctively Jewish gift to literary criticism was theorized in Russia by Jewish critics working in a specific historical context, transmitted to Europe and America through exile and emigration, and then combined with other theoretical traditions to produce the critical apparatus that transformed Western literary academia. The contribution is not simply the product of Jewish intellectuals entering American or British or French English departments. It is the product of a specific intellectual tradition, developed across multiple national contexts in response to multiple specific historical configurations, flowing into Western literary culture through multiple channels over several decades.
The Russian case demonstrates that the formal abolition of antisemitism, the removal of legal barriers to Jewish participation, does not resolve the custodianship question. The early Soviet period shows that when formal barriers are removed Jewish intellectual participation can be rapid, substantial, and enormously productive. It also shows that the gifts brought by Jewish intellectual participation, the comfort with interpretive plurality, the sensitivity to official and unofficial discourse, the moral seriousness rooted in accountability, the willingness to speak truth to power, are precisely the qualities that an authoritarian regime cannot tolerate. The Soviet system eventually turned against precisely the intellectual gifts that Jewish formation had brought because those gifts were incompatible with the monologic authority that Stalinism required. The Talmudic tradition of permanent productive disagreement is the antithesis of totalitarian cultural management.
It also demonstrates the specific vulnerability of the Jewish intellectual contribution to political catastrophe. In Germany the catastrophe was genocide. In the Soviet Union the catastrophe was a combination of murder, imprisonment, exile, and enforced silence that destroyed a specific intellectual generation and its possibilities. In both cases what was lost was not just individual talent but an entire formation, a specific way of reading and thinking and remembering that the broader literary culture had not developed independently and could not easily recover once it was destroyed.
The underground and dissident traditions that survived the Stalinist suppression are the most important legacy of Soviet Jewish literary scholarship for my argument. They demonstrate that the specifically Jewish moral grammar, the obligation of memory, the preservation of authentic accounts against official falsification, the willingness to transmit truth at personal cost, can survive even the most systematic institutional suppression. Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized her husband’s poems. Frida Vigdorova transcribed Brodsky’s trial. Countless unnamed individuals copied and circulated samizdat texts. These acts of preservation are continuous with the deepest commitments of the tradition that my analysis has been examining, the tradition that insists on remembering what power wants forgotten, that finds in the preservation of authentic transmission a moral obligation that takes priority over personal safety.
The final point the Russian case adds is about what happens to the Jewish intellectual contribution when the Jewish community that produced it is systematically destroyed. Russian Jewry was the largest and in many respects the most culturally productive Jewish community in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was destroyed by a combination of Soviet cultural suppression, the Holocaust, emigration, and assimilation. What was lost was not just the individuals who were killed or silenced or driven out but the entire communal formation that had produced their specific intellectual gifts. The Talmudic learning, the Yiddish literary culture, the specific forms of religious and intellectual life that had developed over centuries in Eastern Europe, all of this was destroyed or dispersed in ways that cannot be recovered. The intellectual contributions that survived, in the work of the formalists, in the dissident tradition, in the poetry of Mandelstam and Brodsky, are fragments of a formation that no longer exists in anything like its original form. They are the legacy of a destroyed world, preserved through exactly the kind of heroic memory work that the tradition had always demanded and that the catastrophe made more urgent than it had ever been before.
This is perhaps the least examined of the national cases and it has some genuinely distinctive features that illuminate the broader pattern from an unexpected angle.
Start with the structural background. Italy’s relationship between Jews, universities, and literary culture was shaped by several overlapping historical configurations that differ significantly from the German, French, Russian, and Anglo-American cases. Italian Jews were among the oldest established Jewish communities in Europe. The Roman Jewish community dates to before the Common Era. The communities of Venice, Florence, Ferrara, Mantua, and Rome had deep roots in Italian civic and cultural life that predated by centuries the more recent Eastern European Jewish communities that dominated the German and Russian cases. This longevity produced a specific kind of Jewish formation that was simultaneously more integrated into the surrounding Italian culture and more distinctively particular in its own right than the communities in countries where Jewish settlement was more recent.
The papal states maintained the ghetto system in Rome until Italian unification in 1870, making the Roman Jewish community one of the last in Western Europe to live under formal ghetto restrictions. But Italian Jews outside the papal territories had been emancipated considerably earlier in many regions, particularly in Piedmont under the House of Savoy, where Jewish emancipation came with the Albertine Statute of 1848. The result was a geographically uneven pattern of integration that produced Italian Jewish intellectuals with very different relationships to Italian cultural life depending on their regional origin.
Italian unification created a unified secular state with a strong anticlerical dimension rooted in the Risorgimento’s conflict with papal authority. This gave Italian Jews a natural alliance with the liberal nationalist project, since both had reasons to welcome the dissolution of the clerical order that had maintained the ghettos. Italian Jews participated disproportionately in the Risorgimento and in the early institutions of the unified Italian state, including the universities, the military, and the professions. The proportion of Jews in Italian academic and cultural life in the decades after unification was remarkable given their tiny percentage of the total population, roughly one tenth of one percent.
The Italian literary tradition that Jewish scholars were entering had a distinctive character that differs importantly from the English literary tradition at the center of my analysis. Italian literature from Dante through the Renaissance and beyond is saturated with Catholic theology and Catholic culture in ways that are if anything more thorough than the Anglican formation that shaped English literature, but the Catholicism of the Italian literary tradition is different in texture from the Protestant formation of English literature. It is more aesthetic, more sensual, more visually oriented, more comfortable with the coexistence of sacred and profane elements, more tolerant of internal complexity and contradiction. Dante’s Comedy is simultaneously the supreme expression of Catholic theology and a deeply personal act of political and emotional settling of scores. Petrarch combines classical learning with Christian devotion in ways that resist easy categorization. Boccaccio’s Decameron treats clerical corruption with a comic irreverence that is a Catholic form, the tradition of Carnival that Bakhtin identified as central to European literary culture.
This specific character of the Italian literary tradition made it in some ways more accessible to Jewish scholars than the English tradition, because its Catholicism was less doctrinally rigid and more culturally saturated in ways that allowed a certain kind of engagement that did not require theological commitment. You could love Dante without being a Thomist in a way that was harder to separate from the specific formation that Anglican literary culture demanded. The aesthetic dimension of Italian Catholicism, its visual culture, its music, its architecture, its literary elaboration of theological themes, offered entry points to someone formed outside the tradition that the more specifically doctrinal Protestant inheritance did not as readily provide.
The figure of Graziadio Isaia Ascoli is the appropriate starting point for the academic story. Ascoli was a Jewish philologist and linguist who became one of the most important figures in Italian academic life in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was professor of comparative linguistics and Oriental languages at the Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria in Milan from 1861 until his death in 1907, and his work on Italian dialects, on Romance linguistics, and on the history of Italian established him as a founding figure of Italian scientific philology. His Jewishness was publicly acknowledged and did not prevent him from achieving the highest levels of academic recognition, including the presidency of the Accademia dei Lincei, Italy’s most prestigious scientific institution. His career illustrates both the genuine openness of post-unification Italian academic life to Jewish participation and the specific form that Jewish intellectual contribution took in the Italian context, rigorous philological and historical scholarship that worked to establish the scientific foundations of literary and linguistic study.
The contribution of Jewish scholars to the establishment of Italian literary and philological scholarship on scientific foundations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was significant and somewhat analogous to the role of Jewish scholars in establishing professional literary scholarship in America, the replacement of gentlemanly taste and impressionistic criticism with rigorous historical and philological method. This is the academic equivalent of the distancing mechanism, the substitution of verifiable scholarly method for the kind of aesthetic and cultural judgment that requires formation in the tradition, and it served similar functions of allowing entry into an institution whose cultural formation was not originally your own.
The early twentieth century saw continued Jewish participation in Italian literary and cultural life at significant levels. The Triestine Jewish community produced a remarkable concentration of literary talent in this period, Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba being the most important cases. Trieste was a peculiar environment, an Austro-Hungarian port city with a large Jewish community, a strong German cultural influence, and a complex relationship to Italian national identity, and it produced a specific form of Jewish Italian literary culture that combined Central European psychological sophistication with Italian aesthetic sensibility in ways that were genuinely distinctive.
Italo Svevo, born Aron Ettore Schmitz, is perhaps the most important Italian Jewish novelist of the early twentieth century and his case is directly relevant to my argument. Svevo wrote in Italian despite having been formed partly in German language culture, and his novels, particularly The Conscience of Zeno, combine a Freudian interest in self-deception and psychological complexity with a distinctively Italian comic sensibility. His work was almost entirely ignored by the Italian literary establishment until it was championed by James Joyce, who had known Svevo in Trieste and recognized in his work a psychological depth that the Italian literary mainstream had not been prepared to receive. The pattern is familiar from my analysis, the outsider seeing what the comfortable insider cannot, the Jewish intellectual bringing to the tradition gifts that the tradition’s own custodians lack the position to recognize or value. The irony is that Svevo’s recognition came through an Irish writer operating outside the Italian literary establishment rather than through that establishment.
Umberto Saba’s poetry represents a different form of Italian Jewish literary contribution. Saba’s verse is simultaneously deeply embedded in the Italian lyric tradition, formally conventional and metrically careful in ways that connected him to the established canon, and shaped by a psychological and moral intensity that his Triestine Jewish formation contributed. His Canzoniere, the great collection of his life’s work, reads the ordinary experiences of bourgeois Jewish life in Trieste with a combination of love and irony, of formal beauty and psychological honesty, that is recognizably continuous with the gifts my analysis has identified. His Jewishness is present in the work not as explicit subject matter but as a moral and perceptual formation that shapes how he sees and what he values.
The fascist period and the racial laws of 1938 represent the catastrophic interruption of Italian Jewish cultural and academic life that parallels the German catastrophe while differing from it in important ways. Mussolini’s racial laws of 1938, introduced under German pressure and with far less popular enthusiasm than the Nazi racial legislation had generated in Germany, formally excluded Jews from Italian universities, schools, professions, and public life. The effect on Italian academic life was significant. Jewish scholars and scientists who had been among the most productive members of Italian universities were suddenly expelled. Some emigrated, bringing their formation and their gifts to other countries. Some remained in Italy under clandestine conditions. A few, particularly after the German occupation of northern and central Italy in 1943, were deported and killed.
The emigration of Italian Jewish scientists and scholars after 1938 had consequences for other countries that parallel the consequences of the German Jewish emigration after 1933. Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi, though Fermi was not Jewish, left Italy and contributed to the American atomic bomb project. The brain drain from Italian academic life produced by the racial laws was a significant and lasting damage to Italian intellectual culture that the fascist ideology had not anticipated because it had not understood what it was destroying.
Primo Levi is the figure whose work is most directly relevant to my argument and who adds something to the German case with Celan and Arendt that is worth developing carefully. Levi was a chemist and a writer who survived Auschwitz and spent the rest of his life bearing witness to what he had experienced there. His relationship to the Italian literary tradition was formed before the deportation and resumed after it, and the resulting work is the Italian equivalent of what Celan and Arendt produced in relation to the German tradition, an engagement with a beloved cultural inheritance from a position of radical outsideness created by the experience of what that tradition’s civilization had been capable of enabling.
But Levi’s relationship to Italian literary culture differs from Celan’s relationship to German literary culture in a way that is illuminating. Celan remained in a condition of permanent irresolvable tension with the German language, unable to leave it and unable to be fully at home in it, and his poetry reflects that tension in its extreme formal difficulty and its resistance to conventional interpretation. Levi by contrast chose clarity as his primary literary virtue, a prose style of crystalline precision that he associated explicitly with his scientific training and with the ethical obligation to be understood. His Italian is lucid where Celan’s German is opaque, accessible where Celan’s is resistant, and the difference reflects both the different relationships to the national literary tradition and the different personalities of the writers.
Levi’s clarity is a form of the prophetic tradition’s moral urgency, the obligation to make the truth accessible rather than to protect it through obscurity. His If This Is a Man, published in Italian in 1947 and long ignored before its eventual recognition as a masterpiece, is simultaneously a document of witness, a work of literary art, and a sustained act of the zachor, the obligation of memory, that my analysis identified as a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture. His The Periodic Table, which interweaves episodes from his life with meditations on the chemical elements, is a form of midrash, a commentary on experience that finds in the materials of the physical world a moral and spiritual significance, a sacramental reading of chemistry that is recognizably continuous with the tradition of finding sacred meaning in the most ordinary dimensions of created reality.
His suicide in 1987, like Celan’s in 1970, raises the question of what the tradition finally costs those who bear witness to its worst possibilities. Whether Levi’s death was suicide is still debated, but the symbolic weight of the question is unavoidable. The writer who had devoted his life to bearing witness, to the obligation of memory, to the transmission of what the world needed to know and preferred to forget, died in circumstances that suggested the burden of that obligation had finally become insupportable. The Jewish moral grammar that commanded remembering did not offer exemption from the cost of what was remembered.
The postwar Italian literary academy and its relationship to Jewish scholars raises questions that are somewhat different from the equivalent questions in Germany because Italy’s relationship to its fascist past was organized differently from Germany’s relationship to Nazism. Italy developed a mythology of resistance and a collective narrative of antifascism that allowed the country to avoid the kind of systematic reckoning with collaboration and complicity that Germany undertook, however incompletely. The racial laws of 1938 and the deportations of 1943 to 1945 were assimilated into a narrative in which the responsibility lay primarily with the Germans and with the small minority of Italian fascists who had enthusiastically implemented the racial policies, while the majority of Italians were retrospectively repositioned as reluctant collaborators or secret resisters.
This narrative served the needs of Italian postwar national identity. It was a coalition device that allowed postwar Italy to maintain social cohesion by avoiding the full accounting of what the fascist period had involved. The Jewish scholars and writers who returned to Italian academic and cultural life after the war encountered this narrative as the dominant framework within which their experience was being processed, and their relationship to it was necessarily complicated. They knew what had actually happened. They had experienced what Italian institutions had done when required to choose between their Jewish members and the demands of the fascist state. The convenient belief of Italian antifascism was considerably more comfortable for non-Jewish Italians than for the Jews who had experienced the reality it was designed to paper over.
Natalia Ginzburg is among the most important postwar Italian Jewish writers whose work engages with the question of what remained of Italian culture and Italian family life after the catastrophe of fascism and war. Her novels and her autobiographical writing, particularly Family Sayings, examine the texture of Italian Jewish bourgeois life with a combination of love and irony, of formal restraint and moral seriousness, that is recognizably continuous with the gifts my analysis has identified. Her prose style, like Levi’s, is characterized by clarity and economy that contrasts with the rhetorical elaboration of much Italian literary tradition, and this stylistic choice is a moral statement, a preference for honesty over ornament that reflects a formation that could not afford the luxury of beautiful falsification.
Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is perhaps the most widely read Italian literary treatment of the Jewish experience under fascism and it represents a specific form of Italian Jewish literary contribution that has no precise equivalent in the other national cases. Bassani writes about the Ferrarese Jewish community, the ancient established Italian Jewish community that had been part of Italian civic life for centuries, with a mourning that is simultaneously personal and historical. The novel’s central subject is the destruction of a world that had seemed permanent and protected, the bourgeois Jewish life of the Italian provincial city that had managed to be simultaneously Jewish and Italian for so long that its destruction was genuinely unimaginable until it happened. Bassani’s prose style is elegiac in a way that draws on the specifically Italian tradition of beautiful melancholy, the literary mode of mourning for a vanished world that runs from Leopardi through D’Annunzio, but it is filled with a moral specificity and a historical precision that the purely aesthetic tradition of Italian elegy could not provide. The Jewish moral grammar of memory and accountability is operating within the Italian aesthetic tradition of beautiful mourning, and the combination produces something that neither tradition could have produced alone.
The figure of Umberto Eco, who was not Jewish, is relevant here as a counter-case that illuminates what the Jewish intellectual contribution provided by contrast. Eco was among the most intellectually gifted Italian literary scholars and novelists of the twentieth century, formed in the Catholic tradition, expert in semiotics and medieval studies, a brilliant analyst of popular culture and literary structure. His work is formidable and his influence enormous. But his relationship to the tradition he studied is that of the insider, and his criticism, brilliant as it is, lacks the specific quality of moral urgency and the specific sensitivity to what official discourse excludes that the Jewish intellectual formation produced in the scholars my analysis has been examining. The comparison is not meant to diminish Eco but to clarify what is distinctive about the Jewish contribution by identifying what is present in one case and absent in another.
The contemporary Italian situation involves a Jewish academic and literary presence that is small in proportion to the total Jewish population remaining in Italy, much reduced from its prewar level, but significant in certain specific areas. The study of the Holocaust and of Jewish history in Italy has become an important field, partly through the efforts of scholars with Jewish formation and partly through the broader European reckoning with the fascist period. The translation and critical reception of Levi, Bassani, Ginzburg, and Saba into world literature has made Italian Jewish literary culture internationally visible in ways that the prewar marginalization of these writers did not permit. Levi in particular has become one of the most widely read and most morally serious Italian writers internationally, his work used in educational contexts across Europe and America as a document of witness and as a model of ethical prose.
The Italian case demonstrates the specific contribution of an ancient and deeply rooted Jewish community whose integration into the surrounding culture was both more complete and more fragile than the integration of more recently settled communities. The Italian Jews had been part of Italian civic and cultural life for so long that their formation was genuinely Italian as well as genuinely Jewish, and the destruction of that formation by the racial laws was therefore a destruction of something that was simultaneously a Jewish loss and an Italian loss. What was lost was not just a Jewish perspective on Italian culture but a specifically Italian Jewish synthesis that had developed over centuries and that could not be rebuilt after the catastrophe.
It also demonstrates the specific literary form that the Jewish obligation of memory takes when the world that needs to be remembered is not only a world of persecution but a world of beauty and belonging and genuine cultural achievement. Bassani mourns a lost world of Italian Jewish civic life that was genuinely lovely before it was destroyed. Levi bears witness to the destruction of that world with a moral clarity that the love makes more rather than less demanding. The combination of love for the world that was destroyed and moral clarity about how it was destroyed is a specifically Italian Jewish literary achievement that adds a dimension to the overall picture that the German and Russian cases, where the relationship between the Jewish intellectual and the surrounding culture was always more adversarial, cannot provide.
The final point is about the relationship between Italian Jewish literary culture and the specifically aesthetic dimension of the Italian tradition. The Italian tradition’s emphasis on beauty, on formal perfection, on the relationship between aesthetic achievement and moral seriousness, is something that Jewish writers engaged with in ways that were both transformative and transformed. Levi’s clarity is a moral aesthetic. Ginzburg’s economy is a formal ethical statement. Bassani’s elegy is a moral use of beauty. Saba’s formal conventionality is a way of insisting that ordinary Jewish bourgeois life deserves the same aesthetic seriousness that the tradition had lavished on heroic and aristocratic subjects. These are all forms of the same operation, the specifically Jewish moral grammar applied to and through specifically Italian aesthetic forms, producing work that is neither purely Jewish nor purely Italian but genuinely both, and that illuminates both traditions by their intersection.
This is a genuinely underexamined case and it differs from all the previous national configurations in ways that are illuminating precisely because the differences are structural rather than merely circumstantial.
Start with the demographic reality. The Jewish communities in Scandinavia were tiny by the standards of any of the previous cases. Denmark had roughly eight thousand Jews at the time of the German occupation in 1940. Sweden had perhaps forty-five thousand. Norway had fewer than two thousand. Finland had a small community concentrated in Helsinki. These numbers mean that the custodianship question in Scandinavian literary and historical departments operates on a completely different scale from the German, Russian, French, or American cases. You are not asking about the entry of a substantial professional class into established institutions. You are asking about the influence of an extremely small community whose intellectual participation was necessarily limited by sheer numbers.
The smallness of the communities is significant for my analysis because it means that the Jewish intellectual contribution to Scandinavian literary and historical culture came primarily not from inside those cultures but from outside them, through the influence of German Jewish, Central European Jewish, and later American Jewish intellectual traditions on Scandinavian academic life. The question of Jews in Scandinavian literature departments is therefore partly a question about the transmission of intellectual traditions developed elsewhere into a specific national context, rather than primarily a question about the internal development of a local Jewish intellectual community.
The Lutheran formation of Scandinavian culture is the essential starting point for understanding what kind of tradition Jewish scholars would have been entering. Scandinavia was the heartland of the Lutheran Reformation and Lutheran Christianity shaped Scandinavian culture at every level from the Reformation onward in ways that were in some respects more thorough than the Anglican formation that shaped English culture. Lutheranism emphasized literacy and direct engagement with the biblical text, which produced high literacy rates and a specific relationship to textual culture that was simultaneously religious and democratic in its implications. The Scandinavian literary tradition from the medieval period through the nineteenth century was shaped by this Lutheran formation in ways that were less aesthetically elaborate than the Catholic traditions of Italy and France but more morally serious and more directly engaged with the relationship between religious conviction and ordinary life.
The nineteenth century saw the emergence of the specifically Scandinavian literary tradition that achieved international recognition through figures like Ibsen, Strindberg, Bjørnson, and later Hamsun. This tradition was characterized by a specific form of moral seriousness rooted partly in Lutheran formation and partly in the specific social conditions of Scandinavian bourgeois life, its claustrophobia, its conformism, its moral hypocrisy, and its genuine ethical seriousness simultaneously. The outsider’s gift of defamiliarization was not brought to this tradition primarily by Jewish critics but was generated from within it by writers who were simultaneously inside the bourgeois world they criticized and sufficiently uncomfortable in it to see it with unusual clarity. Ibsen is the paradigmatic case, the insider who became the supreme critic of the insider position.
The Danish case is the most historically interesting for this analysis because of the extraordinary rescue of the Danish Jewish community in October 1943. When the German occupation authorities moved to deport Danish Jews, the Danish population organized a spontaneous rescue operation that transported the overwhelming majority of the Danish Jewish community to neutral Sweden over a period of days. This event, unique in occupied Europe, reflects something specific about Danish culture and Danish Lutheran formation that is directly relevant to the custodianship question. The Danish Lutheran tradition had developed a specific understanding of the relationship between Christian identity and Jewish identity, partly through the influence of the theologian and bishop NFS Grundtvig, that was less supersessionist and more fraternal than most European Christian traditions. Grundtvig’s theology emphasized the continuity between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in ways that produced a relatively warm relationship between Danish Christianity and Danish Jewish identity.
The rescue also reflects the specific smallness and social integration of the Danish Jewish community. Danish Jews were not a visible, distinct, and largely unassimilated community like the Eastern European Jewish communities in Germany and Poland. They were thoroughly integrated into Danish civic life, known personally to their neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens in ways that made their abstract designation as enemies of the state obviously false to the people who knew them. The social integration that in some other contexts produced the assimilation costs this analysis has been examining produced in the Danish context a degree of civic solidarity that saved almost the entire community.
The Jewish scholars and intellectuals who were part of Danish cultural life before and after the war were therefore operating in a context that was more genuinely integrative than most of the other national cases, but the community was also so small and so thoroughly assimilated that the specifically Jewish intellectual contribution to Danish literary and historical scholarship was correspondingly limited. The Danish Jewish community produced important figures in other fields, medicine, law, commerce, and the arts, but the specifically literary and historical scholarly contribution was modest in scale even if significant in quality.
Georg Brandes is the towering exception and he is one of the most important figures in the entire comparative picture this analysis has been developing. Brandes was a Danish Jewish literary critic whose influence on Scandinavian and indeed European literary culture in the late nineteenth century was enormous and whose career illustrates the custodianship question with unusual clarity and unusual drama.
Brandes was born in 1842 into a secular Danish Jewish family that was thoroughly assimilated into Danish bourgeois culture. He received a completely Danish formation, studied at the University of Copenhagen, and developed into the most formidable literary critic in Scandinavia in the second half of the nineteenth century. His lectures at the University of Copenhagen in 1871, later published as the six-volume Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, were the most important single intervention in Scandinavian literary culture in the modern period. They introduced Scandinavian writers and readers to the European literary tradition, particularly the French realist and naturalist traditions, and argued that literature should engage with contemporary social problems rather than retreat into romantic idealism. The lectures directly inspired Ibsen, Strindberg, and Bjørnson to develop the social realist drama that made Scandinavian literature internationally significant.
Brandes is the clearest possible demonstration of the outsider’s gift of defamiliarization applied to a literary tradition from a position of simultaneous inside and outside. He was formed in Danish culture with complete seriousness and genuine love for the Danish literary tradition. He was also shaped by a position of Jewish outsideness that gave him the angle of vision to see what the comfortable Danish literary establishment could not see, particularly its provincialism, its romantic retreat from contemporary social reality, and its failure to engage with the European intellectual currents that were transforming literature elsewhere. His intervention was simultaneously an act of love for Scandinavian literary culture and an act of defamiliarization that made that culture strange to itself in productive ways.
His relationship to his own Jewishness was characteristically ambivalent in ways that directly parallel the patterns Klingenstein documents. He was not religiously Jewish, had no serious Jewish religious formation, and did not present himself primarily as a Jewish intellectual. He was a Danish intellectual who happened to be of Jewish origin, and his universalism was genuine rather than merely strategic. But his Jewishness was also the source of his outsideness, the thing that gave him the angle of vision that his critical gifts required. He was excluded from the University of Copenhagen professorship he deserved for years partly because of antisemitism, and the exclusion reinforced the outsider position that his criticism drew on. The man who taught Ibsen and Strindberg to see Danish society clearly was himself a permanent outsider to the institutions of that society.
His Main Currents is in many ways the critical equivalent of what the Jewish historians in Novick’s account did to the American historical canon. He staffed a new literary canon into existence, not the canon of Danish national romantic literature that the establishment valued but a European cosmopolitan canon organized around the criterion of engagement with contemporary reality rather than retreat from it. The canon he championed, which included George Sand, John Stuart Mill, Heine, and the French realists, reflected both his genuine cosmopolitan formation and his specific position as someone who could see European literary culture whole in a way that the provincial Danish establishment could not. His Jewishness, which had developed through centuries of living between cultures and between languages, gave him the multilingual cosmopolitan range that the literary critical enterprise he was undertaking required.
His biography of Heine is particularly significant because it represents Jewish intellectual solidarity of a specific kind, the recognition by one Jewish intellectual of what another had achieved in a similar position. Brandes saw in Heine, who had also entered German literary culture from a position of outsideness and had paid a comparable price in exclusion and exile, a mirror of his own situation. His reading of Heine is simultaneously literary criticism and autobiography, the Jewish critic reading the Jewish poet in the light of a shared structural position, and producing from that shared position a reading that illuminates both the literary achievement and the historical condition that made it possible and made it costly.
The Norwegian case adds a specific and painful dimension that the Danish case does not provide. Norway’s Jewish community was small, less than two thousand people, but its destruction during the German occupation was comprehensive and involved active Norwegian collaboration that the postwar Norwegian national narrative was slow to acknowledge. The deportation of Norwegian Jews in November 1942, organized with the active participation of the Norwegian police under the collaborationist Quisling government, was among the most complete destructions of any Western European Jewish community. Of the approximately seven hundred and seventy Norwegian Jews who were deported, only thirty-four survived.
The literary and historical reckoning with this catastrophe in Norway illustrates the custodianship question from a different angle. The Norwegian literary and academic establishment’s engagement with the deportation and with Norwegian collaboration was slow, incomplete, and shaped by the same convenient belief framework that operated in the Italian case, the narrative of resistance and victimhood that allowed the full accounting of collaboration to be deferred. The Jewish scholars and intellectuals who survived, a tiny number given the small size of the community and the completeness of the destruction, carried a relationship to Norwegian culture that was in some ways the most extreme version of the pattern this analysis has been tracing. They had experienced what Norwegian culture was capable of doing when required to choose, and they returned to or remained in a society that preferred not to examine that choice honestly.
The figure of Johan Borgen is relevant here as a non-Jewish Norwegian writer whose engagement with the occupation and with Jewish identity during the occupation illustrates what the custodianship question looks like from the inside of the majority culture. Borgen’s wartime writing, produced clandestinely during the occupation, engaged with the persecution of Jews and with Norwegian collaboration in ways that were more honest than most Norwegian cultural production of the period. His honesty is the honesty of the insider who has chosen to exercise the outsider’s critical vision voluntarily rather than being positioned there by birth and history. The contrast with what the Jewish intellectuals who survived the deportation produced is illuminating, because the voluntary outsider’s perspective and the involuntary outsider’s perspective produce different kinds of honesty and different kinds of literary achievement.
The Swedish case is distinctive because Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War meant that its Jewish community was not subjected to the catastrophic destruction that overtook the Jewish communities in Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Poland. Swedish Jews were also a relatively assimilated and socially integrated community, though not on the same scale of integration as the Danish community. The Swedish academic and literary establishment was more open to Jewish participation than most European equivalents in the interwar period, partly because Sweden’s relative prosperity and social stability reduced the economic competition and social anxiety that fueled antisemitism elsewhere.
The most important Swedish Jewish intellectual contribution to literary culture came through the emigration and exile networks that Sweden’s neutrality made possible. Sweden was a refuge for Jewish intellectuals fleeing Germany and German-occupied Europe, and the intellectual contribution of these refugees to Swedish cultural life in the 1940s and 1950s was significant. The German Jewish literary critical tradition was partially transmitted to Swedish cultural life through this route, adding European depth and sophistication to a national literary culture that had been relatively isolated from continental intellectual currents.
Peter Weiss is the most important case. Weiss was a German Jewish writer who emigrated to Sweden and spent his career there, writing primarily in German but living and working in a Swedish cultural context. His plays, particularly Marat/Sade and The Investigation, represent a specific form of the Jewish intellectual contribution to European literary culture, the engagement with political violence, historical catastrophe, and the relationship between aesthetic form and moral urgency, that this analysis has identified as distinctively Jewish in its formation even when it presents itself in universal theoretical terms. The Investigation, a documentary play based on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, is in the Levi tradition of bearing witness through formal means, the obligation of memory fulfilled through theatrical rather than narrative form. Its Swedish premiere was a cultural event that brought the specifically German Jewish reckoning with the Holocaust into Swedish cultural consciousness in ways that the Swedish literary establishment had not been forced to confront directly.
The Finnish case is the smallest and most peripheral of the Scandinavian configurations and it adds one genuinely distinctive feature to the overall picture. Finland’s Jewish community, roughly two thousand people concentrated primarily in Helsinki, existed in the extraordinary position of fighting on the German side against the Soviet Union during the Continuation War of 1941 to 1944 while simultaneously refusing to hand over its Jewish citizens to the Germans. Finnish Jewish soldiers served in the Finnish army fighting alongside German forces while those same German forces were implementing the Final Solution elsewhere in Europe. The Finnish refusal to hand over its Jews, maintained despite German pressure, reflects a specific form of Finnish Lutheran formation and Finnish civic solidarity that parallels the Danish case while occurring in a completely different military and political context.
The Finnish Jewish intellectual contribution to Finnish literary and historical scholarship was minimal in scale given the tiny size of the community, but the community’s extraordinary historical position, simultaneously allied with the perpetrators and protected by the society it was part of, produced a specific relationship to Finnish cultural identity that has been examined in Finnish Jewish historical writing in ways that illuminate the broader custodianship question from an unusual angle. The Finnish Jewish community was in the position of the ultimate insider-outsider, fighting for a country that was allied with a power that was simultaneously trying to kill them, and the historical writing about this experience raises the custodianship question in its most acute form. Who belongs to a tradition? Who can speak in its name? Who bears its obligations?
With regard to the Scandinavian countries, the Brandes case is the most important single addition because it demonstrates that the Jewish intellectual contribution to literary culture can operate at the level of founding and transforming an entire national literary tradition, not just enriching or complicating an established one. Brandes did not enter an existing canon and read it from a position of outsideness. He created the conditions for a new canon and a new critical practice that transformed Scandinavian literature internationally. The scale of the intervention is larger than anything the American Jewish critics achieved individually, and it was achieved from a position of more thorough outsideness, since Brandes was not just ethnically outside the dominant formation but was also excluded from the institutional positions that would have given him the platforms his American equivalents eventually obtained.
The rescue cases, Denmark and to a different degree Finland, add something that none of the other national configurations provides, which is evidence of what happens when the majority culture actively chooses to protect its Jewish minority rather than collaborating in its destruction. The Danish rescue was not simply a humanitarian act. It was an act of cultural solidarity rooted in a specific Lutheran theological formation that understood Danish Jews as part of the Danish community rather than as an alien element to be expelled when the costs of inclusion became high. The contrast with the Norwegian collaboration, where the same Lutheran cultural formation produced a completely different response, demonstrates that the custodianship question cannot be answered by cultural formation alone. It requires also the specific choices that individuals and communities make when the cost of solidarity becomes real rather than abstract.
The Norwegian case adds the specific pain of the small community’s destruction and the long delay in honest reckoning with what happened. Norway’s belated acknowledgment of its role in the deportation, which came formally only in 1998 when the Norwegian government apologized and established a compensation fund, illustrates the convenient beliefs framework. The narrative of Norwegian resistance, which was dominant in Norwegian cultural and historical scholarship for decades after the war, was a coalition device that protected national self-image at the cost of honest accounting. The Jewish scholars and community members who knew what had actually happened were not in a position to challenge the narrative effectively because they were too few and because the cost of challenging a convenient belief that was load-bearing for Norwegian national identity was prohibitively high. The reckoning came eventually because it always does, but it came slowly and incompletely.
The same underlying forces, the Jewish intellectual contribution rooted in specific historical formation, the custodianship question about who has the right and the capacity to transmit a tradition, the costs of assimilation and the gifts of outsideness, the catastrophic interruption of the Holocaust and its long shadow over postwar cultural life, operated in Scandinavia where the scale was much smaller, the communities were more thoroughly integrated, and the national formations were specifically Lutheran rather than Catholic, Anglican, or Orthodox. The differences in scale and formation produce differences in the specific form the story takes, but the underlying structure remains recognizable across all the national variations. The Jewish intellectual brings specific gifts rooted in a specific historical formation. The entry into the dominant institution requires a specific price in assimilation and cultural loss. The catastrophe interrupts the process and forces a reckoning that the dominant culture prefers to defer. The reckoning comes eventually and incompletely, shaped by coalition interests as much as by honest historical assessment.
The Brandes legacy is perhaps the most important single contribution of the Scandinavian cases to the broader analysis because it demonstrates that the Jewish intellectual contribution can be founding rather than merely enriching, can transform the conditions of literary production rather than simply operating within existing conditions, and can do so from a position of genuine formation in the national tradition combined with an outsideness that gives the critical enterprise its specific power and its specific limitations. Brandes loved Danish literature and transformed it. He was excluded from the institutions that should have recognized that transformation. His exclusion reinforced the outsider position that his criticism required. The pattern is the same one that runs through all the national cases. The gifts and the costs are inseparable, and the honest accounting requires naming both.
Switzerland is not a nation state in the conventional sense but a confederation of linguistically and culturally distinct communities, German-speaking, French-speaking, Italian-speaking, and Romansh-speaking, each with its own literary tradition, its own relationship to the dominant culture of the neighboring nation whose language it shares, and its own institutional structures. This means that the custodianship question in Switzerland is already more complicated than in any of the previous national cases because there is no single Swiss literary tradition to be entered or transformed. There are at least three, each of which participates in a broader linguistic tradition while maintaining a specific Swiss character that differentiates it from the literature of Germany, France, or Italy proper.
The Jewish communities in Switzerland were small and their legal situation was distinctive and in some respects uniquely restrictive by Western European standards. Swiss Jews did not receive full civic rights until 1866, later than in most Western European countries, and the specific form of Swiss civic organization, with its cantonal structure and its direct democracy, meant that Jewish emancipation required cantonal referenda that reflected popular attitudes in ways that more centralized political systems could override from above. The Swiss Jewish community was concentrated primarily in the German-speaking cantons and in the major cities, Basel, Zurich, Geneva, and Bern, and numbered roughly twenty thousand by the early twentieth century.
The Swiss relationship to the Second World War adds a specific and uncomfortable dimension to the custodianship question that the Swiss cultural and historical establishment was slow to examine honestly. Switzerland’s neutrality, like Sweden’s, protected it from the direct catastrophe of occupation and genocide. But Switzerland’s wartime behavior, including its closure of borders to Jewish refugees, its financial dealings with the Nazi regime, and its use of the J stamp in German Jewish passports that facilitated the identification and exclusion of Jewish refugees, was considerably more compromised than the postwar Swiss self-image of the honest neutral broker acknowledged. The Swiss historical reckoning with this wartime behavior, which came seriously only in the 1990s with the Bergier Commission’s investigation of Swiss wartime conduct, is a perfect illustration of the convenient beliefs framework operating at the national level.
The Basel case is the most important starting point for the custodianship question specifically. Basel was the site of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, organized by Theodor Herzl, and the choice of Basel was not accidental. Basel’s university, founded in 1460 and one of the oldest in Europe, had a relatively open intellectual culture compared to the German universities of the period, and Basel’s position as a border city connecting German, French, and Swiss cultural traditions gave it a cosmopolitan character that made it more hospitable to Jewish intellectual participation than many German universities. The fact that Herzl chose Basel for the founding of the Zionist movement reflects this relative openness, though it also reflects the practical consideration that a Swiss venue was more politically neutral than any German or Austrian city would have been.
The University of Basel’s intellectual tradition is relevant to this analysis because it produced Jacob Burckhardt, one of the most important historians and cultural critics of the nineteenth century, and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose relationship to the Jewish question was characteristically complex and whose influence on subsequent European intellectual life was enormous. Burckhardt’s cultural history, particularly The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, established a model of cultural historical analysis that had significant influence on subsequent literary and historical scholarship. His approach, which emphasized the total cultural environment of a period rather than political or economic factors alone, created a framework that Jewish cultural historians found congenial because it was organized around the kind of holistic cultural analysis that the Jewish intellectual tradition, with its emphasis on the interconnection of all dimensions of communal life, was naturally suited to.
Nietzsche’s relationship to antisemitism is one of the most discussed and most frequently misrepresented questions in intellectual history. Nietzsche was explicitly and consistently anti-antisemitic in his writings, broke with Wagner partly over Wagner’s antisemitism, praised Jewish intellectual vitality and moral seriousness repeatedly, and was appropriated by the Nazis after his death through selective quotation and falsification organized largely by his antisemitic sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. His actual views on Jews were complex and involved both genuine admiration for what he saw as Jewish toughness, historical resilience, and intellectual honesty, and a complicated critique of what he called the priestly type that had some Jewish associations in his thinking. His influence on Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was considerable, particularly on those who found in his critique of Christian morality and his celebration of intellectual courage resources for rethinking the relationship between Jewish identity and European culture.
The figure of Carl Spitteler, the Swiss German writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919, illustrates what the mainstream of Swiss German literary culture looked like before significant Jewish intellectual participation. Spitteler’s epic poetry, rooted in a specifically Swiss Protestant formation and drawing on classical and Germanic mythological traditions, represents a form of literary culture that was simultaneously ambitious in its scope and relatively closed in its cultural references. It is the literature of a specific formation, German Protestant Swiss bourgeois culture, that did not require or particularly invite outsider engagement.
The most important Jewish intellectual contribution to Swiss literary and cultural life came through the German-speaking Swiss university system, particularly the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the ETH. Zurich had a specific significance in Jewish intellectual history because the University of Zurich was one of the first European universities to admit women and was relatively more open to Jewish students and faculty than most German universities. It attracted Jewish students from across Central and Eastern Europe who were excluded from or marginalized in their home universities, and this created a specific intellectual environment in which Jewish intellectual formation encountered Swiss academic culture in ways that were productive for both.
The psychoanalytic tradition is the most important specific contribution of this Swiss Jewish intellectual environment. Sigmund Freud was Viennese rather than Swiss but the institutionalization of psychoanalysis happened partly through the Zurich Psychiatric Clinic, the Burghölzli, under Eugen Bleuler and Carl Gustav Jung. The relationship between Freud and Jung, which was initially collaborative and then dramatically ruptured, is a version of the custodianship question this analysis has been examining. Jung was a Swiss Protestant who brought to psychoanalysis a specifically Swiss Protestant formation rooted in the German romantic tradition, in Goethe and Schopenhauer and the mythology that the German romantic movement had elaborated. Freud was a Viennese Jew who brought to psychoanalysis the specific Jewish intellectual formation this analysis has identified, the interest in what lies beneath the surface of official discourse, the sensitivity to the gap between what is said and what is meant, the hermeneutics of suspicion rooted in centuries of reading between the lines of hostile cultures.
The rupture between Freud and Jung was not simply a theoretical disagreement about libido theory or the collective unconscious. It was also a disagreement about the custodianship of psychoanalysis as a tradition, about whether the tradition’s specifically Jewish intellectual formation was essential to it or incidental, about whether the tradition could be universalized into a form that dissolved its specifically Jewish origins or whether that universalization necessarily distorted something essential. Freud’s famous remark that psychoanalysis must not become a Jewish national affair, which he made in the context of supporting Jung’s leadership of the International Psychoanalytic Association, reflects his awareness of this tension and his attempt to navigate it through the assimilation strategy that Novick identified in the American historical profession. The tradition must present itself as universal rather than particular in order to gain institutional acceptance. The price of universalism is the concealment of the specifically Jewish formation that made the tradition possible.
Jung’s subsequent elaboration of his own analytical psychology, after the rupture with Freud, took a specifically Swiss Protestant direction that drew heavily on Germanic mythology, on alchemical symbolism, on the Christian mystical tradition, and on what he called the collective unconscious of specifically European peoples. His wartime statements about the differences between Jewish and Aryan psychology, which were genuinely antisemitic in ways that his subsequent defenders have never fully accounted for, represent the logic of the custodianship question taken to its most explicit and most damaging conclusion. If psychoanalysis had been distorted by its specifically Jewish origins, the corrective was a psychology rooted in the specifically Aryan formation that the Jewish tradition had supposedly suppressed or ignored. The argument is the mirror image of the argument this analysis has been making about what Jewish intellectual formation contributed to literary and cultural scholarship, but inverted into a claim that the specifically Jewish contribution was a distortion rather than an enrichment.
The Thomas Mann connection to Switzerland is important because Mann spent his years of exile from Nazi Germany in Switzerland and then in America, and his relationship to the Swiss German literary tradition illuminates what the Jewish intellectual contribution looked like by contrast and by interaction. Mann was not Jewish but several of his closest intellectual associates and correspondents were, and his great work of Swiss exile, the Joseph tetralogy, was a direct engagement with the Hebrew Bible’s Joseph story that drew on Jewish textual tradition with a depth and seriousness that reflected his sustained engagement with Jewish intellectual life. The Joseph novels are in some ways the most important example in German literature of a non-Jewish writer producing a work deeply shaped by Jewish intellectual and literary formation through sustained engagement with Jewish scholars and the Jewish textual tradition. Mann’s relationship to his Jewish correspondents and to the Jewish refugee community he shared exile with produced a body of work that illustrates the possibilities of genuine cross-traditional fertilization when the engagement is serious and sustained rather than superficial and decorative.
The figure of Walter Benjamin’s close friend Gershom Scholem is essential here because Scholem spent his early years in Germany and Switzerland before emigrating to Palestine and becoming the founder of the modern scholarly study of Jewish mysticism. His early academic formation was partly Swiss, and his relationship to the German academic tradition, from which he eventually turned away in favor of building a specifically Jewish scholarly tradition in Palestine, illustrates one response to the custodianship question that none of the other national cases had produced clearly. Scholem’s decision to leave the German university system and to work instead on building Jewish scholarly institutions in Palestine was a deliberate choice to redirect his intellectual gifts toward Jewish rather than German cultural formation, to become a custodian of a specifically Jewish tradition rather than a Jewish custodian of a German tradition. His work on Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, which established an entirely new field of scholarly inquiry, represents the alternative to the assimilation strategy, the investment of the Jewish intellectual formation in specifically Jewish rather than European scholarly enterprises.
His relationship to Benjamin, who made the opposite choice and attempted to remain a Jewish intellectual within the German cultural tradition, is one of the most poignant intellectual friendships of the twentieth century precisely because it embodies the tension between the two possible responses to the custodianship question. Scholem repeatedly urged Benjamin to come to Palestine, to learn Hebrew, to redirect his extraordinary gifts toward Jewish rather than German scholarly culture. Benjamin repeatedly deferred, remained in Europe, remained committed to his engagement with the German and French literary traditions, and died trying to escape the consequences of that choice. The friendship and the argument between them is the most honest dialogue available in the historical record about what the custodianship question ultimately means for the individual Jewish intellectual who must decide which tradition to serve.
The Swiss historical profession’s engagement with the wartime past is the most important contribution of the Swiss case to this analysis of the custodianship question in historical scholarship. The Bergier Commission, formally the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland Second World War, was established in 1996 following international pressure and the revelation of the extent of Swiss financial collaboration with the Nazi regime. The commission’s report, published in 2002, was a comprehensive historical accounting of Swiss wartime conduct that challenged the dominant postwar Swiss narrative of the honest neutral in ways that were deeply uncomfortable for Swiss national identity.
The commission’s work and the political controversy it generated illustrate the convenient beliefs framework with unusual clarity because the convenient belief being challenged was not just an academic historical interpretation but a load-bearing element of Swiss national identity. Switzerland’s self-image as the humanitarian neutral, the country of the Red Cross, the honest broker between warring powers, was not merely a flattering story that Swiss people told about themselves. It was the basis of Switzerland’s international role, its financial industry’s claim to special trustworthiness, and its political legitimacy as a small nation surviving between larger powers. Challenging that narrative was therefore not just a historical revision but a threat to the institutional and economic structures that the narrative supported.
The historians who led the most searching examination of Swiss wartime conduct, both within the Bergier Commission and in the broader historical scholarship that preceded and followed it, included Jewish scholars whose formation gave them specific reasons to pursue the inquiry honestly and specific sensitivity to what the official narrative was concealing. The figure of Jean Ziegler, a Swiss sociologist and politician who had been among the earliest and most aggressive critics of Swiss wartime conduct, illustrates both the contribution of the outsider’s perspective and the coalition costs of that contribution. Ziegler was not Jewish but his willingness to challenge the Swiss national narrative made him a permanent target of Swiss political and institutional hostility that illustrates precisely how coalition enforcement operates when a convenient belief is threatened.
The Swiss German literary tradition’s engagement with the custodianship question takes a distinctive form through the work of Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, neither of whom was Jewish but both of whom produced work that engaged with the relationship between Swiss national identity, moral complacency, and the Jewish question in ways that illustrated what the outsider’s defamiliarizing vision looked like when exercised voluntarily by insiders who had chosen uncomfortable honesty over comfortable belonging.
Frisch’s Andorra, first performed in 1961, is the most direct literary engagement with the custodianship question in the Swiss literary tradition. The play depicts a fictional small country whose inhabitants collectively project onto a young man the identity of a Jew, treating him as Jewish in their perceptions and expectations even though he is not actually Jewish, and the play traces the consequences of this collective projection for both the individual and the community. Frisch’s point is partly about antisemitism but more fundamentally about how communities construct otherness, how the outsider’s identity is as much a product of the insider’s projections as of the outsider’s actual formation, and how the community’s need for an other to project onto is inseparable from its own identity formation. The play uses the Jewish question as a lens for examining something universal about communal identity, which is precisely the operation of defamiliarization that this analysis identified as a distinctively Jewish intellectual contribution. Frisch performs this operation from inside Swiss culture on Swiss culture, without being Jewish, which suggests that the specific intellectual operation can be learned and transmitted even across the boundary of formation.
Dürrenmatt’s The Visit and The Physicists engage with similar questions about moral responsibility, collective guilt, and the relationship between prosperity and complicity that the Swiss wartime experience raised without being able to address directly. Dürrenmatt’s Swiss Protestant formation gave him a specifically Swiss angle on these questions, the Calvinist tradition’s emphasis on individual moral responsibility and collective accountability, and his plays use this formation to examine questions that his country’s national narrative preferred to avoid. The Jewish question is present in his work less as an explicit subject than as a subtext, the unexamined presence that shapes the moral landscape without being directly named.
The multilingual and confederal structure of Switzerland means that the custodianship question operates simultaneously across multiple literary traditions and multiple national formations, each of which has its own relationship to Jewish intellectual participation and its own convenient beliefs about what its tradition is and who has the right to speak in its name. The German-speaking Swiss literary tradition is not identical to German literature. It has its own character rooted in Swiss Protestant formation, Swiss civic culture, and Swiss relationship to the German literary tradition as something simultaneously central and foreign. The Jewish intellectual who entered this tradition was therefore entering something that was itself already positioned as an outsider to the dominant version of the tradition it participated in, which creates a doubling of the outsider position that has no precise equivalent in the other national cases.
The psychoanalytic tradition and the Freud-Jung rupture add the most philosophically sophisticated version of the custodianship argument available in any of the national cases, because it makes explicit the question of whether a tradition’s specifically Jewish intellectual formation is essential to it or incidental, and what happens when an attempt is made to universalize or de-Judaize the tradition. The answer that the history of psychoanalysis provides is that the de-Judaization does not produce a more universal tradition. It produces a different tradition with its own specific formation, in Jung’s case a specifically Germanic Protestant romantic formation, that has its own limitations and its own blind spots. The universalist claim conceals a particularist substitution, which is exactly what this analysis argues happens when the custodians of a tradition change.
The Scholem-Benjamin dialogue adds the most honest engagement with the fundamental choice that the custodianship question poses for the individual Jewish intellectual. You can invest your formation in the service of the dominant tradition you have entered, becoming its Jewish custodian and paying the assimilation price that entry requires. Or you can redirect your formation toward building specifically Jewish scholarly and cultural institutions, becoming a custodian of your own tradition rather than someone else’s. Neither choice is without cost. Benjamin’s choice cost him his life. Scholem’s choice cost him the engagement with the German literary tradition that his formation had equipped him to make. The dialogue between them is the most honest available record of what the custodianship question ultimately means for the individual who must live with the consequences of the answer.
The Swiss wartime reckoning and its convenient beliefs dimension adds a demonstration of how the custodianship question operates at the national level when the tradition being defended is not a literary canon but a national identity narrative. The Swiss case is the clearest example in the comparative analysis of how a convenient belief that is load-bearing for national identity resists honest historical examination, how the coalition enforcement mechanisms operate to protect the narrative, and how the reckoning comes eventually and incompletely through the pressure of external forces and the persistent work of scholars whose formation gives them specific reasons to pursue the truth that the dominant coalition prefers to avoid.
Finally the Frisch and Dürrenmatt cases add a demonstration that the specific intellectual operations this analysis has identified as distinctively Jewish contributions, defamiliarization, the reading of official discourse against the grain, the moral urgency rooted in accountability, the willingness to name what the community prefers to leave unnamed, can be learned and transmitted across the boundary of formation when the conditions are right. Frisch and Dürrenmatt were not Jewish. They were Swiss Protestants formed in a tradition that had its own resources for moral seriousness and honest self-examination. But their work performs operations that are structurally continuous with the Jewish intellectual contribution this analysis has been tracing, and it does so in direct engagement with the specifically Swiss version of the question that Jewish intellectual formation had raised elsewhere. The Swiss case suggests that what is specifically Jewish about the intellectual contribution is not a fixed essence that only Jews can produce but a set of intellectual habits and moral commitments that develop naturally in conditions of outsideness and historical vulnerability and that can be learned, however imperfectly, by insiders who choose the outsider’s perspective voluntarily. That conclusion is the most generous and the most honest resolution of the custodianship question that the comparative analysis makes available.
Holland is a genuinely rich case and it differs from all the previous national configurations in ways that are historically distinctive and analytically illuminating.
Start with what makes the Dutch case structurally unique. The Netherlands had one of the oldest and most deeply rooted Jewish communities in Western Europe, with Sephardic Jews arriving after the expulsion from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497, followed by Ashkenazic Jews from Central and Eastern Europe over the subsequent centuries. Amsterdam became known as the Jerusalem of the West, the most important center of Jewish life in Western Europe in the seventeenth century, and the Dutch Jewish community was among the most culturally productive and most intellectually significant in the early modern period. This deep rootedness created a relationship between Dutch Jewish intellectual life and Dutch culture that was both more intimate and more complex than the equivalent relationships in countries where Jewish settlement was more recent.
The Dutch Reformed tradition that shaped Dutch culture from the Reformation onward had a specific relationship to Jewish identity and Jewish textual culture that differs importantly from the Lutheran formation that shaped Scandinavian culture and from the Anglican formation that shaped English culture. Dutch Calvinism was organized around intense engagement with the Hebrew Bible, with the Old Testament as a living document rather than merely a prefiguration of the New Testament, and with a conception of the Dutch nation as in some sense analogous to ancient Israel, a covenant people with a special relationship to God mediated through scripture. This Hebraic dimension of Dutch Calvinist culture produced a relationship to Jewish textual tradition and Jewish identity that was simultaneously more theologically serious and more potentially fraternal than the equivalent Catholic or Anglican relationships. Dutch Calvinist intellectuals studied Hebrew, engaged seriously with rabbinic commentary, and in some cases developed genuine scholarly relationships with Jewish contemporaries that were more equal and more intellectually substantive than anything available in most other European cultural contexts.
Baruch Spinoza is the founding figure for any account of Jewish intellectual engagement with Dutch culture and the custodianship question, and his case is so fundamental and so philosophically rich that it deserves careful attention even though he was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656 and therefore occupies a position that is outside both the Jewish tradition and the Dutch Christian tradition simultaneously.
Spinoza’s excommunication is the most dramatic instance available in the historical record of what happens when a Jewish intellectual follows an argument beyond what the community can accommodate. The cherem issued against him by the Amsterdam Jewish community was more severe in its language than almost any other excommunication in the community’s records, and its specific charges remain somewhat unclear, but the general thrust is not difficult to understand. Spinoza was developing a philosophical system that dissolved the distinction between God and nature, denied the divine authorship of the Torah, questioned the historical claims of the biblical narrative, and undermined the basis of Jewish communal authority. He was doing, from inside the Jewish intellectual tradition and using the tools of Jewish textual analysis, precisely what this analysis identifies as the operation of reading a tradition against the grain of its own official self-presentation. But he was doing it to his own tradition rather than to the Christian tradition that Jewish intellectuals would later enter, and the community responded with exactly the coalition enforcement mechanism this analysis predicts.
His subsequent career, working as a lens grinder while developing the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise, represents a specific resolution of the custodianship question that none of the other cases in this analysis had produced. Spinoza was neither a custodian of the Jewish tradition he had been expelled from nor a custodian of the Dutch Christian tradition he had never entered. He was working outside both traditions on a philosophical system that claimed to supersede them both by finding the rational foundations that underlay their different mythological expressions. His universalism was more radical than the assimilation universalism that Novick identified in American Jewish historians because it was not a performance of belonging designed to gain institutional access. It was a genuine philosophical commitment to a framework that dissolved the categories of both belonging and exclusion.
The influence of Spinoza on subsequent Dutch intellectual and literary culture is complex and long-running. He was condemned in his own time by both the Dutch Reformed establishment and the Jewish community, but his ideas gradually permeated Dutch intellectual culture and became central to the Dutch Enlightenment tradition that developed in the eighteenth century. The specifically Dutch version of Enlightenment thought, which was more tolerant and more pluralistic than the French version and more philosophically rigorous than the English version, bears Spinoza’s intellectual DNA in ways that shaped the Dutch cultural context within which Jewish intellectuals would subsequently operate.
The Dutch Golden Age context is essential for understanding what the Jewish intellectual community contributed to Dutch cultural life before the period of formal academic institutions. The Amsterdam Jewish community of the seventeenth century was one of the most intellectually productive in the world, and its engagement with Dutch culture was not primarily through academic institutions but through the printing industry, through commerce, through medicine, through philosophy, and through the specific form of intellectual sociability that Amsterdam’s cosmopolitan character made possible. The Jewish printing houses of Amsterdam were among the most important in Europe, producing not only Hebrew and Yiddish texts for Jewish communities across Europe but also texts in multiple languages that circulated in the broader Dutch and European intellectual market. This gave Amsterdam’s Jewish community a specific relationship to the production and circulation of knowledge that was different from the relationship of Jewish communities in countries where printing was more tightly controlled by religious authorities.
Menasseh ben Israel is the figure who most clearly represents the Jewish intellectual engagement with Dutch culture in the Golden Age period. Menasseh was a rabbi, a printer, a scholar, and a diplomat who engaged with Dutch intellectual culture at the highest levels and who used his position in Amsterdam to advocate for the readmission of Jews to England, eventually persuading Cromwell to allow Jewish settlement in England in 1656. His intellectual relationships with Christian Dutch scholars, including Hugo Grotius and Rembrandt, who painted his portrait, illustrate the specific form of Jewish-Dutch intellectual engagement that Amsterdam’s unique cultural environment made possible. Menasseh was simultaneously a custodian of the Jewish tradition and an active participant in the broader Dutch intellectual culture, moving between the two without fully belonging to either in ways that anticipate the position of the Jewish intellectuals this analysis has been examining in later national contexts.
The Dutch literary tradition that would eventually become the object of academic study and interpretation is a tradition with specific characteristics that are relevant to the custodianship question. Dutch literature from the medieval period through the Golden Age and into the modern period is marked by a specific combination of Calvinist moral seriousness, bourgeois realism, and cosmopolitan openness that reflects the specific social conditions of Dutch urban culture. The great Dutch painters of the Golden Age, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, produced a visual art that is the closest analogue to the literary tradition in its values and its methods, attending to the specific particularity of ordinary experience with a moral and perceptual seriousness that has no precise equivalent in any other European tradition. The literary tradition shares these values even when it lacks the visual tradition’s supreme artistic achievement.
The academic institutional context for literary and historical scholarship in the Netherlands developed through the universities of Leiden, Utrecht, Amsterdam, and Groningen, each with its own specific character and intellectual tradition. Leiden was the most prestigious and the most internationally connected, founded in 1575 as a reward for the city’s resistance to the Spanish siege and closely associated with the Dutch Calvinist humanist tradition that produced figures like Hugo Grotius and Joseph Scaliger. The Leiden tradition of classical and Oriental scholarship, which included serious engagement with Hebrew and with Jewish textual tradition, created a specific intellectual environment that was more open to Jewish intellectual participation than most European equivalents.
Jewish entry into Dutch academic institutions followed a pattern broadly similar to the other national cases but with some specifically Dutch variations. The relatively early emancipation of Dutch Jews, who received full civic rights in 1796 under the Batavian Republic established by the French Revolutionary armies, gave Dutch Jews a longer period of formal legal equality than most European Jewish communities enjoyed. This earlier emancipation meant that the first generation of Dutch Jewish academics was already operating in the mid-nineteenth century, considerably earlier than the equivalent generations in Germany or the United States.
The figure of Isaac da Costa illustrates the specific complexity of Dutch Jewish intellectual engagement with the Dutch cultural tradition in the nineteenth century. Da Costa was a Sephardic Jewish poet who converted to Christianity in 1822 and became one of the leading figures of the Dutch Réveil, the Dutch Protestant revival movement that was a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and French revolutionary secularism. His conversion was partly intellectual, rooted in his engagement with German romantic Christianity, and partly social, a response to the cultural pressure to assimilate that the post-emancipation Dutch Jewish community faced. His subsequent career as a Christian poet who maintained a profound engagement with his Jewish origins, writing extensively about Jewish history and Jewish identity from a Christian perspective, illustrates the custodianship question in one of its most painful and most philosophically complex forms.
Da Costa’s case raises a question that this analysis has not yet fully addressed, which is what happens when a Jewish intellectual does not simply maintain an analytical distance from the Christian tradition he enters but actually converts to it. The conversion is the most complete possible form of the assimilation strategy, the abandonment of outsideness in favor of full insider belonging. But da Costa’s experience suggests that the conversion did not resolve the custodianship question but simply relocated it. He was never fully accepted as a Dutch Christian by a community that continued to see his Jewish origins as relevant to his identity. He was never fully accepted as a Jewish intellectual by a Jewish community that experienced his conversion as betrayal. He occupied a position of double outsideness that was in some ways more painful and more philosophically complex than the position of the secular Jewish intellectual who maintained his Jewish identity while entering the Christian cultural tradition without converting.
The Multatuli case is important as a counter-example that illuminates the Jewish contribution by contrast. Eduard Douwes Dekker, who wrote under the name Multatuli, was the most important Dutch novelist of the nineteenth century and his Max Havelaar, published in 1860, is the foundational text of Dutch colonial literature and one of the earliest and most powerful literary critiques of European colonialism. Multatuli was not Jewish but his position in Dutch literary culture was that of the radical outsider who saw the official self-presentation of Dutch colonial culture with the clarity of someone who had experienced its actual practice in the Dutch East Indies. His defamiliarizing vision of Dutch colonial self-congratulation, his willingness to name what the comfortable Dutch bourgeoisie preferred to leave unnamed, performs exactly the operation that this analysis has identified as a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture. The fact that it was performed here by a non-Jewish Dutch writer who occupied an outsider position for different reasons illustrates again the point you made earlier about the operation being learnable across the boundary of formation when the conditions of outsideness are present for other reasons.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw significant Jewish participation in Dutch literary and intellectual life that is less well-documented than the equivalent participation in German, French, or American culture but that follows similar patterns. The Dutch socialist movement had significant Jewish participation and the relationship between Dutch Jewish intellectuals and the socialist tradition parallels the relationship between American Jewish intellectuals and the liberal tradition that Novick documents. Both represent the adoption of a universalist political framework as an assimilation strategy that simultaneously reflected genuine commitment and served the specific interests of a group seeking inclusion in institutions that had previously excluded them.
Herman Heijermans is the most important Dutch Jewish literary figure of the early twentieth century and his case directly illustrates the gifts and the costs of the Jewish intellectual position in Dutch literary culture. Heijermans was a playwright and journalist who became one of the most popular and most critically acclaimed Dutch writers of his generation. His play Op Hoop van Zegen, The Good Hope, published in 1900, is a naturalist drama about the exploitation of Dutch fishing workers that combines the moral urgency of the prophetic tradition with the literary methods of European naturalism in ways that are recognizably continuous with the Jewish intellectual contribution this analysis has identified. The play’s engagement with the suffering of the poor and the moral responsibility of those with power reflects the covenant tradition’s insistence on accountability and its sensitivity to the gap between official piety and actual practice.
Heijermans wrote also about specifically Jewish subjects, producing a body of work that engaged with Amsterdam Jewish life with a combination of love and critical honesty that parallels what Roth and Bellow did for American Jewish life later in the century. His Jewish writing is less well-known internationally than his social realist plays but it is essential for understanding the full range of his contribution. The combination of engagement with the dominant Dutch literary tradition and engagement with specifically Jewish subject matter, without fully subordinating either to the other, represents one of the more successful navigations of the custodianship question available in any of the national cases.
The Dutch historical tradition and the custodianship question in historical scholarship raises questions that are in some ways more politically charged than the equivalent questions in literary scholarship because Dutch history includes the history of Dutch colonialism and the Dutch role in the Atlantic slave trade, both of which are subjects where the honest accounting has been slow and incomplete in ways that parallel the Swiss wartime reckoning.
Johan Huizinga is the most important Dutch historian of the twentieth century and his Autumn of the Middle Ages, published in Dutch in 1919, is among the most influential works of cultural history produced anywhere in the period. Huizinga was not Jewish but his method, which combined meticulous archival research with a sensitivity to the emotional and aesthetic texture of historical experience that went beyond what conventional political or economic history could capture, reflects the influence of the Swiss German cultural history tradition that Burckhardt had established and that Jewish intellectual participation had helped shape. His engagement with the declining medieval culture of the Burgundian Netherlands produces a form of historical elegy that is structurally similar to what Bassani produced for Italian Jewish bourgeois culture, the mourning for a world of genuine beauty and genuine achievement that is nonetheless passing away.
The Jewish historians who worked within or alongside the Dutch historical tradition brought to it specific gifts that Huizinga’s own formation, rooted in Dutch Calvinist bourgeois culture, could not provide. The sensitivity to the experience of the excluded and the marginalized, the awareness of what official Dutch historical narrative concealed about the treatment of Jewish communities, colonial subjects, and other outsiders, the moral urgency rooted in accountability, all of these are present in the Dutch Jewish historical contribution in ways that parallel the contributions this analysis has identified in the American, German, French, and Russian cases.
The Second World War and the destruction of Dutch Jewry is the catastrophic interruption that shapes everything in the Dutch case. The Netherlands lost approximately seventy-five percent of its Jewish population during the German occupation, the highest percentage of any Western European country. Roughly one hundred and five thousand Dutch Jews were murdered, out of a pre-war population of approximately one hundred and forty thousand. The completeness of the destruction was facilitated by the efficiency of Dutch administrative systems, the relatively flat geography that made hiding difficult, and the active collaboration of a significant portion of the Dutch civil service and police with the German occupation authorities.
The figure of Anne Frank is the most internationally known Dutch Jewish victim of the Holocaust and her diary, discovered and published by her father Otto Frank after the war, became one of the most widely read documents of the twentieth century. The diary’s international reception illustrates the custodianship question from an unexpected angle, because the specific form in which Anne Frank’s story has been transmitted and received internationally has been shaped by editorial and theatrical decisions that have tended to universalize her experience in ways that minimize or bracket its specifically Jewish character. The famous conclusion of the theatrical adaptation, her statement that she still believes people are good at heart, was extracted from a context in which the full weight of what was happening to her and to her community is present, and presented as a universal statement about human nature that could comfort audiences of all backgrounds. The specifically Jewish dimension of what the diary documents, the systematic murder of a specific people for being that people, was softened in the transmission in ways that parallel the operations this analysis has identified across the literary academic cases.
This universalizing reception of Anne Frank’s diary is itself a demonstration of the custodianship question operating at a popular cultural level. The diary was placed in the hands of custodians who brought to it the distancing mechanism that this analysis has been examining throughout, who read it as a universal human document rather than as a specifically Jewish document, and who transmitted a version of it that the broadest possible audience could receive without being fully confronted by its specifically Jewish content. The debate about this reception, which has been ongoing since the diary’s first publication and which intensified with the theatrical adaptation, is a microcosm of the broader argument this analysis has been making about the relationship between insider and outsider custodianship of a tradition.
The postwar Dutch historical reckoning with the occupation and with Dutch collaboration has followed a trajectory broadly similar to the Swiss and Norwegian cases but with specific Dutch variations. The initial postwar narrative emphasized Dutch resistance, celebrating figures like those who sheltered Anne Frank and other Jewish families, and minimized the extent of Dutch collaboration with German occupation authorities. The gradual erosion of this narrative through more honest historical research, associated with scholars like Loe de Jong whose massive history of the Netherlands in the Second World War took decades to produce and generated enormous controversy.
The specifically Jewish contribution to this historical reckoning has been significant. Jewish historians and survivors who understood what had actually happened, who carried the specific knowledge of what Dutch institutions had done when required to choose, brought to the historical enterprise a motivation and a moral urgency that the dominant Dutch historical establishment found uncomfortable precisely because it threatened a narrative that was load-bearing for Dutch national identity.
The figure of Presser is essential here. Jacques Presser was a Dutch Jewish historian and novelist whose work on the destruction of Dutch Jewry, particularly his Ondergang, published in English as Ashes in the Wind, was the first comprehensive historical account of the persecution and murder of Dutch Jews during the occupation. Presser was himself a survivor whose wife had been murdered in the camps, and his history is simultaneously a work of rigorous scholarship and a work of moral witness that carries the full weight of personal knowledge of what it was documenting. His dual identity as a historian and a survivor placed him in the position of the ultimate insider-outsider with respect to the Dutch historical tradition, someone who had full professional formation in Dutch historical scholarship and full experiential knowledge of what that scholarship had to account for.
His novel De nacht der Girondijnen, published in English as Breaking Point, which fictionalizes the experience of a Dutch Jewish official who collaborated with the German authorities in the administration of the deportations in exchange for temporary protection for himself and his family, is one of the most morally serious Dutch literary works of the postwar period precisely because it refuses the comfortable narrative of resistance and collaboration in favor of an honest engagement with the impossible moral choices that the occupation imposed on its victims. The novel is written from the position of the Jewish intellectual who cannot afford the luxury of the simple moral narrative, who understands from personal experience that the conditions the occupation created made moral clarity inaccessible to its victims in ways that the postwar moral narrative consistently refused to acknowledge.
The Dutch case also adds something distinctive through the figure of Etty Hillesum, whose diaries and letters from the years 1941 to 1943, written in Amsterdam and in the transit camp at Westerbork before her deportation and murder at Auschwitz, represent one of the most spiritually and intellectually serious documents of the Holocaust period. Hillesum was a Dutch Jewish woman with a profound engagement with Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, with psychology, and with a form of mystical spirituality that drew on both Jewish and Christian sources without fully belonging to either. Her diaries are simultaneously a document of witness, a spiritual autobiography, and a work of literary art that engages with the Dutch literary and intellectual tradition she had been formed in from the position of someone experiencing its complete failure to protect her.
She read Dostoevsky with an intensity that was simultaneously aesthetic and existential, finding in his engagement with suffering, with moral complexity, and with the relationship between human darkness and human capacity for love resources for understanding what she was experiencing in ways that no specifically Dutch literary tradition could provide. She was simultaneously inside the Dutch cultural tradition she had been formed in and reaching beyond it toward a Russian literary tradition that spoke more directly to the extremity of her situation. The custodianship question appears here in its most intimate form, the individual reader in extremity finding in a foreign tradition resources that her own tradition cannot supply, and bringing to that foreign tradition an engagement rooted in her specifically Jewish formation that illuminates it from an angle its native custodians could not easily occupy.
The postwar Dutch Jewish intellectual contribution to Dutch literary and cultural life has been shaped by the smallness of the surviving community and the enormousness of what was lost. The destruction of seventy-five percent of the Dutch Jewish population meant that the intellectual formation that had been building across generations, the specific combination of Dutch civic culture and Jewish textual tradition that had produced figures like Heijermans and Presser and Hillesum, was largely destroyed. What remained was a community working to reconstruct both its numbers and its intellectual tradition from a condition of catastrophic loss, and the work of reconstruction has been a form of the zachor, the obligation of memory, was a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture.
The Spinoza case is the most philosophically fundamental contribution because it demonstrates what happens when the Jewish intellectual formation is applied not to the Christian tradition but to both the Jewish and the Christian traditions simultaneously, finding in the intersection a philosophical system that claims to transcend both. Spinoza’s double excommunication, expelled from the Jewish community and condemned by the Dutch Reformed establishment, is the most extreme version of the outsider position, and his subsequent philosophical career is the most radical attempt to resolve the custodianship question by dissolving the categories of belonging and exclusion that make the question arise. Whether that resolution is philosophically satisfying is a question that has been debated for three and a half centuries. What is clear is that it comes at a cost of total isolation that even the most marginal of the other Jewish intellectuals in this analysis did not face.
The Dutch Golden Age context provides the most developed historical example of genuine Jewish-Christian intellectual partnership available in the early modern period, the Amsterdam environment in which Menasseh ben Israel and his Christian colleagues could engage in substantive scholarly exchange across the confessional boundary without either side having to perform the full assimilation that later institutional contexts would require. This suggests that the custodianship question does not have only the two resolutions thisanalysis has been examining, full assimilation with its costs or complete outsideness with its gifts. There are configurations in which something closer to genuine partnership is possible, and the Amsterdam Golden Age is the historical example that demonstrates this possibility most clearly.
The Presser and Hillesum cases add the most intimate and the most morally serious versions of the custodianship question as it operates at the individual level, the scholar and the reader in extremity finding in their formation and their engagement with literary tradition resources for understanding and bearing witness that the catastrophe that was destroying them simultaneously demanded and made almost impossibly difficult. Their work is the most honest demonstration available of what the Jewish intellectual formation contributes to the engagement with literary tradition when the stakes are ultimate rather than merely institutional, when the question is not about professional recognition or canonical inclusion but about the capacity to bear witness to what is happening with enough moral clarity and enough literary precision that the truth survives.
The Dutch wartime reckoning and its convenient beliefs dimension adds a demonstration, parallel to the Swiss case but more extreme given the scale of the destruction and the degree of collaboration, of how the custodianship question operates at the national level when the tradition being defended includes a national identity narrative that is load-bearing for the institutional structures of the postwar state. The Dutch case is perhaps the most painful of the Western European cases precisely because the destruction was so complete and the initial narrative so dishonest about what Dutch institutions had done, and because the honest reckoning when it came was still incomplete in ways that the surviving Jewish community and its historians could document but could not fully force the dominant institutions to acknowledge.
The final distinctive contribution of the Dutch case is the Spinozist tradition of radical philosophical universalism that runs through Dutch intellectual culture and that creates a specific intellectual environment within which the Jewish contribution operates differently than in any of the other national cases. The Dutch tradition’s comfort with radical philosophical questioning, its tolerance for heterodoxy rooted in the commercial and political pragmatism of a small trading nation that needed to accommodate multiple confessions and multiple nationalities, created an intellectual climate that was in some respects more genuinely open to the kind of radical questioning that the Jewish intellectual formation naturally generates than any of the other national traditions this analysis has examined. The paradox is that this openness also created the conditions for the most radical assimilation, the Spinozist dissolution of Jewish identity into universal philosophical humanity, that represents the most complete possible version of the assimilation cost this analysis has been documenting across all the national cases.
The Neutralization Theory of Hatred
Using this theory, the Holocaust, Vichy, the Soviet purge of cosmopolitans, the Norwegian and Dutch deportations are mass activations of an evolved adaptation whose function is to neutralize individuals whose continued existence imposes net fitness costs on the hater. Sell’s framework lets you read the antisemitic catastrophe as something more than ideological failure or political opportunism. It was the deployment, at industrial scale, of cognitive machinery that evolved to remove toxic individuals from small ancestral environments.
Start with the trigger structure. Sell identifies four pathways: direct experience of costs, counterfactual reasoning about non-existence, social copying of who others find toxic, and outputs from other emotion systems such as envy, fear, disgust, shame, jealousy, and anger. The European antisemitic tradition activates all four at once. Christian theology supplied the social copy template across centuries. Jews are toxic and you should hate them because everyone you trust hates them. Envy supplied the trigger for resentment of Jewish economic and intellectual success, the disproportionate representation of Jews in banking, commerce, the professions, and academic life. Sell cites Sowell on the demonization of middleman minorities as a consequence of envy. Fear supplied the trigger associated with rumors of Jewish power, blood libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the conspiracy theory infrastructure that made Jewish neighbors appear as agents of an alien plot. Disgust supplied the trigger about purity and contamination, the racial hygiene framework that the Nazis elaborated drew on disgust adaptations rather than reasoned argument.
The convergence of these triggers explains something my essay leaves implicit. The Jewish intellectuals you document brought gifts to the traditions they entered. Brandes transformed Scandinavian literature. Mandelstam wrote some of the greatest Russian poetry of the twentieth century. Benjamin read Goethe with greater depth than most native German custodians. Bergson and Levinas reshaped French philosophy. The hatred adaptation does not require that the target impose actual costs. It requires that the target trigger one or more of the cue systems that ancestrally predicted negative association value. Envy of intellectual achievement is sufficient. Disgust at perceived foreignness is sufficient. The accumulated weight of generations of social copying is sufficient. The contribution can be recognized as valuable and the hatred can persist beside that recognition because hatred does not consult the long-form ledger.
Sell’s account of information warfare illuminates the propaganda apparatus that accompanied every wave of European antisemitism. The hateful person, he argues, attempts to lower other people’s welfare tradeoff ratios toward the target by spreading information designed to recalibrate the status-setting machinery in third parties. The information does not need to be true. It needs only to convert bystanders into co-haters who will withdraw protection from the target. The Dreyfus Affair, the Doctors’ Plot, the Stürmer cartoons, the wartime Jewish question newsreels, these are the information warfare strategy of hatred deployed at the level of the modern state. Soviet rhetoric of rootless cosmopolitans functioned as antisemitic targeting through deniable language maps onto Sell’s prediction that hatred information warfare uses whatever vocabulary the local social environment supplies.
Sell predicts that hatred spreads through coalitions and that defenders of the hated person become themselves objects of hatred for blocking the neutralization project. This explains the rescue cases and their rarity. Where Jewish neighbors were known personally, integrated into civic life, and visible to the bystander population as concrete individuals rather than as the abstract category supplied by the propaganda, the social copying could fail. The Danish rescue happened because Danish bystanders did not copy German hatred. They had personal positive welfare tradeoff ratios with their Jewish neighbors that the Nazi designation could not override. The Norwegian collaboration happened because the bystander population was too small, too dispersed, and too removed from concrete relationships with Jews to resist the imported hatred frame. The Italian case sits between, with mass collaboration in some regions and active rescue in others depending on the texture of local relationships.
The Dutch case is the most painful application of the theory because the Netherlands had perhaps the deepest historical integration of Jews into civic life of any Western European country, going back to Spinoza and Menasseh ben Israel, and yet seventy-five percent of Dutch Jews were murdered. The theory predicts this outcome through a different feature, predatory aggression and timing. Sell argues that hatred-based aggression times itself to victim vulnerability and exploits administrative competence. Dutch civil service efficiency, Dutch geographical exposure, Dutch police compliance, the very competence of Dutch institutions converted them into instruments for the predatory aggression strategy of an external hater, the German occupation, supplemented by enough domestic collaborators to operate the machinery. The personal positive welfare tradeoff ratios that protected Danish Jews could not protect Dutch Jews because the institutional apparatus operated at a scale where individual relationships had no purchase.
Sell’s prediction about reciprocal hatred opens onto something that the conventional wisdom treats as a moral mystery. He argues that hatred is reciprocal because if someone hates you, your continued existence becomes a threat to him, lowering his association value for you, triggering hatred in return. The Jewish intellectuals who produced morally serious work such as Arendt, Hillesum, Benjamin, did not reciprocate hatred for hatred. They continued to engage with the traditions of the cultures that had tried to kill them. Levi wrote in Italian, the language of the racial laws. Celan wrote in German, the language of his murderers. Arendt remained engaged with Heidegger across his Nazi years. This non-reciprocation is the anomaly the theory does not predict, and it points to something in the prophetic tradition, the obligation of memory, the witness function, the moral grammar that asks what truth-telling requires rather than what self-protection allows. The hatred adaptation can be overridden by other systems. The work of Levi and Celan is what overriding looks like under the most extreme conditions the theory’s environment can produce.
The Spinoza case maps onto the within-group version of the theory. Sell describes how a community member who threatens communal authority can shift from positive to negative association value within the community, triggering coalition enforcement. The cherem against Spinoza is the Amsterdam Jewish community’s hatred adaptation activating against someone whose continued community membership had become a fitness cost to the rabbinical authorities whose authority his philosophical work threatened. The same logic explains the postwar Jewish community’s reception of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Finkielkraut’s The Imaginary Jew. Both works threatened the postwar community’s organizing convenient beliefs, and both authors faced coalition enforcement of varying intensity from sectors of the community whose authority depended on the beliefs.
The Freud-Jung rupture illustrates the theory at the level of intellectual traditions. Jung’s wartime claims about Jewish versus Aryan psychology are the hatred adaptation applied to a tradition rather than to a person. The argument is that the Jewish formation that shaped psychoanalysis was a contamination from which the tradition needed to be cleansed. Sell’s framework predicts this kind of move. If the tradition is perceived as having negative association value because of its Jewish origins, the corrective is to identify and remove the toxic element. Jung’s analytical psychology is the result. The argument’s structure parallels Nazi cultural ideology applied to literature, and its persistence in some Jungian circles after the war is the same phenomenon in Italian, Norwegian, Swiss, and Dutch reckonings, a convenient belief load-bearing for institutional identity that resists honest reexamination.
The harming-those-we-have-unjustly-harmed prediction is the most useful single insight for understanding the postwar pattern. Sell cites the Schopler and Compere finding that we hate those we have harmed unjustly, because the act of harming triggers an estimation that the target now has reasons to harm us in return, lowering his association value, triggering hatred. The European postwar reckoning operated under exactly this logic. Acknowledging that French institutions had collaborated in the deportation, that Norwegian police had organized the roundups, that Dutch administration had supplied the lists, that Swiss banks had laundered the proceeds, that Italian universities had purged their Jewish faculty, would have required acknowledging that the pre-existing antisemitism that made all this possible was not accidental but was the functional precondition for the catastrophe. Easier to maintain that the hatred was elsewhere, that the local population was a victim or a resister, that the few collaborators were aberrations rather than expressions of a hatred the population had broadly supplied.
The terminating conditions of hatred close the analysis. Sell identifies five: correction of misperceived association value, recalibration by the target, shifting alliance structures, new avenues of cooperation, and costs of hatred outweighing benefits. The postwar slow reckoning, the Bergier Commission, the Norwegian apology of 1998, Finkielkraut’s reckoning, the Italian recovery of Levi and Bassani, the Frankfurt School’s gradual reintegration into German academic life, is the slow operation of the first three. The catastrophic completeness of the destruction made it possible, eventually, to recalculate the association value of the surviving Jewish populations in honest terms because they no longer represented the perceived threats that the prewar propaganda had assigned to them. They were now, visibly, the victims of a catastrophe rather than the agents of one. The reckoning came incompletely and slowly because the cost of completing it, acknowledging that the prewar hatred had been the population’s own rather than imported or imposed, remained too high for the institutional structures that depended on the convenient narrative.
This essay documents what the Jewish intellectual contribution looked like at the level of literary and cultural scholarship. The defamiliarization, the moral seriousness rooted in accountability, the comfort with interpretive plurality, the obligation of memory, the willingness to read against the grain of official discourse. These are the cognitive operations of a population that had been the target of hatred adaptations across generations and had developed compensating intellectual habits as a survival strategy. The hermeneutics of suspicion is what a population produces when reading the official narratives of its hosts has been a survival skill for two millennia. The theory predicts that the gifts and the costs are inseparable because they have the same evolutionary source. The intellectual contribution is the byproduct of the very persecution that eventually destroyed the communities that produced it.
That is the most somber reading the theory licenses. The European Jewish intellectual tradition was a flowering of cognitive adaptations developed under the pressure of the very hatred adaptation that finally destroyed the communities that had developed them. The Spinoza-Benjamin-Levi-Celan-Arendt sequence is the brief moment in which those adaptations were turned to literary and philosophical achievement before the hatred they were designed to survive caught up with them. What I’ve called the custodianship question has, in this reading, an evolutionary answer. The custodians of a tradition who are best positioned to read it honestly are those who have been forced by hatred into the outsider position from which honest reading becomes possible, and the cost of that position is borne by them and by their children for as long as the hatred adaptations of the surrounding population remain triggerable.
Hybrid Vigor
The Hybrid Vigor essay treats biology as a toolkit for social analysis. Heterosis, inbreeding depression, outbreeding depression, niche construction, horizontal gene transfer, and crypsis each generate predictions about what happens when populations cross or remain closed. Apply the framework to your custodianship question across the European national cases and the whole picture reorganizes around a single biological principle. The European Jewish intellectual contribution to literary scholarship is a heterosis story operating at civilizational scale, and the catastrophes that interrupted it are inbreeding depression reasserted as ideology.
Start with the donor population. The European Jewish intellectual class arriving at the threshold of national literary academies in the nineteenth century carried two millennia of accumulated crossings. The Babylonian Talmud is the paradigm case. Composed in Sassanid Persia under exile conditions, forced into contact with Persian legal culture and Mesopotamian commercial practice, it became longer, more dialectically sophisticated, and ten times more influential than the Jerusalem Talmud composed within the homeland. The Jewish intellectual formation that arrived at the German university or the French Sorbonne or the Russian literary journal was the cumulative product of similar crossings repeated across centuries: Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek, then Arabic, then Spanish and Portuguese, then German, then Yiddish, then the languages of every host country that the dispersions touched. The textual habits, the multilingual range, the comfort with permanent interpretive plurality, the moral grammar of accountability, all of these are heterotic traits produced by repeated crossings under adverse selection conditions. The donor population is not the bearer of a single tradition but the bearer of a hybridized formation that had already been refined under pressure.
The host populations were comparatively inbred. German Bildung was Lutheran formation crossed with classical and German romantic tradition under conditions that excluded most outside material for centuries. Russian high literary culture before 1917 had been even more closed because Jewish exclusion from universities and professions kept the formative population narrow. French universalism was more demanding than the others because it was more ideologically articulated, requiring full absorption into a Frenchness that claimed universality but expressed a specific Catholic-secular synthesis. Anglican literary formation operated through Oxford and Cambridge under conditions that were at least as restrictive as the German case. Each of these national literary traditions had achieved deep optimization within its niche. Each had also accumulated the deleterious recessives that closed systems produce when the environment shifts.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presented exactly the environmental shift that punishes inbred systems and rewards heterosis. Industrial capitalism, mass literacy, urbanization, the collapse of the old aristocratic order, the emergence of mass politics, the rise of modern science, the encounter with non-European civilizations through colonialism, the development of psychology and sociology and linguistics as new fields, the catastrophe of the First World War. The literary traditions of Europe needed to develop capacities for self-reflection and critical analysis that the inbred Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox formations could not produce out of their own material. They needed hermeneutic tools that the host populations had not selected for, because the host populations had not lived under conditions that selected for them. The Jewish entrants arrived with exactly the toolkit the new environment demanded.
This is why Brandes transformed Scandinavian literature so completely. Denmark in 1871 had a literary culture optimized for conditions that no longer obtained. The romantic national tradition had lost contact with the European intellectual currents reshaping literature elsewhere. Brandes brought French realism, German biblical criticism, English political economy, Heine, Mill, Sand, into contact with a Danish literary culture that had developed in relative isolation. The result is heterosis at the founding of an entire national modernity. Ibsen and Strindberg and Bjørnson are the offspring of the cross Brandes engineered. None of those writers was Jewish. They were Scandinavian writers whose native formation was activated and made productive by encounter with the hybridized intellectual material Brandes imported. The institutional response, his exclusion from the Copenhagen professorship he deserved, is the closed system rejecting the heterosis that has just enriched it. The native custodians could not absorb the source of the vigor without destabilizing their own claims to authority.
The Russian case operates on a more dramatic timeline because the legal restrictions kept the Jewish population from entering Russian literary culture until the Bolshevik revolution removed the barriers all at once. The early Soviet period saw the most rapid heterosis event in modern intellectual history. Russian formalism developed within roughly fifteen years and transformed literary scholarship internationally. Shklovsky, Jakobson, Eikhenbaum brought Talmudic textual habits and the outsider’s defamiliarizing vision into contact with the Russian literary tradition that Pushkin and Tolstoy had built. The result was a critical apparatus, the concept of ostranenie above all, that no closed system could have produced from inside itself. Jakobson then carried the heterotic material out of Russia through Prague to America, where it crossed again with French structuralism and American New Criticism to produce the theoretical apparatus that reshaped Western literary academia from the 1960s onward. Each crossing produced offspring with greater vigor than either parent line could have generated alone.
The German case is the richest single demonstration of the principle and also the clearest case of inbreeding depression reasserting itself as catastrophe. The Jewish-German intellectual symbiosis from 1871 to 1933 produced Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, Arendt, Cassirer, Auerbach, Spitzer, Curtius, and the philosophical and philological achievements that remain the most productive engagements with the German tradition the twentieth century produced. Auerbach’s Mimesis is heterosis at its purest. A Jewish philologist trained in the German tradition, exiled to Istanbul during the war, writing without access to the German research libraries, produces the most comprehensive single account of European literary realism ever written. The conditions of exile that should have crippled the project are exactly the conditions that produced its breadth. Auerbach reads Western literature from a position no German custodian inside Germany could have occupied. The book is the Babylonian Talmud principle operating at the level of individual scholarship.
The Nazi response is inbreeding depression as ideology. The demand for racial purity in literary scholarship is the demand for the closed system. Blood and soil literary theory, Aryan philology, the purging of Jewish and Jewish-influenced material from German universities, all of this is the closed-system reflex against the heterosis that had just enriched the tradition. The Nazi cultural project is the perfect inverse of what the Jewish intellectual contribution had achieved. Where the Jewish entrants brought hybridized material that gave the German tradition tools for self-understanding it could not produce alone, the Nazis demanded the systematic elimination of exactly that hybridized material in favor of a fantasy of pure native formation. The result was the destruction of the most heterotic intellectual stock the West had produced and the immediate impoverishment of German literary scholarship for at least two generations. The postwar German academy could not recover the formation that had been killed and exiled. What remained was the inbred remnant operating without the crossing partner that had given it productive capacity.
The French case shows the heterosis principle operating under different institutional conditions. Laïcité offered Jewish intellectuals genuine inclusion but on terms that demanded the suppression of the visible donor formation. Bergson, Levinas, Derrida produced work that is recognizably hybrid in its intellectual DNA, drawing on Talmudic and prophetic and rabbinic resources, but presented within frameworks derived from Husserl and Heidegger and Saussure. The crossing happened. The vigor it produced is unmistakable in twentieth century French philosophy. But the donor formation was rendered invisible at the cost of the assimilation contract. This is the heterosis hidden, with the offspring inheriting the vigor while the genealogical record is suppressed. Levinas’s ethics of the other carries the prophetic moral grammar undiluted, but presents it as universal phenomenology. The heterotic offspring is more vigorous than either parent could have produced alone. The donor population pays the cost of invisibility for the privilege of contributing.
The Dutch Golden Age provides the historical example of bidirectional heterosis in genuine partnership. The Amsterdam environment in which Menasseh ben Israel corresponded with Hugo Grotius and posed for Rembrandt represents a moment of crossing that did not require the donor population to suppress its identity. Christian Hebraists studied with Jewish scholars and produced work neither tradition could have produced alone. Spinoza is the case where the heterosis runs hot enough to dissolve both parent populations. His philosophical system is so completely hybridized that neither the Amsterdam Jewish community nor the Dutch Reformed establishment can claim him. The cherem of 1656 is the donor population rejecting the offspring whose crossing has gone too far. The Dutch Reformed condemnation is the host population rejecting the same offspring for the same reason. Spinoza occupies the position of pure outbreeding depression at the philosophical level, the hybrid that is rejected by both parent populations because it has crossed beyond what either can recognize as its own. His subsequent philosophical influence is enormous. His personal isolation is total. Both outcomes are predicted by the framework.
The Italian case shows what happens when the heterosis operates over centuries of integration rather than across a single generation of contact. The Roman, Venetian, Ferrarese, and Mantuan Jewish communities had been part of Italian civic life for so long that the formation produced was a stable hybrid rather than an ongoing crossing event. Levi and Bassani and Saba and Ginzburg write within a tradition that is genuinely both Jewish and Italian, with the synthesis stable enough that the categories cease to be useful as separate descriptors. The racial laws of 1938 destroyed not just a Jewish community but a specifically Italian Jewish synthesis that had taken centuries to develop. Bassani’s elegy in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is the mourning for a stable hybrid that had achieved its own niche optimization and was destroyed by the reassertion of the closed-system ideology. What was lost is exactly what cannot be recovered, because what was lost was a co-adapted complex that had developed over time and could not be reassembled from its parts after the destruction.
The Norwegian and Swiss cases illustrate the principle from the negative angle. Both populations were small enough and culturally homogeneous enough that the Jewish intellectual contribution to native scholarship operated at modest scale. Both populations also developed convenient narratives after the war that protected the closed-system self-image at the cost of honest reckoning. Norwegian historiography of the war remained inbred for decades because the small native scholarly population had no significant Jewish remainder to challenge the dominant account. Swiss neutrality mythology remained intact for similar reasons. The Bergier Commission’s eventual challenge to the Swiss narrative came partly through Jewish scholarship and partly through international pressure that brought outside material into a system that had been operating in relative closure. The reckoning came when the closed system was forced to accept material it had been excluding.
The Anne Frank reception case shows the principle operating at the level of popular cultural transmission. The diary’s universalization, the suppression of the specifically Jewish content in favor of a universal humanism that broader audiences could receive, is the heterotic offspring being repackaged as native material for the host culture. The Jewish formation that produced the diary is rendered invisible so that the work can circulate as universal property of the receiving cultures. This is the same operation Klingenstein documented at the academic level in America and that Finkielkraut named in France. The host population accepts the heterotic offspring on the condition that the donor formation be made invisible. The vigor is retained. The genealogical acknowledgment is refused.
The Frankfurt School transmission to America is the most consequential case of horizontal gene transfer in twentieth century literary scholarship. Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse arrive in America carrying the hybridized formation that had been killed in Germany. American literary academia in the 1950s was relatively closed, dominated by New Critical formalism with limited theoretical scope. The Frankfurt School material crossed with American academic conditions to produce the theoretical turn of the 1970s and 1980s. By the time the cross was complete, the offspring had transformed American literary scholarship in ways that no internal development from native New Critical material could have produced. Said’s Orientalism is heterosis at the third generation, with Said carrying Palestinian Christian formation and English literary training and Frankfurt School theoretical apparatus, all crossed and producing offspring that reshaped postcolonial studies internationally. The donor populations that produced each generation of crossing were repeatedly destroyed or marginalized. The offspring carried the vigor forward into new institutional environments that could host the next round of crossing.
The Spinoza case generalized gives the deepest reading of the custodianship question available through the framework. Spinoza demonstrates that heterosis can run far enough that the offspring is rejected by both parent populations. The Amsterdam Jewish community could not maintain him because his philosophical work had crossed beyond what the rabbinical authority could recognize as continuous with the tradition. The Dutch Reformed establishment could not absorb him because his work had crossed beyond what Christian doctrine could accommodate. He occupied a position that is biologically possible, the hybrid so far from either parent population that neither can claim him, with descendants whose intellectual influence is enormous but whose communal location is nowhere. Levi and Celan and Arendt and Benjamin all face versions of the same condition in less extreme form. Each one occupies a position where the formation is too hybridized for the donor community to fully claim and too marked by the donor formation for the host community to fully absorb. The cost is permanent isolation. The benefit is the breadth of vision that no comfortable insider in either tradition can achieve.
The catastrophes the essay documents are inbreeding depression reasserted as state ideology. Nazism, Stalinism, Vichy collaboration, Norwegian and Dutch and Italian collaboration, Swiss accommodation, all of these are versions of the closed system attempting to purge the heterotic material that had enriched it. The biology predicts the immediate consequence. Closed systems that purge their crossing partners lose the capacity to address novel environmental challenges. German literary scholarship after 1945 is impoverished in exactly the ways the framework predicts. Russian literary scholarship after the campaigns against rootless cosmopolitanism is impoverished in the same ways. French and Dutch and Italian literary scholarship recover faster because the destruction was less complete and because the institutional structures retained more of the hybridized material. But each national case shows the same pattern: the closed-system ideology destroys exactly the crossing partner that the tradition needs to remain productive, and the cost of the destruction is paid for generations afterward in reduced intellectual vitality.
The custodianship question receives a biological answer through this framework. Who guards a tradition’s sacred objects? The native custodian has the deep optimization that comes from inheriting the closed system. The hybridized entrant brings the vigor that comes from crossing. The tradition cannot remain productive without both. The native custodian cannot read his own tradition critically because he lacks the angle of vision that distance provides. The hybridized entrant cannot read the tradition without the deep formation that immersion provides. The productive moment is the moment of crossing, when both formations remain available and the offspring can draw on each. The catastrophic moment is the moment when the closed system attempts to purge the crossing partner in the name of native purity. The catastrophe destroys exactly the relationship the tradition needs to remain productive. What is lost is not just the donor population but the heterotic capacity itself, which cannot be reconstructed by either parent population alone.
The Jewish intellectual contribution to European literary cultures was not a gift the host populations could choose to accept or reject. It was the heterotic enrichment that the inbred host traditions needed to address the environmental shift of modernity. The host populations that accepted the crossing produced the most vital literary scholarship of the twentieth century. The host populations that rejected the crossing destroyed their own intellectual productivity along with the populations they were attempting to purge. The custodianship question has no resolution at the level of moral argument because the question is not finally moral. It is biological. Closed systems that purge their crossing partners pay the cost in reduced fitness for generations. Open systems that maintain crossing relationships preserve the heterotic capacity that lets them respond to changing environments. The European twentieth century is the demonstration of the principle written in catastrophic clarity, with the host populations that destroyed their Jewish intellectual partners paying costs that remain visible in the impoverishment of their literary cultures eighty years later.
Not Born Yesterday
Mercier’s argument inverts the standard reading of European antisemitism. The conventional account treats anti-Jewish sentiment as mass hysteria, propaganda success, contagion, the manipulation of credulous populations by demagogues. Mercier’s evidence demolishes this account. Hitler’s speeches had negligible effect on Nazi electoral fortunes. Nazi propaganda worked only where antisemitism was already entrenched and produced backlash where it was not. The German population resisted calls to boycott Jewish stores until the regime imposed boycotts through state coercion. The masses were not duped into hating Jews. They were tracking what they took to be their interests, and the propaganda activated where the underlying interest calculation already favored the message and failed where it did not.
Apply this to the custodianship question across the European cases and the entire moral architecture shifts. The question is not why Europeans were hysterically convinced of false beliefs about Jews. The question is what interests Jewish presence threatened, in which populations, under what conditions, such that anti-Jewish coalitions could form when material conditions made the formation worthwhile. The same logic applies to philosemitic moments. The Danish rescue, the Amsterdam Golden Age partnership, the Italian civic integration, the Dutch tolerance under Spinoza’s century are not failures of a hysteria that elsewhere succeeded. They are cases where Jewish presence served the local population’s interests and where the coalition logic favored protection rather than predation.
Start with the German case under this reading. The Bildung tradition was not threatened by Jewish entry as a matter of mass psychological contagion. The German professional and academic classes faced a genuine competitive problem. Jewish entry into medicine, law, journalism, banking, and academic life happened at rates vastly disproportionate to the Jewish percentage of the population. The non-Jewish German professional was not hallucinating when he noticed that the Jewish lawyer or doctor or professor was outcompeting him. The competition was real. The interest in restricting that competition was real. The question is not why Germans were tricked into hating Jews. The question is which segments of the German professional class found their interests served by anti-Jewish coalition formation, and what conditions made such coalitions politically operational.
Mercier’s framework predicts that anti-Jewish propaganda would succeed where preexisting interest conflicts had created receptive audiences and would fail where such conflicts had not formed. The historical evidence confirms the prediction. Voigtländer and Voth’s research on radio antisemitism in Nazi Germany found that propaganda activated existing antisemitism and produced backlash in regions without it. Bavarian Catholic regions with deep historical antisemitism received Nazi messaging and amplified it. Hanseatic commercial cities with traditions of Jewish integration resisted the same messaging. The propaganda did not create the sentiment. It selected for the populations whose interests had already aligned against Jewish neighbors.
This reframes the German Jewish intellectual contribution. The Jewish entrants were not naively presenting gifts to a population that misperceived them as threats. They were correctly perceived as competitors by the segments of the German professional class whose institutional positions their entry destabilized. The Bildung-formed German philologist who saw Auerbach producing Mimesis in Istanbul exile understood that the Jewish philologist was outcompeting him at his own discipline. The non-Jewish German philosopher who saw Cassirer producing The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms understood the same. The hatred was not hysteria. It was the coalitional response of a professional class whose institutional monopoly was being broken by competitors with superior preparation. The propaganda machine activated this preexisting interest conflict by giving the threatened class a coalition vocabulary and a state apparatus willing to act on it.
The French case operates under the same logic but with different interest structure. Laïcité was not a hysteria. It was the coalitional settlement of nineteenth century French politics, in which the republican faction defeated the clerical faction and built state institutions favoring secular over Catholic personnel. Jewish intellectuals were natural allies of the republican coalition because the same institutional changes that opened universities to Jews were the changes that broke clerical control. The Dreyfus Affair was not mass hysteria either. It was the testing of whether the republican coalition would hold under stress, and the moment when significant portions of the French military and Catholic establishment defected from the republican coalition under the pressure of the war scare and the institutional rivalry with Germany. Jewish intellectuals correctly perceived that their inclusion in French civic life was conditional on the republican coalition holding, and Vichy demonstrated what happened when the coalition fell apart. Bergson refusing the Vichy exemption and registering as a Jew was not a moral gesture against irrational hatred. It was the philosophically articulate response to a coalition realignment that had stripped his civic protection because the new coalition’s interests had reorganized to favor his exclusion.
The Russian case shows interest-driven coalition formation operating across two phases. The Tsarist exclusion of Jews from universities, professions, and most cities was not motivated by hysterical hatred. It was the policy of a regime whose coalition base included orthodox Christian peasants, aristocratic landowners, and clerical establishment, all of whom had specific interest reasons to support Jewish exclusion. The Pale of Settlement was a coalition device that delivered economic and social goods to the regime’s supporters by restricting Jewish competition in the rest of the empire. The pogroms of 1881 to 1884 and 1903 to 1906 followed economic distress and were concentrated in regions where Jewish commercial competition was visible and where local non-Jewish populations could be activated against Jewish neighbors as scapegoats for economic conditions the state could not address. The Bolshevik abolition of the legal restrictions in 1917 was a coalition realignment, with the new regime’s base including industrial workers and revolutionary intellectuals whose interests aligned with breaking the Tsarist exclusionary system. The Stalinist turn against rootless cosmopolitans in the late 1940s was another coalition realignment, with the regime’s base shifting toward Russian nationalism and Russian ethnic majority resentment of Jewish disproportionate representation in cultural and intellectual life. Each phase tracks interest reorganization, not the rise and fall of hysteria.
The Mandelstam case under this reading becomes legible in a way the hysteria account cannot reach. Mandelstam was not killed because Stalin was hysterically antisemitic. He was killed because his poetry threatened the regime’s interest in monopolizing legitimate speech, and his Jewishness made him a politically cheaper target than a comparable Russian dissident might have been. The regime’s coalition base could absorb the elimination of a Jewish poet at lower political cost than the elimination of a Russian poet of equivalent stature. Nadezhda Mandelstam memorizing the poems is not a romantic gesture against irrational hatred. It is the rational response of a competent informant to a regime that has misallocated lethal force against valuable intellectual material. She knew what the regime did not, that the poems would outlast the regime, and she preserved them through the channel that worked, which was the human memory of someone the regime had not bothered to kill.
The Holocaust requires careful application of Mercier’s framework because the scale of the catastrophe makes hysteria explanations seductive. Mercier’s evidence cuts against this. The Germans who participated in the deportations were not hysterically convinced that Jews were demons. The Order Police battalions Christopher Browning studied in Ordinary Men were neither true believers nor hysterics. They were men following orders within an institutional framework that made participation rational under coalition pressure and refusal individually costly. The Polish neighbors Jan Gross documented in Neighbors who killed the Jews of Jedwabne were not hysterics. They were men whose interests ran through the elimination of Jewish neighbors whose property they could seize, whose competitive presence in local commerce they could remove, and whose absence the German occupation had made temporarily possible to achieve at low cost. The propaganda mattered as a coalition coordination device, not as a persuasion engine. It told participants that this killing was sanctioned, that the coalition was on board, that the costs of participation were lower than they had been before. It did not convince people of things they had not previously found congenial to their interests.
The rescue cases test the framework from the positive side. The Danish rescue was not the absence of a hysteria that elsewhere succeeded. It was the operation of a coalition whose interests favored protecting Jewish neighbors. Danish Jews were thoroughly integrated into Danish civic and commercial life, known personally to non-Jewish Danes, embedded in the same professional and social networks. The cost to non-Jewish Danes of letting their Jewish neighbors be deported was the cost of accepting that the German occupation could break Danish civic relationships at will, which threatened all Danes. The rescue served Danish interests in maintaining Danish civic autonomy against German interference, and the small size and integration of the Jewish community made the rescue logistically possible. The same logic that produced anti-Jewish coalition formation in Poland and Lithuania produced pro-Jewish coalition formation in Denmark, because the underlying interest calculations ran in opposite directions in the two cases.
The Italian case under this reading shows what happens when interest conflicts are absent or weak. Italian Jews had been integrated into Italian civic life for centuries, with no significant economic or professional competition that could activate anti-Jewish coalition formation in the populations among whom they lived. The 1938 racial laws were imposed under German pressure and against the interests of most Italians, including most Italian fascists, who had no significant grievance against Jewish neighbors. Italian collaboration with deportations was correspondingly reluctant and partial, with Italian officials repeatedly subverting the deportation machinery, Italian populations sheltering Jewish neighbors at significant rates, and the Vatican itself opening religious institutions as hiding places. The Italian behavior was not the absence of hysteria. It was the coalition response of a population whose interests did not run through Jewish elimination, faced with an external pressure to participate in a project that served German rather than Italian coalition logic.
The Dutch case shows the same logic producing a different outcome. Dutch Jews were also integrated and posed limited interest competition to non-Jewish Dutch. But Dutch institutional efficiency, the geographical exposure that made hiding difficult, and the specific structure of the German occupation that converted Dutch civil servants into instruments of the deportation machinery, all combined to produce mass killing under conditions where the Dutch population’s interest calculation favored compliance with German demands. Dutch civil servants who participated in the deportations were not hysterically antisemitic. They were men whose institutional positions made compliance with German demands rationally preferable to resistance, given the enforcement mechanisms the occupation operated. The Dutch failed to save their Jews not because they hated them more than the Danes did but because the Dutch institutional structure made compliance individually rational under occupation conditions in ways the Danish structure did not.
The Spinoza case maps onto Mercier’s framework with unusual clarity. The Amsterdam Jewish community’s cherem of 1656 was not a hysteria. The rabbinical authorities had specific institutional interests in maintaining communal authority over textual interpretation, and Spinoza’s philosophical work threatened those interests directly. The community was a precarious recent arrival in Amsterdam, with civic toleration that depended on the rabbinical authorities maintaining control over their members. Spinoza’s heterodoxy threatened both the religious authority structure and the communal political settlement that protected the community from Christian criticism. The cherem served the community’s institutional interests as the rabbinical leadership understood them. It was not irrational. The Dutch Reformed condemnation of Spinoza was equally interest-driven, with the Reformed establishment defending its monopoly over legitimate theological speech against a philosopher whose work would have undercut both Reformed and Catholic authority simultaneously. Spinoza’s isolation was the product of two coalitions correctly identifying him as a threat to their interests, not a hysteria operating in either community.
The convenient beliefs framework you have integrated through Turner sits inside Mercier’s argument as a particular case. The postwar Norwegian narrative of resistance, the Swiss narrative of neutrality, the Dutch narrative of Anne Frank as universal humanism, the French narrative of widespread resistance, and the Italian narrative of reluctant collaboration are all coalition products. Each one served specific institutional interests in the postwar period. Each one resisted honest examination because honest examination would have undercut the coalition base that depended on the narrative. Mercier’s framework predicts that these narratives would not be challenged by argument alone because the people holding them were not holding them on the basis of evidence in the first place. The narratives were coalition coordination devices, and the coalitions held until the interest structure shifted enough to make alternative narratives more useful to enough people to break the consensus. The Bergier Commission did not change Swiss minds because it produced superior evidence. It produced superior evidence in a context where Swiss banking interests had become exposed to American litigation and where the costs of maintaining the old narrative had risen to exceed the benefits.
The Anne Frank universalization Mercier’s framework explains as the coalition product it is. The diary’s specifically Jewish content was suppressed in postwar transmission not because audiences were hysterically resistant to Jewish particularity but because the coalition that controlled the diary’s presentation had specific interests in framing the work for maximum mass acceptance. Otto Frank’s editorial decisions, the theatrical adaptation’s choices, the educational use of the diary, all reflect coalition calculations about what version of the story would serve the largest possible audience and the institutions promoting it. The universalization was not a failure of historical accuracy. It was the coalition optimization of a cultural product for transmission across populations whose interests in receiving the work varied in their capacity to accept Jewish specificity. The German audience, the American audience, the Dutch audience each required a version that suited its specific interest structure, and the universalized version served the lowest common denominator across these audiences.
The Jewish intellectual contribution acquires under Mercier’s framework a different significance than the moral or aesthetic readings allow. The Jewish entrants into European literary academies were not naive bearers of gifts to populations that misperceived them. They were skilled coalition operators who correctly understood that their entry served some host population interests and threatened others, and who positioned their work to maximize acceptance by the coalitions whose support they needed while minimizing exposure to the coalitions opposed to their entry. The hermeneutics of suspicion, the comfort with reading official discourse against the grain, the willingness to name what insiders preferred unexamined, all of this is not just a moral or cognitive achievement. It is the developed political competence of a population that had survived for two millennia by accurately reading host population coalitions and positioning itself within them. The Talmudic tradition trains exactly this competence. Its institutional product is a population unusually skilled at coalition reading and unusually capable of contributing to the literary critical enterprise as a result.
The custodianship question receives under Mercier’s framework an interest-based answer that the moral framing cannot reach. The native custodian defends his tradition because his institutional position depends on that defense, not because he holds beliefs about the tradition that the entrant is failing to hold. The Jewish entrant offers readings the native custodian cannot accept because accepting them would undercut the institutional authority that pays the native custodian’s salary and credentials his work. The conflict is not between superior and inferior readings of the tradition. It is between coalitions whose interests run through different readings, with each coalition correctly identifying the other as a threat. The eventual resolution depends on which coalition holds institutional power, not on which reading is more accurate. The accuracy question is a downstream effect of the coalition outcome, not the determinant of it.
The European catastrophe under this reading is the reorganization of host coalitions in ways that destroyed Jewish protective relationships across multiple national contexts roughly simultaneously. The Nazi project was not the success of a propaganda machine in convincing populations of false beliefs. It was the construction of a coalition with specific interest structure that benefited from Jewish elimination, the alignment of state power with that coalition, and the export of that coalition logic to occupied territories where collaborative coalitions could be assembled on similar interest bases. The catastrophe operated through interest, not through deception. The populations that participated were tracking their interests as their coalitions defined them. The populations that resisted were doing the same. The moral question my essay raises about how these participations were possible has under Mercier’s framework an answer that is more troubling than the hysteria answer. The participations were possible because they served interests. The participations were rational given the coalition structures within which they occurred. What needs explaining is not the failure of populations to resist hysteria but the structural conditions under which Jewish elimination became coalitionally rational across multiple European societies in the same historical period.
The most useful single insight Mercier offers for the custodianship question is the relationship between argument and behavior. Beliefs do not drive actions. Actions drive beliefs as post hoc justifications. The European populations that participated in the destruction of their Jewish neighbors did not first hold antisemitic beliefs and then act on them. They first found themselves in coalitions whose interests ran through Jewish elimination, then accepted the antisemitic beliefs that justified the actions the coalitions required. The propaganda machine produced the justifications after the coalition had formed. This explains the persistence of antisemitism after the Holocaust, the continuation of antisemitic patterns in Eastern European countries that lost most of their Jewish populations, and the difficulty of debunking antisemitic beliefs through evidence and argument. The beliefs serve coalition functions. They cannot be dislodged by evidence because they are not held on the basis of evidence in the first place. They can be dislodged only by changes in the coalition structures that the beliefs justify, which depend on changes in the interest configurations of the populations holding the coalitions together.
This reading places the Jewish intellectual contribution in its hardest light. The contribution was not received by host populations that simply misperceived its value. It was received by host populations whose coalition structures determined whether the contribution would be welcomed, tolerated, suppressed, or eliminated, depending on whether Jewish presence served or threatened the coalition’s interest structure. The same intellectual work that produced a Nobel Prize for Modiano in France produced exile for Auerbach in Germany and death for Mandelstam in Russia, not because the work differed in quality but because the coalition structures that received it differed in the interests Jewish presence served or threatened. The brilliance of the work mattered to its long-term influence, but the brilliance did not determine the immediate fate of the worker. The coalition structure determined that. Mercier’s framework will not let us pretend otherwise.
Situationism
Doris dismantles the moral architecture my essay implicitly assumes about both the European Jewish intellectual contribution and the catastrophes that interrupted it. The essay treats character as the operative variable. The Jewish intellectual brings specifically Jewish moral grammar formed by tradition. The European host populations exhibit national character expressed through their literary cultures. The collaborators and rescuers display individual moral character that explains their choices. The custodianship question itself presupposes that custodians possess character traits that determine how they handle the tradition. Doris’s situationist evidence pulls every one of these character attributions into question and forces a different reading of the entire historical pattern.
Start with the participation problem. My essay treats the European populations that participated in the destruction of their Jewish neighbors as somehow possessed of antisemitic character that the Jewish intellectual contribution had failed to penetrate or transform. The Holocaust under this reading is the failure of European character to receive what the Jewish gifts offered. Doris cuts through this. The participants in the Holocaust were not monsters with antisemitic character traits robust enough to drive killing under any conditions. They were ordinary men whose situations made killing locally rational, whose institutional structures provided the cover and the orders, whose drinking and weeping and apparent psychological conflict revealed exactly the absence of stable murderous character that the situationist account predicts. Browning’s Reserve Police Battalion 101 commander Trapp wept after issuing the killing orders. The killers drank heavily because, as one put it, sober life was intolerable. The Einsatzgruppen worked one-hour shifts with liberal alcohol because the situation was difficult to sustain even for men who were carrying out the killings.
This is not the picture of populations whose antisemitic character had matured into murderous expression under permissive conditions. It is the picture of populations whose situations had been engineered to produce killing from men who lacked the character to resist the situational pressures and equally lacked the character to commit murder enthusiastically. The killing happened because the situations made it the path of least resistance, not because the killers possessed antisemitic character of a kind robust enough to survive transfer across situations. The same men, in different situations, did not kill. Many of them returned home after the war and lived ordinary postwar lives. Their character did not change. Their situations changed. The behavioral output changed accordingly.
The rescue cases work the same way under Doris’s framework. The Danish rescue was not the expression of Danish national character or Lutheran Christian character or Grundtvigian theological character. It was the operation of a situation in which Danish Jews were thoroughly integrated into Danish civic networks, in which the German occupation had been comparatively light, in which geographical access to neutral Sweden was available, and in which the rescue operation could be coordinated through existing social channels at acceptable individual cost. The Italians who sheltered Jewish neighbors were not exhibiting Italian Catholic character. They were responding to situations in which they knew the Jewish family personally, in which the Vatican had created institutional cover for sheltering, in which the German occupation was extracting compliance reluctantly, and in which the local Italian population resented German authority enough to make resistance to Nazi demands locally satisfying. Change the situation and the same Italians might have collaborated in the deportations. Some did. The variation across regions in Italian behavior under occupation tracks situational variables, not differences in Italian character.
The Norwegian collaboration tells the situationist story with painful clarity. Norway had a small, integrated Jewish community, deep Lutheran formation that on the Danish model might have produced rescue, and a population whose subsequent self-image emphasized resistance. Yet seventy of every hundred Norwegian Jews were murdered, with active Norwegian police participation in the deportations. The situational variables that made Danish rescue possible were absent in Norway. The geography did not permit a mass exodus to neutral territory. The German occupation had captured Norwegian institutional structures more completely. The advance warning that Danish Jews received was not available to Norwegian Jews. The same Lutheran-Grundtvigian formation produced opposite outcomes because the situations differed. Character did not determine the outcome. Situation did.
The Jewish intellectual contribution acquires under Doris’s framework a different significance than the moral or aesthetic readings allow. My essay describes Jewish intellectuals as bringing specifically Jewish gifts: defamiliarization, hermeneutics of suspicion, prophetic moral grammar, comfort with interpretive plurality. The framing assumes these gifts are character traits possessed by Jewish intellectuals across situations. Doris suggests this is mistaken. The Jewish intellectuals did not possess these gifts as stable character traits independent of the situations that activated them. They expressed these capacities in situations that selected for the expression. The Talmudic tradition does not produce a stable character trait of comfort with interpretive plurality. It produces a learned situational response to the activity of textual interpretation, which manifests when the situation calls for textual interpretation and which may not manifest at all in other situations. The same Jewish intellectual who reads against the grain of the Christian literary tradition might fall into rote conformity when reading a text from his own tradition. The defamiliarization is situation-specific.
This explains an oddity in my essay that the character framework cannot reach. The Jewish intellectuals you document did not all bring the same gifts. Spinoza brought radical philosophical universalism. Levinas brought ethics of the other. Benjamin brought messianic historical materialism. Brandes brought European cosmopolitanism into Scandinavian provincialism. Mandelstam brought lyric formal mastery to Russian poetry. These contributions are not unified expressions of a single Jewish intellectual character. They are distinct situational responses by men who happened to share a Jewish formation but whose intellectual outputs were shaped by the specific situations they encountered: Amsterdam in the seventeenth century for Spinoza, Paris in the twentieth for Levinas, interwar Germany for Benjamin, post-1871 Denmark for Brandes, Stalinist Russia for Mandelstam. The Jewish formation provided certain materials. The situations determined how those materials would be expressed. Different situations produced different contributions from formations that overlapped but did not produce identical outputs.
The custodianship question Doris reframes most dramatically. My essay treats the question as one about who possesses the character to be a faithful custodian of a tradition. The native custodian has the character formed by full immersion in the tradition. The Jewish entrant has the character formed by outsideness combined with formation. The contest between them is a contest between different types of custodial character, with the question being which character produces better readings. Doris will not let this stand. There is no custodial character. There are only people in situations, and the situations of academic literary scholarship are rich with the kind of subtle situational pressures that Doris’s research documents producing wide variation in behavioral output from people whose character was assumed to be stable.
The Jewish entrant into the German Bildung tradition was not a man with outsider character producing outsider readings. He was a man whose situation, marked by recent emancipation, partial inclusion, professional precarity, awareness of the Vichy-style possibility of revocation, encounter with native custodians whose institutional positions depended on resisting his entry, all of these situational features producing the readings that the situation called forth. Move the same man to a different situation, an Israeli university in 1960 or a Yeshiva in Mea Shearim or a Reform congregation in Cincinnati, and he produces different readings because the situational pressures are different. The hermeneutics of suspicion is not a character trait Auerbach carried with him into Istanbul exile. It is the situational response of a philologist working without German research libraries, without German institutional support, without the assumption that he was producing scholarship for a German audience that would receive it. The exile situation produced Mimesis. The same Auerbach in 1925 Marburg produced different work because the situation was different.
The catastrophic reckoning my essay traces in the postwar period takes on under Doris’s framework a different character. My essay treats the Norwegian, Swiss, Italian, and Dutch failures to reckon honestly with collaboration as expressions of national character defects, convenient beliefs maintained by populations whose moral character could not face the truth. Doris would point out that the same populations, in different situations, did face the truth. The Bergier Commission produced honest accounting when the situation shifted, when American litigation pressure created institutional incentives for Swiss reckoning. Norwegian apology came in 1998 when the situation had changed enough that the costs of maintaining the resistance narrative had risen above the benefits. The reckoning was not produced by character development in the populations. It was produced by situational change that made the previously unwelcome truth locally rational to face. The same populations who had refused honest reckoning under one set of situations performed honest reckoning under another. Their character had not changed. Their situation had.
The convenient beliefs framework you have integrated through Turner sits inside Doris’s argument as a particular case. Coalitions form to maintain beliefs that serve coalition interests. The beliefs are not held on the basis of evidence or character but on the basis of situational rewards for holding them. When the situational rewards shift, the beliefs shift. This is why argumentative challenge to the convenient beliefs typically fails. The believers are not holding the beliefs on argumentative grounds, so argumentative refutation does not dislodge them. What dislodges them is situational change that makes the beliefs locally costly to maintain. The Italian recognition of Levi as a major writer happened when Levi’s reputation in international literary culture had risen high enough that Italian institutional interests aligned with claiming him. The German rehabilitation of the Frankfurt School happened when American academic prestige flowed to scholars who engaged with Adorno and Benjamin. The situations changed. The reckonings followed.
Doris’s framework also illuminates the variation across the Jewish intellectuals themselves. My essay treats the moral seriousness of Levi, Celan, Benjamin, Arendt, Hillesum as expressions of specifically Jewish moral character formed by tradition. Doris suggests this attribution is too clean. These figures were placed in situations of unusual moral pressure: exile, persecution, witness to genocide, the demand that they speak for what was happening. The situations called forth the moral seriousness. Other Jewish intellectuals in less extreme situations did not produce comparable work. The character account cannot explain why Levi rose to the situation while other Italian Jewish chemists who survived Auschwitz did not produce If This Is a Man. The situational account can. Levi happened to have the literary training, the survival of the specific period of imprisonment that gave him the materials, the postwar Italian publishing context that initially rejected him and forced him to refine the work, and the temperamental endowment that responded to the situation by producing the writing rather than collapsing into silence. None of this is character. It is situation interacting with capacity to produce the specific output.
The Hillesum case is especially clean for Doris’s purposes. Etty Hillesum’s diaries from 1941 to 1943 are spiritually and intellectually extraordinary. They are also the product of an extraordinary situation: a young woman in Amsterdam under German occupation, watching the deportations approach, choosing not to hide, reading Rilke and the Bible and Augustine, processing her impending death through writing. The diaries do not reveal Jewish character or female character or Dutch character. They reveal what one person with her specific endowments and her specific reading produced in that specific situation. Move Hillesum to peacetime Amsterdam in 1925 or postwar New York in 1955 and the diaries do not exist. The character that produced them does not exist independent of the situation that called them forth. The situation was the condition of the writing, not the occasion for an already-formed character to express itself.
The deepest reading Doris’s framework allows turns the moral question my essay raises into a question about institutional design. My essay implicitly asks how character could have failed so completely across European populations in the twentieth century, allowing the destruction of the Jewish intellectual partner that the host traditions needed to remain productive. Doris would reject the question. Character did not fail because character did not operate in the way the question presupposes. Institutions failed. Specifically, the institutional structures that had previously made Jewish presence locally tolerable to host populations were dismantled or captured by Nazi institutional logic, and the new institutional structures made participation in the destruction the path of least resistance for ordinary men whose character was no different than it had been before. The institutions that produced the rescue in Denmark, the partial protection in Italy, the Bulgarian refusal to deport, the French Protestant village of Le Chambon’s sheltering of Jewish children, all of these were institutional configurations that made the protective behavior locally rational rather than character expressions in populations who happened to be morally superior to their neighbors.
This places the custodianship question on a different footing. The question is not which custodians have the character to handle a tradition well. The question is what institutional structures produce conditions under which custodians of varying capacity can do their work without being overwhelmed by situational pressures toward bad practice. The European Jewish intellectual contribution was sustained for a brief period by institutional structures: emancipation, university access, professional licensing, civic equality. The destruction of these institutional structures by the Nazi project ended the contribution not because European character had degraded but because the situational conditions that made the contribution possible had been removed. The postwar partial reconstruction of those institutional structures has permitted partial reconstruction of the contribution, with the limits of the reconstruction tracking the limits of the institutional restoration rather than residual character defects in postwar European populations.
The honest implication for the present is more uncomfortable than the character account allows. If the Jewish intellectual contribution depends on institutional structures rather than on Jewish character or European character, then the contribution is vulnerable to institutional shifts that the character account does not anticipate. The character account suggests that what Jewish intellectuals brought to European literary culture was a stable trait that could be transmitted across institutional changes. The situational account suggests the opposite. Change the institutional structure, change the situational pressures, and the contribution disappears or transforms into something different, regardless of whether Jewish formation persists in the population. The American academy of 2026 is not the German academy of 1926, and the Jewish intellectual contribution to American literary scholarship today is not what the contribution to German literary scholarship was a century ago, because the situations differ even when the formation overlaps. The current generation of Jewish American literary scholars is not failing to live up to its predecessors’ character. It is responding to a different situation that calls forth different work.
The Doris reading dissolves much of the moral architecture my essay leans on, but it returns something more useful in exchange. It returns the possibility of institutional intervention. If the catastrophe was situational, the prevention is also situational. If the rescue cases were situational, the conditions of rescue can in principle be reproduced. The hard question becomes not how to develop better European character but how to design institutional structures that produce protective situations for vulnerable populations across the range of host coalitions that may form against them. The Danish rescue was not a moral miracle. It was an institutional success that can be studied for its situational components: integration, geography, advance warning, social network density, civic infrastructure for coordination. These are reproducible features. They are not the inheritance of stable character. They are the products of institutional configurations that can be built and dismantled by deliberate choice.
The Jewish intellectuals my essay celebrates did not save themselves through character. The few who survived survived through situational luck combined with capacities that situations called forth. Levi survived Auschwitz because he was assigned to a chemistry detail rather than an extermination work group, because he contracted scarlet fever just before the death march and was left behind, because the Soviet liberation reached the camp before he died of the disease. None of this is character. It is the survival of one specific situation that he then had the capacity to write about. The work that followed was the response of a particular endowment to a particular situation. Generalizing it into Jewish character or human resilience or moral courage misses what Doris would identify as the actual structure of the achievement. Levi did not save the Jewish intellectual tradition through moral character. He documented one situation with sufficient precision and sufficient literary capacity that subsequent generations could read what the situation had required. The reading is now available because the institutional structures that publish, translate, and teach Levi exist. Remove those institutions and the reading disappears, regardless of whether anyone retains Jewish character in the populations that previously produced him.
This is the situationist conclusion at its hardest edge. The European Jewish intellectual tradition does not exist in a stable form independent of the institutions that sustain its transmission. It exists as a series of situational responses to specific conditions, preserved by institutional structures that themselves depend on situational conditions for their persistence. The custodianship question is not finally about character. It is about which institutional structures we can build and maintain that will produce protective and productive situations for the readings the tradition needs. Doris would say this is the only honest question to ask, because the character question has no answer that the evidence supports.
The Great Delusion
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, applied to my custodianship question, dissolves the framework on which the entire essay depends. The essay treats the Jewish intellectual contribution as the work of individuals who brought specific cognitive and moral resources to host literary traditions. The contribution gets attributed to figures, Auerbach, Benjamin, Brandes, Levinas, Spinoza, Levi, named individuals whose names structure the analytical narrative. Mearsheimer’s argument is that this naming produces a category error. There were no Jewish intellectuals contributing as individuals to host traditions. There were members of one social group whose formation occurred inside that group’s specific socialization, encountering members of other social groups whose formation had occurred inside different socializations. What looks like individual intellectual achievement is the surface expression of group membership operating through people whose individuality is a thin overlay on the group socialization that produced them.
This means the custodianship question has been miscast from the beginning. The question has been treated as one about which individuals have the cognitive and moral resources to read a tradition well. Mearsheimer would reframe it as a question about which groups are competing for control over which institutions, with the individuals visible in the contest serving as the local representatives of group interests they did not choose and could not fully see. The Jewish entrant into the German Bildung tradition was not Walter Benjamin, individual genius bringing his individual gifts to a German literary culture that misperceived him. The Jewish entrant was the Jewish people, operating through a man named Walter Benjamin whose socialization had infused him with values and cognitive habits and reading practices that he experienced as his own but that were the product of two millennia of group formation. The German custodian was not Hans Weltanschauung, individual professor defending his individual claims. He was the German people, operating through professors whose socialization had infused them with values and cognitive habits that they experienced as universal scholarly standards but that were the local product of German group formation. The contest was not between individuals. It was between groups, with individuals as the visible markers of a deeper conflict that was running through them rather than being chosen by them.
This reading reorganizes the moral status of the catastrophe. The character account treats the Holocaust as the failure of European character to receive Jewish gifts. The situationist account treats it as the operation of institutional pressures producing killing from men who lacked stable murderous character. Mearsheimer would offer a third account that is harder than either. The Holocaust was the operation of group dynamics in which one group identified another as a competitor for resources and institutional control, mobilized for the elimination of the competitor, and recruited individuals whose group socialization made participation feel locally meaningful. The killers were not individual men acting on individual character or responding to individual situational pressure. They were group members performing the group’s project, and their individual psychology is a secondary phenomenon overlaid on the primary group dynamics. The fact that some killers wept and drank and reported psychological conflict does not undercut the group account. It confirms it. The individual psychology was conflicted because the group project required individuals to do things that their individual moral intuitions, themselves products of an earlier group socialization, found objectionable. The group project won because group socialization runs deeper than individual moral intuition and provides the operative framework within which individual conflict is metabolized.
The European Jewish intellectual contribution receives under this reading a darker significance than the celebratory framing my essay implicitly carries. The contribution was not the gift of individuals to a host tradition that should have welcomed it. It was the entry of one group’s representatives into institutions controlled by another group, with the host group correctly perceiving that the entrants represented their group’s interests and not the host group’s interests, however much the entrants themselves might have believed otherwise. Spinoza thought he was producing universal philosophy. Mearsheimer would say Spinoza was producing the philosophy that an Amsterdam Sephardic intellectual formation produced when forced to engage with Dutch Reformed and Cartesian materials, and that this philosophy correctly served the long-term interests of Spinoza’s group by undermining the religious authority structures that had historically been used against Jewish populations across Europe. Spinoza’s individual subjective experience of doing universal philosophy is not the operative variable. The group function of his work is. His excommunication by the Amsterdam community was not a misunderstanding of his individual genius. It was the community correctly identifying that his work threatened the group’s interests in maintaining communal cohesion under precarious civic conditions. The community was not being narrow-minded. It was being sociologically accurate.
Brandes thought he was importing European literary modernity into Scandinavian provincialism for the universal benefit of literary culture. Mearsheimer would say Brandes was a Sephardic Danish intellectual whose group formation gave him cognitive access to European intellectual currents that the German-Danish Lutheran formation of the Copenhagen establishment did not have, and his importation of those currents served his group’s interests by breaking the institutional monopoly that the dominant Danish coalition had maintained over national literary culture. The Danish establishment’s exclusion of Brandes from the Copenhagen professorship was not a failure of Danish appreciation for individual genius. It was the dominant Danish coalition correctly identifying that granting Brandes the chair would have transferred institutional authority from one group to another. Brandes won the substantive argument because the European intellectual currents he imported were better suited to the changing situation of Scandinavian literature. He lost the institutional fight because the dominant group still controlled the institutional levers. The eventual recognition of his contribution after his death is the standard pattern in which a defeated coalition’s contribution gets absorbed by the winning coalition once the defeated coalition is no longer present to claim the institutional credit.
The Levinas case shows the same logic at higher philosophical resolution. Levinas thought he was producing universal phenomenology that happened to draw on Jewish sources. Mearsheimer would say Levinas was a French Jewish philosopher whose group formation gave him cognitive access to a moral grammar that French Catholic and French secular formations did not produce on their own, and his presentation of this moral grammar in phenomenological language served his group’s interests by securing institutional credit within the French academy while keeping the source of the insights deniable enough to escape the antisemitic backlash that explicit Jewish particularity might have provoked. Levinas was performing what my essay’s framework calls assimilation cost, but Mearsheimer would describe it not as a moral cost paid by the individual Levinas. He would describe it as the strategic positioning of a group representative within a hostile institutional environment, with the cost paid by the group’s tradition of explicit Jewish moral grammar that gets rendered invisible in the universalist presentation. The trade was not Levinas’s to make as an individual. It was the standard trade that Jewish intellectuals across Europe were making collectively because their group’s institutional position required it.
The custodianship question receives under Mearsheimer a brutal answer. There are no custodians of a tradition who are not group representatives. There is no neutral position from which a tradition can be read on its own terms. Every reader is a group member, every reading is a group function, and the contest over which readings prevail is the contest among groups for institutional control. The native custodian’s claim that he is faithfully transmitting the tradition is the claim of a group representative whose group benefits from the existing institutional arrangement. The Jewish entrant’s claim that he is reading the tradition with greater honesty than the native custodian achieves is the claim of a group representative whose group would benefit from a different institutional arrangement. Both claims are true at the descriptive level. Both are also strategic at the group level. There is no level above the group competition at which the question of which reading is more accurate can be settled, because accuracy itself is a category that gets defined within particular group socializations and that varies across groups whose interests run differently.
This is harder than the situationist conclusion because Doris at least allowed for institutional design as a path of intervention. Mearsheimer would close even this path. Institutions are themselves products of group conflict, with their design reflecting which group held power when the design was settled. The Bergier Commission was not a neutral truth-finding body. It was an institutional product of a coalition realignment in which Swiss banking interests had become exposed to American litigation pressure, with the commission serving the interests of the American Jewish coalition that had won the leverage to demand the investigation. The commission’s findings were not less accurate for being coalition products. They were accurate. But the accuracy was not the operative reason for their being produced. The operative reason was group power, and the findings would not have been produced under different group power configurations regardless of the underlying historical truth.
The implication for the European Jewish intellectual contribution is therefore that the contribution was not freely given by individuals to host populations who freely received or rejected it. It was the institutional transfer of materials and methods between groups whose competition for institutional control structured every step of the exchange. The host populations that benefited from the transfer benefited because their groups had won the institutional position that allowed the transfer to occur on terms favorable to them. The Jewish populations that supplied the transfer did so because their groups lacked the institutional position to retain control over their own materials. The catastrophes that destroyed the transferring populations were the predictable outcome of group competitions in which the supplying group’s vulnerability had reached the point where elimination became coalitionally rational for the host populations. The postwar partial reconstruction of the contribution was the product of new coalition configurations in which the surviving Jewish populations had aligned with American power in ways that made some recovery of institutional position possible.
My essay’s deepest move, the celebration of individual Jewish intellectual achievement against the catastrophic backdrop, becomes under Mearsheimer’s framework a reproduction of the liberal individualism whose accuracy he disputes. The essay treats Levi and Celan and Arendt and Benjamin as individuals whose individual moral achievements survive the destruction of the communities that produced them. Mearsheimer would say this framing imports the liberal individualism that his book identifies as a misreading of human nature. These figures were not individuals. They were group members whose work expressed group formation under specific historical conditions, and their work survives only insofar as group institutions exist to preserve and transmit it. The Levi reading you and I have access to in 2026 is the product of postwar Italian publishing institutions, American Jewish academic networks, Holocaust memorial organizations, and translation infrastructures that depend on group power configurations remaining favorable to their continued operation. Change those configurations and Levi disappears from circulation regardless of his individual literary merit. The merit is not the operative variable. The institutional support is.
The custodianship question Mearsheimer would not let you ask in the form my essay has been asking it. The question presupposes that there are traditions that have custodians who could in principle be evaluated for their fidelity to the tradition. Mearsheimer would say there are no traditions independent of the groups that produce, transmit, and modify them. The German literary tradition is what German group formation has produced under successive historical conditions, with each generation’s version of the tradition reflecting the group power configurations of its time. The Jewish addition to the German tradition between 1871 and 1933 was not a foreign supplement that could in principle have been incorporated faithfully or unfaithfully. It was the entry of another group’s formation into an institutional space that had been controlled by German group formation, with the encounter producing a hybrid product that neither group could fully own and that neither could continue producing once the institutional conditions that had permitted the encounter were destroyed.
The Jewish intellectuals who produced the most morally serious work of the catastrophe period, Levi, Celan, Arendt, Hillesum, Benjamin, were not exhibiting individual moral character of unusual depth. They were group members whose group’s situation had been pushed to extreme conditions and whose specific positioning within the group, their literary capacity, their philological training, their philosophical formation, allowed them to produce records of the situation that the group needed for its continuation. The group needed witness. These individuals supplied it because they were the members positioned to do so. Their individual subjectivity is real but it is not the operative variable. The group function of their work is. Levi’s testimony preserves the experience of his group under genocide. Celan’s poetry preserves the relationship of his group to the German language that had tried to destroy it. Arendt’s philosophy preserves the political analysis his group needed for postwar reconstruction. Each individual product served a group function that the individual did not fully choose and that operated through him rather than being authored by him in the strong sense the liberal account assumes.
The hardest implication is the one Mearsheimer’s anthropology forces on the present. If groups are the operative unit and individuals are the surface expressions of group socialization, then the question of what intellectual contributions any group can make to host traditions in the future depends on whether the group’s institutional position permits the formation that produced the contributions. The European Jewish intellectual formation that produced my essay’s celebrated figures cannot be reproduced because the institutional conditions that produced it cannot be reproduced. The Eastern European Yiddish-speaking communities, the Central European bourgeois assimilated communities, the Sephardic Mediterranean communities, the German-Jewish Bildung communities, all of these formations existed under specific institutional conditions that no longer exist. Their products survive in archives and translations. The conditions that produced the products do not. Future Jewish intellectual contributions, where they occur, will reflect the institutional conditions of contemporary Jewish life, primarily American and Israeli, and these contributions will not be the same as the European contributions because the formations differ. The American Jewish contribution to American literary culture in 2026 is not Auerbach in Marburg or Benjamin in Berlin. It is something else, produced by group socialization under different conditions, serving different group functions in different institutional contexts.
My essay’s celebration of the European Jewish intellectual achievement carries, under Mearsheimer’s reading, an unintended elegiac function. The achievement was the product of conditions that no longer obtain. The catastrophe was not an interruption of an ongoing process but a destruction of the conditions under which the process had been possible. What the essay celebrates is not a tradition that continues but a moment that ended. The continuation under different conditions is something else, neither better nor worse but different in ways the celebratory framing tends to obscure. The honest accounting requires recognizing both the specificity of what the European conditions produced and the impossibility of reproducing it under contemporary conditions. The custodianship question, in its strong form, asks who guards a tradition. Mearsheimer’s answer is that no one guards it, because traditions do not have guardians independent of the groups whose institutional positions produce and modify them. The traditions exist as long as the groups exist and exist in the ways the groups’ situations permit. When the groups change, the traditions change. When the groups disappear, the traditions disappear with them, leaving behind archives that future groups will read in ways their own situations dictate, with the readings serving their own group functions and not the original group’s purposes.
This is the porous self argument operating at the level of cultural transmission. My essay’s celebrated figures did not author their works as buffered selves whose individual genius produced the achievement. They were porous to the group formations that ran through them, and the works they produced are inseparable from those formations. The buffered self that the liberal account places at the center of literary achievement is, on Mearsheimer’s view, a culturally produced fiction. The actual unit of analysis is the porous group member through whom the group’s situation expresses itself in whatever form the individual’s specific endowments permit. This is the settled position you have reached across earlier work, applied to its most uncomfortable case. The European Jewish intellectual contribution, read through Mearsheimer’s anthropology, is the group’s brief moment of institutional access, expressed through individuals whose porous selves carried the group’s formation into encounters with host groups whose own porous selves carried different formations, with the encounter producing hybrid offspring that survive in archives whose continued accessibility depends on group power configurations that are themselves unstable. There is no level above this at which a more reassuring account of individual achievement can be sustained. The liberal account, applied to the case, generates the illusions your earlier work has identified. The realistic account, the one Mearsheimer’s anthropology forces, generates the harder reading that is also the more accurate one.
The custodianship question, in its final form under Mearsheimer, is therefore not about who reads a tradition well. It is about which groups have the institutional position to maintain the conditions under which their formations can continue producing the work that they need their members to produce. The European Jewish answer to that question, between 1871 and 1933, was that institutional position had been briefly granted, the formation had produced extraordinary work, and the position had then been revoked with catastrophic consequences. The American Jewish answer in 2026 is different because the institutional position is different. The work being produced is different because the formation is different. The continuity that the celebratory framing assumes is largely illusory. What persists is not the formation but the archive of what the formation produced when it had institutional access. The archive is read by new groups for new purposes. The original group function of the work is no longer operative. The current group function is whatever the current readers’ situations make of the materials they encounter. This is what cultural transmission actually is, on Mearsheimer’s account. It is not custodianship. It is successive group appropriation under successive institutional conditions, with each generation’s reading reflecting the group power configurations of its time and the previous formations becoming, like Latin or Greek, materials available for use rather than living traditions with custodians who could be evaluated for fidelity to them.
Against Essentialism
In his book The Social Theory of Practices, Stephen Turner wrote: “Understood broadly as a tacit understanding ‘shared’ by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty… there is no plausible mechanism by which a ‘practice’ is transmitted or reproduced.”
In his chapter “Throwing out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices” in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, 2001):”‘Practices’ talk… gets into trouble over the notion of ‘sharing’… If we decide that these difficulties are insurmountable, I argued, we can dispense with the notion of sharing altogether. Practices without sharing… are habits—individual rather than shared. Habits are simply the part of the phenomenon described by the term ‘practices’ that remains when the idea of people possessing the same shared thing is eliminated.”
He adds that apparent uniformity is often “literally superficial, a matter of external similarity, with internal or personal consequences [i.e., cognitive structures] that vary from individual to individual.”
In a 2025 interview, Turner said: “We cannot do anything to get behind the notion of practice, either in a causal or justificatory way, because practices are not objects, but are rather explanatory constructions that solve specific problems of comparison and unmet expectations.” “Ontologizing, both for practices and collective intentionality, is a premature stopping point that avoids the explanatory issues.”
Wikipedia notes:
What we call culture (and similar concepts) “needs to be understood in terms of the means of its transmission. There is no collective server by which it is simply downloaded and ‘shared’. What we take as ‘collective’ is really produced through experiences of interaction which are different and produce different results for different individuals but which also produce a rough uniformity through mechanisms of feedback rather than ‘sharing’.
Turner’s anti-essentialism dissolves the categories on which this entire essay depends. The essay treats Jewish intellectual formation, German Bildung tradition, French universalism, Russian literary culture, Italian Catholicism as if these were stable entities with definable contents whose interactions could be tracked across national contexts. Turner would deny that any of these entities exists in the form the essay assumes. The essentialist commitment that makes the comparative analysis possible is itself a coalition product whose function is to organize current institutional conflicts by projecting stable group identities backward across history.
Start with the most fundamental category the essay deploys. What is the Jewish intellectual tradition? The essay treats this as a real entity with definable contents: hermeneutics of suspicion, comfort with interpretive plurality, prophetic moral grammar, hermeneutics of survival, defamiliarization, obligation of memory. These contents are presented as having developed over two millennia of diaspora experience and as having been transmitted through institutional structures of Jewish religious and educational life. The contents are then deployed to explain what Jewish intellectuals brought to host literary traditions. Turner would point out that this account has the structure of essentialism that his work has shown to be empty. The tradition is being attributed a defining essence that produces certain effects, and the effects are then traced back to the essence as their cause. The whole structure is circular. The contents that supposedly define the tradition are derived from looking at what Jewish intellectuals produced. The production is then explained by reference to the contents. There is no independent access to the tradition that allows the explanation to escape the circle.
Turner’s critique of Oakeshott applies here with particular force. Oakeshott posited a tradition of conduct that was supposedly carried by tacit knowledge transmitted through immersion in the practice. Turner showed that this tacit knowledge cannot do the explanatory work Oakeshott assigned to it. There is no mechanism by which the tradition’s content gets transmitted in the form of stable knowledge that subsequent generations possess. What gets transmitted is varied, partial, contested, modified by each generation’s situation. The tradition as a stable entity with continuous content does not exist. What exists is successive uses by successive generations of materials they inherit from earlier uses, with each generation’s version of the tradition being a current product that gets projected backward as if it had always existed. Apply this to the Jewish intellectual tradition this essay invokes. The hermeneutics of suspicion that the essay attributes to two millennia of diaspora experience is not an entity that has been transmitted continuously across those millennia. It is a current intellectual operation that contemporary Jewish intellectuals deploy and that gets projected backward onto earlier Jewish intellectual practice as if it had been present there as well. The Talmudic tradition that the essay invokes as the source of comfort with interpretive plurality is not a stable entity whose properties caused subsequent Jewish intellectual habits. It is a vast and varied collection of materials that different generations have used in different ways, with current uses then getting attributed to the materials as if the materials themselves had carried these uses across the centuries.
The same critique applies to the host traditions the essay treats as receivers of the Jewish contribution. German Bildung is not a stable entity with definable contents that the Nazi regime then violated. It is a contested label that different German coalitions have applied to different practices at different times for different institutional purposes. The Goethe-Schiller-Beethoven version of Bildung that the essay invokes is one specific construction, produced primarily in the late nineteenth century by specific German educational institutions for specific institutional reasons, including the integration of the Bildungsbürgertum into the new German state. The Bildung tradition that supposedly received the Jewish contribution between 1871 and 1933 was not a continuous entity stretching back to Goethe. It was a recent institutional construction whose stability was already in question and whose composition the Jewish entrants helped to produce rather than merely entering. The essay treats Auerbach and Cassirer and Benjamin as outsiders contributing to an established tradition. Turner would point out that these figures were among the producers of what later got called the Bildung tradition. They did not contribute to a thing that already existed. They participated in the construction of the thing that subsequent observers projected backward as if it had existed before them. The essentialist framing creates a false distinction between the tradition and its contributors.
The French universalism the essay treats as a stable entity is even more clearly a coalition product. Laïcité was not a continuous French tradition that French Jews entered. It was a specific late nineteenth century institutional settlement of the conflict between Catholic and republican coalitions, with Jewish intellectuals participating in its construction as members of the republican coalition. The universalism the essay describes Bergson, Levinas, and Derrida as both serving and being constrained by was itself a partial product of Jewish intellectual labor, not an external constraint imposed on them by an existing French tradition. The Dreyfus Affair was not a moment when the Jewish intellectual encountered a stable French universalism whose limits were then exposed. It was a moment of coalition contestation in which the meaning of French universalism was being fought over, with the outcome of the fight determining what the term would mean going forward. The essentialist framing that treats French universalism as a stable thing that Jewish intellectuals encountered, served, or transformed, conceals the fact that the term’s meaning was the object of the conflict, not its setting.
Turner’s distinction between good theories and bad theories applies usefully here. Bad theories are convenient. They provide ready-to-hand explanations that satisfy current coalition needs without requiring the difficult work of empirical demonstration. Good theories are inconvenient. They survive serious testing against evidence that the bad theories cannot accommodate. The essentialist framing of the Jewish intellectual contribution and its host traditions is, on Turner’s account, bad theory. It is convenient because it provides ready-made entities to track across national contexts and to celebrate or mourn. It satisfies current institutional needs by giving contemporary Jewish intellectual life a clear genealogy from a glorious European past, and by giving European literary cultures a clear account of what they lost when the Jewish populations were destroyed. The convenience is real. But the entities the framing posits do not survive serious examination. The Jewish intellectual tradition with the contents the essay attributes to it is a current construction that has been projected backward. The host traditions with the contents the essay attributes to them are similar projections. The encounter between these supposed entities is itself a current narrative construction, not a description of an actual historical process.
What actually happened, on Turner’s account, is much messier than the essentialist framing allows. Specific individuals operating within specific institutions at specific times produced specific works. Some of these individuals were Jewish in the senses that mattered to their contemporaries, which varied widely. Some of these works drew on materials that had been used earlier by Jewish intellectuals, but the use varied with the situation and the materials were also drawn on by non-Jewish intellectuals when the institutional configurations permitted. The traditions the works are now seen as belonging to or transgressing are not the actual frameworks within which the works were produced but later constructions that have been read back into the historical material. The neat narrative of Jewish gifts brought to host traditions, partially received and partially rejected, then catastrophically destroyed, is a story we tell now because it serves current purposes. The actual historical record is more local, more contested, more variable, and resists the kind of generalized comparative analysis the essay performs.
This sounds like it would be devastating to the essay, but Turner’s position is more sophisticated than simple deflation. He does not deny that the materials the essay tracks are real. The works exist. The institutions existed. The catastrophes happened. What he denies is that the materials can be organized into the kinds of stable entities the essentialist framing produces. The work is real. The Jewish intellectual tradition that supposedly produced the work is not real in the same sense. Auerbach’s Mimesis exists as a specific text produced under specific conditions by a specific man. The Jewish intellectual formation that supposedly explains the text is a current construction that organizes our reading of the text by projecting backward onto Auerbach’s biography a unified formation that the actual evidence does not support. Auerbach was a particular man with a particular education in particular German philological traditions, with specific exposure to Jewish materials that varied across his life, with specific responses to the Nazi catastrophe that reflected his individual situation rather than a unified Jewish intellectual response. The essay’s framing makes Auerbach an instance of the Jewish intellectual contribution. Turner would say there is no Jewish intellectual contribution that Auerbach is an instance of. There is Auerbach’s specific work, which we now read as belonging to a tradition that we have constructed for our own purposes from various materials including Auerbach’s work itself.
The catastrophic interruption that organizes the second half of this essay receives under Turner’s framework an even more uncomfortable reading. The essay treats the Holocaust and the Soviet purges and the various national collaborations as the destruction of a specific entity, the European Jewish intellectual tradition, whose loss is then mourned and whose surviving fragments are valued accordingly. Turner would point out that the entity being mourned is itself a postwar construction, produced by specific institutional and political forces that needed a unified loss to mourn. The destruction was real. But what was destroyed was not the entity the postwar construction posits. What was destroyed was a vast and varied set of populations, communities, institutions, individuals, and works, with no unified character that could be summed up as the European Jewish intellectual tradition. The unified character is the work of the survivors and their successors, who needed a coherent object of mourning for institutional and political reasons that were themselves products of the postwar coalition configurations. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the academic field of Holocaust studies, the canon of survivor literature, all of these institutions have produced and continue to produce the unified entity whose destruction we now treat as a historical fact rather than as a current construction.
This is harder than it sounds. Turner is not denying that the destruction occurred or that the destruction was a moral catastrophe. He is pointing out that the categories we use to describe what was destroyed are not the categories that organized the populations being destroyed at the time. The Jews of Salonika did not understand themselves as members of the same Jewish intellectual tradition as the Jews of Vilna or the Jews of Berlin. The Jews of Berlin in 1933 did not understand themselves as members of the same tradition as their grandparents had been members of. The unification of these various populations into a single Jewish people whose intellectual tradition was destroyed in the Holocaust is a postwar achievement, mostly American and Israeli, that has succeeded in establishing itself as historical truth despite its retrospective character. The actual populations that were destroyed had varied formations, varied institutional structures, varied relationships to host cultures, varied internal conflicts, and varied modes of self-understanding. The unification is a coalition product that serves current institutional needs but that does not accurately describe what was destroyed.
The custodianship question this essay asks dissolves under Turner’s framework in a different way than it dissolved under Mearsheimer’s. Mearsheimer dissolved it by reducing it to group competition for institutional control. Turner dissolves it by denying that the entities being custodianed exist in the form the question presupposes. The German Bildung tradition has no custodians because it is not a stable entity that could have custodians. The Jewish intellectual contribution has no custodians because it is not a stable entity that could be custodianed. What exists are specific institutions with specific personnel making specific decisions about what materials to teach, what works to canonize, what readings to authorize. The contests over these institutional decisions are real. The institutional outcomes are real. The framing of these contests as conflicts between custodians of stable traditions is a coalition product that makes the contests legible to the contestants but that does not accurately describe what is happening. The contests are not over fidelity to traditions that exist independently of the contests. They are over which constructions of what counts as the relevant tradition will become institutionally authoritative.
The convenient beliefs this essay tracks across national contexts receive under Turner’s framework their most accurate description. The Norwegian narrative of resistance, the Swiss narrative of neutrality, the Dutch narrative of Anne Frank as universal humanism, the French narrative of widespread resistance, the Italian narrative of reluctant collaboration, all of these are coalition products that organize current institutional life by projecting unified national identities backward across periods of massive variation and contestation. Turner’s analysis predicts that these narratives will be defended not because they are accurate but because they perform institutional functions that the institutions cannot continue performing without them. Challenge the Swiss neutrality narrative and you challenge the institutional structures of Swiss banking and Swiss diplomacy. Challenge the Dutch resistance narrative and you challenge the institutional structures of Dutch postwar political legitimacy. The challenges, when they come, are coalition realignments rather than simple corrections of factual error. The Bergier Commission did not correct an error. It reorganized the coalition configuration of Swiss institutional life under American pressure, with the new configuration permitting different facts to be officially acknowledged.
The deepest application of Turner to this essay concerns the comparative analytical framework itself. The essay tracks the Jewish intellectual contribution across America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The comparative method assumes that Jewish intellectual contribution is the same kind of thing in each national context, varying only in its specific local expression. Turner would deny this assumption. What gets called the Jewish intellectual contribution in each national context is a different thing, produced by different local institutional configurations, serving different local coalition functions, and bearing only loose family resemblances to what gets called by the same name elsewhere. The American Jewish intellectual contribution to literary scholarship that Klingenstein documents is not a local instance of a general phenomenon. It is its own specific thing, produced by specific American institutional configurations including the postwar expansion of higher education, the GI Bill, the rise of literary theory, and the specific dynamics of American Jewish acculturation. The German case is its own specific thing, produced by different conditions. The Russian case is its own specific thing. The supposed family of cases that the comparative analysis tracks is a current construction that reads similarities across cases that, on closer examination, are different in kind rather than merely different in expression.
The essay’s most ambitious move, the unification of these national cases into a single argument about Jewish intellectual gifts to European literary cultures and the catastrophic costs paid for those gifts, is therefore an essentialist construction that Turner’s framework would reject. The argument depends on the gifts being the same gifts across the cases, the costs being the same costs, and the relationship between gifts and costs being the same relationship. Turner would deny each of these unifications. The gifts varied. The costs varied. The relationship varied. The unification is the work of the analyst, not a description of an actual historical pattern. The pattern that the essay celebrates and mourns is the pattern produced by the celebratory and mourning framework, not a pattern that was there in advance to be discovered.
This sounds like it would force the essay to be abandoned, but Turner’s position offers an alternative path. The essay can be reconstructed without the essentialist framing as a series of specific local studies, each tracking what specific individuals did in specific institutions under specific conditions, without claiming that these specific cases instance a general phenomenon called the Jewish intellectual contribution. The reconstructed essay would be more modest in its claims, more attentive to the specific local conditions, and more honest about the constructed character of the categories it uses. It would be less satisfying as a unified narrative and more accurate as historical analysis. The trade is whether the satisfaction of the unified narrative is worth the inaccuracy of the essentialist framing that produces it. Turner would say it is not. The essentialist framing serves current coalition needs but produces bad theory. The local studies serve no coalition need but produce good theory. The choice between them is a choice about what the analysis is for.
The Auerbach case can illustrate the difference. The essentialist version reads Mimesis as a Jewish contribution to European literary scholarship, with Auerbach’s exile in Istanbul producing the conditions under which Jewish hermeneutic traditions could flower into a comprehensive treatment of Western literary realism. The local version reads Mimesis as a specific work by a specific philologist trained in specific German traditions, exiled to a specific institution in Istanbul, working without specific German research libraries, producing a specific text whose specific properties reflect the specific conditions of its production. The local version notes that Auerbach was a Reform Jew with limited engagement with traditional Jewish learning, that his philological training was thoroughly German, that his work draws more on Vico and Romance philology than on any identifiably Jewish materials, and that the specifically Jewish reading of Mimesis is a postwar interpretation that says more about the readers’ interests than about Auerbach’s situation. The essentialist version is more dramatic. The local version is more accurate. Turner would say the choice between them is the choice between bad theory and good theory, and that good theory should be preferred even when it is less satisfying.
The Levi case shows the same difference. The essentialist version reads If This Is a Man as a Jewish contribution to literary culture, with Levi’s chemical training and Italian formation combining with his Jewish identity to produce the morally serious witness literature that the catastrophe required. The local version reads If This Is a Man as a specific work by a specific Italian chemist who happened to be Jewish in a sense that became consequential under the racial laws but that had been minor in his earlier formation, who survived a specific period of imprisonment, who tried to publish the book in postwar Italy and was initially rejected, who eventually found a publisher and an audience under specific institutional conditions that made the book legible as Holocaust literature in ways that earlier Italian readers had not made it legible. The local version notes that Levi was a thoroughly assimilated Italian who understood his Jewishness primarily through the lens of the racial laws rather than through any positive Jewish formation, that his literary models were more Manzoni and Dante than any identifiably Jewish writers, and that the specifically Jewish reading of his work is a postwar construction that has gradually displaced the more accurate reading of him as an Italian witness whose Jewishness was a contingent fact about his persecution rather than the source of his literary capacities. The essentialist version is more dramatic. The local version is more accurate. The choice between them is again the choice between bad theory and good theory.
The custodianship question, finally, can be reformulated under Turner’s framework in a way that preserves what was useful in the original question while abandoning the essentialism that made the original question incoherent. The reformulated question is: which institutional configurations produce conditions under which the kinds of literary and intellectual work we currently value can continue to be produced? The reformulation drops the assumption that there are stable traditions whose custodians can be evaluated. It treats traditions as current constructions that organize the institutional configurations producing the work. It asks about the institutional configurations directly rather than about the traditions whose stability the institutional configurations supposedly serve. This is the question Turner’s framework permits. The original custodianship question is not answerable because its categories are empty. The reformulated question is answerable because its categories track actual institutional structures whose properties can be examined.
This essay, read in light of Turner’s anti-essentialism, becomes a document about the construction of a unified narrative more than about the historical events the narrative purports to describe. The narrative is powerful. It does institutional work. It serves coalition functions. It also misdescribes what it claims to describe, in the specific way that essentialist framings always misdescribe what they claim to describe. The choice the essay implicitly faces is whether to maintain the essentialist framing for the dramatic and institutional benefits it provides, or to abandon it in favor of more modest local studies that are more accurate but less satisfying. Turner would not make this choice for you. He would point out that the choice exists and that the essentialist version is bad theory. What you do with that information depends on what you want the essay to do. If you want it to perform the coalition function of unifying disparate Jewish populations into a single people with a single intellectual tradition whose destruction can be unified into a single mourning, the essentialist version serves the purpose. If you want it to describe what actually happened in the various national contexts, the essentialist version cannot serve the purpose because what actually happened did not have the unified character the essay attributes to it. The good theory and the institutional function pull in opposite directions. The honest accounting requires acknowledging the pull and choosing one or the other rather than pretending they can both be satisfied at once.
