Antisemitism and the Politization of Jewish Identity

Abstract

This paper examines the process of politicization of the Jewish identity following the collapse of the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment and the contemporary reading of this process for the current political debate about identity. First, I will argue that modern antisemitism revealed the inner contradictions lying beneath the Enlightenment rationale. Second, I will explore how the politization of Jewish condition entailed a reconfiguration of the Jewish identity which resulted in different political projects aiming at the emancipation of the Jewish people. However, I argue, the re-thinking of Jewish as a political subject embodied both the potential of critical alterity and an identity essentialization. Is thus possible to include identity within any emancipa-tory project? The goal here is to expose the insights afforded by the experience of Jewish recent history to contemporary emancipatory struggles.