Law, antisemitism and the Holocaust

Dismisses the theory of an "eternal antisemitism", as well as the conception of antisemitism as a failure of Jewish emancipation. Critical theory of the 19th-21st centuries came close to explaining the emergence of antisemitism in the modern period, positing that it was the political emancipation itself which had caused it. Examines and criticizes the views on this point held by critical theorists: Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer, Arendt, Sartre, Bauman, Lyotard, and Agamben. All of them, in different ways, have ascribed antisemitism to a "ressentiment" against the emancipation, that had its origins in a perceived loss or absence brought about by it. Critical theorists also tended to regard antisemitism as a natural phenomenon, evolving in accordance with the Laws of Nature. Civil law and the Rights of Man were the utmost expressions of the emancipation, hence it was the new laws, presumably stemming from the Laws of Nature and detached from ethics, that brought about the sense of "ressentiment", antisemitism, and ultimately the Holocaust. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)