The word ‘nation’ initially expressed all the aspirations of the peoples of Europe to be self-determining, but it turned into its opposite when the patriotic ideal inspired by the Enlightenment spirit became transformed into a communitarian project based on attachment to the soil. This was how the term ‘nationalism’, derived from ‘nation’ and invented in 1797 by the Abbé Augustin de Barruel, a sworn enemy of the Jacobins, as a way of referring pejoratively to the patriotic ideal seen as a ‘masonic plot’,¹ eventually became – forty years later – a doctrine based on chauvinism, the exclusion of otherness, and the primacy of the collective over individuality.

And yet, the aspiration to become a free nation had been, throughout the whole of Europe until 1850, an ideal of progress and freedom – witness the great revolutionary movement of 1848: the springtime of the peoples, the springtime of revolutions, the springtime of liberalism, the springtime of socialism, and the dawn of communism. Everywhere, Europeans called for the abolition of the monarchical anciens régimes that had been restored, after 1830, in every country where the Napoleonic Wars had contributed to spreading the ideals of 1789: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre’, wrote Marx and Engels in 1848.² These revolutions were, of course, severely put down, and the aspiration for peoples to gain self-determination changed into a desire to unify not men with other men, Europeans with non-Europeans, but individual nations which would then stand opposed to one another.

From then on, every nation, now turned in on itself, could be identified with the sum of its particularisms. Thus, nationalism became a doctrine that ran counter to the original ideal of which it had been the bearer. ‘The Constitution of 1795’, de Maistre wrote in 1796, ‘like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc. […] But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.’³

In the bourgeois France of the second half of the nineteenth century, which now scorned socialism, Valmy, and the uprisings of the starving, the term thus assumed a new significance. Far from serving to designate the union of the people and their native land, it was used around 1850 to define a community bonded by a collective soul, by resemblance and by genealogical identity. And this entity, characterized by a certain historical given, was given the name ‘race’. Later on, with the development of Darwinism, a biological twist was added to this new notion, fostering the shift from a historicist or morpho-psychological conception of the origin of peoples (and races) to an organicist conception. A designation based on culture or identity would no longer be sufficient: physical anthropology supplied further specifications: skin colour and the shape of the skull, ears, nose, and feet.

Against the Enlightenment spirit, German and French historicist scholars sought to rid themselves simultaneously of universalism and of the question of the origin of religions by claiming to discover a way of secularizing theology via the study of languages. Leaving behind God, faith, and myths, they set out to imagine how civilizations had begun, drawing on a science of languages – philology – whose task it was to express the national soul of different peoples and the organic body of different nations. In this way, they invented the infernal couple of Aryans and Semites, convinced that each of these two imaginary peoples was the bearer of a secret identity whose values had been transmitted since the dawn of time, so that every European nation could find its origins in them.⁴ In this way, they reinvented the ancestral myth of race war – and thus of the dialectic of the conquest and enslavement of one race by another.⁵

From this point of view, the Semites, i.e., the Hebrews (and thus the Jews) had the privilege of inventing monotheism but, remaining nomadic, were incapable of creation, knowledge, progress, and culture. On the other hand, the polytheistic Aryans – confused with the Indo-Europeans – were seen as having all the virtues of dynamism, reason, science, and politics. Only Christianity then showed itself able to bring about a harmonious synthesis between Jewish monotheism, saved by Jesus, and the Aryan dynamism that had such future potential.⁶

It is easy to see how the infernal couple operated structurally, and how it later gave rise to anti-Semitism. While the Jews were, of all the Semites, the first people, people of the first religion, they became uncreative nomads, harmful, wandering, and useless, once the Christians had taken from them their most sublime possession: monotheism. So they were viewed as inferior to the so-called Aryans, who were defined as alone being able to fuse the qualities of monotheism, imported by Christianity, with the (intrinsic) qualities of an Indo-European tradition rebaptized as Aryanism – hence their superiority.

Whatever the variations on this theme – Aryanizing Christianity, Semitizing Aryanism, inventing intermediate stages between them – the proponents of this approach were consistently intent on demonstrating that Christianity was superior to Judaism, not as a religion but as a civilization; that language was an affair of race; and that Judaism, as a cultural identity, did not find itself continued in Christianity but in Islam, a culture pronounced to be just as Semitic as the culture of the Jews. Seen this way, the Muslims were of course scorned, insofar as they belonged to the Semitic camp, but the Jews were scorned even more, as they had given birth to Islam. The thesis of the ‘first parent’ was here immortalized while being both secularized and then ‘racialized’. There was thus a shift from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism and then to racism: the Jews were viewed no longer as followers of a religion but as Semites – and, of all Semites, as the worst – in other words, as part of a race that was historically inferior to all others.

This train of thought reveals the deep reasons why racism is bred in the womb of anti-Semitism – why, to put it another way, all racism is first and foremost the expression of a form of anti-Semitism. Let us note, first, that, while racism and anti-Semitism are two distinct manifestations – one has to do with an obvious otherness and the other with an otherness without any apparent stigma – they both converge, always, however tortuous the routes they have followed. But anti-Semitism comes first and racism second. Since Judaism was the first monotheistic and Abrahamic religion, and gave rise to the two others, when the Jews were designated as a so-called Semitic race, around 1850, they remained the first parents, no longer just because they had produced the other monotheisms, but because they had become the original basis for all primary racial projections.

Furthermore, what we find is that the shift from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism has as its historical corollary the invention of racism,⁷ itself popularized by colonialism. I will be returning to this.

Around 1848, fascinated by the infernal couple of Aryan and Semite, Ernest Renan set out to produce a great philological thesis, without knowing that it would make him one of the founding fathers of anti-Semitism. He was an agrégé in philosophy, fascinated by the Orient and heavily influenced by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder and Franz Bopp. He became one of the greatest Hebrew scholars of his age, a remarkable expert in ancient languages and archaic cultures, which – he claimed – revealed the secret of the way modern societies functioned. And he then conceived the crazy plan of turning philology into the exact science of mental productions and thus of the human race. It was within this context, once he had freed himself from the yoke of religion, that in 1855 he published his major study on the question: Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques [General history and comparative system of Semitic languages].⁸

When we read the five hundred pages of this work devoted to the origin of languages and mankind, when we leaf through the great saga that leads us from the study of the Bible to that of the Semitic and Indo-European peoples, we are struck by the rigour of the demonstration, and by the passion that the author brings to reconstructing an amazing mythology which, he thinks, must open the way to a science of the foundations of human nature. At the heart of this monument of erudition, saturated with bibliographical references and Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic terms, we watch the great fable of the Semite and the Aryan unfold – between ‘[the] sublime and [the] odious’.⁹ We learn about the lives of, for example, the Hebrews, the Aramaeans, the Hevites, the Hethites, the Pherezites, the Gergezites, and the Jebusites, and we are dumbfounded to discover how much this newly promoted science may act as the basis for a web of legends that apparently demonstrate that languages are nothing other than the product of human consciousness, that all theory of language resides in its history, and that, finally, languages are nothing but an illustration of the existence of a natural inequality between the different components of the human species. Not the least rhetoric, not the least emotion, not the least romanticism, not the least renunciation of reason: this is Renan's manner – a cold passion.

And so, four years before Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species, this great scholar, a fervent humanist, serenely proclaimed that mankind, ever since its origins, has been composed of three types of race:¹⁰ the inferior, those of the archaic epoch, now vanished; the Chinese and Asiatic races, materialistic, attracted to business, incapable of any artistic feeling and possessing an underdeveloped religious instinct; and, finally, the noble races, composed of two branches: the Semites and the Aryans. The former, who invented monotheism, then succumbed to the greatest decline, giving birth to Islam, which ‘simplifies the human mind’, while the latter, superior in every way, had become – after incorporating monotheism – the lords of the human race, alone able to ensure the forward march of the world: ‘If the Indo-European race had not appeared in the world’, writes Renan, ‘it is clear that the highest degree of human development would have been something analogous to Arab or Jewish society, a society without philosophy, without thought, without politics.’¹¹

To judge from appearances alone, some would say that the anti-Judaic imprecations of the men of the Enlightenment – from Voltaire to Marx – make for much more painful reading today than Renan's scholarly language, smooth and elegant, always careful to respect the truth of different peoples and their history. And yet, let us not be fooled. The verbal excesses of the former are merely the expression of a desire to emancipate mankind, to free it from religion, while the historicizing elegance of the latter foreshadows the coming of a doctrine of extermination. In this sense, it joins hands, despite the differences, with the tradition of persecution in Christian anti-Judaism. It will come as no surprise that Renan was the first person in France to incorporate Christian anti-Judaism within an apparent science of the historical inequality of the Semites. Though he moved away from religion – so much so that he was treated as a blasphemer by the Catholic Church for having historicized the life of Jesus – he still continued to hold to its main prejudice. He replaced the ‘perfidious Jew’ with the degenerate Semite, thereby making the idea of this degeneracy – and thus of this inferiority – acceptable. ‘French anti-Semitism's debt to Renan is undeniable’, writes Zeev Sternhell: ‘it is difficult to imagine Drumont's success and his influence up to the race laws of 1940 without the respectability that – thanks to Renan – the idea of the inferiority of the Semites had acquired.’¹²

And when, in 1882, Renan spoke out for the rights of different peoples to self-determination, this was – yet again – simply so as to combat the spirit of the Enlightenment. For what he called ‘nation’ was not the native land of the constituent members but, rather, the kernel of nationalism, that nation which presupposed that each man was duty-bound to belong to an organic and hierarchical collective body. And Renan hated Germany. So he supported French democracy out of French nationalism.¹³

This was quite different from Nietzsche's revolt against the French Enlightenment. Keenly interested in philology, the German philosophy never succumbed to the passion of anti-Semitism, despite the claims of those who make him out to be a precursor of Nazism.¹⁴ Nietzsche did not like Christianity (a ‘slave religion’), or socialism, or democracy, or the masses, or nationalism, or even the Jewish religion in the strict sense. But, if he criticized the Enlightenment, this was only to light new lamps, darker and at the same time more dazzling. So he hoped that transcending the Enlightenment by a new Enlightenment might give rise to a ‘fusion of nations’ capable of producing a new European man.

This is why, in 1878, just as German anti-Semitism was becoming established, Nietzsche condemned the persecution of the Jews as one of the most hideous faces of nationalism, consisting as it does in ‘leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter as scapegoats for every possible or private misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a question of the conserving of nations but of the production of the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew will be just as useable and desirable as an ingredient of it as any other national residue.’ And, after singing the extravagant praises of Spinoza and hailing the genius of freethinking Jews, he added, taking a position diametrically opposed to that of Renan and the followers of the infernal couple,

it is thanks not least to their efforts that a more natural, rational and in any event unmythical elucidation of the world could at last again obtain victory and the ring of culture that now unites us with the enlightenment of Graeco-Roman antiquity remain unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the occident, Judaism has always played an essential part in occidentalizing it: which in a certain sense means making of Europe's mission and history a continuation of the Greek.¹⁵

Finally, in 1887, in a letter to Theodor Fritsch, whom he viewed as an idiot, he attacked anti-Semitism in the proper sense of the term:

Believe me: this abominable ‘wanting to have a say’ of noisy dilettantes about the value of people and races, this subjection to ‘authorities’ who are utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind (e.g., E. Dühring, R. Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, P. de Lagarde – who among these in questions of morality and history is the most unqualified, the most unjust?), these constant, absurd falsifications and rationalizations of vague concepts ‘germanic,’ ‘semitic,’ ‘aryan,’ ‘christian,’ ‘German’ – all of that could in the long run cause me to lose my temper and bring me out of the ironic benevolence with which I have hitherto observed the virtuous velleities and pharisaisms of modern Germans. – And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites?¹⁶

The same year as Renan gave his lecture, Count Arthur de Gobineau, a mediocre writer and failed diplomat heavily influenced by romanticism and haunted by a fatalism typical of anti-Enlightenment thinkers, published his notorious Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, which, at that time, met with little success. Instead of taking as the foundation of this alleged inequality the infernal couple of the Aryan and the Semite, he sang the praises of the Jews – ‘a free, strong people which had provided the world with as many doctors as merchants’¹⁷ – so that he could lambast all the more effectively what he called the inferior races, in the morpho-psychological or physiognomic and not the biological sense. So he postulated the existence, at the origin of human history, of an archetypal race – the Arians or Aryans – a real aristocratic caste or ‘pure race’ that, he claimed, had given birth to the most civilized peoples in the world. And he also stated that the mixing of races – or interbreeding – had always led to the decay of civilizations.

At the pinnacle of the pyramid he set the white race, superior in all respects, in beauty, intelligence, and powers of resistance. Then, at the bottom of the scale, came the black race, savage and abject. In the middle, he placed the obese and apathetic yellow race, always in thrall to material pleasures and sensual impulses. But, as a good Catholic, he preserved the idea of an original unity of the human race, emphasizing that even in the most repellent cannibal there could still be found a spark of the divine fire. No people can evolve because race determines the human condition: so no progress is possible, and, as a corollary of this, any colonization is futile.

In fact, Gobineau was not concerned – as was Renan – to provide his arguments with any rational content. He systematized them simply in order to apply them to an analysis of the post-industrial society that he loathed. So he attacked socialists as well as liberals, both followers of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And he compared them on occasion with people of the yellow race, who were good only at satisfying their natural wants. He thus created a skilful amalgam of race with social class. At the bottom of the scale, he said, was the ‘peat’, as in a bog – peasants and workers, similar to the blacks; in the middle, the industrious bourgeois – the yellows; at the pinnacle, the nobility, or white race, which alone was capable of any grandeur, but was dying out.

It will come as no surprise that Gobineau's ideas, venerated by the Nazis and collaborationists (as were those of Edmond Drumont), were rehabilitated in the 1980s, not only by supporters of the new right, but also by those who attacked the so-called anti-Semitism of the Enlightenment. Since the count was an apologist for the Jews, they basically said, his doctrine of inequality matters little: it is simply an affirmation of the structural diversity of cultures, and is conceivable even in the terms of modern anthropology. And, in support of this claim, they used a quotation from Lévi-Strauss, though first taking care to decontextualize it.¹⁸ In Race and history, Lévi-Strauss does emphasize that Gobineau thought of the inequality of races in a qualitative, not quantitative way, which might have been a positive feature of his thought. But Lévi-Strauss immediately adds that Gobineau had made the mistake of confusing race and culture: he had thus become trapped in the infernal circle of an ‘unwitting legitimation of all attempts at discrimination and exploitation’.¹⁹ In the rest of his text, Lévi-Strauss dissolves the notions of race and inequality, showing that the existence of a diversity of cultures is one of the main principles behind the notion of mankind. This is the complete opposite of Gobineau's ideas.

In reality, Gobineau's work successfully gave credence to the inegalitarian idea that became one of the main components of anti-Semitism. It added to Renan's ideas the element that they lacked, without which the notion of race (in the biological sense) could not have been used to complement the old morpho-psychological formulation. It then became of little importance if the Jews did not appear in it as such. For the later development of Social Darwinism, and then eugenicism, a doctrine based on the prospect of an alleged improvement in the human race, was sufficient basis for the birth of political anti-Semitism, founded on an anti-modern, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and nationalist vision of the world. Sophisticated discussions that had hitherto been the province of dapper orientalists, keen to preserve the lofty authority of the Bible and carefully determine the origins of our first parent, were transformed, in some fifteen years or so, against a backdrop of social and ethnic crises, into the realistic, dangerous, and populist expression of a mass anti-Semitism: the ‘socialism of imbeciles’, as August Bebel called it.²⁰

In Germany, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, the middle classes aspired to a profound reform of culture and society. While several radicals from the extreme left, hostile to liberalism, moved towards a pan-Germanic ideal, the liberals, who had gone over to Bismarck and his policy of unification based on the Prussian model, embraced the nationalist cause for reasons of economic efficiency, but also because they supported the disillusioned realism that succeeded the optimism of the springtime of the peoples.²¹ Thus, in 1870, a wave of anti-modern pessimism swept across Germany just as France suffered a humiliating defeat, which soon led to a nationalist and Germanophobe reaction.

It was at this juncture that, on both sides of the new borders drawn by the peace treaty between the two countries, the Jews were made responsible for all the misfortunes that seemed to have befallen both nations. In a Germany that was now powerful and unified, but reduced to a Kleindeutschland dominated by Prussia, and mainly Protestant in character, the Jews were accused of having contributed to a social and cultural modernization that went against the old imperial ideal of Grossdeutschland, with its Catholic majority (with Austria) and its romantic and Goethean tradition.

In Austria, however, the Jews – coming as they did from all the communities spread across the central empires – had been integrated into the liberal bourgeoisie by adopting German language and culture. Between 1857 and 1910, Vienna became the great Jewish metropolis of Mitteleuropa.²² But this was just the problem: in this new context, the integration of the Jews within Viennese society fostered the rise not only of anti-Semitism but also – and much more than elsewhere – of the notorious Jewish self-hatred (jüdischer Selbsthass) found especially among intellectuals such as Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, and many others: ‘This characteristically Austrian form of ego rejection, this Jewish doubt, this passionate instinct of self-denial’, wrote Arnold Zweig, ‘first appears when the life of non-Jewish society produces or reflects a real, coloured, magical attraction, and a humane humanity.’²³

From 1873, after the financial crisis, the urbanized Viennese Jews were faced with violent rejection and accused of being responsible not just for the destabilization of the markets but also for the decline of patriarchy. In other words, yet again, they were held responsible for the process of social transformation that would logically lead to an evolution in their lifestyle and a new family organization. Had not the Jewish people always been a wandering people, without native land or borders, always inclined to practise ritual murder, to favour perverse sexual practices, to be drawn by the lure of gain?²⁴

In fact, the repercussions of the political disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire turned Vienna, at the end of the nineteenth century, into one of the ‘most fertile melting pots for an ahistorical culture’ of the period, as Carl Schorske has shown.²⁵ As a result, the children of the Jewish bourgeoisie, faced with the onslaught of anti-Semitism and the rise of pan-Germanic nationalism, rejected the liberal illusions of their fathers and expressed other aspirations: Freud was fascinated by death and timelessness; Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau dreamt of a promised land.

In France, a country that had been defeated, and then weakened by civil war, the Jews were marked out as plotters who had worked for the defeat of the nation with the complicity of the Germanic enemy. Nationalists of every stripe then saw anti-Semitism as ‘the common denominator able to act as the platform for a mass movement’,²⁶ as Zeev Sternhell put it. These nationalists ranged themselves against liberal democracy and bourgeois society (in the case of certain socialists and anarchists who suffered the repression imposed by the Versailles government) and against the spectre of the Revolution of 1789 and internationalist German Marxism (in the case of the radical anti-universalist right, hostile to the Communards and devoted to the ideas of the old monarchical France).

The adjective ‘anti-Semitic’ made its first appearance in Germany in 1860, in a piece of writing produced by Moritz Steinschneider, an eminent orientalist Jew from Bohemia, who used this term to designate the expression of a prejudice hostile to the Jews (antisemitisches Vorurteil). And it was in connection with an article on Renan's work by another Jewish philologist (Heymann Steinthal) that Steinschneider criticized the so-called anti-Semitic thesis which claimed that Semitic peoples laboured under cultural and racial defects.²⁷

Nineteen years later, in 1879, the word had migrated from the sphere of scholarly debate to constitute, in the writings of Wilhelm Marr, the kernel of a new vision of the world: Antisemitismus. A mediocre publicist and a product of the extreme Left, Marr moved towards anarchism and atheism before founding a league that saw it as its task to expel the Jews of Germany to Palestine, and above all to stigmatize them as belonging to a class that spelled danger for the purity of the Germanic race.

In a few years, up until the First World War, anti-Semitism spread throughout Europe in several variant forms: biological, hygienist, and racialist in Germany, nationalist and Catholic in France.

Its proponents set up leagues everywhere and founded a press specializing in denunciation and insult, aiming at a broad public in search of scapegoats. They published several pamphlets against the Enlightenment spirit and absorbed, to different degrees, the main components of Christian anti-Judaism, so as to integrate them into a political programme that was oppositional, anti-liberal, monarchist, anti-Marxist, populist, xenophobic, anti-universalist, anti-modern, anti-emancipatory, and anti-progressive. Now, when the word ‘anti-Semitism’ was used, it targeted exclusively the Jews – and not the other Semites, the Arabs in particular, who had previously been associated with the Jews. By adding to Renan's ideas those of Gobineau and his heirs, this meant they could describe the Jews as representatives of an inferior race, identifiable by the stigmas it bore and, since the dawn of time, hell-bent – through the alleged intensity of its three instinctual powers (perverse sex, money, and intellect) – on devouring the civilized ‘Aryan’ peoples.

In France, in Germany, and then throughout Europe, anti-Semitic leagues spread, stigmatizing the so-called Jewish race, of which other peoples needed to rid themselves at all costs. The age of assimilation and integration, which had torn the European Jews so violently apart – especially the German Jews – finally led to the advent of a great project of eradication. Hatred of the Jew was replaced by the premises of a policy of extermination that would be put into practice fifty years later.

It was Édouard Drumont, a Catholic and monarchist journalist, inspired by the writings of Hippolyte Taine and hating the liberal bourgeoisie as much as he did the heritage of the Enlightenment and the 1789 Revolution, who produced the most abject book ever written against the Jews. La France juive (Jewish France) was a veritable manual and founded a tradition of consummate anti-Semitism: published in 1886,²⁸ it set out to trace objectively, in six parts, a truth that had been permanently hidden: the history of the destruction by the Jews of the civilized peoples of Europe. And, to provide the world with the proof of his ideas, Drumont adopted the entire conspiracy theory of Christian anti-Judaism: the Jews spread the plague, they committed ritual crimes, cut children into pieces, and so on. But he incorporated the history of these alleged plots into the long epic of the fight to the death that had been waged over the centuries between Semites and Aryans. And he drew the conclusion that the greatest victory won by the Aryans against the Semitic scourge was the expulsion of the Jews in 1394. Between this date and the outbreak of the 1789 Revolution, he said, France, ‘thanks to the expulsion of this vermin, had finally become a great European nation’.²⁹ After which, he explained, France had started to decline.

Drumont describes the Semite as a vile, grasping, cunning, feminine being, the slave of his instincts, and a nomad, while the Aryan is a veritable hero, the son of heaven, death-defying, and driven by a chivalrous ideal. He contradicts Renan's view that the Semites invented monotheism, and explains that the true Semite is no longer the Saracen (who was at least capable of heroism) but the barbarous Jew recognizable from the stench he gives off – a result of his ‘immoderate taste for the flesh of goats and geese.’³⁰

So the Semite is the Jew and nothing but the Jew, a person who belongs to a ‘race’ before he practises a religion.³¹ As for the Aryan, he gave birth to the Christian, who invented monotheism. The anti-Semitic discourse founded by Drumont thus drives a decisive wedge between, on the one hand, Judaism and Christianity and, on the other, Judaism and ‘Mohammedanism’. As for Protestantism, Drumont equates it with a ‘semi-Judaism’: ‘Protestantism acted as a bridge over which the Jews could enter the ranks, not of society, but of mankind. The Bible [i.e., the Hebrew Bible], relegated to secondary status in the Middle Ages, took its place closer to the Gospels. The Old Testament was set beside the New. Behind the Bible appeared the Talmud.’³²

From this point of view, negroes or ‘Mohammedan’ Arabs are indeed inferior peoples, but they are less dangerous for Aryan, i.e., Christian, civilization than are Jews: and so, while the former group need to be enslaved, the others – the ‘Semitic race’ – must be eliminated. Since they have no territory of their own, the Semites are assimilated only in order to destroy the peoples who have taken them in. In other words, contrary to Gobineau (whom he does not quote), Drumont is less racist than anti-Semitic, which confirms the hypothesis that anti-Semitism was the matrix of the modern racism to which it led.

Although he sought to be European in his crusade against the Jews, Drumont labelled everything that was not ‘French’ as ‘Jewish’. So immigrants were Jews. But that was not enough. For a non-Jew to be equated with a Jew, he still needed to be either a freemason, or an atheist, or a republican, or a Protestant, or a Jacobin. So Cambacérès was designated as a Jew since he was defined as a freemason, and so was Léon Gambetta, since he was a republican of Italian origins. Thanks to this line of argument, France has been ‘turned Jewish’ on every level ever since the Jews had acquired all powers thanks to their emancipation – and this was the fault of Voltaire and the Abbé Grégoire, the first because he was anti-Christian and the second because he was an apostate. In this respect, Drumont was not in the least bothered by the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, having understood that this anti-Judaism was aimed at freeing the Jews from the burden of religion.

Popularizing the ideas of Barruel and a considerable number of anti-Enlightenment thinkers, Drumont stated that ‘Semitism’ was born in the eighteenth century, which meant that the Revolution was, in his view, nothing other than a Jewish plot against the real France, which was Christian and Aryan.³³ But since he also claimed to be inspired by the rebellious people of ‘French stock’ who opposed the now Jewish-influenced liberals, and by Christian France against the cosmopolitan socialists who were also enjuivés, he accused the conservative French (the supporters of the Versailles government) of crushing the 1871 Commune, and the socialists of hijacking the revolt of the Communards, so as to benefit the reactionaries. As a result of all this, the destruction of the Commune had been brought about by the Jews: ‘So the Commune had two faces. The one was unreasonable, unthinking, but brave: the French face. The other was mercantile, grasping, and thieving: the Jewish face. The French fédérés fought well and were killed. The Jewish communards stole, murdered, and petrolled (sic) [i.e., used petrol bombs] to conceal their thefts.’³⁴

Not only were the Jews, in Drumont's eyes, cosmopolitan creatures, dirty, lustful, and stinking, but he described them as affected by all sorts of physical and mental illnesses that were indicative of corruption of blood and soul: scurvy, mange, scrofula, neurosis: ‘Examine the specimen that is dominant in Paris: political pimps, stock exchange speculators, journalists – you will find them consumed by anaemia. Their eyes roll feverishly, their pupils are the colour of toasted bread, which denotes hepatitis: and the Jew has in his liver a secretion produced by a hatred that has lasted for eighteen hundred years.’³⁵

Not content with revising history by explaining that the victims were the persecutors and the murderers were victims,³⁶ Drumont invented a style, a vocabulary, and a syntax based on insult and incrimination. He thereby created the new mode of journalistic expression to which I referred above, and which would be the special brand, as it were, of La libre parole [Free Speech], his newspaper, and also prevalent during the Dreyfus Affair, before re-emerging, in an even more virulent form, in the interwar period and up until 1945 – with the pamphlets of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Robert Brasillach's incitements to murder. Drumont drew up lists, named names, passed on rumours, and painted portraits of the anti-France: Rothschild, Fould, Crémieux, Kahn, Halévy, the valets of Marx, Heine, and Disraeli. In a word, he founded the language of anti-Semitism, which would subsequently be repeated indefinitely, like a structure, giving rise to a discourse that always remained the same, and has indeed become almost unvarying, in spite of its many metamorphoses.

And, going the whole hog, Drumont dragooned into his services the most popular writer of the nineteenth century, thereby playing the romantic card against classicism: Victor Hugo against Voltaire. Ventriloquizing through the dead, he explained that the great poet, who had, one year earlier, been given a state funeral, was a real anti-Semite and defender of Christian values. Hugo, he says, systematically stuffed his texts with the adjective ‘filthy’ [immonde] whenever he mentioned Jews. Furthermore, Hugo was apparently himself the victim of a Jew who wormed his way into his house and assassinated him after preventing him from ‘returning to Christ’.³⁷

The choice of Hugo was loaded. By turning the Jews into regicides (1793), murderers of the people (1871), and the assassins of the most famous writer of the nineteenth century, an awakener of consciousness and freedom, Drumont attempted to bring together – so as to fight more effectively against them – the ideals that lay behind the founding of two Frances: mediaeval France on the one side, embodied by Joan of Arc and Christianity, and the people's France on the other, the France of the oppressed, wretched, and rebellious. Now Hugo, as everyone knows, was the true symbol of both those Frances. He was so in his life, since he had been a monarchist in his youth, liberal during his maturity, and republican as he entered old age; and he was so in his work, since he had never stopped narrating France's heroic metamorphoses while suffering from his inability to solve the ancestral struggle between Judaism and Christianity. By exposing the hatred that the Jews aroused, Hugo had really been stating that he ‘could not quietly let men be Jews, in other words, persecuted’.

To stir up the entire French people against the Jews in this way, Drumont summoned Hugo to his side. But he neglected to say that, if Hugo sometimes – in his comments on the Bible, or when he reinvented the legend of the ‘ritual crime’ – uncritically indicated that the Christians viewed the Jews as a deceitful and deicide people (‘I love so I hate’), he had nonetheless stated that they should be blessed after being cursed, and that the curse that weighed down on them was a tragedy: ‘There is a curse on the Jews; there is a mystery in the gypsies. The Jews are caught up in a tragedy, the gypsies in a drama.’³⁸

And, of course, the author of La France juive also ignored the poet's appeal, in 1882, on behalf of persecuted Russian Jews,³⁹ and the celebrated letter written in 1843 to the director of the Israelite Archives, after a performance of Hugo's play Les Burgraves, which the director had severely criticized for its representation of the Jews: ‘The thirteenth century’, he said,

was a twilit age. It was filled with thick shadows, little light, much violence and crime […]. The Jews were barbarous, so were the Christians, the Christians were the oppressors, the Jews were the oppressed, the Jews reacted […]. We need to depict historical periods as they were. Does this mean that, in our own time, the Jews murder little children and eat them? Monsieur, in our day, Jews such as yourself are full of knowledge and light, and Christians such as myself are full of esteem and consideration for Jews such as you. So declare an amnesty on Les Burgraves, Monsieur, and allow me to shake you by the hand.⁴⁰

Drumont concluded his work with a summons to France to find for itself, at long last, a ‘chief dispenser of justice’ capable of wiping out the ‘Jews who are rolling in wealth’. ‘Have I prepared the way for our renaissance? I do not know. I have, in any case, done my duty, by responding with insults to the countless insults that the Jewish press pours down on Christians.’⁴¹

The fact that Drumont needed to turn the situation upside down in this way, converting hatred against the Jews into a hatred emanating from the Jews, clearly shows that anti-Semitic discourse, in its deepest structure, proceeds to a perverse or delirious revision of history that, in its very excessiveness, is always transformed into a denial of reality. The facts are replaced by a fable of memory. From this denial, once the genocide of the Jews had been accomplished, would spring Holocaust denial.

But in 1886, at the age of forty-two, as anti-Semitism spread across Europe as a political movement, Drumont really was the man of the hour.

Poor, déclassé, filled with thoughts of revenge and with hatred of the rich and the educated, he never stopped blaming society – and thus the Jews – for the manic-depressive madness of his father, who was interned in the asylum at Charenton in 1862, and the insignificance of his practically half-witted mother, of whom he was ashamed. Brought up amid stupidity and deprived of any emotion, he suffered from his ugliness, his squalor, his myopia, a puny body – and therefore projected onto the Jews all the vices from which he himself suffered.

And when he was accused – he, the Christian visionary – of being nothing but the valet of the Jesuits, he would then appeal to the shades of his republican father, a follower of Voltaire, even though he felt nothing but contempt for him. And when he was challenged to a duel by Arthur Meyer, a journalist whom he had insulted, he drew from the scratch he received an additional glory: ‘The finest day in my life’, he called it. Reduced for years to a poverty-stricken existence, thanks to his sloth and his inability to live off his wits, he was also forever seeking consolation from ugly women from modest backgrounds so that he could more easily mistreat them. When he eventually grew rich from his writings, he simply became even stingier than before.

Such was the man who claimed to be the redeemer of the French nation, supported by an important fringe of the press and the intellectual right: by Alphonse Daudet, who untiringly sang his praises, then by Alphonse's son Léon, the harsh critic of Freud's theories, then by Edmond de Goncourt, and finally by the cohort of anti-Dreyfusards: Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Paul Bourget, etc.

As for Georges Bernanos, he regarded La France juive as a literary masterpiece, an event in the history of the French people, a people who had shown their ability to express themselves in words finally liberated from the yoke of the Republic: ‘La France juive struck home, hit the regime at the very spring of life, right in the artery.’ And he added, in the purest Drumontesque style: ‘Clemenceau was not deceived. From the depths of his study, in the midst of his ridiculous Chinese knick-knacks, that cruel and magical fellow, an expert in poisons, consumed by contempt, fixed his eyes, the eyes of a Mongol murderer, on the anguish of the accomplices, and gazed on that spurt of golden blood, quivering with hatred and pleasure.’⁴²

In 1939, accusing Louis-Ferdinand Céline of being in the pay of Germany and spreading ‘hideous anti-Semitic propaganda’ on their behalf, Bernanos stated that the Jews, on their side, were racists. In this way he made his own the anti-Semitic idea that, by considering themselves to be the chosen people, the Jews had invented racism: ‘We must neither hate nor scorn the Jews. Nonetheless, Jewish racism is a Jewish fact. It is the Jews who are racists, and not us.’⁴³

Apart from Zola's J'accuse, which, after 1898, put an end to Drumont's career and that of the other anti-Dreyfusards, only one thing really disturbed Drumont. It was a weapon he had not thought of: humour, the genius of Jewish humour. And it was by resorting to this humour that his enemies managed to lash out at him, spreading far and wide the legend that this ugly customer with his curved nose and brachycephalic cranium was none other than … a ‘renegade Jew’, a ‘Semite in disguise’, the descendant of an illustrious family of opticians from Cologne, the Dreimonds. This rumour would pursue him to the end of his days: he responded to it with rage and fury – and without the least humour: ‘My work is me, and my work is my race, my race is my origin.’⁴⁴

This Bible of hatred is still today, just like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, a major reference point, throughout the world, for all the proponents of fully fledged anti-Semitism, in all its variant forms.

A mystical, desperate, and profoundly visionary writer, Léon Bloy opposed Drumont in a remarkable work, Le salut par les Juifs [Salvation through the Jews].⁴⁵ He condemned any idea of eradication or persecution. In his view, the Jews, who had inherited the virtues ascribed to the ‘first parent’, had become debased as a result of the stigmatization they had suffered: ‘I have wasted a few hours reading, like so many other people, the anti-Jewish elucubrations of Monsieur Drumont, and I do not remember him ever quoting these simple words (salus ex judaeis est), so powerful, spoken by Our Lord Jesus Christ and related by Saint John in the fourth chapter of his Gospel.’⁴⁶

And to highlight the psychological and physical wretchedness of the Jews and advocate the ideal of conversion to Christianity, which in his view was the only thing that could save Jews and Christians together, by ensuring that the latter were not the orphans of the former, Bloy embarked on an apocalyptic description of the great Jewish market in Hamburg. He simultaneously deployed and rejected the language of anti-Semitism to tell the story of an apparition. In the middle of all the cast-off clothes, the filth, and the second-hand goods, he had seen three horrible old men, ‘yids’, who, in a sort of transformation of the abject into the sublime, reminded him of the biblical triad of the sacred Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. ‘Imagine them – I scarcely dare to write it – those three great persons, more than human, from whom sprang all the people of God and the word of God himself.’

Against Drumont, Bloy paid homage one last time to a Christian anti-Judaism that was on the point of vanishing, and of which he claimed to be the most desperate follower in a world steeped in anti-Semitism – in other words, riven by a criminal split between the two first monotheistic religions. For, in his view, the abjection in which the Jew lived – ‘an old, sordid, hook-nosed Hebrew, scrabbling for gold among piles of garbage’ – was also what, in Christianity, made him worthy of compassion. And so, to those three ‘incomparable villains’ encountered in Hamburg, he addressed the salvation of the crucified Christ, remembering, at the threshold of a godless modernity, that the salvation of the Christians came from the salvation of the Jews: ‘I owe them this homage of an almost affectionate memory, since they brought to my mind the most grandiose images that can enter the plain and humble dwelling place of a mortal mind.’⁴⁷

Once his book was published, Bloy was supported by Bernard Lazare, a Jewish writer and journalist,⁴⁸ who became one of the main protagonists in the Dreyfus controversy. Between the visionary of the catacombs, haunted by madness, and the radical atheist, who called for a Spinozist revolution, a strange relation developed. Lazare shared Bloy's visceral anti-Drumont feelings.⁴⁹ And yet, for several years, he himself had attacked foreign Jews, contrasting their ‘barbarous perversion’ with the figure of the civilized Jew: the Israelite. Then, abandoning the aestheticism of the literary avant-garde for a greater commitment to the proletarian cause, he had transformed his hatred into a devotion to the poor and wretched. So the encounter with Bloy led him from the self-hatred so pervasive in his Histoire de l'antisémitisme [History of anti-Semitism]⁵⁰ to an acceptance of his Jewish identity that would lead him to do a volte-face. Hannah Arendt painted a vibrant portrait of him, depicting him as a ‘conscious pariah’.⁵¹

Such, in any event, was the singular place occupied by Léon Bloy in the French history of the Jewish question.

In the interwar period, the followers of Drumont who admired Nazism unhesitatingly equated some of Hitler's ideas with those of their hero, even though this meant ignoring the differences between the two discourses. So it barely mattered that Drumont was a militant Catholic who had no time for the doctrine of the ‘master race’, for Nordic mysticism and the visceral anti-Christianity characteristic of Nazism: the main thing was to amalgamate all the European tendencies of anti-Semitism. The two men, Drumont and Hitler, were also akin in their origins and in the way they had converted professional failure into a desire for vengeful insurrection: there was the same exaltation of populism, the same spirit of destruction, the same murderous impulses towards the ‘two-faced’ Jew, that master of finance, inventor of the Revolution, hatcher of plots, monopolist of intellect and of the secrets of sex. There was one difference, however: in Hitler's case, the passion of anti-Semitism had been transformed, by the end of the First World War, into a cold and rational determination to act out his hatred and exterminate the Jews legally – something that went beyond planning their elimination in fiery rhetoric. ‘Anti-Semitism based on purely sentimental reasons’, he wrote in 1919, ‘will find its final expression in pogroms. The anti-Semitism of reason, however, must lead to a legal and methodical struggle, and to the elimination of the privileges that the Jew possesses, unlike the other foreigners who live among us. But its ultimate and immutable objective must be the elimination of the Jews in general.’⁵²

In 1967, after a long eclipse, the admirers of Édouard Drumont gathered at his burial place in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris to celebrate the glorious memory of this ‘pure-blooded Frenchman, this true Frenchman of France …’. They founded an association which brought together all the variants of neo-fascism, followers of Maurras, and Catholic fundamentalists. What these groups had in common was their hostility to Charles de Gaulle, to the Resistance, to decolonization, and to Algerian independence. It was at this juncture that Emmanuel Beau de Loménie, with the support of the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert and the philosopher Jean-François Revel, the future fanatical opponent of Marx, Freud, Sartre, and the spirit of the Enlightenment, had the idea of publishing an anthology of Drumont's texts presented in a positive light and in a somewhat conspiratorial guise. Drumont was depicted not as an anti-Semite, but as an anti-capitalist stifled by the ‘grandees of the Sorbonne’: his ‘rehabilitation would be absolutely necessary, stirring, and likely to shed light for rising generations on the causes of our failures and the means of our potential recovery.’⁵³

But the most incongruous post-war commentary is still that of Georges Bernanos, the eternal defender of Drumont. A writer of exceptional talent, but in revolt against everything – communism, democracy, liberalism, and capitalism, the bourgeoisie, the republicans, and the socialists – Bernanos had rejected Maurras, l'Action française, Francoism, the appeasement spirit of the Munich Agreement, and Nazism before going into exile in Paraguay and then, in June 1940, supporting de Gaulle's Resistance.

In the period after the extermination of the Jews,⁵⁴ Bernanos – still haunted by his fears of a Europe in decline and the advent of American ‘bestiality’ – lambasted the new parliamentary administration that had emerged from the Liberation, emphasizing that at least the Vichy regime could state in its own defence that it had placed itself at the service of the occupying forces. And, surveying the Zionist movement and the return of the Jews to Palestine, he reiterated, in exaggerated and simplistic terms, remarks he had made during the interwar period:

There is a Jewish question. This is not just my own personal view: the facts are there to prove it. After two millennia, the Jewish racist and nationalist feeling is so obvious to everybody that no one found it extraordinary that, in 1918, the victorious Allies imagined they might restore them to a land of their own: does not this demonstrate that the capture of Jerusalem by Titus did not solve the problem? Anyone who talks this way is treated as an anti-Semite. This word increasingly fills me with horror; Hitler has forever dishonoured it […]. I am not anti-Semitic – and in any case, this does not mean a thing, since the Arabs are Semites too. I am not at all anti-Jewish […]. I am not anti-Jewish but I would blush to write, when I do not think this is true, that there is no Jewish problem, or that the Jewish problem is merely a religious problem. There is a Jewish race: they can be recognized from certain obvious physical signs. If there is a Jewish race, there is a Jewish sensibility, a Jewish mentality, a Jewish sense of life, of death, of wisdom and happiness […]. There is no French race. France is a nation, in other words a human product, a creation of mankind […]. But there is a Jewish race. A French Jew who has been incorporated into our people for several centuries will probably remain racist, since his entire moral and religious tradition is based on racism, but this racism has gradually become humanized, and the French Jew has become a Jewish Frenchman.⁵⁵

These notorious words have often been debated. Ever since 1947, Bernanos's admirers have continually striven to deny that the writer was not in any way a proponent of anti-Semitism, since he had so stridently poured public contempt on Hitler's Germany. But they thereby forgot that, in thus expressing his horror of a word that he deemed to be ‘dishonoured’, Bernanos was condemning Hitler only so that he could rehabilitate Drumont all the more effectively and hate Germany – Germany as a whole, not just Nazi Germany. The implication is that this denial suggested there might be an honourable form of anti-Semitism. But what form?

His words are, to put it mildly, ambiguous, expressing as they do a hatred for the other⁵⁶ which merely reflects, without ever sublimating it, the sordid self-hatred that marks the characters in his novels. Bernanos was announcing the birth of a new mode of expression for anti-Semitic discourse. This had become, after Auschwitz, unspeakable: it could now be stated, at least in Western societies, only in an ‘honourable’ – that is, a masked, denying, unconscious – way.

It was in France that political anti-Semitism was invented, culminating in the rabble-rousing venture of General Boulanger in the 1880s, then continuing throughout the Dreyfus Affair and gaining a new impetus after 1930. But it was in Germany⁵⁷ that interest was focused on biological anti-Semitism – a racially based, and thus racist anti-Semitism – which, forty years later, fed into Nazism. With it, the former concept of race, in the genealogical sense, assumed a new, purportedly ‘scientific’ meaning.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the most eminent authorities in German medical science, fascinated by the rise of Darwinism and terrified by the possible decadence of societies and individuals, promoted the establishment of a biocracy. They sought to move beyond political conflict by governing their nations with the help of the life sciences in the same way that their historicist teachers had believed they could explain the origin and hierarchy of races by philology. The medical specialists were more egalitarian and less attached to genealogical myths than the historicists, but they regarded themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment rather than as proponents of a return to the past. And, as they had taken stock of the burden imposed by industrialization on the souls and bodies of a proletariat that was increasingly exploited in grim, unsanitary factories, they wished to purify German cultural structures and combat every form of ‘degeneracy’⁵⁸ linked to mankind's entry into industrial modernity.

As materialists who were hostile to religious obscurantism, they invented a strange scientific figure: the new man, regenerated by reason and self-overcoming. They were imitated by the communists⁵⁹ and by the founders of Zionism, including Max Nordau,⁶⁰ who saw in the return to the promised land the only way of liberating Jews from the stultification in which anti-Semitism had immersed them.

Favourable to women's emancipation and a concerted mastery of procreation, these Enlightenment savants – doctors, biologists, sociologists, etc. – set up a state programme for the regeneration of bodies and souls, a eugenicist programme in which they encouraged the populace to purify themselves by making medically controlled marriages. They urged the masses to wean themselves off their vices: tobacco, alcohol, and any form of unbridled sexuality. They also set up large-scale testing for the diseases that were eroding the social body: syphilis, tuberculosis, etc.

Some of them, such as Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneer in homosexual emancipation, supported this programme, convinced that a new type of homosexual, finally rid of the perverse inheritance of an accursed race, could be created by science. He too, like the founder of Zionism, wished to create a new man: ‘the new homosexual’. So, in 1911, he launched an appeal on behalf of the protection of women, the right to abortion, and the physical and psychological improvement of the human race.⁶¹

When the movement for racial hygiene was set up, it became split between two main trends. The first, represented by the illustrious doctor Rudolf Virchow, drew on a form of medicine oriented towards the natural sciences and designed to promote a progressive programme for the prevention of diseases and epidemics. Liberal in his views on lifestyle, hostile to anti-Semitism, to Gobineau, and to colonialism, in 1869 Virchow founded the Berlin Society of Anthropology, thus bringing this discipline closer to biology. He insisted on the need to work on the diversity of cultures while developing the idea that diseases evolved – in the same way as races.

The second trend, taking its lead from the ideas of Ernst Haeckel, the popularizer of Darwinism in the German-speaking world, was based on the narratives of Gobineau, which thus met with posthumous success. Eager to apply the theory of species selection to human society, Haeckel sought to incorporate the human sciences into zoology. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon Darwinist school, which was preoccupied by competition and based on a liberal – but still just as racialist⁶² – conception of natural selection, Haeckel conceived a classification of human races that mixed monogenism with polygenism.⁶³ Convinced that the human world resembled the animal world, he thought that mankind, in spite of its original unity, was divided into several species. So he stated that the differences between superior and inferior human beings were greater than those that distinguished inferior human beings from superior animals.⁶⁴ And, among the inferiors, he included the mentally handicapped, the insane, and peoples of colour: blacks, Aborigines, Hottentots. Furthermore, he thought that mankind was divided into twelve human species and thirty-six races, themselves grouped into four classes: savages, barbarians, the civilized, and the cultivated. Only European nations comprised, in his view, the cultivated classes. As a result, it was their task to bring their civilizing mission to the rest of the world.

All these post-Darwinian ideas spread through the many different European varieties of the new colonial imperialism of the end of the nineteenth century. This assumed a commercial and differential guise among the English, a cultural and assimilationist form among the French, and an exterminating (but belated and short-lived) guise among the Germans, who later turned their expansionist drives against a Europe that had been, they claimed, ‘Jewified’.⁶⁵

After 1920, in a broken Germany that the economic slump had reduced to poverty, the heirs of this biocracy pursued this programme, adding euthanasia and systematic sterilization to it. They thus moved from an Enlightenment to an anti-Enlightenment position, and from a biological scientism to a criminal science whose sole purpose was the implementation of a will to genocide.⁶⁶

Terrified at the potential prospect of the decline of their ‘race’, they invented the notion of ‘negative value of life’, convinced as they were that certain lives were not worth living. These included the lives of people afflicted by an incurable illness, a deformity, a handicap, or an anomaly, the lives of the mentally ill, and finally the lives of so-called inferior races. The figure of the new man fabricated by the most highly developed science in the European world thereby turned into the abject figure of the master race in SS uniform. In this way, Nazism, taking over for its own purposes the anti-Christian biological theories propounded by the post-Darwinians and a French political anti-Semitism stripped of its Catholicism, set itself the task of ‘depopulating’ the world of all non-‘Aryan’ races, including the worst of them all, the Jews, defined as belonging to a sub-animal realm: vermin, lice, microbes, viruses, etc. Anti-Judaism thus fused with anti-Semitism, since, in the Nazi view, Judaism and Christianity were merely two faces of the same Semitism of which only the Jews should bear the emblem, while Christians could free themselves from it only by converting to ‘Aryanism’.

Christian anti-Judaism did not survive the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis; nor did the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment. And this is why, after 1945, any anti-Semitism could be nothing other than the perpetuation of the passion of anti-Semitism – a passion that was disguised in states that observed the rule of law but was openly flaunted in the rest of the world.

The Nazis gave the name ‘Final Solution’ (Endlösung) to the genocide of the Jews, and they called the process of extermination ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung). They assassinated the German language: as a result, certain words can no longer be uttered. And they believed that they had ‘solved’ the Jewish question by annihilating the Jews: this was their way of obeying the fin-de-siècle injunction claiming that anti-Semitism would end only with the disappearance of the Jews. They then eliminated every trace of the act by which they had perpetrated this annihilation. As defeat loomed, they destroyed the instruments of the crime – the gas chambers – and got rid of the witnesses who might ‘carry secrets’ with them, in the belief that they were creating the conditions for a future, warped reconstruction of the past. In obedience to Hitler, who himself had drawn inspiration from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they thought they could spread the idea that the war had been willed and provoked solely by international financiers of Jewish origin or working on behalf of Jewish interests.⁶⁷

Against these labels (Endlösung, Sonderbehandlung) which, in all their bureaucratic banality, aimed to obscure the horror of administered death, and against this destruction of the traces of destruction, history would hold up the generic name Auschwitz – the same in every language – to designate what the Nazis had sought to disguise. And the eye-witness accounts of those who escaped would continue, in spite of the Holocaust deniers, to reverse the effacement of all traces which these deniers had sought.

And so, beyond the shadow of the camps and the smoke of the ovens, Auschwitz⁶⁸ would become, over the years, the main signifier of an extermination which the founders of anti-Semitism had dreamt of without believing it could actually be carried out.

1 Augustin de Barruel (1741–1820) was one of the instigators of those conspiracy theories that continued to target freemasons and Jews: see his Mémoires pour servir l'histoire du jacobinisme (1797–8).

3 Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. and ed. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

4 The best book on this question is by Maurice Olender, The languages of paradise: race, religion, and philology in the nineteenth century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Olender studies the works of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Ernest Renan (1823–1898), Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875), Rudolf Friedrich Grau (1835–1893), and, finally, Ignaz Isaac Goldziher (1850–1921), who was the only one to criticize the foundations of the use of the infernal couple and who became one of the founding figures of the modern study of Islam. See Jean-Pierre Vernant’s foreword, ibid.: ‘In these two linked but asymmetrical mirror-images, these projections in which nineteenth-century scholars attempted to discern their own image, we cannot today fail to see looming in the background the dark silhouette of the death camps and the rising smoke of the ovens’ (p. xi).

5 On the metamorphoses of the question of race war, see Michel Foucault, ‘Society must be defended’: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–6, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2004).

6 The term ‘Semite’ is derived from Sem or Shem, the name of one of Noah's three sons (the other two being Ham and Japheth), ancestor of Abraham, from whom sprang the Hebrews, Arabs, Aramaeans, Phoenicians, and Elamites. The so-called Aryan languages, derived from Sanskrit, were – on this view – originally spoken by the Latins, Slavs, Greeks, Celts, Germanic peoples, and Persians, all stemming from the Indo-European group. This confuses the Indo-Europeans, peoples of Europe and Asia, with the so-called Aryans, who existed solely in the theoretical imaginings of nineteenth-century philologists who wanted to set them up in opposition to the Semites.

7 The French term racisme appeared in 1894, penned by a collaborator on La libre parole, the journal of Édouard Drumont.

8 Renan, Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: L'Imprimerie impériale, 1855). This work was republished many times. Renan was a supporter of Darwin, even though the latter's ideas, in The Origin of Species, were quite different from his own.

12 Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914: les origines françaises du fascisme, new edn (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 20.

13 Renan, ‘Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?’ (1882). Quoted in Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire, pp. 19–20.

14 This was the result of the way his sister Élisabeth Förster, an anti-Semite and supporter of Hitler, falsified his work.

15 Nietzsche, Human, all-too-human: a book for free spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 175.

16 Nietzsche, letter to Theodor Fritsch, 29 March 1887. Available at: www.consciencia.org/nietzsches-letters-1887. See Jacques Le Rider, L'Allemagne au temps du réalisme: de l'espoir au désenchantement (1848–1890) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008), especially pp. 422–32 on Nietzsche's alleged anti-Semitism. Theodor Fritsch (1852–1933), a disciple of Wilhelm Marr and the first German translator of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, wrote a review of Beyond Good and Evil. He declared that he had found in it an ‘exaltation of the Jews’ and a ‘harsh condemnation of anti-Semitism’, and he considered Nietzsche to be a ‘superficial philosopher’ who had ‘no understanding of the essence of the nation’.

17 Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l'origine des races humaines (1855), vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard), p. 306. An early translation of this was The moral and intellectual diversity of races (1856), republished with an editor's note by Robert Bernasconi (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002).

18 This is partly the argument of Pierre-André Taguieff, who takes a stand against the presentation of Gobineau's work as a racist theory for the use of anti-fascists, and contrasts the good racialism of the count with the bad racialism of Vacher de Lapouge and the Nazis: ‘After 1945’, he writes, ‘a reversal of this ideological evaluation could not fail to happen: anti-Gobinism was mechanically integrated into anti-fascism as one of its cultural components. Gobineau's work became a source of shame for France’: Taguieff, La couleur et le sang: doctrines racistes à la française (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002), p. 58. See also the article in the French Wikipedia on Gobineau and the article by Jean Gaulmier in the Encyclopaedia Universalis.

19 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 10. Lévi-Strauss never concealed his admiration for some of Gobineau's works.

20 August Bebel (1840–1913) was one of the founders of the German Social Democratic Party and is famous for his works in favour of cultural diversity.

23 Quoted by Claude Klein in his ‘Essai sur le sionisme: de l'État des Juifs à l'État d'Israël', in Theodor Herzl, L'État des Juifs (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), p. 129.

24 In anti-Semitic discourse, the Jew is always the embodiment of a so-called perverse sexuality: so he is viewed as being as dangerous as the homosexual or the transvestite. The worst type of Jew, in the eyes of the anti-Semite, is the Jewish woman, the ‘feminized’ Jew, or the intellectual Jew, incapable of so-called virile activity. The hatred of women or homosexuals is often the sign of a disguised anti-Semitism. Hence the way that Jewish self-hatred goes together with a rejection of the Jew's alleged ‘feminity’.

25 Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: politics and culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also Le Rider, Modernity and crises of identity: culture and society in fin-de-siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).

27 Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), Hebräische Bibliographie: Blätter für neuere und ältere Literatur des Judenthums, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1860). Heymann (Hayim) Steinthal (1823–1899), ‘Zur Charakteristik der Semitischen Völker’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 4 (1860). See also Gilles Karmazyn, ‘L'“antisémitisme”: une hostilité contre les Juifs. Genèse du terme et signification commune’, 2002, available at: www.phdn.org/antisem/antisemitismelemot.html.

28 Édouard Drumont, La France juive: essai d'histoire contemporaine (Paris: Ernest Flammarion & Charles Marpon, 1886). The first edition of the book, presented in two volumes with a total of 1,200 pages, sold 65,000 copies, and the work went through 150 editions. I am here quoting the 1887 edition, illustrated with ‘scenes, views, portraits, maps and plans by our best artists’ (Paris: Librairie Blériot, 954 pp.). See also Grégoire Kauffmann, Édouard Drumont (Paris: Perrin, 2008). On French anti-Semites of left and right – Joseph Proudhon, Maurice Barrès, Jules Guérin, Alphonse Toussenel, Gustave Tridon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Charles Maurras, etc. – see Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire.

31 Drumont draws particularly on the ideas of Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), a French psychologist and a supporter of theories of hereditary degeneracy and the inequality of races. In a celebrated work of 1873, Heredity (Eng. trans., 1875), he postulated that the formation of a nation resulted from physiological and psychological laws. I have given the name ‘the unconscious French-style’ to a pattern of thinking that has come down from this doctrine and has been constantly adapted by anti-Freudians such as Marcel Gauchet, Jacqueline Carroy, and the authors of The Black Book of Communism (by Stéphane Courtois et al.; trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). See Élisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 2 vols (Paris: Fayard, 1994); new edn (Paris: Hachette, 2009). On the way Max Nordau adapted the idea of degeneracy, see below.

32 Drumont, La France juive, p. 157. ‘Say Jew and what you really mean is Protestant’, as Alphonse Toussenel put it in les Juifs, rois de l'époque: histoire de la féodalité financière, published the same year as La France juive (1886).

33 The current opponents of the spirit of the Enlightenment, who claim that the latter ‘leads to Auschwitz’, are merely unwittingly repeating, in an inverted form, Drumont's ideas.

36 This idea would be repeated by the Nazi perpetrators of genocide: it was uttered in these words by Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz. See Roudinesco, La part obscure de nous-mêmes: une histoire des pervers (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), especially the chapter ‘Les aveux d'Auschwitz’.

38 Henri Meschonnic and Manaka Ôno, Victor Hugo et la Bible (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001), p. 22.

39 Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881, the Russian Jews had been accused of plotting against the regime and subjected to persecution.

40 Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Massin (Paris: Le Club français du livre), vol. 6 (1966), p. 1232.

42 Georges Bernanos, La grande peur des bien-pensants (Paris: Le livre de poche, 1998; first published 1930), p. 169. This work was followed by ‘A propos de l'antisémitisme de Drumont’ (1939), ‘Encore la question juive’ (1944), and ‘L'honneur est ce qui nous rassemble …’ (1949). The theme of the Jew as a poisoner, with Mongol features, is characteristic of anti-Semitic discourse. When he wrote these lines, Bernanos was quite aware that Clemenceau had been one of the main figures to take up the cause of Dreyfus.

44 Quoted in Kauffmann, Édouard Drumont, p. 17. Bernanos ascribed this rumour to Abraham Dreyfus, a dramatist quoted in La France juive, and he accused the communist Paul Lafargue of having spread it, which enables him to take up (likewise without the slightest humour) the defence of a Drumont who was a ‘victim of the Jews and the communists’ before adding these words: ‘Around 1908, the same editorial offices were filled with the rumour that Maurice Barrès was descended from Portuguese Jews’: see Bernanos, La grande peur des bien-pensants, p. 39.

48 Bernard Lazare (1865–1903): socialist and anarchist, highly anti-religious, he was the first French Dreyfusard. He later briefly moved in the circles of Theodor Herzl, while remaining a socialist Zionist of the diaspora.

49 See Christian Jambet (ed.), Léon Bloy (Paris: Éditions de l'Herne, 2003), and Pierre Glaudes (ed.), Léon Bloy au tournant du siècle (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2003), especially the article by Rachel Goitein.

50 Bernard Lazare, Histoire de l'antisémitisme: son histoire et ses causes (1849), followed by Contre l'antisémitisme (1895). The two works were republished in dubious conditions, with prefaces by the Holocaust denier Pierre Guillaume (Paris: La Différence, 1982 and 1983 respectively).

51 Hannah Arendt, Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 283–6.

52 Adolf Hitler, letter of 16 September 1919, quoted in Eberhard Jäkel, ‘L'élimination des Juifs dans le programme de Hitler’, in L'Allemagne nazie et le génocide des Juifs (Paris: Gallimard & Le Seuil, 1985), p. 101.

53 Emmanuel Beau de Loménie, Drumont ou l'anticapitalisme national (Paris: Pauvert, 1968), p. 12.

54 In a text written in 1946–7, Bernanos contented himself with referring to ‘the countless Jewish graves of this war’, paying homage to a Jewish friend of his son who had died fighting for France. See ‘L'honneur est ce qui nous rassemble’ (1949), reprinted in La grande peur des bien-pensants, p. 401.

55 Bernanos, ‘Encore la question juive’, in La grande peur des bien-pensants, pp. 397–9. Although he said that he felt uneasy at ‘the anti-Semitism of Bernanos’, Élie Wiesel declared in 1988: ‘I cannot harbour ill-feeling against Bernanos, who had the courage to oppose fascism, to denounce anti-Semitism, and to say precisely the things he said and wrote about the beauty of being Jewish, the honour of being Jewish and the duty of remaining Jewish’ (ibid., p. 13).

56 ‘In Bernanos’, as Bernard Lonjon emphasizes, ‘the enemy is the person who hates his neighbour whatever that neighbour may do or say’: in ‘La psychose de l'ennemi chez l'écrivain’, Société, 80/2 (2003), p. 37.

57 Especially with Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), a writer of English origin and German nationality, the son-in-law of Richard Wagner, who had a great influence in Austria. See also Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna.

58 The term ‘degeneracy’ was invented in 1857 by the French psychiatrist Bénédict-Augustin Morel (1809–1873) to denote an illness that marked a deviation from an ideal primitive type. It was taken up by Max Nordau.

60 See chapter 3. I have also tackled this question in La part obscure de nous-mêmes.

62 See Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, the second part of Origins of totalitarianism. See also André Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales: de la Bible à Darwin (Paris: Flammarion, 2008).

63 As against the biblical precepts that defended the idea of a unity to the human race (fixist monogenism), some Enlightenment philosophers (especially Voltaire) adopted a polygenist thesis, according to which the origin of mankind was founded on the existence of a plurality of races. To isolate peoples from one another in an arbitrary way, following the principle of a dangerous differentialism, polygenism would lead to racism – in other words, to the notion of inequality between races – while Darwin himself had maintained the monogenist idea without thinking of it in essentialist terms.

64 This racist thesis was taken up by the proponents of deep ecology, for instance Peter Singer. I present a critique of it in La part obscure de nous-mêmes. Haeckel was also the inventor of the word ‘ecology’ (1866). See also Élisabeth de Fontenay, ‘Pourquoi les animaux n'auraient-ils pas droit à un droit d'animaux?’, Le Débat, 109, March–April 2000.

65 Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinovski, ‘L'antichambre de l'Holocauste?’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d'histoire, 99, July–September 2008. The two authors draw a connection between the massacres committed by the Germans in Southwest Africa, between 1904 and 1907, and the genocide of the Jews.

66 See Paul Weindling, L'hygiène de la race, vol. 1: Hygiène raciale et eugénisme médical en Allemagne, 1870–1933 (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), with a preface by Benoît Massin.

67 Hitler speaks: a series of political conversations with Hitler on his real aims (London: Butterworth, 1939), pp. 231–8, and Norman Cohn, Warrant for genocide: the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, new edn (London: Serif, 1996), ch. 8.

68 The generic name of Auschwitz symbolizes the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, i.e., in total, some 5.5 million Jews exterminated in the context of the Final Solution. Within five years, 1.3 million men, women, and children were deported to the camp at Auschwitz and 1.1 million exterminated, 90 per cent of them Jews. Placed under the control of Heinrich Himmler, Auschwitz was an industrial complex composed of three camps: Auschwitz I (the main camp), a concentration camp, opened on 20 May 1940; Auschwitz II–Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp (gas chambers and ovens), opened on 8 October 1941; and Auschwitz III–Monowitz, a labour camp for the IG Farben factories, opened on 31 May 1942. This overall arrangement was supplemented by some fifty or so small camps scattered across the region and placed under the same administration. The name ‘Auschwitz’ is also the signifier of the extermination by the Nazis of Jews, gypsies, and all those who represented races deemed to be ‘impure’.