Description:

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: 'ANTI-SEMITE AND JEW'
(1905 – 1980) French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism. His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying: 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution' and '…a Jew is nothing other than this ‘project' to overcome an intolerable situation…'. Superb content A.M. (unsigned), 2pp. 4to., [n.p., n.d.], a portion of a draft for his 1946 work 'Anti-Semite and Jew'. In part: '…What will he choose? There is nothing to predict since he is free. However, the situation reduces him to this alternative: me must choose to deny his situation or claim it. And it is indeed one or the other of these choices that he will take: but there are a thousand…ways of refusing, a thousand…ways of accepting. There are also thousands of Jewish ‘characters' – in fact one can conceive of an infinity. Because a Jew is nothing other than this ‘project' to overcome an intolerable situation. Neither race, nor religious: but a free man who, surrounded by hatred or unjust contempt, throws himself beyond this contempt and this hatred, towards his own goals. And if he chooses to flee, who would dare blame him? This flight is not cowardice, nor desertion: it is an attempt to live one's life as if the Jewish problem didn't exist, and effort to be a whole person, which manifests itself in work as in play, in solitude and in life…to symbolically eliminate the reality of the Jewish problem from within and outside of man. This leak is a martyrdom, in the literal sense of the word, because the Jew who flees tries to prove with his flesh that the Jewish race does not exist. Thus, he is relentlessly haunted by this ghost that he wants to destroy and, of course, it is this attempt at escape that constitutes him as a Jew, because it is the Jew alone who can want to escape from the Jewish situation…'. A few areas of dampness otherwise finely penned and very good. Sartre wrote 'Anti-Semite and Jew' after the liberation of Paris in 1944, and the essay was published in 1946. With the embers of the crematoria barely extinguished and before the Nuremberg trials in which anti-Semitic policies would be tried as actionable crimes, Sartre sought to explain the 'whys' of anti-Semitism from an existential and psychological standpoint. He concluded that it stemmed more from a passion and imagined idea of 'the Jew' rather than actual objective experience with Jewish people. For Sartre, anti-Semitism is not a fear of the Jew as the 'other,' but rather the anti-Semite's fear of the world who actually fears assimilation, and thus projects that fear onto the Jew. Finally, condemning the liberal democratic ideology which he believed foments anti-Semitism, Sartre states: 'The cause of the Jews would be half won if only their friends brought to their defense a little of the passion and the perseverance their enemies use to bring them down.'.

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September 10, 2025 10:00 AM EDT
Elkton, MD, US

Alexander Historical Auctions LLC

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