Enzo Traverso > Quotes

“First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy’ was potentially more dangerous than ‘the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’.2 In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted the anthropological models of neoliberal capitalism as a ‘new fascism’ compared to which the regime of Mussolini appeared irremediably archaic, as a kind of ‘paleofascism’.3 And in even more recent decades, many historians seeking to provide interpretations of Berlusconi’s Italy recognized its intimacy—if not its filiation—with classical fascism”
― Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right

“Today, anti-Semitism remains a distinctive feature of the nationalisms of eastern Europe, where Islam is almost non-existent and the turn of 1989 gave new life to the old demons (still present, even where there are no Jews), but it has almost disappeared from the discourse of the west European far right (which often proclaims its sympathies for Israel).”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Hannah Arendt, drawing on an intuition of Max Weber and Bernard Lazare, tackled the ‘ambiguous semantics’ of Jewish political history head-on in order to forge a new concept: pariah Judaism. Invisibility, exclusion from the public space and ‘worldlessness’ were for her its key features, despite the cultural richness it had demonstrated.25 She set out on this basis to decipher totalitarianism by analysing its emergence as the product of the crisis of the system of nation-states. In a certain sense, Jewish modernity coincided with the trajectory of pariah Judaism. The obsession of Zionism, the child of nineteenth-century nationalisms, was to put an end to this ‘ambiguous semantics’, so that Jews would accede to a ‘normal’ existence: nation, state, sovereignty.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“born from the treaty of Versailles in the wake of the collapse of the empires. In these states, Jews embodied modernity and polarized the rejection of conservative forces. In France, they became the target of legitimists and nationalists opposed to the Third Republic; in Italy, of Catholics horrified by the Piedmont monarchy that had led the peninsular’s unification; in Germany, of conservatives who sought to preserve the Christian character of the Prussian monarchy. After”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“If Judeophobia has a millennial trajectory, anti-Semitism was born in the second half of the historical sequence noted above (1850–1950).”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“mito”
― Enzo Traverso, Gaza ante la historia

“Calvinist Holland saw them as Jews, while Jews saw them as Christians. They studied Hebrew, spoke Spanish or Portuguese, wrote in Latin and lived in a cosmopolitan world. They saw Judaism not as a closed world but rather as a laboratory and a crossroads of experiences. Out of this background, Spinoza elaborated a philosophy of immanence that went beyond both Judaism and Christianity. Inevitably, this champion of the Enlightenment was accused of heresy and banished from the Jewish community.17 The messianic hope was then rethought in a secular perspective of political emancipation (Menasseh ben Israel), reformulated as subversive apostasy (Sabbati Tsvi) or as a ‘messianism of reason’ (Spinoza).”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“London, at the same time, Isaac Deutscher distinguished between ‘heretics’ and ‘renegades’ (communists who became anti-Stalinist and those who became anti-communist), in a definition that sought not to cast anathemas but rather to describe a psychological attitude and a mental habitus.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“intellectual specialization. Jews embodied the market economy from the Middle Ages on, and managed the affairs of European courts long before the advent of finance capitalism. They experienced exile and learned to live in a diaspora several centuries before the concept of ‘globalization’ appeared in our vocabulary. Commerce, banking, law, textual interpretation and cultural mediation always organized their existence. Emancipation propelled them to the centre of modernity, as an elite of ‘Mercurians’ (foreign and mobile, producers of concepts) in a world of ‘Apollonians’ (sedentary warriors, producers of goods).”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“the deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon official Abram Shulsky, the Middle East presidential adviser Elliot Abrams and the strategist of the war on Iraq, Richard Perle.68”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“and eastern Europe, to settle in town, especially in the capital cities of the Habsburg and Wilhelmine empires. It was in the context of this multiform upheaval – the demographic growth and the urbanization process generated by the industrial revolution, modernization and assimilation – that German Jewry acquired a new profile. Vienna, where no more than 2,000 Jews had lived in 1850, counted more than 200,000 on the eve of the First World War, or 10 per cent of the total population; in the same timeframe, the Jewish population of Berlin grew from less than 10,000 to nearly 200,000, here making up 7 per cent of the total population.12 The Jewish populations of Budapest, Prague, Lvov, Krakow and Czernowitz underwent similar growth.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Between 1933 and 1938, a great exodus of German Jews began, far greater in its extent than that of the Spanish Jews after 1492 or that of the Huguenots after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. More than 450,000 Jews left central Europe as it came under Nazi rule.37 The whole of German-Jewish culture was exiled”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“sphere, while the myth arose of Jews as a ‘state within the state’.10 They became ‘Israélites’ or ‘of Mosaic faith’ (jüdischen Glaubens). With its assimilation into national cultures, Jewishness metamorphosed into a kind of moral substratum, a ‘spirit’ that rabbis, scholars and notables celebrated as harmonizing with the various European nation-states, from the German Reich to the Habsburg empire, the French republic to the Italian monarchy. In eastern Europe, on the other hand, anti-Semitism posed an obstacle to emancipation. Here,”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“liberty and the homeland of the Jews. Athenian democracy had shifted to Washington, and ancient Judaism had taken a secular form in the state of Israel.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“the presence of a lively anti-Semitism, particularly in France. Its origin lay with the ‘state Jews’, an elite almost absent in Germany or Austria, but particularly flourishing in Britain, France and Italy. Under the Third Republic, hundreds of Jews reached the summits of French public service: prefects, generals, state counsellors, deputies, senators and ministers, not to mention a large number of scholars and scientists admitted to the most prestigious cultural institutions such as the Collège de France.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“of German-Jewish writers as ‘a marvellous nationality that they claimed when reminded of their Jewish origin, which somewhat resembles those modern passports that grant the bearer the right of sojourn in every country expect the one that issued it’.27”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“anti-communism in the 1950s, this aspiration shifted to the defence of the ‘free world’, then, from the 1990s, to the unconditional defence of Israel.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“A violência palestiniana tem a força do desespero. Brota de «uma comunidade de dor e ressentimento», como escreveu Jean-Pierre Filiu, formada por décadas de uma ocupação impiedosa que transformou a Faixa de Gaza numa «prisão a céu aberto». Esta descrição, acrescenta, «estava, de facto, errada, uma vez que em qualquer cadeia não se supõe que os reclusos sejam atingidos a tiro ou bombardeados, excepto no caso de um verdadeiro motim. Em Gaza, os ataques israelitas, fossem “direccionados” ou não, continuaram a ser um acontecimento regular. Não se trata de idealizar a violência, mas de compreender as suas raízes. O Hamas é popular entre um grande número de palestinianos, é um facto. É sobretudo popular entre os jovens da Cisjordânia, onde não consegue fazer valer a sua influência através da coerção. É popular porque luta contra a ocupação. Criado em 1987 na sequência da Primeira Intifada como o braço político e militar da Irmandade Muçulmana, o maior dos movimentos islâmicos conversadores do Médio Oriente, o Hamas ganhou força depois do fracasso dos Acordos de Oslo. Em 2000, a Segunda Intifada deu-lhe um novo influxo de energia. Em 2006, o Hamas foi eleito para governar Gaza, substituindo a Autoridade Palestiniana amplamente desacreditada. Condenou o Holocausto e o anti-semitismo, declarando que a sua luta não é contra os Judeus, mas contra o Estado sionista. Em 2017, os seus novos estatutos abandonaram o plano de destruir Israel e adoptaram a ideia de um Estado palestiniano dentro das fronteiras de 1967, ou seja, a Cisjordânia, a Faixa de Gaza e Jerusalém Oriental. A resposta de Israel foi o massacre de Março de 2018 mencionado anteriormente. Enquanto o Hamas desenvolvia uma estratégia política para substituir a opção militar ineficiente, Israel fechou a porta a qualquer diálogo, Netanyahu declarou a sua oposição a um Estado palestiniano e o seu governo expandiu os colonatos na Cisjordânia, mudou a capital para Jerusalém e «congelou» Gaza. O 7 de Outubro foi a retaliação inevitável.”
― Enzo Traverso, Gaza Faces History

“the Enlightenment, no one was prepared to see totalitarianism as a product of Western civilization and a paroxysmic expression of its own contradictions. Only a few were able to grasp Hannah Arendt’s most fertile intuitions. The genetic relationship that linked Nazism to imperialism and nineteenth-century colonialism remains still today a historical workshop largely unexplored.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“The Holocaust put an end to an age in which, to use the words of Eric Hobsbawm, Jews underwent an explosion of creativity, like boiling water lifting the lid of a saucepan.82 But the end of pariah Judaism also meant the end of the stage in the history of critical thought in the Western world.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“On the eve of the Second World War, almost ten million Jews had lived in Europe; by the mid 1990s less than two million remained.3 After the war, Jewry practically ceased to exist in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and Austria, the countries that had been its main centres.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“frame Jewish modernity. After having been its cradle, Europe became its tomb and its heir.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“enemy: the”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“The Zionism of its founders sought to emancipate Jews in the context of a modern nation-state. Like any nationalism, its ideology drew on an ancestral mythology but was projected towards the future: the Jewish nation had a long history, but once it gave itself a state existence, it would fit into modernity. The upheavals of the twentieth century enabled it to carry out its project but, by a kind of historical irony, Israel put an end to Jewish modernity. Diaspora Judaism had been the critical conscience of the Western world; Israel survives as one of its mechanisms of domination.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“them at the centre of an emerging cultural industry, based around publishing and press. Journalism thus became a ‘Jewish’ profession, along with commerce and finance.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“brief, German Jews were prisoners of what George L. Mosse analysed as an insurmountable contradiction between Bildung and Sittlichkeit, the former being increasingly Judaized, while the latter remained ever unattainable, even by individuals as rich and powerful as the banker Gerson Bleichröder or the industrialist Walther Rathenau.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“Now emancipated, they became members of a political entity that transcended the borders of the religious community built around the synagogue; they ceased to be an external element, whether stigmatized or tolerated, persecuted or enjoying ‘privileges’ within society. Before this major turn they led a life apart, despite the generalized lack of political rights – their condition was certainly better than that of enserfed peasants.”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“During this period, the Jew embodied the abstraction of the modern world dominated by impersonal and anonymous forces. Mass society was perceived as a hostile realm shaped by big cities, the market, finance, the speed of communications and exchange, mechanical production, the press, cosmopolitanism, democratic egalitarianism, culture transformed into an industry by way of the press, photography and the cinema. Amid this upheaval, the Jew emerged as personification of a modernity in which everything was measurable, calculable and yet impossible to grasp, in which everything was removed from nature and annexed to the enigmas of an abstract and artificial rationality. As shown by a”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity

“This small digression shows that fascism has not only been transnational or transatlantic,5 but also transhistorical. Collective memory establishes a link between a concept and its public use, which usually exceeds its purely historiographical dimension. In this perspective, fascism (much like other concepts in our political lexicon) could be seen as a transhistorical concept able to transcend the age that engendered it.”
― Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right

“The Jewish anomaly thus”
― Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity