A seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time.
The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept’s origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß.
Written on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, Lessing’s hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside.
“The truthful translation by Peter Appelbaum, including Lessing’s own footnotes, manages to make this book more readable than the German original. Two essays by Sander Gilman and Paul Reitter provide context and the wisdom of hindsight.”—Frank Mecklenburg, Leo Baeck Institute
From the forward by Sander Gilman:
Theodor Lessing’s (1872–1933) Jewish Self-Hatred (1930) is the classic study of the pitfalls (rather than the complexities) of acculturation. Growing out of his own experience as a middle-class, urban, marginally religious Jew in Imperial and then Weimar Germany, he used this study to reject the social integration of the Jews into Germany society, which had been his own experience, by tracking its most radical cases…. Lessing’s case studies reflect the idea that assimilation (the radical end of acculturation) is by definition a doomed project, at least for Jews (no matter how defined) in the age of political antisemitism.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Translator’s Preface
Peter C. Appelbaum
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Sander L. Gilman
ATRIUM
Chapter 1. Jewish Destiny in the East – History as Meaning – How to Apportion Blame
Chapter 2. Jewish Destiny in the West – The Class Struggle, Antisemitism and Zionism
Chapter 3. The Psychology and Pathology of Self-hate – The Logic and Morality of Self-Hate – Prophets and Psalmists
Chapter 4. The Impractical Dreamer – Six Symbolic Figures – Present Day Examples
Chapter 5. The Suffering of Self-hate – Its Three Paths – Healing
SIX LIFE STORIES
Paul Rée
Otto Weininger
Arthur Trebitsch
Max Steiner
Walter Calé
Maximilian Harden
VAULT
Afterword
Paul Reitter
Über den Autor
Theodor Lessing was a German-Jewish philosopher. He taught at Hanover Technical College until right-wing student protests forced him to leave in 1926, after which he worked as an independent scholar and journalist. He was assassinated in 1933 by two National Socialists.
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