The Occulted Paragraph: Menahem Brinkers Translation and Reading of Sartres Reflexions sur la Question Juive (original) (raw)

2020, Sartre, Jews, and the Other: Rethinking Antisemitism, Race, and Gender (Edited by: Manuela Consonni and Vivian Liska), De Gruyter, Oldenburg

In the heart of Menahem Brinker’s Hebrew translation of the Réflexions sur la question juive, one of the key paragraphs of the book is missing, the one from the third part of the book where Sartre claims the Jew cannot be defined through his relation to (Jewish) history. On the other hand, in Brinker’s commentary of Sartre’s text - “Sartre on the Jewish Question: Thirty Years Later” –, published as an afterword to the Hebrew translation, this very paragraph is discussed quasi-implicitly and thoroughly, and Sartre’s thesis about the non-existence of Jewish history becomes the object of one of Brinker’s main critiques of this text (which eventually leads to a criticism of Sartre’s main thesis: The Jew is made by the anti-Semite). The present study proposes a reading of this textual intrigue found in the Hebrew translation of the Réflexions. Like a symptom, this missing paragraph permits to look deeper into a possible modality of the relation of the modern Jew to the Jewish question. Discarding on the one hand the religious dogmas, Brinker is, so to say, compelled to refer to them, awakening them as it where from his deepest self, in order to confront Sartre’s thesis, in order to think the Jew as something more than just the result of the hateful gaze of the anti-Semite. In order to think that which he himself experiences, even if negatively: the positivity of Jewish existence.