completed by a second volume recording what Sartre wrote and said
about Jews, Israel, and the Palestinians throughout the years, to the very
year of his death in 1980 .”^25 Obviously, Sartre’s adoption of an Algerian
Jewess as his daughter and literary executrix as well as his close relation
with the Egyptian Jew who served as his secretary and co-author of an
important set of interviews toward the end of his life confirms this
involvement even as it demands the complement toReflectionsthat
Rybalka calls for. Despite its limitations, which Sartre himself acknow-
ledged on more than one occasion, the book was enthusiastically received
by a new generation of Jewish intellectuals who, as Rybalka observes,
“were able to understand the originality of Sartre’s position and the
complexity/simplicity of its existentialist philosophy.”^26 As historian
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, whose parents had died in Auschwitz, recalls:
“When I readAnti-Semite and Jew, I felt myself avenged indeed.”^27
The first chapter, “Portrait of an Anti-Semite,” appeared in an early
issue ofLes Temps Modernesa year after its composition. The rest of
the work did not come out in book form until 1946. To cut to the chase,
Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not a mere opinion, an innocuous
view simply to be tolerated. As he explains: “I refuse to characterize as
opinion a doctrine that is aimed directly at particular persons and that
seeks to suppress their rights or to exterminate them.”^28 Sartre does not
use the term “holocaust” in this work and has been sharply criticized
for failing to do so. But he begins his reflections with this mention of
“extermination” as ingredient in the passion of the anti-Semite. In the
third chapter he raises the immediately relevant question of how his
countrymen will react to “those Jews whom the Germans did not deport
or murder [and who] are coming back to their homes.” Sartre is among
the first in such a visible manner to raise the question: “Do we say
anything about the Jews? Do we give a thought to those who died in the
(^25) Michel Rybalka, “Publication and Reception ofAnti-Semite and Jew,”October 87 (winter
1999 ): 162. For discussion of “the remainder of the story,” Vincent von Wroblewsky has
gathered a collection of such texts as an addition to his German translation ofRe ́flexions sur
la question juive. See Jean-Paul Sartre,U ̈berlegungen zur Judenfrage(Reinbeck bei Hamburg:
26 Rowohlt,^1994 ).
27 Rybalka, “Publication,”^162.
28 “Remembrances of a^1946 Reader,”October^87 (winter^1999 ):^7.
Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Shocken, 1995 ), 9 ; hereafterAnti-
Semite and JeworAJ.
Reflections on the Jewish Question (Anti-Semite and Jew) 243