Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (review)

Jonathan Judaken's Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question explores a provocative thesis about the role that Sartre's reflections on Judaism and anti-Semitism play in his larger philosophy. It is generally believed that Sartre's interests in these topics are peripheral to his central philosophic ideas. He analyzes anti-Semitism at length, of course, in Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question Juive), but most believe that his analysis flows out of the broader philosophic claims about freedom and personhood he develops in Being and Nothingness. His remarks on anti-Semitism are read, in short, as mere consequences or illustrations of his brand of existentialism. Judaken proposes, however, that "at each defining moment of his intellectual agenda Sartre turned to the image of 'the Jew' to either clarify, reassess, or redefine his ideas" (3). This is a bold claim. Yet Judaken persuasively argues for it in his thoroughly-researched and well-written study, which should be of interest to Sartre scholars, scholars interested in post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual life, and, indeed, anyone with an interest in the history of ideas in the twentieth century.

If there is a flaw in Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, it is that the book's closing pages seem rushed in comparison with earlier chapters. Judaken discusses in detail in early chapters, for example, the Dreyfus Affair, Sartre's writing while he was a prisoner of war and during the German occupation, and Sartre's post-Vichy characterizations of resistance, collaboration, and the role of the intellectual. These early chapters lead the reader through a series of convincing narratives about how Sartre revised his thinking at key stages in his career, and Judaken convincingly shows that reflection on "the Jew" plays a key role in each narrative. However, he lapses in his book's final chapter into a kind of summary listing of how various French Jewish intellectuals (Levinas, Ravi, Claude Lanzman, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and so forth) responded to Sartre's Réflexions sur la question Juive.

This small flaw, however, is greatly outweighed by the many merits of Judaken's study. Judaken's familiarity not only with Sartre's literary and philosophic writings but with the broader intellectual, political, and cultural history of France in the twentieth century is dazzling, and his ability to shift skills, from exegesis of Sartre's philosophic writings to biography to intellectual history, leads him to develop extremely rich insights into Sartre's thinking. Let me give one example. Judaken develops a provocative reading of Sartre's Nausea in an early chapter, one that relies heavily on a controversial interpretation of Roquentin's vision of the Jewish composer of "One of these Days" in the book's final pages. It is not well known, in this reviewer's opinion, that this closing vision is mistaken. Roquentin mistakenly assumes that "One of these Days" was written by a Jewish composer and performed by an African American woman, when, in fact, it was written by an African American composer, Shelton Brooks, and sung by a Jewish performer, Sophie Tucker. Not only is Judaken familiar with the song's recording history, but he convincingly argues, through careful interpretation of references to Sophie Tucker in Sartre's contemporaneous short story "The Childhood of a Leader," that Sartre must have known it as well, and thus, Roquentin's faulty vision at the close of Nausea must have been intended by Sartre. This is a small detail, but it nicely illustrates how Juddaken's deep familiarity both with Sartre's writings and with broader intellectual and cultural history helps him develop subtle insights into Sartre's thinking. An admirable quality of his study is that it abounds in such subtleties.

A related merit of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question is the quality of the book's writing, which is accessible and engaging. Judaken has a gift for writing in such a way as to make the evolution of Sartre's thinking...