The End of Jewish Modernity

In the annunciation of its principle insights, this exciting and delightful work is deceptively simple and straightforward, but in the elaboration of its theses, it is unusually sophisticated and imaginative. Despite its manifestly limited focus, this slim volume manages to deliver a comprehensive statement which makes a significant contribution to the discourses of politics, postmodern theory and intellectual history. Indeed, it helps us judge the universalist claims of western modernity and its ‘Jewish’ deconstructions in a more sober, if not altogether sombre, mood, revealing them as contingent and dated exchanges in a revoltingly racist world. Little wonder, it fortifies the insight that the world of history and politics is forever in flux where there are no eternal enemies or friends, and where intellectuals switch loyalties as brazenly as demagogues. ‘Jewish modernity’ in this work is simply defined as an epoch, albeit ‘of extraordinary cultural richness with a well-defined and coherent profile, somewhat like Hellenism’, that is already passé and defunct. The Emancipation at one end and the Holocaust and the birth of Israel at the other, quite logically for Traverso, constitute the historical boundaries of Jewish modernity. Hence, as the axis of Jewish world since the Holocaust has demographically,....