SOURCE: Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “The Jew in Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive: An Exercise in Historical Reading.” In The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, edited by Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, pp. 201-18. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

In the following essay, Suleiman discusses Jean-Paul Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive in the context of French attitudes toward Jews in the 1940s. Suleiman points out anti-Semitic elements in Sartre's language even as he is criticizing anti-Semitism.

… that book is a declaration of war against anti-Semites.

Jean-Paul Sartre¹

Sartre is transformed in the third part of his essay into the antisemite against whom he rails in the first part.

Elaine Marks²

In a sense, this essay will be nothing more than my attempt to fill in the gap between those two statements, both of which I consider true. Can a “declaration of...