In his Letter on Humanism penned in November 1946, Martin Heidegger famously questioned the necessity to “retain the word humanism” in the postwar vocabulary. A corruption of thought by metaphysics, argued the German thinker, the man-centered Western intellectual tradition was also the culprit of destructive modernity. His intricate Letter debunked the tenets of philosophical humanism yet also offered an intriguing sociological observation. Although “-isms have for a long time now been suspect,” Heidegger remarked with humanism in mind, “the market of public opinion continually demands new ones. We are always ready to supply the demand.” The discourse of Man, lamented the philosopher of Being, was alive and well in the aftermath of World War II.Footnote ¹

Heidegger’s assessment was not off the mark. In France especially, the liberation from German occupation was accompanied by an explosion of humanist rhetoric. “Existentialism is a humanism,” proclaimed Jean-Paul Sartre in October 1945. The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, for his part, retrieved humanism from Karl Marx’s early writings. Under the influence of Jacques Maritain, Christian humanists championed the sacredness of the person against secular individualism. Interest for the “human” in France, however, was not limited to high-brow philosophy: A dozen of books published in 1945 and 1946 alone contained the words “l’homme” or “l’humanisme” in their titles. “Our country,” wrote the novelist and essayist François Mauriac in March 1945, “is the most humanist par excellence … our moralists carried to perfection that science of man which is valid for all, Christians and unbelievers alike.”Footnote ²

Contrary to the boastful Mauriac, however, proponents of humanism in liberated France pointed instead to a crisis of man after Nazism. One of twenty-three international thinkers tasked by UNESCO to help the new organization advance the “common welfare of mankind,” the novelist and art theorist André Malraux compared “bloodstained and ravaged” Europe to the “face of the Man that she had hoped to bring to the world.” But after rejecting blind faith in human mastery and progress, the French intellectual announced that “there is a humanism possible to the European man.”Footnote ³ The “man” in question remained the victim of Nazism more than colonial oppression. “Torture has meant for us more than physical pain,” Malraux declared, even if the last-hour resister never personally suffered at the hands of the Gestapo. A decade before counterinsurgency methods in Algeria spurred anti-colonial activism in France, Malraux used the metaphor of torture to illuminate the degradation of the “European man” and signal the start of his recovery.

Malraux’s reflections validated Heidegger’s observation: Despite a burgeoning revolt against Western humanism in French philosophy, “man” remained omnipresent in early postwar culture.Footnote ⁴ The German thinker banned from Freiburg University eluded, however, the reason behind this popularity: The terror inflicted on Europe by nearly six years of German rule. In countries occupied by the Third Reich, resistance movements not only fought for national liberation but also placed “man” at the forefront of their cause. That one of the first clandestine organizations in wartime France was founded by staff members of Paris’s Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) was not incidental. In France and across German-ruled Western Europe, intellectual resisters of different political background dreamed of moral and social renewal to rehabilitate man from fascism.Footnote ⁵ Albert Camus, who joined the underground network Combat in 1943 as a journalist, was one of them. “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning,” wrote Camus in July 1944, “but I know that something in it has meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.”Footnote ⁶

Dramatized by the resistance humanism of the war years, the figure of man made a spectacular come back in 1945. In philosophy, literature, and the arts, this return took the form of a solemn reassessment of the category “human.” Some of the first memoirs of concentration camps contributed to this reexamination. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), David Rousset’s L’univers concentrationaire (1946), and Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947), three texts emblematic of this genre, documented the process of human degradation in Nazi camps. Yet they simultaneously rescued man from the abyss. Frankl’s testimony was first entitled in German “Nonetheless Say Yes to Life” before the Viennese Jewish psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor became an international sensation. Even a handful of prisoners able to “keep their inner liberty,” wrote Frankl, was proof that “man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.” The former French resisters and internees David Rousset and Robert Antelme likewise salvaged man’s irreducible consciousness from the horrors of concentration camps. “The more our condition as men is contested by the SS,” wrote Antelme, “the more likely our chances to be confirmed as such.” Rousset, for his part, detailed the “total disaggregation of the individual” in the Nazi camp system. He nonetheless discovered in Buchenwald “the power and the beauty of the fact of living itself (…) even through the worst crises or the most serious setbacks.”Footnote ⁷

In If This Is a Man [Survival in Auschwitz], first published and barely noticed in 1947, Primo Levi famously questioned the possibility of human sovereignty within the universe of the camp. His Hobbesian tale of survival in Auschwitz, where the Italian Jewish prisoner descended “into the arena as a beast against beasts,” illuminated the drowning of man more than the preservation of human essence. In various writings published between 1946 and 1950, the French poet and Mauthausen survivor Jean Cayrol used the allegory of Lazarus rising from the dead to distinguish returnees from concentration camps, solitary and beyond repair, from the rest of humanity. In the United States, Hannah Arendt portrayed Nazi terror as an attempt to create “human beings superfluous,” the starting point of posthumanist interpretations of concentration camps. But as Frankl, Rousset, Antelme, and other humanist camp memoirs demonstrated immediately after the war, the lager (camp) symbolized both the destruction and the reconquest of humanity.Footnote ⁸ These two images, about which more below, were also projected on Holocaust refugees and the first Israeli Jews.

Although Western humanism came under attack in French thought, humanism retained its popular appeal throughout the 1950s. The success of the travelling photographic exhibition The Family of Man is a case in point. First shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1955, its purpose, according to its curator Edward Steichen, was to highlight “the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” Although French, British, and Dutch so-called police actions or emergencies had since 1945 brought back colonial warfare in the emerging Third World, large crowds from Rome to Stockholm marveled at unitary mankind, depicted in 503 images from 68 countries. That same year, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism lashed out at a “pseudo-humanism that for too long has diminished the rights of man (…), is incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.” In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Franz Fanon called for “tabula rasa” on a humanism which had only achieved “a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.”Footnote ⁹ Yet in postwar Europe, humanism not only survived World War II unscathed: With The Family of Man, the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography, it also gained a place of choice in the cultural Cold War.Footnote ¹⁰

How did this post-fascist humanist consensus affect perceptions of the Holocaust, Jewish refugees, and Israel during the first two decades of Western European democracy? Until the late 1950s, the humanist reprobation of Nazi inhumanity universalized the Holocaust as the catastrophe of mankind, thereby reintegrating the Jew into the family of man. Sympathetic observers of the new state of Israel went further. The Jewish homeland, in their eyes, not only rescued but fulfilled the promise of European humanism. Democracy reinstated the Jew as Man: From 1948 to 1967, Israelophilia heralded the Jew as symbol of the human.

Humanism and Genocide

Through various iterations, humanism became in 1945 the prime language of European “recivilization” after the moral collapse of war.Footnote ¹¹ Despite the persistence of European imperial rule at the end of World War II, the idea of man as bearer of values or dignity helped demarcate recovered democracy from dictatorship. Exorcizing fascism also entailed the rehumanization of Jews after Nazism. “Victors’ justice” at the Nuremberg Trial (1945–46), to be sure, did not separate the planned murder of Jews from other crimes. But thanks to documentary evidence on death squads, ghettoization, and the Final Solution, the prosecution of “crimes against humanity” showcased in return the incontrovertible humanity of Jewish victims.Footnote ¹²

The return of humanism after barbarism, however, did not guarantee particular attention to the Jewish catastrophe. The first international discussions on the rehabilitation of humanistic culture confirmed this pattern. Convened in Paris in late 1946, UNESCO’s inaugural conference ignored the recent extermination of European Jews. The new organization only resolved to conduct a perfunctory study of the “social and psychological problems of Nazism.”Footnote ¹³ Attended by a plethora of European thinkers, the forum Rencontres internationales de Genève dedicated in September 1946 to the revival of the “European spirit” – two other meetings took place in 1949 and 1951 – was equally silent on the subject. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers was the only participant to devote a few lines to Jews when he referred to biblical Judaism as “one of the fundamental forces in the history of the West.” In earlier lectures delivered at Heidelberg, however, Jaspers called upon fellow Germans to “answer for the acts of the regime you tolerated.” Passivity when “to our ineradicable shame and disgrace, the synagogues (…) went up in flames throughout Germany,” he wrote, “made all of us guilty in front of God.”Footnote ¹⁴ Jaspers’s plea for moral purification laid out the foundations of a culture of guilt shunned by most Germans but later conducive to deeper confrontation with the Nazi past. His lecture in Geneva, however, did not include any mention of German crimes against the Jews. Even for the courageous advocate of “guilt consciousness,” the reconstitution of humanist Europe could proceed without explicit engagement with the genocide. The young Swiss-Jewish literary critic Jean Starobinski took notice of this omission. “It seems that these six million dead Jews have been quickly forgotten,” he told the attendees in Geneva, “and the European spirit, in its abstract generality, appears as unbothered as in the past.”Footnote ¹⁵

Also present in Geneva, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty had recently reflected on his own blindness. Prior to his discovery of “German antisemitism,” Merleau-Ponty observed in October 1945, “we did not think there were Jews or Germans but only men, or even consciousnesses.” The French thinker, however, still yearned for a society “in which past traumas have been wiped out” and essential identities left behind. Simone de Beauvoir admitted to a similar mindset. Before 1945, the famed intellectual only saw “men” in her Jewish friends and acquaintances. “I was right to refuse essentialism,” she remarked, “but the universalism to which I subscribed took me far away from reality.”Footnote ¹⁶ De Beauvoir ultimately recognized the validity of Jewishness after the Holocaust, a discovery which in the late 1940s translated into pro-Israel sympathies and silence on indigenous Palestinians. Yet like Merleau-Ponty, she entered the postwar period unprepared to grasp the distinctiveness of the category “Jew.” This propensity was characteristic of intellectual antifascism in general. Contrary to Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, antifascism in Western Europe did not require obligatory alignment with communism. To be intellectually “antifascist” after 1945 meant revolting against the wreckage wrought by Nazi terror on the human condition. Such antifascism consecrated Jews as victims of inhumanity, yet their tragedy remained only one piece in the greater puzzle of Nazi criminality.

Both published in 1946, the first systematic studies of Nazi concentration camps exemplified this approach. In L’univers concentrationnaire, the former Neuengamme and Buchenwald prisoner David Rousset acknowledged that separate “camps for Jews and Poles” functioned as sites of “widespread destruction and industrialized torture.” He also labeled Auschwitz-Birkenau, where nearly 1 million Jews perished, the “largest city of death.”The only difference between extermination camps and “normal” concentration camps, he observed, was one of “degree not kind.”Footnote ¹⁷ In Der SS-Staat, the left-Catholic German writer Eugen Kogon, a survivor of six years of internment at Buchenwald, similarly described the galaxy of Nazi concentration camps as a “super state … a system of terror unparalleled in the history of civilized nations.” Kogon’s meticulous analysis empathized with the ordeal of Jews. The anti-Nazi German author even hinted at the uniqueness of the Final Solution when he avowed that “it is impossible to present here anything like an exhaustive picture of the Jewish mass tragedy.”Footnote ¹⁸ But like Rousset, Kogon blended “extermination” and “concentration” camps into a singular system of terror encompassing forced laborers, political, and racial deportees from all corners of Europe.

Shown at the Cannes Festival in 1956, Alain Resnais’s documentary film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) gave cinematographic form to this mode of thought. A humanist meditation on concentration camps with only one occurrence of the word “Jew” in the screenplay, Nuit et Brouillard was nonetheless filmed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. It also included images of Dutch prisoners with yellow stars at the Westerbrok transit camp, of Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz, as well as photographs of the Vel d’Hiv – the Parisian cycling stadium where French authorities interned Jews in July 1942. In charge of the commentary, the former Mauthausen prisoner Jean Cayrol disregarded these Jewish signs in favor of a general reflection on human dignity. “Under its hygienic pretext,” he wrote of prisoners stripped of their clothes before disinfection, “nakedness (…) surrenders to the camp a man already humiliated.” Indeed, viewers of Nuit et Brouillard did not learn any facts about the racial war waged between 1939 and 1945 against European Jews. “At the end,” wrote Cayrol in the screenplay, “all deportees resemble each other.” The film, as Alain Resnais himself acknowledged, was not about the Final Solution but the peste concentrationnaire (“the plague of concentration camps”) – and its resurgence in the form of colonial violence in French Algeria.

Until Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah supplanted it in 1985, however, Nuit et Brouillard remained for three decades the most popular documentary representation of the Jewish genocide on screen. Slow pans across the abandoned remnants of Auschwitz, unsettling archival footage, or the actor Michel Bouquet’s haunting narration, were suggestive enough to code Nuit et Brouillard as a Holocaust film. Resnais’s “meditation on the most important phenomenon of the twentieth century,” commented the film-maker François Truffaut in 1956, was about “the human being in ourselves, who has to open wide his eyes and at his turn, to wonder.” Nuit et Brouillard did not separate Jews from other targets of Nazi terror, and as Truffaut intimated, saw “human beings” before Jews. Yet its evocative aesthetics nonetheless showed the genocide without talking about it. This humanist perspective, of course, potentially exempted viewers from ever thinking about the Jewish fate. Yet for all its ambiguities, Nuit et Brouillard soon offered student or artsy audiences in Britain, the Netherlands, and above all West and East Germany, a first encounter with a universal “Holocaust,” at midpoint between silence and Judeocentric remembrance.Footnote ¹⁹

The humanist lens, however, did not always magnify the drama of mankind at the expense of Jewish experiences. Between 1946 and 1948, Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe elicited distinctive pro-Jewish sentiment in France and Italy, where Holocaust survivors passed through on their way to British-ruled Palestine. Approximately 200,000 Jewish displaced persons also lived in occupied Germany during the same period, but the “DPs” did not inspire broad compassion in the chaotic aftermath of the war. As opposed to the United States, where the situation of Jewish refugees in occupied Germany was monitored in the press, the displaced persons did not make headlines on the rebuilding continent. In Britain, suspicion of Zionist ploys to alter the demography of Palestine, as well as acts of Jewish terrorism in the country still under mandate, did not endear Jewish DPs to public opinion. The transit of Holocaust survivors through Mediterranean ports, however, left a different impression. From 1946 to 1948, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Jews entered the French territory before illegally embarking to Palestine. Between 50,000 and 70,000 Jewish border-crossers also arrived in Italy as part of the Brichah (Flight), the Zionist code name for the secretive immigration of Jews.Footnote ²⁰ Although brief, this experience inspired long-lasting empathy for “humanity at sea.”Footnote ²¹

Humanitarian Philosemitism

Returning to his home country after his liberation from Auschwitz, Primo Levi was struck to discover young Jews “travelling with us towards Italy at the end of our train (…) coming from all the countries of Eastern Europe. They felt immensely free and strong, lords of the world and of their destinies.”Footnote ²² When in the summer of 1945 Jewish refugees who passed themselves off as “Austrians” crossed the Brenner Pass into Italy, members of the national unity government demanded firm action. The former resistance leader and prime minister Ferrucio Parri, however, extended hospitality. “The Italian Government considers right and proper to give help to the Jews forced to leave other countries because of racial persecution,” declared Parri in November 1945. He trusted that “immigrants can find in our country at least the spirit of freedom and human solidarity that animates the Italian people in their Risorgimento.”Footnote ²³

Jewish displaced persons reached almost all Italian regions including the Cinecittà DP Camp in the vicinity of Rome. Yet few Italians took notice of their presence until the forty-five days standoff between British authorities and Jews in the Ligurian port of La Spezia (April–May 1946). Intent of blocking two ships from illegally sailing to Palestine, the British Navy sealed the bay off with heavy weaponry. Under the captainship of the secret agent Yehuda Arazi, Jewish refugees responded with a hunger strike and threats of collective suicide. Their steadfastness impressed Italian observers. “The Daughters of Israel, marked by the fire of Teutonic barbarians, invoke the Promised Land,” editorialized Il Corriere della Sera. Admiring of their tenacity, Avanti! offered them the full “solidarity of Italian socialists.”Footnote ²⁴

While the return of Italian Jewish survivors of concentration camps did not generate particular interest, the events at La Spezia stirred up popular emotion. On May 8, 1946, a large crowd of well-wishers bid farewell to 1,014 Jewish immigrants after the British agreed to issue entry certificates. A few months later, neighbors of the Cinecittà DP camp, including a carabinieri chief convinced that Palestine was “somewhere in Africa” and a mayor who located it in “faraway Asia,” greeted Jewish refugees with shouts of “Viva la Palestina Ebraica!”Footnote ²⁵ The standoff at La Spezia solidified a positive perception of Jewish refugees as symbols of antifascist resistance. As in the case of the Enzo Sereni, an illegal ship who left the small port of Vado Ligure in January 1946, former partisans offered discrete assistance to Jews en route for Palestine.

The idealization of the Brichah as continuation of the Italian antifascist struggle popularized Zionism within the Left. On June 30, 1946, the communist mouthpiece Unità denounced “the repression of the independence movement of the Jews in Palestine […] who are fighting for the liberation of the country from British oppression.” In keeping with Soviet strategy in the Middle East, Italian communists veered toward anti-Zionism after 1948. Until then, however, the PCI heralded Jewish refugees as freedom fighters against fascism and British imperialism. Avanti!, for its part, portrayed the Jews’ dream to “rebuild their homeland” as “sacrosanct.” A recurring feature of this discourse was the scant attention paid to the country’s indigenous Arab population. “Martyred” Jews, learned the readers of the socialist newspaper in mid July 1946, sailed across the Mediterranean to redeem Palestine from the grip of feudal effendis and heartless British imperialism, with only benefits for Arab masses. Contrary to their European counterparts, Italian Socialists remained committed to “unity of action” with the Communist Party. Yet emotional support for the cause of Jewish refugees in the pages of Avanti! already announced the special relationship soon to bind “humanist socialism” – as social democracy branded itself during the Cold War – and the young state of Israel.Footnote ²⁶

In France, the Exodus saga drew even larger sympathy. Clandestinely brought from Germany, 4,500 Jewish refugees set sail from the port of Sète on July 11, 1947. Their goal was to run the British blockade of Palestine and advertise the plight of Jews in search of a homeland. In a show of force, Royal Navy sailors boarded Exodus 1947 and diverted it to Haifa. On July 20, the refugees were put on board three deportation vessels and sent back to Port-de-Bouc near Marseille. The French state offered permanent asylum. “In this painful case,” declared the government’s spokesman and future socialist president François Mitterrand, “France intends to adopt an attitude of humanity”: The event was a decisive moment in Mitterrand’s life-long friendliness with Israel.Footnote ²⁷ The majority of Jewish passengers, however, refused to disembark. For more than a month, a large press corps reported on their deplorable situation. In the socialist newspaper Le Populaire, the former Popular Front leader Léon Blum described a “moral and physical suffering surpassing all human limits … a red iron on a bleeding wound.” French communists contributed their own imagery. L’Humanité compared the ships in Port-de-Bouc to a “floating Auschwitz, the only way to depict the hell in which the passengers of Exodus 47 live.”Footnote ²⁸ Under a glare of negative publicity, the Exodus passengers were returned to displaced persons camps in northern Germany. The episode ended in a British fiasco and a propaganda victory for Zionism.

The travails of Jewish refugees, pointed out Simone de Beauvoir in October 1947, “has nothing to do with pity, it is a matter of justice.” As the famed feminist wrote in her autobiography (1963), “the niceties of English democracy were meaningless for these men crammed in camps, wandering on boats, despaired.”Footnote ²⁹ De Beauvoir’s comments revealed the effect of the Exodus saga on prominent French intellectuals: the identification of Jews stranded at sea as exemplar victims of injustice. The pro-Zionist French League for a Free Palestine, to which her companion Jean-Paul Sartre lent his name, rallied prestigious members of the intelligentsia to the cause of Exodus, including Emmanuel Mounier, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Claudel, and Raymond Aron. Artists and writers also entered the fray. The painter Henri Matisse, the Communist poet Louis Aragon, and the former resister Vercors, among others, added their names to an anti-British poster distributed in Paris. In the pages of Esprit, the Catholic priest and Jewish convert Alexandre Glasberg drew a dire conclusion. The British abuse of Jews, he wrote, proved that Hitler continued to live “in ourselves.”Footnote ³⁰ David Rousset, for his part, saw in Holocaust refugees “the pathetic witnesses of our own bankruptcy.” For the early French critic of the Soviet Gulag, British internment camps in Cyprus, packed with Jews diverted from their journey to Palestine, demonstrated the perpetuation of barbarity after Nazism. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich, the Jew remained “the first sacrificed victim of the concentration camp world (le monde concentrationnaire).”Footnote ³¹ The former Buchenwald internee later demanded reciprocity when he sought the involvement of Holocaust survivors in his campaign against Soviet labor camps. Yet in the aftermath of the Exodus affair, Jewish refugees trapped in “prison-ships” or deported to Cyprus symbolized in his eyes the banalization of political terror after 1945.

Humanitarian philosemitism was expectedly less visible in Britain where the press routinely compared the clandestine immigration of Jews to an enterprise of “nationalist fanatics.” The pro-Labour Manchester Guardian was an exception: “It is against the ghostly background of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and a dozen of other places whose name have acquired an indelible significance of horror that the present condition of Jewish displaced persons must be studied.”Footnote ³² Some British soldiers who took part in disembarking operations at Hamburg docks felt sympathy: “We were told that these Jews had a way of sneaking up to you and cutting you with razor blades. What we saw were poor bewildered people clutching a few belongings moving towards the train.”Footnote ³³ But in August 1947, reports on the hanging of two British sergeants at the hands of Irgun terrorists in Palestine elicited far greater outrage than the “prison ships” anchored in Port-de-Bouc.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, the press occasionally discussed the situation of Jewish displaced persons but mainly as potential manpower for industrial reconstruction. The Dutch Protestant weekly De Spiegel, however, compared the “Exodus stunt” to the methods of Joseph Goebbels.Footnote ³⁴ In Austria, newspapers only sparingly reported on the Exodus story through brief communiqués issued by Viennese Jews.Footnote ³⁵ In Germany, the press covered the event but news of 4,000 Jewish refugees returning to the country elicited mixed reactions. Not a single town offered hospitality. Newspaper headlines, however, alerted their readers to the mistreatment of Jews by British troops in Hamburg, and in one case featured a front-page photograph of two Exodus passengers with the caption “once again behind bars.”Footnote ³⁶ In Bavaria, a public opinion poll conducted by American authorities revealed that most businessmen, journalists, university professors, and students supported Jewish refugees against the British. For some respondents, the Exodus affair presented an opportunity to minor down German guilt through philosemitic expression. “One cannot blame us for the concentration camps and at the same time block the road to freedom for these oppressed people,” an outraged student told American interviewers.Footnote ³⁷

Empathy and exculpation similarly overlapped in Italy. Before its Americanization through Leon Uris’s novel (1958) and Otto Preminger’s film adaptation (1960) – both riddled with grotesque anti-Arab racism – the Exodus story inspired Duilio Coletti’s Il grido della terra (The Earth Cries Out, 1948), a melodramatic film on Jewish immigrants who sailed from southern Italy to Palestine. Coletti, who had worked as a film director under Mussolini, gave in the movie a symbolic role to the Genoese ship captain who led Jews to their destination. “This journey,” declares the seafarer at the end of the screenplay, “has great meaning for me … I feel like a Good Samaritan rather than a sailor.” Through the character of the benevolent captain, a brave helper of stateless Jews, Il grido della terra reinforced the myth of “good Italians” innately allergic to both Fascism and antisemitism.Footnote ³⁸

Sympathy for “humanity at sea,” however, had a more important consequence for philosemitism in Western Europe: the legitimation of Zionism as moral imperative, irrespective of its effect on Palestine’s native population. The Exodus Affair indeed elicited a harmless vision of Jewish self-determination while magnifying the humanity of its protagonists. In France, Albert Camus’s reaction to the predicament of Holocaust refugees epitomized the appeal of humanitarian Zionism among writers moved by “all those who have trembled, day after day, for years, who are nowhere at home, and were told about orange orchards and lakes where nobody would spit on their face.”Footnote ³⁹ Such empathy, in Camus’s case, was also the result of a unique intellectual trajectory.

Jews as Moral Rebels: Camus’s Philosemitism

Contrary to Jean-Paul Sartre, the French Algerian writer born in 1913 did not devote particular attention to the “Jewish question” after the liberation of France. In May 1945, the Combat essayist addressed the situation of liberated French concentration camp survivors still awaiting repatriation from Dachau. Although Camus quoted a prisoner reporting that “everyday Jews are dying and once dead they are piled in a corner of the camp,” his article mainly drew attention to “the thousands of [non-Jewish] political deportees … the guardians of honor and the witnesses of courage.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Until May 1947, Camus’s journalistic writings only indirectly touched on Jews or antisemitism. As one entry in his private Carnets suggests, Camus may have exercised self-censorship. “What seals my mouth,” he wrote to himself, “is the fact that I was never deported. But I know which scream I stifle when I say this.”Footnote ⁴¹ After reading David Rousset’s second account of internment at Buchenwald (Les jours de notre mort, 1947), Camus admitted his inability to speak in the place of all survivors of concentration camps, Jews and non-Jews alike.

In Camus’s most famous novel, allusions to the Holocaust remained allegorical. The Plague, published in 1947, could indeed be read on multiple levels. The best-selling chronicle of a bubonic plague in Oran was simultaneously a factual description of an epidemic, a reflection on the human condition, a call to act against the absurd, and a thinly disguised account of life in German-occupied France. The novel, which since sold millions of copies in France and across the world, also metaphorically evoked the Holocaust. “Men and women (…) flung into death-pits indiscriminately,” or “a vague odor [of burned corpses] coming from the East” were some of the suggestive images conjuring up the Jewish catastrophe. Yet the victims of the plague remained unnamed, the word Jew is not spelled out and extermination is only referred to as “the scandal.” To see the Holocaust in The Plague would have required special attention for persecuted Jews and a desire to decode the story accordingly, both lacking in the late 1940s. What was hard to miss, however, was Camus’s commitment to solidarity. “But now that I have seen what I have seen,” tells the journalist Raymond Rambert to Docteur Rieux after visiting devastated Oran, “I know that I am from here, whether I want it or not. This business concerns all of us (cette histoire est notre histoire).” As Camus pointed out to the literary theorist Roland Barthes, “compared to The Stranger, The Plague marks the transition (…) from an attitude of solitary revolt to the recognition of a community whose struggle we must share.”Footnote ⁴²

“Community” did not of course specifically mean Jews. In Camus’s journalistic essays ranging from the late 1930s to his accidental death in 1960, exploited Arab Algerian workers and famished Kabylian peasants, Spanish Republicans, East-German demonstrators, Algerian and Tunisian nationalists sentenced to death, French anti-torture activists, or Hungarian insurrectionists in 1956, were all “communities” warranting solidarity. His “shared struggle” with Arab Algerians, however, was limited to equal rights without self-determination. And although The Plague takes place in Oran, Arabs are absent from the novel, an erasure famously compared by postcolonial critics to an “artistic Final Solution” of the Arab question.Footnote ⁴³ The weak spot in Camus’s ethics of solidarity remained the issue of Algerian independence, even if in May 1945 Camus wrote that the “era of Western imperialism has passed.” Nonetheless, as Camus explained, The Plague reflected his evolution from the individual experience of the absurd toward “solidarity and participation” in times of oppression.

Revealingly, Camus launched at the same time a blistering attack against French racism and antisemitism. “It is impossible to accept without revolt,” he wrote in Combat in May 1947, the reappearance of a “stupid and criminal disease.” Unwavering support for the French army in the press, despite massacres perpetrated by troops in colonial Madagascar, was one symptom of racist contamination. In Algeria, the use of torture to obtain “spontaneous confessions” from insurgents also proved that “in these instances, we are doing what we reproached the Germans of doing.” Yet the popularity of certain antisemitic stereotypes in France was another indication of racist contagion: “You will invariably come across a Frenchman who (…) thinks that Jews exaggerate [their suffering] and that they are wrong to stick together.” Camus equated unsavory but nonviolent antisemitism with colonial brutality. “Spectacular or not,” he argued, “these signs of racism reveal what is most abject and senseless in the heart of men.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The pied-noir moralist, however, soon singled out what in his mind constituted the unique feature of antisemitism in postwar democracy: not discrimination or the infliction of harm, but the disappearance of the “persecuted” from public sight. “Our society is fed up with persecuted people and does everything to not see them,” Camus wrote in his preface to Jacques Méry’s Laissez passer mon peuple (Let My People Go, 1947). This journalistic reportage followed 600 Jewish immigrants aboard the Ben Hecht, the illegal vessel which left Port-de-Bouc to Palestine on March 1, 1947. Their journey and imprisonment in Cyprus, observed Camus, challenged the conscience of “those who will turn their head away and those who will change the subject.” In this “Odyssey, in which Ithaca is surrounded by barbed-wire and Ulysses beaten,” wrote the admirative prefacer, the journalist Jacques Méry “listened, on the most beautiful of all seas, throughout long nights, to the song of the persecuted.” Here Camus’s love for the Mediterranean reinforced his sympathy for Jewish refugees without consideration of Palestine’s native inhabitants. “After years of unspeakable martyrdom,” Holocaust survivors on the high seas forced the question of responsibility on Great Powers until now content to simply look away.

Another reason accounted for Camus’s attraction for the Ben Hecht passengers. Already at work since 1946 on L’homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), Camus saw in them a symbol of moral rebellion against humiliation. Contrary to doctrinaire revolutionaries, “the survivors of the ovens” did not seek absolute justice or absolute freedom. The people “who had enough of mass graves” only wanted a place where it would no longer be “spat upon.” In this idyllic Arab-free vision, a “land of orchards and lakes” awaited Jews who only longed for “the right to have a burial place.” Camus briefly counterbalanced this lyricism with a question: “Mind you, what if the persecuted learned the lesson and became, one day, the persecutors?”Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet he did not dwell long on this thought: The Holocaust refugee validated his notorious distinction between ethical rebellion and violent revolution. Perhaps not aware that the Ben Hecht was sponsored by American Revisionist Zionists committed to Jewish supremacy over the whole territory of mandatory Palestine, Camus identified with “the people which is the symbol of persecution”: moral rebels who said no to injustice without blind pursuit of power or utopia. Present at a rally organized in Paris in May 1948 to salute the birth of the state of Israel, the towering writer swiftly evolved from humanitarian Zionist to fervent Israelophile.Footnote ⁴⁶ Journalists, intellectuals, and politicians who saw in Jewish statehood the fulfilment of European humanism felt similar admiration.

Humane Israel

“On one hand, there where the disunited Arab states (…) whose troops, because they did not know why they fought, fought poorly; on the other, there was this extraordinary Jewish people (…) showing to this soil the passionate love of men who see a house built, a tree grow, and a garden flourish out of their own hands.” This is how the French novelist and journalist Joseph Kessel, who from mid May to mid June 1948 covered the War of Palestine for the high-circulation newspaper France-Soir, summarized the conflict: against “enemies barely awakened from the Middle Ages” stood “men who in this world only have their labor and the culture of the spirit.”Footnote ⁴⁷ A former Free French aviator, the writer of Russian-Jewish origin and coauthor of the Chant des partisans (the moving anthem of the French resistance) also compared Jewish troops to heroic maquisards, the underground fighters who resisted German occupiers. Echoing his earlier enthusiasm for Jewish settlers in Palestine (Terre d’amour, 1927), Kessel’s articles stood out in their mystical admiration for “a newborn people and yet a thousand-year-old.” Although French reports on the war between Jews and Arabs before May 15, 1948, and the interstate military conflict afterwards, were predominantly sympathetic to the Jewish side, Kessel’s exaltation remained exceptional. Even the pro-Zionist Arthur Koestler, whose articles written from Palestine for the Manchester Guardian (June–November 1948) also appeared in Le Figaro and numerous European newspapers, refrained from such fervor. The Central European Jewish émigré, to be sure, offered his own orientalist clichés. “Holy Jihad and Arabian Knights on one side: the Bible with the Maccabeans on the other,” he wrote from Tel Aviv on June 16, 1948.Footnote ⁴⁸ But his misgivings about “native Jewish Tarzans” contrasted with Kessel’s euphoria. Koestler instead rationalized the emergence of Jewish statehood as the inexorable march of modernity. Zionists, he wrote a year later, “did not dispossess, or victimize or exploit [Palestine’s] native owners, but substituted themselves for the former by virtue of a historic fatality.” Better coordinated than their “primitive adversaries,” victorious Jewish soldiers were only “the relatively decent human executors of the amoral workings of history.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Other British correspondents present in Palestine before May 15, 1948, like The Observer Clare Hollingsworth, focused instead on Jewish “actions” in Deir Yassin, Haifa, and Tiberias, “a calculated execution of a policy of terror learned (…) from the Germans.” Her reports did not signify solidarity with Palestinians but confirmed that adulation for Zionist humanism had no place in British coverage of the events. In the Italian media, including the Catholic Press, the establishment of the state of Israel was met with limited interest or reservations. But writers from the Left, such as the socialist journalist Paolo Vittorelli, cast a positive light on Jewish statehood, portrayed as a just struggle for freedom and emancipation through socialist Jewish-Arab coexistence. In Germany, media coverage of the events in Palestine was resolutely pro-Zionist. This had less to do with philosemitism than with the journalists entrusted with the reporting. Lacking resources to send their own correspondents, newspapers relied on Jewish writers of German or Austrian origin who did not hide their sympathies. In France, the Catholic newspapers Témoignage Chrétien and La Croix were the only discordant voices within a press generally supportive of the Jewish homeland.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet whether favorable to the Jewish side or, more infrequently, sympathetic to Arabs, press coverage of the 1948 events did not captivate Western European readers. Neither the success of Jewish forces against Arab armies nor the flight and expulsion of most Palestinians from their land – an issue only discussed in detail after the “problem of refugees” became a fait accompli – preoccupied societies more concerned with economic reconstruction and the intensification of the Cold War.

At the start of the 1950s, however, intellectuals fascinated with the new state recognized in Israel a positive symbol of Western humanism. “Israel remains a living witness to the triumph of human idealism (…) over the allegedly inexorable laws of historical evolution,” wrote the British Jewish political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1953, “and this seems to me to be to the eternal credit of the entire human race.”Footnote ⁵¹ The Oxford professor did not ponder whether the “the last State built on the humane and liberal foundations heralded by the great French revolution and the European revolutions of 1848” also came at a human cost. In Berlin’s reflections on the birth of Israel, Arabs only make one brief appearance as “neighbors” of the new state who yearn for the Jews’ extermination. The scholar knighted in 1957 greeted instead the establishment of a state for a people with “too much history and too little geography.” Israel, in his eyes, also revolutionized Jewish life in the diaspora. To become Israeli, assimilate in another country or remain in “a betwixt-and-between condition,” Berlin marveled, “is now a purely individual problem which each Jew is free to solve as he chooses (…) as an individual human being.”Footnote ⁵² Both anglophile and attached to Israel, Berlin saw in diaspora Zionism a welcome alternative to single-loyalty nationalism: a chance for Jews everywhere in the West to realize themselves “in as many directions as freely, variously and richly as they can.”Footnote ⁵³

Berlin’s praise for the “human idealism” of Jewish statehood was a Jewish intellectual response to the creation of Israel. In the 1950s, however, the projection of humanness on the Jewish state occurred within a larger Israelophile current. Like Cold War liberals in the United States, Western European socialists formed the backbone of progressive philo-Zionism between 1948 and 1967. The forty-year-old Margaret Thatcher, to be sure, lauded the new country for its supposed anti-welfarism. “They don’t pay people for being idle in Israel,” she reported after her first visit in 1965.Footnote ⁵⁴ But social democrats set the tone of admirative discourse. Israel, in their eyes, epitomized socialism “at a human scale.” Their romanticization of Jewish settlers in Palestine, part and parcel of a vision of empire as disseminator of modernity, nonetheless predated the year 1948. From the mid 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, European socialist parties heralded Labor Zionism as their outpost in the non-Western world and considered the Jewish colonization of the land a benign infringement beneficial to backward Arab natives oppressed by “feudal” effendis.Footnote ⁵⁵

This rhetoric evolved after World War II. Like most members of the Labour party’s intelligentsia, the pro-Zionist MP Richard Crossman believed in 1947 that “the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine is an important part of the Socialist creed.” But the Jewish “socialist Commonwealth, intensely democratic, intensely collectivist” was no longer an exotic oasis of utopian socialism: It now inspired the welfarist New Jerusalem which Clement Attlee’s government pledged to build in England.Footnote ⁵⁶ Sam Watson, the Labour party’s leader who visited Israel in 1950, acknowledged this kinship. “It is a fact that on all economic and social problems,” reported Watson in the pages of the left-Labour mouthpiece Tribune, “we are attempting to carry out the same policy.” The 1 million inhabitants of Israel, he also reported, are “progressive, democratic, and Socialistic.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Not all social democrats, to be sure, enthused about Zionism. In West Germany, the SPD initially reacted with reserve to the creation of Israel before changing course. Although supportive of Jewish self-determination, Italian socialists harbored less enthusiasm for Israel than the far more sympathetic SFIO in France. But a dominant representation of the Jewish state imposed itself within the noncommunist left after 1948: the country where socialism revealed its human face.

Created in 1951, the umbrella organization of socialist parties known as the Socialist International officialized this admiration. In March 1955, its secretary Julius Braunthal marveled at “socialist Israel, which has succeeded in the realization of splendid social, economic, and cultural aspirations in the face of difficulties such as scarcely any socialist party in the world has ever encountered.” The Histadrut trade union, he added, “is a labour organization without parallel in the world (…) a powerful rock on which the magnificent edifice of Socialism in Israel is built.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Dedicated to the exclusion of Arab workers from “Hebrew Labor” in the 1920s and 1930s, the sectarian Histadrut only agreed to full Arab membership in 1960: By then the approximately 200,000 Palestinian residents of Israel placed under military rule until 1966 no longer challenged Jewish hegemony in the labor market.Footnote ⁵⁹ The kibbutz movement, for its part, took over the land of destroyed Palestinian villages and agricultural fields abandoned after 1948. That the Histadrut and Israel’s vaunted collectivist farms were also instruments of dispossession did not dent their reputation in socialist eyes. Even young Marxist idealists in search of an authentic communist experience felt drawn to the Jewish state. Born in 1933, the radical Italian philosopher Antonio Negri became later in life a theorist of capitalist globalization and a fierce critique of Israel. In 1954, however, Negri discovered in Kibbutz Nahshonim “practices of Communism that were as radical as they were elementary. The utopia was real. Its reality had bite.” Negri already sensed then “the guilt of the expropriator who always gives a vulgar coloring to the figure of the colonizer.” But as the Italian intellectual ideologically close to the Red Brigades stunningly avowed, “Israel was my luck, my chance – and my symbol.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The 1956 Suez crisis further reinforced Israel’s humanness in West European eyes. The “Nazification” of Gamal Abdel Nasser following Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 affixed to the new country the image of democratic enclave in a totalitarian Middle East. The British conservative Prime Minister Anthony Eden, to be sure, equated the Egyptian leader to Hitler without effusive pro-Zionism. “Nasser’s plans and intentions,” argued Winston Churchill’s successor, were akin to the Führer’s “acts of aggression” on the eve of World War II.Footnote ⁶¹ In France, however, the socialist head of government Guy Mollet dubbed Nasser a “would-be Hitler” while lavishing praise on the Jewish state. A day after Israeli forces entered the Sinai Peninsula, Mollet extolled Israel’s “attachment to the rights of man and the fundamental principles of democracy – principles whose price the Israelis, more than any other people perhaps, know the exact cost.”Footnote ⁶² Together with the Labour party’s leader Hugh Gaitskell, the Welch socialist politician Aneurin Bevan mounted a vigorous campaign against the French–British–Israeli military expedition. Yet Bevan also detected in the Egyptian regime’s “basic fascist tendencies.” Arab socialism, in the mind of Labourites favorable to Zionism, paled in comparison to its Israeli counterpart. “There is a socialist state growing up in the Middle East,” the trade unionist Sam Watson had already announced in 1955, “and that socialist state contains within itself some of the finest creative impulses mankind has ever seen.Footnote ⁶³ The Socialist International spokesman Julius Braunthal shared a similar view. “The cause of socialism in Israel,” argued the Austrian-born émigré in Britain in August 1956, “is the cause of democratic socialism all over the world.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Anti-colonialism, of course, had already began to steer parts of the European Left away from its earlier support or acceptance of Zionism. Yet in France, the Suez crisis invigorated the pro-Israel feelings of socialists still wedded to the idea of French rule in Algeria. In Britain, the Labour party’s opposition to the tripartite invasion of Egypt did not undermine its predominant pro-Zionist orientation. And in both countries, the portrayal of Nasser as “Hitler of the Nile” valorized the humane reputation of Israel in public opinion.Footnote ⁶⁵ “The survival and freedom of the State of Israel,” wrote Albert Camus in 1958, “may well dash the dreams of Nasser or other slave-owning kings.” Camus also sympathized with the “misery of Arab peoples” yet for the 1957 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, solidarity with “exemplary Israel” remained the moral obligation of “us, Europeans, who are still accountable for the martyrdom of millions of Jews.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Numerous Christian Democrats, anti-communist conservatives and far-right “antisemitic Zionists” impressed with Israel’s military strength also spoke favorably of the Jewish state in the wake of the Suez crisis.Footnote ⁶⁷ But until 1967, the idealization of Israel in the political arena primarily remained the hallmark of the reformist Left. Key figures of European socialism between 1948 and the Six-Day War – the French François Mitterrand, the Italian Pietro Nenni, the British Harold Wilson, the Dutch Willem Drees, or the Belgian Camille Huysmans – harbored life-long sympathy for Israel. Born in 1913, Willy Brandt had taken “a skeptical view of Zionist ideas” in his youth, favoring then the “social and cultural integration” of Jews in Germany. Yet the “Israelis’ will to succeed and their remarkable ability to make the desert bloom,” which he first discovered during a visit in 1960, left a deep impression on the West Berlin mayor and future chancellor. “Israel’s arduous first thirty years of existence need not to be recounted here,” Brandt later wrote in his autobiography, “but I was never indifferent to its fate.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Eyewitnesses of Humanity

Israelophilia was also a literary phenomenon. Throughout the 1950s, glowing reports from the country propagated positive representations of the Jewish state. In the United States, this trend started immediately after Israel’s proclamation of independence. Between 1948 and 1950, observed the Jewish American anthropologist Raphael Patai in 1951, “the average frequency of the new publications on Israel in the English language alone was one book every two weeks (…) not counting pamphlets, mimeographed publications, reports, yearbooks, memoranda, directories, musical publications, business publications and documents.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This frantic pace was never matched in Western Europe but books on the Israeli experience also found a readership on the continent and Britain. In West Germany, laudatory accounts of Israel compensated for Nazi crimes – an issue discussed in this chapter’s final section. Yet in the Federal Republic as in other West European countries, pro-Israel books published in the 1950s emanated in part from Jewish authors sympathetic to Zionism or who had become Israeli citizens. The writings of Arthur Koestler, Jon and David Kimche, Norman Bentwich, Harry Sacher, and Abba Eban in Britain; Elian Finbert, André Néher, André Chouraqui, David Catarivas, Pierre Paraf, or Paul Giniewski in France; Martin Buber and numerous writers of German or Austrian origin in the Federal Republic, all vehiculated an attractive image of Israel. Some of these publications were also translated into Italian and Dutch, alongside books initially published in English in the United States. David Ben-Gurion’s Rebirth and Destiny, for instance, first appeared in New York in 1954 before its translation in various European languages.Footnote ⁷⁰

Israelophile travel writing, of course, was not an exclusive Jewish phenomenon. The state of Israel indeed rapidly attracted the attention of visiting European journalists, politicians, trade unionists, intellectuals, artists, and Christian personalities. One theme common to these apologetic writings was “the birth of a new race,” as the French journalist Henri Amouroux already observed in 1950. The Jews he encountered in Israel no longer resembled “the Jews of Warsaw who docilely obeyed the orders of the SS”; or “Parisian Jews” convinced that the Legion of Honor protected them against persecution. The new race, wrote Amouroux, was “hardened, proud and stubborn.” Laborers in kibbutzim, the journalist added without fear of antisemitic innuendos, were proof that “this people could resist the old temptation of money.”Footnote ⁷¹ The French novelist Georges Duhamel, for his part, detected changes in Jewish anatomy. Israelis, he discovered, “have clear eyes, blond hair, a short nose and a thin and mobile mouth.” Transplantation to Palestine, concluded the man of letter also trained in medicine, “can modify the structure of an organism.”Footnote ⁷²

Another characteristic of travel reports from Israel, especially when published in the early 1950s, was their unreformed colonial and/or orientalist language. “Crossing the Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem to reach Israel from Jordan,” noted the French Catholic journalist André Frossard, meant “leaving contemplation and pleasant idleness” for the world of “organizing realism.” The former member of the French resistance also informed his readers that “while the Jew plants, the Arab idly leans against the wall.”Footnote ⁷³ One of the founders of the Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, the Catholic intellectual Jacques Madaule likewise opposed “immobile” Islam to Jewish vitality. The state of Israel, argued the visitor of the country in 1951, realized in Palestine “what colonial powers achieved or should have achieved in other parts of the world.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The idea of Zionism as exemplary colonial project was also conveyed to British readers. “Israel,” marveled in 1952 the Arabist and diplomat Gerald de Gaury, “is an unequalled example of the possibility of man to overcome the seemingly impossible in colonization.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The British poet and novelist Stephen Spender, who toured Israel in 1952 to write a book on immigrant children, praised the Jewish colonization of Palestine as a model for global demography. “With a little of the zeal of Israel,” Spender wrote, “people could be shifted out of crowded areas into empty ones (…) Israel shows that it would be possible to make willingly those shifts in population which would solve many problems.”Footnote ⁷⁶ One of the first official German guests of the Jewish state, the CDU economist, and parliamentarian Franz Böhm likewise projected colonial fantasies on the state’s “astonishing civilizing efforts.” At the height of decolonization, admiration for the “civilizing potency of world Jewry” was not only a way for Germans to distance themselves from Nazism: It also assigned to Israel the role of rescuer of the European colonial idea.Footnote ⁷⁷

French visitors, for their part, fixated on Palestine’s mise en valeur (development and improvement) under Israeli rule. Borrowed from the lexicon of French colonial humanism, the phrase described here the modern transformation of a land recently in the hands of “feudal Arab lords oppressing without qualms a miserable population.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Elian Finbert’s Pionniers d’Israël (1956), soon translated into German, English, Italian, and Dutch, made ample use of this image. “I crisscrossed the country in a jeep, by foot, hitch-hiking, and explored it as I would explore any other virgin land,” wrote the French traveler. Israel’s valleys, he observed, “now look Californian, Umbrian, Australian (…) and increasingly lose resemblance with their physical reality of lore, that of the Levant.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The Third Republic’s civilizing mission, and until its dissolution in 1958, the Fourth Republic French Union, aimed to bring progress in Indochina and Africa: Jewish mise en valeur was now carrying out this task in the Middle East. The renowned theatre and cinema actor Jean-Louis Barrault, however, drew other similarities between the Jewish state and French Republicanism. A guest of the country for two weeks in 1960, Barrault waxed lyrical about a “nation-in-arms” identical to the one victorious in 1792 “at the battle of Valmy.” One of the “noblest events in the history of our civilization,” the creation of Israel appeared in his eyes as the levée en masse of concentration camp survivors and indomitable fighters.Footnote ⁸⁰

Barrault’s portrayal of Israelis as modern-day French revolutionaries posited historical resemblance between the two countries. In the United States too, sympathy for Israel during the early Cold War era was premised on historical sameness. Otto Preminger’s film Exodus (1960), for instance, drew absurd but effective parallels between the American Revolution and the Zionist struggle against British rule in Palestine. Throughout the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies, the “Americanization of Israel” swayed a public until then indifferent to Zionism toward identification with the Jewish state. Protestants celebrated a common biblical heritage while journalists, publicists, and entertainers, stressed similarities between rugged frontiersmen and Jewish settlers; or between the American melting pot and the Israeli in-gathering of exiles. The budding special relationship between the United States and Israel derived from geopolitical calculations: It was also grounded on perceived cultural or “Judeo-Christian” kinship.Footnote ⁸¹

Yet while “Our American Israel” was imagined as a replica of the United States, European Israelophiles heralded the uniqueness of Israeli society. After a second tour of the country in 1958, the French essayist Henri Amouroux explained to his readers why he would emigrate to Israel had he been Jewish. A country “at a human scale, where everything depends on man and his willpower,” Israel was “one of the most extraordinary adventures of the modern world.”Footnote ⁸² For André Malraux too, Israel was “a nation unlike the old nations of Europe.” The French intellectual had wondered a decade earlier if the “European man” could ever recover from the destruction of war. One unmistakable site of this resurrection was the Jewish state, “the symbol of a metamorphosis which transformed a community of intellectuals and traders into a nation of peasant soldiers.”Footnote ⁸³ The British artist and photo-reporter Richard Lannoy summarized the function of Israel for the European conscience. The country “may be deciphered any way you chose,” the visitor wrote in 1958, yet it remained “the test of everyone’s humanity.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Humanism’s Other

Enthusiasm for humane Israel, however, went hand in hand with the erasure of the Palestinian trace: Not a single Arab interlocutor appears in a large multilingual corpus of travelogues published during the fifteen years that followed the War of Palestine.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Dutch biblical scholar Theodoor Vriezen, who toured Israel for several weeks in April and May 1950, stopped like other tourists in Nazareth (the Arab Christian town was spared depopulation in 1948) but did not converse with its inhabitants. Although he criticized “Jewish travelogues” for not showing “compassion, and especially respect, for Arabs,” the Dutch visitor wrote out Palestinians from his account: The drawing featured on the cover of his book featured an empty land redeemed from desolation at the hands of Israeli farmers, an image also used in some of the first airline advertisements of flights to Israel.Footnote ⁸⁶

Committed to “record all that I could, as accurately as possible, in a factual way,” the British Gerald de Gaury avoided “the controversial politics of the past and that aftermath of the war, the Arab refugee problem.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In his sympathetic report on the state’s tenth anniversary, the Italian historian and former antifascist partisan Angelo Del Boca interviewed a wide range of Israelis but limited himself to an endnote on “Arab Palestinians,” the “seven hundred thousand Arabs who left the country during the war of 1948–1949.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The future critic of Italian colonial crimes in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa also dedicated several pages to “second-class citizens” in Israel. But this phrase referred to Jewish immigrants from Arab lands, not the remnants of Palestine’s indigenous population still under military rule. “I do not believe,” remarked a British traveler in 1950, “that anything written on Israel must be United Jewish Appeal propaganda or antisemitic pamphlet.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Yet the first European eyewitnesses of Israeli society did not dwell on the price exacted by the establishment of the state on Arab natives. “Israel proves in the final analysis that the world constitutes itself out of will and imagination. It proves the dominance of the spirit over matter,” observed the German writer and former anti-Nazi exile Wolfgang Cordan in 1954. Such veneration for Israel’s humanness left little space for the humanity of the defeated.Footnote ⁹⁰

The absence of Palestinians from Israel-friendly travelogues enabled their authors to vehiculate a one-sided interpretation of the “Arab-Israeli conflict”: a struggle whose point of origin was the Arab invasion of the new state on May 15, 1948. The depopulation of the country, in these narratives, resulted from the foolishness of Arab leaders who encouraged temporary evacuation and promised imminent victory. The Israeli refusal to readmit Arab “absentees” stemmed from justifiable fears of fifth columnists. When acknowledged, the expulsion of Palestinian peasants and townspeople, or the systematic destruction of conquered villages, was rationalized by the brutality of war. The takeover of abandoned homes and fields to resettle Jews from Europe or Arab countries was not spoliation but necessitated by “immigrants crowding by their thousands into a land desperately short of housing.”Footnote ⁹¹ Israel’s official version of its War of Independence found indeed a large echo in this literature. The atrocities committed in “Deriakim” (Deir Yassin) in March 1948, admitted Jacques Madaule in 1951, forced the panicked inhabitants of Palestine’s interior into flight but “coastal Arabs,” he assured, “undoubtedly” abandoned their homes voluntarily.Footnote ⁹² “A miracle took place,” noted the French journalist David Catarivas in 1955. The wonder in question was the mass departure of Arabs from Palestine despite the “supplications of Jewish communal leaders.”Footnote ⁹³ The rubble of Arab Palestine, wrote the British journalist Roy Elston, symbolized “the wanton absurdity of a war forced upon a simple people by [Arab] leaders (…) who cared very little for what happened to the unfortunate Arabs of Palestine.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Generally, however, sympathetic reports from Israel did not go into such details. The exodus of Palestinians from the land was not the concern of writers who, like Elian Finbert, extolled the “Israeli man, overloaded with history, conscious of his past and of his future.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The opening sentence of J. H. Grolle’s A People Returns Home (1953) was not a lamentation but the start of an extraordinary journey: “Palestine no longer exists.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The Dutch Reformed churchman acknowledged the erasure of Arab Palestine but felt compassion for the refugees he observed in East Jerusalem and Jordan, whose “tent camps (…) could not be habited by animals.” Like other pro-Israeli authors, he blamed the persistence of the “refugee problem” on Arab governments unwilling to solve the crisis but recognized the suffering of Palestinians placed under the care of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA). “A mass of misery and destitution,” wrote the British Zionist leader Harry Sacher in 1952, the refugees of 1948 only dodged famine thanks to the “philanthropy of the U.N. (…) and happily the worst anticipations of pestilence were avoided.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The humanitarianization of Palestinians, however, contrasted with the humanization of Israelis. Compared to refugees “poor and miserable in every way,” remarked J. H. Grolle, the Jewish nation was “upright, a people moved by the human spirit, alive!”Footnote ⁹⁸ This contrast was also apparent at the level of visual representation. In the 1950s, photographs of refugee camps produced by UNWRA staff in Gaza, Jordan, or Lebanon reinforced the humanitarian identity of displaced Palestinians. The camera lens of Western photo-reporters lured to the Jewish state, on the other hand, searched for the human among Israeli Jews.

Visual Israelophilia

“The art of photography,” wrote in 1955 the curator of The Family of Man exhibit Edward Steichen, “is a dynamic process of giving form to ideas and explaining man to man.” Reaching peak popularity in the 1950s, the humanist photography genre, in the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson, had one overarching subject: “mankind: man and his life, so brief, so frail, so threatened.” Using black and white film, other illustrious French photographers such as Robert Doisneau, Brassaï, and Willy Ronis, captured the spontaneity of human emotions in the simplicity of everyday scenes. Against the depersonalization of the individual in totalitarian ideologies, they highlighted the singular humanity of common people. From Robert Capa’s iconic The Fallen Soldier (1936), featuring the death of a Spanish Republican combatant, to the unicity of mankind celebrated in The Family of Man (1955), humanist photography set out to recover human dignity in the wake of fascism.Footnote ⁹⁹

Since its appearance in ethnographic books in the 1930s, however, this photographic genre also recorded fragments of Jewish life. In 1935, the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee commissioned the Russian-born photographer Roman Vishniac to document Jewish communities in East-Central Europe. For three years, Vishniac’s Leica camera captured the faces of rabbis, pupils, shopkeepers, and peddlers – the last visual record of a Yiddish-speaking world on the verge of destruction. In 1947, Vishniac also portrayed Holocaust survivors in the displaced persons camps of occupied Germany.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Jewish photographers who after 1933 emigrated from Germany and Austria to Palestine, for their part, concentrated on chalutzim (pioneers) and children in the Yishuv. Even before 1948, Zionist photography advertised the New Jew through modernist images of vibrant youth and pioneerism.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The creation in New York of the Magnum Photos agency (1947) accelerated the circulation of such photographs. The famous cooperative covered events across the globe but two of its original founders, the Jewish émigrés and war photographers Robert Capa and David Seymour, visited Israel several times between 1948 and 1954. Magnum’s task, stated its French cofounder Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952, was to “evoke a situation, a truth” and capture “the poetry of life’s reality.” The agency’s executive editor John Morris likewise singled out the distinctive talent of Magnum’s photo-reporters. Committed to bear witness to the world “in terms of people rather than propaganda of statistics,” they offered “a peculiarly human point of view.”Footnote ¹⁰² Published in Life magazine and other media outlets, Capa’s and Seymour’s portraits of male and female soldiers, laborers, and new immigrants to the state, highlighted the humanness of everyday Israelis. The photographers of Jewish origin Tim Gidal and Jerry Cooke also joined the fray: Between 1948 and 1950, several photobooks on a state “in which one million Jews (…) can wrestle with their own destiny,” already found their place on American coffee tables.Footnote ¹⁰³ In September 1951, Life magazine featured a photo-reportage on “The Forgotten Arab Refugees, friendless exiles of Israel” in south Lebanon. These images of “sullen, bitter, and hopeless” people in Saida and Ein El Hilweh countervailed favorable coverage of Israel in the US media. Yet humanitarian photography did not match the humanist vibrancy of John Phillips’s portraits of Israeli Jews published in Life in 1949; or Capa’s close-up photographs of Jewish immigrants displayed in the same magazine in May 1951 and in other media until 1954, the year of his accidental death.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The young Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, to be sure, documented UNWRA camps as early as 1949 and visited them throughout his life. But only decades later did his photographs of Palestinian refugees, neither “helpless and miserable-looking” nor “terrorist,” receive humanist consecration.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the 1950s, however, Israelis remained a subject of choice for “concerned” photographers dedicated to “truth, commitment, and engagement.” In the United States, their visual production appeared in magazines, books, and advertisements well into the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Similar images circulated in Western Europe. Through its Parisian office, Magnum sold photo essays on the continent and in Britain. European newspapers also independently relied on photo-reporters based in Israel.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As in the United States, however, coffee-table photobooks opened another channel of pro-Zionist humanist expression. Willem Van de Poll’s Daybreak of a Nation, a collection of photographs published in 1952, was the first volume of this kind in Western Europe. After covering the Netherlands under German occupation and the Dutch Indies on the eve of decolonization, the photographer travelled to Israel in 1949 to document “the daybreak of this old new state.” Faithful to the humanist format, Van de Poll portrayed the arrival of Holocaust survivors in Haifa and the faces of Jewish immigrants from all corners of the world. Van de Poll later continued his journey to Jordan, where he took numerous photographs of Palestinian refugees. Yet his photobook on Israel, dedicated “to the memory of those who were destined not to witness it,” did not include any of these pictures. It instead staged Jewish survival in the background of Arab absence. One of his photographs features an immigrant from Europe with a concentration camp tattoo on his left arm, holding a child in front of an abandoned Arab house. “A young father and his son on his arm,” says the caption, “gazes at the dilapidated remains of the strife-ridden house. How many ruins and how much rubbles have these eyes surveyed already?” The homes left by the “departed Arab population must be cleared (…) and made habitable as soon as possible,” the caption also explained, as “a new future of young life is going to rise and flourish.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Another emblematic photographic essay on Israel was the book authored in 1955 by Izraels Bidermanas (known as Izis), a Lithuanian Jew settled in France since the 1930s and a prominent practitioner of humanist photography.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Translated into English in 1958, the volume featured various types of Israeli Jews: shoemakers in the streets of Tel Aviv, shepherds in the Galilee, soldiers, and watchmen on the border, dancing children. Yet the “most beautiful photograph of the book,” pointed out its prefacer André Malraux, did not show flourishing deserts or vigorous laborers. It featured instead a beggar “reminiscent of Job, immersed in a Prophet’s sleep,” likely of Yemeni origin, sitting at the doorstep of a condemned Arab house in the city of Ramla (al-Ramla), from which Palestinians were expelled on July 13, 1948. An erudite specialist in ancient art, Malraux only saw in the condemned Arab door a decontextualized “Chaldean arch” while the old Jewish beggar evoked the biblical prophetic tradition. The book also contained images of schoolchildren on a hill near Jerusalem planting the Forest of Martyrs “whose six million trees will grow in memory of Hitler’s victims.” Close-up photographs of an elderly man watching the scene, and of a young girl preparing to plant a tree, encouraged Malraux to muse over the meaning of the Jewish face (visage in French). In 1947, the dramatist and visual artist Antonin Artaud had famously stressed the distinction between the plasticity of face and the expressiveness of visage. “Which means that the human face [le visage humain],” wrote Artaud, “has not yet found its face and that it behooves the painter to give it one.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Malraux ascribed an identical function to humanist photography: The camera revealed the human visage of Israeli Jews. “Although its ruins have all been destroyed,” he observed, “the Jewish people still bears on its face [visage] the oldest history of the world.” Izis, however, also cast his gaze on several Palestinian figures. Yet they consistently appear as fleeting or faceless ghosts, such as a lone Arab woman shepherding a few goats amid the Arab ruins of Lod-Lydda or another one hastily walking in Ramla-al-Ramla.

Such distance between the humanist camera and the Arab subject remained a typical feature of Israelophile photography between 1948 and 1967. Except for Bedouins or Druze enlisted in the Israeli army, occasional children, or exoticized “sons of the desert,” close-ups of Palestinians are conspicuously absent from this visual production – a trend only reversed in left-wing photojournalism at the start of the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, the Israeli visage not only dignified the Jewish face dishonored in antisemitic propaganda: It also magnified the humanity of Zionism in democratic Europe.

The Humanization of Germans

In the Federal Republic of Germany, travelogues and photobooks on Israel similarly forged a mythologized image of the newly established country. Between 1953 and 1955, the first official German guests of the Israeli government, including the Protestant pastor Hermann Maas, the Hamburg journalist Erich Lüth, and the CDU politician Franz Böhm, published enthusiastic accounts of their travels.Footnote ¹¹¹ In search of an “experience-based theology” connecting the Bible with the reality of Jewish statehood, Protestant churchmen followed suit at the end of the 1950s. Reflecting on his first visit of the country in 1959, the West Berlin theologian Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt compared this experience to a “second baptism.”Footnote ¹¹² Socialist party leaders also embarked to Tel Aviv. In March 1957, the SPD chairman Erich Ollenhauer inaugurated an oft-repeated ritual: a tour of kibbutzim and Israeli cities punctuated by friendly meetings with David Ben-Gurion and Labor party or Histadrut representatives. The SPD politician Carlo Schmid, the West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, and members of the trade unions federation, soon walked on Ollenhauer’s footsteps.Footnote ¹¹³ Journalists, independent publicists, and members of Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, likewise flocked to the country from the late 1950s to 1967. The titles given to their books give a measure of their enthusiasm: Israel State of Hope, Homeland of the Homeless, The Desert Rejoices in the Land of David, Encounters with Israel, Le-Chaim to Life, Schalom Israel, and so on.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 1967, the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlisch famously identified in German society an “inability to mourn” the Nazi past. Yet even before the establishment of diplomatic relations between Bonn and Jerusalem in 1965, German travelers to Israel already displayed an uncanny ability to love.

Such “sentimental advertisement,” countered Theodor Adorno in 1962, did little to reduce the latent antisemitism still pervasive in the Federal Republic.Footnote ¹¹⁵ To combat Judeophobia, argued the Frankfurt School philosopher, the critical study of ingrained anti-Jewish stereotypes was far more effective than “images of water plants and children in kibbutzim.” Adorno alluded to the loveable Jew marketed to the public through cultural Israelophilia. Produced in 1955 and 1959, two influential documentary films conveyed to their viewers what authors of travelogues similarly observed: The moral and physical improvement of Jews resettled in Palestine. No longer the hideous or parasitic hucksters depicted in Nazi propaganda, the redeemers of “deserts” also embodied European culture away from the continent. “Isn’t it Europa?,” marvels the narrator of Paradies und Feuerofen [Paradise and Fire Oven, 1959] as images of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra appear on the screen.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this film prized in 1959 at the Berlin Festival, German-born citizens of Israel are presented as the emissaries of the humanistic “other Germany” transplanted across the Mediterranean. Conservatives, for their part, re-Germanized the victims of Nazism through the lens of militarism. The expression “Prussians of the Middle East” coined at the time of the Suez crisis, or Bild magazine’s portrayal of Moshe Dayan as “Israel’s Rommel” in the wake of the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, resurrected a tabooed German nationalism through Israel’s military might. The Viennese psychologist Friedrich Hacker, one of the first analysts of this phenomenon, concluded in 1973 that through identification with Israel, the Germans’ “self-esteem and pride in their own past is salvaged and justified at least fragmentarily.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Israelophilia, however, was also part and parcel of a discourse of guilt. The publicist Erich Lüth set the tone in 1955. Because “the Jewish question (…) remains the central problem of our spiritual being,” he wrote, “Israel is the country that we must look for with our soul.” The initiator of the Peace with Israel movement in August 1951, Lüth stood among the first advocates of a special relationship between the two countries. The Reparations Agreement signed between the Federal Republic and Israel in September 1952, in his mind, was only a “first step” toward deeper engagement.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Contrary to Konrad Adenauer’s government, Lüth did not view the payment of monetary reparations as a final settlement of debt. “For us Germans,” he wrote in his travelogue, “the salvation of Israel in the present and the future is a crucial admonition for our own transformation.” The Left Catholic intellectual Walter Dirks similarly pleaded in 1957 for a “solidarity of destiny” between Germans and Israelis. In 1960, Lüth enjoined again his compatriots to “love the ancient country of the new Israel … a fate from which one cannot escape.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

This language also permeated the writings of Protestant churchmen, mostly former members of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, who travelled to Israel in the late 1950s. The existence of the Jewish state, Helmut Gollwitzer told a Berlin audience in 1958, should affect Germans “more deeply than the existence of any other country.” The Lutheran theologian and future sympathizer of the 1968 student movement cautioned against “setting a blind philosemitism in the place of blind antisemitism.” Yet the depth of German guilt required a special bond with the survivors of Nazism. “Every German who travels [to Israel] should be clear,” declared Gollwitzer in 1958, “every Jew who lives today lives not because of us, but in spite of us … in spite of me!” In 1959, the West Berlin student pastor Rudolf Weckerling advised his co-travelers to the Holy Land that “the heaviest baggage you are carrying with you is our guilt to the Jews.” Testifying at the Eichmann Trial in May 1961, the Protestant provost Helmut Grüber, imprisoned in Dachau during the war, refused to talk about his own travails. The only non-Jewish German invited to the proceedings instead told the court that he only wanted to bear witness to “the suffering of my Jewish friends.” The settlement of German protestants in the communal Christian village of Nes Ammim founded in 1960 in northern Israel, or the tours of the country organized by the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) from the late 1950s to 1967, shared the same goal: the earning of absolution from Jews as precondition for German redemption.Footnote ¹²⁰

In Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann Trial for The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt wrote in April 1961 to her husband Heinrich Blücher that the city was swamped “with Germans who are so philosemitic, enough to make one’s stomach turn.” When next to her a sobbing journalist uttered the words “it is we Germans who did this,” she felt as if she were “in a theater.”Footnote ¹²¹ The vast majority of citizens polled on this question, however, did not feel guilty for the Holocaust. Public opinion surveys conducted during or in the wake of the Eichmann Trial returned unambiguous results: West Germans still blamed the fanatical “inner core” of the bygone Nazi regime for the annihilation of European Jews.Footnote ¹²² Conservatives like Franz-Joseph Strauss, the former Wehrmacht officer on the Eastern front twice appointed defense minister between 1956 and 1969, nonetheless acknowledged that “millions of Jews were murdered as a result of German criminality and with German weapons.” In 1958, the Bavarian politician compensated for these actions by authorizing covert military aid to Israel. His goal, however, was to quickly “leave the past behind us.”Footnote ¹²³ During the Konrad Adenauer era (1949–63) and under his successor Ludwig Erhard (1963–66), reparations, reconciliation, and the establishment of diplomatic or military relations with Israel, traded German good will for a clean historical sheet.

Yet in the wake of the Eichmann Trial, a network of Protestant leaders, several Christian Democrat figures, and above all, pro-Israel socialists, harbored a different attitude: Their warm feelings for the state of the victims derived from the indelible stigma of being German after the Holocaust. “The horrendous crimes (…) against millions of Jewish people cannot be extinguished by any good will, any reparation, any recompense,” declared Willy Brandt in 1961.”Footnote ¹²⁴ A special bond with Israel, however, could humble Germans into guilt. “Pictures of the past,” the president of the Bundestag Eugen Gerstenmeier declared after his tour of Yad Vashem in December 1962, “are sufficient in themselves to silence us Germans, and this silence is the silence of shame and the poignant fellow-feeling of countless numbers of my people in thinking of the people of Israel.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In the absence of official Holocaust memory in the Federal Republic, Israel became in the 1960s the stage of German expiation. From 1959 to 1965, 40,000 young Germans visited the Jewish state where they worked in kibbutzim and participated in meetings with Israeli youth. The development of airline travel also encouraged an increasing number of tourists to visit the country. On the eve of the 1967 June War, German public opinion overwhelmingly favored Israel over Arab countries. Such bias, however, did not correlate with acknowledgment of guilt. Support for Jews presented in the media as facing potential extermination (in May 1967, Israel’s request of 20,000 gas masks from Bonn reinforced this perception) instead whitewashed the stain of Nazism: The former gassers of Jews now publicly stood on the side of their rescuers. For the minority of West Germans who belatedly shared in Karl Jaspers’s “consciousness of guilt,” however, solidarity with Israel meant more than compensation for past crimes. The anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian 1967 student movement, of course, soon assailed the official philosemitism of the Federal Republic. For guilt-ridden older Germans, however, the path of re-humanization passed through a special relationship with the state of Israel. Nonintervention in the Middle East remained the proper course of action, the Grand Coalition’s foreign minister Willy Brandt stated on June 7, 1967. But cautious diplomacy, he made clear, neither meant “moral indifference” nor “neutrality of the hearts.”Footnote ¹²⁶

The Apogee of Humanist Philo-Zionism

The emergence of pro-Israel sentiment in Western Europe from 1948 to 1967 did not of course occur without opposition: Israelophilia ran parallel to negative views of Zionism. In the late 1940s, the French orientalist Louis Massignon and the English scholar Arnold Toynbee portrayed the creation of the Jewish state as an act of historical injustice. Although less vociferous than their Stalinist Eastern European counterparts, French and Italian communists turned against Israel in the early 1950s. Following the Suez crisis of 1956, anti-colonial intellectuals began to raise the “question of Palestine” to oppose the positive image of Israel within parts of the Left. Theorists of colonialism in the 1950s, including Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon, did not, however, openly side with Palestinians. But in 1958 the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur questioned the “debt of guilt” paid to Jews at the expense of an innocent native population. Ricoeur accepted the existence of Israel as a fact yet by facilitating its establishment, he argued, Europe and the United States contracted a similar debt to Palestinians.Footnote ¹²⁷ A decade later, the French Marxist sociologist Maxime Rodinson theorized the anti-colonial critique of Israel in Israël, fait colonial? [Israel, A Colonial Fact?], an essay published in Les Temps Modernes in May–June 1967. By the mid 1960s, a more sober tone was even noticeable in books otherwise admirative of Israel. In their travelogues, the British David Pryce-Jones, the Italian Giovanni Russo or the Austrian journalist Bruno Frei all claimed to separate “utopia” from reality.Footnote ¹²⁸ The glorification of “humane Israel,” it appeared, was now a matter of the past.

In the weeks preceding the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, however, fears of Israel’s destruction elicited a wave of sympathy across Western Europe. Military experts doubted the likelihood of Nasser’s victory, but public opinions predominantly sided with Israel. In June 1967, 58% of positive attitudes were recorded in France, 55% in Britain, 56% in Denmark, and 62% in the Netherlands (outlier Italians remained indifferent to the conflict): These percentages increased in the immediate aftermath of the war. Most West Germans and Austrians likewise indicated pro-Israel bias. In these two countries, the press also fervently espoused the Israeli cause.Footnote ¹²⁹ Surveys of French attitudes are a case in point: Between June 8 and June 13, only 2 percent of the population expressed sympathies for the Arab side. In October 1967, 44 percent of the French declared themselves “more strongly anti-Arab than anti-Jewish.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Five years after the country’s defeat in Algeria, pro-Israel attitudes in France did not only reveal sympathy for “David against Goliath.” They also stemmed from what Edward Said later called the “transference” of antisemitism toward Arabophobia: a first step toward the entanglement of philosemitism and Islamophobia in the late twentieth century.

Until 1967, however, left-leaning philosemitism and pro-Zionism went hand in hand. For the thirty-nine-year-old German novelist and SPD intellectual Günter Grass, the Arab Israeli war miraculously improved the odds of German-Jewish reconciliation. “For the first time since the Nazi persecution,” declared Grass in July 1967, “Germans are doing something more than lamenting the past or trying to atone for it with reparation payments.” The famed author of Tin Drum (1959), who visited Israel in May 1967, alluded to the thousands of German intellectuals, clergymen, students, and trade unionists who mobilized in favor of the Jewish state before and during the short war. This “spontaneous upsurge of sympathy for the bravery of the Jews in their struggle to protect their homeland and have a dignified life,” rejoiced Grass, earned Germans new standing in their relation to the Jewish people: “the possibility to express our solidarity for Israel and the fate of the Jews without our feelings being hindered by the past.”Footnote ¹³¹ Jean-Paul Sartre, to the contrary, clung to the legacy of Nazism to explain his position on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Although in May–June 1967 his review Les Temps Modernes framed the conflict as right against right, Sartre took a stand: “We are allergic to anything that could in the least resemble anti-Semitism. To which many Arabs would respond: “We are not anti-Semitic but anti-Israeli.” Doubtless they would be right, but can they change the fact that, for us, the Israelis are also Jews?”Footnote ¹³² Sartre’s position frustrated his many admirers in the Arab and decolonized world. How could the celebrated anti-colonial thinker, they pondered, “surrender to Zionist propaganda”?Footnote ¹³³ The Parisian intellectual moved closer to their cause at the start of the 1970s when he justified Palestinian “counterterror against established [Israeli] terror.” On the eve of the Six-Day War, however, the philosopher felt “affective” solidarity with Israel.Footnote ¹³⁴ “We are all bound to the Jew,” his pledge issued twenty-two years earlier in Réflexions sur la question juive, remained in effect. His secular philosemitic engagement intersected with epochal winds of change: The mid-to-late 1960s was also the moment when the Church professed its own special esteem for Jews, God’s first love.