The chapter explores the meanings of the word “philosemitism” before the Holocaust (late nineteenth century to 1945) and since then. It states the book’s main argument: the valorization of Jews in European liberalism from the Holocaust to the present. The chapter also includes a discussion of the existing literature on philosemitism.

This chapter examines the resurgence and reinvention of antisemitism in Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II. To understand why anti-antisemitism became a distinctive philosophical, theological, and political project requires attention to the resilience of Judeophobia in the late 1940s and 1950s. Although unrepentant Nazis, former pro-German collaborators, or traditionalist Catholics transgressed the taboo, the delegitimation of antisemitism in the public arena also forced Judeophobia to take cover behind favorable views of Jews: Tactical philosemitism in occupied Germany and the early Federal Republic is a case in point.

The development of Jewish studies and Holocaust research in academia during the 1970s and 1980s, or fascination with the “Jewish sign” in post-modern philosophy, were other legacies of 1968 in higher education and thought. But another “1968” informed liberal visions of cosmopolitan Europe during the last decade of the Cold War. Established in France since 1975, the Czech émigré novelist Milan Kundera almost single-handedly prompted the nostalgic rediscovery of Mitteleuropa in the West. His influential essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1983), romanticized Central European Jewish intellectuals as symbols of lost but retrievable supranational Europe. Advocates of the European Union, however, grounded cosmopolitanism on the memory of the Shoah – the birth certificate of a new Europe allegedly triumphant over nationalism, antisemitism, and racism. Competing memories of communist oppression impeded the export of Holocaust remembrance across the former Iron Curtain. Yet post-Communist countries developed their own forms of Shoah memorialization, even if “to control the way in which the Holocaust is remembered, understood, and interpreted.” At the start of the twenty-first century, the commemoration of murdered Jews had become “our contemporary European entry ticket.”

Islamophobic and anti-immigrant parties in the European Union also found benefits in philosemitism. Postwar Europe had until then resisted Judeo-Christian civilizational discourse, but Islamophobia precipitated this conversion. The antisemites of yesterday, joined by culturally progressive “Enlightenment fundamentalists,” yearned for a Jewish-Christian alliance against “Islamo-fascism” and Muslim immigrants. Muscular Israel now symbolized Western resistance against Islam: For illiberal philosemites, the Jewish state showed weak liberal Europe the path to its survival. In Germany, “remembrance culture” hardened into a key symbol of national identity during the long Angela Merkel chancellorship (2005–21). In the Federal Republic, the nationalization of Holocaust memory translated into permanent alert against “imported” antisemitism, shielded the Holocaust from comparability, and affirmed Germany’s commitment to Israel’s security in the name of “reason of state.”

This chapter situates philosemitism within the discourse of postwar humanism. Despite a burgeoning revolt against the Western conception of “man” in French and anti-colonial philosophy, “everyday humanism” remained omnipresent in early postwar culture. 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. Sympathetic observers of the new state of Israel went further. The Jewish homeland, for its admirers, not only rescued but fulfilled the promise of European humanism.

This chapter documents the mutation of the most preeminent form of non-Jewish defense of Jews since the late nineteenth century. From mere disapproval of prejudice, anti-antisemitism evolved in 1945 into a singular struggle against Jew-hatred. Leftist parties in liberated Western Europe continued to oppose antisemitism in the name of universal antiracism. But in Britain and France, anti-antisemite pioneers such as the Labour MP Richard Crossman, the Anglican scholar James Parkes, and above all the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, reframed antisemitism as a special ill – the problem of “contaminated” non-Jewish society. From London, George Orwell offered the first postwar critique of this view. To single out the Jew as “a species of animals different from ourselves,” he wrote, could only “make antisemitism more prevalent that it was before.” The Parisian thinker’s decisive contribution to “philosemitic Europe,” however, was to turn the “war on antisemitism” into a politics of pro-Jewish solidarity – a progressive stance also accepting of Zionism until 1967 and beyond.