LJUBLJANA, Slovenia ¨C ¡°We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation,¡± wrote Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust, in 1935.
¡°The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish State. ... (O)ur good wishes and our official goodwill go with them.¡±
In Heydrich¡¯s terms, the creation of the State of Israel thus represented the triumph of Zionism over assimilationism. But it also complicated the traditional antisemitic perception of Jews as a deracinated, rootless people. This was Martin Heidegger¡¯s view, in 1939, when he called for an examination of ¡°Jewry¡¯s predisposition to planetary criminality¡±:
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.