IV.3. L’omniprésence d’une absence. La Shoah et les philosophes en Israël

Abstract

In comparison to most other disciplines and modes of intellectual or artistic production, philosophy has produced very little writing on the Holocaust. At the same time, there is reason to suggest that very few, if any, events have had a more determining influence on the subjects and the style of contemporary philosophy than the destruction of the European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators, although this influence usually lies below the surface. This is also true insofar as the philosophical community in Israel is concerned. In Israel, though, there is a relative institutional and thematic separation between so-called “general” philosophy and Jewish thought. The lines separating these two fields, which encompass research, teaching and, more generally, philosophy and theology, or religious thought, are often blurred. However, most philosophical and semi-philosophical reflections on the Holocaust are produced by scholars belonging to the latter field. In this article, we propose an overview of the primarily Hebrew-language philosophical literature, which deals with different aspects of the Holocaust. We mainly concentrate on the more secular literature.