Surviving Maurras: Jacques Maritain's Jewish Question.

ESSAYS; MAURRAS, Charles, 1868-1952; MARITAIN, Jacques, 1882-1973; PHILOSEMITISM; ACTION Francaise

Crane's essay begins to engage the complex, polyvalent nature of the so-called Jewish Question in the early twentieth century by following closely the evolving ideas of a French intellectual who eventually emerged from his association with figures such as Action Francaise leader Charles Maurras to offer a sustained and vehement rejection of antisemitism, a rejection itself almost unheard of in respectable circles. The philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) has been identified as an extraordinarily philosemitic member of the Catholic intelligentsia in interwar France. Having broken with the anti-democratic and antisemitic Maurras in 1927, by the late 1930s Maritain established an international reputation as an outspoken anti-fascist and opponent of antisemitism. In response to the intensification of anti-Jewish prejudice in interwar Europe, he strove to advance a metahistorical understanding of what might be called the Sacred Jew in an era in which the racially hygienic construct of the Dirty Jew threatened to prevail in contexts ranging from the gutter to the drawing room to the classroom. But Maritain's recasting of the timely Jewish Question as the timeless Mystery of Israel amounted to just as much of an expression of the political-cultural anxieties of the interwar period as its racist and ever more eliminationist counterpart, articulated as the so-called Jewish Problem. Both removed the Jewish object of the question from the perspective of visible mundane reality and uncovered—or recovered—hidden apocalyptic secrets. Maritain's vision of Jewish identity in the modern world, as it developed in the 1920s and 1930s, thus proved inseparable from his negotiation of the personal and public crises of his time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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