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Cosmopolitanism and the critique of antisemitism: two faces of universality

Abstract The antisemitic imagination sometimes derides Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, and sometimes as the particularistic enemy of cosmopolitanism. The seemingly contradictory character of these antisemitic representations is not new but needs unpacking. In this article the author argues that Enlightenment cosmopolitanism has shown two faces to Jews: an emancipatory face manifest in movements for legal recognition of Jews as equal citizens and for social recognition of Jews as equal human beings; and a repressive face that has been expressed in the form of the so-called ‘Jewish question’. The former holds that Jews are human beings and treats this sense of common humanity as a practical imperative; the latter turns ‘the Jews’ into an imagined collectivity incapable of meeting the universal standards of humankind. The Jewish question is in nuce the question of what is to be done about the harm Jews inflict on humanity at large; it appears and reappears in the modern world in a variety of forms; and it is always at odds with the emancipatory face of cosmopolitanism. The author illustrates this conflict within cosmopolitanism at three key moments of Western European history: the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, nineteenth-century revolutionary thought, and the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ of our own time. He addresses in a historical fashion some of the difficulties the ambivalence of cosmopolitanism poses for our understanding of antisemitism and conversely some of the difficulties the study of antisemitism poses for the further development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking.