# 259 / Editorial
When it comes to present-day Iran, which since the Islamic revolution of 1979 has become the site of state institutionalization of global antisemitism, the Book of Esther, the biblical book that recounts the existential threat to the Jews and their subsequent survival, immediately comes to mind. This is because the Iran of the mullahs has actively worked to elevate itself to the status of persecutor par excellence—a status it considers enviable—by making the eradication of the State of Israel a political priority and becoming the capital of Holocaust denial. The Islamic Republic of Iran has repeatedly explained the logic behind this position: the “Zionist regime” was imposed on the region by the West as a result of the Shoah, so the Shoah must be a lie. Under this condition, the destruction of the Zionist enterprise, since it is fraudulent in its very foundations, is legitimate. For Israel then appears to be nothing more than the armed wing of Western imperialism in the region. The Islamic Republic of Iran did not invent this reasoning, but picked it up in the West, where anti-Zionism and Holocaust denial became intertwined in the postwar period. Maurice Bardèche, in his 1948 book Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise (Nuremberg or the Promised Land), inaugurated a series that was destined to proliferate. One of the most prominent links in this chain was the activism of Faurisson, who was invited to appear both at the Shoah cartoon contest in Tehran and at the Paris shows of comedian Dieudonné, who was convicted of antisemitism.
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It follows that the war currently underway—the stakes of which are manifold, but where the liberation of the Iranian people from a bloody dictatorship is paramount for us— a hope echoed by the Iranian voices of Mahnaz Mohammadi and Atefe Asadi, which we are republishing this week—has an additional dimension for the State of Israel and Jews around the world that cannot be reduced to the fluctuating strategic interests currently at play in the Middle East: loosening the noose of exterminatory anti-Zionism, which was certainly fabricated in the West, but to which Iran and its allies have given a state foundation, practical military force, and terrorist power outside its borders, and which now finds—as if the export of this hatred had returned to its place of origin—a favorable echo in entire segments of public opinion, including on our campuses. The clock installed in a square in Tehran that publicly counts down the time remaining before Israel’s demise has, for decades, resonated with us as the countdown from the decree to exterminate the Jews of Persia to its inactivation in the Book of Esther. If the time it indicates cannot be shortened by nuclear weapons, and, better still, if the clock can be dismantled by the liberated Iranian people, this would mark the beginning of a new era in the Middle East. But the fact that Europe, and with it France, is a mere spectator to this upheaval, and remains so at this decisive moment in time, is a sad sign of its political insignificance. Even more worrying is the fact that it no longer recognizes its responsibility in exporting hatred of Jews—and, consequently, its responsibility to combat it.
What gives Judaism its substance, this fact which, in the words of Gershom Scholem, “cannot be defined according to its essence, since it has no essence”? David Lemler’s book L’invention du judaïsme (The Invention of Judaism), published last November by Albin Michel, sets out to investigate this question by exploring the diversity of historical responses given by Jews to the question of what constitutes the collective to which they belong. Danny Trom returns this week to Lemler’s ambitious undertaking, in order to better highlight the Jewish question that arises in our contemporary world. As Jews’ self-awareness is torn between the reality of a state and doubts about the sustainability of their people, under what conditions could the crisis of reflexivity be overcome?
Kafka was a guiding star of a generation of Germanophone Jews, for whom he conceived the heavens as a void in which all those who tried to speak in a modern world disconnected from tradition existed. Avishag Zafrani permits us to glimpse another side of Kafka’s language, where he does not speak at all, but rather draws on a scrap of paper, an old bill or a check from one of the magnificent, loquacious cafes of Prague.
