L’antiebraismo e l’antisemitismo giudeofobico: dai primordi precristiani all’antigiudaismo della Chiesa delle origini

Abstract

This essay, starting from a broader concept of “witness literature”, understood in the sense of having to make known what would otherwise remain ignored, presents a little-known theme, namely that of anti-Jewish hatred, germinated from pre-Christian beginnings to the anti-Judaism of the early church, which, enriched by anti-Semitic literature over the centuries, would lead to Hitler’s Final Solution, with the darkness of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a metaphor and metonymy for absolute radical Evil, which dwells at the heart of Western civilisation, elusive, unjustifiable and incomprehensible. The exact knowledge of the history of Judeophobic anti-Semitism, in its millennial development, compared with theology, philosophy, ethics and literature, leads to the conclusion that to make known means to prevent, as Benjamin put it, that “what happened can happen again”. Only the knowledge of historical facts, even in their dramatic implications, up to the excess of Evil, referring to the whole Judeophobic history what Nemo asserts about Job’s case, is the only antidote against the unrepeatable barbarism that, in the 20th century, the century of horrors and of the bankruptcy of the subject, has interrupted the linear course of history and civilisation, as Diner reminded us.