"Jewish, French, Writer"

An intimate interview of Stéphane Zagdanski by Vanessa De Loya Stauber

What is Written of Us?

By Vanessa De Loya Stauber (Source in French)

July 9, 2025

Interview. On the occasion of the expanded re-release of De l'antisémitisme, Stéphane Zagdanski explores the ancient roots of hatred, the unease of intellectuals, and the subversive power of Jewish texts in the history of ideas. Interview by Vanessa De Loya Stauber

You've given us about twenty books on philosophy and literature. In 1995, De l'antisémitisme was published, and a new, revised and expanded edition recently came out. Did re-reading Léon Poliakov and the resurgence of antisemitism lead you to revisit this urgent and pressing issue today?

Yes, in part. As a matter of principle and passion, I'm meticulously re-editing all my works published since 1991. This new edition of De l'antisémitisme is part of that decision and would have happened anyway. However, I took the opportunity to write a new, long preface that addresses the insane global resurgence of antisemitic acts since October 7, 2023. I also added around 300 pages of appendices, written between 2021 and 2024, focusing on anti-Zionism, Heidegger, and the resurgence of antisemitism, among other topics. I also expanded the chapter specifically dedicated to Muslim anti-Judaism and antisemitism, which date back to the origins of Islam.

Finally, to fully answer your question, I didn't need to re-read dear Léon Poliakov to grasp the unfortunately eternal nature of his analyses, nor to understand what his works taught me decades ago – and which I describe in De l'antisémitisme as a "very clear sensation of an immense underlying wave, a mundane and purring fury since the dawn of time. A hatred of the boredom of Time against the night of the Text."

Do you think the escalation of hatred stems from covetousness, from the second constantly wanting to be first?

It's obviously a complicated matter to try and unravel the multi-millennial mystery of antisemitism. You allude to the two daughter religions, stemming from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and you are right to highlight this latecomer's complex that haunts them and fuels their secular anti-Judaism.

My idea is that the Jewish Word-Text is profoundly subversive, in the sense that it places questioning at the center of the world, and that it innovates in its oscillatory conception of truth, which is neither certainty nor adequation to reality. In doing so, it undermines the will to power of ancient empires, mainly the Roman Empire, upon whose model modern empires were more or less conceived. The biblical prohibition against killing, the regulation of arduous servitude and the obligation of Shabbat rest—including for animals and servants—the ethical place given to the foreigner, the poor, the widow, and the orphan; all these Jewish specificities are profoundly disturbing for a universal political project, in the sense of apostolic Roman Catholicism of the early centuries or the rival imperialism of Islam from the seventh century CE. This subversion inherent in the Jewish Word is encysted like a painful thorn in both civilizations, Christian and Muslim, which cannot help but develop an animosity, however suicidal, towards their own spiritual source.

However, to come to your specific question, this original paradox of a source to which one owes one's existence but which one refutes in order to spread throughout the world, produces a genuine civilizational neurosis, an ambivalent, profoundly loving animosity towards Judaism, its bearers (the Jews), and all its symbols—the State of Israel included. Unlike a Japanese or Eskimo child, a Christian or Muslim child born today already appears at the heart of a civilization, a culture, a language, a literature, an entire mental, proverbial, linguistic universe, where the word "Jew" is magnetized by this deep residual negativity. Upon this negativity, the neurotic hatred of someone who has failed in life (jihadists, for example) can then focus, from simple invective to the most savage murder. The abhorrent case of Mohamed Merah provides a perfect example.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, through his subversive text "The End of Judaism," provoked strong reactions in you, leading to a book where you rigorously reframe his arguments. How could he have so vehemently slid into blatant anti-Zionism after having been so enthusiastic about Walter Benjamin?

This confirms my hypothesis of a civilizational neurosis that precedes and transcends individuals: to see such a renowned intellectual as Agamben succumb to the most simplistic and historically inaccurate anti-Zionism. Unlike, for example, Noam Chomsky or Judith Butler, Agamben explicitly refers to Jewish mysticism to fuel his highly aggressive online interventions against Israel and Jews. I felt it necessary to closely examine his thought, which I hadn't known personally but for which I held a respected reputation, to understand the underpinnings of this hostile outburst. To my surprise, I discovered an entire edifice of trickery, falsification, and unworthy amalgams for a seriously cultivated intellectual. These included, for instance, his takes on the status of the "Muslim" at Auschwitz, or the "Dispositif" according to Michel Foucault, or the convoluted relationship between Scholem and Benjamin. Most notably, there's a passion for Saint Paul that uncritically rehashes the apostle's anti-Judaic "under-thought," exactly like his comrade, the philosopher Alain Badiou. And what reading Agamben's autobiography, Self-Portrait in the Studio, taught me is his nihilistic neurasthenia, and that his entire depressive and deprecatory attitude stems from an assimilation he makes on a page of his work between "thinking" and "urinating"!

A report from the Urban Warfare Institute and the International Legal Forum, published in May 2025, was co-authored by Arsen Ostrovsky and John Spencer. You meticulously dissected it, revisiting the "Seven Lies About Gaza." Is this a way for you to act as an ambassador for Israel, by debunking fake news and dismantling false assumptions?

You're referring to my activity on my Substack site, a social network mainly frequented by intellectuals (journalists and writers, especially Anglo-Saxons). There, I frequently disseminate, in French translations, analyses of the ongoing conflict in Gaza by informed and rational figures like John Spencer or the Israeli historian Haviv Rettig Gur. This is a work of elucidation and understanding of the chaotic contemporary world, particularly the Middle East, to which my seminar on anti-Zionism, held between 2022 and 2023, before October 7th, also tried to contribute.

I also post many of my own analyses, in text or video, and recently, still through my Substack site, I've started dialogues with friends who have an original perspective on a given question, as recently with Joshua Lhote on the peaceful coexistence between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Gibraltar. In this context, I plan to make a long video interview over the summer with the historian Georges Bensoussan, which will aim to be a sort of "masterclass" from him concerning the entire Zionist question, revisited from its beginnings to the present day.

Do you consider yourself a writer and a Jew?

I don't need to "consider" myself, as that's what I intimately am, in this "chronological" order: Jew, French in language and culture, and writer. But, unlike the formula of Jankélévitch, who opened his great essay dedicated to Bergson, which I devoured at twenty, stating that "the problem of the relationship between Bergson and Judaism lies entirely on the conjunction 'And'," there is no rupture or problematic knot within me between these three realities of my intimate being: Jew, French, and writer.

This is also true of my artistic work, which is an integral part of manual writing. There is therefore a mysterious fusion between my reality as a French-language writer (it's important to specify this, because I've been radiated and initiated since I was twenty by the highest classical French literature) and my Jewishness, which I somewhat audaciously dare to compare to the two facets of "I am" in the Eternal's response to Moses at the Burning Bush: "I will be what I will be."

What is your confession of lineage with Judaism?

Again, this isn't a "confession," but an obvious fact since my earliest age. Even if I didn't receive an orthodox Jewish education, only a traditionalist one, and if from the age of eighteen I had to rediscover the great texts of Jewish thought, including the Bible, by my own means, my ancestors were Hasidim from Poland affiliated with the dynasty of the Rebbe of Gur. All this profound, mystical, and joyful spirituality of Ashkenazi Hasidism, which Kafka, for example, discovered with astonished enthusiasm in adulthood, and which so opposed the stiff, anemic, and assimilated Judaism of his parents... it flowed in my veins from my tender childhood, particularly through snippets of Yiddish, both slang and sentimental, that my parents had inherited from their own childhood, and which I strive today as best I can to transmit to my own daughter.

What does the Jew in you respond to, beyond the face-to-face with the text and your enjoyment of exegesis?

That's still the essence of what constitutes my Jewishness: this "face-to-face with the text" and this "enjoyment of exegesis." Otherwise, many quite typically Jewish traits have been bequeathed to me by destiny and upbringing, such as a certain existential anxiety, or an ethical concern for attention to "ordinary people," as they say, to "simple folk," who never fail to touch me.

But I am also inhabited by a great Hasidic joy, corroborated by my Hebrew name Simh'a—given to me during my circumcision by my paternal grandmother—which means "Joy," just like "Freud" or "Joyce."

In light of Judaism, what questions you most: resemblance or belonging?

I belong to the text-people of the children of Israel, an infinitely literary people since it sprang from a Book. I share many of its traits, of course, like an unwavering love of study, but also its legendary flaws, such as "stiff neckedness" and widespread ironic sarcasm...

Does the divine hold an attraction for you?

Of course. Despite my too little religious practice, which I lament, I have a deep attachment to the Jewish God, that of the Torah, the Kabbalah, and the Talmud. However, despite some efforts, I can't sufficiently "fear" this God whom I sincerely love, to compel myself to perform all the mitzvoth. I don't boast about it, and I consider my very religious cousins in Israel to be paragons of piety whose practice of their faith I sincerely admire. I regret that this practice was not instilled in me from early childhood, to the point that it would be natural for me today and would require no real effort on my part. I'd like to be religiously Jewish like a (kosher) fish in water, whereas I feel more like a cetacean resting in the depths of its religion but unable to resist leaping and catching its breath on the surface of the profane world.

Thinking is so close to foreboding; how do you envision the future of the diaspora?

I am very pessimistic and fatalistic, but I am also awaiting the miracles that will happen, because anything is always possible. It's probable that if I weren't so attached to the French language and culture, I would undoubtedly have already gone to live in Israel.

Have you made the book your place, your land, in the sense that language is hospitable?

Yes, considering everything I've just revealed to you, of course books, starting with the Jewish Bible, are invigorating perpetual sources of energy and meditation for me, rather than places themselves. I don't really have a designated place, apart perhaps from my thoughts, which unfold in my own books, those I write. But it's true that the French language, of Catholic and royal origin therefore, is my only intimate place, hence this strange oscillation, which I love, between the Jewish world and that of French literature. This is what I call the "swing of meaning," and there's nothing dramatic about it, just like true swing.

In Chaos brûlant (Burning Chaos), you explore Kafka's work through the lens of combat via writing. He managed to create parallel worlds. What are your detours?

Precisely the books of Kafka and all the many writers I love and who have helped me build my thought. I include writers from whom I am psychologically quite distant, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Martin Heidegger, and whom I nevertheless read and study with great intellectual fervor. These are my "detours" in the sense that they do not correspond to my intimate axis, but rather irrigate it like tributaries that contribute to the course of a river.

Inside your new novel in progress La Fin, you write: "What I dreaded has come upon me." Tell us about this self-fulfilling prophecy.

In 2021, I had the idea for a new radical novel about the metamorphoses of Evil—in the vein of Chaos brûlant, which focused on money and mass media; Les intérêts du temps (The Interests of Time), centered on journalism and technology; and Miroir amer (Bitter Mirror), dedicated to the manipulation of living things.

By a truly nightmarish inspiration, undoubtedly inspired by Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, I decided to describe the violent disappearance of Jews from the face of the earth, and the spiritual desolation that would follow everywhere on the planet. The envisioned title of this novel (still being written today) was The End.

To make this "end" of the Jews plausible, I imagined that the vast Pfizer vaccination campaign in Israel went wrong, and that Israelis suddenly died, dropping like flies. Palestinians took advantage to savagely invade Israel and finish massacring the last survivors, like the religious Jews who had refused to be vaccinated.

The phrase you quote is a quotation from Job, which I had used as an epigraph for this profoundly dark book: "What I dreaded has come upon me." This was in February 2022, and this interrupted novel draft then remained in my drawers.

One can imagine my terror on the morning of October 7, 2023, when I discovered scenes of horror on the internet that literally echoed those I had imagined and begun to write two years earlier. And since October 7, reality seemed to have become both my most fateful rival and my worst inspirer. I, who two years earlier had been looking for a way to describe with some realism a world galvanized by anti-Jewish hatred, suddenly saw it surgir in abundance on all social networks, daily invaded by anti-Zionist or antisemitic simpletons, as if this planetary delusion's main function was to whisper to me day and night: "Here's documentation in abundance for you. When do you plan to get back to it?..."

I must make one final confession: on October 7, 2023, I couldn't help but be struck by the thought that, perhaps, with my morbid imagination, I had caused, through a form of unconscious black magic, this misfortune that had just befallen Israel and the Jews in a way comparable to what I had put down on paper two years earlier. Fortunately, this type of black magic does not exist. There are only the enchantments of cybernetics which, alas, already cause quite enough damage.

Following the latest ills that have shaken us since the war, what do you feel compelled to support, what thrill animates you?

In a way, all masks have fallen since October 7. We've seen a string of intellectuals express their raging incompetence almost everywhere in the media. Even Israel's very recent attack against Iran, which targeted no civilians, deeply hurt a tyrannical regime despised by its own people, and eliminated a serious nuclear threat, was described in the same incriminating way as the war in Gaza, whose unfolding is not without its complexities either. Israel's 12-day war against Iran is undoubtedly the "cleanest" imaginable, targeting only scoundrels, and yet the same eternal critics of the Jewish state found a way to plead the cause of the mullahs whom all free spirits should nevertheless abhor. Conclusion? When it comes to Israel, there are no more free spirits.