Why has the debate about the Jewish people become so central, even global? No doubt because a whole range of contradictory projections and expectations have collided with its enigma. A bifocal people, diasporic but also sovereign in the State of Israel, a people but also a Church, a religion, a global people, bringing together men and women from every continent, every race, every culture, but with the feeling of being a single people. A people vilified, delegitimized, sometimes denied by its own people, but whose resurgence in Israel, after its programmed extinction in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, is striking. A people whose roots lie in an immemorial past, whose heritage is still very much alive, but who were also a laboratory in which modernity tried out its worst experiments as well as its best. In this book, Shmuel Trigano attempts to think about this people in a new, systematic and political way. He also attempts to show us how his experience concerns us all, whether we are Jews or not.
