The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essays

Isaac Deutscher is widely recognized as one of the foremost political biographers of the twentieth century and his full-scale studies of Trotsky and Stalin translated into many world languages have played a major role in elucidating the character and fate of the Russian Revolution. <br><br>He died on 19 August 1967 at the height of his powers. From his papers his widow Tamara Deutscher selected and edited a group of essays and articles with a special unity of theme: the place of the Jew in the modern world. In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with calmness and clear-sightedness; as a historian he writes without anger but with com­passion; as a non-Jewish Jew he writes without religious belief but with generous breadth of understanding. As a philosopher he writes first of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza Heine Marx Trotsky Rosa Luxemburg and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the `remnants of a race' after Hitler; of the Zionist ideal of the establishment of the State of Israel of the war of June 1967 and of the perils ahead.