Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
Moses and Atheism
By J.M. Cameron
The Refusers: An Epic of the Jews
by Stanley Burnshaw
Horizon Press, 447 pp., $14.95
Some time ago I found myself writing: 'Anti-Semitism circulates in the European bloodstream like a permanent infection.' This was first brought home to me with great force when a Catholic publicist explained Jacques Maritain's refusal to support Franco's cause in Spain by Maritain's having a Jewish wife. That Raïssa Maritain, who came from a Hasidic Jewish family and kept the luminous piety of her early milieu, was a Catholic gave her no protection—not that she and Maritain would have welcomed such protection. But for the wretched man who made this remark the category of Jewishness was ineffaceable, not as a glorious endowment but as a kind of ugly spiritual tattoo.
Review, 2002 words
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