Tyranny of Hate: The Roots of Antisemitism a Translation Into English of Memsheleth Sadon
| Author: | Rappaport, Aron Harrison, Graham Brunner, Constantin | |
| Year: | 1992 | |
| Pages: | 208 | |
| ISBN: | 0-7734-9562-2 978-0-7734-9562-3 | |
| Price: | $179.95 + shipping | |
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This book deals with the subject of Hatred as examined in the Constantin Brunner's philosophical opus The Doctrine of the Spiritual Elite and the Multitude. The book avoids the idealistic reproaches of breach of morality, goodness and similar toothless phraseology. In the larger, practical part of the book, the author meets head on the open and veiled prejudices perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews. However, the main theme is human hatred, though it is studied here on the historical example of pandemic anti-Semitism. The author's scientific radicalism is controversial, and should interest scholars of human rights, progressive religious groups, Jewish institutions, university libraries, and the general reader as well as psychologists and sociologists.
Reviews
"A most thought-provoking treatise on the subject of antisemitism. Brunner puts forward a non-religious theory of antisemitism, a theory that could, in hindsight, only have been produced by pre-war German Jewry. I don't know what I find more fascinating, this doctrine of the cause of hatred of the non-Jewish Jew, the indistinguishably distinguished individual, differing from his gentile haters by some mysterious, intangible quality. . . or the enigmatic person of Constantin Brunner, so fiercely anti-antisemitic, clinging to a dream of identification with his brother Germans -- a dream that was never to come true. It would be an intellectual crime to hide this book from modern English readers. . . . I would recommend . . . the book specifically as a treatise on antisemitism, but also as a study of the agony of a Jew living in pre-World War II Germany." - Kenneth H. Norwich
"The Tyranny of Hate is only partly about anti-semitism or about the Jews. It is about hatred and bigotry, about human needs and moral choices, about flawed societies. It is only that Brunner could test his hypotheses most easily on what he knew: German anti-semitism and the Jews. The conclusions of The Tyranny of Hate are generic. . . . the questions (many of them first posed by Brunner) remain telling ones today. . . . Indeed, the disconcerting aspect is that The Tyranny of Hate is too prophetic, not in a political or historical sense, but in a social or philosophical one. . . . this book, now in translation, will have a triple audience: historians of the period, scholars of philosophy and psychology, and those expressly interested in the topic of anti-semitism. The translation is quite deft, and while the style remains truly of its period, it is not overpowered by German syntax." - John S. Cowan
"The Tyranny of Hate is only partly about anti-semitism or about the Jews. It is about hatred and bigotry, about human needs and moral choices, about flawed societies. It is only that Brunner could test his hypotheses most easily on what he knew: German anti-semitism and the Jews. The conclusions of The Tyranny of Hate are generic. . . . the questions (many of them first posed by Brunner) remain telling ones today. . . . Indeed, the disconcerting aspect is that The Tyranny of Hate is too prophetic, not in a political or historical sense, but in a social or philosophical one. . . . this book, now in translation, will have a triple audience: historians of the period, scholars of philosophy and psychology, and those expressly interested in the topic of anti-semitism. The translation is quite deft, and while the style remains truly of its period, it is not overpowered by German syntax." - John S. Cowan