Two terms joined in order to create a title: Of Jews and Animals. With that creation, there is the inevitable risk that their conjunction will be misunderstood. It could be read as though the terms announce a possible reduction or a forced similarity in which not only would specificity be denied, but the prejudice in which Jews were equated, to their detriment, with animals would have been reiterated, as if, in other words, that reiteration and thus connection were simply unproblematic. Nonetheless, there is an important relationship between Jews and animals. They appear within the history of philosophy, art and theology in ways in which the differing forms of conjunction mark the manner in which dominant traditions construct themselves. In certain instances, however, it is the separate presence of Jews and animals that serve the same ends. This study is concerned with both these eventualities. The weave of animal and Jew, their separate and connected existence, thus of Jews and animals.

To begin: allowing for a specific figure of the Jew provides, for example, the axis around which Pascal can develop his version of Christian philosophy. The interconnection between the Jew and the animal within the philosophical writings of Hegel, again as a specific instance, becomes an exacting staging of the complex way these two figures are already implicated in the philosophical project of positioning the relationship between particular and universal, The result of that positioning is that neither the Jew nor the animal, though for different reasons, can form part of a generalised conception of universality, especially that conception of the universal that would incorporate all modes of being.