Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Foreword by Professor Robert A. Segal
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: History and comparative epistemology
- Part I Georges Dumézil, or Society
- Part II Claude Lévi-Strauss, or the Mind
- Part III Mircea Eliade, or the Sacred
- 12 Fascism and mysticism
- 13 Primitive ontology
- 14 The eternal return of anti-Semitism
- 15 The neo-paganism of homo religiosus
- 16 Metaphysics and politics: Eliade and Heidegger
- Addendum III Esotericism and fascism
- Addendum IV The reconstruction of prehistoric religions
- Addendum V The Eliadean conception of symbolism
- Addendum VI Forgetting the Shoah
- Conclusion: Modern theories of myth and the history of Western thought
- Bibliography
- Index
Addendum VI - Forgetting the Shoah
from Part III - Mircea Eliade, or the Sacred
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Foreword by Professor Robert A. Segal
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: History and comparative epistemology
- Part I Georges Dumézil, or Society
- Part II Claude Lévi-Strauss, or the Mind
- Part III Mircea Eliade, or the Sacred
- 12 Fascism and mysticism
- 13 Primitive ontology
- 14 The eternal return of anti-Semitism
- 15 The neo-paganism of homo religiosus
- 16 Metaphysics and politics: Eliade and Heidegger
- Addendum III Esotericism and fascism
- Addendum IV The reconstruction of prehistoric religions
- Addendum V The Eliadean conception of symbolism
- Addendum VI Forgetting the Shoah
- Conclusion: Modern theories of myth and the history of Western thought
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In autumn 1999 a letter was published in the bulletin of the French Research Center in Jerusalem. It had been taken from the archives of the French Collection in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem; it was addressed by Eliade to Gershom Scholem, and dated June 25, 1972. This long letter, anxious but also cleverly argued, was in reply to one from Scholem. In Scholem's letter this specialist in the cabbala stated that he had learned that his eminent colleague in the history of religions and his neighbour at meetings in Ascona was hiding a past that he as a Jewish intellectual could only look upon in dismay. The occasion of this discovery or confirmation was provided by reading the Israeli journal Toladot, which had just published extracts of Mihail Sebastian's Journal (1935–1944), in which Sebastian spoke of Eliade's “conversion” to the ideas of the Iron Guard, and reported some of his anti-Semitic statements. Sebastian, a Romanian playwright of Jewish origin, had been a close friend of Eliade's in the years preceding the Second World War.
I should like to recall and comment on some significant passages from this letter that concern the established facts, and consequently the most revealing and most embarrassing. They especially show that Eliade never hesitated to lie in order to hide his opinions and past involvements, which become even more weighty when one understands their influence on the actual content of his work drafted after the war.
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- Twentieth Century Mythologies , pp. 277 - 288Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2006