The Non-Jewish Jew

Isaac Deutscher is widely recognised as one of the foremost political biographers of the twentieth century. 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.

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.