The Non-Jewish Jew

Essays on Judaism in the modern world, from philosophy and history to art and politics

In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with a calm clear-sightedness. As a historian he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding; as a philosopher he writes of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, 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, as well as of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the Six-Day War, and of the perils ahead.“Deutscher is an exceedingly vivid writer with a sense of style.”
—Times Literary SupplementIsaac Deutscher (1907–1967) was born near Kraków and joined the Polish Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1932. His books include Stalin and the Unfinished Revolution and a three-part biography of Trotsky hailed by Graham Greene as “among the greatest biographies in the English language.”