“We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation,” wrote Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust, in 1935.
“The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish State. ... (O)ur good wishes and our official goodwill go with them.”
In Heydrich’s terms, the creation of the State of Israel thus represented the triumph of Zionism over assimilationism. But it also complicated the traditional antisemitic perception of Jews as a deracinated, rootless people. This was Martin Heidegger’s view, in 1939, when he called for an examination of “Jewry’s predisposition to planetary criminality”:
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