Why does anti Semitism seem to be so deeply engrained in our societies our institutions and our attitudes To answer this question we need to look beyond our current practices and see that anti Semitism has much deeper roots that it is woven into the very structures of Western thought Jean Luc Nancy argues that anti Semitism emerged from the conflictual conjunction of two responses to the eclipse of archaic cultures The Greek and the Jewish responses both affirmed a humanity freed from myth but put forward two very different conceptions of autonomy on the one hand the infinite autonomy of knowledge of logos and on the other the paradoxical autonomy of a heteronomy guided by a hidden god The first excluded the second while simultaneously absorbing and dominating it the second withdrew into itself and its condition of exclusion and domination How could the long and terrible history of the hatred of the Jew masking a self loathing be generated by these intrinsically contradictory beginnings That is the question to which this short book gives a compelling answer Excluding the Jew Within UsJean Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg Stanford has published English translations of a number of his worksncluding The Muses 1996 The Experience of Freedom 1993 The Birth to Presence 1993 Being Singular Plural 2000 The Speculative Remark 2001 and A Finite Thinking 2003..