This book offers an exhaustive analysis of one of the twentieth century’s most troubling philosophical enigmas: how Martin Heidegger, perhaps the last great thinker to grapple with the bedrock questions of Being, simultaneously embodied the profound moral collapse that his involvement with Nazism represents.
Donatella Di Cesare, in a sweeping and inexorable inquiry, contends that Heidegger’s so-called “metaphysical anti-Semitism” is not merely a peripheral defect, not merely a bibliographic curiosity in the margins of his Black Notebooks, but a painstakingly elaborated position bearing on his entire philosophical trajectory. The contradiction that has haunted generations—how someone so hermeneutically attuned to the concealed resonances of being-in-the-world could so ardently welcome the politics of annihilation—here takes on an unforeseeable urgency. No ordinary indictment of ideology, Di Cesare’s investigation thrusts us back to the wellsprings of Heidegger’s thinking, unveiling how that thinking itself, in its fierce radicalization of Western metaphysics, managed to fixate on the Jews as the antitype of the new destiny Heidegger fantasized for Germany.
Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks confronts a legacy that, for decades, philosophers believed they could circumvent through selective reading, or by confining Heidegger’s Nazism to a mere misstep in the early 1930s. Drawing on a deeply contextual reading of the recently published Black Notebooks—those thousands of pages where Heidegger wrote candidly during the darkest years of Hitler’s Reich—Di Cesare captures how he configured “world Judaism” as the adversary of Being, the incarnation of the very “machination” and rootlessness that threatened to sever Western Dasein from its Greek-German wellspring. These Notebooks astonished even seasoned scholars by cataloging Heidegger’s repeated allusions to the Jews not as a traditional “other” in theological polemic, but as a metaphysical challenge to his entire concept of a new inception. Through this lens, Di Cesare lays bare Heidegger’s scorn for the Jews—an impetus that is neither wholly racial nor narrowly political, but that hinges on his dream of a regenerated Volk reconnected to the earth and emancipated from the accelerating rationality of modernity.
Far from minimizing Heidegger’s alliance with the Nazi cause, Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw in those anti-Jewish measures, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust, something more fateful than ephemeral political strategy: they were, for him, a potential “purification of Being,” a violent means to eradicate the uprooted “agents of modernity” who had, in his view, derailed the spirit of the West. From the vantage of contemporary scholarship, it is precisely Heidegger’s metaphysical condemnation—his recourse to a thinking that confuses Being’s destiny with a racial essence—that turns his anti-Semitism into a philosophical stance rather than a passing prejudice. In his judgments about “rootless Jewry” (the wanderers without a land, standing supposedly outside the communal ethos of labor and settlement), Di Cesare detects a radical recapitulation of ancient anti-Jewish stereotypes. But these stereotypes are intensified by his sovereign aspirations for Germany as the new dawn of the history of Being.
Situating Heidegger’s language of Bodenständigkeit (the sense of rootedness in native soil) and Volk (the communal destiny of the people) within the crisis of the Nuremberg Laws, Di Cesare insists that Heidegger saw the Jew as an anathema to his entire ontology, an alien who epitomized endless displacement and thus the dissolution of any stable beginning. The Jew, for Heidegger, became less a flesh-and-blood individual than a metaphysical figure of “worldlessness,” lacking any capacity to ground itself or dwell authentically in the earth—like stones in the path of Being, blocking the new inception of Western history. This brutal negation of the Jew, made more chilling by Heidegger’s own speculation on “machination” and “total mobilization,” casts the Shoah itself in a sinister philosophical hue: the mass murder of Jews was rationalized as a kind of monstrous “self-annihilation” or “acceleration” that they allegedly invited through their deep complicity with technology and modern rationalism.
Unfolding with a clarity that never diminishes her subject’s horror, Di Cesare reconstitutes the arc of this vision. She exposes how Heidegger’s call for a radical revolution of the university in his 1933 rectoral address—where he brandished the language of spiritual “struggle”—slid into the conviction that Bolshevism and international Jewry belonged to the same infiltration and leveling of the West, and that the only way to withstand it was through the total mobilization of the new German empire. Even after he resigned his rectorship and retreated to the Black Forest, Heidegger’s endorsement of Hitler’s war on the “Judeo-Bolshevik threat” remained. Di Cesare painstakingly recounts how these convictions, so often swept aside in polite commentary, crop up with growing insistence in the Notebooks, where the philosopher, contrary to hopes of a turn to quiet introspection, affirms the sense that the planet-wide conflict would also be the site of a final cleansing for a Germany he believed to be historically destined.
Di Cesare’s book thus lays out an argument that is both forensic and philosophical: Heidegger’s entire narrative of the “history of Being,” from the primordial Greek inception to the promise of a new dispensation, entailed a metaphysical identification of the Jew with a structural menace. While other major thinkers who criticized modernity—Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, and even Schmitt—demonized the Jew in comparably dehumanizing ways, Heidegger’s approach situates that demonization at the central pivot of his ontology. The Nuremberg measures and, later, the “final solution” itself become horrifyingly legible through the lens of his diatribes on “machination” and “calculation,” culminating in a sense that the Holocaust, in his twisted speculation, was not a crime for which Germans alone bore responsibility, but an outgrowth the Jews themselves provoked by “forgetting” Being and fostering the “dominance of entities.”
Such a thesis may sound outlandish; but as Di Cesare makes plain, Heidegger wrote this down in feverish scrawl within pages that a later age would discover with shock. In so doing, Di Cesare does not proceed by demonizing his entire philosophical legacy. Rather, she meticulously demonstrates that no reading of Being and Time or Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) can remain unchanged after encountering his explicit statements about “the Jew.” If his earlier path of fundamental ontology had cast existence as finite, thrown, and open to possibility, his subsequent writings, which he never intended to publish during his lifetime, reveal the catastrophic intersection of that hermeneutic with an unyielding hostility to Jewish life as the supposed exponent of “the worldless.”
The significance for Heidegger’s legacy is overwhelming. Di Cesare’s pages explore how the scandal of the Black Notebooks has precipitated two extreme reactions—an outright dismissal of Heidegger’s philosophy as a façade for Nazism, or a denial that his hateful statements are relevant for a philosophical discussion. Over and against both extremes, she shows that one must assess how such remarks about the Jew, however sporadic, function within his broader reflection on technology, modernity, and the forgetting of Being. From the remnants of those disquieting passages arises a new, if profoundly upsetting, sense of responsibility for philosophy: How do we continue to read Heidegger’s fundamental ontology once we see that anti-Semitism was no mere footnote, but an outgrowth of his condemnation of “uprooted agents” who must be destroyed?
Echoing the sentiments of readers like Babette Babich, who praises this study as “a tour de force combining intellectual history and philosophical reflection that goes beyond the routine alternative of rabid condemnation or blinkered defense,” Di Cesare illuminates how Heidegger’s metaphysical anti-Semitism stands at the intersection of the existential, historical, and ontological. She compels us to rethink the meaning of no-thing, of metaphysical boundaries, and of totalizing projects that—under the label of “spiritual revolution”—paved the way for extermination. Rather than consigning Heidegger’s Black Notebooks to a sealed historical coda, she weaves them into the arc of his philosophical oeuvre, revealing all those maneuvers by which, time and again, he names “the Jew” as the foe of his highest hopes for a new beginning.
In an era when the aftershocks of Holocaust revelations continue to rupture comfortable narratives about Europe’s intellectual heritage, this book forces us to confront Heidegger’s texts without evasions. Di Cesare’s exacting philological approach, her command of the relevant historical documents, and her willingness to traverse the complexities of phenomenology and “ontological difference,” result in a study that is more than a condemnation: it is a demonstration of how philosophy can go catastrophically astray when it treats entire peoples as abstract typologies in the name of a “higher truth.” In the end, one encounters a Heidegger who ironically reveals the depths of Western metaphysics’ potential for violence, conjuring a monstrous “purification” of Being that, as Di Cesare reveals, mutated into complicity with genocide.
Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks is consequently indispensable for anyone engaged with continental philosophy, Holocaust studies, or modern intellectual history. Beyond the controversies that have swirled around the man from Messkirch since 1945, Di Cesare draws out new stakes for interpreting the Holocaust’s ideological impetus. Exploring Heidegger’s revulsion against “world Judaism” and its alleged conspiracies, she marks a crucial turning point in our comprehension of how metaphysics—or any conceptual monism that projects the Other as the outside—can become entangled with crimes that defy rational justification. Students will find that the lines between an arcane ontology and lethal political programs are often thin. Scholars of philosophy, theology, and Jewish studies, meanwhile, will discover fresh perspectives on how antisemitic logic shaped—and was shaped by—Heidegger’s thinking about technology, historical rootedness, and the fate of Europe.
Throughout, Di Cesare resists the temptation to present Heidegger as a mere moral cautionary tale. Rather, her measured but searching exposition of his metaphysical anti-Semitism opens a dimension that continued to hover over postwar debates: whether a philosophical tradition that repeatedly casts the Jew as “outside Being” can be reconciled with a modern world we now recognize as irrevocably plural. The question rings with unanticipated force: has the looming presence of the Jew, so systematically denigrated or excluded, laid bare the fault lines of Western philosophy’s drive for total comprehension and dominion? As Di Cesare suggests, there is no easy resolution—her study ends not with a rhetorical closure but with an appeal to rethink the entire link between difference, community, and Being.
Melding philosophical subtlety with historical scope, Donatella Di Cesare’s Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks is an unflinching and necessary confrontation with the underside of Heidegger’s eminence. That, as reviewers have noted, makes it a “fastidious forensic investigation,” an inquiry that refuses to relegate the matter of anti-Semitism to footnotes or moral censure alone. It shows in slow detail how the impetus for destruction surfaces in the conceptual apparatus itself, and how the illusions of “arche” and “purity” can legitimize atrocities. It is not simply a monograph on a single thinker’s prejudice. By illuminating how a philosopher of Heidegger’s stature could envision the Holocaust as both “self-destruction” and “the purification of Being,” Di Cesare forces the reader to measure again the lethal conflation of logic and fanaticism.
For all these reasons, this wide-ranging book takes its place as an essential resource. Philosophers, historians, and general readers will discover how far deeper than a year’s “political intermezzo” lay Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, and how, to do justice to his lasting philosophical achievements, we must re-examine them at their innermost folds, where hostility to Jews was distilled into an inhuman principle for universal destiny. The reverberations of this condemnation against an entire people will not allow us to exonerate philosophical reason from its deadly illusions. Rather, through Donatella Di Cesare’s scholarly rigor and unrelenting clarity, we learn that even the subtlest reflection on Being can mask catastrophic illusions of power—illusions that, once enshrined in texts as influential as Heidegger’s, become a cautionary bell tolling across the decades for every discipline that seeks to interpret the human condition.
Simon Gros 
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