34 // TYPES OF BEING - HISTORICAL ANTI-SEMITISM

included Stalin and Hitler, but we cannot rule out that along with Hitler and Stalin, this characterization encompassed “Jewry” as well. However we might read the sentence, the formulation “peculiar [eigen-tümliche, as related to Er-eignis] predetermination” (my italics) attests to the being-historical character of this thinking about the Jews.

Similar to the “skillfulness at calculating” that is attributed to the Jews, this third type of anti-Semitism in Heidegger, oriented around the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is difficult to delimit. The lecture course from the summer of 1942 on Hölderlin’s “Ister” hymn shows this. Here Heidegger sees the Germans threatened more than ever by “Americanism,” i.e., by the “unhistorical.” This threat, however, comes not from without but from within. The philosopher could not understand why the Germans were not in a position to recognize what is their “own” in the relationship between “poetizing and thinking” as outlined by him. Instead of this, they went along with the global “total mobilization,” indeed, they even became its leading exponents. Hidden behind “Americanism,” was there not the “everywhere elusive” world Judaism?

In general, the opposite of everything Heidegger sought to save philosophically—“rootedness,” “homeland,” what is “one’s own,” the “earth,” the “gods,” “poetry,” etc.—appears to be transposable onto “world Judaism.” Consequently this receives a kind of paradigmatic status. When Rabbi Joachim Prinz proclaims (cited in note 34) that the “fate of the European metropolises in general” would be embodied in the “fate” of the Jews, then the Jew, who “has the ‘nose’ [Riecher]” for what is modern, would be the antagonist of Heideggerian thinking plain and simple.41

Note that what is anti-Semitic in this is not the identification of Judaism with an international lifestyle. Even Arendt conceded that the “lies about a Jewish world conspiracy” had “based themselves on the existing international interrelationship and interdependence of a Jewish people dispersed all over the world,” i.e.,