Stéphane Zagdanski

Origins and early life

Stéphane Zagdanski was born in Paris on 28 April 1963, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family whose grandparents had emigrated from Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century; he has described the household as an Ashkenazi atmosphere of minimal and permissive traditionalism, which is to say the ordinary condition of second-generation Jewish Paris. He read philosophy at the Sorbonne, writing on legal speech under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas, and became a novelist, essayist and, later, an artist.

Work and career

His essays return continually to Jewish thought and to what literature does with it. De l'antisémitisme, published in 1995, reads the hatred of Jews through rabbinic exegesis rather than through sociology, an unusual method that treats antisemitism as a question about language. Céline seul, of 1993, takes on the hardest case in French letters, the writer whose antisemitic pamphlets sit beside a body of prose no French reader can dismiss, and refuses either to excuse the first or to deny the second.

He has written on Kabbalah and on Talmudic reasoning, and has published novels and works of criticism, arguing throughout that the Jewish habit of reading closely is itself a literary method.