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The fugue of Being. Heidegger’s critique to the
Jewish-Christian tradition in the context of the
Black Notebooks (1931–1948)
By
Francesca Brencio
Freiburg im Breisgau

“Das Zeitalter der Wahrheit-losigkeit muß aber zugleich den vollendeten Schein
des unbedingten Wahrheitsbesitzes um sich legen, der es jederzeit als überflüssig
und zudringlich erscheinen läßt, das Zeitalter selbst auf sein Wesen
und seine Bestimmtheit innerhalb der Seynsgeschichte zu befragen”. 1

“Watchman, how far gone is the night?”

The watchman says:
“Morning comes but also night. If you would inquire, inquire. Come back again”. 2

1. Introduction

Since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks have been published, the academic de-
bate on these volumes seems to be focused only on accusations against Heideg-
ger through his own words. The widespread interpretation of Heidegger’s anti-
Semitism – both ontological and metaphysical – has captured the attention of
many eminent scholars, putting aside the complexity of those themes that char-
acterize the notes pencilled between 1931 and 1948. The risk of this unidirec-
tional massive attention is to forget the considerations in the Black Notebooks
on Heidegger’s pathway of thinking and on his relation to the history of philo-
sophy.
Hegel’s motto “philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts” 3, is
one of the tasks of Heidegger’s thinking in his philosophical engagement. Hei-
degger has been a thinker in constant dialogue with the western philosophical
tradition: his meditation on the issue of Being is not separated from his study
and interpretation of all the metaphysical tradition, from its very beginning till
his time. Raised as a logical issue during the very early years of his philosophical

1 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI: Schwarze Hefte 1938/39, hrsg. von Peter Trawny
(GA 95), Frankfurt am Main 2014, 385.
2 Isaia 21.12
3 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, hrsg. von Eva Moldenhauer und
Karl Markus Michel, Band 7: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Frankfurt am Main
1979, 26.

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education and career 4, it assumed the guise of a phenomenology of living life 5 in
its historical development till to the “Natorp-Bericht” 6, to move forward to the
historical-ontological thinking soon after Sein und Zeit and the first “turn” in
the early 1930’s. We could claim that the Seinsfrage itself is the result of this
dialogical necessity: investigating the issue of Being means investigating one of
the major themes of western philosophy and every interpretation given by Hei-
degger about each philosopher is inscribed into this necessity. The quote from
Plato at the beginning of Being and Time is an evident sign of Heidegger’s will
to confront the history of philosophy through an accurate philosophical dispute
(Auseinandersetzung) that assumes the feature of the historical-ontological
thinking soon after the interruption of Being and Time.
If we step outside the anti-Semitism fog that seems to cover the Black Note-
books, perhaps we can see how the real main character of these volumes is think-
ing itself in its constant strive toward Being. In this perspective, the Schwarze
Hefte can be useful tools to understand Heidegger’s attempts to answer to the
question of Being. The aim of my paper is to show how and why the critique to
Christianity raised in Black Notebooks is not only a matter of philosophical
education or simply the result of Heidegger’s separation from his original faith,
but it is rooted in this philosophical necessity, that is to answer to the question
of Being and to dismantle the primacy of historical development of Christianity
(Christentum) in philosophy, a primacy that “corrupted” and “altered” Greek

4 See Martin Heidegger, “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy,” in: The New Year-
book for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy IX (2009), 19–32.
5 In the letter dated March 5th 1916 to his fiancé Elfride Petri, a young Martin Heidegger writes:
“Ich weiß heute, daß es eine Philosophie des lebendigen Lebens geben darf – daß ich dem
Rationalismus den Kampf bis aufs Messer erklären darf – ohne den Bannstrahl der Unwis-
senschaftlichkeit zu verfallen – ich darf es – ich muß es – und so steht heute vor mir die Not-
wendigkeit des Problems: wie ist Philosophie als lebendige Wahrheit zu schaffen und als Schöp-
fung der Persönlichkeit wert- und sinnvoll”, Martin Heidegger, “Mein liebes Seelchen!”. Briefe
Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride 1915–1970, herausgegeben und kommentiert von
Gertrud Heidegger, München 2005, 36–37.
6 See Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, hrsg. von Bernd Heimbüchel
(GA 56/57), Frankfurt am Main, 1999.
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Ausarbeitung für die
Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät (1922), hrsg. von Günther Neumann
(GA 62), Frankfurt am Main 2004.
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks: Theorie der philoso-
phischen Begriffsbildung, hrsg. von Claudius Strube (GA 59), Frankfurt am Main 1993.
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. 1. Einleitung in die Phänomenologie
der Religion, hrsg. von Matthias Jung und Thomas Regehly / 2. Augustinus und der Neuplato-
nismus / 3. Die philosophischen Grundlagen der mittelalterlichen Mystik, hrsg. von Claudius
Strube (GA 60), Frankfurt am Main 1995.
Martin Heidegger, Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität, hrsg. v. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns
(GA 63), Frankfurt am Main 1988.
Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (GA 24), Frankfurt am Main 1975.

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thought and that opened the pathway toward western metaphysics in terms of
the oblivion of Being. The critique of Catholicism in particular is stratified on
three levels (historical, speculative and political) and the polemic sentences
against Jews could be inscribed into this necessity. Far from those interpreta-
tions that support some form of anti-Semitism at work in Heidegger’s thinking,
my idea is that the Judenfrage is not the main theme of Black Notebooks and his
critique toward Judaism should be considered into the broader framework of
the critique to modernity, in which Jews are embedded.

2. Those not so “black” Notebooks

“The entries in the black notebooks are at their core attempts at simple
designation – not statements or even sketches for a planned system” 7. One can
read these words at the very beginning of the first volume of Heidegger’s Black
Notebooks, those books that have been delivered by press and also by some
scholars to the wide community of Heidegger’s readers as the “most scanda-
lous” books of his entire production. However, as Heidegger states for three
times in his notes 8, the materials penciled into these volumes are only attempts
for a pathway of thinking (Gedankengang) 9. In the Appendix of Mindfulness,
entitled Looking Back on My Career, we find some important indications on the
meaning of these notebooks: “What is recorded in these notebooks, particularly
in notebooks II, IV, V, reveals also, at least in part, the basic attunements of my
questioning into and my indications of the most advanced horizons for my en-
deavors in thought. While these notebooks seem to be the product of circum-
stance, they display the unceasing endeavor concerning the one and only ques-
tion” 10.
Attempts, basic attunements, belated notes – these are perhaps the most
adequate words to define what Black Notebooks are. The so-called Schwarze
Hefte 11 are 34 notebooks in which Heidegger collected his thoughts and opi-

7 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI: Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938, hrsg. von Peter Trawny
(GA 94), Frankfurt am Main 2014, 1; Martin Heidegger, Ponderings, II–VI: Black Note-
books1931–1938, trans. by Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington 2016, 1.
8 See Peter Trawny, Nachwort des Herausgebers, in Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI:
Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938, 530.
9 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (GA 95), 52.
10 Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 66), Frank-
furt am Main 1997, 426; Mindfulness, trans. by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, London/
New York 2006, 376.
11 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (GA 94); Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI
(GA 95); Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV: Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941, hrsg. von
Peter Trawny (GA 96), Frankfurt am Main 2014; Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V:
Schwarze Hefte: 1942–1948, hrsg. von Peter Trawny, Frankfurt am Main 2015.

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nions from 1931 to 1976. Only after having accepted the decision to create a
collection of completed works in 1973, he decided to let the Hefte be published
at the end of the Gesamtausgabe 12. Under this respect, it is correct to claim that
the Schwarze Hefte were not written to be published: we can figure that they
were for Heidegger a set of work files on which he penciled his ongoing
thoughts.
Ponderings (Überlegungen) and Remarks (Anmerkungen) are not a diary,
neither a philosophical testament. They do not have an intimate tone like diaries
usually do, and they don’t give any last disposition in political issues; rather,
they join the stylistic form of notes or aphorisms embodying theoretical content
and a few private ideas and remarks. In their stylistic form, they are similar to
the writing of Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) because they recall the
same tone, even though the contents are more complex. They are called by Hei-
degger himself “belated notes”. The Notebooks published by Klostermann Ver-
lag are those written from 1931 to 1941 (Gesamtausgabe 94, 95, 96 – called
Überlegungen) and from 1942 to 1948 (Gesamtausgabe 97 – called Anmerkun-
gen). The name “Black Notebooks” is derived from the book cover: a black wax
leather.
Due to the nature of these books – written as personal belated notes – the
reader is confronted with a new dimension of Heidegger’s thought, that is the
dimension of thinking constantly in dialogue with itself. In these pages we ex-
perience Cato’s motto on the relationship between thinking and solitude: in our
solitude we are never alone and the constant dialogue with ourselves is the first
form of thinking. In reading the Black Notebooks we can see how deeply Hei-
degger is involved in his meditation; as his brother Fritz Heidegger will write in
a letter to Hugo Friedrich during 1950,
Heidegger is completely himself in his private notes (not in the teaching lectures or pub-
lic conferences); these private notes are here almost untouched, only a few have been
transcribed. In these notes that fundamental aptitude that should be the beginning and
the aim of each philosophy shows itself; I have been calling it ‘humility’ for a long time. 13
From this perspective, the Notebooks are a precious tool to deepen some
passages and movements of Heidegger’s thought, including some contradic-
tions: they are a work in progress meditation that illuminates our understanding

12 Perhaps it is useful to recall that the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks happened in
violation of Heidegger’s last will, according to which the Schwarze Hefte had to be published
only at the end of the Gesamtausgabe. The administrators of Heidegger’s Nachlass, Dr. Her-
mann Heidegger and his son Arnulf Heidegger however, against the dispositions of Heidegger
himself and his last assistant, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, have decided to anticipate the
publication of these books in accordance with Vittorio Klostermann. See Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri, Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, Brescia
2016, 27.
13 Letter conserved in the University’s Archive in Freiburg.

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of the true theme that crosscuts Heidegger’s philosophy as Ariadne’s thread, the
issue of Being (Seinsfrage).
The Black Notebooks show an amount of topics that can be observed from
two levels: a hermeneutical one and an ideological one. Considering the herme-
neutical level, it is necessary to ask ourselves what kind of writing the Schwarze
Hefte are, in which context they need to be situated and how we can approach
them. After two years of work on the Black Notebooks, I reached the idea that
the Schwarze Wachstuchhefte have not an interpretative feature broader than
other Heidegger works and that they need to be read and to be understood by
comparing their topics with the other works (lecture courses, publications, let-
ters, notes and so on) which Heidegger was working on during the same years 14.
Moreover, they need to be read entirely and apart from the rumors that the press
and some scholars have produced: extrapolating a few sensationalistic sentences
from their original context, in particular those delicate and problematic passages
in which Heidegger talked about Jews 15, putting them on the front pages of
cultural magazines is a questionable operation that can compromise the under-
standing of these books and do not demonstrate anything, or better, only an
assumption: Heidegger was a Nazis, now we have the “prove” of his anti-Semit-
ism. The occasion to “square the circle” is a bit oversimplified to be philosophi-
cally acceptable.
A consistent hermeneutical approach to these volumes is necessary to show
how the relevance of these books is not only philosophical, because Heidegger
reports also personal and private opinions in these pages. Philologically speak-
ing, it would be remarkable to find that every definition of Heidegger’s ontolo-
gical anti-Semitism has been evidenced throughout the entire Gesamtausgabe:
in order to claim that anti-Semitism is relevant in Heidegger’s meditation and it
could contaminate the ontological thinking involving all the history of Being
(Seinsgeschichte), it would be necessary to map the presence of anti-Semitic sen-
tences or terms in the seven major works on the Seinsgeschichte 16. However,

14 See Francesca Brencio, “Heidegger. Una patata bollente”. L’antisemitismo fra cristianita’ e
Seinsgeschichtlickeit”, in Francesca Brencio (ed.), La pieta’ del pensiero. Heidegger e i Qua-
derni Neri, Perugia 2015, 107–186.
15 On Heidegger’s references to Jews and to the misinterpretations of some passages see Frances-
ca Brencio, La fuga dell’essere. Dalle Überlegungen alle Anmerkungen, in Francesca Brencio
(ed.), La pieta’ del pensiero, 369–387; Francesca Brencio, “Martin Heidegger and the thinking
of evil: from the original ethics to the Black Notebooks“, in: Ius Fugit. Revista de cultura
Jurìdica, Universidad de Zaragoza y Institución Fernando el Católico 19 (2016), 87–134;
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri, Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Qua-
derni Neri, 51–327.
16 The major seven works on the history of Being are:
Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie. Vom Ereignis (1936–1938), hrsg. von Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 65), Frankfurt am Main 1989.
Martin Heidegger, Besinnung (1938), hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 66),
Frankfurt am Main 1997.

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since this procedure has not been followed, the hermeneutical approach chosen
by scholars who support anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s thinking presents some
inaccuracies. It seems to me that some interpretations work as petitio principii: a
circular argument, a fallacy in assuming a premise in the same meaning as the
conclusion. What has been considered as evidence of anti-Semite thinking –
such as the sentences in which Heidegger talks about the Jewish feature as
“groundlessness”, “absence of history”, “absence of world”, “empty rational-
ity”, “the forgetfulness of being”, “machination of beings”, “absence of bounds
as such”, “the uprootedness of all beings from being” – is not what characterizes
the spirit of “international Jewry” as such, but the modernity in itself with its
connection to the oblivion of Being. It is hard not to agree with Friedrich-Wil-
helm von Herrmann when he claims:
Everyone who has carefully worked through the onto-historical treatises […] sees […]
that the concepts listed are just onto-historical concepts by means of which Heidegger
characterizes the spirit of the newest new age and thus the present age, insofar as this age
principally understands itself from out of the spirit of the mathematical natural science
and modern technology. And this means that these concepts are not anti-Semitic as such
(i. e., they do not refer to the Jewish spirit only but reflect the spirit of the present time).
In other words, when Heidegger characterizes the spirit of ‘international Jewry’ he
includes it within the modern spirit of the present age. 17

3. Ideological readings: risks and limits

From an ideological point of view, the reduction ad Hitlerum of Heideg-

ger’s works is not new to the philosophical scenario. Since the book written by
Viktor Farias in 1987 Heidegger et le nazisme was circulated, the “Heidegger
affair” has been reinforced. Gadamer perhaps has been the first to discover the
risks of the tendency to read Heidegger in an ideological way: the conference of
Heidelberg was aimed to clarify also this point 18 and the recent unpublished

Martin Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus (1938–1939), hrsg. von Hans-Joachim Fried-
rich (GA 67), Frankfurt am Main 1999.
Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938–1940), hrsg. von Peter Trawny (GA 69),
Frankfurt am Main 2012.
Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang (1941), hrsg. von Paola-Ludovika Coriando (GA 70),
Frankfurt am M. 2005.
Martin Heidegger, Das Ereignis (1941–1942), hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(GA 71), Frankfurt am Main 2009.
Martin Heidegger, Die Stege des Anfangs (1944), vorgesehen für GA 72.
17 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, “The Role of Martin Heidegger’s Notebooks within the
Context of His Oeuvre”, in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Note-
books (1931–1941), 2016, pp. 91–92.
18 Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La conference de Heidel-

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letters exchanged with von Herrmann illuminate the limits of these readings 19.
The accusation of anti-Semitism is the higher point of this reductio – and per-
haps is prone to feed doubts: that is, to understand philosophically (and not
ideologically) the widespread interpretation on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism.
The Black Notebooks erroneously have been delivered into public dis-
course as the “hidden diary” or “philosophical last will” 20 of Martin Heidegger
and, as such, they contain confessions on his anti-Semitism. The Black Note-
books “have been taken by many to provide the ‘smoking gun’ that definitively
demonstrates Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism, and on this basis, also
establishes the unacceptability of Heidegger’s work within the canon of respect-
able thinking” 21. This has allowed some scholars to draw a portrait of Heidegger
in terms of a person involved with Nazism and also as a convinced anti-Semite 22.
In the frame of the public reception, Überlegungen and Anmerkungen have
been presented with different aims: some academics have stressed that the Ju-
denfrage is the main theme of these 1900 pages, others have suggested how anti-

berg, textes réunis, présentés et annotés par Mireille Calle-Gruber, note de Jean-Luc Nancy,
Paris 2014.
19 “Verehrter Herr von Herrmann, Sie glauben gar nicht, wie mich die Angelegenheit Farias
aufregt. Natürlich könnten wir uns in der überlegenen Haltung fühlen, daß dieses oberfläch-
liche und miserable Buch für deutsche Leser im Grunde nichts Neues enthält, jedenfalls nichts,
was man gegen Heidegger ausspielen kann. Aber die Wirklichkeit der Massenmedien nötigt
einen, aus der bisher befolgten Reserve, soweit ich selbst in Frage komme, herauszutreten. Der
Rieseneffekt, den das Buch von Farias in Frankreich macht, zeigt eben, daß man so ober-
flächlich in der Welt mit den Dingen umgeht. […] Aber ich bin skeptisch geworden. Die mod-
ernen Massenmedien sind unersättlich und wissen auch Bedürfnisse zu erzeugen, wo keine
bestehen, und vollends, wenn das Ausland bereits in Rage ist. So habe ich nach dem Studium
des Buches keinen anderen Weg mehr gesehen, als die Sache gründlicher anzupacken. Das ist
nun freilich ein ebenso heikles wie schwieriges Unternehmen. Natürlich ist das alles Unsinn,
wenn man etwa die Stilgebung von ‘Sein und Zeit’ als Pränazismus interpretiert. Leider hat uns
aber die Weltgeschichte genau solche Schlüsse suggeriert. Die ebenso verzweifelte wie doch
auch lebensvolle Zeit der zwanziger Jahre ist zugleich ein Stück Lebenszeit in der Entstehung
der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung gewesen. Die enthusiastischen Erwartungen eines Teils
der Jugend und der jüngeren Intelligenzschichten war damals nicht so gänzlich verschieden
von dem, was Heidegger und seine Freiburger Freunde auf dem Gebiete des Universitäts-
lebens sich erhofften. […] Meine einzige Hoffnung ist, daß sich der Fall Heidegger zum Anlaß
ausweiten wird, das Phänomen des Nationalsozialismus nicht länger aus der Vulgärperspek-
tive anzusehen […]. Die Fehler und Schwächen von Heidegger sind vermutlich keine anderen
und keine größeren, als jeder andere Mensch in exponierten Lagen zu begehen in Gefahr ist.
Davon reden zu müssen, ist immer etwas pharisäerhaft, und ich hasse das”, letter published in:
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri, Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Qua-
derni Neri, 347–352.
20 See Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, Frankfurt am
Main 2014, 14.
21 Jeff Malpas, “On the Philosophical Reading of Heidegger: Situating the Black Notebooks”, in
Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 4.
22 See Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger e gli ebrei. I Quaderni Neri, Torino 2014, 97 and in gen-
eral chapter 3.

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Semitism could be at work in Heidegger’s meditation, others have endorsed the
naïve idea to take excerpts from the Schwarze Hefte – the ones that “prove”
Heidegger’s anti-Semitism – as an interpretative lens with which to read the
entire work of Heidegger 23; others have assumed that the mention of anti-
Semitism could also contaminate the ontological thinking of Heidegger seeing
in Heidegger’s thinking clear implications towards the Holocaust 24; some other
scholars have also proposed expelling Heidegger’s thought from the history of
philosophy because of his Nazism and anti-Semitism 25.
While working on Heidegger’s notebooks my pathway has been illumi-
nated by Gadamer’s words: “When people claim to be ‘against’ Heidegger – or
even ‘for’ him – then they make fools of themselves. One cannot circumvent
thinking so easily”. 26 These words resonate in my mind as a compass among
different interpretations. My work on Heidegger’s Überlegungen and Anmer-
kungen has been not an apology or a defense of Heidegger against his own
words, neither a polemic with some scholars: rather, it has been – and still is – a
simple attempt to investigate Heidegger’s thought philosophically. The wide-
spread interpretation of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the use of media in
their public reception have underlined that for some authors – and in particular
for Heidegger – the boundary between philosophy and ideology is not so clear
and their reception in public scenario risks to become a matter of ideology. I
have noticed that some assumptions and interpretations have been considered
“true” par excellence – but in philosophy we should know that the word true is
extremely problematic, and it should not be overlapped with meaning. The
most eye-catching element of the “Heidegger affair” – provoked by the Black
Notebooks’ release – has been the fact that every scholar who has given another
interpretation of these books has been labelled as “Heidegger’s guardian”: ter-
23 This is the position held by Richard Wolin, Emmanuel Faye, Sidonie Kellerer and Marion
Heinz.
24 See Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 12, 15–16, 65,
92–93; Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger & Sons, Torino 2015, 69–110. On the reading that
promotes to ascribe philosophical responsibilities to Heidegger’s thinking toward the Holo-
caust, see Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 9–11;
Peter Trawny, “Heidegger and the Shoah”, in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Hei-
degger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 169 and following Donatella Di Cesare, “Heidegger’s
metaphysical anti-Semitism”, in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black
Notebooks (1931–1941), 185 and following; Jean-Luc Nancy, Banalite’ de Heidegger, Paris
2015, 18 and 32–33.
25 See Richard Wolin, National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks, in Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/993/
national-socialism-world-jewry-and-the-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/;
Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Michael B.
Smith, New Haven 2009; Emmanuel Faye, “Heidegger und das Judentum: Vom Aufruf zur
‘völligen Vernichtung’ zur Thematisierung der ‘Selbstvernichtung’”, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift
für Philosophie 63, Heft 5 (2015), 877–898.
26 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s ways, trans. by John W. Staley, Albany 1994, 112.

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tium non datur. It is my conviction that this kind of division doesn’t help in
understanding all the hermeneutical issues that are at the core of the Black Note-
books and moreover that the exercise of philosophy should not be confused
with tendentious rewriting finalised to ideological readings.
From my perspective, the interpretation of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is
not philosophically sustainable due to contradictions and fallacies mainly based
on inferences, conjectures and deductions some of them typical of petitio princi-
pii and some others based on cherry picking procedure. These elements charac-
terise the circularity of anti-Semitism interpretation 27. Moreover, what has
caught my attention is the usage of the adjective “ontological” – accompanied
to anti-Semitism – but never clarified. Following Peter Trawny’s main argu-
ment, for example, Heidegger would have contaminated his historical-ontolo-
gical thinking with the collections of stereotypes and prejudices circulated
about the Jews during the 20s and 30s. This argument allows the German editor
of the Black Notebooks to support the idea of contamination but does not pro-
vide the reader with a philosophical explanation of how this anti-Semitism influ-
ences the ontological aspect of Heidegger’s meditation. This last issue is left
open even if some passages of his books seem to invite the reader to consider
that there could be a kind of implication between Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and
his philosophy. Discussing ontological anti-Semitism requires an accurate clar-
ification of what “ontological” means, but it does not seem to be the main focus
of Trawny’s interpretation 28. The missed clarification of the connection between
Seinsgeschichte and the supposed anti-Semitism has as result only to stress the
role played by Jews as Jewish and seperated from the critique of modernity, in
which Jews are embedded 29. Furthermore, the notion of Anti-Semitism is used
without any definition of what Semite means: it would have been remarkable to
27 See Francesca Brencio, “Martin Heidegger and the thinking of evil: from the original ethics to
the Black Notebooks”, 102–109.
28 “A proper companion book to the Überlegungen (Considerations) by the editor would have
had to have a totally different conception and content. If such a book were to contain an
explanation of the offending passages by the author, the explanation would have to work out
and present the philosophical dimension of the Überlegungen (Considerations) and the sundry
critical statements in this context (…). Only this would have done justice to the three volumes
of the Black Notebooks. Instead, the editor leaves out the philosophical dimension of the Black
Notebooks entirely, and pursues his purely ideological-political agenda by completely ignor-
ing the philosophical content of the Überlegungen (Considerations) and their relation to other
manuscripts featuring Heidegger’s onto-historical thinking. In this way he misleads readers”
(Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, “The Role of Martin Heidegger’s Notebooks within the
Context of His Oeuvre”, 92).
29 Even if the third reprint of Trawny’s book Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Welt-
verschwörung is different from the others, trying to adjust previous ideas with new critiques,
the author is quite convinced of his interpretation and extends it to the role played by Heideg-
ger’s thinking on the Holocaust. On the same pathway, we find Di Cesare’s works and Nancy’s
last book, Banalite’ de Heidegger. Particularly interesting is the position of Françoise Dastur
who emphasizes the need for an accurate historical contextualization of Heidegger’s Überle-

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provide the reader with a clarification of what the expression anti-Semitism
means in relation to the history of being and maybe it would be more accurate
to use the expression anti-Judaic to explain the passages in which Heidegger
talks about Jews.
It is in this conceptual scenario that the sentence in which Heidegger claims
that the issue of Jews (Judenfrage) and their position in the world is not a racial
one but a metaphysical one 30 should be considered carefully. With this sentence
Heidegger is not claiming that Jews as Jewish have a particular metaphysical
characterisation, rather they are part of the modernity that has lost the meaning
of the Being and, for this reason, they are in the space of western metaphysics
such as Christians, Russians, Americans, Communists and so on. In other
words, the role played by Jews is the same role played by the mankind em-
bedded into the metaphysical space of modernity, unable to understand the ob-
livion of Being and to deal with nihilism.
In a passage in Remarks II (Anmerkungen II) Heidegger writes:
“Prophecy” is the technique for fending off what is destinal in history. It is an instrument
of the will to power. That the great prophets are Jews is a fact whose secret has not yet
been thought through. (Note for jackasses: this comment has nothing to do with “anti-
Semitism,” which is as foolish and abominable as Christianity’s bloody and, above all,
non-bloody attacks on “heathens.” The fact that Christianity even brands anti-Semitism
as “un-Christian” is part of its highly developed and refined power technique). 31

gungen. See Françoise Dastur, “Y a-t-il une “essence” de l’antisémitisme?”, in: Peter Trawny /
Andrew J. Mitchell (eds.) Heidegger, die Juden, noch einmal, Frankfurt am M. 2015, 96 ff.
30 See Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV, (GA 96), 243. Donatella Di Cesare has consid-
ered this sentence as proof of Heidegger’s metaphysical anti-Semitism. I would stress that this
kind of interpretation is the result only of a confirmation bias, because who considers Jews as
Jewish in terms of a metaphysical subject is not Heidegger himself but the interpreter of this
metaphysical anti-Semitism. The portrait of a metaphysical Jew is not at the core of Heideg-
ger’s interest and writings. The crafting of this portrait has not simply been the result of a
cutting and pasting of quotations from the Black Notebooks, but the logical and sentimental
consequence of an image of Jews that the interpreter draws as metaphysical and that she as-
cribes to Heidegger. It has been the recent work of the Italian philosopher Leonardo Messinese
to clarify this point with accuracy. Messinese claims that Di Cesare’s remarks on Heidegger’s
consideration of Jews are the result of her portrait of the metaphysical Jew; Di Cesare – accord-
ing Messinese – deepens this portrait building a series of metaphysical determinations, all of
them characterising Jews as Jewish, in a metaphysical meaning until arriving, through a cres-
cendo, to confirm her idea of a metaphysical anti-Semitism and to advance the hypothesis that
Heidegger’s thought would be involved in the Holocaust. See Leonardo Messinese, La “ques-
tione ebraica” nei Quaderni Neri considerata alla luce della “critica alla metafisica”, in: Frie-
drich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri (eds.), Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Qua-
derni Neri, 386–391. On the same topic – the critique of the concept of Metaphysical anti-
Semitism – see also: Maurizio Borghi, “Antisemitismo metafisico? Nota su Heidegger e gli
ebrei di Donatella Di Cesare”, in: Eudia, vol. 9 (2015), 1–14.
31 “‘Prophetie’ ist die Technik der Abwehr des Geschicklichen der Geschichte. Sie ist ein Instru-
ment des Willens zur Macht. Daß die großen Propheten Juden sind, ist eine Tatsache, deren
Geheimes noch nicht gedacht worden (Anmerkung für Esel: mit ‘Antisemitismus’ hat die Be-

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In this passage Heidegger is taking his distance from every form of anti-
Semitism, which is defined as vulgar, and he is claiming that the issues concern-
ing the power and the machination need to be addressed from the point of view
of metaphysics, and this occurs within the space of western metaphysics – in
which the question of Being is forgotten – and the space of western technical
rationality.
In the more than 1900 pages of the published Black Notebooks, Heidegger
uses the words Jude, jüdisch, Judentum 14 times 32; only 7 times are these words
used with an anti-Judaic tone, the other times just in connection with the adjec-
tive “Christian”, creating a linguistic plexus that indicates the Jewish-Christian
matrix (or tradition) of the western society which, according to Heidegger, is
the beginning of the oblivion of Being and the beginning of nihilism, into which
politics, secularism, society and institutions are called. My idea is to consider the
framework of the anti-Judaism sentences not from an ontological point of view
and neither from a metaphysical one, but rather in the context of critique of
Christendom and Catholicism that Heidegger elaborates and, more in general,
of modernity itself. This critique arises from volume 94 and proceeds until vo-
lume 97 of Black Notebooks in a crescendo 33. In this context we may assume
that the critique concerning the historical development of Christianity and
Catholicism is not merely a matter of education and distance from his original
faith, but is an inner necessity of the history of being (Seinsgeschichtlichkeit). If
these indications are not wrong, we may assume that theological readings of
Heidegger’s thinking (and works) are not correct as well as the ideological or
political ones. Since the Seinsfrage is the only theme to which Heidegger devotes
efforts and attempts, every reading that stresses elements unable to answer to
the original question (what is the Being?) are too far from Heidegger’s original
intentions. Perhaps this is what makes of Heidegger’s meditation inconvenient:
if we go carefully through his works we find that his thinking doesn’t bow to
anything (or anyone), it is not useful to any cause – not a political one, not a

merkung nichts zu tun. Dieser ist so töricht und so verwerflich, wie das blutige und vor allem
unblutige Vorgehen des Christentums gegen ‘die Heiden’. Daß auch das Christentum den
Antisemitismus als ‘unchristlich’ brandmarkt, gehört zur hohen Ausbildung der Raffinesse sei-
ner Machttechnik)”, M. Heidegger, Anmerkungen II, in GA 97, p. 159. For the English trans-
lation of this passage, Richard Polt, References to Jews and Judaism in Martin Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks, 1938–1948 Gesamtausgabe vols. 94–96 (2014) and 97 (2015), in: https://
www.academia.edu/11943010/References_to_Jews_and_Judaism_in_Martin_Heideg-
ger_s_Black_Notebooks_1938–1948
32 Even if the quantity is not philosophically important, however it shows the scarcity with
whom Heidegger talks about Jews. In other words, the Judenfrage was not a priority for him
and “let alone an essential part of his history of Being”, Jean Grondin, “The critique and
Rethinking of Being and Time in the first Black Notebooks”, in: Jeff Malpas /Ingo Farin
(eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 106.
33 See Francesca Brencio, “Dalle Überlegungen alle Anmerkungen: la critica alla tradizione giu-
deo-cristiana nei Quaderni heideggeriani”, in: La Filosofia Futura, 4 (2015), 69–86.

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theological one, not a social one. His movement of thinking is aimed to sweep
away any fundament that cannot answer to the Seinsfrage, overcoming the wes-
tern metaphysics in direction of a new thinking.

4. Christianity, metaphysics and nihilism in the context of the

Black Notebooks

Only few scholars 34 have devoted their energies to stress the critique to
Christianity in the context of the Black Notebooks and to show how it is rooted
in the critique of modernity, within which anti-Judaism 35 is merely the most
eye-catching element. The well-known distinction between Christentum
(Christendom) and Christlichkeit (Christianity) – as it had been developed in
the conference of 1927 held in Tübingen entitled Phenomenology and Theology
– is deepened in the the Black Notebooks in the light of the difference between
the kerygma and the political organization dominated by Christendom. It is in
this context that Heidegger claims that “the modern systems of total dictator-
ship stem from Judeo-Christian monotheism” 36. However, this is not a novelty:
those who are familiar with Heidegger’s meditation should remember that both
in the Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowing) and in the written memories
and reports of Heidegger’s students – such as Gadamer, Biemel 37, Müller 38 – he
had in mind only one project during the period between 1930–1948, namely to
dismantle the primacy of Christendom in philosophy, primacy that “corrupted”
and “altered” Greek thought and that opened the pathway toward western me-
taphysics in terms of the oblivion of Being.
The words Christianity (Christlichkeit), Christendom (Christentum),
Catholicism are disseminated in all the 4 volumes, with a particular crescendo

34 See Ingo Farin, The Black Notebooks in their historical and political context, in: Jeff Malpas /
Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 289–321, in particular
308–312; Silvio Vietta, “Etwas rast um den Erdball …”. Martin Heidegger: Ambivalente Ex-
istenz und Globalisierungskritik, Paderborn 2015; Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Fran-
cesco Alfieri (eds.), Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, 39–41 and 51–327; Holger
Zaborowski, Metaphysics, Christianity and the “Death of God” in Heidegger’s Black Note-
books (1931–1941), in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
(1931–1941), pp. 195–204.
35 See Jésus Adrián Escudero, “Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Question of Anti-Semit-
ism”, in: Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, 5 (2015), 21–49.
36 Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V(GA 97), 438.
37 See Walter Biemel, Martin Heidegger, Hamburg 1973; Walter Biemel, “Heidegger und die
Phänomenologie in der Marburger Zeit”, in: Phänomenologische Forschungen, Band 6/7: Hus-
serl, Scheler, Heidegger in der Sicht neuer Quellen, Freiburg / München 1978, 141–223.
38 See “Ein Gespräch mit Max Müller”, in:Freiburger Universitätsblätter, Heft 92 (1986), 13–31
und 16–17.

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in volume 96 and volume 97. The word Machenschaft is used more than 200
times and usually in connection with the question of Being. In the 7 anti-Judaic
sentences of Black Notebooks, Jews are described according the stereotypes ty-
pical of the early 20th century, also described in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of
Totalitarism. From the third volume of the Black Notebooks (GA 96) to the last
one (GA 97) we can observe a switch in Heidegger’s thought: he starts to use the
word “Jew” in connection with Christentum and metaphysics. Heidegger stres-
ses the link between Jews and Christendom as the ground of western society:
both Jews and Christendom cannot grasp Being and both of them opened the
path to nihilism and metaphysics, whose devastating effects are clear in the wes-
tern society. The oblivion of Being, the development of Machenschaft, the con-
centration camps and the Holocaust are the more evident consequences of this
matrix – the Jewish-Christian one – that opens the abyss of Nihilism, in which
also secularism is embedded.
Heidegger uses the words struggle or battle (Kampf) in relation to Chris-
tendom and to Catholicism with evident rancour; he writes that the battle
against the Catholic Church is the battle against that kind of thinking that occu-
pies western society 39, namely western metaphysics. This is the battle against a
way of thinking that is without ground and that has not interrogated the issue of
Being but only insisted on a mere anthropology:
The Catholic Church – it alone “is” Christianity – as always, eager to have its opponents
– in order to measure itself against them and to remain alert and strong. It takes the
opponents seriously, plants itself in them, learns from them up to the semblant disavowal
of itself – keeps itself in this way flexible and clever, and constantly makes itself more
secure and richer in experience. This cautious knowing and questioning, this listening
to the opponents that apparently is accepting of them, produces at the same time the
attractive semblance of spiritual freedom for confrontation, the semblance of being cur-
rent and modern, and entails the entire sophistry that basically is as rigid as ever in
crouching over the already accomplished truth and fitting itself into the presently most
beautiful recommendation within the sphere of what one in the precise sense values and
desires. 40
The thinking derived from the Catholic Church is a metaphysical one and,
as such, forgets the Seinsfrage:
The Christian “Churches” have passed over – already long ago – into the service of a
world Christianity that smacks of the Enlightenment and thus also of romanticism and

39 “The knowledge and indeed creation of these conditions require an excess of the surpassing of
a people by itself, the liberation from all calculation of either particular or common usefulness.
As pre-eminently necessary as this requirement is, so little does it touch upon the necessities of
the proper Dasein of a people—necessities which are also not grasped by a mere appeal to the
Christian Churches, but are thereby only distorted”, Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI,
246.
40 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 133–134.

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that decks itself out with everything Hölderlin and Nietzsche (and their successors) crea-
tively suffered in thinking and poetizing. The goal is the complete suppression of ques-
tioning, the repression of all the question-worthiness of beyng into the unknown and
negligible. And all this still under the aegis of a struggle against Bolshevism and every
sort of “totalizing” claim – the trivialization of nihilism – as its most dangerous form. 41
Quite evident are echoes that come from these reflections: Franz Over-
beck’s and Luther’s influence hang in the background of specific sentences, even
if Heidegger’s contribution proceeds in the direction of the history of Being.
Through Overbeck’s meditation, Heidegger starts to be critic of contemporary
theology and of the philosophy of religion due mainly to its “narrow confes-
sionalism”. Theology, like historical consciousness, is a fugitive, inauthentic
way of life. He rejects the “system of Catholicism” but not Christianity or
metaphysics, as we can read in his letter to Prof. Krebs dated January 9th, 1919:
“Epistemological insights extending the theory of historical cognition have
made the System of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me – but not
Christianity and metaphysics (these however in a new sense)”. 42 Heidegger was
committed to a kind of “free Christianity” found in “primitive Christianity,”
i. e. the original or first generation Christian experience. Primitive Christianity
was contrasted to a Hellenized Christianity promoted by the contemporary
theologians 43. He distinguishes between the historical, secular-political phe-
nomenon of the church and the Christian life of the New Testament faith main-
taining that they are not the same. Influenced by Overbeck’s denunciation of
historicizing Christianity and the transformation of Christianity into a social/
political movement within history, Heidegger employs eschatology as a regula-
tive idea into the realm of phenomenological experience.
It has been Gadamer once again to have underlined as the main focus of
Heidegger’s research was to go back to Aristotle and to the Greek conceptuality
through Luther. For Heidegger Luther and Aristotle show a reciprocal cohe-
siveness (Zusammengehörigkeit) 44. It was during the early twentieth-century
“Luther Renaissance” that Heidegger finds in Luther important tools to destroy
phenomenologically Scholasticism and its system; its most evident limit was to
cover the meaning of living life through the insistence toward spiritual cares and
inner life. As Heidegger himself pencilled, “companions in my searching were
the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle, whom Luther hated. Impulses
were given by Kierkegaard, and Husserl opened my eyes” 45.

41 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 330.

42 Letter quoted in Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, London 1993, 74.
43 Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins, Indiana University Press 2006, 113.
44 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Religiöse Dimension”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesam-
melte Werke, Bd. 3, Hegel Husserl Heidegger, Tübingen 1987, 399–390.
45 Martin Heidegger, Ontology. The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. by J. van Buren, Blooming-
ton 1999, 4.

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Another important element that needs to be recalled is the confrontation
that Heidegger has with Nietzsche from the 1930s onwards. “God is dead” is
not merely an aphorism in Heidegger’s interpretation of the last philosopher
belonging to the history of metaphysics, but a matter of fact. The more immedi-
ate translation of this aphorism in terms of facts is that the nihilism crosscuts the
western society.
Nihilism is a historical movement […]. Nihilism moves history in the way of a scarcely
recognized fundamental process in the destiny of the Western peoples. Hence nihilism is
not just one historical phenomenon among others (…) its roots are so deep that its devel-
opment can entail only world catastrophes. Nihilism is the world-historical movement
of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into modernity’s arena of power. 46
With the death of God
the place of God’s vanished authority and the Church’s profession of teaching has been
taken by the authority of conscience and, forcibly, by the authority of reason. (…) The
goal of eternal bliss in the hereafter has been transformed into the earthly happiness of
the greatest number. The diligent care that was the cultus of religion has been replaced by
enthusiasm for creating a culture or for spreading civilization. Creation, once the prero-
gative of the biblical God, has become the mark of human activity, whose creative work
becomes in the end business transactions 47.
It is in this framework that Heidegger names the connection between nihi-
lism and metaphysics with the Jewish-Christian tradition of our society:
Whatever is thus going to be put in the place of the supersensory world will be variations
of the Christian-ecclesiastical and theological interpretation of the world, an interpreta-
tion which adopted its schema of the ordo, the hierarchical order of beings, from the
Hellenistic-Judaic world and whose fundamental structure was established through Pla-
to at the outset of Western metaphysics. The realm for the essence and event of nihilism is
metaphysics itself, always assuming that by “metaphysics” we are not thinking of a doc-
trine or only of a specialized discipline of philosophy but of the fundamental structure of
beings in their entirety. […] Metaphysics is the space of history in which it becomes
destiny for the supersensory world, ideas, God, moral law, the authority of reason, pro-
gress, the happiness of the greatest number, culture, and civilization to forfeit their con-
structive power and to become void. We are calling this essential ruin of supersensory its
putrefaction. Unbelief in the sense of apostasy from the Christian doctrine of faith is
therefore never the essence or the ground of nihilism; rather, it is always only a conse-
quence of nihilism: for it could be that Christianity itself represents a consequence and a
form of nihilism. 48
This is not the right place to rebuild Heidegger’s theological education, his
distance from the original Catholic faith, the influence of Luther in his philoso-

46 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’”, in: Martin Heidegger, Off the beaten
track, trans. by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge 2002, 163
47 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’”, 165.
48 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’”, 165.

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phical meditation and during the Marburg years (1923–1927) in the debate of
theological society. However, what perhaps is important to remark is that his
dialogue with the original faith remained a “thorn in the flesh” with which he
struggled his whole life. Far from being a mere biographical fact, this metaphor
in a letter to Jaspers 49 illuminates one theoretical component of Heidegger’s
meditation and its connection to Seinsfrage. It is in this framework that the
violent critique of Catholicism and of Christianity need to be considered and
the Black Notebooks offer new elements that can illuminate the understanding
of Heidegger’s problematic relationship with theology and with the political
organization of Roman Church.
In the Überlegungen Heidegger writes:
Great corruptors of the spirit are lacking – all the more numerous are the mediocre ones
(…) everything is only a very clever imitation of what the Church Fathers and apologists
of the first Christian century already “practiced” in their own way. The current “spiritual
life” is so lacking in direction and measure that it not only finds such pen-pushing satis-
factory but even considers it something superior in comparison to what preceded 50.
And a bit further:
The confusion is so great that these “political” philosophies, ones “tied to the people,”
are never recognized as wretched imitations of scholasticism. The grotesqueness is com-
plete when all this confusion is joined by the “struggle” against the Catholic Church – a
“struggle” which has still not at all found – and cannot find – its opponent as long as it
thinks with too short a sight (and too narrow a mind) of that which constitutes the
foundations of this Church: the adapted metaphysics of Western thinking in general, in
which these “worldview strugglers” are so inextricably entangled that they do not sur-
mise how much they themselves participate with their “opponent” in the same brittle
foundations (unquestionability of being, groundlessness of truth, essential determination
of the human being). 51
Heidegger sees into the political and historical development of Christianity
one of the devastating effects of western metaphysics and the oblivion of Being.
The historical development of Christianity is the more evident outcome of the
metaphysical space: it is the obstinacy and the shelter of metaphysics of the
Catholic German Church, in terms political organization of faith 52 that embo-
dies the same organization of metaphysics. As he writes in Remarks I (Anmer-
kungen I):
On this basis one must assess what it means, for thinking that enters the concealed, initial
essence of the history of the Western, to meditate on the first beginning among the

49 Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel mit Karl Jaspers (1920–1963), hrsg. von Walter
Biemel und Hans Saner, Frankfurt am Main 1990, 157.
50 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 251 f.
51 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 292–293.
52 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (GA 94), 186.

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Greeks, which remained outside the Jewish character and thus outside the Christian
one. 53
The critique of Christianity is articulated mainly on three levels: first, it is a
historical critique, due to its historical development in which, through the con-
tamination with romanitas, the Christentum loses its own content (the faith –
the Christianity), in order to become a political system; secondly, it is a specula-
tive critique, because Christendom falsifies Christ’s message in the same way as
metaphysics; finally, it is a political critique, because Christendom (in terms of
Christentum) is an outcome of the hegemony of the Roman Church, and it is
situated within the space of metaphysics. Soon after the Concordat between the
Church and the Third Reich (1933) Heidegger notes:
The impending concordat with the Catholic Church is supposed to be a victory, for it is
to drive the priests out of ‘politics.’ That is an illusion; that incomparably well-coordi-
nated organization will remain – and also the power of the priests; their power will
merely be made more ‘sanctified’ and will be wielded more slyly. 54
It is in this philosophical scenario that overcoming metaphysics means to
break away from the legacy of the historical development of Christianity and
Jewish-Christian heritage. The fugue of Being seems to be from Jena to the Jonia
– using Franz Rosenzweig’s words – jumping Rome and Jerusalem in a time that
is still destitute.

53 “Von hier aus ist zu ermessen, was für das Denken in das verborgene anfängliche Wesen der
Geschichte des Abendlandes das Andenken an den ersten Anfang im Griechentum bedeutet,
das außerhalb des Judentums und d. h. des Christentums geblieben”, M. Heidegger, Anmer-
kungen I–V (GA 97), 20.
54 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 86.

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