In his Memoirs (1951), the revolutionary writer Victor Serge, who was not himself Jewish, observed that the Holocaust had shaken “even the idea of the human, acquired over thousands of years of civilization.” This conversation between Jonathan Brent and Christoph Dieckmann, chaired by Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden, explores that threatened “idea of the human” within both its Jewish and its European context—how it developed through centuries of interaction and reciprocal influence, and how the Nazi catastrophe obliterated what Edmund Husserl termed the “idea of Europe,” alongside six million Jewish lives.
Brent and Dieckmann consider what the “idea of Europe” can mean today, and how two millennia of European Jewish culture—documented and preserved in the collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—not only reflect its evolution and spirit but may also help to restore it.
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