Antisemitism In George Steiner's 'Disenchanment'

The book “Disenchantment” by Catherine D. Chatterley visits the life of George Steiner and his works throughout the years. George Steiner spent his life exploring the arts of the language and its uses to explain different human phenomena. This essay will examine Steiner’s theory of antisemitism and his understanding of the Shoah. To fully understand Steiner’s views on the Shoah and his blackmail of transcendence theory, there is a need to understand Steiner’s fundamental views on Jewish tradition and history.
Steiner was born and raised in Paris and lived there until he moved to New York with his parents and sister when he was eleven. Steiner’s move to the USA was less than a month before the Second World War had arrived to France. In the USA, Steiner completed his Bachelor and Masters of Arts before moving to England to study at the University of Oxford after winning the prestigious Rhodes scholarship. In Oxford, cultural differences with the English style of literature at the postwar period established Steiner’s outsider character that accompanied him throughout his entire life: in his field, by his religion, and in his beliefs. …show more content…
Steiner believes that the true irony lies in the desperate need to dehumanize and strip Jews from any virtue. The “humanists”, by doing that, had been dehumanized. In the Shoah, there were no winners: Jews went through genocidal extinction while the Nazis have been dehumanized. Again, Steiner stresses the irony in the fact that the Jews had faced dehumanization by the Nazis. The Jews, who had rejected Christ as human-form God, and by that maintained the human dominance in the world, are those who face the dehumanization into lower than men creatures. Steiner believes that this irony is not coincidental, but he blames the Church for the millennia that they orchestrated Jewish hatred to the levels that led to the