Olender investigates the unsuspected links between erudition and race, showing the affinities between the social sciences and the concept of “race.” The book provides an accessible and lucid pathway through the labyrinth of race and erudition and examines how to deal with diversity without the problematic heritage of racial stereotypes.

* Acknowledgments * Preface to the English- Language Edition: "Race" without History * Introduction: Racism, a Semantic Trap The Hunt for (Self-)Evidence * Pierre Charles, the Society of Jesus, and Protocols of the Elders of Zion The Indo- European Idea between Myth and History * The Revival of Indo-European Studies: Georges Dumezil (1898--1986) * Political Uses of Indo-European Prehistory * Discussion after the Lecture "Political Uses of Indo-European Prehistory" * The Secret Feasts of Georges Dumezil: A Dialogue (1983) * The Long Indo-European Memory III. The Black Gold of Origins * Mircea Eliade (1907--1986) * History of Religions and the Nostalgia for Origins: On the Eliade--Pettazzoni Correspondence IV. Alterities * Barbarophilia and Greek Wisdom: Arnaldo Momigliano (1908--1987) V. Two Figures of Resistance * An Untimely Lucidity: Marcel Mauss (1872--1950) * A Historian of Forgetting: Leon Poliakov (1910--1997) VI. The Silence of a Generation * The Nazi Past of German Universities: Rudolf Schottlaender (1900--1988) * Hans Robert Jauss (1921--1997) * The University, Barbarism, and Memory, by Karlheinz Stierle *"The Radical Strangeness of Nazi Barbarism Has Paralyzed a Generation of Intellectuals": Dialogue with H. R. Jauss (1996) * On Silence as a Possible Form of Witnessing * Postscript for Gunter Grass * Notes * Sources * Index

Race and Erudition is a brilliant, riveting work of warning and illumination. It is crucial reading for anyone seeking to understand the fabric, or rather the fabrication, at the highest (and lowest) levels, of the social fictions and myths of otherness, by which we live and die, by which we continue to suffer and inflict often atrocious suffering.

Race and Erudition is a brilliant, riveting work of warning and illumination. It is crucial reading for anyone seeking to understand the fabric, or rather the fabrication, at the highest (and lowest) levels, of the social fictions and myths of otherness, by which we live and die, by which we continue to suffer and inflict often atrocious suffering. -- Peter Sacks, author of O Wheel and Necessity