When Raphael Gross published the original German version of this book in 2000, it created an instant, enduring sensation as it was widely reviewed in newspapers and journals internationally. His new, provocative thesis started heated debates among historians, legal scholars, and philosophers. He had forcefully confronted one of the most perplexing, reprehensible, and problematic aspects of the renowned political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt: anti-Semitism. While others had in limited ways already examined Schmitt's anti-Semitism and its possible relationship to his thinking and writing, none had systematically analyzed it in the context of the totality of his life and work as Gross would do. Indeed, there appeared little reason to do so. Manifestations of anti-Semitism appeared limited to Schmitt's Nazi collaboration (essentially 1933 through his infamous 1936 conference on “Jews in Legal Studies”). The prevailing scholarly sentiment thus tended to explain what appeared to be a sudden anti-Semitic surge as situational or opportunistic. After all, the available historical knowledge and evidence indicated a total absence of anti-Semitism in his writings before and after this phase. He also had long close associations with Jewish friends, scholars, and students. Even Jewish émigrés, including his former students, doubted the sincerity of his sudden conversion to Nazi racism and anti-Semitism. And extensive documentation disclosed in the 1970s showed that among the reasons the Nazis purged him in 1936 was that they considered him an opportunist who had personally and intellectually affiliated with Jews and that his theories were nonracial.

Perspectives changed dramatically in the 1990s with the publication of Glossarium, Schmitt's private notes (1947–1951), containing scattered vehement outbursts against Jews. Not even Schmitt's staunchest defenders could deny an anti-Semitic dimension to him beyond that of the Nazi years. The pressing new questions concerned the origin, nature, and extent of such anti-Semitism. Evidence of certain pre-1933 anti-Semitic sentiments also surfaced from the Schmitt Nachlass, to which Gross and another German scholar, Andreas Koenen, had access. The outcome was two diametrically opposed new interpretations of Schmitt based essentially upon the same archival evidence and published sources. Koenen's Der Fall Carl Schmitt (1995) depicted Schmitt as intrinsically a Catholic political/theological thinker and activist. To Koenen, Schmitt's statements on Jews were a peripheral issue explained as cultural/religious anti-Judaism rather than anti-Semitism. But to Gross, hateful anti-Semitism stood at the very core of Schmitt's thinking throughout his long life and career. One quite significant point, usually overlooked in this debate over Schmitt and Jews, is that both Gross and Koenen acknowledge that the new archival sources substantiate that, contrary to continued claims by certain scholarly critics of Schmitt, he opposed rather than supported the Nazi seizure of power. But, they argue, Schmitt supposedly tried to take advantage of the emerging new regime: for Koenen, to promote his political/theological agenda; and for Gross, to conduct his “war with the Jews” (p. 31).

Gross repeatedly emphasizes that Schmitt had a theoretical and personal obsessive preoccupation with Jews as the enemy, against whom he continually struggled with “ideological zeal” (p. 26) in a “paranoid fashion” (p. 152). Schmitt supposedly even succumbed to conspiracy theories of Jews in history comparable to those of the Nazis and Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Schmitt's career-long objective was to create a specifically German legal theory, later a Katechon (restraining power), as a bulwark against insidious Jewish influences “accelerating” the destructive currents of the modern world. Schmitt's assaults against positivism, the “pure legal theory” of Hans Kelsen, and universalist humanity, together with his own concepts of friend and enemy, concrete orders, neutralization, depoliticalization, and nomos, were fundamentally the elements of a German-Jewish struggle. But before 1933, and after 1945, Schmitt had, for various reasons, supposedly “masked” the true anti-Semitic foundations and intentions of his writings by deceitfully encoding them in broader concepts.

To those not intimately familiar with the complexity of the issues, literature, and documentation in studies about Schmitt, Gross's “reading” (his term) of Schmitt might appear persuasive. Not only is it argued in an assertive authoritative voice, but, in addition to new archival sources, it also incorporates impressive research into vast literature in philosophy, law, and Judaic studies. Nonetheless, Gross concedes that Schmitt actually said and wrote very little about Jews; and often the meaning of his brief remarks is difficult to discern and interpret. In fact, nowhere, including his anti-Semitic private notes, does Schmitt ever provide the kind of theoretical analysis of Jews Gross attributes to him. Moreover, Schmitt's Nachlass did not reveal a pre-1933 “political or theoretical” anti-Semitism; neither have his recently published early diaries. Gross therefore engages in “structural” analyses of Schmitt's writings to uncover their underlying anti-Semitic essence that has eluded other scholars. The book thus becomes convoluted, over-argumentative, and highly speculative. Typical is Gross's claims that Schmitt's widely respected Weimar constitutional theories (which, like his other non-Nazi writings, never addressed the Jewish question) were actually a continuation of the Bruno Bauer-Karl Marx debate over Jewish emancipation. Writing and terminology lapse into distortion when, for example, Gross erroneously examines Schmitt under subtitles such as “Weimar as ‘Republic of the Jews’” (pp. 86–88). He also neglects much of what the Nachlass and other sources reveal about Schmitt's relationships with Jews. And Gross intentionally ignores what many scholars consider highly significant Nazi and émigré documentation because he had already dismissed its relevance in an earlier article. Quite disturbing as well is the insertion of “the Holocaust” into the English subtitle when nowhere is this subject examined; the German original reflected the book's true content—Carl Schmitt und die Juden. Eine deutsche Rechtslehrer.

Gross deserves credit for disclosing new documentation, providing certain important insights, and demanding that scholars seriously confront and explain Schmitt's anti-Semitism. Many scholars, however, including those quite critical of Schmitt, remain unconvinced by Gross's particular methodology, arguments, and conclusions. In an afterword to the English edition, Gross thus laments that, despite his work, the relentless scholarship on Schmitt continues unabated and that Schmitt now extensively influences legal, political, historical, and cultural theory across Europe and America.