Hitler's Favorite Jew

The Jewish Thinker Who Hated Judaism and Became Hitler’s Unlikely Muse

More than a century after his death, Otto Weininger remains a compelling and divisive figure, as much for his radical views as for his tragic life. In Hitler's Favorite Jew, author and scholar Allan Janik examines the turbulent career of this young Viennese philosopher whose provocative work, Sex and Character, made a lasting impact on figures like Adolf Hitler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, and continues to challenge our views on identity and ideology.

Weininger was twenty-three years old when he published Sex and Character, a sprawling, incendiary treatise that argued for the binary opposition of masculine and feminine principles, claimed that women and Jews lacked genuine individuality and genius, and declared that the highest form of human existence required the rejection of both. The book made him famous. It also made him notorious. A year later, he returned to the house in Vienna where Beethoven had died and shot himself. He was twenty-three years old. Hitler, years later, is said to have declared that “there was only one decent Jew” and that Weininger “was the only one who understood.”

Janik traces Weininger's intellectual journey from his student days in Vienna to his place as a cult figure among modernist writers and fascist ideologues alike. He examines the paradoxes at the heart of Weininger's thought—the Jewish philosopher who wrote the most radical antisemitic text of his era, the misogynist who insisted that every person contained both masculine and feminine elements, the man who preached the denial of the self while writing a book that was nothing but an assertion of self. The result is a portrait of a thinker as fascinating and self-destructive as any he wrote about.

• A provocative exploration of Otto Weininger, the young Viennese philosopher whose Sex and Character influenced Hitler, Wittgenstein, and Joyce

• Examines the paradoxes of a Jewish thinker who wrote one of the most radical antisemitic texts of his era

• Essential reading for anyone interested in the intellectual origins of modern antisemitism, Viennese modernism, and the strange afterlives of books

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

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• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the most dangerous ideas are often the ones that begin as self-hatred.

About the Author

Allan Janik is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna and a former research fellow of the Brenner Archives at the University of Innsbruck. His many books include The Use and Abuse of Metaphor (2003), Wittgenstein's Vienna (with Stephen Toulmin) (1996), and Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger (1985). He is the author of numerous articles and reviews in a wide variety of international journals, and holds a grant from the Austrian Science Foundation to produce a critical electronic edition of the works of Otto Weininger. Janik lives in Vienna.