Abstract

Rachel Bespaloff, a Jewish intellectual of Ukrainian origin and close to philosophers Léon Chestov and Jean Wahl, explored the Jewish Question in her 1938 correspondence with Daniel Halévy. She saw in Péguy a confirmation of her belief in the Jewish people’s destiny to return, beyond persecution, to the Land of the Fathers. During her exile in America (1942-1949), she wrote The Humanism of Péguy, connecting his ideas to her search for humanity’s future, inspired by her reading of the Iliad. For Bespaloff, Péguy bridged the prophets, the Gospel, and great thinkers like Homer, Sophocles, and Descartes. Although he could not foresee the genocidal war to come, his critique of dogmatism and his call for engagement with history remained powerfully relevant. Bespaloff valued Péguy’s deep philosophy of history, which connected the present with eternity and emphasized history as a lived experience, not merely a theoretical one.