Relgis ' Judaic-themed tracts cover a wide range of subjects . In several of them , Relgis concentrates on the Biblical prophet Moses , in whom he sees the symbol of " great human aspirations " . Some texts trace the impact of Moses ' teaching on more modern authors ( from Baruch Spinoza to Charles Darwin ) , others talk about secular Jewish culture , and still others focus on individual Jewish personalities : Buber , Edmond Fleg , Theodor Herzl . As a critic , he also investigated the survival of ancient Judaic themes in the modern art of Marcel Janco , Lazăr Zin or Reuven Rubin , and in the literature of Zweig , S. Ansky , Mendele Mocher Sforim and even Marcel Proust . Other such writings are individual portraits of Romanian Jewish men of letters , from A. L. Zissu and Iosif Brucǎr to Avram Steuerman-Rodion and Enric Furtună . According to Geo Șerban , Relgis spent much of his later career promoting " a more fertile awareness of the links between Judaism and the modern world . " A critic of antisemitism , Eugen Relgis also dedicated some of his main works in the essay genre to the cause of anti-fascism . Early on , he exposed claims about Judeo-Masonic domination as canards , and noted that antisemitism was a negative reaction to the Jews ' own status as natural innovators in both politics and culture . He wrote : " I take antisemitism to be that psychological disease whose manifestations display the characteristics of a phobia , that is to say an obsession . When someone is obsessed with an image , an individual or even a collective entity , these become the center of their world — and all causes and effects , no matter how far apart and different from each other , are connected to the initial obsession . " Writing in 1946 , shortly after the scale of The Holocaust became known to Romanian Jews , Relgis gave credit to the popular , but since challenged rumor that Nazis fabricated human soap . Historian of ideas Andrei Oișteanu analyzes Relgis ' text as more of a reaction to Nazism 's own obsessive take on cleanliness , and writes that , at that time , Jews and Christians in Romania had been collecting certain brands of German soap and burying them as human remains
The Holocaust
The Holocaust
Eugen Relgis