Abram Leon wrote a treatise on anti-Semitism while underground.

Evidence

The one who haunts me most is a Belgian leftist named Abram Leon. Still in his twenties during the war, he could have passed for a young Trotsky himself: a round baby face topped with wavy black hair and heavy black-framed glasses. As a teen, he had lived in Palestine with his family. Back in Belgium, he grew disillusioned with Zionism and became a staunch Trotskyist. During the Nazi occupation, he was forced underground but continued to organize clandestine meetings and publish illegal pamphlets and newspapers. He also worked on a project that might be described as an attempt to understand his own Jewish double: during the war, Leon researched and wrote a scholarly treatise about the uses of anti-Semitism to the global capitalist project, reaching back to the Roman Empire and continuing to the Nazi era. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 956

Categorization

• QUESTION: Klein calls Leon’s project ‘an attempt to understand his own Jewish double’ — the same doubling device she’s been using. Is this casting the doubling method back onto a historical figure, and does it land?
• SEED: A profile of Abram Leon as the doomed underground intellectual of the European Jewish left — writing dense theory while hunted — could anchor an essay on intellectual work under conditions of extremity.