1 Adam Katz and Eric Gans, The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism. Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. Leiden and Boston: Brill-Nijhoff, 2015. Review Roman Katsman This book by Adam Katz and Eric Gans makes a significant and original contribution to the study of antisemitism. It serves as a new stage in the development of the theory and method of generative anthropology developed by Gans and his school, 1 as well as of philosophical anthropology as the study of the mechanisms of sign and culture origination in general. At the foundation of Gans’s theory lies the idea that the human collective is formed at the moment when the “gesture of appropriation” in relation to the object of desire characteristic of the “pecking order” is aborted and deferred, is transformed into an originary sign, a symbol of this object. The sacral is the object that is designated as unassignable. The aborted gesture becomes the first sign of both language and morality, which henceforth transforms from a tribal codex into a universal correlative of the sacral as such. Gans and Katz follow in the direction of René Girard’s “transcendental hypothesis” about the generation of any culture in a unique, singular act of violence. And since, in accordance with Girard’s theory, the behavior of people in this act bears a mimetic character, “one or more members of the group would have had to precede the others, providing the originary example of firstness,” 2 eliciting thereby the unavoidable resentment of all the others. 3 It is precisely this that constitutes, in the opinion of the authors of the book, the essence of antisemitism in Western monotheistic civilization. The firstness of the Jews consists in their being the founders of monotheism as the idea that God cannot be named, is absolutely transcendental, and is inaccessible to representation. 4 1 Cf. Gans, A New Way of Thinking. See also: the website of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference - http://artsites.uottawa.ca/gasc/en, and the website of Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology - http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/. 2 Katz and Gans, The First Shall Be the Last, 9. 3 See also: Katz (ed.), The Originary Hypothesis. 4 Katz and Gans, The First Shall Be the Last, 65.