“A Sickness of Tradition: Ambivalence and Identity in Early Twentieth Century French Jewish Thought” offers a new lens to think about the canon of thinkers who have characterized the discipline of Modern Jewish Thought in the United States, as it crystallized historically through the German Jewish émigrés who fled the Nazis to take up positions at American universities. The dissertation suggests that, as a result of the particular historical context in which this canon of thinkers emerged, Modern Jewish Thought has primarily focused upon thinkers who maintained strong identities as both Jews and as moderns, and that these robust Jewish self-identities were mobilized as a site of articulating Otherness in European thought, offering Jewishness as a place of critical distance from which the philosophical universalism of the Greco-Christian tradition might be productively critiqued. Yet the dissertation suggests that, as a result of certain historical trends related both to Zionism and to key intellectual movements in the critical studies of whiteness, post-colonialism, and queer and gender studies, Jewishness is no longer seen as a stable site through which Otherness might be articulated, and that many Jewish thinkers have become defensive or trapped in old paradigms of thought in response to this intellectual shift. Instead of simply reasserting Jewishness as the site where Otherness might be articulated in contemporary thought, the dissertation suggests an alternate path. This path would come through constructing a new canon of modern Jewish thinkers, composed of those thinkers who felt most deeply ambivalent and conflicted about their own Jewish identities, and who thereby suggest the possibility of relocating this foundational Otherness away from the space that divides the Jewish from the Christian and into the internal space of Jewishness itself, as a means of showing the impossibility of claiming any stable self-identity that is not always already contaminated by the gaze of the Other. Accordingly, the dissertation offers close readings of a number of Francophone Jewish thinkers, drawn together by first experiencing their Jewishness as a site of traumatic rupture, an identity imposed upon them from outside in a racialized sense. The conclusion brings these thinkers in conversation with contemporary debates about Otherness and Jewish identity, suggesting that Modern Jewish Thought today is racked by the anxiety of losing control of a stable, self-contained Jewish identity, and yet perhaps these thinkers of Jewish ambivalence show that there is a tradition of Modern Jewish Thought that recognized that Jews were never in full control of our identities from the point of origin.