On Antisemitism: A Word in History

From one of our most eminent historians, a penetrating and timely examination of how the meaning of antisemitism has mutated, with unexpected and troubling consequences

What are we talking about when we talk about antisemitism? As a concept, it’s always been hard to pin down, but for most of its history it was understood to be a menace from the political Right, the province of blood and soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its tiny Jewish population and infused it with the poison of racist pseudo-science. When the 20th century began, the vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in Europe. For them, there was no confusion about where the threat of antisemitic politics lay, a threat that culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.  

Now, in a piercingly brilliant book that ranges from the term’s invention in the late 19th century to the present, Mazower argues the landscape is very different. More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews live in two countries, Israel and the United States, and the former’s military dominance of its region is guaranteed by the latter. Before the Second World War, Jews were a minority apart and drawn by opposition to fascism into a natural alliance with other oppressed peoples against the racism of the Right. Today, in contrast, Jews are considered “white”, and for today’s anti-colonialists, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has become a critical issue. The old left solidarity is a thing of the past; indeed, the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the left, not the right.  

Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, navigating this minefield through a history that seeks to illuminate rather than to blame. The story encompasses antisemitism’s postwar globalisation and the rise of a pessimistic post-Holocaust sensibility on both sides of the Atlantic. The result has been a gradual conflation of the interests of Jews and Israelis. Half a century ago few people believed that antisemitism had anything to do with hostility to Israel; today mainstream Jewish voices equate the two while others decry this. We live in a state of deep conceptual uncertainty which officially-imposed definitions make worse.

The tragedy, Mazower argues, is that antisemitism exists. If it can be found on the far left, it still is a much graver danger from those forces on the right chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville and their ilk. If we allow the charge to be applied too loosely and widely to shut down legitimate argument that is the life blood of an open society, we are only delegitimizing the term, and threatening to break something essential in how democracies function. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn.