Mark Mazower On Antisemitism
A Word in History
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in memory of Michael Davies (1959–2024)
Acknowledgments
is book owes a great deal to my intellectual home of the past two decades, Columbia University. In particular, it would not have been possible without the resources of its great library, and the work, friendship, and helpfulness of fellow scholars. e Department of History has o ered an environment of pedagogic vitality, collegiality, and care: For me it has epitomized academia at its best. Seth Anziska and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite have been my guides from the outset: I cannot thank them enough for their insights and encouragement. For their willingness to read the manuscript in draft and for their intellectual generosity, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Lee Bollinger, Saul Dubow, David Feldman, Carol Gluck, Gil Hochberg, Kostis Karpozilos, Ira Katznelson, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Kobrin, Peter Mandler, David Pozen, Camille Robcis, Adam Shatz, Maria Stepanova, and Alan Tansman. Elisheva Carlebach, Seth Schwartz, and Michael Stanislawski provided not only reading lists but also a reminder through their own scholarship of Columbia University’s uniquely rich tradition in Jewish history. My thanks too to Tareq
Baconi, Leonard Benardo, Dan Bouk, Florent Brayard, Betsy, Ed, and Daniel Cohen, Molly Crabapple, Zohar Elmakias, Katherine Fleming, Sarah Gensburger, Isabella Hammad, Lorien Kite, Paul LeClerc, Geo rey Levin, Jason Ludwig, Alexis Papahelas, Gerry Rosberg, Robert Rubin, Victoria Sanger, Yasmine Seale, Adam Tooze, and Alexandre Toumarkine for helpful conversations. My brother David Mazower, with his encyclopedic knowledge of Yiddish culture, has been a unique resource for me as for so many others. Several chats with Fred Wiseman opened up new avenues: He has been an inspiration. None of the above is responsible in any way for what follows. I am especially indebted to my students for the many conversations we had together, interrupted only occasionally by the sound of police helicopters overhead, during a memorable couple of years in the university’s history. In Paris, Marie d’Origny, Brune Biebuyck, Sari Castro, and Meredith Hunter-Mason tolerated my distraction and have been the best of colleagues.
It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with Scott Moyers and Simon Winder for more than two decades now. ey embraced the idea for this book right at the start and I have bene ted from their thoughtfulness, experience, and practiced editorial eye. Helen Rouner and the Penguin Press team have been a joy to work with. And I owe thanks as always to James Pullen, Sarah Chalfant, and Andrew Wylie for their support. Hiya Jain provided me with indispensable research assistance and feedback that helped remind me just how odd much of this story really is: I look forward to seeing where her own path takes her.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, once con ded to his private journal: “One should put one’s shoulder to the door and keep out the insanity all one can.” In the course of tackling this topic, I have sometimes felt the same way and would like to thank my family for their support, especially my mother, Miriam Mazower, Jed and Selma Mazower, and above all Julie Fry, who has not only
heard more than anyone could ever want to about antisemitism but been the best antidote imaginable to the lunacy of the world and a reminder of its beauties. A di erent kind of support was provided by the memory of my father and my grandparents, whose attitude to the matters discussed here has served as a kind of inspiration.
I started writing this book during the nal months in the life of Michael Davies, an old and dear friend. He was a charismatic and fearless teacher of history, and after leading a school trip to Israel and the West Bank, he developed a pedagogy to bring the study of the world’s most intractable con icts into the classroom, founding a charity called Parallel Histories that now helps educators around the world. e courage with which he faced his own death made an ineradicable impression on everyone who knew him. is book is dedicated to his memory and to his wife, Carys Davies, a writer of wondrous gifts.
On Antisemitism
Confusion
“ at’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
Lewis
Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking- Glass 1
One of our most vivid glimpses of life in the ird Reich started out as a set of jottings by Victor Klemperer, a professor of literature who wanted to record the ways in which words were changing and terms that once had helped to clarify the world were coming to befuddle it. Klemperer was trying to understand how the Nazi dictatorship had turned language into an instrument of power, but the truth is that words themselves are mutable things. at is why good dictionaries track shifts in their usage, the variations in meaning that appear or vanish as some emerge and others become obsolete. Such changes may catch us by surprise, and when they do they can cause confusion and argument. Which brings us to the word at the heart of this book. 2
It was in 1879 that a rabble-rousing German pamphleteer called Wilhelm Marr announced the formation of a League of Antisemites to oppose the granting of full legal equality to the Jews. In the blink of an eye there was an abstract noun: antisemitism . It entered the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910 and spread globally once Adolf Hitler made an extremist version of the creed the ideological core of Germany’s war to dominate Europe. “Α ntisemitism,” the historian Salo Baron remarked in 1942, “has become a world power.”3
Today dozens of countries have pledged to combat it, envoys
monitor it, and there are task forces and working groups dedicated to eradicating it. Yet with those accused of antisemitism ranging from white supremacists to the UN secretary-general, never has there been less consensus on what it actually means: “When it comes to antisemitism many of us literally don’t know what we’re talking about and are happy to admit it,” the historian David Feldman has noted. “As for the rest of us who think we do know . . . we are congenitally unable to agree among ourselves.” ere are arguments about the hyphen: anti-semitism versus antisemitism. ere is anti-antisemitism and now there is anti-anti-antisemitism too.4
ings were not always so complicated. Antony Lerman, the longtime editor of the Antisemitism World Report, reminds us that only half a century ago the foe was by common consent the far Right, whose racist stereotyping, conspiracy theories, and Holocaust denialism had done so much harm and caused such unspeakable su ering. e muddle we nd ourselves in started once the ght against these extremists came to be entangled with a question that used to occur to almost no one: When is criticism of Israel antisemitic? How essential a Jewish state (a political entity) is to being Jewish (an ethnic or religious identity) is a vital but unsettled issue that has been and is to this day passionately debated among Jews themselves, as well as forming part of the wider debate on the question of Israel and Palestine. e result is now general uncertainty over what one may say about Israel without being accused of antisemitism. How we came to nd ourselves in such a quandary is the question this book tries to answer.
e shadow of the Nazi genocide unavoidably hangs over any discussion of this subject, for it was only after 1945 that the study of antisemitism really became systematic. A survey of attitudes toward Jews in London’s East End had been undertaken in 1939 without making much impact. Ten years later, however, when a group of émigré social scientists based at Columbia University published their
ndings on the roots of hatred, the result was a series of bestselling studies that spurred further investigation. “ e history of antisemitism, which before the war had been the preserve of a couple of bold pioneers, [is] now attracting the attention of many scholars,” one observed two decades later. Since then, academic research has ourished across many disciplines, and it has provided insights without which this book could not have been written. But the Holocaust looms over the subject in a second sense too, as a major cultural phenomenon of our times. For as an in uence shaping the ways antisemitism is now generally understood, academic scholarship takes second place to something that we might call Holocaust consciousness. e nineteenth century has been described as a time when people thought with History; so far as antisemitism is concerned, we think these days with the Holocaust.5
Widespread public awareness of the Final Solution did not emerge immediately. When discussion really got going in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, it involved a generational reckoning with the past on the very terrain where wartime persecution, deportations, and killings had taken place. But as Holocaust memorialization spread around the globe, it turned history into a source of general moral and political lessons: to bear witness rather than to remain silent; to act, not to stand by and watch; to combat hate and prejudice. By the end of the century, dozens of lms were appearing each decade. Forty-plus governments have now created remembrance ceremonies, and visitor numbers to Auschwitz have quadrupled in recent years to more than two million annually. Not everyone has seen this as entirely good. “For the sake of our collective sanity as Jews, we should all stop for a moment,” wrote the Israeli state archivist Evyatar Friesel, who had himself ed Nazi Germany as a boy, “and try to bring ourselves under control.” 6
Alongside the evident bene ts, one of the consequences has been what one critic called “exaggerated and wrong-headed Holocaust and Nazi analogies.” Familiarization with the catastrophe seems to have
made some people more inclined to draw alarming parallels between present and past than to register the signi cant di erences. In Israel, where the country’s rst leaders had once actually discouraged reminders of Jewish weakness, the 1970s saw the Holocaust turned into an inescapable rhetorical trope, especially after Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whose parents had been killed in the war, repeatedly likened Israel’s predicament to that of the Jews under the Nazis. In the United States, where American Jews generally were enjoying conditions of prosperity and security, a paradoxical sense of insecurity increased as the century ended. Asked in 1960 what they thought the future held, American rabbis had been optimistic that antisemitism would continue to decline, and the Middle East con ict would be settled by the century’s end. A survey of the American Jewish community around the same time found that both Israel and the Holocaust had had “remarkably slight e ects on the inner life of American Jewry.” By the century’s end they were central to its self-de nition, and impressive material success was accompanied by a growing sense of anxiety and victimhood. Many commentators were puzzled. While “the American Jewish community has become the model for what an ethnic group can accomplish,” noted the writer Leon Wieseltier in 2002, “imprecise and in ammatory analogies abound. Holocaust imagery is everywhere.” 7
Polling data on social attitudes in the United States indicated that the marked drop in anti-Jewish discrimination that had taken place over half a century showed no signs of being signi cantly reversed in the new millennium: Before the longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League retired in 2015, a headline spoke of the “declining face of antisemitism.” 8 It is true that there was a resurgence of prejudice in Europe after the Cold War ended, as right-wing nationalism reentered the mainstream, and in western Europe, especially in France, synagogues, cemeteries, and other Jewish communal centers were attacked, often as proxies for Israel: e perpetrators tended to be
either right-wing extremists or young Muslims.9 e constant invocation of the Holocaust, however, gave the past misleading weight. For one thing, in many places other groups were more a ected by rising xenophobia than Jews; for another, neither Muslims nor Arabs were Nazis any more than Israelis were. “[Arab antisemitism] is directed rst and foremost against Israel and not necessarily against world Jewry,” noted Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence. “Or more precisely, because of Israel it is directed also against the Jews.”10
Yet the ghosts of genocide past in ltrated the corridors of power and were invoked to support new political and diplomatic commitments. In 2004, the US Congress told the State Department to report on anti-Jewish prejudice worldwide. When the department objected that other racial and religious groups might demand similar treatment, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, retorted that “the current eruption of the age-old disease of antisemitism is more pernicious than anything we have seen since the Holocaust.” e State Department was overruled, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act was passed, and today twenty-plus governments have created posts to combat antisemitism. No other form of racial or religious prejudice enjoys comparable international attention.11 e 2004 act changed things in another way too. In a break from earlier decades, it understood antisemitism to include “vili cation of Zionism . . . and incitement against Israel.” Opposing antisemitism and supporting Israel had formerly been considered two largely separate matters. “To attribute condemnation of Israel’s actions in the Sinai Campaign to anti-Semitism,” a commentator wrote in 1967, “is stretching the term beyond recognition.” For most American Jews in the 1950s and 1960s, antisemitism was chie y a domestic problem connected to a larger American struggle against discrimination and prejudice: If it had an international dimension, this lay in the Soviet Union and West Germany, not in the Middle East. For their part, the rst
Israeli governments saw antisemitism as a curse of the diaspora unrelated to its own regional problems. Only from the 1970s onward did more and more Israelis begin to read Arab hostility as antisemitic; only then did American Jewish anti-hate campaigners start to include the defense of Israel in their remit. Once seen optimistically as something capable of being dispelled by education, antisemitism came to be regarded in the light of the Holocaust as a hatred unlike any other. Today many people would be astonished to learn of a time when defending Israel from criticism and ghting antisemitism were not connected.12
In con ating these things, an important part has been played by some of the well-established Jewish defense organizations like the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). People used to joke that as a think tank the famously discreet American Jewish Committee was more “think” than “tank” because of its commitment to analytic rigor. In the 1940s its watchwords were, according to a recent historian, “dialogue, compromise, rationality, and research” and its wonderfully named Division of Scienti c Research enjoyed great prestige. But organizations change and it is hard to fundraise and campaign in our charged times while maintaining a reputation for impartial expertise. Today the think-tank joke has passed its sell-by date. Indeed, it is now at least a decade since its longserving antisemitism expert quit on the grounds that the AJC had sacri ced “an instinct for serious thought . . . in favor of ardent proIsrael advocacy.” Beholden to a new class of mega-donors with pronounced ideological agendas, old bastions of Jewish philanthropy struggle to preserve even a semblance of the long-standing ction that they are inherently apolitical. So partisan have some of them become that the critic Peter Beinart has asked if the ght against antisemitism has lost its way.13
Part of the problem is that it is very easy to label an individual or an institution as antisemitic, and this facilitates attention-grabbing
tactics like the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Global Anti-Semitism Top Ten,” a made-for-media list that once named the makers of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream alongside Hamas and Iran.14 And because donors often give more when anxiety about antisemitism rises, and hate crime data are notoriously liable to manipulation, campaigning groups are often tempted to paint conditions in the most terrifying colors. adl officials say antisemitism rampant throughout the world announced the headline of a skeptical piece in the Jewish press half a century ago. Twenty years later, the historian and rabbi Arthur Hertzberg remarked that the ADL’s own data did not bear out its “sensational conclusion.” Not much has changed: Even the ADL’s own researchers complain about the reliability of its leadership’s warnings. Activism set in permanent panic mode makes it hard to know whose gures or assessments to trust, and this does not really help anyone except perhaps antisemites. In the words of the editor in chief of e Forward: “Calling everything a crisis is bad for the Jews.”15
As if all this were not enough, the enormous attention given in recent times to de ning antisemitism has created its own problems. For as scholars in the eld know well, the de nition of antisemitism has always been a mine eld. e concept, which derives its very name from a discredited racial theory, is routinely applied to everything from prejudices and stereotypes to feelings, attitudes, and forms of legislation, not to mention acts of violence ranging from petty abuse to massacre and genocide. at’s already a broad spectrum. It also involves attributing motives that are frequently murky even to the perpetrators and interpreting contexts that are ambiguous in meaning. And it often hides dubious generalizations about human psychology, the nature of social interactions, and the identity of the Other.16 None of this makes de ning it straightforward. e Israeli historian of the Holocaust Yehuda Bauer once called antisemitism “the wrong term” that “makes a mess of research projects” and involves “talking nonsense.” “ e term ‘antisemitism’ is a snare and a pitfall that traps
us in spite of knowing its dangers,” wrote the author Ben Halpern. “It shows up the objects it brings to our attention in a dim and distorted focus at best, if not in utter confusion.” Halpern tried parsing the term’s many tangled connotations; the more he persisted, the less his e orts looked like a de nition.17
As if to bear out the force of these warnings, a recent e ort at de nition sponsored by a little-known organization called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), demonstrates the kind of trouble a poorly conceived approach can cause.18 Purporting to clarify the line dividing antisemitism from reasonable criticism of Israel — something that is unquestionably needed — it has served merely to blur it further (for details see chapters 9 and 10). Yet the IHRA de nition has been adopted in dozens of countries, and in the United States, a 2019 executive order that extended federal antidiscrimination protections to include antisemitism cited it. A 2023 bill (H.R. 6090) even proposed ruling out the use of other de nitions lest they “fail to identify many of the modern manifestations of antisemitism” meaning criticism of Israel. We have traveled far since 1981, when an outstanding scholar could meticulously discuss how to de ne antisemitism in the journal Modern Judaism without making any mention of Israel at all.19
Some recent researchers usefully suggest making a distinction between antisemites and antisemitic beliefs: e former refers to those who are possessed by an ideology and really do have an obsession with Jews because they regard them as holding some power over the life of nations and individuals; the latter are that large repertoire of stereotypes and prejudiced clichés about Jews in general that the past has bequeathed us. e former originated the term antisemitism , often proudly called themselves “antisemites,” and saw themselves as political actors in a movement that reached its apogee in the middle decades of the twentieth century. e latter form part of a vast cultural
reservoir of prejudices and generalizations to be found in many societies about not only Jews but also many races, faiths, and ethnic groups. ese days, hardcore antisemites are as yet relatively few compared to before the Second World War, and the policies they once espoused — discriminatory and eventually murderous — are still largely discredited in the West. But society has no more banished every antisemitic belief than it has other kinds of bigotry, and an openly racist Right is in the ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. 20
At a time when Jewish communities around the world have had to become accustomed to having to study or pray under armed guard, there can be no question but that Jews continue to be among those groups who are targeted these days for who they are. Anyone who takes antisemitism seriously as an ongoing problem must surely therefore be dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term, not to mention the overuse that threatens to strip it of meaning. Not only does this do a real disservice to those who are its victims, but by helping to dampen down political dissent over Israel’s actions in the occupied territories, it also provides a cover for continued injustice and systemic violence against Palestinians. And while some anti-Zionism masks anti-Jewish sentiment, much of it does not, and it surely does not bene t Israeli governments to be encouraged to think that any criticism of their policies invariably re ects ethnic prejudice. Nor—need it be said? — will it bene t Jews or anyone else when the ongoing struggle against discrimination and prejudice is used opportunistically to try to destroy the autonomy of universities, political freedoms, and liberty of thought itself.
De nitions and theories are available aplenty elsewhere. is book o ers another approach, suggesting instead that we view antisemitism in its historical context as a term that has been used to mean di erent things at di erent times. To avoid misunderstanding, let us be clear from the outset that antisemitism is much more than a word, and his-
tory is about far more than language alone: e issues at stake certainly cannot be tackled simply through semantic analysis. But, as the cultural commentator Raymond Williams once observed, there are occasions when the issues that concern us probably cannot be understood without viewing particular words as integral aspects of a larger problem in their own right. And because words do not exist outside time and place, we need to understand them in their setting. “We must know, if possible, the date and place of their birth,” wrote the Victorian philologist Dean Chenevix Trench, “the successive stages of their subsequent history, the company which they have kept, all the road which they have travelled, and what has brought them to the point at which we now nd them.” What follows then is a kind of historical sketch that looks at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chie y European political movement in part 1 before shifting gears in part 2 to analyze the origins and spread of a new conceptual paradigm that originated in the 1970s largely as a way to rationalize growing criticism of Israel. In the early years of the new millennium this led to an international campaign directed against what some termed a new antisemitism that partly overlapped with, and partly contradicted, older understandings of the term. e word was the same, but the world had changed. e hope behind this book is that an account of how the concept emerged and spread can help us gure out what sort of work it does today and may remain capable of doing in the future. As George Orwell wrote: “ e worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.” 21
Part 1
Europe in the Age of the Antisemites
God, Nation, Eternity
After being introduced [Professor Cohen] said, “I have been asked to speak on the Jewish problem. Gentlemen, there is no Jewish problem” and thereupon he sat down.
A Tribute to Professor Morris Raphael Cohen, Teacher and Philosopher1
Idealist conceptions of Zionism are naturally inseparable from the dogma of eternal anti-Semitism.
Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation2
Nineteenth-century nationalists projected the idea of their People deep into a distant past. Struggling for independence, Greeks dreamed of the ancients, Italians of Rome. As for Germans, some opted for the Teutonic tribes, while others preferred the less brutish-sounding Aryans. It was this particular pseudo-racial pedigree that as an anonymous French journalist reported shortly after the Franco-Prussian War provided inspiration for a new political movement. “An antiJewish party formed . . . and was called the antisemitic party,” he wrote in 1881. He went on to explain that in Germany, everything has an essentially scienti c allure. . . . Today when the progress of comparative linguistics has made the names of the Aryan races more or less popular . . . people know too that the Aryan races are opposed in the name of grammar and ethnology to the Semitic races which have no close kinship with them at all. . . . To call the Jews Semites is to underscore their foreign origin, to indulge the Teutonism currently in
vogue, in short to excite the national ber so sensitive whenever it rubs up against whatever is not German. 3
A recently uni ed Germany, the new insights of scienti c racism, nationalist sensitivities: e invention of the concept of antisemitism in and around 1880 was part of the birth of the modern. It was in fact a reaction against modernity itself, which portrayed the Jews as singlehandedly responsible for pretty much every grievance contemporary life presented and did so using the preeminently modern vehicles of the popular press and party politics. As the movement spread it attracted critical attention. Liberals saw it as an outrage to reason and a spur to educate public opinion; the revolutionary Left saw it as a mistaken diagnosis of a real problem capitalism and regarded it as a “socialism of fools.” For both, it was a mark of modernity gone astray.
But one group of thinkers was not surprised and saw nothing very new in what was happening. Zionism emerged around the same time as many of its European nationalist counterparts and like them it was a modern political phenomenon that encompassed a vast range of ideological possibilities. It too turned traditional religious faith into a political aspiration: Embracing the Romantic nineteenth-century attachment to territory, with stunning boldness its leaders advocated the Holy Land, where generations of devout Jews had aspired to go to die, as a place for Jews to live. And like other European nationalisms of the time, Zionism thought about the future with and through history. It saw the Jews not merely as those who shared a common faith but as a national unit, a People who had been plunged into exile before they were to be redeemed through restoration under one political dispensation or another to their ancestral land. Nothing short of a miraculous combination of a positive and a negative force had kept them together through their many centuries of wandering and misery: e positive force was the promise of Israel’s return to Zion; the
negative was antisemitism. “Who can tell us,” wrote Josef Hayyim Brenner in 1914, “whether, had there been no universal and understandable hatred of such a strange being, the Jew, that strange being would have survived at all? But the hatred was inevitable and hence survival was equally inevitable!” 4
e rst Zionists generally argued that legal and civic equality alone would never truly end anti-Jewish prejudice since freedom for Jews was impossible so long as they lived amid societies that hated them. National independence would nally bring them normalcy and perhaps even allow the genuine international cooperation that they dreamed of like so many nineteenth-century nationalists. “ e legal emancipation of the Jews is the crowning achievement of our century,” wrote the activist Leo Pinsker in 1882.
[But] the civil and political emancipation of the Jews is not sufcient to raise them in the estimation of the peoples. e proper and only remedy would be the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil, the auto-emancipation of the Jews; their emancipation as a nation among nations by the acquisition of a home of their own.5
For most Zionist thinkers, the hatred Jews faced from those around them was to be expected: Jews, they preached, were bound to be seen as alien by non-Jews. It was “a general law,” wrote Pinsker, “that no people, generally speaking, has any predilection for foreigners.” e historian Lewis Namier stated baldly that it was a fact of life that “nations do not like each other”: Antisemitism was in his telling merely another form of national animosity, analogous to the enmity between, say, Germans and Poles. Others said that hatred of Jews was di erent because it was unique and timeless. Either way most Zionist thinkers agreed that antisemitism was part of the natural order of things with an obvious remedy: a Jewish state. What that state would
look like was unclear: Few imagined a politically independent entity of the kind that eventually emerged, and fewer still that the great Jewish heartlands of central-eastern Europe could ever be wiped out. But the bene ts of Jewish self-government were largely unquestioned: Bring that into being, preferably in Ottoman Palestine, Jews would surely emigrate there, and antisemitism would vanish. Why it had taken until the late nineteenth century for God to reveal this solution was a problem they did not dwell on.6
For Zionism’s Jewish critics, this approach betrayed a complacency toward and even an acceptance of antisemitism. “ roughout the 40 years of Zionism’s existence, the following rule has practically always held: the darker the world, the brighter it gets in the Zionist tent; the worse for Jews, the better for Zionists,” wrote Henryk Erlich in an article in the New York Yiddish press in October 1938. Erlich was a leader of the left-wing Jewish Labor Bund, the largest Jewish political party in interwar Poland. e Bund’s supporters believed in what they called “hereness” the need to ght for a future where Jews actually lived not the “thereness” of Zionism, which in their view was likely to re-create in Palestine the very intolerance Jews wanted to vanquish in Europe. Erlich warned of an inherent contradiction in the Zionist program.
When Zionists speak to the non-Jewish world, they are outstanding democrats, and they present the conditions in today’s and future Palestine as exemplary of liberty and progress. But if a Jewish state is to be founded in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: an eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs), unending ghting for every little piece of land, for every scrap of work, against the internal enemy (Arabs). . . . Is this the kind of climate, in which freedom, democracy, and progress can ourish? Is this not the climate, in which reactionism and chauvinism typically germinate?7
e Bund a onetime rival to Zionism in the Russian lands was to meet a tragic end as a political force, e ectively crushed between the dual enmities of the Nazis and the Communists, and Erlich himself was murdered on Stalin’s orders while held in Soviet captivity during the war. Yet there was a striking prescience in what he wrote. After the establishment of Israel, the journalist William Zukerman, a kindred spirit, re ected upon the connection between antisemitism and the new state. “Without anti-Semitism,” he wrote, “Israel would be but another small state, like Ireland, Greece, Denmark and Lebanon. With anti-Semitism, it is a state with a special Messianic mission to redeem all Jews.” For Zukerman, it was thus not only Zionism but also Israel that somehow needed antisemitism in the world to justify itself the same Israel whose leadership promised to make Jews safe by allowing them to escape antisemitism’s hold over them. Could antisemitism in fact really be brought to an end in this way, through the triumph of Jewish nationalism? Or would it simply be replaced, as Erlich had warned, by a new enmity created by the establishment of a Jewish state in Arab lands?8
As if to bear out Zukerman’s insight, the idea that antisemitism was a hatred that held the key to understanding the Jewish past shaped professional scholarship in Israel’s early years: A group of Zionist historians the so-called Jerusalem School framed the centuries of Jewish life in Europe as the story of “a people apart,” doomed to persecution so long as they remained “in exile,” endlessly beset by what one termed “the longest hatred” of them all, a visceral Gentile loathing that might vanish from view for a time but must always reemerge.9 In their telling, history turned into an eternal cosmic drama in which “neither Jew nor antisemite changes, only the masks the antisemites wear.” It was a kind of Jewish history that highlighted not so much our achievements and doings, as it were, but rather a set of unremitting feelings, stereotypes, and ideas that they have had about us. ( is view in the works of a historian of the Spanish Inquisition called Benzion
Netanyahu would in uence the outlook of his son, Israel’s longestserving prime minister.)10
e rst leaders of the new Jewish state were repelled by this depressing view of the past. ey frowned upon discussion of the Holocaust lest it perpetuate the idea of Jews as weak; obsessing over antisemitism, they felt, could only accentuate the old story of passivity and powerlessness. In their view, the establishment of Israel was supposed to mark the moment when antisemitism ceased to matter, or more precisely, when it mattered solely as a motivation for the Jews of the diaspora to return from their “exile.” e historians of the Jerusalem School, however, disagreed: Antisemitism would never cease to matter. Nor was it only the European past they painted in dark tones; they argued that such a deep-rooted phenomenon as antisemitism could not have ended with the Holocaust, and they discerned it around them in Stalin’s Soviet Union and the United Nations, metastasizing into a global force with footholds in the Middle East and the Muslim world. For these scholars, Arab hostility in particular was neither the kind of natural reaction to the fact of Israel’s existence that the Bundists had warned about nor the re ection of a sense of ethnic or religious solidarity with the dispossessed Palestinians. It was all much simpler than that: It was the latest incarnation of the hatred that would never die. is interpretation fundamentally turned diplomacy into a holding action or a fool’s errand for what could be done in the face of an eternal antipathy other than to remain permanently vigilant? Any peace would only be temporary. It was, at heart, a view that abolished the room for political thought and left only the gure of the immortal enemy.
If we were to ask how it was that Zionism whose original dream had been to restore the Jews to political normalcy if not to turn them into a beacon for other nations came to adopt such a bleak view, we would have to say that in this case, as in others, it was drawing upon ideas it
had inherited from the religious tradition. In particular the Hebrew phrase sinat Yisrael (hatred of Israel) was a well-established axiom in rabbinic thought that non-Jews invariably hate Jews. Insofar as we can tell, this trope became entrenched somewhere between the end of late antiquity and the early medieval period as part of a larger process that was taking the place of conceptually demarcating the boundary between Jews and non-Jews. Since then, many generations of rabbis have accepted it as a truism. “One of the unique aspects of our history,” noted the leading Talmudist and Orthodox Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “is surely our capacity to evoke sinat Yisrael, the persistent and ever-present hostility which humanity directs at us as a people; it is a strange and inexplicable fact of our history.”11
Actually the evidence suggests that in ancient times Jews had accepted that nations were of di erent kinds and that not all of them were necessarily hostile; the starker and simpler view came later. Nonetheless many commentators look to the Bible to con rm their own vision of a Jewish nation surrounded by hostility, citing in particular the Old Testament story of Esau, the brother who was cheated out of his birthright by Jacob, losing the primacy that should have been his. In theological terms, the original antipathy of non-Jews for Jews may thus be located in the Biblical assertion that “Esau hated Jacob.” In short, sinat Yisrael o ers a religious explanation of antisemitism as the price to be paid by the Jews for God’s favor.
Such a view has not been con ned to the rabbis. e view that the Jews are in the words of the Bible a “people that dwells alone” has become a commonplace for many Israeli public gures and a corollary perhaps of the equally axiomatic view that Jews have a special obligation to love and look out for one another. ere were, to be sure, more positive alternatives — that the Jews were destined to become a “light unto the nations,” for instance, or that there was, in nineteenthcentury philo-semitic terms, some special “mission of Israel” to the world that God had stored up. But that sinat Yisrael may be balanced by
counterviews, also biblical in origin, that testify to ideals of peaceful coexistence does not diminish its signi cance. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir often invoked the phrase; the erudite diplomat Yaakov Herzog advanced a formidable defense of it. At various times Yitzhak Rabin both embraced and rejected it and eventually came to see it as an impediment to peace.
How sinat Yisrael might be interpreted historically is not an easy question to answer because the theological idea that it is so closely connected with the uniqueness of the Jews poses a special problem when thinking about the past. e historian Yosef Yerushalmi, in a classic work, identi ed this as a central paradox that faced his profession. “Jewish historiography,” he wrote, “must stand in sharp opposition to its own subject matter, not on this or that detail, but concerning the vital core: the belief that divine providence is not only an ultimate but an active causal factor in Jewish history, and the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself.” In other words, to identify the Jewish experience as conditioned by some unique relationship to God is to accept a premise that not only lies outside history itself but in some sense contravenes it.12
Yerushalmi had in mind those nationalist historians who saw the Jewish past as the story of a unique people whose centrality to God was taken for granted. Shmuel Ettinger, an animating gure in the Jerusalem School, criticized those who would “turn Jews into a marginal or even a casual element . . . in the framework of world history.” e historian Yitzhak Baer once proposed astonishingly that “there is a power that lifts the Jewish people out of the realm of all causal history.” As if to say: e Jews, by virtue of their special relationship with God, are exempt from the laws that apply to all others.13 History, however, as a secular discipline that seeks to explain events by reference to human action, is fundamentally incompatible with a theological worldview that invokes the divine as a cause. For those unable to follow Baer down his mystical path, the conclusion is clear: History