Antisemitisms: A History of Jew Hating
By Sander L. Gilman
Reaktion Books, 288 pp.
On Antisemitism: A Word in History
By Mark Mazower
Penguin Press, 352 pp.
As noxious isms go, antisemitism has generated an unusually extensive volume of discourse on its origins, meanings and contours. The word was popularized by the 19th-century German politician Wilhelm Marr to describe his opposition to the political emancipation of the Jews—that is, the extension to them of the rights of citizenship. “Semitic” designated the family of languages to which Hebrew (and Arabic) belong, and, as Sander L. Gilman relates it, Europeans imbued with the scientific spirit of the age saw language families as imposing immutable characteristics that marked the Semite, for example, as incapable of becoming part of Germanic society. Apparently, we think too differently.
Anti-Zionism was at one time regarded as something altogether different; it described opposition to the idea of a Jewish state, a viewpoint held by a significant number of Jews who saw more promise in their prospects as members of minority communities in democratic societies than in Zionist dreams of laboring in the desert. Now, though, we have reached a point where the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism—and the question of whether such a distinction even exists—is a point of contention among politicians, activists, scholars, Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, supporters of Israel and the state’s critics.
Gilman, author of Antisemitisms: A History of Jew Hating, comes well-armed for a multidisciplinary approach in his exploration of antisemitism. He is a polymath: A professor emeritus of liberal arts and sciences at Emory University and the former head of Jewish Studies programs at three universities, he has also taught psychiatry and written extensively on the history of science.
When it comes to the “scientific” justifications of antisemitism in 19th-century Europe, where most of the world’s Jews lived, Gilman invokes his favorite word of disapproval to disparage them: wobbly. Jews, he points out, were regarded by the medical authorities of the day as possessing a “degenerative nature,” one that presents itself, according to a 1912 handbook of forensic medicine that Gilman cites, with “physical signs of degeneration such as asymmetry and malocclusion of the skull, malocclusion of the teeth, etc.” The neurologist Wilhelm Erb called the Semites “a neurotically predisposed race,” blaming that predisposition to neurosis on “an untamed desire for profit and…centuries of imposed lifestyle, as well as inbreeding and marriage within families.” That last contributing factor was echoed by the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot—a political liberal, Gilman notes—who wrote that “Jews are ill because of their consanguineous marriage.” For “consanguineous,” Gilman adds, one can read “endogamous marriage, which…was thought to be a form of incest.” Gilman identifies this as an especially “wobbly” idea, given that Europe’s crowned heads had elevated inbreeding to a prerequisite for the divine right to rule.
Turning to America, Gilman presents parallels between American race science’s treatment of Jews and its treatment of other minorities. One example was the pseudoscientific claim that the disease neurasthenia, a (wobbly) nervous condition newly named in the 1880s, was found at higher rates among urban African Americans and Native Americans living off the reservation than among rural Black people in the American South and reservation dwellers. “Appropriate places for health; appropriate places for illness,” Gilman remarks. Those cities full of profit-hungry Semites with their asymmetric skulls and various malocclusions, apparently, were no place for naturally slowpaced country folk. Race scientists of the day also considered “mulatto” children inherently weak, demonstrating yet more wobbliness in the previously noted medical diagnosis of Jewish nervousness as stemming from endogamy. Marrying your own kind will do you in; marrying out will, too. You can’t win.
Today’s campaigners against antisemitism should look at how the American Jewish community navigated the 1950s and 1960s, when discriminatory barriers of all kinds were overcome, dismantled or abandoned.
This was the pattern of much antisemitism in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America. The Jews could not assimilate well into a majority Christian society, it was argued, as they were inherently nomadic, lacking the fixity that attaches people to their land. On the other hand, they were not welcome to settle and acquire the relationship to country they supposedly lacked. The themes of antisemitism, the alleged evidence against the desirability of Jewish citizenship or migration, are so diverse, if similar in their wobbliness, that Gilman has come to see them as a plural: antisemitisms, “variants of patterns of xenophobia, fear and thus hatred of strangers that are part and parcel of all human experience.”
Viewing antisemitism, singular or plural, as a variant of a broader hatred is an important starting point. The same idea directed Jewish organizations and important Jewish philanthropists in the years before World War II to act in defense not only of the Jews, but also of other victims of hate. The shared victimhood was genuine; Jews who were among the founders of the NAACP did so not only to advance Black welfare, but to support a tolerant society that would benefit all.
One idea that Gilman shares with Mark Mazower, the Columbia University professor of European history who is the author of On Antisemitism: A Word in History, is a rejection of the view that antisemitism lies outside the realm of common xenophobia—that as the world’s “longest hatred” it is so potent and enduring as to be unique in its ancient roots and its persistence in the modern world. Rather, both writers understand both Jews and antisemites to be influenced by events and to have their ideas shaped by them. Both Gilman and Mazower dissented from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which includes a statement that “antisemitism has been manifested in the demonization of the State of Israel.” The definition has been adopted by many countries (some of which have legal bans on hate speech that our First Amendment would not permit) and has been invoked against American student protesters (as well as some faculty members and universities themselves) whose criticism of Israel has been perceived as antisemitic.
Mazower traces modern antisemitism in Germany to what he sees as its roots in reaction against social changes—first, in the reaction against the disruption of traditional society wreaked by capitalism, in which Jews were used as a stand-in for devastating economic change; subsequently, in the opposition to Jewish emancipation. By the eve of World War I, he writes, the cause of Jewish emancipation was settled, won by Jews and their liberal allies. But the war’s end and the collapse of three empires in Central and Eastern Europe—the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—left a political vacuum in the East, where ethnic violence raged in formerly Russian and Austro-Hungarian provinces, much of it committed against Jews by right-wing German anti-Bolsheviks, as well as Polish and Ukrainian nationalists.
As Mazower writes,
A wave of pogroms erupted that dwarfed anything seen under the tsars…the death toll was staggering: As many as one hundred thousand Jews may have perished in Ukraine alone, with millions more displaced…Nothing like the killing of civilians on this scale had occurred in modern times in Europe—only the death toll of the Armenians in Anatolia exceeded it.
He concludes a few pages later: “The triumph of the antisemites was essentially a product of the ideological earthquake that came out of the first total war.”
As a Columbia professor, Mazower had a front-row seat to the anti-Israel protests that erupted after the massacre of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing debates over antisemitism, anti-Zionism and what distinguishes one from the other. His argument in the book is that—unlike in the 1940s and 1950s when there were significant numbers of anti-Zionist Jews in America and elsewhere—large numbers of Jews in ensuing decades came to accept the Israeli proposition that Israel speaks for the Jews, wherever they are. In this, he would add, they were swayed by Israeli-backed “influencers.” This idea shrinks the space between Judaism (the faith) or Jewishness (the ethnicity) and the behavior of Israel. It becomes increasingly difficult to criticize Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Iran without being accused of an anti-Zionism that, if more critical of Israel than of other countries, is denounced as antisemitic.
Mazower quotes Kenneth Stern, who wrote the first draft of the IHRA definition, as later renouncing its limits on free speech, including hateful speech on campus. “I can say I think Israel is Nazi-like and shouldn’t have to worry about being prosecuted,” Stern has said. “By trying to censor anti-Israel remarks, it becomes more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma.”
Even in the short time since Mazower published his book, criticism of Israel and American public support of the Palestinian cause have risen greatly. Most Senate Democrats, including most Jewish senators, have voted for limitations on U.S. weapons sales to Israel. Jewish political candidates report a huge increase in the antisemitic abuse they experience from the public. One may try blaming Donald Trump for unleashing all this, but it is he who accused elite universities of antisemitism for tolerating abusive language about Israel and it is he who has twice gone to war against Iran as Israel’s senior (and only) partner. If anything, he has been the Israelis’ dream president.
What to do? Mazower observes that “historians of antisemitism tend to be catastrophists by nature and they rarely dwell on the times when the phenomenon subsides.” He says today’s campaigners against antisemitism should look at how the American Jewish community navigated the 1950s and 1960s, when discriminatory barriers of all kinds were overcome, dismantled or abandoned. In those days, he notes, antisemitism was not regarded as something unique or as something that had to “be treated separately from other kinds of bigotry or discrimination.”
It has become difficult to argue for a Jewish American return to the politics of a progressive alliance with other minority groups. Such groups have often rejected the Jewish experience as lacking a requisite familiarity with victimhood. Also, today’s publicly debated standards of equality extend to questions of gender fluidity that may be more complex than opposing, say, racial segregation. And let’s face it, Barack Obama’s decision to abandon the red line he drew when Syria used poison gas on its own people did not bring American universities to a halt.
Still, Israel’s critics, including if not especially the Jewish ones, hold her to high standards. It behooves Jews who support the continued safe existence of a democratic, Jewish state of Israel to hold her to equally high standards before U.S. support turns truly wobbly.
Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary contributor.