ON ANTISEMITISM

The world in a word.

Anti-Jewish sentiment and action have been part of Western culture for thousands of years. “Antisemitism,” however, is a term of recent coinage, originating in the legal and social strictures of late-19th-century Europe. This richly researched book shows how antisemitism became part of modernity itself. Its diffusion recalibrated concepts of nation-state citizenship, of liberal democracy, and of patriotism. By the middle third of the 20th century, “the Jewish question,” in the words of the Nazi Reich press office, became “the key to world history.” Antisemitism and the rise of the emancipation of Jews went together. Mazower writes, “As a movement against Jewish emancipation, antisemitism fundamentally involved a critique of the idea that the law should treat all alike.” The impact of antisemitism, then, went beyond laws discriminating against Jews. It created a world in which law and national identity became inextricably linked. In a postwar world, could Jews be “true patriots?” Mazower, professor of history at Columbia University and author of Hitler’s Empire, also argues that the emergence of the state of Israel as a world power reshaped both the social and the legal positions of Jewish communities throughout Europe and America. “With the secularization of American Jewry and its embrace of ethnic politics, antisemitism was gradually becoming more and more linked to the question of Israel.” While Mazower declines to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, he recognizes that, increasingly, some do. Mazower concludes his book with a reflection on student protests in the wake of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza. The word “antisemitism” has become ammunition that fits many different guns. “To clarify terms like it,” he writes, is to make us aware of the “hidden depths” behind its modern history and, in the end, “make ourselves participants in the process of change in the world.”

A fluently argued history of modern antisemitism by one of America’s leading historians of power and identity.