Rethinking Anti-Semitism

Jonathan Judaken Discussion

Colleagues, I want to call your attention to the forthcoming issue of The American Historical Review, vol. 123, no. 4, which features a Roundtable, titled "Rethinking Anti-Semitism" that challenges scholars to reflect on the concepts, epistemologies, narratives, methodologies, and theories that animate our approach to the topic. The Roundtable includes 7 contributions that focus on key flashpoints in the field. Here is the list of articles and their abstracts. 

Introduction: In his introduction, Jonathan Judaken surveys theories and debates about anti-Semitism. He makes three salient observations about what hampers the field. First, it lacks agreed-upon definitions of its central concepts and terms. Second, how anti-Semitism compares to Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and other forms of oppression is unresolved. Third, periodization of anti-Semitism remains vague. In particular, he underscores and counters eternalist and teleological narratives, claims about uniqueness, and apologetics. He argues that these impediments are in part a product of the shadow of the Holocaust and the continuing conflict over Israel/Palestine. To move out of these theoretical impasses, Judaken makes two recommendations. First, he suggests replacing the term “anti-Semitism.” He argues that as a term for the fear and fascination about Jews and Judaism, “Judeophobia” better lends itself to conceptual clarity, periodization, and comparability. Second, he calls for more meta-level considerations, drawing from work in critical social and literary theory, postcolonialism, and studies of racism and gender. Congruent with this conceptual groundwork, Judaken suggests that Judeophobic discourses and practices encompass five modes—stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, racialization, and murder—and five periods—ancient, early Christian, high medieval, modern, and post-Holocaust.

Toward a History of the Term "Anti-Semitism": David Feldman's essay traces the changing meanings of the term “anti-Semitism” from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on Britain, it demonstrates that anti-Semitism, like any other concept, has a history—but in this case, one that remains largely uncharted. The essay draws a contrast between early usages of the term that regarded anti-Semitism as a specifically modern phenomenon and later meanings that have conceived anti-Semitism as a continuous and deep-seated malaise. Changes in the history of the concept of anti-Semitism were closely bound up with the history of minority rights and with the changing relationship of Jews to states. The foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 was a revolution in the relationship of Jews to state power that also led to radical changes in the meanings of anti-Semitism. Acknowledging the sedimented layers of meaning that lie within the concept of anti-Semitism will help us understand why the term has become so contentious in the present.

Strange Bedfellows? Anti-Semitism, Zionism and the Fate of "the Jews": Scott Ury's article examines the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism have confronted and influenced one another through a tension-filled dialectic that is simultaneously self-evident and counterintuitive. The essay begins with a discussion of the central place of anti-Semitism in canonical Zionist texts such as Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Both Pinsker and Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was a permanent or immovable force, and this interpretation of anti-Semitism led them to embrace, if not create, political Zionism. The following section analyzes the works of two émigré scholars, Salo W. Baron and Hannah Arendt, who wrote fervently about the need to avoid “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” and the school of “eternal antisemitism,” and to focus instead on the actions that Jews undertook as historical actors in specific contexts. Despite their influence, the study of anti-Semitism over the past two generations has returned to a perspective that is strikingly similar to traditional Zionist interpretations. The penultimate section of this piece delineates how two historians in Israel, Shmuel Ettinger and Robert S. Wistrich, reinforced and reaffirmed key aspects in this interpretive paradigm, including anti-Semitism’s unique nature as “the longest hatred,” the recurrent abandonment of the Jews by their neighbors, and the strange, befuddling, and problematic relationship between anti-Semitism and Zionism. The essay ends with a discussion of the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism continue to interact with and influence one another, in particular through current debates in and between the public and the scholarly realms regarding “the new anti-Semitism.” The article concludes by suggesting that scholars return to the contextual-comparative approach to the study of anti-Semitism as part of larger efforts to separate and insulate academic research on the topic from contemporary political considerations.

"Islamic Anti-Semitism" in Historical Discourse by Daniel Schroeter: Countering the growing hostility to Israel and Zionism in the decades that followed the 1967 war, proponents of the “new anti-Semitism” have identified Arabs and Islam at the epicenter of anti-Semitism in the world. With the purpose of advocating for Israel, scholars and political activists have created a myth of “Islamic anti-Semitism,” producing a biased view of the history of Muslim-Jewish relations. Critics of these politicized writings have created a tendentious counter-narrative with the aim of condemning Zionism and Israeli policies, obfuscating the history of Judeophobia among Muslims. Discourses of Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism have evolved since the late 1960s in three phases. The first focuses on “Arab anti-Semitism,” a consequence of the national conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The second, with the turn to radical Islam, emphasizes the Islamic basis of anti-Semitism among Muslims, and especially Palestinians. In the third phase, following 9/11 and the expansion of global jihad, scholars have stressed the eternal enmity of Islam to the Jews, and opponents to Zionism and Israel of the past are anachronistically recast as “Islamists.” A reevaluation of the history of Judeophobia among Arabs and Muslims must first consider how scholarship has been shaped by conflicting narratives on the Israel/Arab/Palestine conflict.

An Imperial Entanglement: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Colonialism: Ethan B. Katz's article probes the historical relationship between anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and colonialism. Scholars have typically employed two frameworks in writing about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: treating the Muslims of contemporary Europe as “the new Jews,” and regarding anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as coterminous hatreds within broader Orientalist systems of exclusion. These approaches both miss the mark: anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, defined substantially by the colonial context, constitute an entangled history of Othering. French North Africa, particularly Algeria, offers a suggestive starting point for writing this history. The article examines closely three fragments of entangled history: sections of Edouard Drumont’s 1886 bestseller La France juive; a memo from the French resident-general of Tunisia during World War I; and the manifesto of a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic French Muslim. In each instance, we see how a document ostensibly focused on Jews is also deeply concerned with Muslims and the two groups’ interrelationship. These fragments point up the necessity of placing the historical position of Jews and Muslims—as well as that of other marginalized groups—within a single analytical frame.

Gender and the Politics of Anti-Semitism: Stefanie Schuler-Springorum's contribution focuses on the development of gendered anti-Semitic stereotypes based on material drawn from post-Enlightenment Germany, exploring their ambivalent messages and meanings. It shows that this development was intimately connected with the creation of bourgeois gender roles and images of sexuality that were adapted by middle-class Jewish men and women even as they were used to denigrate them. By ascribing “femininity” to Jewish men as a means of depriving them of their masculinity, on the one hand, and insisting on their specifically immoral sexual behavior, on the other, the highly gendered Judeophobic tropes persistently blurred the line between the norms of masculine and feminine behavioral codes—a phenomenon that appears in strikingly similar ways all over Europe. In the gendered hierarchy of Jewish communities, however, this attack on the most intimate form of identity was internalized by blaming women for giving credence to anti-Jewish propaganda. A gendered perspective on Judeophobia thus broadens our understanding both of the mindsets of anti-Semites and of internal Jewish gender debates and norms.

Literature and the Study of Anti-Semitism: Maurice Samuel's article asks what historians might have to learn from recent trends in literary scholarship and takes the example of anti-Semitism in literature as a case study. Focusing mainly on New Historicist critical approaches to literary texts about Jews and Judaism, but also touching on other methodologies, including the psychoanalytic, the article examines what anti-Semitic literature has been shown to reveal about ideologies such as nationalism and liberalism, as well as about the affect or emotion underlying historical processes such as modernization. Drawing on recent studies of Shakespeare, George Eliot, Trollope, T. S. Eliot, Balzac, Céline, and other writers, the article aims to show how reading literary texts in conjunction with non-literary texts reveals new dimensions of the “political unconscious” of the period that produced them. The article concludes by pointing to the narrative elements underpinning all forms of anti-Semitic discourse and suggests that attention paid to the literary dimension of texts brings key aspects of the anti-Semitic mindset into sharper focus.

Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism by Bryan Cheyette: In recent years Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has become a common point of reference for those within postcolonial studies—such as Paul Gilroy, Aamir Mufti, and Michael Rothberg—who wish to explore the historical intersections between racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism” relates Arendt’s comparative thinking to other anticolonial theorists and camp survivors at the end of the Second World War—most prominently, Jean Améry, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, and Jean-Paul Sartre—who all made connections between the history of genocide in Europe and European colonialism. The article then compares this strand of comparative thought with postcolonial theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who, contra Arendt, divide the histories of fascism and colonialism into separate spheres. It also contrasts postcolonial theory with postcolonial literature by exploring the intertwined histories in the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips. Said’s late turn to Jewish exilic thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, and Sigmund Freud is also related to this Arendtian comparative project. The main aim of the article is to promote a more open-minded sense of historical connectedness with regard to the histories of racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.