Antisemitism by Mark Mazower — shifting senses

In his new book, Mark Mazower investigates the strange career of a single, vexing word: antisemitism. How did a term originally used to describe a political movement of 19th- and 20th-century Europe come to be associated primarily with hostility to the nation state of Israel, asks Mazower. Today, he writes, there is “general uncertainty over what one may say about Israel without being accused of antisemitism”.

On first glance, to many readers, the answer will be obvious: antisemitism is primordial hatred of Jews; Israel is the home of the Jews; hostility towards Israel is the newest form of this ancient hatred. But as Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University and occasional FT contributor, lucidly demonstrates, each step in this syllogism is contestable; and none of them would have been self-evident to earlier generations.

While Jew hatred remains a serious — at times, deadly — problem, Mazower writes, those “who take antisemitism seriously as an ongoing problem” ought to be “dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term, not to mention the overuse that threatens to strip it of meaning”.

Mazower sets about his task with diligence and style in On Antisemitism, which is divided into two parts. In the first, Mazower “looks at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chiefly European political movement”. Here, Mazower carefully distinguishes prejudice against Jews — which had indeed existed for centuries — from “antisemitism”, which “emerged as a countermovement aiming to . . . reverse the achievements of the Jewish emancipation” across the continent.

Those ‘who take antisemitism seriously as an ongoing problem’ ought to be ‘dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term’, Mazower writes

The aim of its adherents was “not so much . . . persuading people of negative stereotypes about the Jews . . . but rather in getting them to believe that the Jews were a serious threat to their core social or political concerns”. Antisemitism was, Mazower emphasises, “a reaction against modernity itself”, which treated Jews as both synecdoche and handmaid for everything depraved, tumultuous and unmooring about modern life.

This “classical” antisemitism was largely defeated in the second world war, but not before it enabled the near-extermination of European Jewry. Mazower is careful to note that Stalinist eastern Europe “evolved its own form” of antisemitism after 1945 as a means of winning popular support for Communism. As such, a ghostly version of classical antisemitism survived in Soviet states where it was legally proscribed.

In the book’s second half, Mazower carefully analyses the “origins and spread of a new conceptual paradigm”, propagated in the 1970s, which equated antisemitism primarily with hostility to Israel — from Arabs, Black nationalists and the Third-Worldist left. The twin historical preconditions for this paradigm shift were the founding of Israel in 1948 and the new prominence of American Jewry on the world stage.

But as Mazower shows, its success was not fated. Jewish leaders in the US remained ambivalent about Israel through the early 1960s, resenting the implication — inherent to “Zionism”, the philosophy of Israel’s founders — that Jews would never be safe or self-actualised in the diaspora. The ironclad union of Israel and American Jews had to be forged. Only after 1967’s Six-Day War, and with the advent of American Holocaust commemoration in the 1970s and ’80s, did mainstream American Jewish life become thoroughly “Zionized”.

Likewise, the notion that Arab hostility to Israel was purely a product of antisemitism — or indigenous anti-Jewish loathing — was also, Mazower argues, an invention. It was only in response to the upheavals of 1948 that European antisemitic conspiracy theories gained widespread circulation in the Middle East; Arab elites, eager to blame their “military shortcomings on satanic forces rather than ineptitude”, he writes, did not discourage these delusions.

Despite publicly equating his regional foes with the Nazis, Israel’s prime minister David Ben-Gurion admitted, in private, that Arab hostility had nothing to do with antisemitism — and everything to do with land. As he told Nahum Goldmann, founder of the World Jewish Congress, in 1956, “There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their [the Arabs’] fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.”

As early as 1968, Iraqi-Israeli historian Nissim Rejwan had put his finger on the trap Israel’s propagandists were setting for the Arabs and their allies. Describing the work of fellow Arabist Yehoshafat Harkabi, Rejwan wrote, “Harkabi gives me the feeling that he wants to eat the cake and have it. He himself, as a Zionist, would not really make any distinction between Zionism and Judaism, Israeli and Jew — but he asks the Arabs to do so.” 

By the beginning of the 21st century, Jewish groups and the Israeli government had established “a new orthodoxy — that antisemitism was the same as opposition to Israel, and that it was therefore chiefly a problem of the Left rather than the Right”. This paradigm was underwritten by an international campaign, backed by the US state department, to track antisemitism in the west, relying on Israeli data which exaggerated the severity of the problem.

Meanwhile, as the world’s antisemitism watchdogs turned their sights on the anti-Zionist left, European post-fascist parties like France’s National Rally embraced Israel and officially condemned Jew hatred to sanitise their reputations. Thus, the campaign against the “new” — and largely fictive — antisemitism was providing cover for adherents of the “old” antisemitism to come back into political life; upon doing so, they dutifully turned their sights on Muslim migrants in place of the “wandering Jew”.

As such, the war on the “new” antisemitism has taken on characteristics of antisemitism itself: ham-fisted simplification, an allergy to context, the dishonest imputation of nefarious motive — all for the purpose of political convenience and the demonisation of a scapegoated other. To explain criticism of Israel largely in terms of antisemitism is itself a form of reductive conspiracy. In the 20th century, antisemitism was a thought-killing ideology; in the 21st century, anti-antisemitism risks becoming something similar.

Mazower, himself Jewish, became preoccupied with the meaning of “antisemitism” while teaching at Columbia University in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks. “The claim that American universities were hotbeds of institutionalised antisemitism I knew from my own experience to be an accusation as preposterous as it was damaging,” he writes.

More disturbing than this “outrage to common sense”, however, is the eagerness of so many Jews to go along with it. In the first half of the 20th century, it was Jews, writes Mazower, who “feared the arbitrary power of the state and understood all too well the dread of a knock at the door”. Now, in the US, he writes, “some are so at ease with their own access to power and feel their interests to be so happily aligned with those of the American state that they publicly brag about their role in getting others defamed, expelled, dismissed, or arrested”.

It’s a bewildering, infuriating saga. We are in Mazower’s debt for unearthing it. But by the end of his book, my admiration was mixed with a sneaking suspicion that Mazower’s careful spadework would not be richly rewarded. Alleviating a great confusion is an intellectual generosity, but only to those who wish to be unconfused.

On Antisemitism: A Word in History by Mark Mazower Allen Lane £25/Penguin Press $29, 352 pages 

Sam Adler-Bell is a columnist at New York Magazine

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