Adolf Hitler’s defeat didn’t end prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower’s judgment, “discredit antisemitism as a positive programme for decades to come”.
It is an arresting turn of phrase that makes reckoning with the Holocaust after the second world war sound more like a trend in public policy than a moral imperative. But that is the point. Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, is talking about a particular manifestation of anti-Jewish sentiment that rose and fell in a relatively short time frame.
The operative word, dissonant in the context of mass murder, is “positive”. People didn’t stop hating Jews after 1945, but they found there was an electoral penalty for boasting about it. The loud, proud style of antisemitism was banished from the mainstream.
Mazower’s book contains many such distinctions – subtle twists of the lens that bring different shades of personal and ideological animus into focus. The underlying thesis is not controversial, at least not as historiography. Medieval massacres, Tsarist pogroms, industrialised slaughter by Nazis, Soviet persecutions and terrorist attacks on Israel all belong to a single category to the extent that Jews are identified as the victims. But they are also functions of diverse economic, religious and political contexts that, from the historian’s perspective, defy being summed up by a single word.
Before you even get to the task of comparing motives for prejudice there is the problem of defining the target. Judaism is ancient, but Jewishness as an identity and, by extension, a set of attributes to be vilified, has evolved. Many of its current secular expressions would have been scarcely comprehensible to devout religious communities in premodern Europe. And yet, centuries-old rituals of faith are a strong pillar of cultural association even for atheist Jews today. Such are the paradoxes that Mazower grapples with in order to bring some precision to the meaning of antisemitism.
The story begins with the coinage of the word in late 19th-century Germany. The concept is embossed with intellectual and political fixations of that place and time – the emergence of nationalism as an organising principle for European states and the accompanying pseudoscience of racial difference and hierarchy.
For Mazower it is important to distinguish this relatively recent coalescence of anti-Jewish feeling as a driver of political activism from previous generations of animosity. He is especially critical of the tendency to treat antisemitism as a phenomenon as old as Judaism itself – the plotting of 20th-century atrocities on a continuum of hatred that reaches back to biblical narratives of exile, and further still to slavery under the pharaohs. His point is not to deny the long list of regimes and societies that have mistreated Jewish populations, but to resist the fatalism that conflates modern political phenomena with scriptural and liturgical tales of suffering and persecution.
This becomes especially important, and inevitably controversial, when Mazower’s timeline reaches the creation of modern Israel. Differentiating between modes of hostility to Jews before 1948 was a challenge. It becomes spectacularly difficult once the scene shifts to the Middle East.
In 1920, the place most Jews called home was somewhere in Europe. By 1950, it was the US. Now it is Israel, where a radical nationalist government presents itself as the embodiment and only legitimate political expression of Jewish interests worldwide. That is an extreme reconfiguration of the original Zionist project. It is not a view shared by many diaspora Jews, nor indeed by liberal Israelis.
Mazower strives to be systematic in setting out legitimate reasons for political opposition to the actions of the Israeli state and identifying the place where a certain ferocity of condemnation shades into antisemitism. It is possible to express fury at the deaths of civilians in Gaza without tilting into old conspiracy theories about Jews as a uniquely bloodthirsty global power elite. It is possible to demand justice for Palestinians without insisting on the annihilation of Israel.
Crowds of Israelis who protest against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government manage it all the time. Plainly they aren’t all antisemites willing destruction on themselves and their country. That doesn’t mean the charge isn’t levelled against them by fanatical ultra-Zionists, who themselves sometimes aren’t even Jewish. There is a disturbing trend for white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists to adopt extreme pro-Israel stances because they see Gaza as the frontline in a civilisational struggle against Islam.
As Mazower engages with these present-day arguments, his book takes less nuanced, more polemical and US-centric turns. His partisanship for the progressive side in a culture war being waged against US universities by Donald Trump’s administration is understandable, but it comes at a cost in relevance to readers in European countries, where the balance of political forces and arguments is different.
But it surely asks too much that a book on this subject, at this inflection point in history, might illuminate all angles equally. For Mazower to provide any respite of clarity on a topic befogged in rage and confusion is achievement enough.
• On Antisemitism: A Word in History by Mark Mazower is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
