Adolf Hitler\u2019s defeat didn\u2019t end\u00a0prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower\u2019s judgment, \u201cdiscredit antisemitism as a positive programme for\u00a0decades to come\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0particular manifestation of anti-Jewish sentiment that rose and fell in\u00a0a\u00a0relatively short time frame.<\/p>\n
The operative word, dissonant in the context of mass murder, is \u201cpositive\u201d. People didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Mazower\u2019s book contains many such distinctions \u2013 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\u00a0diverse economic, religious and political contexts that, from the historian\u2019s perspective, defy being summed up by a single word.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0an identity and, by extension, a\u00a0set\u00a0of\u00a0attributes to be vilified, has evolved.\u00a0Many of its current secular expressions\u00a0would 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 the emergence of\u00a0nationalism as an organising principle for European states and the\u00a0accompanying pseudoscience of racial difference and hierarchy.<\/p>\n
Mazower is especially critical of the tendency to treat antisemitism as a phenomenon as old as Judaism itself<\/p>\n
For Mazower it is important to distinguish this relatively recent coalescence of anti-Jewish feeling as\u00a0a\u00a0driver of political activism from previous generations of animosity. He\u00a0is especially critical of the tendency to treat antisemitism as a phenomenon as old as Judaism itself \u2013 the plotting of\u00a020th-century atrocities on a continuum of hatred that reaches back\u00a0to biblical narratives of exile, and\u00a0further 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.<\/p>\n
This becomes especially important, and inevitably controversial, when Mazower\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0extreme reconfiguration of the original\u00a0Zionist project. It is not a view shared by many diaspora Jews, nor indeed by liberal Israelis.<\/p>\n
Mazower strives to be systematic in\u00a0setting out legitimate reasons for political opposition to the actions of\u00a0the Israeli state and identifying the\u00a0place where a certain ferocity of\u00a0condemnation 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\u00a0possible to demand justice for Palestinians without insisting on the\u00a0annihilation of Israel.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Crowds of Israelis who protest against Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government manage it all the time. Plainly they aren\u2019t all antisemites willing destruction on themselves and their country. That doesn\u2019t mean the charge isn\u2019t levelled against them by fanatical ultra-Zionists, who themselves sometimes aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But it surely asks too much that a book\u00a0on this subject, at this inflection point in history, might illuminate all\u00a0angles equally. For Mazower to provide any respite of clarity on a topic\u00a0befogged in rage and confusion is\u00a0achievement enough.<\/p>\n