On Antisemitism
A Word in History
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian
'An immense contribution... In tracing the evolving meaning of ‘antisemitism,’ [Mazower] demonstrates persuasively how we might turn it from a weapon back into a word... Rigorous and lucid' - Lily Meyer, The New Republic'
For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in this piercingly brilliant book. More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former’s military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right.
Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism’ and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstood in ways affecting free speech and foreign policy alike. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This rigorous account from historian Mazower (The Greek Revolution) explores antisemitism from its 19th-century emergence as a "European political movement" to the present, when consensus about what constitutes antisemitism has come unraveled. The book beings by addressing "anti-Jewish sentiment" in the Middle Ages; Mazower takes pains to explain how he sees this long-standing bias as distinct from antisemitism, the political movement that started "in and around 1880" when Germans began imagining their Jewish neighbors were the source of society's ills, and that the future would constitute a heroic return to a racially pure past. This section pointedly highlights how thinkers on the political left consistently rejected antisemitism, and how, similarly, early leftist Jewish critics of Zionism were critical of its "acceptance" of the same racial premises that justified antisemitism. The second part of the book tracks the post-WWII effort to cast opposition to Israel as antisemitic, which succeeded definitively during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when Israeli politicians used warnings of a second Holocaust to justify the conflict. This led many American Jews to begin to see Israel as a safeguard of all Jewish lives, meaning that criticism of Israel's government constituted an act of hate against Jews. Mazower's meticulous deep dive reveals how ideological war is waged on the semantic level. The result is an elegant and illuminating glimpse of how politics shapes language itself.
