On Antisemitism: A Word In History review – a book to comfort Jew-hate apologists at the expense of Jews

Reader, I kid. Rather, he has set out to provide a global, historical account of why his “Calm down, you silly Jews” approach was essentially right all along. If one were to turn the apologist’s reflexive tic of appending “…and other forms of racism” to any rote denunciation of antisemitism into a scholarly work, this would be it.

Historians of antisemitism tend, he airily, dismissively pronounces, to catastrophise – while reeling of an inventory of the catastrophes to which they are reacting 

One should not assume from this that the book is without use or merit. On the contrary, as a history of antisemitism and of Jewish responses to it, it contains a wealth of information. What is remarkable is Mazower’s own ability to reach conclusions, whether tacit or overt, that defy this information. One cannot state as a fact that he has deliberately set out to attempt a book-length restatement of the Livingstone Formulation; to show that, blinded by loyalty to their homeland (whose very existence is, of course, a tragedy and a mistake enabled by colonial powers seeking Jewish finance decades earlier), Jews make too great a fuss of antisemitism, dishonestly or hysterically redefining it via the IHRA to nobble any criticism of Israel; and that contemporary Jewish opposition to left antisemitism in particular consists chiefly of bad faith and special pleading. One may, however, ask: if he had, how would his book look any different?

Thus On Antisemitism becomes a curiously fascinating simultaneous exercise in erudition and in cognitive dissonance. Historians of antisemitism tend, he airily, dismissively pronounces, to catastrophise – while reeling off an inventory of the catastrophes to which they are reacting. Just as AsAJews are always eager to let their political tribe know they’re not like all the other Jews, so he is evidently keen that his, which one might describe as a certain segment of the dinner-party left, should see he is not like all the other historians of antisemitism.

He gives a detailed account of how the Soviet Union embraced and promoted antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism, yet declines to allow that this might have significantly influenced “the non-communist Left”, as if there were an impermeable quarantine barrier in place. (Elsewhere he writes of how, views “that were extremist in 1918 were mainstream by 1920”. But in Mazower’s intellectual world, this appears to be a phenomenon that occurs only on the right.)

Disputing the notion there is anything singular about antisemitism, he stresses that everybody suffers or has suffered prejudice from some direction, without ever recognising what his own history helpfully underlines: the grim uniqueness of how Jews routinely suffer prejudice from every direction. The recently late and peerlessly great comic songwriter Tom Lehrer offers a clearer insight in four lines of his mid-1960s ditty National Brotherhood Week than Mazower does over 300-odd pages: 

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Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,

And the Catholics hate the Protestants,

And the Hindus hate the Moslems,

And everybody hates the Jews.

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Anyone who seeks to advance the claim that Jews actively want antisemitism to be somehow special – and that recognising its peculiar shapeshifting nature equates to according it greater moral weight than other prejudices (which, to be clear, it should not, does not, and cannot) – will find this book an aid and comfort. The idea that we too would prefer antisemitism to be merely another prejudice, much as we wish the world would see Israel as “but another small state”, does not make the running. Repeatedly, we see that rhetorical pattern favoured by apologists for left antisemitism, whereby any complex description of that phenomenon is deemed insufficiently simple, and any simple opposition to it deemed insufficiently complex.

Mazower is a Professor of History at Columbia University in New York, where many Jewish students have testified to particularly ugly treatment by would-be pogromists parading themselves as activists. He offers a rueful first-person account of events on that campus in which, holding the telescope to his blind eye, he spies no antisemitism (“an accusation as preposterous as it was damaging”), but laments the persecution of the noble and idealistic anti-Israel students. On Antisemitism serves as a handbook for those Jews who believe that if only the rest of us were as wise, forbearing and enlightened as they, no not-an-antisemite who does or says regrettable yet understandable things to Jews would ever be provoked into such an action. Most of what is recounted in it indicates otherwise. 

On Antisemitism: A Word
In History, by Mark Mazower

Allen Lane