Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction

Abstract

Oxford University Press's ‘Very Short Introduction’ series now has more than one hundred titles surveying a wide variety of fields. A large minority are on historical topics, and these are likely to be read with interest by students writing essays, and, indeed, by their lecturers writing their classroom presentations. Anti-Semitism—hostility to Jews—has been described as ‘the world's oldest hatred’, and, in one guise or another, seems strangely ineradicable. Chiefly because of the Holocaust—which of course colours everything concerned with this topic—it has been examined and discussed by innumerable historians and other scholars. It is normal to divide anti-Semitism into two components: theological hostility to the Jews, which comprised its basis in medieval and early modern Europe; and racial and ultra-nationalist hostility, which underpinned much of the ideology of modern anti-Semitism, especially in the extreme and eventually genocidal form it took in continental Europe from about 1870 until 1945. While this appears straightforward, there were also innumerable departures from these archetypes, ranging from the social anti-Semitism found among many élite groups in America and elsewhere prior to 1945, to the left-wing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism so prominent in the Soviet Union, and among a visible component of the western left in recent decades. In general, Steven Beller has produced a highly competent, well-informed, and interesting work, which is fully appreciative of the many faces worn by anti-Semitism. Wisely, and perhaps bravely, he does not shy away from the fact that the highly visible and indisputable over-representation of Jews among continental Europe's wealthy capitalists, successful professionals, significant cultural modernists, and Marxist revolutionaries in the period 1870–1945 was itself a powerful factor in the popularity of anti-Semitic ideologies and movements; anti-Semitism was less extreme and less virulent in areas, such as the English-speaking world, where Jews did not exhibit these characteristics in the same striking and visible way. Inevitably, Beller attempts to explain the diabolical nature of the Nazi Holocaust which, in a subtle discussion, he attributes to ‘a particular German type of modernity’ (p. 95). He rightly distinguishes this—if, indeed, it existed—from ‘Western liberal democratic capitalist modernity’ (p. 96). Nevertheless, it is arguable that the murderous totality of Nazi anti-Semitism was primarily centred in Adolf Hitler himself: it is almost inconceivable that the Holocaust would have occurred had Hitler not become German dictator in 1933, and no one anywhere imagined that it would.