Context and Continuity in Histories of Antisemitism

Abstract

Context and Continuity in Histories of Antisemitism Paul Hanebrink (bio) Kalman weiser begins his introduction to the excellent key concepts in the Study of Antisemitism with a set of reflections that will ring true to anyone who teaches about antisemitism at an academic institution. He and his fellow editors work in different countries: two (Weiser and Sol Goldberg) in Canada; the third (Scott Ury) in Israel. Weiser writes that the two Canada-based scholars teach students who generally know little of Jewish history apart from the Holocaust, see Jews primarily as a religious minority that is now well-integrated into Canada's (white) majority culture, and think of antisemitism as a marginal relic hardly comparable with more urgent forms of racial injustice. By contrast, the Israel-based editor teaches many students who are convinced that antisemitism is an eternal hatred that has shaped Jewish life everywhere from antiquity to the present, who see in Zionism and the Israeli state the only historically effective guarantee of Jewish security, and who are dismissive of Palestinian classmates who see that history very differently. Colleagues at many universities in the United States will recognize both of these perspectives among their own students. Too often, antisemitism is described either as a form of racism that is largely over or as an enduring evil that is always with us. How can scholars and teachers of antisemitism push back against such widespread (and politically explosive) cliches? Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism is meant to be a resource and a tool for instructors and researchers around the world who face this very dilemma. Its greatest innovation is in its design. Instead of producing a more usual historical survey of antisemitism through the ages, the editors have solicited a rich and diverse collection of short essays from leading scholars in the field about various concepts associated with the study of antisemitism. Topics range from anti-Judaism to emancipation; from conspiracy theories to nationalism; and from Jewish self-hatred to philosemitism. In each case, the authors were allowed to approach their chosen topic as they saw fit. Some are genealogical studies that show why the concept was created and what the [End Page 182] consequences of its use have been. Others survey the intellectual history of writing and thinking about the concept in order to highlight alternative ways of seeing it. Still others are built around one or more case studies, in order to illuminate the differences and commonalities between several manifestations of the concept or to focus on one illustrative instance that highlights its general discursive features. Weiser explains the philosophy behind the volume's design in the introduction. Invoking Salo Baron's famous admonition against the "lachrymose narrative of Jewish history," he writes trenchantly about the pitfalls of studying antisemitism chronologically as a force that retains a core essence of Jew hatred even as it mutates from one era to another. However carefully done, this approach inevitably casts Jews as perennial victims of a persecuting society, overlooks more complicated forms of social interaction with non-Jews that shaped the reality of Jewish life in certain contexts, flattens distinctions between different times and places, and generates a narrative that inevitably ends with Auschwitz and a warning to avoid its repetition. The result is a distorted historical record that obscures other ways of imagining relations between Jews and non-Jews historically, all at a significant political cost. Constructing the volume as a collection of essays about concepts has two principal advantages. First, it highlights the myriad ways that anti-Jewish stereotypes inform and interact with other social and cultural forces at a given historical conjuncture. Moving from one essay to the next helps us to see that anti-Jewish thought is not a pre-set "mask" laid over a nearly-infinite variety of ideas, concepts or social antagonisms, as David Nirenberg once proposed, but rather a protean element reconstituted and refashioned again and again as it becomes a part of the social and cultural relations of a specific time and place.1 Scott Ury emphasizes the dialectical relationship between antisemitism and Zionism in his essay on the writings of key Zionist intellectuals. Daniel Schwartz examines the complex...