The Politics of Xenophobia and the Salience of Anti-Semitism

Abstract

The exploitation of anti-Semitism for political purposes was long regarded as a quasi-monopoly of the authoritarian Right. It is only since World War II that the exploitation of anti-Jewish prejudices on the Left, particularly in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and in the East European People's Democracies, has attained such high public visibility that it can no longer be dismissed as trivial, exceptional, or a mere relic of some regrettable historic legacy. It reminds us that some forms of political Left and Right have much in common. It also points to certain recurrent patterns of political parochialism manifested by authoritarian political systems and movements. Anti-Semitism, defined as hatred of and agitation against Jews, is, to be sure, an ancient phenomenon whose prevalence has varied in time and place.l In thirteenth-century England, widespread hostility toward Jews found expression in bloodshed and massacres, terminating in their expulsion. During the twentieth century, England became a haven for many Jews fleeing from the persecution inflicted upon them in Eastern and Central Europe, a region to which, paradoxically, Jews had fled in the sixteenth century in order to escape oppression visited upon them by the Inquisition in Spain. In some areas of the world, and among some cultures into which Jews have migrated, anti-Semitism appears not to