Muslim Antisemitism Research Articles

Communists Encounter Islamic Antisemitism and Misogyny, 1917–1957

Abstract Contemporary far leftists deny, trivialize, or even endorse, Islamic antisemitism. The response of Communists and fellow travelers to Islamic antisemitism in the four decades after the Bolshevik revolution was more complex. Communists were initially inclined to accept Karl Marx’s view of Islam as reactionary and an obstacle to progress. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets made concerted efforts to overturn Islamic beliefs and eradicate Muslim practices in their Central Asian republics. But the Communists’ rigid adherence to narrow class analysis led them to vastly underestimate the influence of Islamic teaching about Jews in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and often to downplay the worst outbreaks of antisemitic violence. The two lines of the Communist approach to Islamic societies were the Muslim subjugation of Jews and women, each of which they viewed as an obstacle to progress. But while their insistence on overturning the Muslim confinement of women remained unrelenting until late in the period under consideration, their challenge to Islamic subjugation of Jews was inconsistent. This article analyzes Communist responses to Muslim pogroms against Jews in Mandatory Palestine, Algeria, Tripolitania, and elsewhere. It also assesses the commentaries on Islamic antisemitism by Communists and fellow travelers from the West who spent considerable time in Soviet Central Asia in the 1930s. The final section considers the twenty-first century far left alliance with Islamists, which embodies the worst features of the earlier Communist outlook.

The politics of nostalgia and pessimism

This article provides a sociopolitical and historical analysis of Thierry Cohen’s novel Avant la haine (2015) in order to ascertain how this novel negotiates Jewish and Muslim identities and the category of ‘Jewish-Muslim relations’ and broader, more dominant representations of these identities and relations. In doing so, I show how literary interventions into the question of Jewish-Muslim relations and their representations may both challenge and reaffirm polarizing discourses of Jewish-Muslim tension more broadly found in contemporary French society. Most significantly, this novel is steeped in pessimism or at the very least a pessimistic optimism when it comes to perceiving Jewish-Muslim presents and futures. This sense of pessimism suggests the difficulty of articulating counter-narratives in a contemporary context that consistently emphasizes Jewish-Muslim polarization, overdetermined by theories of a new Muslim antisemitism and an importation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article’s conclusions are not meant to apply to all literary productions on Jewish-Muslim (or inter-ethnic/-religious) relations, but rather to be exploratory in nature, i.e. to suggest how literature may mediate and navigate intergroup relations that are presented as polarized and tense in broader media and political discourses.

Islamic Antisemitism: Characteristics, Origins, and Current Effects

Muslims and non-Muslims generally use the same tropes to express aversion to Jews. In both cases we find the classic conspiracy myths; the blood libel, which is rooted in Christian sources; Holocau...

The split Arab/Jew figure revisited

ABSTRACT In this essay, Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethnonationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories, so as to address the complex imaginaries of both ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’. Elaborating on her earlier dialogue with Edward Said’s account of the bifurcated Oriental/Semitic myth—one rendered as the Orientalist (the Jew) and the other as the Oriental (the Arab)—Shohat offers a genealogical reading of this gradual splitting, locating it prior to the partition of Palestine and even to the emergence of Zionism, and tracing it back to the dissemination of a colonial-inflected Enlightenment discourse. More crucially, Shohat asks where the indigenous Jew of ‘the Orient’, and more specifically the Arab-Jew, might fit conceptually within this split. Today, with the epic-scale reconceptualization of belonging in the wake of partition, diasporization and competing nationalist imaginaries, the Arab-Jew figure silently occupies an ambiguous position within the bifurcation. Yet a critical analysis of the Orientalist splitting that sidesteps the question of the Arab-Jew risks reproducing the fixed ethnonationalist lexicon that posits Jewishness and Arabness as irreconcilable. At the same time, this very ambiguity, Shohat argues, was already fomented with the imperial ‘translation’ of the Enlightenment project into a racialized idiom, now applied differentially to the Muslim and the Jew-within-the-Orient. This essay traces such representational ruptures back to the nineteenth century, examining various instances of what the essay regards as ‘the de-indigenization of the Arab-Jew’. To illustrate her thesis, Shohat examines the gendered imagining of both Jewish and Muslim communities within a relational and transnational comparative framework. Orientalist tropes such as the odalisque, the hammam and the un/veiled female had long been projected on to Muslim and Jewish women throughout the region but, with the emergence of imperial ‘minorities’ discourse, the exoticized Jew-in-the-Orient became the object of a gendered rescue phantasy, as vividly illustrated in Dehodencq’s painting L’Exécution de la juive. Rather than a document of Muslim antisemitism, however, the colonial visual archive inadvertently registers what Shohat defines as a ‘split-within-the split’, highlighting the novel formation of an ambivalent indigeneity for Arab-Jews within ‘the Orient’. Yet the aesthetic dispositions also inadvertently and paradoxically reveal an underlying, thoroughly syncretic and shared Judaeo-Muslim cultural geography. Here the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew reveals an intricate landscape of belonging that offers an alternative conceptual framework in which to discuss the ruptures prior to the grand rupture of partition, and to illuminate the post/colonial transformation that dramatically impacted the narrative of Jewish at-homeness within Muslim spaces.

Antisemitism in the Muslim Intellectual Discourse in South Asia

South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) has produced some of the greatest Islamic thinkers, such as Shah Wali Allah (sometimes also spelled Waliullah; 1702–1763) who is considered one of the originators of pan-Islamism, Rahmatullah Kairanwi (1818–1892), Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), Syed Abul A’la Mawdudi (also spelled Maududi; 1903–1979), and Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadwi (1914–1999), who have all played a pivotal role in shaping political Islam and have all had global impact. Islamism is intertwined with Muslim antisemitism. Some of the greatest Islamist movements have their bases in South Asia, such as Tablīghi Jamā’at—the largest Sunni Muslim revivalist (daw’a) movement in the world—and Jamā’at-i-Islāmi—a prototype of political Islam in South Asia. The region is home to some of the most important institutions of Islamic theological studies: Darul Ulūm Deoband, the alleged source of ideological inspiration to the Taliban, and Nadwātu’l-’Ulamā and Firangi Mahal, whose curricula are followed by seminaries across the world attended by South Asian Muslims in their diaspora. Some of the most popular Muslim televangelists have come from South Asia, such as Israr Ahmed (1932–2010) and Zakir Naik (b. 1965). This paper gives an introductory overview of antisemitism in the Muslim intellectual discourse in South Asia.

“Islamic Anti-Semitism” in Historical Discourse

Countering the growing hostility to Israel and Zionism in the decades that followed the 1967 war, proponents of the “new anti-Semitism” have identified Arabs and Islam at the epicenter of anti-Semitism in the world. With the purpose of advocating for Israel, scholars and political activists have created a myth of “Islamic anti-Semitism,” producing a biased view of the history of Muslim-Jewish relations. Critics of these politicized writings have created a tendentious counter-narrative with the aim of condemning Zionism and Israeli policies, obfuscating the history of Judeophobia among Muslims. Discourses of Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism have evolved since the late 1960s in three phases. The first focuses on “Arab anti-Semitism,” a consequence of the national conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The second, with the turn to radical Islam, emphasizes the Islamic basis of anti-Semitism among Muslims, and especially Palestinians. In the third phase, following 9/11 and the expansion of global jihad, scholars have stressed the eternal enmity of Islam to the Jews, and opponents to Zionism and Israel of the past are anachronistically recast as “Islamists.” A reevaluation of the history of Judeophobia among Arabs and Muslims must first consider how scholarship has been shaped by conflicting narratives on the Israel/Arab/Palestine conflict.

Talking about Antisemitism in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher

This article explores tensions in French Jewish discourses about antisemitism in the post-2000 period. Drawing on commentary from French Jewish intellectuals, national Jewish organizations, and the French Jewish press from the mid-2000s until after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, I note a complex relationship between change and continuity in discursive characterizations of French antisemitism. While empirical manifestations of antisemitism were notably transformed by the Toulouse attacks of 2012, much French Jewish discourse insisted on continuity from the early 2000s onward. At the same time, Jewish narrative practices shifted rather dramatically. In a political context where Israel was often depicted as part of a history of violent settler colonialism, early 2000s Jewish discourse divorced French antisemitism from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (post)colonial racism in France. After 2012, some Jewish commentators linked Israel to French antisemitism by likening terrorism in Israel with Islamic antisemitism in France. These disjunctures between narratives and empirical violence suggest that the “structures of feeling” behind Jewish reactions to contemporary antisemitism cannot be reduced to empirical questions about safety and security. Social scientists thus need to move beyond an empirical analysis of antisemitism itself and attend to the cultural and affective work Jewish discourses about antisemitism do in any particular moment.

Antisemitism (New and Old), Islamist Judeophobia, and the Defense of Israel: Remembering and Using the Work of Robert Solomon Wistrich

Antisemitism (New and Old), Islamist Judeophobia, and the Defense of IsraelRemembering and Using the Work of Robert Solomon Wistrich Frederick Krantz (bio) The inner spring [of the leftist sycophancy towards communist and Islamist totalitarianism] is a deep self-alienation and loathing for real harmony, happiness, and success in this world. Such perverse feelings among some of the more privileged beneficiaries of Western society lead to a nihilistic hate for hate’s sake, a morally twisted attraction for the most despicable mass murdering tyrannies and an increased disposition to hate America and Israel. Such feelings are, unfortunately, also to be found among some of the more militant “anti-Zionist” Jews who claim to speak in the name of universal justice. —Robert S. Wistrich, “Epilogue,” A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010) The final published work by the late Robert S. Wistrich, our greatest contemporary student of antisemitism, is a multi-faceted examination of the nature and ubiquity of what has come to be termed “the new antisemitism.” This post-1945 phenomenon is exhaustively [End Page 109] and powerfully analyzed in Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), comprised of 25 incisive, overlapping, multi-authored chapters, including two by Wistrich himself. Indeed, the range and power of many of these essays provide a rich counterpoint and homage to the remarkable oeuvre of the Hebrew University’s Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish History and Director of its Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, who passed away suddenly, at Rome, in May 2015. This body of work, developed across the last forty years in a wide-ranging series of studies drawing on his broad and deep historical training and research and wide command of all the relevant European languages, is a lasting monument to Wistrich’s pre-eminent status in the field. His vast erudition, which enabled him to track the “longest hatred” across time and place, ensures that he will be ranked among the very greatest figures in the modern study of antisemitism, including, inter alia, Marcel Simon, Jules Isaac, James Parkes, Salo W. Baron, Léon Poliakov, H. H. Ben Sasson, Menahem Stern, Louis Feldman, Bernard Lewis, and Jacob Katz. Wistrich’s work is marked by a clear awareness of the longues durées—of how antisemitism is deeply rooted in “pagan” Graeco-Roman, early and medieval Christian, and Islamic (from the Quran and hadith forward) tropes.1 And it clearly demonstrates, too, how modern, post-Enlightenment secular dynamics, left and right, down to and beyond the Holocaust, and pre- and post-9/11 Islamic elements, murderously transformed earlier religious and cultural configurations. Wistrich was equally at home in English, French, German and Slavic cultures, in pre-modern and modern history, and in Western, Central European and Middle Eastern milieus.2 He also well understood the role of left- as well as of right-wing movements in the etiology of European and Western Jew-hatred. A key thematic already present in Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (1991) and sharpened in A Lethal Obsession (2010), leftist antisemitism and anti-Zionism are explicitly addressed in From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel (2012), and other writings. [End Page 110] Robert Wistrich wrote with authority on the Nazi perpetrators.3 He was born in Kazakhstan in 1945, the son of Polish refugees who moved to the Soviet Union, back (briefly) to Poland, and thence to France and finally England. There Wistrich was educated at Cambridge and the University of London, focusing naturally on Soviet and left antisemitism.4 And, from the 1980s on, he was already concerned with the increasing threat of Islamic antisemitism. Muslim Anti-Semitism. A Clear and Present Danger (2002) was followed by pieces on “Islamic Judeophobia: An Existential Threat” and “The Jihadist Challenge” (2004), and by substantial chapters on the subject in both Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred and The Lethal Obsession. The new antisemitism’s israel focus The general consensus of the essays in Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel is that the “new antisemitism” is focused principally not on Jews per se, but on the Jewish state, Israel—focused first on delegitimizing...

Islamic Antisemitism: Its Genesis, Meaning, and Effects

Islamic Antisemitism: Its Genesis, Meaning, and Effects

“The Sons of Pigs and Apes”: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence, written by Neil J. Kressel

“The Sons of Pigs and Apes”: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence, written by Neil J. Kressel

The burdens of brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France

Headlines from France suggest that Muslims have renewed an age-old struggle against Jews and that the two groups are once more inevitably at odds. But the past tells a different story. The Burdens of Brotherhood is a sweeping history of Jews and Muslims in France from World War I to the present. Here Ethan Katz introduces a richer and more complex world that offers fresh perspective for understanding the opportunities and challenges in France today. Focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, Katz shows how Jewish–Muslim relations were shaped by everyday encounters and by perceptions of deeply rooted collective similarities or differences. We meet Jews and Muslims advocating common and divergent political visions, enjoying common culinary and musical traditions, and interacting on more intimate terms as neighbors, friends, enemies, and even lovers and family members. Drawing upon dozens of archives, newspapers, and interviews, Katz tackles controversial subjects like Muslim collaboration and resistance during World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish participation in French colonialism, the international impact of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and contemporary Muslim antisemitism in France. We see how Jews and Muslims, as ethno-religious minorities, understood and related to one another through their respective relationships to the French state and society. Through their eyes, we see colonial France as a multiethnic, multireligious society more open to public displays of difference than its postcolonial successor. This book thus dramatically reconceives the meaning and history not only of Jewish–Muslim relations but ultimately of modern France itself.

Export-Import Theory and the Racialization of Anti-Semitism: Turkish- and Arab-Only Prevention Programs in Germany

AbstractSince the year 2000, remembering the Holocaust and fighting anti-Semitism have come to be accepted as cornerstones of European identity. The flip side of this development has been racialization of Muslims by singling them out as the main contemporary anti-Semites. After discussing the emergence of the concept “Muslim anti-Semitism,” I scrutinize government-issued reports and anti-Semitism-prevention programs in Germany. I show how the recent wave of struggle against anti-Semitism depicts Muslims as outsiders who bring unwanted ideologies, evaluates their anti-Semitism as more dangerous than that of right-wing German nationals, and attributes to Muslims culturally transmitted psychopathologies that make Muslim nations prone to anti-Semitism. Experts locate the root of Turkish anti-Semitism in their “myth of tolerance toward Jews,” and of Arab anti-Semitism in their sense of a “false victimhood” and “desire for power and pride.” Educators focus on each nationality separately to distinguish these alleged group-specific myths and feelings. Efforts and money that go into producing nation-specific Muslim anti-Semitisms depict a new Germany that has fully liberated itself from any anti-democratic tendencies surviving from its Nazi past. It also obscures connections between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism, both of which are active forces in mainstream German society.

European Muslim antisemitism: why young urban males say they don't like Jews

European Muslim antisemitism: why young urban males say they don't like Jews

Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict by Maud Mandel (review)

Reviewed by: Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict by Maud Mandel Daniella Doron Maud Mandel. Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 272 pages. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN: 9780691125817. The issue of Muslim-Jewish relations in France took center stage in 2014, once again. As the 2014 war in Gaza unfolded in the Middle East, a video recording of pro-Palestinian protesters attacking a Jewish synagogue in the 11th arrondissement of Paris went viral. Newspapers across the globe reported on the modest but steady rise of French Jews immigrating to Israel, a trend commonly attributed to France’s purportedly inhospitable environment for Jews, and the rise of antisemitism amongst France’s Muslim youth. Cultural commentators in France and abroad advanced several explanations for the rise of antisemitism among French Muslim minorities, and the disconcerting tendency to attribute current events in Israel to diaspora Jewry. Some commentators pointed to the disadvantaged position of Muslim youth within French social and economic life, while others blamed age-old Muslim antisemitism, and yet others directly linked developments in France to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. [End Page 211] Maud Mandel’s timely and superb historical study Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict nuances these reductive explanations. French Jews and Muslims indeed have a shaky relationship that has devolved in recent decades, as evidenced in the antagonistic reactions to the 2014 events in Israel by both communities. Muslims and Jews in France seeks to explain how these two French minorities, who share multiple political concerns and by all logic should strike an alliance, have instead built a relationship characterized by mutual suspicion and enmity. But rather than reducing this conflict to timeless and intractable Muslim antisemitism or ephemeral events in Israel, Mandel attributes the current state of “conflict” to developments in North Africa and France between the 1948 war in Israel and the 1980s “right to be different.” Mandel’s argument is threefold: she argues that conversations amongst Muslims and Jews that were seemingly about the Middle East actually functioned as forums to voice dissatistfaction with French administrative and socio-economic inequalities; the particular dynamics of French decolonization in North Africa and immigrant settlement patterns in France were critical in helping shape the trajectory of future French Jewish and Muslims relations; and, finally, the framing of Muslim-Jewish interactions as necessarily polarized or as a binary relationship papers over the exceedingly complex social reality and the diversity of French Jewish and Muslim experience. Throughout the study, Mandel turns to the port city of Marseille to illustrate how French Muslims and Jewish individuals could live harmoniously side by side and yet all the while decolonization, events in the Middle East, and French minority politics could inflame tensions between the two communities. The book begins in Marseille in 1948 as war breaks out in the Middle East over the establishment of the State of Israel. Unlike elsewhere in France, the situation was especially heated because Marseille was both the new home of Algerian Muslim laborers and a hub for postwar illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. Mandel argues that the events in Israel actually functioned as a “barometer of the country’s fluctuating and contradictory commitments to some of its most insecure citizens” (33). Postwar French Jews, who had been so recently stripped of citizenship, encouraged French administrators to support the State of Israel and ignore the stream of migrants and munitions passing through Marseille’s ports, while poor and disadvantaged Muslim laborers and pan-Arab nationalists, for their part, prodded the French state to stem the tide of illegal Jewish immigration but, just as crucially, to remain true to its stated commitment to equality of citizenship. The government’s ultimate willingness to turn a blind eye to Jewish illegal immigration brought into stark relief, for some politically active Algerian Muslims, the inequities inherent in the French system and their disadvantaged position. The second chapter turns to decolonization in North Africa, and perceptions about the migration of North African Jews to France and Israel. Though North African Jewish migration occurred in the larger context of European migration, Mandel argues that a specifically Jewish narrative emerged...

"The Sons of Pigs and Apes": Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence

"The Sons of Pigs and Apes": Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence

Muslim anti-Semitism: The by-product of existential fear: A review of The sons of pigs and apes: Muslim antisemitism and the conspiracy of silence.

Muslim anti-Semitism: The by-product of existential fear: A review of The sons of pigs and apes: Muslim antisemitism and the conspiracy of silence.

Treading in Troubled Waters: Seeking the Roots of Muslim Antisemitism

The resurgence of antisemitism worldwide in the wake of the Second Intifada in September 2000 and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. led to the proliferation of new publications on antisemitism in general, and its Muslim variant in particular. Most of these new publications challenged the conventional approach among scholars of Arab antisemitism that it was a new phenomenon, which developed out of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contended that it stemmed from a long religious and cultural tradition, and that Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism bore inherent fascist traits. The books reviewed are in different degrees part of this trend. This article demonstrates that the debates over the origins of Muslim antisemitism are debates of the deaf, and shows that this field of research has become highly politicized, mixing scholarship and advocacy.

The Legacy of Islamic antisemitism: from sacred texts to solemn history

This comprehensive meticulously documented collection of scholarly articles presents indisputable evidence that a readily discernible and uniquely Islamic antisemitism has been expressed continuously since the advent of Islam. The contributors show that the Koran itself is a significant source of hostility towards Jews as well as other foundational texts.

The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right (review)

Reviewed by: The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right Saul Lerner The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right, by George Michael. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. 397 pp. $34.95. George Michael has written a very important book in The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right. Not only has he effectively described the historic background of both U.S. and [End Page 138] non-U.S. extremist and hate groups and militant Islamic groups, but he has effectively shown how such groups share goals and objectives and, therefore, are likely to develop and encourage future cooperative efforts. The book describes the nature, political objectives, and historical backgrounds of such groups as Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, the American and the European extreme right, neo-Nazis, radical Christians, and others. Michael makes clear that although “virtually all terrorists come from the ranks of extremists, most extremists are not terrorists,” but “political extremism often serves as an incubator for future terrorism” (p. 13). Opposition between militant Islamists and American extremists over religious belief, racial/ethnic background, cultural differences, and other important distinctions has not undermined the goals that the two groups hold in common, and both continue to oppose modernity, democracy, aspects of capitalism and globalization, the United States, nation-states, and other such phenomena. Moreover, both militant Islamists and the extreme right are angered by U.S. involvement in the Middle East, participation of the United States in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. support of Israel, and the influence of Israel on U.S. politics and political decision making. These groups are strongly motivated by support of the Palestinian cause, a deep commitment to antisemitism, and demonization of the Jew. In his analysis of the American extreme right, Michael indicates that two major changes have taken place since the 1980s: the ultimate demise of communism turned this group away from extreme patriotism and, as the nonwhite population of the United States grew, this group became increasingly nihilistic (p. 23), viewed the United States as controlled by a “Zionist Occupation Government” (ZOG), and grew ever-more obsessed with Jews. The result has been that the extreme right has sought destruction of the old order. Terrorism has been seen as a means of shocking the masses into overthrowing Zionist domination (pp. 28–9). Citing the study of Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Comes to America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), the Islamic militants have shared some views with American extremists, for they have been: “[r]adical [u]topian,” “[t]otalitarian,” “[a]ntidemocratic,” “[a]ntimoderate,” “[a]nti-Semitic,” “[a]nti-[w]estern,” and “[u]nwilling to coexist” (pp. 33–34). Militant Islamists view the United States and “Israel—along with a putative international Zionist cabal—” “as the main threat to and oppressor of Islam” (p. 45). Hence, in the same way that the extreme right sees overthrow of the government of the United States as key to the resolution of all American problems, Islamic militants seek to resolve modern problems and the problems [End Page 139] of all humanity by overthrowing U.S./Zionist domination and restoring “the universalistic fervor of early Islam” (p. 34). Based on such works as those of Daniel Pipes, Yossef Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument (Houston, TX.: Ariel Center for Policy Studies, 1999), and others, circulation in the Middle East of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, widespread Arab belief that an Israel lobby dominates American Middle Eastern policy, and support of the destruction of Israel, Michael has built an effective case describing militant Islamist antisemitism. Moreover, he has traced the development of such antisemitism from the years prior to the World War II, including Arab support of the Nazis during World War II, collaboration with neo-Nazis in the post-war period, and opposition to both Israel and Jews throughout the decades since the end of World War II. Anti-Jewish and anti-U.S. perceptions are considered by the author to be part of the political and...

The context of antisemitism and Islamophobia in France

ABSTRACT Silverstein's essay explores the social drama surrounding the reported rise of a ‘new antisemitism’ in France in the context of a history of violence and present discrimination against French Muslims. Eschewing the essentializing approaches to Muslim antisemitism characteristic of many critics and pundits, the essay shows how current categories of ethnicity and religion in France (e.g. Jewish, Muslim, Arab and Berber) developed historically through colonial conquest, anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial racist violence. Focusing on the period of ‘Beur’ activism of the 1980s and more recent anti-police demonstrations by young men from suburban housing projects, Silverstein traces the formation of political subjectivity among Franco-Maghrebis in opposition to French state actors, police forces and those (including, more recently, assimilated French Jews) who appear to benefit disproportionately from the social, economic and political privileges of the national bourgeoisie. In the present period, many of these Franco-Maghrebis have increasingly identified as ‘French Muslims’ as their primary form of belonging, an identification bolstered by their ambivalent interpellation as, on the one hand, suspect members of the French nation under the policing and surveillance procedures of France's ‘war on terror’ and, on the other, objects of state dialogue via the creation of representative Islamic councils. Such politics of exclusion and incorporation, the essay argues, has played out in recent accusations of French Muslim antisemitism, accusations that challenge the right of French Muslims to recognition as a legitimate ‘community’ within France. Moreover, it critically examines statistical evidence for the reported rise in antisemitism and its attribution to French Muslims, paying close attention to schoolyard incidents of violence that constitute a large number of the reported incidents. Finally, Silverstein examines various minority voices among French Muslims—particularly Berber/Amazigh activists—who have enthusiastically adopted a secularist ideology and philosemitic discourse.