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Key Concepts
in the Study
of Antisemitism
Edited by
Sol Goldberg · Scott Ury · Kalman Weiser
Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism
Series Editor
David Feldman
Birkbeck College—University of London
London, UK
Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism considers antisemitism
from the ancient world to the present day. The series explores topical and the-
oretical questions and brings historical and multidisciplinary perspectives to
bear on contemporary concerns and phenomena.
Grounded in history, the series also reaches across disciplinary boundaries
to promote a contextualised and comparative understanding of antisemitism.
A contextualised understanding will seek to uncover the content, meanings,
functions and dynamics of antisemitism as it occurred in the past and recurs
in the present. A comparative approach will consider antisemitism over time
and place. Importantly, it will also explore the connections between anti-
semitism and other exclusionary visions of society. The series will explore the
relationship between antisemitism and other racisms as well as between anti-
semitism and forms of discrimination and prejudice articulated in terms of
gender and sexuality.
Kalman Weiser
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To our children
Odelya
Matan and Shira
Orly and Talia
Acknowledgments
vii
Praise for Key Concepts in the Study
of Antisemitism
“This book is the rarest of things: a handy reference work that is also intel-
lectually challenging and methodologically innovative. Designed especially for
the college classroom, the 22 essays in this volume offer substantive yet acces-
sible overviews of major topics, not all of which are typically examined even
in standard works on the subject. Written by leading scholars in the field,
each entry cuts across boundaries of period, geography and discipline to pro-
duce fresh insights and perspectives. Amidst a spate of recent publications on
antisemitism, Key Concepts stands out as a novel tool that will enhance our
understanding of a complex and seemingly intractable phenomenon.”
—Jonathan Karp, Associate Professor in the History and Judaic Studies
Department at Binghamton University, New York, USA
ix
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Kalman Weiser
2 Anti-Judaism 13
Jonathan Elukin
3 Anti-Semitism (Historiography) 25
Jonathan Judaken
4 Anti-Zionism 39
James Loeffler
7 Conspiracy Theories 79
Jovan Byford
8 Emancipation 93
Frederick Beiser
9 Gender 105
Sara R. Horowitz
xi
xii CONTENTS
10 Ghetto 121
Daniel B. Schwartz
13 Nationalism 161
Brian Porter-Szűcs
14 Nazism 173
Doris L. Bergen
15 Orientalism 187
Ivan Kalmar
16 Philosemitism 201
Maurice Samuels
17 Pogroms 215
Jeffrey S. Kopstein
18 Postcolonialism 229
Bryan Cheyette
19 Racism 245
Robert Bernasconi
20 Secularism 257
Lena Salaymeh and Shai Lavi
22 Zionism 287
Scott Ury
Index 331
Notes on Contributors
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and
the Associate Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish
Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. He specializes in Jewish his-
tory and the language and culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews. He is the author
of Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland
(2011), and co-editor of Czernowitz at 100: the First Yiddish Language
Conference in Historical Perspective (2010) and also of the expanded and
revised second edition of Solomon Birnbaum’s Yiddish: a Survey and a
Grammar (2015).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Kalman Weiser
This is a volume born of a common frustration, one that its co-editors first
experienced when they independently began teaching university-level courses
about antisemitism more than a decade ago. The academic study of antisem-
itism is a fascinating endeavor. It raises conceptual and methodological que-
ries that transcend disciplinary boundaries and chronological eras. Its research
literature is rich and contentious, examining thousands of years of recorded
history through multiple theoretical lenses and at times from opposing ide-
ological perspectives. In short, antisemitism is a subject that is wont to raise
more questions than answers.
But antisemitism is not merely a topic of “academic” interest, a historically
delimited phenomenon that can be approached with equanimity from the safe
distance of the present. Sadly, as recent events demonstrate, manifestations of
violence and hatred toward Jews continue to rear their ugly head, along with,
and at times in conjunction with, other forms of intolerance and bigotry.
Precisely those features that make studying the body of scholarship about
antisemitism so engaging for the researcher—notably, its intellectual breadth,
depth, and the often politicized nature of its controversies—also make teach-
ing about it a formidable task, especially for the instructor attempting to
strike a balance between the ideals of objective and engaged scholarship. The
wide divergences in the cultural assumptions, political views, and moral intui-
tions that students bring to the classroom only magnify this challenge, which
is likely to be felt now more than ever by instructors on today’s politically
charged campuses.
K. Weiser (*)
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: kweiser@yorku.ca
Take, for example, the experience of two of this volume’s three co-editors
who teach undergraduate courses about antisemitism in metropolitan
Canadian universities. Students are of diverse backgrounds in a multieth-
nic, multireligious city such as Toronto. While assertions of Jews’ collective
guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus still occasionally surface, most students are
little inclined to announce adverse attitudes toward Jews. Rather, they fre-
quently arrive in the classroom seeking insight into the Holocaust, often the
only historical event focusing on Jews taught in the Canadian high school
curriculum. Many are only remotely aware that the Nazis’ brand of murder-
ous Jew-hatred taps into a hoary tradition of anti-Jewish ideas and practices.
Given the common North American understanding of Jews as foremost a
faith community, students primarily conceive of antisemitism as a form of reli-
gious bigotry, one today restricted to the margins of respectable society in an
ostensibly tolerant, multicultural country such as Canada. Jews are regularly
perceived not as a minority group long subjected to forms of discrimination
and intolerance but as part of a privileged white majority and consequently
immune to or, in comparison with visible minorities, insignificantly affected
by the hatred of contemporary racism. Students sometimes react with surprise
or indignation when Jewish (and occasionally non-Jewish) classmates, even
ones with little awareness of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, feel insulted or
threatened by imagery and rhetoric that periodically appears in anti-Zionist
and anti-Israel campaigns that they deem inherently malicious, unjust, and
prejudicial.
An entirely different reality faces the third co-editor, who teaches at an
Israeli university with a largely Jewish student body. These students typi-
cally arrive in the classroom with a very different set of assumptions about
the nature and history of antisemitism, as well as a different understanding
regarding the historical relationship between its perpetrators and victims.
Israeli students are the product of a state educational system that privileges an
interpretation of antisemitism as an enduring theme in the millenniums-old
history of the Jewish people. Indeed, providing a refuge from antisemitism is
understood as part of the raison d’être for Israel’s existence. For many Jewish
students, antisemitism is a sui generis problem that has proven an existential
threat to diasporic Jewish life from time immemorial, one to which Zionism
has thus far provided the most effective response. Yet, many also see anti-
semitism as continuing to affect Jews everywhere—whether in the form of
continued hostility toward Jews and Jewish communities outside Israel or as
part of hostile campaigns seeking to delegitimize the State of Israel in the
international sphere. Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens of Israel present in the
same classroom seldom embrace Israel’s founding narrative or recent legis-
lative efforts to define it formally as a Jewish nation state. On the contrary,
they commonly view themselves as the unjust victims rather than the benefi-
ciaries of Zionism, which they understand as a discriminatory ethno-nation-
alist ideology. Their assumptions about the nature of antisemitism, its causes
and manifestations, its entanglement with other forms of bigotry, and its
1 INTRODUCTION 3
relationship to Zionism are at times miles apart from those of many of their
Jewish classmates. Together with some Jewish classmates, they define their
opposition, whether to Zionism as a whole or to specific Israeli policies, not
as motivated by anti-Jewish animus but as a strictly ethical protest meant to
redress injustice.
Undoubtedly, such examples could be refined and multiplied to
include other political contexts and demographic groups across the globe.
Heightened sensitivity to social and political contexts, as well as cultural and
political biases, is, however, not the only challenge awaiting the instructor.
The task of teaching about antisemitism is rendered even more difficult by
the paucity of suitable literature for use in the university classroom. Well-
meaning but often simplistic or politically motivated narratives dominate
offerings intended for students. Even the better textbooks available are ham-
pered by the ambition to follow the phenomenon of Jew-hatred across vast
temporal and territorial expanses for the benefit of students who often possess
scant knowledge of either history or geography. In their quest for thorough-
ness, they necessarily support, wittingly or unwittingly, the historically ques-
tionable thesis of antisemitism as “The Longest Hatred,” an uninterrupted
but constantly evolving chain of Jew-hatred from antiquity until the present
day (Wistrich 1992, 2010).
This view’s popularity is perhaps not surprising in light of a long-standing
tendency to treat antisemitism as merely the dark side of Jewish or modern
European history. Indeed, the lion’s share of textbooks and anthologies about
antisemitism are produced by specialists in these fields. Vital contributions
to the investigation of antisemitism from such varied disciplines as Religious
Studies, Psychology, Sociology, Legal Studies, and Critical Race Theory have
yet to be integrated systematically into the available literature directed at a
student reader. Moreover, few graduate students in the Humanities or Social
Sciences receive explicit training to conduct research or teach about antisem-
itism, either as a distinct phenomenon or in relation to other forms of racism
and prejudice that require a wider, multidisciplinary framework.
The available literature directed at a student audience is, however, bur-
dened by an even more fundamental challenge: the absence of a general
scholarly consensus about the very definition and dimensions of the phe-
nomenon under investigation. For centuries, theological justifications proved
sufficient for religious thinkers—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—to account
for Jew-hatred. Long before the introduction of “antisemitism” into any lex-
icon, Jewish communities used terms such as Sinat-yisrael (Jew-hatred) and
rishes (evil) to express an antipathy they considered a well-nigh permanent,
albeit lamentable, consequence of their status as the unique upholders of a
sacred covenant with God and an unenviable reminder that they remained in
exile from their ancient homeland. By the early nineteenth century, however,
expectations concerning the inevitability of this hostility began to decline.
At that time, many Jews began to undergo secularization and to abandon
elements of their cultural particularity and social separateness, seeking to
4 K. WEISER
participate fully in the societies of European countries (and their colonial off-
shoots). The “Jewish Question,” the question of whether Jews’ integration
into gentile societies was desirable and under what conditions, preoccupied
thinkers across the continent. Ultimately, after much debate, most moderniz-
ing states had emancipated their Jewish populations by the twentieth century,
spelling an end to most legal disabilities and their historic status as an autono-
mous “state within a state.”
The term “Antisemitismus” (antisemitism) grew in popularity in the last
third of the nineteenth century. It was then introduced in Germany as a
term to designate both individual and organized political opposition to the
Jews’ rapid and unprecedented socioeconomic integration across European
society following their civil and political emancipation. Its proponents—self-
proclaimed Antisemites—wished to “turn back the clock,” to limit or reverse
what was perceived as Jews’ illegitimate and threatening dominance in a
number of professional and cultural fields. While some insisted that the term
meant a secular and rational—rather than religious-based—opposition to
Jews, one rooted in their purported racial foreignness as “Semites,” it quickly
spread across cultural and disciplinary borders to designate a variety of types
of hostility toward them. Today, its veneer of pseudo-scientific sophistication
stripped away, it serves as a catch-all phrase to describe virtually any act or
attitude that targets Jews qua Jews (Engel 2009).
The thorough ambiguity of the term makes context all the more impor-
tant in trying to define and identify incidents and aspects of antisemitism.
Popular and humoristic quips defining antisemitism as hating Jews more than
is “absolutely necessary” (ascribed to the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin,
himself a Jew) or as “the socialism of fools” (usually attributed to the German
socialist August Bebel) not only tell us much about the societies in which
they originated. They also point to some of the fundamental questions con-
temporary scholars continue to explore in their attempts to understand the
origins, nature, and definition of antisemitism. Does, for example, antisemi-
tism constitute a rational phenomenon, a consequence of intergroup frictions
between Jews and gentiles such as economic or political competition that is
on par with those found between other human collectives? Is it a form of
xenophobia, prejudice, or racism similar to others, mutatis mutandis? Or is
it something exceptional, if not unique? If so, does this exceptionalism lie in
some aspect(s) of Judaism, Jewish culture, or the Jews’ character or nature?
Or does it reside in non-Jews or their culture? Is it a psychological or social
disorder that can be mitigated—perhaps even cured—through changes in
theological interpretations, educational practices, or political, societal, and
economic structures? Or is it an inescapable fate that will accompany the Jews
for eternity?
Scholarly perspectives are in competition even over the very nature of
antisemitism as a historical phenomenon, if indeed it constitutes a single
phenomenon. Although some scholars take antisemitism to be an intrinsic
feature of Western civilization with consistent features across time and space
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