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‘Upping the Antis’: Addressing the Conceptual Ambiguities Surrounding ‘Antisemitism’

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Abstract

The question of antisemitism encompasses a dispute between “eternalists,” who believe in the perpetual continuity of anti-Jewish sentiments throughout history, and “contextualists,” who regard each instance in its own time, place and situation. The essay aims to confront and clarify some of the complexity of the problem by reconsidering the notions of discontinuity versus continuity and by focusing on antisemitism in its relationship to racism and anti-Zionism.

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Notes

  1. See the collected volume: Shmuel Almog, ed., Antisemitism through the Ages (Oxford-New York: Pergamon Press 1988 [Hebrew 1987]).

  2. On the debate see the Roundtable on The American Historical Review 123, 4, 2018, and in particular: Jonathan Judaken, “Rethinking Antisemitism”, The American Historical Review, 123, 4, October 2018, 1122–1138; David Feldman, “Toward a History of the Term Antisemitism”, pp. 1139–1150; Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, “Gender and the Politics of Antisemitism”, pp. 1210–1222. See also: Jonathan Judaken, “Deconstructing Antisemitism and Eternal Anti-Judaism,” Marginalia, December 13, 2013, https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/deconstructing-antisemitism-and-eternal-anti-judaism/; the compelling volume edited by Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams, The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism. Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 2018). See in particular in this work: Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams’s Introduction: “Volcanic Archives. Towards a Direct Comparison of Pre-Modern and Modern Forms of Antisemitism,” pp. 3–16; Ulrich Wyrwa, “The Making of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Europe as an Invention of Tradition,” pp. 30–41; Brian Klug, “What is Antisemitism like? An Analogical Approach,” pp. 42–55; Carlo Ginzburg, “Postface,” pp. 428–437; David Nirenberg, “Which Past for Which Present? A reply to Carlo Ginzburg’s Postface on Anti-Judaism,” pp. 438–456; Steven Englund, “The Medieval (and Ancient) Roots of Antisemitism,” pp. 19–29. See further: David Hirsch, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (New York: Routledge, 2018); Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed. Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspective (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2013); Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010), 1184 pp.; Jonathan Judaken, “So What’s New? Rethinking the ‘New Antisemitism’ in a Global Age,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, nos. 4–5 (2008): 531–560; Matti Bunzl, Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); Pierre-André Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie (Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2002); Saul Friedländer, “Redemptive Antisemitism,” chap. 3, in Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), pp. 73–112; Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism, the Longest Hatred (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l’ antisémitisme, vol. 1: Du Christ aux Juifs de cour (Paris: Calman Levy, 1955); Jules Isaac, Genèse de l’Antisémitisme (Paris: Calman Levy, 1956). I include, within the discussion, three other seminal studies: Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, Los ageless and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 and Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish history, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Some of the articles were published in his Hebrew collection “Tadmit ve-toda’ah historit be-yahadut u-bi-svivatah ha-tarbutit” (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1991).

  3. David Engel, “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism: An Essay in the Semantics of Historical Description”, Rethinking European Jewish History, eds. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (Oxford Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), pp. 30–53. The revised text appeared recently, in its Hebrew version for the journal Zion, which devoted an entire number to Engel’s study: Scott Ury and Guy Miron, eds. Historical Concept, Public Debate - Zion, 95, 1–4, 2020.; David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013).

  4. For the debate see David Engel, “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism: An Essay in the Semantics of Historical Description”’, Rethinking European Jewish History, eds. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (Oxford 2009), pp. 30–53; David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013). See also the compelling volume edited by Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams, The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism. Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 2018).

  5. I am referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, published in 2016, promoted Jewish and non-Jewish scholars and intellectuals, government institutions, which has been adopted widely but has become, particularly in the last few years, a site of intense controversy and political actions. In November 2020, 122 Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists and intellectuals issued a statement which declared their opposition to antisemitism and the IHRA’s working definition thereof, which, they said, promotes the suppression of Palestinian rights for self-determination. In March this year the IHRA definition confronted a new challenge in the form of two alternative definitions: the Nexus Document, “Understanding Antisemitism at its Nexus with Israel and Zionism,” by the Nexus Task Force, a group of Jewish American scholars who offered a definition of antisemitism that grants more leeway to criticism of Israel than the one that Jewish groups are pressing governments to adopt: and the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, JDA, written by Jewish and non-Jewish scholars and intellectuals which put emphasis on the legitimate political speech and action concerning Israeli Politics and the Occupation, with the twofold aim: (1) to strengthen the fight against antisemitism by clarifying what it is and how it is manifested, (2) to protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine.

  6. Cfr. Michel Foucault, “Introduction”, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 9

  7. Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernità e Olocausto, Bologna: Il Mulino 1989, p. 42 [Modernity and the Holocaust, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989]

  8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew. An Exploration into Etiology of Hate (New York: Schocken Books), 1976, p. 5. [1946]

  9. Cf. Yosef Haym Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Antisemitism: the Iberian and the German Models (New York: Baech Institute), 1982, p. 5.

  10. Jacques Lacan, having formulated the concept of the mirror as a moment in the life of the infant, grouped it more generally under the concept of the imaginary. As part of his later work, he corrected some biases of his original conception, viewing the mirror stage less as a necessary stage in the development of the child than as the basis for the constitution of a subject, divided between the I, the subject of the unconscious, and the super-ego, the instance which relates to the image and the social, as the paradigm of “Imaginary order“. Jacques Lacan, Écrits. A Selection, London-New York: Routledge, 2008 [1966]), pp. 1–6.

  11. Reinhart Koselleck, Il Vocabolario della modernità. Progresso, crisi, utopia e altre storie di concetti (Editore: Il Mulino 2009); “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History”, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press), 2004, pp. 75–92. [1979] See also Roland Barthes, S/Z. Una lettura di “Sarrasine” di Balzac (Torino: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 251.

  12. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, op. cit., p. 157 ff., p. 156; “Linguistic Change and the History of Events”, Journal of Modern History 61, 4, 1989, pp. 649–666; idem, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. [1959]). See also Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” in German, Jews, and Antisemites (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Pres, 2006), pp. 67–158.

  13. Wilhelm Marr (1818–1904) introduced the term “antisemitism” into politics and founded the first “Antisemitic League” in 1879. Marr began his political career as a democrat and revolutionary, fighting for the emancipation of all oppressed groups including the Jews. But when he became disillusioned with contemporary politics, Jews became the focus of his attack. Cf. Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr. The Patriarch of Antisemitism (Jerusalem: Shazar, 1982. (Hebrew) See also Leon Poliakov, Storia dell’antisemitismo, IV, L’Europa suicida, 1870–1933 (La Nuova Italia, Florence 1990), p. 37.

  14. Zeev Sternhell, Les Anti-Lumières: du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide, (Paris: Gallimard, 2010 [2006]).

  15. The 1879 public debate termed ‘Berliner Antisemitismusstreit’ between Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke erupted over an earlier derogatory comment by von Treitschke in which he regarded Jews as a danger and misfortune to Germany. The public debate was in fact about the relationship between German Jews and the German state and nation in the late nineteenth century, and it is generally seen as a debate on nationality. It was sparked by an article published by von Treitschke, in which he spoke out vehemently against “an age of hybrid German-Jewish culture.” See: Krieger, Karsten, ed. Der „Berliner Antisemitismusstreit“1879–1881. Eine Kontroverse um die Zugehörigkeit der deutschen Juden zur Nation. Kommentierte Quellenedition (München: K. G. Saur, 2003), vol. II, p. 953. In 1894, in the midst of the Catholic anti-Jewish campaign, Bernard Lazare published his two-volume history of antisemitism, probably the first answer to Édouard A. Drumont’s 1886 book, La France juive, which contains an attack on the role of the Jews in France, calling for their exclusion from society. He initiated the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. Bernard Lazare, L’Antisémitisme. Son histoire et ses causes (Paris: Léon Chailley, éditeur, 1894); Édouard A. Drumont, La France juive. Essai d’histoire contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1886). In 1892, Drumont’s newspaper La Libre Paroleplayed a leading role in the virulence of its antisemitic propaganda.

  16. Cf. Peter Schäfer, “Introduction”, Judeophobia. Attitudes towards the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1998 [1997]), p. 1 et seq.

  17. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Sulla parola. Istantanee filosofiche, Alfonso Cariolato, ed., (Roma: Nottetempo, 2004), pp. 27–28. See also Id., De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), pp. 42–108.

  18. See Charles S. Maier: “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era”, The American Historical Review, 105, 3 (2000), pp. 807–831.

  19. Robert S. Wistrich was probably the historian who has studied this aspect in the most detailed manner. See his books: Antisemitism, the Longest Hatred, op. cit. and A Lethal Obsession. Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, op, cit.

  20. The question of whether the visibility – cultural, political, economic and social – of the Jews after emancipation was a determining factor in the unleashing of the violent prejudices against Jews is at the center of Arendt’s reflections in The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit.: Antisemitism - in particular chapter three “The Jews and Society,” pp. 75–103; Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction. Antisemitism, 1770–1933, op. cit.; Shmuel Ettinger’s Modern Antisemitism. Studies and Essays (Tel Aviv 1978) and Jacob L. Talmon, “European History as the Seedbed of the Holocaust”, Holocaust and Rebirth. A Symposium (Jerusalem 1974), pp. 11–75. See also Dan Diner, “Epistemics of the Holocaust considering the question of “why?” and of “how?”, Naharaim, vol. 1, pp. 195–213; idem, “The Holocaust in European Political Culture”, New German Critique, 90, 2003, pp. 36–44.

  21. Among the uninterrupted flow of scholarly texts on this topic from the 1990s to the present I would cite as the most groundbreaking works: Arno J. Mayer, “Memory and History: On Poverty and Remembering and Forgetting the Judeocide,” Radical History Review 56 (1993): 5–20: 7, 14; Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945 (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1996); Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag,1999), And from the year 2000 see: Jeffrey C. Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals. The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama,” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 5–85; Jean Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victims. Génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris 2002); Michael Rothberg, “Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 158–184; Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006 [2003 in German]). Paul Gilroy, Between Camps. Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Color Line (London: Allen Lane, 2000); Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003); Carolyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Dan Stone, History and Memory and Mass Atrocity. Essays on Holocaust and Genocide (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); Dirk Moses ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Manuela Consonni, “The New Grammar of Otherness: Europe, the Shoah and the Jews”, Jewish History 24 (2010): 105–126; Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2014); Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015); Claudio Fogu et al., eds., Probing the Limits of Holocaust Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.- London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2016); Raz Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians. War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Ethan Katz et al., eds., Colonialism and the Jews (Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Press, 2017); Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba. A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Carolyn J. Dean, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony After Genocide (Ithaca - London: Cornell University Press, 2019); Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject. Beyond Victim and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

  22. On the matter of time Dan Diner notes: “this metaphor of temporal condensation is that the Holocaust, as an ultimately radical event of extremely short duration – embracing in actuality the compacted span from the summer of 1941 to the end of the war in 1945, or even more precisely, i.e., more radically, from summer 1942 to autumn 1944 – packs all preceding and subsequent time layers into its vortex,” “The Holocaust in European Political Culture”, cit., p. 43.

  23. Zionism is a complex ideological movement with secular left-wing and religious right-wing factions that was born at the end of the nineteenth century to address the need of the Jews for national self-determination as a response to the resurgence of an active and vigorous antisemitism decades before the Holocaust. See Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972).

  24. The main studies on the matter are: Pietr Lagrou, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1945–1965”, Past and Present, 154–155 (1997), pp. 181–222; Id., The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge 2000); Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism and the Holocaust, Berkeley 2000; David Bankier, ed. The Jews are Coming back. The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after World War II (New York-Jerusalem 2005); C.S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past. History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge-London 1988). For France, see Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1987); J.B.Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust. The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). For Italy see Guri Schwarz, Ritrovare se stessi. Gli ebrei nell’Italia post-fascista (Rome-Bari 2004); Manuela M. Consonni, Resistenza o Shoah. Gerush veHashmada beItalia, 1945–1985 (Jerusalem: Magnes University Press, 2010); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Penguin Press, 2005); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: St. Martin Press, 2012); Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, op. cit; Raz Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians. War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945, op. cit.

  25. It is worth ‘revisiting’ the debate organized by the American Journal Judaism and held in New York on March 26th, 1967 (four months before the war). Four prominent Jewish intellectuals, Elie Wiesel, Emil Fackenheim, Richard Popkin and George Steiner, were invited to participate in a symposium on the theme of “Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust future.” At the center of the discussion stood Jewish identity, the role of the Jews in the world, the Shoah and its legacy. It is here, for the first time, mostly because of Wiesel’s intervention, that the premises of the idea of the uniqueness of the Jewish extermination were expressed. The Jewish extermination should be understood, in Wiesel’s words, as a “Jewish (emphasis added) experience, and the event [viewed] as both irrational and unique”, claiming it as “glorious chapter of our eternal history of the Jews.” Steiner saw the extermination in its more universal aspect, and the value of being a Jew after the Holocaust as “the value of being a man who has experience to the uttermost the bestiality of man.” Judaism, March 16–3, 1967, pp. 280, 285, 288. After the war, two publications, against the grain, came out the collected volume, edited by Jean-Paul Sartre of Les Temps Modernes 22, 1967, 253 BIS. The book gave a voice to Arab and Israeli politicians, historians and intellectuals: ‘The Arab point of view’ (pp. 91–367) and ‘The Israeli point of view’ (pp. 371–967). I believe that it was in this book that the question of Israel was formulated for the first time in terms of a ‘colonial-settler state’ by Maxime Rodinson, the French Marxist historian, in the chapter “Israël, fait colonial?”(pp. 17–88). It was subsequently published in English: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Monad Press, 1973). His position on the war and its aftermath was based on a fundamental proposition: Israel could not be regarded only as a colonial-settler state but also as a national fact.

  26. See in one section of the discussion the response of the French intellectual Raymond Aron to Charles De Gaulle, who, after the outbreak of the Six‐Day War, broke his alliance with the State of Israel, defining the Jews “an elite self-confident and ruling people.” Aron saw in De Gaulle’s words not an off-the-cuff remark, but one which was deeply related to France’s choices at the end of the Algerian war and which also underlined the impact that this discussion would have on the world’s perception of the Jews. In Aron’s opinion, “a new period in the history of the Jews and maybe of antisemitism [had begun…], not the time of contempt, but the time of suspicion.” Raymond Aron, Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine (Paris 2007), p. 62. Fittingly enough, it was Primo Levi who stated that the center of gravity should remain in the Diaspora, holding that the essence of Judaism could be better preserved in the Diaspora than in Israel. See Gad Lerner, “Se questo è uno stato,” in Primo Levi. Conversazioni e Interviste, 1963–1987 (Turin 1997), pp. 308–72. In a 1969 essay, Gershom Scholem spoke of the centrality of Jewish extermination as a cement that bound the Diaspora and the State of Israel together: “Everything that from now on came to pass among the survivors stood – and stands – in the shadow of this trauma. That is as true of Israel, [. . .] as it is of the Jews in the Diaspora. All were confronted by a fact with which they had not reckoned, a fact that boggled the mind, and the reaction to which involved a task for one’s awareness that was as urgent as it was insoluble. It is this community of a deeply felt experience that concerns and agitates all of us so directly, that – far above and beyond all theories or even theologies – represents the strongest emotional bond between Israel and the Diaspora.” Gershom Scholem delivered a lecture on “Israel und Diaspora” at the annual convention of the League of the Swiss Jewish Communities in Geneva on May 14th 1969. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, Werner J. Dannhauser (ed.) (New York 1976), p. 250 [orig. Judaica 2, Frankfurt-am-Main 1970, pp. 55–76].

  27. From different perspectives and often in conflict over their contentions, arguments and claims: Benny Morris; 1948 and after. Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994); Ilan Greilsammer, La nouvelle histoire d’Israël (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); Anita Shapira and Derek J. Prenslar, eds. Israeli historical revisionism: from left to right (Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 2003); Yoav Gelber, Independence Versus Nakbah: The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 (Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Hebrew, 2004). Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté. Judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale, (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007); Anita Shapira, Israel: A history (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2012); Derek J. Prenslar, et alii, eds. Israël face à son passé (Paris: Arkhe editions, 2010); Yoav Gelber, Independence Versus Nakbah: The Arab–Israeli War of 1948 (Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Hebrew, 2004): David N. Myers, Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy and Law, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 2018), pp. 183–191; Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).

  28. Cf. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler colonialism: a theoretical overview (London & New York: Palgrave MacMillan,2010). See Maxime Rodinson, “Israël, fait colonial?”, op. cit. See also on the topic one of the major scholars: Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto Press, 2006) and “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation”, Journal of Palestine Studies 42, 2 (2013),

  29. Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine / Israel”, Settler Colonial Studies 2, 1 (January 2012): 59–80; Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 61–78; Honaida Ghanim, “Lo Mamash Apartheid: Al Ha-Dinamika Bein Kolonialism Hityashvuti le-Kibus Tzva’i”, Hamerhav Hatziburi 6 (2012): 95–112. 26–42. See also Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  30. See for example Philip Weiss, ‘Documenting Palestinian Invisibility for 40 Years – an Interview with James Zogby’ https://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/documenting-palestinian-invisibility/

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    Manuela Consonni

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Consonni, M. ‘Upping the Antis’: Addressing the Conceptual Ambiguities Surrounding ‘Antisemitism’. Soc 59, 25–33 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00665-4

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