The New Antisemitism

We live in a turbulent age of dislocation. Far-right ethno- nationalism is surging. Extreme left-wing ideologies are on the uptick. Radical Islamist movements have become increasingly influential. Amid these developments, democracy has come under siege and a strain of antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism has emerged.

Shalom Lappin examines these unsettling trends in The New Antisemitism: The Resurgence of An Ancient Hatred In The Modern World (Polity Press), a trenchant work of scholarship that should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand our contemporary world.

It is less than surprising that these malignant ideas have appeared at a time of wrenching economic and social upheaval and the growing concentration of wealth in an era of globalization. Naturally, these trends have created a deep sense of inequality, abandonment, helplessness and anger.

There was a similar period in late nineteenth century Europe, and it gave rise to variants of political and racial antisemitism whose end product was fascism in Italy and a genocidal Nazi regime in Germany.

Lappin, a professor at Queen Mary University of London, delves into this topic with expert authority.

He is particularly adept at drawing portraits of European political activists who started off as liberals and evolved into reactionaries. Willhelm Marr, a German pamphleteer who coined the word antisemitism, claimed that Jews sought to exploit emancipation to seize control of societies. Karl Lueger, a mayor of Vienna, railed against Jews while expanding the city’s social welfare system.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain accused Jews of igniting wars through financial manipulation. Edouard Drumont, the founder of the Antisemitic League of France, was a major figure in the campaign against the French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus.

Far more recently, alt-right movements antagonistic to Arab and Islamic power have adopted a pro-Israel position, while retaining their basic antisemitic attitude to Jews.

Yet, as Lappin points out, antisemitism has not been the sole preserve of right-wingers. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the anarcho-socialist, demanded the expulsion of Jews from France. Bruno Bauer, a German philosopher and theologian, identified Jews as theologically and culturally incompatible with a radical liberal order. Karl Marx, a baptized Jew, wrote scathingly, “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”

“In general, the European left, like the right, regarded the continued existence of a Jewish collectivity as acutely problematic,” writes Lappin in a piercing sentence that encapsulates his thesis. He adds, “The hostility of sections of ostensibly progressive opinion to Jewish collective existence, formulated as opposition to ‘Jewish particularism,’ has remained an active current of Western thought throughout the postwar era into the present.”

Lappin points out that anti-Jewish polemics are as old as recorded history, having surfaced in the Greco-Roman world and having predated Christianity by several centuries. The refusal by Jews to accept pagan cultural influences and Jesus as the messiah was a problem in each of these separate periods. During medieval times, Jews were subjected to expulsions throughout Europe.

Jews in Muslim lands, though usually treated better, faced a host of barriers and restrictions. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of ethnocentric nation states, and the rise of political Zionism imperilled Christians and Jews alike.

Political Islam developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a reaction to Arab and Turkish nationalism. Its proponents ran the gamut from Mohammed Rashid Rida to Sayyed Qutb. While Rida regarded Zionism as a plot by Jews to take over Palestine, Qutb labelled Jews as perfidious enemies of Islam. Qutb’s ideas were embraced by Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda founder, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Lappin claims that the informal alliance between political Islamism and the far-left has increasingly shaped what passes for “progressive activism” over the past twenty five years. Islamists are given a free pass on their theocratic and patriarchal ideology, and their antisemitism is accepted as an expression of anti-colonialism, he notes.

“The Islamist/far-left alliance has generated a toxic environment for many Jewish communities in the Diaspora,” he says. It has been on vivid display since the one day Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023.

“Increasingly, Jews are expected to publicly disavow Israel as a condition for acceptance,” he writes in an allusion to Jews on the left. “This is particularly the case at universities in the West. Jewish students are frequently required to run a gauntlet of political legitimacy tests to participate in a variety of campus organizations.”

In Lappin’s view, a minority of Jews have joined the far-left, which rejects Zionism and calls for a one-state solution in place of Israel. The modern far-left movement, having inherited and updated the traditional anti-Zionism of the Marxist left, perceives Zionism as a reactionary expression of Jewish separatism.

“This part of the left has transformed Zionism from a political ideology that was formulated as an attempt to solve the problem of severe racism in the Diaspora into an international conspiracy that manipulates governments through a network of powerful lobbies.”

He adds, “The entry of Zionist conspiracy theories into the political and academic mainstream is generating an increasingly toxic environment for Jews in the broader public domain.”

In short, Jews have been attacked by all sides.

As Lappin puts it, “They are identified as subversive agents of corruption by the far right, and they are treated as beneficiaries of white privilege by elements of the post-modernist left. For both they are vilified as members of an elite who manipulate instruments of financial and state power to advance nefarious interests.”

Turning to the United States, he believes that the deep sense of acceptance and security American Jews have enjoyed was disrupted by Donald Trump during his first term of office.

For the first time, they were confronted by a president whose electoral base included large numbers of white supremacists for whom antisemitism is an “integral part of their world view.” Throughout his presidency, he claims, Trump “made a point of not distancing himself from these groups.”

Lappin’s observations are thoughtful, based on thorough research and expressed in fluid prose. He has written a comprehensive and relatively concise account of the world’s longest and deepest hatred that both the average reader and scholars alike will probably appreciate.