cover image Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism

Robert S. Wistrich. Pantheon Books, $27.5 (341pp) ISBN 978-0-679-40946-5

An excellent, thoughtful and alarming survey of anti-Semitism's long, ugly history and its contemporary resurgence, this volume accompanies a PBS television series. Wistrich, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Hitler's Apocalypse, traces anti-Jewish hatred from the pagan world's envy of the Jewish diaspora through Christianity's theological polemics against Judaism to the Enlightenment, when Voltaire and Rousseau ridiculed Jews as inherently perverse. The Christian condemnation of the Jews as murderers of God and agents of Satan was later taken up by Nazis, Bolsheviks and Muslims. Wistrich astutely sifts the stereotypes, fantasies and obsessions that have preoccupied anti-Semites for more than two millennia. He tracks the persistent undercurrents of prejudice that have spawned anti-Semitic violence and neo-Nazi or ultrarightist movements in modern Britain, America, Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the Arab world, he notes, anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism command quasi-automatic support under authoritarian regimes. Scores of remarkable illustrations enliven the narrative. (Aug.)