Is anti-Semitism a new name for an ancient, uninterrupted phenomenon? It is a recent name, no doubt—its 1878 coinage being attributed to Swiss radical Wilhelm Marr. Yet, new names have become one of the curious features of problems that either refer to a long and obstinate history (e.g., the hatred of the Jews through the centuries) or indicate sites of resistance, the refusal to confront diverse and changing phenomena. Understandably, different interests seeking to isolate and refute or, alternatively, contextualize "anti-Semitism" necessarily run the risk of sacralizing or banalizing it. Thus, inseparable from the study and elusive comprehension of such an object (or objects), the politics of anti-Semitism have involved most manifestly the definition of the word Semite (along with its companion, Aryan, a term that was invented in German Protestant theological circles circa 1771 and quickly spread to England, France, and their respective empires) and most covertly the very representation of the West vis-a-vis its others.
HISTORY
Scholars and ideologues differ in invoking, for different periods and regions of the world, terms such as Jew-hatred, anti-Judaism, Judeophobia, more recently including even anti-Zionism. Is there, then, one history of anti-Semitism through the ages (Almog 1988)? Should one not attend instead to the distinct histories of relations between Jews and the populations among whom they have lived? A further claim has been made that some forms of anti-Semitism have thrived, in fact, in the complete absence of Jews. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, famously asserted that anti-Semitism is essentially independent of the Jews, that it rather "makes the Jew" ("c’estl’antisemite qui fait le Juif") (1948, p. 84). Indeed, it now seems as if anti-Semitism has become a unified and universal, indeed global, phenomenon, one that has spread and radiated from its historical center in early Christian theology (borrowing from earlier Greek and Latin writers) and in western Europe to all corners of the planet. When considering the genocidal paroxysm that hostility to Jews reached in Europe (and, incidentally, only there), the temptation has increased to read all prior hostility toward Jews as prefiguring the horrors of the Holocaust (Bernstein 1994).
EXPLANATIONS
Clearly, anti-Semitism demands explanation—and refuta-tion—and many compelling cases have been made in this direction. Some have sought to testify to anti-Semitism’s quasi-eternal nature (Netanyahu 2001; Bein 1990) or account for its specific persistence (the recurrence of Christian theological prejudice). Others have explored vectors of change (the well-known, modern shift from religion to race described by Leon Poliakov; the teleological understanding of Daniel Goldhagen) and tried to account for historical distinctiveness (Amos Funkenstein on the changing and proximate nature of the Jewish-Christian dispute; Gavin Langmuir’s criterion of "socially significant chimerical hostility" [1990, p. 341]; Jeremy Cohen’s description of the medieval transformation of the Jews from "theological witness" to "demonic" figures) and geographical or cultural difference (Poliakov, again, as well as Mark Cohen). At times, Jewish thinkers themselves have gone so far as to consider Jewish "antisocial behavior" as a major source of anti-Jewish hostility (Bernard Lazare; Israel Yuval on Jewish collective suicide in the eleventh century).
Other reasons, equally contentious, have been proposed: materialist reasons, for example, and chief among them, socioeconomic ones ("Jews and money," as the old topos goes, but see also Abram Leon’s notion of the Jews as a "people-class"), and political reasons (Karl Marx, but also Hannah Arendt’s theory of the modern state and the role of "political anti-Semitism" in it) and psychological reasons as well (Sigmund Freud on sibling rivalry and castration, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno on mimesis). Historians of science have shown the importance of new categories of thought and classification, including those operative in Jewish self-perception (Gilman 1986; Hart 2000). There are those who have sought to locate anti-Jewish hostility within the larger frame of attitudes toward "outsiders" (Mayer 1982) or as one among numerous features of a "persecuting society" (Moore 1987). A recurring dispute continues to separate those who wish to distinguish exclusionary practices on the basis of their (real or fantasmatic) targets and those who uphold the strategic usefulness of conducting a unifled analysis of (and struggle against) all agents of exclusionary practices. Should all racisms be studied and fought as the different guises of one essence or should differences be acknowledged and exposed?
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
Hannah Arendt (1958) insisted on the numerous elements and structures that relate attitudes toward the Jews with issues of state formation, modern racism, imperialism, and colonialism. After Arendt, however, the most significant breakthrough in the study of anti-Semitism was made by Edward W. Said (1978). Arguing that the history of Orientalism (and prominent among them "western views of Islam") is the history of anti-Semitism, Said has enabled a novel understanding of the emergence of the category of "Semites" as the most obvious manifestation of an enduring theologico-political problem. This problem, which antedates modernity, is at the heart of the West’s own constitution as a historical subject. Relating theological premises to political endeavors, and religion to race, Said demonstrates the necessity of understanding the distributive and dynamic distinctions between Jews and Arabs, between Judaism and Islam, strategically associating and dissociating the two from within the standpoint of Western Christendom and, later, of European colonialism (Anidjar 2003). This dynamic approach also means taking the measure of the late eighteenth-century invention of "Semites" as the unity of race and religion, of Jew and Arab (Olender 1992; Hess 2002). From this novel perspective, it becomes possible to better understand the spread of European anti-Semitism to the Arab world (described, for example, by Bernard Lewis and Genevieve Dermenjian), as well as phenomena like Zionism in its different figures, at once emancipatory and potential manifestations of covert self-hatred (Gilman 1986).
The intricate connections that tie modern anti-Semitism to Zionism may further explain the continued contaminations we witness today between the two (Wistrich 1990; Finkelstein 2005). The Zionist "negation of exile" also participated in the project to reinscribe and undo the unity of the Semites and recast it from within as either a separation of Jews from Arabs (anti-Semitism from Orientalism) or as a binational perspective—advocated by Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Arendt, and other members of Brit Shalom, a Jewish group founded in 1925 dedicated to promoting coexistence—seeking to invent and promote collective rights for both Jews and Arabs (Raz-Krakotzkin 2001). The debate over the persistence of anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism can therefore be better understood as the enduring effort to maintain Jews and Arabs as separate and opposed, indeed as objects of different, unrelated, exclusionary practices. Reframed as the unity of a theologico-political complex that manages both hostility to Jews and hostility to Arabs, anti-Judaism and the war on Islam, anti-Semitism and Orientalism, are revealed as indissociable: one and the same in their very difference.
