In July 2025, I visited Stanford University. Tacked up all over the campus were leaflets identifying Israel as a leading—possibly, the leading—cause of climate change. The notion that a country of 10 million people could be a principal agent bringing about a global rise in temperatures is, of course, ridiculous. It’s also an ironic assertion in that it singles out a Middle Eastern nation that is not a major oil producer.
Not quite a year later as I am writing this, I see a story in The New York Times that claims that Israel has trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. The source for the article it turns out is a Hamas front group in Switzerland that previously said that Israel was using a secret technology to “vaporize” Palestinians and that it was harvesting Palestinian organs for re-sale. The Times’s columnist neglected to mention all this, instead presenting the outfit as a serious nonprofit research group.
The leaflet and the bizarre assertions of organ harvesting and Israeli prison guards working in tandem with Lassie to rape Palestinians are evidence of something that’s been readily apparent of late. This extends beyond passionate hatred of Israel. Protestations to the contrary, that antipathy is symptomatic of the extent to which anti-Semitism has become chic and acceptable both on the “activist” left and on the far right.
For that reason, Sander L. Gilman’s new book, Antisemitisms: A History of Jew Hating, is timely. An emeritus professor of psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Antisemitisms displays both the many virtues and the routine failings that one might expect to encounter in a work by an older, academic psychiatrist. On the positive side of the ledger is Gilman’s thorough knowledge of his subject. Gilman has titled his book in the plural because he correctly realizes that Jew-hatred has quite a number of forms and motivations, that it’s gone through an assortment of styles through its long history, and that the term is a catchall expression.
Among the manifest weaknesses of Gilman’s book is his mode of interpretation. This sometimes prompts him to view the issue through an opaque lens. Thus, he looks to a number of notoriously unreliable thinkers who were once much beloved in the academy. Among these are the Frankfurt School philosophers and Sigmund Freud. Gilman does far better when he sticks to his own take on the historical record.
What may be an even greater problem is that his book is almost entirely descriptive and almost never prescriptive. In addition, as he is a liberal academic, he has an almost instinctive sympathy for other liberal academics, and he treats self-hating anti-Zionists with far more deference than they rightly deserve. All too often he is interpretative but unwilling to present an unambiguous judgment of right and wrong.
Gilman is correct, though, in seeing anti-Semitism in terms of its antiquity. Jews composed a large proportion of the population of the Roman Empire. Some estimates have gone as high as 10% of the whole. That would mean that when the empire was at its greatest extent, there might have been seven million Jews—nearly half as many as there are now in the world. A better guess is that there were likely half or one-third that number. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly the case that even after the Roman legions destroyed the Second Temple in 70 A.D., Jews were one of the empire’s largest religious sects and one might even routinely encounter the followers of Yahweh throughout the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the empire. Moreover, in spite of their monotheism, Jews were generally tolerated. (Paul, let us remember, was a Roman citizen.) This acceptance was a consequence of Jews not proselytizing. This aspect of Christianity—initially regarded as a singularly pernicious Jewish denomination—prompted Roman emperors to undertake periodic and often bloody methods of persecution aimed at the new faith.
Christianity’s rise to the status of state religion in 380 overturned Judaism’s position. No longer was it a harmless if peculiar faith. Instead, it became of use to Christianity as a proof of Jesus’s origins but a cause of consternation owing to its adherents’ irksome yet steadfast refusal to convert. Still, in Europe, Jews were relatively few until early modern times. It has been estimated that there were only 100,000 Ashkenazic Jews as recently as 1600. Far greater were the numbers of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, those living in predominantly Islamic lands.
Thus, until the time of the First Crusade, Jews attracted very little interest or notice from the Christians among whom they lived. The first anti-Jewish attacks—as at Speyer in 1096—broke out at that time. An assembled mob of religiously inspired troops undertook the first European pogrom. Other assaults followed in Worms and Mainz.
In the next few centuries, Jews were repeatedly tossed out from different European nations for an entirely different reason. As Christians had been told not to engage in forms of banking that required the charging of interest, Jews took on this role, and Christian kings used forcible expulsions to be freed from their debts. This happened repeatedly in France and England. Thus, Jews were expelled from Paris by Philip Augustus in 1182, and there were more general attempts to remove Jews from the whole kingdom of France—and to take their property—by Louis IX in 1254 and Philip IV in 1306. Similar motives drove Edward I to expel Jews from England in 1287.
The inspiration to expel Jews from Spain in 1492 bore greater similarity to the attacks of the Crusades, as King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella, and their Inquisitors were intent on making their newly united kingdom one that was uniformly devout and orthodox. That led Spain’s Jews to flee to an assortment of other lands and regions, including the Netherlands, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.
The widely asserted claim that Jews were once broadly accepted within the Islamic world is thorny. It is undeniably true that the Ottomans employed Jews in a variety of critical roles—including some high government offices—and that, like Christians, they were permitted to live in protected enclaves known as millets. However, adherents of both faiths were subordinate. Compelled to pay special taxes, they were prevented even from something as ordinary as purchasing a gun or riding a horse.
As the Jews were being expelled from Spain, Pope Alexander VI was welcoming them to Italy. So often painted as a rogue, Rodrigo Borgia was nevertheless a friend of the Jews. Thus, the concept of the Jewish ghetto appeared at a later date. The first one was constructed in Venice in 1516, 13 years after his papacy ended.
Modern anti-Semitism, too, has had many forms and guises, and Gilman considers a number of them. The early American republic was remarkably welcoming of Jews. That was famously demonstrated by George Washington in his letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, in which he said:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.… May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.
It is a curious but undeniable fact that prior to the Civil War, the U.S. was far more plagued by persecution of Roman Catholics. Thus, in many states in the late 18th century, there were laws against Catholics holding public office, and in the 1850s Protestant mobs attacked Catholic churches and even some convents.
The persecution and hostility that Jews began to experience in Europe during and after the onset of the Enlightenment had numerous causes. Gilman fails to give sufficient regard to one that is by no means entirely undeserved. Washington’s letter had included a crucial reservation. This was the injunction upon the Jews that they should be counted on for “effectual support”: patriotism and devoted action, especially in time of war.
Although Jews have provided this throughout their sojourn as exiles, it is also true that many of the most infamous political radicals and revolutionaries in the Western world have been of the tribe of Abraham. Marx’s parents were Jews who had converted to Christianity, and it’s said that he was even an earnest Christian for a period during his adolescence. Nonetheless, he is foremost among a long list of Jewish intellectuals who merit our censure. Also on that list are Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman, Karl Radek, and more recent figures like William Kunstler. They are, as Jews would say, a shonda: cause for shame. They have also provided a foundation for many of the wilder notions of fervent anti-Semites who insist that the activities of Jewish radicals are part of a deliberate plot by Jews to gain control over non-Jews.
A better way of thinking of this was provided in an editorial that appeared in February 1920 in the Illustrated Sunday Herald. There Winston Churchill argued that there was a war taking place in the Jewish soul between the advocates of Zionism and the advocates of Communism. It was a perceptive observation and a striking instance in which the causes of good and evil were so clearly delineated. Jewish radicalism is a rejection of Judaism. It is also a means by which some Jews seek to throw off the stigma of Jewishness.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism wedded paranoid antipathy for “Jewish” Bolshevism with certain precepts taken from Social Darwinism. For Nazis, the success of Jews in secular occupations was a reason to regard them as dangerous rivals who had to be sidelined. This is yet another kind of anti-Semitism.
As we can see, anti-Semitism is shape-shifting and recurrent. Thus, the recent hostile preoccupation with Israel’s attempts to defend itself seems to have replaced transgender surgery for minors as the crackpot leftist cause of the moment. This obsession contains elements of earlier incarnations of anti-Semitism, yet it unites the extreme right with the far left.
Among the right-wingers there is a belief that Jews are manipulating American foreign policy. Such folk share some of their beliefs with the ideology set forth in Nazism—and in numerous instances they have turned out to have an unhealthy fascination with that ideology. They find potential allies among the current crop of Marxists, as Hitler once embraced Stalin. The latter number are only steps apart from earlier generations of socialists who identified Jews with capitalism and privilege and hated them accordingly. One of Marx’s more clever remarks applies to them: “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools.” Sadly, it’s a statement that applies also to Marx, as his essays and letters reveal and display both his anti-Semitism and his racism.
Sander Gilman ends his book with some implicit criticism of the ways of the Haredi, this is to say, the Orthodox Jews, in Israel. Alongside this, Gilman presents a defense of the secular Jews, like himself, who look down on them.
It’s a small-minded end to a sometimes highly informative book, and its effect upon me is not what the author intends. Rather than persuade me, it reminds me of my obligation as a member of the tribe to acknowledge the unpleasant fact that a number of Jews have been among the most dangerous radicals of the past century.
That is counterbalanced, however, by the knowledge that Jews have also been leaders in attacking and exposing these ideas. (Think of Milton Friedman and Irving Kristol.) This can’t disabuse people of hatred of Jews, of course. Nor can it persuade people that Israel’s acts of self-defense aren’t genocide, and it isn’t an apartheid state. But reason has its limits, and when supposedly legitimate people in supposedly serious publications are saying that you train dogs to rape prisoners, the problem isn’t sufficient application of reason.
