YOU PEOPLE

Antisemitism and its tangled meanings.

- BY IAN BURUMA

Exactly who the Jews are—often a fraught question—has rarely been a mystery to their enemies. Stalin cast them as “rootless cosmopolitans” colluding with “American imperialists” to undermine the Soviet Union. In Hitler's fevered imagination, they were bacilli infecting the healthy “Aryan” race. They have been denounced as lecherous predators and as omnipotent conspirators, as arch-Bolsheviks and arch-capitalists. Increasingly, these days, “Jew” is conflated with “Zionist,” which, as a term of opprobrium, can mean anything from “settler colonialist” to “fascist” to “racist.”The older sense of Zionism—establishing a Jewish state to shield Jews from persecution—has largely slipped from view.

Of course, opposition to Zionism does not itself amount to antisemitism. And right-wing politicians who accuse pro-Palestinian students of antisemitism are hardly credible arbiters. The Trump Administration, which poses as a defender of Jews, has nurtured links to antisemitic extremists; Trump himself has dined with outspoken Holocaust deniers and once said that neo-Nazi marchers raging against Jewish “replacement” of non-Jewish whites included “some very fine people.” A hard-right government full of blood-and-soil nationalists which claims to be the protector of a Jewish minority would once have seemed very peculiar indeed.

When words lose their original meanings and are repurposed as verbal cudgels, the public sphere becomes a jungle of denunciation, intimidation, and even violence. Right-wing politicians who label all critics of Israel antisemites are the mirror image of those who assume that all Jews are Zionists and all Zionists are racists. One of the many virtues of Mark Mazower’s excellent and timely “On Antisemitism” (Penguin Press) is his effort to restore historical context to a word that has become a generic term of condemnation.