41845358-Antisemitism

P REFACE
THIS BOOK HAS TAKEN MUCH LONGER TO WRITE than either of us anticipated
when we embarked on it more than a few years ago, the principal
reason being that there is no end to mythmaking about Jews. While we were
in the last stages of revising our work, the events of September 2001 suddenly
made the myths discussed in this book newly relevant and their irrational nature
more glaring. Throughout the Islamic world the bizarre tale quickly
spread that Jews had engineered the bombings of the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. As proof, its proponents, descending deeper into the world of
delusion, maintained that four thousand Jews, warned by Israeli agents, did
not report to their offices at the World Trade Center on September 11. This
belief in an international Jewish conspiracy is only one of several classic myths
about Jews that are widely believed in the Muslim world, all imported from
the Christian West, copied in the most literal way from the enormous corpus,
medieval and modern, of European antisemitism. The widespread propagation
and acceptance in the contemporary Arab Islamic world of these discredited
myths is another illustration, in a different time and place, of the historic
antisemitism that scarred Christian Europe.
The vastness of the topic and space constraints have compelled us to be
extremely selective. Thus even in our longest chapter, which discusses that
common anti-Jewish delusion, the “rich Jews” and their putative economic
wizardry, much material on Jewish economic history had to be deleted or drastically
abbreviated. In writing the chapters, the memory of the Holocaust,
which was the terrible fulfillment of mythical thinking, was ever present. Our
research into the murky area of anti-Jewish myths, particularly those that demonize
and dehumanize the Jewish people, reinforces our belief that historians
need to explore more fully the power and significance of the nonrational in
human affairs. Our experience also confirms the assertion that Jewish history
is an integral part of general history, particularly in the generations after
emancipation when Jewish genius contributed so much to Western thought,