Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

In the Classroom
Leonid Livak*
Hardly a year goes by without the appearance of a book endeavoring
to explain present-day attitudes toward Jews and Israel by means of a longview
historical analysis. Authors typically locate the beginning of the story
in Christian antiquity’s theological anti-Judaism; subsequently, they
examine the translation of the Church’s teaching about Judaism and its
practitioners into the cultural image and social treatment of Jews (Judeophobia/Judeophilia)
in Europe from medieval to modern times. The next
step is to trace the permutations of these practices under the influence of
modern scientific and political theories, which ultimately merge in the ideology
of antisemitism and dominate attitudes toward Jews from the late
nineteenth century through the Second World War. In the wake of the war,
Jew-baiting, now rationalized as anti-Zionism, gets a second lease on life in
the Soviet empire and the Muslim world. A typical narrative ends with the
spread of anti-Zionism in the culture of the New Left, which, from the
1960s on, instrumentalizes the Arab-Israeli conflict to its own ideological
ends. So much so, in fact, that this “new antisemitism” overshadows the
racially motivated rhetoric of the political right, made taboo by the Shoah,
as the left effectively replaces the right in the role of the main intellectual
host and purveyor of anti-Jewish attitudes today.
These books carry on the intellectual tradition of examining current
attitudes toward Jews within an uninterrupted continuum spanning two millennia—a
tradition pioneered by James Parkes, Jules Isaac, and Joshua
Trachtenberg seventy years ago and subsequently elaborated by several
generations of scholars in theology, history, culture, and the arts (Norman
Cohn, Alan Davies, Sander Gilman, Jacob Katz, Gavin Langmuir, Hyam
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