Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

760 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:759one of the editors of a left-wing magazine and something of a peacenik,participating in ideological debates and criticizing both people and the governmentfor their complacency following the resounding military victory inthe June war. Tours in east central Europe brought home to Wistrich thecommunist regime’s cynical exploitation of antisemitism and anti-Zionismas a political weapon, revealing how little freedom of any kind was permittedin the Soviet bloc and how far the colossal experiment fell short of itsideals: To each according to need, From each according to ability. Theseexperiences, and his disillusionment with communism and the left generally,induced Wistrich to take up the subject of socialism and the Jewishquestion in central Europe for his doctoral dissertation. Advised that UniversityCollege, London, would be the optimum location for access tosources among other advantages, in the early 1970s he embarked on whathas been his lifetime pursuit. In the four decades since he has made himselfthe master—utilizing, I note with envy, his command of twelve languages—ofthe whole history of antisemitism; witness his magnificent treatiseof 2010, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to theGlobal Jihad (reviewed in the June 2010 [Vol. 2, No. 1] issue of the JSA).Over those years, Wistrich has written numerous general works,monographs, and specialized articles as well as reviews and journalisticpieces, a great many of which follow through to the present on the themesand concerns first addressed in his dissertation at the University of London,Socialism and the Jewish Question in Germany and Austria 1880-1914(1974). From Ambivalence to Betrayal synthesizes his own contributionsand those of many others to the field as well as original archival researchfilling in lacunae and imparting a unifying interpretative thesis to the fullsweep from the 1830s to the present—namely, the consistency and continuity,east and west, of antisemitism and anti-Zionism from the socialistpioneers of the early nineteenth century over that long span of time and inmany countries and regions to the present. Thus, Wistrich is a man from theleft who has been exercised these many years by antisemitism on the left,and his book is an inquiry “whether antisemitism was a movement of theleft or right, radical or conservative—or whether it belongs to some moreheterogeneous, hybrid category.” In another passage, he states (not definitively,much less dogmatically) that antisemitism on the left was primal andoriginal, that on the right it was derivative, that Nazism “was an anti-Jewishmutation of the socialist idea which the European Left was singularly illpreparedto confront.”Although From Ambivalence to Betrayal is an extraordinary achievement,it has flaws, one regarding the UK that is considered later in thisreview. Comparing it to his masterpiece, A Lethal Obsession, the book issomewhat disappointing for the reader. There are many repetitions, e.g., the