Review

Reviewed Work(s): Antisemitism: A History by Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy

Review by: Jonathan D. Sarna
Source: Journal of American Ethnic History , Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 119-121
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History
Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.2.0119

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Reviews 119

Wenger is also careful to acknowledge that the Yiddish-speaking Left had a more
ambiguous stance toward the Americanization project. As she shows, Socialists
sometimes recognized America’s superiority over eastern Europe but often used
holidays to point out where America was falling short of its promise of equality and
democracy. In children’s textbooks, they identified with a dissenting tradition that ran
through the abolitionists and labor leaders such as Eugene V. Debs. The Communist
stance toward the American Jewish heritage depended on the general politics of the
movement at the time. Here Wenger is on shakier ground than she is in the rest of
the book, for she misattributes the Communists’ sudden interest in both American
patriotism and Jewish tradition in the late 1930s to a growing disillusionment with
the Soviet Union rather than to its actual cause: the Popular Front line adopted at the
Soviet Union’s behest. Finally, during the McCarthy period, the official community
efforts to commemorate the tricentennial of Jewish settlement in North America
explicitly allied American Judaism with the Cold War front against Communism.
Wenger concludes with a short account of the 350th anniversary commemora-
tions in 2004. These involved professional historians to a degree that would have
been impossible fifty or a hundred years earlier, when professional historians of
American Jewry scarcely existed. This wave of commemoration also sought to
include women more than previous ones had. In all, Wenger impressively demon-
strates that the project to create a Jewish identity compatible with American values
necessarily continues as those values evolve.
Daniel Soyer
Fordham University

Antisemitism: A History. Edited by Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xi + 288 pp. Maps. $95 (paper).

The upsurge of antisemitism in Europe and the Middle East has spawned a renewal
of scholarship concerning the history and course of antisemitism from antiquity to
the present. Robert Wistrich’s A Lethal Obsession (New York, 2010), weighing in at
almost 1,200 pages, traces the subject “from antiquity to the Global Jihad.” Anthony
Julius, in Trials of the Diaspora (New York, 2010), devotes 800 pages to the history
of antisemitism in England. The present work, a collection of essays by sixteen schol-
ars, is, by comparison, a miracle of compression. It dispatches the subject, from the
biblical Exodus to the contemporary Middle East, in just 288 pages.
Albert S. Lindemann, the senior editor of this volume, has published several
highly controversial books on the history of antisemitism, most notably The Jew
Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs, Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank, 1894–1915 (New York,
1991) and Esau’s Tears: Modern Antisemitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge,
UK, 1997). In these volumes, he sets forth the central themes that have animated
his scholarship: (1) that modern antisemitism is distinct from pre-modern hatred

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120 Journal of American Ethnic History / Winter 2013

of Jews, and not (as many other scholars have insisted) simply a new name for an
ancient hatred; (2) that scholars of antisemitism should focus upon Jews as actors,
responsible in many ways for their own fate, and not simply characterize them as
victims, or objects of hatred; and (3) that antisemitism is more than just a pathologi-
cal disease. “Jews,” he wrote in Esau’s Tears, “have been disliked for many reasons
by a very wide variety of normal people, many of whom were neither emotionally
unstable nor intellectually unsophisticated” (p. xiii).
These ideas are repeated in the present volume, particularly in Lindemann’s in-
troduction and opening chapter (provocatively entitled “The Jewish Question”). He
posits, for example, that the biblical Pharaoh displayed a “legitimate concern about
the Israelites’ growing numbers and unstoppable, potentially dangerous power.” Pha-
raoh was therefore justified, according to Lindemann, in enslaving the Israelites “to
prevent looming disaster should the Israelites side with Egypt’s enemies” (p. 20). He
similarly labels as “understandable” the hatred for Jews displayed by Haman in the
biblical book of Esther and Esau’s hatred for Jacob in the Book of Genesis. Reading
the Bible typologically, as the Puritans did, he suggests that antisemitism in Russia at
the turn of the twentieth century “was an example of the events of the Bible seeming
to repeat themselves” (p. 28), since Russia’s Jews, like the ancient Israelites, were
growing in numbers and power (and therefore, he implies, deserving of persecution.)
At the same time, he insists that modern antisemitism should be distinguished from
its pre-modern counterpart because emancipation and the rise of the Jews in the
modern era produced a whole new conception of the Jewish Question.
Fortunately, most of the remaining essays in this volume treat antisemitism with
greater dispassion and more moral sensitivity. Five essays summarize recent scholar-
ship on hostility to Jews from antiquity through the end of the seventeenth century.
Jonathan Karp, in a particularly original and persuasive chapter on antisemitism
in the age of mercantilism, highlights and contextualizes economic aspects of the
phenomenon: “the image of Jews as powerful and dangerous economic actors” (p.
94). Adam Sutcliffe offers a fine review of recent scholarship, including his own, on
antisemitism in France from the Enlightenment to Napoleon. In a subtle critique of
Lindemann’s thesis, he observes that the country’s tiny Jewish minority (40,000 out of
20 million in the late eighteenth century) inspired practically as much interest on the
part of French intellectuals as did neighboring England, its most significant national
rival. Jews, he demonstrates, were more of an intellectual obsession than a realistic
threat. Much the same was true, Richard Levy shows, in Germany and Austria, though
there, he posits, emancipation and Jews’ rising status underlay antisemitic “fantasies
of enormous Jewish power, acquired in illegitimate ways” (p. 123). Moving to eastern
Europe (excluding Russia and the Soviet Empire), István Deák brilliantly explains
how greed, competition, popular associations of Jews with Communism, and the
desire to create ethnically “pure” states underlay much of the area’s antisemitism.
His essay underscores the vast changes in that region between 1848 and the present.
Two excellent essays survey antisemitism in the Arab world. Norman A. Still-

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Reviews 121

man’s “Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in the Arab and Islamic World Prior to 1948”
provides nuance and balance to a subject that has far too often been politicized and
misunderstood. “Only when Jews did not conform to the humble role prescribed for
them, and when they were perceived as having transgressed the bounds of proper
conduct as stipulated in Islamic law,” he shows, “were specifically anti-Jewish
sentiments stirred up” (p. 215). Meir Litvak and Esther Webman continue the story
following the creation of the State of Israel. “Antisemitism,” they sadly conclude,
“has become entrenched in the political culture of the Middle East following the
continuous antisemitic allegations against the Jews in a wide variety of media, its
articulation as an integral part of broader Islamist discourse, and the continued
sense of crisis in the Muslim world” (p. 248).
Readers of this journal will be disappointed to learn that no essay focuses directly
on the history of antisemitism in the United States. Instead, William D. Rubenstein,
professor of history at the University of Aberystwyth, devotes fifteen pages to a
survey of antisemitism in the English-speaking world as a whole. Sadly, he is not
up to the task. He makes no use of Leonard Dinnerstein’s Antisemitism in America
(New York, 1994), the standard survey of the field, or of David Gerber’s brilliantly
edited Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana, IL, 1986); ignores the writings
of Anthony Julius and others on English antisemitism; and introduces several unfor-
tunate errors into his narrative. Instead of insightful comparisons and contrasts, he
trivializes and overgeneralizes the phenomenon, maintaining utterly unpersuasively
that “antisemitism in the English-speaking world . . . has always been a minor issue,
confined to the fringes of political life” (p. 150; emphasis added).
Antisemitism: A History, in sum, is too uneven and idiosyncratic to recommend
as a survey text, but it includes some extraordinarily valuable essays. As for the
bumper crop of fresh scholarship concerning antisemitism, it shows no sign of abat-
ing. While preparing this review, I received a copy of the latest entry into the field,
Phyllis Goldstein’s A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (Brookline,
MA, 2012).
Jonathan D. Sarna
Brandeis University

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the Unit-
ed States, 1890–1940. By Marcella Bencivenni. New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2011. viii + 278 pp. Notes and index. $50 (cloth).

In the last decade or so, the traditional view of the conservatism of Italian im-
migrants to the United States has been significantly revised as scholars have pro-
duced fine studies of Italian American left-wing radicalism. Much of the focus of
the revisionists has been on political organizations and labor unions for obvious
reasons: these were the vehicles in which radical alternatives were most effectively

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