JEWS were first labelled as Semitic in the second half of the 19th century. With the rise of ethno-centric nationalisms during this period, it then became easy to describe Jews as their own racial group, and thus to position them as a foreign presence in any search for a “pure” national identity. Political anti-Semitism was born, and it was mainly a German invention. But the reality of the continuing “ancient hatred” of this book’s subtitle extends into the deep history of Western and Middle Eastern psyches, leaving us with the questions how and why this happened.
The answer to those questions are explored in this enlightening and clearly argued book. There is a basic hostility from ancient pre-Christian history which survives, ready to be recapitulated when the next scapegoat is needed to match the latest political turbulence.
The vilification of Jews is present in Egyptian, Roman, and Greek writings, where Jews were described as enemies of civilisation and purveyors of barbaric religious rites. Jewish independent-mindedness and resistance to cultural-religious integration seem to have been responsible for generating anti-Jewish conspiracy.
But it is the modern world, in which conspiracy continues to flourish, that interests Shalom Lappin the most. His thesis is that anti-globalist movements of the radical Right and Left, together with Islamist uprisings in different parts of the world, have provided the tinder-box contexts for the modern iterations of anti-Semitism with which we are all depressingly far too familiar. For the radical Right, the idolatry of the purity of national identity motivates their hatred; for the radical Left, as Lappin has it, “The demand for recognition as a cultural and/or national minority on a par with other groups was vigorously dismissed as reactionary separatism.”
Between being designated either an impurity or a reactionary, Jewish existence was and remains precarious. Add to this impossible positioning the rise of radical political Islam, which seeks to eject Western-style colonialist presence from its heartlands and considers Israel a bastion of exactly this polity, Israel then becomes the latest battleground over anti-Semitic politics.
Lappin’s account of the ancient hatred was completed on the eve of Hamas’s attack on Jewish Israeli citizens on 7 October 2023; and yet he was able to add some brief comments on an emerging catastrophe. But that conflict has endured longer than anyone could have foreseen, and it presents a new emergency affecting the future of Israel and any resolution to the baked-in Israel-Palestine antagonism.
Lappin is no lover of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, and he leans towards a two-state resolution to the conflict. The final chapter of the book sets out “Notes for a New Progressive Politics”, arguing that both peoples have degrees of justice on their side. Given the current devastation, how far both sides can agree now with those claims only the future can tell.
This book will be highly informative for anyone seeking to understand this most persistent of ancient hatreds.
The Revd Dr Alan Race is a retired priest in Reading, in the diocese of Oxford. He is the chair of trustees for the World Congress of Faiths.
The New Antisemitism: The resurgence of an ancient hatred in the modern world
Shalom Lappin
Polity Press £25
(978-1-5095-5856-8)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50