When Antisemitism Disappears from View

A Zionist conception of the history of antisemitism?

In recent years, there have been a lot of debates about antisemitism research being politically motivated. These debates concerned first and foremost the IHRA definition, although not exclusively. Critics of IHRA, inspired by a “historicist” school of historians¹, also frequently attacked what they called the “eternalist” conception of antisemitism, which they regard as stemming from a Zionist conception of history. It is this Zionist conception that would be responsible for the undue extension of the concept of antisemitism, which would now include criticism of Israel, while it wasn’t the case before. The argument goes as follows: Zionism is constantly in need of antisemitism to persist; therefore, the Zionist stance adopted by the historiography of antisemitism and also by sociological antisemitism research artificially recreates the representation of the phenomenon. Therefore, the preoccupation with Zionism and Israel originates in an essentially Jewish communitarian view, say critics, who lament alleged political pressures on research, resulting in both methodological flaws and false categorizations. 

The historico-methodological arguments of historicists aimed at pointing out that the concept of continuous antisemitism throughout the ages (or for some even the concept of antisemitism itself) has been a hindrance to historical research, because it unifies empirically disparate phenomena in space and time.² This unification is said to be a consequence of political interests and considerations, usually on the part of antisemites and also Jews. Antisemites construe a history centered on Jews and project their hostility back in time. They try to prove that Jews were always hated throughout history, and this is for a reason: because of their wickedness and harmfulness to society. The way Jews view antisemitism allegedly mirrors that of the perspective of antisemites in that they also conceive it as eternal. Their question is the same: why so much hate against the Jewish people? Their answer, of course, is very different: it is because of a sort of universal and immutable animosity toward a singular people, akin to the theologically defined “sinat Yisrael”. Both are essentialist and metaphysical conceptions, which don’t have a place in respectable social science. According to critics, Jewish historiography now has explicitly espoused, or, mostly, returned to a Zionist view, that is, has favored political considerations over scientific ones. Scott Ury formulated this criticism as follows: 

“Why has the traditional Zionist interpretation of Jewish history, society, and fate returned over the past two generations to become the dominant academic and public framework for researching, studying, and explaining anti-Semitism? How has the resurgence of this specific intellectual paradigm helped shape, define, and determine the contours and development of this particular scholarly field and accompanying public discussions over the past few decades?”³ 

We already learned before that a very influential, perhaps even dominant current in antisemitism research and also in the historiography of the Jewish people was the continuist-eternalist-essentialist approach, basically a Zionist methodology vitiating historical findings. Whereas this “Zionist methodology” has informed historical research from its very beginning, from the mid-19^th century on, now Zionism comes to the fore once again with the question of Israel, as a direct political preoccupation, and not only as something inherent in methodology. Therefore, contemporary antisemitism research may be doubly Zionist: once, it already was like that at its inception, also being responsible for its detachment from a general theory of racism. Now this tradition has been pursued ever since, and “Zionism” seems to be built into its very methodology. But the second aspect of this “Zionism” would be the renewed interest in the question of Israel. Thus, according to critics, this “double Zionism” is mirrored by the conception of the “new antisemitism”.   

The argument goes as follows: Zionism is constantly in need of antisemitism to persist; therefore, the Zionist stance adopted by the historiography of antisemitism and also by sociological antisemitism research artificially recreates the representation of the phenomenon.

In contrast, scientific research on antisemitism should follow the discontinuous path; the continuist perspective is, by definition, unscientific, not only because it is construed as essentialist and metaphysical, but also because it stems from external influence and interest. A position within the historiographical debate will unequivocally be linked to a political position outside of science, while the other, rival (historicist and discontinuist) position will be presented as devoid of external political influence, hence the only legitimate. However, to say the least, one of their main positions regarding the treatment of antisemitism and racism together in the same, “universalist” framework can only be taken to be a political injunction, frequently decoupled from empirical reality. Also, this position is blind to the fact that today’s dominant conceptions of racism (in critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, etc.) and political agendas (intersectionality) built on them explicitly exclude the study of antisemitism, and also Jews from spheres of political activism. Or, maybe, it is simply prone to accept the view that antisemitism constitutes an empty set thoroughly subsumed under the larger category of racism – which would not be surprising in view of the “end of antisemitism” conception with massive Hegelian overtones that they seem to profess.⁴

Interestingly enough, in this framework, the question of whether antizionist attacks or campaigns against Israel, beyond the potential “political manipulation” of the category, may have anything to do with antisemitism is never posed. Antisemitism as an empirical phenomenon that may change due to social and historical factors, or even due to discursive ones appearing in academia, is never considered, but is simply bracketed: authors will only mention how the way antisemitism has recently been dealt with has changed for the worse, but they won’t say how the reality of antisemitism may have changed in the meantime. On the contrary, the inclusion of antizionist utterances and actions in all of their forms under the category of antisemitism would stem from the good old eternalist conception, which, supposedly, has always accompanied the “Zionist position”. In fact, for Zionism to persist, it requires antisemitism, and when antisemitism seems to subside, Zionists create, that is, construct some more, at least on the level of theory. 

It seems that the fundamental debate within antisemitism research has been reduced to the issue of definitions and categorizations, where the main questions are: what antisemitism is not; the battle of categorization between antisemitism and antizionism; and the power structures responsible for the construction of the category of antisemitism in our time. It is by the mapping of these outside influences supposedly responsible for the “social construction of antisemitism” as a present-day social problem that this approach perpetuates the historicist one. Alternatively, the historicist phase could be considered the first stage of the social constructionist analysis of antisemitism, while in the second stage, the intention is to map out more concretely the specific social influences on the category, which then invites deconstruction or purification. In the second stage of this analysis, we can even observe the re-categorization of the instances of antisemitism with the help of a supposedly more adequate concept, namely that of antizionism (or, in their usage, “anti-Zionism”⁵). Should we intend to critique this act of purification and recategorization, we would need to point out that antisemitism has become an ever-shrinking space, while “anti-Zionism”, opposite to antisemitism, remains a totally undertheorized and even irreflexive but ever-growing category. 

When the history of a word obscures the reality of a phenomenon

In fact, paradoxically, this is a view that by barring all interpretation and meaning, it reduces antisemitism to a natural phenomenon – the very thing that continuist approaches have been accused of. With the only difference that here, antisemitism, deprived of its category, is becoming re-coded as a natural consequence arising from conflicts largely unrelated to Jews, in a given “context”, therefore, not-really-antisemitism, where “context” in itself is deemed sufficient to interpret, or rather, to explain away cases of antisemitism. By putting forward social causation as the only factor in the formation of the category of antisemitism, it makes every meaningful representation of contemporary antisemitism different in kind from its 19th-century version, a product of outside influence and power interests, that is, something constructed, where “construction” stands for untruth, bias, and even fiction. Thereby, in this framework, making sense of antisemitism as a real, existing phenomenon in the present has been rendered impossible. 

There are many iterations of this position, the most recent, most elaborate, and most influential being Mark Mazower’s book On Antisemitism: A Word in History, published last year⁶. This work can be seen as the summary of the arguments both against the category and the present-day relevance of antisemitism and its supposed instrumentalization, and furthermore, as an effort to give a sort of social constructionist explanation (understood as unmasking) for what is happening in antisemitism advocacy and those domains of research that stubbornly reassert that antisemitism does exist even in our time. As the title already suggests, the work is the examination of the history of the word “antisemitism” (and so not really the history of the phenomenon itself), which, according to Mazower, is bound up in confusion. As we gradually learn, this confusion is due to the fact that the concept has been unduly extended and now comprises attacks on Israel and Zionism. However, Mazower does not stop here, as most analyses do; he intends to provide a complete socio-historical explanation for this confusion. 

True, in the first part, the book provides a brief account of the history of European antisemitism from the 19th century to the end of communism. At the same time, it doesn’t put forward any original interpretation. It is a kind of textbook summary of what we are supposed to know about these periods, and, like every student manual, it strives to anchor the accumulated knowledge of the phenomenon. Going further, it turns out that this knowledge to be anchored is not only considered something fixed relative to the past, but also viewed as unchanged, unchangeable, and even extendable in view of the post-WW II period. 

In fact, Mazower’s theme and method suddenly change in the second part. Here, the question is no longer the history of the phenomenon, but rather the fulfillment of the mission alluded to in the book’s title: tracing the history of the word “antisemitism”. More precisely, he reduces the antisemitic phenomenon after 1945, or at the latest, from the 60s, to the changing definition of the word “antisemitism”, while the empirical phenomenon itself will be bracketed. The only somewhat empirical observation that Mazower makes is that antisemitism has subsided in the United States after 1945, backing it up with the enumeration of some factors concerning the diminution of prejudicial attitudes and discrimination. This is supposed to serve as a general background to the social-semantic analysis of the history of the category. Obviously, the reductive procedure of criticizing the concept of antisemitism, by which Mazower and others think it is possible to downplay or even get rid of the phenomenon, is problematic. According to the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, discourse on social construction is ambiguous because it is often unclear whether researchers talk about the construction of the object or the construction of the concept of the object.⁷ Many times, when they mean the latter, they still draw consequences for the former. But even if the concept contributes to the making of reality, it doesn’t mean that reality can be made to disappear by the unmasking of the concept that may have contributed to its making. 

The reductive procedure of criticizing the concept of antisemitism, by which Mazower and others think it is possible to downplay or even get rid of the phenomenon, is problematic.

According to Mazower, people only tend to think that there is more antisemitism, or even that antisemitism has been perpetuated in the present, because the definition has been manipulated for a reason: Jewish organizations fighting against antisemitism have been unwilling to register the change, the end of the history of antisemitism. They were afraid of losing importance, while they wanted to shield the Jewish state from attacks; therefore, they included criticism of Israel in the picture. And the whole story of this manipulation: propaganda, political influence, etc. by Jewish NGOs in the US, by the Israeli government, by IHRA fills up his book. Obviously, from this narrative, we can never learn what antisemitism really is in our time, according to the author, since the question has already been bracketed beforehand or was assumed to be unimportant. Clearly, the discourse on antisemitism is just a “discourse”, with no basis in empirical reality. Now it is the formation of this discourse that Mazower sets out to study empirically. He wants to understand the emergence of the discourse on Israel-related antisemitism and its “weaponization” from the transformation of American Jewish society, or by analyzing the activity of Jewish organizations fighting antisemitism, like the AJC or the ADL, or again by turning to the changing conception of Israeli leaders on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who gradually framed it also in terms of antisemitism. Similar analyses have been conducted by other authors as well, with the additional assumption that antisemitism cannot be present in relation to Israel when Jews have a “powerful” state: 

“Most radically, as the relationship of Jews to state power altered fundamentally following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, so too did some of the meanings of antisemitism. Yet it was only at the beginning of the twenty-first century that some international organizations, strongly encouraged by Jewish campaigning bodies, promoted the idea that Jews (and society more broadly) would benefit from an explicit and formally promulgated definition of antisemitism.”⁸

This description obfuscates the fact that Israel’s “power” is very relative in the region, especially at the birth of the state and in the following decades, and also that antisemitism has always been directed against Jews perceived (or shall we say, constructed) as powerful, which, therefore, cannot serve as a counter-argument. The vulgar critique of power often stumbles upon the “Jewish question”, and, unsurprisingly, even more so, when Israel is the target.

Now, the question is whether the stance of bracketing empirical reality and turning only to the concept can be methodologically justified in Mazower’s book? Intuitively, the “end of the history of antisemitism” doesn’t seem like a plausible conception. Considering events just from the last 25 years, the second intifada, Durban, the BDS movement, the changing climate for Jews in the West, the strengthening of Islamism and Islamic antisemitism, all have to be omitted to stick to the original program. The same will happen with the direct aftermath of Oct 7: Oct 8 and the following weeks in left-wing spaces, the pro-Hamas demonstrations of the last two and a half years, with the exacerbated campus antisemitism all over the Western world. Mazower, following his methodological rule, is not taking into account any of the transformations, any of the attacks not only on Israel (Oct 7 denial, glorification, denial of rape, global media campaigns, etc.), but also on Jews (serious cases of campus antisemitism, attacking Jews in Amsterdam after a football match, violent and often deadly attacks on synagogues and cultural centers, etc.) related to this event. 

Mazower’s tacit category on antisemitism, aligned with the conception of “the end of the history of antisemitism”, can only recognize instances that are similar to the ones that occurred in the past.

In other words, Mazower’s book strikes us as being a pre-Oct 7 book, written after the event, and even a pre-Durban book, in spite of having been published in 2025. Mazower, at least concerning the post-war period, is not interested in interpreting antisemitism; he is interested in what antisemitism is not, in the “purification” of the concept as he imagines it. Everything that the concept has been illegitimately filled with should be taken out of it. This is, of course, in itself, a legitimate procedure. Criticizing a fallacious conception of antisemitism is a laudable and even necessary enterprise. But then, several problems arise. First, there is no explicit definition, let alone conception that Mazower would have recourse to, although he repudiates the IHRA definition of antisemitism, while he is sympathetic to its rival, the Jerusalem Declaration (JDA). He certainly has some ideal-type in mind, constructed on the basis of pre-war antisemitism, as a result of the bracketing of the present, which functions as a tacit norm for judging about new instances in our time. 

So the perspective based on the past will be projected onto the present as a sort of eternalist conception, since the history of antisemitism seems to have ended. The history now is only continued arbitrarily, as a simulacrum, which can be analyzed in terms of construction, as this purified and petrified (implicit) definition, beyond figures of the past, has the ambition to cover future instances. However, this conception cannot handle the new instances of antisemitism, which could not have been known in advance, and which may surpass any established, even if tacit, definition. Any new instance, in this conception, is inevitably bound up with the antisemitism category that Mazower considers fallacious, as far as it contains any reference to Israel or Zionism. His tacit category, aligned with the conception of “the end of the history of antisemitism”, can only recognize instances that are similar to the ones that occurred in the past. In this way, Mazower, simply by virtue of his method, will be obliged to downplay potentially new types of antisemitic phenomena that don’t fit his implicit definition. 

The history of antisemitism seems to have ended. The history now is only continued arbitrarily, as a simulacrum, which can be analyzed in terms of construction.

Downplaying is coupled with re-categorizing them under “anti-Zionism”, where this latter is taken to mean a simple and legitimate political stance, devoid of antisemitism. Hence, antisemitism and anti-Zionism are presented as two mutually exclusive categories. Anti-Zionism, for Mazower, contrary to his reductionist view on antisemitism, is taken in several different meanings: it can refer to pre-war anti-Zionism, to “criticism of Israel” in all of its radicalized forms (in all senses present in the JDA and more), and even to hostile acts against Jews committed in the name of the Palestinian or anti-imperialist struggle. Surely, these meanings are all questionable. But most importantly, not only is there no Israel-related antisemitism for Mazower, but, as we will see, his conceptualization goes well beyond the JDA guidelines, especially contradicting its seventh point: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct or treating Jews, simply because they are Jewish, as agents of Israel.”  

Antisemitism as social construction? 

Mazower and the authors whom he references view antisemitism as a social construction that is said to be unobservable in empirical reality, as a putative definition employed by Jewish and Israeli lobbyists. For them, definitions of antisemitism, and especially the one by IHRA, are only universals arbitrarily imposed on reality, which influence and even shape our perception. In contrast, when antisemitism is purified from nefarious influence, it turns out that it should be viewed as something permanent, fixed, as it is assumed to be constant, with varying degrees of intensity and relevance, but mostly fading in the present. That is to say, there is an implicit definition of antisemitism, unexamined by the theoretician, arising from the “end of the history” conception of antisemitism. Further, this procedure, under the cover of criticizing undue political intervention, clearly has the inconvenience of exorcising interpretation as such, since Mazower doesn’t present a modified category of antisemitism other than his hidden ideal-type, forged on the model of 19th-century antisemitism. More precisely, the alternative category offered is “anti-Zionism”, construed as the opposite of antisemitism. If there is no concept or category, we cannot make sense of antisemitic events in reality, unless we assert that we can derive it from the context of the event. But the problem is that the context doesn’t give meaning by itself. The historicist view has already run into this contradiction, and the same holds for the constructionist view. The major difference is that, contrary to the historicist historians, it deals with the present or the recent past, therefore the stakes are much higher. The constructionist view in the case of contemporary antisemitism a priori neutralizes and thereby absolves every discourse and act that could potentially be evaluated as antisemitic in the present, unless it conforms to the tacit ideal-type of “right-wing” antisemitism as the repetition of the past. 

In fact, it is becoming a positivist type of explanation, which would imply that antisemitism can be explained away by reference to “contextual factors”, as a variation of the “facts talk for themselves” belief. What do we get when we apply this rule? Mazower alleges, for example, that attacks on synagogues, Jewish sites in the West are a consequence of Israeli or US actions, while not stemming from “real” antisemitic attitudes or feelings (which he thinks, or rather, tacitly holds, by virtue of an unexamined norm or definition, that it can only arise from the extreme right). About targeting of Jewish venues in Western Europe, he writes: “Often they were selected as proxies for the United States or for Israel and in fact it was hard sometimes to tell motives of classical antisemitism apart from retaliation for the US-led invasions in the Middle East or from anger at the plight of the Palestinians.”⁹ Also, another one of his counter-arguments is that hostility against Zionism stems from anti-imperialism or Third Worldism (165, 234), therefore it cannot be antisemitic, unless anti-Zionism is automatically equated with antisemitism. This “argument” only testifies to several misunderstandings: that anti-imperialism would exclude antisemitism; that one would necessarily need to consciously uphold antisemitic views to spread antisemitism, whereas antisemitism is spreading by the production of antisemitic consequences, consciously or not (which is, by the way, one of the fundamental theses of the IHRA definition). 

Mazower took away, excluded by definition, any concept of antisemitism (stigmatized as Zionist construction) that could serve as the principle of intelligibility of contemporary incidents and attacks.

He continues in this vein even in the case when he absolves “Arab nationalists” in Iraq, Egypt and Lybia in the forties and fifties of antisemitism, by saying: “they too identified the Jews as proxies for a European colonialism that was seeking to remain in control” (149). So now, so it seems, we “understand” the Farhud¹⁰ in Iraq better. Or again, when he argues that “growing anxiety about Zionist intentions was also gradually jeopardizing the position of the Jewish communities of the Arab world” (150). So much so for the expulsion of 850 thousand Jews from these countries, apparently unrelated to any kind of antisemitism.

For Mazower, if antisemitism were to appear as the “function” of something else, then it is not antisemitism. If there is a seemingly contextual and “rational” explanation for incidents that, on the face of it, are antisemitic, then one should be aware that they are not. Only a Zionist conception of antisemitism would point to these as antisemitic, whereas a rational explanation (and the two are construed as opposites) would classify them as merely “anti-Zionist”. But if this is true, then the antisemitic phenomenon (now devoid of the misguided Zionist concept of antisemitism) is nothing but an inexplicable irrational core, when “Jews are attacked as Jews”¹¹, and this, without a reason. That is, attacking Jews without a reason other than they are Jews would be the only case of antisemitism. But this is, of course, only a tautology, and does not provide a veritable “reason”, which is why antisemitism can only appear as an irrational (unintelligible) speech or act. In every other case, when there is an “intelligible” reason, and where the preposition “as” is manipulated to explain away antisemitism, the attack is taken to be of anti-Zionist and political nature. Political action has intelligible motivations, while antisemitic action, according to Mazower’s reductionist conception (interpreted with the help of the “purified” category of antisemitism), has none. By this move, the space of potential antisemitic action has shrunk to barely becoming perceptible. Meanwhile, the space of political action, understood as anti-Zionism, has grown a great deal. 

In this way, the unmasking of the category of antisemitism (on the basis of a tacitly held norm) has led to its reduction to some irrational core; whereas politically motivated (“anti-imperalist”, “anti-colonial”, “anti-Zionist”) action is now taking its place to a large degree. Furthermore, it is only anti-Zionist action defined in this way that can become the legitimate object of scientific inquiry, because the formation of its category is supposed to be devoid of political influence, and because it determines rational (understood as intelligible) action. In every other case, talking about antisemitism will mean for Mazower exclusively its 19th-century and/or “right-wing” form,  

However, the problem is precisely this: that Mazower took away, excluded by definition, any concept of antisemitism (stigmatized as Zionist construction) that could serve as the principle of intelligibility of contemporary incidents and attacks. And, by the same token, substituted in their place the “purified” category of antisemitism (now liberated from undue exterior, “Zionist” influence) designating an unintelligible, therefore uninteresting factor; and also anti-Zionism, as the sole legitimate, disinterested and scientific principle of intelligibility. But the main issue arising from this procedure is that Mazower further restricts the meaning of antisemitism, even more than the JDA, which he emphatically seemed to uphold as opposed to the IHRA definition. However, even the JDA is explicit in saying that extending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to hostility against Jews outside of Israel is antisemitic. True, after Oct 7, the JDA has been superseded by the crowds and ideologues who effectively deny that this is antisemitic. For them, it’s just anti-Zionist. Or not even, just anti-imperialist. Mazower goes along with the tide without even taking note when he says that Jewish venues in Europe were only attacked as “proxies” of Israel, and not out of “antisemitic” motivation. This analysis is supposed to describe how the present-day category of antisemitism, which is empty, has come about and has been shaped exclusively by external forces, that is, how it was socially constructed. On the one hand, within this critique, antisemitism (if not replicating the pattern of being “classical”, “right-wing”) is becoming a fiction. On the other hand, in the absence of a broader concept of antisemitism (as the direct consequence of the analysis discrediting the category of antisemitism), hostile acts against Jews are becoming naturalized, as symptoms of something more essential, and re-categorized as “anti-Zionist” action. 

Antisemitism doesn’t exist?

However, Mazower commits the same error that he previously attributed to authors who pointed to connections between antisemitism and anti-Zionism: he is irreflexively manipulating the word “anti-Zionism” – the same way as he thinks the word “antisemitism” has been manipulated, just the other way around. Now, this procedure certainly cannot be considered as part of the historical examination of the transformation of meaning, since now it is the author himself who engages in manipulative transformation (as a result of his implicit normative stance), the very same practice he wanted to point out against adepts of the IHRA definition and Jewish advocacy groups. 

Assuredly, the main problem is not simply theoretical. If this analysis is widely accepted (as it seems to be), it will have the effect of legitimizing a whole array of acts, otherwise considered antisemitic (and this even according to the JDA, the main task of which is to absolve even the most radical figures of antizionist discourse). For example, recently we learned, as mainstream media outlets reported on it, that the attacker of the Temple Israel synagogue in Michigan acted because he had relatives killed by Israel in Southern Lebanon. The title of a New York Times piece (and of several others) says it all: “Lebanese Family Members of Synagogue Attacker Died in Airstrike”.¹² The interpretation by journalists and media pundits practically everywhere was that the synagogue attacked in Michigan was an “Israeli synagogue”, as it bore Israel¹³ in its name (and was built in 1941 to honor a future Israeli state before it was actually created). 

Why would someone think it relevant that the terrorist attacking the synagogue had family members killed in Lebanon by the IDF? How does this alter our perspective of the attack? What does it mean that the synagogue in Michigan had “Israel” in its name? Of course, it testifies to an extreme ignorance to say that it was an “Israeli synagogue”; how many synagogues bear in their names “Israel”? But further, they argue that the synagogue was dedicated to Israel in 1941: at every occasion that an Israeli connection is to be found, the violence will be justified. 

All this only changes the perception if we think that the motif was reasonable: it didn’t arise from antisemitism. Of course, the fallacy is already evident in the formulation: it only permits one motif for the action to take shape by excluding any other. The attacker was furious about his terrorist brothers being killed in Lebanon, so he attacked the synagogue “dedicated” to Israel. The subtext is the following: this is not antisemitism, but anti-Zionism. The causal explanation has been turned into the rationalization and justification of the act: it’s only a political act, meaning there cannot be an absolute judgment that qualifies it; its evaluation is up for debate. And how people evaluate it will depend on their political convictions.

Questioning antisemitic motif or consequence, by emphasizing that Jews may be attacked “for other reasons than that they are Jews” (or even rightfully attacked because of Israel), is precisely the erasure of the logic of (really existing) antisemitism.

What comes to mind is the legitimization of the acts by way of denying that it was an act of terrorism, and also that antisemitism played a role. And then the categorization of the act as “political”, as opposed to an act of hatred, based on irrational feelings and prejudice. In this context, “political” gives outright legitimacy: fighting for a cause, based on a value system, which eventually can be taken to be “anti-Zionist”. Although the incident happened after Mazower’s book was published, he certainly would not have a problem with this explanation, since he relies on similar examples to refute the existence of contemporary antisemitism. 

And further, now we seem to have a “general theory” of antisemitism, or more precisely, of its absence, which at every point proves its non-existence and eventually will end up totally absolving the perpetrators of even the most violent antisemitic acts. We read further in the article mentioned: “A wave of rising antisemitism in America has been exacerbated by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.” Or even better, antisemitism is rising because of Israel, being a natural reaction to Israel’s behavior, that needs no further analysis, as a historian, once more inspired and more judicious, Omer Bartov has put it in a recent interview. He said: “The way Israel has been behaving, especially after October 7, especially in Gaza, has given licence to the rise of antisemitism all around the world. Israel presents itself as the representative of Jews around the world. (…) And many people take it seriously. And when they see Israel destroys entire communities, entire cities (…), they turn to their Jewish neighbors (…) and they assume they support them.”¹⁴

But of course, these kinds of interpretation, theorized by Mazower, constitute a slippery slope and will give a wide opening to further justifications of antisemitism. The same logic may equally encompass cases hitherto considered as evident cases of antisemitism, and even those unrelated to Israel. For example, when a left-wing critic argues that “the Rothschilds symbolize in populist rhetoric the socio-economic domination of the ‘plutocrats,’ while the Jews as a people are not questioned or attacked at all for who they are or what they represent,”¹⁵ he seems to follow the very same logic. We may also evoke the words of ex-PM Viktor Orbán in the midst of his campaign conducted against George Soros. Just because Soros is a Jew, he said, he cannot make an “exception” for him in his efforts of protecting the nation: “against those who threaten the security of Hungary, we will use the political and legal power of the Hungarian state, regardless of origin, religion or wealth”¹⁶. 

Questioning antisemitic motif or consequence, by emphasizing that Jews may be attacked “for other reasons than that they are Jews” (or even rightfully attacked because of Israel), is precisely the erasure of the logic of (really existing) antisemitism. By the same token, it means the acceptance of the argument put forward by the antisemite to justify his stance. Antisemitism is always formulated as the pseudo-critique of hegemony and domination, epitomized by the Jewish group or Israel; it is not a surplus (independent of antisemitism) that could explain anti-Jewish animosity. If these properties associated with Jews are invoked as a legitimate “reason” for anti-Jewish hostility, one may become susceptible to accepting the antisemite’s logic. Small wonder that this discourse will find fewer and fewer cases of antisemitism, while unwittingly justifying antisemitic speech and action, since it has already incorporated ontological manipulation and an unjustified normative stance as methodological principles.

1.  See an excellent article attributing the “historicist” name to this current: Matt Bolton, “Does antisemitism really exist?”, https://k-larevue.com/en/2025/01/30/does-antisemitism-really-exist/
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2.  David Engel, “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism: an Essay in the Semantics of Historical Description” in Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (eds), Rethinking European Jewish History, Liverpool University Press, 2009.  
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3.  Scott Ury “Strange Bedfellows? Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Fate of ‘the Jews’”, American Historical Review, October 2018, 1166.
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4.  See, for example: Stephen Beller, Anti-Semitism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan, L’Antisémitisme partout: Aujourd’hui en France, Paris: La Fabrique Edition, 2011.
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5.  The hyphenated version intends to construct a continuity between pre-war anti-Zionism as a political position and post-war attacks against the state of Israel, even if the pre-war version was largely an internal debate inside the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, having little to do with opposing the existence of the state of Israel after 1948.
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6.  Earlier summaries of the same constructionist positions include Anthony Lerman’s Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? (2022), which, however, has been way less influential. Mazower’s book, to a large degree, is a recapitulation of Lerman’s arguments. 
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7.  Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 9.
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8.  David Feldman and Marc Volovici, “’The Pure Essence of Things’? Contingency, Controversy, and the Struggle to Define Antisemitism and Islamophobia”, in Feldman-Volovici (ed.), Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition, Palgrave MacMillan, 2023, 5. See also: David Feldman and Brendan McGeever, “On Slaughter and Solidarity,” Vashti Media, 9 November 2023, https://vashtimedia.com/hamas-israel-pogrom-antisemitism/.
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9.  Mazower, 204.
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10. A violent pogrom that targeted the Jewish community in Baghdad, Iraq, on June 1^st and 2, 1941 [Editor’s note]. ↩︎
11.  The formulation is familiar from the JDA, which is built on a reductive type of analytical philosophy of language, and devoid of any sociological reflection, as it appears in the work of Brian Klug, one of the authors of the definition. See for example: Brian Klug „Interrogating ‘new anti-Semitism’”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36:3, 2013
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12. The Associated Press published an article with an almost identical headline: Man who rammed into Michigan synagogue had just lost family in an Israeli strike in Lebanon. https://apnews.com/article/michigan-synagogue-attack-fbi-investigation-58331bad2c28e78c6c99a4a764637873 ↩︎
13. The synagogue was called “Temple Israel,” where Israel refers to the Jewish people in its biblical and historical sense, not to the state of the same name. [Editor’s note] ↩︎
14.  « Les dirigeants européens qui refusent de parler de génocide à Gaza accordent une impunité à Israël », https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/270526/les-dirigeants-europeens-qui-refusent-de-parler-de-genocide-gaza-accordent-une-impunite-israel?at_format=reel&at_account=mediapart&at_campaign=1046&at_medium=custom7 
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15.  Julien Giry, “Archéologie et usages du style paranoïaque’. Pour une épistémologie critique” , Critica Masonica, Les amis de Critica, 12, 2018, 7.
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16.  András Király, “Pont a zsidóktól inkább egy kis segitségre számitott volna Orbán” [From the Jews, Orbán would have liked a little help], 444.hu, July 7, 2017.
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