Neither eternalism nor historicism: antisemitism, history, and language in the wake of 7 October

Why do some historians of antisemitism absolutely reject any analogy between October 7 and historical anti-Jewish persecution? Matthew Bolton situates this debate, with its far-reaching political implications, on an epistemological level, explaining why “historicists” refuse to conceive of antisemitism as “eternal hatred”. In return, he exposes the flawed nature of their method, which ends up dissolving the very concept of antisemitism by obliterating its historical necessity.

 

 

The academic study of antisemitism has long been riven with acrimonious disagreement: there is not even a consensus over whether the word should have a hyphen or not. Yet even for this most disputatious of fields, the past year has been particularly febrile. A central point of contention has been whether the violence of 7 October and subsequent attacks on Israelis and Jews should be compared to past incidents of Jewish persecution. For one influential group of scholars, the answer is clear. In numerous articles, interviews and co-signed ‘open letters,’ these leading intellectuals – many of whom occupy prestigious chairs at gilded American universities, run the main European antisemitism research institutes, and edit the top-ranking journals –  have argued that analysing 7 October and its aftermath by reference to the history of antisemitism is not only inaccurate and misleading, but even ‘politically dangerous.’

Six weeks after 7 October, for example, the New York Review of Books (NYRB) published an ‘An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory.’^[1] Co-signed by many prominent researchers – from the renowned Holocaust historians Omer Bartov and Christopher Browning to David Feldman and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, respectively directors of the London Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (BISA), and the Berlin Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung – the letter expressed ‘dismay’ at those who ‘[a]ppeal[ed] to the memory of the Holocaust’ to interpret the Hamas atrocities. Such a comparison ‘obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today, and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.’ Two weeks earlier, Feldman and BISA lecturer Brendan McGeever had criticised descriptions of 7 October as a ‘pogrom,’ arguing that such analogies are ‘misleading in significant ways’ and ‘do nothing to help us understand the antisemitism Jews face today.’^[2] McGeever reprised this argument following the November 2024 attacks on Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans in Amsterdam. In a viral thread on X, he denied that the attacks were motivated by antisemitism and insisted again that the widespread descriptor of ‘pogrom’ was misplaced.^[3]

Such interventions from these luminaries of antisemitism scholarship have sparked controversy. They have been accused of wielding their academic authority to minimise, deny or even justify antisemitism.

For these scholars, then, attacks on Israelis and/or Jews today should not be compared to the Holocaust or pogroms. But this does not mean that such analogies are useless. Aspects of the history of antisemitism are, in fact, being repeated – but it is Israel, not its attackers, repeating them. The NYRB letter thus claimed that it was the language of certain Israeli politicians rather than the 7 October attacks which carried ‘echoes of historical mass violence.’ One signatory, Holocaust historian Raz Segal, made the point explicit. Just six days after the Hamas attacks – when Israel was still counting its dead, and the war in Gaza had barely begun – Segal declared that Israel was already engaged in a ‘textbook case of genocide.’^[4] Feldman and McGeever similarly suggest that the term ‘pogrom’ is ‘a closer fit to…the violence of armed Israeli settlers’ in the West Bank than any attack on Jews today. The reason why it is ‘politically dangerous’ to use the terminology of past Jewish suffering when discussing attacks on Israel is because that language is thereby ‘weaponized,’ as Omer Bartov puts it.^[5] Words like ‘Holocaust’ and ‘pogrom’ become tools of legitimation enabling Israel to inflict those same forms of persecution on the Palestinians. 

Such interventions from these luminaries of antisemitism scholarship have sparked controversy. They have been accused of wielding their academic authority to minimise, deny or even justify antisemitism.^[6] Prohibiting Jews from using the language of their own history through tight conceptual gatekeeping, they are charged with loosening the meaning of terms like ‘genocide’ or ‘apartheid’ until Israel can be convicted of every imputation thrown its way.^[7] And this is not a new claim. Long before 7 October, many of these scholars and the research centres they lead faced heavy criticism from mainstream Jewish communities, politicians and major funders alike, accused of downplaying contemporary antisemitism – especially on the left, university campuses and Muslim communities. For some critics, their research does little more than ‘confer academic legitimacy onto antisemitism.’<footnote>David Hirsh quoted in Lee Harpin, ‘Pears Foundation removes name from antisemitism institute,’ Jewish News, 7 April 2021, https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/pears-foundation-removes-name-from-antisemitism-institute</footnote> Not only do they fail to ‘take antisemitism seriously,’ they ‘provide encouragement to those who have systematically denigrated Jews.’^[8] The implication is that this alleged failure of scholarship is itself an expression of antisemitism, however deeply buried or denied. 

Such explanations might be parsimonious, but ultimately feel thin and unsatisfying. The idea that acclaimed scholars – many Jewish, some Israeli, and all having spent their lives immersed in the historiography of Jewish persecution – refuse to place current events within that lineage because they do not take antisemitism seriously seems implausible. Rather than seeking to explain this intellectual tendency through assertations of personal prejudice, attention should be focused precisely on its intellectual foundations. What do these scholars take themselves to be doing, and why? Answering these questions is complicated by the diversity of perspectives within the group – they are by no means a homogenous bloc, with rancorous disagreement occasionally breaking out.^[9] Yet given the frequency with which they present themselves as a group – co-publishing essay collections, issuing collective statements, holding joint conferences, collaborating on the ‘Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism,’ a controversial rival to the much-maligned IHRA ‘working definition’ of antisemitism – it should be possible to identify the basic theoretical premises that draw them together as a distinct academic faction. For reasons that will become clear, I will call this collective the ‘Historicist Antisemitism Studies’ school.

The ‘Historicist Antisemitism Studies’ school: against eternalism

What is the ‘Historicist Antisemitism Studies’ school? The first thing to note is that, as the name suggests, it is a group dominated by historians. While the post-WWII wave of antisemitism research was primarily the domain of sociologists, today historians are ‘the key interpreters’ of antisemitism, with historical empiricism taking methodological precedence over social or critical theories.^[10] Second, despite its privileged academic status, the historicist school regards itself as fighting a rear-guard action against the erroneous notion of antisemitism that supposedly dominates public discourse today – one pushed by non-HAS experts, uncritically adopted by politicians, codified in IHRA, and propagated by the Israeli state.

In Antisemitism and the Politics of History – a 2023 volume featuring many HAS associates – Scott Ury and Guy Miron argue this ‘predominant understanding’ has four ‘fundamental postulates.’ The first is that ‘antisemitism has a long, continuous history dating back to ancient times.’ The destruction of the Second Temple, medieval blood libels, Tsarist pogroms, the Holocaust, and attacks on Israel are all different manifestations of a singular two-thousand year old form of hostility that, as Robert Wistrich famously put it, is ‘the longest hatred.’ Second, the Holocaust is said to be ‘the almost logical… conclusion of thousands of years of anti-Jewish sentiment.’ Third, antisemitism is qualitatively distinct from other forms of prejudice, and not receptive to comparative study. Fourth, Israel has become the target of a ‘new antisemitism,’ in which ‘hatred and bile are directed toward the State of Israel as the “collective Jew.”^[11] These assumptions can be boiled down into two interrelated theses – ‘antisemitism is eternal’ and ‘antisemitism is exceptional.’ The HAS school are united in their opposition to both claims.

It is unquestionably true that the notion of ‘eternal hostility’ is devoid of explanatory power: it cannot explain why that hostility manifests in different ways across time, or why it appears in one place but not another.

The HAS critique of ‘eternal antisemitism’ has its roots in the question Hannah Arendt famously posed in The Origins of Totalitarianism: why the Jews? ‘If it is true,’ writes Arendt, ‘that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument.’ Naturalising antisemitism in this way is not only dangerous but entirely ‘question begging.’^[12] And it is unquestionably true that the notion of ‘eternal hostility’ is devoid of explanatory power: it cannot explain why that hostility manifests in different ways across time, or why it appears in one place but not another. Indeed, under the aspect of eternal antisemitism, the particular details of any given historical manifestation – from the Inquisition to the Holocaust to George Soros conspiracies – are mere contingencies. They are only of interest to the extent that they reveal the singular anti-Jewish essence underlying them all. In this way, ‘antisemitism’ is emptied of concrete historical content and becomes wholly abstract – a transcendent, self-propelling force, floating above history, which might nevertheless ‘take hold’ at any moment. But the specific reasons why it does so is a question that the ‘eternal’ perspective cannot even formulate, let alone answer.  

Building on Arendt’s critique, the historicists assert that any incident of anti-Jewish hostility can only be understood within its specific historical context. The demand for historical specificity rules out comparisons between 7 October and past episodes of Jewish persecution. This is because the establishment of Israel is said to have fundamentally changed the conditions of Jewish existence. Prior to 1948, Jews lived as politically powerless minorities within states dominated by non-Jewish majority populations. Jews were a ‘racialised’ group –attributed a set of ‘natural’ negative characteristics, which were used by the state to justify the denial of political and civil rights. Both the Holocaust and the pogroms, according to this argument, were thus the result of ‘violent acts by sections of the majority population’ – backed by state power – ‘against a racialised minority lacking in rights or state protection.’^[13] Given that Jews in Israel now live as a majority in a heavily-armed state, and that the Palestinians do not have a state and are, so the argument goes, themselves a ‘racialised minority,’ attacks by Palestinians or others on Jews in Israel or Israelis elsewhere cannot be conflated with pre-1948 oppression. Attempting to do so through the use of terms like ‘pogrom’ is to make a category error. The ‘vast difference between the status of Jews in Europe a century ago and their place in Israel today’ is erased, replaced by a false image of ‘a world populated in perpetuity by beleaguered Jews and their powerful enemies.'^[14]

Despite its privileged academic status, the historicist school regards itself as fighting a rear-guard action against the erroneous notion of antisemitism that supposedly dominates public discourse.

This argument was pushed to its limits by the historian David Engel in his influential 2009 essay ‘Away from a Definition of Antisemitism.’ Engel argued that the concept of ‘antisemitism’ is ‘an invented analytical category’ which does not correspond to any actually existing referent.^[15] ‘Antisemitism’ arbitrarily brings together under the same name disparate events which have no connection. This is as true synchronically as it is diachronically: for Engel, there is no empirical relation between, say, the Tsarist pogroms and the contemporaneous Dreyfus Affair, beyond the fact that the same word – ‘antisemitism’ – is applied to both. By forcing everything from casual prejudice to legal discrimination to industrial extermination into a single capacious category, crucial distinctions are lost, so that ‘reiterating an anti-Jewish stereotype suddenly conjures images of Nazi storm troopers.’^[16]

Engel contends that ‘constituting ‘antisemitism’ as an object of historical study, in whatever form and according to whatever parameters, has diverted…historians from potentially fruitful ways of investigating the specific incidents, texts, laws, visual artefacts, social practices, and mental configurations that that rubric customarily subsumes.’^[17] Each individual incident of speech or behaviour that Jews find threatening should be interpreted within its own singular context. Engel therefore called for the concept to be abandoned altogether. Following his lead, many HAS scholars have turned away from the study of antisemitism as a historical phenomenon, and onto the history of the concept of antisemitism itself – the different meanings ascribed to it over time, the various theories built around it, and the uses to which it has been put by different political actors.

Against exceptionalism

Engel’s rejection of a distinct phenomenon named ‘antisemitism’ leads on to the second claim of the historicists: that antisemitism is not ‘exceptional’ but rather ‘entangled’ with other modes of prejudice. ‘The oft-claimed uniqueness of anti-Semitism,’ argues Jonathan Judaken, ‘must cede to comparative frames, and ultimately to a history of interlaced pasts.’ Emphasis should be on how the Jewish experience ‘parallels and overlaps,’ rather than diverges, with that of ‘other targeted groups.’^[18] The other forms of prejudice with which antisemitism is said to be entangled vary. Schüler-Springorum suggests that the ‘excess of anti-Jewish resentment in modernity’ is grounded in ‘fear of ambivalen[t]’ forms of gender and sexuality.^[19] Others focus on connections between antisemitism and Islamophobia. The most frequent argument, however, is that antisemitism is ‘entangled’ with racism – or rather, that antisemitism is a sub-category of racism. 

This is made clear in the preamble of the Jerusalem Declaration. While hedging its bets by presenting the struggle against antisemitism as ‘inseparable from the overall fight against all forms of racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender discrimination,’ racism – understood in terms of state-led ‘racialisation’ – is given the primary position. The ‘overall fight,’ then, is against racialisation: the struggle against antisemitism is but one part of that general battle. As such, focusing on antisemitism alone, asserting that its distinct character might require an equally distinct remedy, is to undermine the universal struggle. For David Feldman, this is the problem with the IHRA definition: the ‘absence of any mention of antiracist principles or universal rights’ isolates antisemitism from racism, and Jews from other racialised minorities. In contrast, ‘conceiving of antisemitism as a form of racism…makes it easier for Jews to ally with other minorities’ in the face of a shared threat.^[20]

If antisemitism is a sub-category of a generic racism, where has the idea of its ‘exceptionality’ come from? Ury and Miron argue that the first post-war wave of antisemitism research – including such seminal figures as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and Jean-Paul Sartre – sought to explain antisemitism via universalistic theories of modernity, imperialism, or psychology. By the 1970s these approaches were challenged by a new generation of predominantly Israeli researchers who, like the historian Shmuel Ettinger, alleged that scant attention had been paid to the ‘specific character’ of Jewish communities and their relation to surrounding societies. By immediately leaping to generalist explanations, Jews had been turned into ‘a marginal or even casual element’ in the story of their own persecution.^[21] Theories of Jewish oppression, Ettinger contended, should refocus on the particularities of Jewish history. In the HAS reading of this move, the isolation of ‘antisemitism’ from other forms of prejudice emerges through a ‘Judaisation’ of explanations for Jewish persecution. Accompanied by increased focus on the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust, the result was a ‘hierarchy of suffering,’ with Jews cast as the ‘exceptional’ victims of history.

Post-1948, the language of antisemitism was now a tool with which the Israeli state could forge a national identity based on perpetual fear and victimhood, and justify an expansionist military strategy grounded in the racialisation of Palestinians.

For those historicists for whom political usage determines conceptual meaning, these developments must be seen as driven by a particular brand of Zionist politics. The notion of antisemitism, the Holocaust and Jewish victimhood as ‘exceptional’ was, so this argument goes, consciously cultivated by Israeli political actors precisely at the historical moment where the establishment of a Jewish state had ‘radically’ changed ‘the relationships of many Jews to state power and to the rights of minorities.’^[22] Post-1948, the language of antisemitism was no longer a means of pointing to the fate Jews shared with other ‘racialised’ minorities. It was now a tool with which the Israeli state could forge a national identity based on perpetual fear and victimhood, and justify an expansionist military strategy grounded in the racialisation of Palestinians. By making antisemitism stand apart from racism, by making the Holocaust distinct from other genocides and forms of mass violence, and by making Israel the logical result of these supposedly exceptional phenomena, Israel positioned itself as what Omer Bartov describes as ‘a unique entity that operates according to its own rules and logic,’ one ‘liberate[d]…from the constraints imposed on all other nations.’^[23] 

Editor of the Journal of Genocide Research and HAS attack dog Dirk Moses goes further. For Moses, not only the ‘exceptional’ character of antisemitism or the Holocaust but the very concept of ‘genocide’ itself was from the outset a Zionist construction that sought to enforce an arbitrary distinction between the Nazi persecution of the Jews and colonial violence.^[24] This could then be used to legitimate Israel’s ‘settler colonial’ destruction of the ‘indigenous’ Palestinian people. From this perspective, virtually any analytical differentiation of ‘antisemitism,’ ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ from racism, imperialism, and generic state-led ‘mass violence’ is little more than terminological ‘weaponisation’ in support of Zionism’s racist and imperialist goals.

Historicist abstractions

Much of the HAS school’s critique of an ‘eternal’ and ‘exceptional’ antisemitism is inarguable. Spurious notions of a ‘two-thousand year old hate ideology’ have indeed contributed to some astonishingly crass historical comparisons made by ‘pro-Israel’ commentators over the past year – some of which should be regarded as Holocaust distortion, if not worse.^[25] Parallels can certainly be found between antisemitism and other modes of prejudice: one of the distinguishing characteristics of antisemitism might even be the extent to which it overlaps with almost every other form of discrimination at one point or another. And accusations of prejudice and narratives of the past can undoubtedly be ‘instrumentalised’ by political actors, including the Israeli government. A critique of the HAS school should not, then, begin with a re-affirmation of antisemitism’s eternal or incomparable character. As paradoxical as it might seem, the strongest charge against historicism is rather that it fails to make a proper break from the eternalist-exceptionalist paradigm: that it replicates key elements of the very argument it defines itself against.

The first point of contact emerges from the way both eternalist and historicist schools approach the relationship of antisemitism to history. As we have seen, by assuming ‘the longest hatred’ to have existed unchanged across time, the eternalists cannot explain why antisemitism appears in different ways at various historical moments. The historicists combat the eternalist abstraction via a radical re-historicisation of antisemitism. Yet the underlying logic of this turn to historical specificity is strikingly similar to the transcendent approach. If the eternalists separate antisemitism from historical experience in order to demonstrate its persistence and peculiarity, then the historicists deny that persistence and peculiarity by the same means.

What remains are isolated incidents that, while regrettable, are of no broader significance.

For David Engel, each incident of anti-Jewish speech and behaviour should be treated as a singular event, produced by a historically-specific combination of factors, with no inherent relationship to any other anti-Jewish incident. From this perspective, the fact that Jews have been the targets of a succession of such events over time can only be viewed as an unfortunate coincidence. Indeed, Engel’s fragmented, episodic approach to history is incapable of moving beyond annalistic description in order to develop the analytical distinctions needed to recognise each of those events as, precisely, acts of anti-Jewish speech and behaviour, as opposed to acts of which Jews merely happened to be the victims. Without such recognition, a theory of antisemitism able to explain its historical development is impossible. When pushed to its limits, the historicist approach is trapped in the same theoretical dead end as the eternalists. It too avoids the problem of explaining the historical development of anti-Jewish hostility – not by assuming what needs to be explained, but by denying its existence altogether. 

Engel’s dissolution of antisemitism into a series of random events with no underlying connection mirrors the attitude of many contemporary anti-racist movements. The prominent US anti-racist activist Linda Sarsour, for example, has claimed that ‘[w]hile anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish Americans, it’s different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic.’^[26] As Balàzs Berkovits notes, here antisemitism, unlike other racisms, ‘is not a collective or structural phenomenon, but the sum of scattered individual acts.’^[27] As with the eternalists, antisemitism is again treated as an exception, qualitatively distinct from other forms of racism. This mode of exceptionalism, however, does not derive from the supposed singularity of Jewish history or the Holocaust. Instead, particularly in American discourses, it is justified by the supposed ‘whiteness’ of Jews – or their ‘proximity’ to whiteness – which allows Jews to benefit from the privileges white people receive in contrast to black and brown people. 

This argument dovetails with a broader theory of ‘structural’ racism that is generally accepted by the HAS school. This comes in two forms. The first is the overt denial of formal rights to racialised minorities. The second appears once formal rights have been granted. Now differentiated practical treatment of formally-equal minority groups by the state and other institutions leads to poorer economic, educational or health outcomes, as well as an increased likelihood of police violence. In both modes, the theory of structural racism is itself structural, and highly abstract. Concrete differences between one racialised minority and another are of secondary importance, little more than contingencies. Questions of how a group became a racialised minority (through slavery, migration, fleeing persecution, imperial conquest, imperial collapse, war, and so on), the particular ideological justification for their status (colonial racial hierarchies, the religious character of the state), and the specific qualities ascribed to the group (propensity for physical labour, sexual power, shadowy conspiratorialism, greed) need not impinge upon the analysis. What matters is the structural position vis-à-vis the state, and the statistical measurement of the chosen outcomes. 

As we have seen, antisemitism once fitted neatly into the structural model of a state-backed majority targeting a racialised minority. But once the establishment of Israel meant that model no longer applied, then Jews could no longer be the targets of overt institutional racism. On the other hand, given the relative economic success of Jewish minorities in the diaspora, success supposedly owed to their ‘proximity’ to whiteness, Jews do not suffer the negative outcomes of structural racism either. Whether from a political or economic perspective – and in contrast to other forms of racism – antisemitism no longer has a structural basis. What remains are isolated incidents that, while regrettable, are of no broader significance. To the extent that the historicists understand racism in abstractly structural terms, then, they have no choice but to treat post-1948 antisemitism as an outlier.

Antisemitism becomes simply an appendage to ‘deeper’ structural shifts, all-but disappearing once its structural basis is lost.

The central role attributed to Israel in antisemitism’s loss of structural status brings the historicists tantalisingly close to classic Zionist narratives. A common justification for a Jewish state was that it would ‘normalise’ Jewish existence by establishing Jews as a majority group with political power, and thus bring antisemitism to an end. But whether in its HAS or Zionist form, this structuralist account of antisemitism again relies upon a highly episodic theory of history. Here clean structural breaks at a political level signal an absolute transition from one historical era to another. In both cases, antisemitism is once more deprived of status as a properly historical phenomenon: it becomes simply an appendage to ‘deeper’ structural shifts, all-but disappearing once its structural basis is lost.

The terms of entanglement

The historicists’ structuralist premises tend to exclude any aspects of antisemitism that do not fit within its rigid models. State-centric accounts of racialisation struggle to comprehend the fact that, as David Nirenberg argues, for much of the Medieval era Jews were collectively seen as the private property of the monarch, ‘the king’s Jews,’ protected by rulers despite their de jure political exclusion. Some were able to leverage personal riches into positions of power, taking on ‘specific financial functions such as money lending and tax collecting.’ However precarious, this proximity to rule – engendering an ‘association of Jews with sovereign power’ and ‘sovereign (especially fiscal) power with Judaism’ – was inconceivable for, say, chattel slaves in the USA.^[28] But once the political winds changed, Jews often found themselves targeted as the representatives of the hated ancien regime. This is a fundamentally different relationship to the state from that assumed by theories of structural racism. 

Nor were Jewish minorities regarded as ‘alien’ members of a single, often territorially neighbouring, national community, as is the case with most majority-minority relations, including those in Israel-Palestine. Each separate Jewish minority was simultaneously part of a ‘rootless’ conglomerate that exceeded the borders of any one state.^[29] This was a crucial factor in the peculiarly international character that antisemitism had from the outset, as Arendt was quick to recognise. Only the deterritorialised ‘cosmopolitan’ power attributed to Jewish minorities meant that a text like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion could be produced in a specific Russian context but quickly find a global audience – including, of course, Hamas, who inserted numerous excerpts from the Protocols into its 1988 charter. For those who understood Jews in this way – from the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg to the British liberal J. A. Hobson – the prospect of a Jewish state was no ‘normalising’ panacea to the threat posed by Jewish cosmopolitanism. Long before the actually-existing Israel came into being, a Jewish state was perceived as undermining the very concept of statehood, becoming the central coordinating node of Jewish global power.

Each separate Jewish minority was simultaneously part of a ‘rootless’ conglomerate that exceeded the borders of any one state. This was a crucial factor in the peculiarly international character that antisemitism had from the outset.

Understanding the international aspect of Jewish minority status and the perception of Jewish power – and, indeed, the way these ideas worked together – is crucial to any historically-grounded theory of antisemitism. The intended global reach of the Nazi Final Solution – a world-spanning project of extermination which, at the risk of further enraging Dirk Moses, does distinguish the Holocaust from colonial genocides and other forms of mass violence – simply cannot be grasped without this historical background, even if it did not emerge teleologically from it. Nor can the symbolic weight that the idea of ‘Zionism’ has carried from the outset, both positively and negatively, far exceeding that ascribed to any other national ideology. 

The communal euphoria that characterised the Tsarist pogroms derives too from this combination. Parallels can certainly be drawn between anti-Jewish pogroms and other episodes of state-sanctioned popular violence against racialised minorities. But as Leon Trotsky recognised, the pogrom – unlike, say, the anti-black lynching – was the moment the world turned upside down and the ‘doss-house trap [became] king,’ the penniless peasant joyfully inflicting his revenge upon the Jewish money-lender.^[30] Antisemitism’s superficially anti-hegemonic character cannot be comprehended by a perspective which remains at an abstract level of majority-minority relations, statistical economic outcomes or even a generalised ‘suffering.’ By reducing the theory of antisemitism to that of structural racism, these antisemitism-specific aspects are left to float outside history. This again mirrors the eternalist approach, albeit in an inverted manner: rather than being the transcendent cause of antisemitism, they are acknowledged only as non-essential contingencies. If the terms of ‘entanglement’ dictate the eradication of antisemitism’s historical content in this way, then the resistance to such efforts becomes easier to understand.

Its rigid structuralism and high level of abstraction means that when the HAS school does attempt to theorise those ‘non-structural’ elements of antisemitism, it is forced to present them at a purely discursive level, unmoored from social conditions. Antisemitism today, according to Feldman, McGeever and their BISA colleague Ben Gidley, exists as a ‘a reservoir of narratives and myths that can be taken as a resource in specific historical and social contexts.’^[31] As David Seymour has noted, the metaphor of the reservoir presents antisemitism as ‘form[ing] outside [the] society into which it then spills, flooding the arenas of…social conflicts.’^[32] Much as for the eternalists, here antisemitism and society exist in separate spheres. This not only ‘exceptionalises’ – effectively downgrades – antisemitism from other racisms, which are, by contrast, presented as constituting social conflicts. It comes at the price of any explanation why this or that antisemitic narrative might be taken up by a given actor at any point – the whole purpose of the historicist turn.

Antisemitism’s superficially anti-hegemonic character cannot be comprehended by a perspective which remains at an abstract level of majority-minority relations, statistical economic outcomes or even a generalised ‘suffering.’

As Seymour points out, any actor who ‘dip[s] into the ‘reservoir’ in search of hostile antisemitic rhetorical forms’ to ‘explain’ a particular social conflict, must have ‘already abstracted these issues from their embeddedness in the complexity of contemporary social, political and economic relations so as to ‘perceive’ them as a conflict with ‘the Jews’.’^[33] What needs to be explained is the move from society to the reservoir. If antisemitism can no longer be understood in structural terms, then what drives this decision? For the eternalists, of course, there is nothing to explain: antisemitism drives antisemitism. But for the historicists, committed to historically-specific explanations, the answer can only lie in historical conditions. And this means returning to those elements of antisemitism which do not fit into the abstract model of structural racism, those aspects that are indeed peculiar to Jewish history, and approaching them once again as active historical phenomena, rather than contingent accidents.

Neither eternalism nor historicism

This was, in fact, the approach taken by the so-called universalist theorists of antisemitism in the post-war period. Contra both the eternalists and historicists, neither Arendt nor Adorno relied on structural or abstractly universal theories to explain antisemitism. While situating antisemitism within a wider history of state power and imperialism, Arendt was famously criticised for seeming to pin the blame for antisemitism on the actions of Jews themselves. She emphasised the naivety of those Jews who sought protection by cultivating close relations with political leaders – only to find themselves horribly exposed when social conditions changed. She showed the fragility of Jewish assimilation, and how decades of integration, successful economic ‘outcomes’ and perhaps even a ‘proximity to whiteness’ not only provided Jews with no protection from the Nazi terror but intensified it. And while she was clear that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity – that is, inherently universal – she insisted that the choice of the Jews as the targets of that crime was ‘no mere accident.’^[34]For Arendt any theory of antisemitism which shirked from either its universal or particular elements, which sought to render one side essential and the other accidental, from whatever direction, was not worthy of the name.

For Arendt any theory of antisemitism which shirked from either its universal or particular elements, which sought to render one side essential and the other accidental, from whatever direction, was not worthy of the name.

In their ‘Elements of Antisemitism,’ meanwhile, Adorno and Max Horkheimer carefully formulated a range of different, interlocking answers to Arendt’s question: ‘why the Jews?’^[35] These ranged from Christianity’s oedipal relation to Judaism, to the way ritualistic or ‘mimetic’ elements of Jewish identity were perceived as living representations of a repressed nature in capitalist modernity. They then showed how these Jewish-specific elements were activated through broader processes of instrumental rationality and Manichean ‘ticket thinking’ in an era of ‘administered’ life. More recently, Moishe Postone sought to explain the intangible yet all-encompassing power attributed to Jews in the antisemitic imagination by arguing that the rise of romantic nationalisms turned ‘cosmopolitan’ Jews into the personification of global capital’s abstract domination.^[36] 

Arendt, Adorno and Postone do not belong to either the ‘eternalist’ nor ‘historicist’ camps. They are not myopically focused on the singularity of Jewish experience such that any kind of comparison is ruled out from the start. But neither do they immediately reach for universalist explanations that only recognise antisemitism to the extent that it fits within a single abstract structure, with everything that does not downgraded to the status of contingency. Their theories attempt to set out the social-historical conditions through which the antisemitic figure of ‘the Jew’ took shape in modernity, showing how that image in turn began to play an active role in the further development of those conditions. It this image that the concept of ‘antisemitism’ seeks to capture, however imperfectly. 

From this perspective, ‘antisemitism’ is not merely an arbitrarily chosen word which acts as a vehicle for the expression of other, supposedly deeper or truer, ‘interests.’ Like all such concepts, the concept of antisemitism was made necessary by the historical circumstances from which it emerged: it was produced through the meanings and experiences that have accumulated within it across time. The concept of antisemitism is here understood as a crystallisation of historical experience. It captures something vital about both its social and political context, and the history from which that context was produced, such that neither that context nor its history can be understood – as opposed to simply described – without reference to the concept itself. Like David Engel, we might want to abandon the word ‘antisemitism’ – but doing so does nothing to erase the layers of historical experience, meaning and interpretation that have accumulated within the concept that the word is taken to signify. This means that the meaning of a concept like antisemitism cannot be simply created, discarded or ‘instrumentalised’ at will. Any political use of a concept takes place within a historical context which has already been shaped by the experiences and meanings the concept seeks to capture.^[37]

The concept of antisemitism was made necessary by the historical circumstances from which it emerged: it was produced through the meanings and experiences that have accumulated within it across time.

Recognising the historically-necessary character of concepts, rather than dismissing them as arbitrary political constructions, provides the tools for exploring how the antisemitic figure of ‘the Jew’ concretely relates to those of other discriminated groups. But this form of ‘entanglement’ does not take place through the abstract equivalence imposed by HAS structuralism, in which any remaining particularity is declared to be either contingent or the result of a political-motivated ‘exception.’ Rather, as Christine Achinger, Marcel Stoetzler, Hylton White and other contemporary theorists working in this critical tradition have shown, analysis of the historically-constituted ‘exceptions’ that distinguish one mode of prejudice from another makes visible their shared social basis – in a manner denied to those who remain at the level of abstract universalism.^[38] This approach also offers a route to a more theoretically nuanced perspective on the practices of ‘weaponisation’ that are so central to the historicist worldview. Instead of making Machiavellian Zionists solely – exceptionally – responsible for the defilement of otherwise pristine narratives of racism, here the focus shifts to the social dynamics of ‘competitive victimhood’ in contemporary politics, and the differing roles ascribed to the figure of ‘the Jew,’ ‘the Zionist’ and other identity characteristics within that discourse.^[39]

‘Some pogrom in Lithuania’

In their various writings on 7 October, Feldman and McGeever frequently quote the ‘haunting’ question posed by Amit Halevi, mayor of the ravaged Be’eri kibbutz, as he contemplated its destruction: ‘what is this, some pogrom in Lithuania?’ In their view this encapsulates the type of ahistorical comparison that has dogged debates for the past year. But once we leave behind the structuralism of the HAS approach, it becomes possible to see how in this statement the mayor was expressing the ineradicable tension between present and past that is carried by concepts like ‘pogrom’ and indeed ‘antisemitism’ itself. ‘What is this, some pogrom in Lithuania?’ is a question that can only be posed – with such evident shock – in a context where ‘Lithuania’ and all that it represents was assumed to have been left behind. 

As the historicists assert, along with much of the Zionist tradition, the state of Israel was meant to make such violence impossible.^[40] Not the violence of state against state, or even militia against state, but that ecstatic popular violence against undefended Jewish civilians – ‘Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!’ – that was, as we have seen, characteristic of historical pogroms. On 7 October the firewall between the Jewish past and present that Israel had supposedly built seemed to collapse, even if just for a moment – as Halevi himself put it, ‘I feel like the state of Israel ceased to exist.’^[41] The same can be said for the storming of Dagestan airport three weeks after 7 October by a mob searching for ‘Jews,’ or the ‘Jodenjacht’ on the streets of Amsterdam. As the perpetrators demanded to see the passports that would identify their victims as Jewish Israelis, as a man pleaded with his attackers that he was ‘not Jewish,’ a moment of that past seemed to come alive, to ‘flash up in a moment of danger,’ in the way Walter Benjamin describes in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’^[42] Recognising that image as it ‘unexpectedly appears,’ resurrecting a past that was once thought to be long dead, is precisely the point at which for Benjamin ‘historical materialism cuts through historicism[’s]’ picture of history.

On 7 October the firewall between the Jewish past and present that Israel had supposedly built seemed to collapse, even if just for a moment – as Halevi himself put it, ‘I feel like the state of Israel ceased to exist.’

This does not mean falling into the easy habits of conflating past and present, depriving the present of its own historical weight. That the violence of 7 October came laden with a further history that meant it was not simply ‘some pogrom in Lithuania’ is presupposed by Halevi’s question itself. But that further history – of Zionism, of Israel, of Palestinian and Arab nationalism, Islamic extremism, the rise of the Israeli far-right, war, occupation, terror, catastrophe – cannot be fully understood without recognising that the very concept of a Jewish state has always carried within it the experience of ‘Lithuania’ (and of Hebron and the Farhud and so on) both in its positive Zionist articulation and in the ways that state has been resisted and rejected. The ghost of ‘Lithuania’ continues to hover about the security walls that make Jewish schools, nurseries, community centres and synagogues in Europe today look more like prison complexes than spaces of communal life. Traces of its presence appeared in the unbridled glee with which the slaughter of Israeli civilians was greeted by swathes of the self-identified left.^[43]

The image of ‘Lithuania,’ then, flashing up in a moment of danger, captures something about antisemitism that refuses to be reduced to abstract categories, nor dissolved away by appeals to historical specificity. It is this image of which many of those who have turned to the language of Jewish history to explain 7 October and its aftermath seek to take hold. They do so not to pretend that things are exactly as they once were, nor to mindlessly justify every Israeli bomb that has fallen upon Gaza – although this is not to deny that some have indeed done precisely this – but in shocked recognition that perhaps history has not ‘moved on’ quite as much as they assumed. 

In history, there are no clean structural breaks that render irrelevant everything that has come before. But nor is there simple continuity, the ceaseless return of an eternal same. Trapped in a ‘bad infinity’ of abstraction and exceptionalism, batted between historically-blind teleology and ‘conceptless empiricism,’ neither the eternalist nor historicist schools allow us to comprehend how the idea of ‘Lithuania’ has erupted through the linear progress of time assumed by both Zionist and structuralist accounts of history.^[44] Doing so means reasserting the historical status of antisemitism: neither an arbitrary contingency nor a transcendent given, but a socially-necessary crystallisation of a damaged world.

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Matthew Bolton