Mark Mazower has written a stunner of a book: informed, questioning, probing, thought-provoking, and highly readable. On Antisemitism tackles one of the most fraught political questions of our time, informed by Mazower’s background as a leading historian of modern Europe.

Words shift and change their meaning over time and place. Raymond Williams’s Keywords, alluded to by Mazower, is a “vocabulary of culture and society” running though the shifts and changes in around 130 keywords — art, class, exploitation, family, hegemony, industry, violence, welfare, and many more. Were Wiliams alive to revise the book today, there is no doubt that he would include “antisemitism,” together with a range of other cognate keywords with which it is now inevitably associated: Zionism, Israel, anti-Zionist, “the Jewish people.”

It is appropriate that Mazower’s introduction to the concept of antisemitism should start with the word “confusion” in its introduction and head it with a quotation from Lewis Carroll: “‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.” As Mazower points out, changes in meaning may “catch us by surprise.” This book provides a case study of one such change.