Mazower divides the book into two parts, the first consisting of “a kind of historical sketch that looks at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chiefly European political movement,” the second analyzing “the origins and spread of a new conceptual paradigm that originated in the 1970s largely as a way to rationalize growing criticism of Israel”:

In the early years of the new millennium this led to an international campaign directed against what some termed a new antisemitism that partly overlapped with, and partly contradicted, older understandings of the term. The word was the same, but the world had changed.

All I can hope to do here is single out some of the important moments Mazower identifies and some of the guiding principles that emerge from his analysis.

Part one, “Europe in the Age of the Antisemites,” is a rich historical account of Jewish emancipation and the reactions to it, leading to the emergence and consolidation of modern antisemitism and its incarnation in various political regimes, culminating in the Nazi genocide and its aftermath. Part two, “On the Battlefield of Ideas,” opens with a prelude, establishing the United States, Israel, and the Middle East as the frame for an emerging struggle over the changing nature of what antisemitism was perceived to be.

What runs throughout the book is Mazower’s sense of the openness of history, of contingency and possibility. Antisemitism, he stresses, “is almost never an autonomous force or program . . . it cannot be properly understood when it is framed as if it stands apart from its historical context.”

What we now call antisemitism was new when Wilhelm Marr first coined the term in 1879, emerging in response to the birth of modernity and its promises of progress and emancipation. Mazower depicts it as something radically new, different from the age-old prejudices against Jews and indeed against others everywhere in the past. There wasn’t previously a word for it because it was so commonplace in societies in which prejudice of all kinds was normal.

It was the emergence of mass literacy in the late nineteenth century, the rise of a public sphere in which ideas circulated, and the rapid expansion of cities as industrialization and capitalist development took off that transformed conceptions of time, religion, and history. While antisemitism may have been nourished by Christian traditions of Jew hatred, something new was taking shape. For Mazower, the coining of a new word, antisemitism, is suggestive in itself.

Zionism emerged at about the same time as other nationalistic movements (and in tandem with antisemitism as a political force). It saw Jews not merely as those who adhered to a faith, but as a people, with hatred toward them playing its part in preventing their assimilation. Most Zionists shared some of the assumptions of this new antisemitism, agreeing that it was inevitable. A Jewish state, long promised in the Bible, was therefore the only solution. “Why,” Mazower remarks, “it had taken until the later nineteenth century for God to reveal this solution was a problem they did not dwell on.”

The particularity of the Jews lay at the core of the dominant Jerusalem School of history which came into its own in the 1950s, built around the notion of a “people apart,” forever doomed to persecution while it remained in exile. Antisemitism in this perspective was the longest hatred, with history a cosmic frame in which, as Mazower puts it, “neither Jew nor antisemite changes, only the masks the antisemites wear.” From this perspective, the focus of Jewish history was less a history of what Jews did but of the unremitting feelings, stereotypes, and ideas that others formed about them.

Yet for many decades, history seemed to offer the Jews a more optimistic outcome. The mass migration of Jews to the United States and elsewhere, particularly in the far-flung countries of the British Empire, was to liberate and enrich Jews as never before. Within Europe itself, emancipation seemed to be sweeping restrictions before it. Only the Tsarist Empire remained intransigent.

How contingent some developments appear in retrospect! In 1914, Mazower argues, the tide was flowing toward emancipation. When World War I broke out, Jews naturally joined their national armies in Britain, France, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and even to some extent in Russia, where two hundred thousand enlisted. In the Pale of Settlement, however, the military remained closed off to Jews, and as the Russian army marched west, it engaged in an orgy of destruction.

With this turning tide, the Austro-Hungarian and German armies were welcomed as liberators by Jews in the region. Germany presented itself as a plausible guarantor of their rights. Who now remembers that, in 1916, General Paul von Hindenburg announced that Yiddish would be recognized as an official language, and that the German foreign ministry endorsed the idea of minority rights? Or that Austro-Hungary offered proportional representation and even a secretary of state for Jewish affairs?

As Mazower observes, the defeat of the Central Powers effectively wiped such episodes from historical memory: “Forgotten in the subsequent course of history, and almost incomprehensible to us today, these reminders of how different the Jewish fate in a monarchical German-led Europe might have been were lost in the German collapse a few months later.”

Even so, the new model of national self-determination that underpinned the postwar settlement replaced the paradigm of liberal assimilationism with equal rights for all faiths and none. The primacy of national rights with protection for minorities on the basis of their ethnicity appeared to provide a solution of great benefit to Jews and others, as Mazower notes: “In the early 1920s, the forces of Jewish emancipation appeared to have triumphed across Europe.” Alas, this moment was all too short-lived.

The dangers had already been heralded by the pogroms that followed the collapse of the empires in Central and Eastern Europe. Apart from the Armenian genocide, nothing like them had been seen before. The rise of antisemitism in the civil wars that followed fed into a crazed fear of Bolshevism and the growth of opposition both to it and to the settlement imposed by the victors in the war. Antisemitic agitators used the very prominence of Jews, not just in Russia but in the revolutionary upheavals throughout Central Europe, to feed these fantasies.

Despite the consolidation of antisemitic forces in Central Europe during this period, so long as the liberal victors of the war underwrote the international system and the League of Nations, hope remained alive. The fate of the Jews of Central Europe was bound up with the fate of the postwar liberal constitutional settlement, and many factors were involved in the collapse of that settlement. Its fate was not inevitable.

Even after 1933, as Mazower shows, the development and consolidation of the Nazi regime was a complicated process. Conservative forces in Germany were shocked by the scale of violence that the Nazis unleashed in 1933 against their opponents, and the new rulers often had to feel their way cautiously, choosing legalized discrimination rather than indiscriminate brutality.

When such brutality was occasionally unleashed from above, it was “as much a means for those running the state to radicalize a reluctant population as it was an expression of popular attitudes.” As Mazower insists, the Nazis had to clear several hurdles before they could embark on a genocidal project: “Much like emancipation itself, its reversal was not a one-off event but a tortuous process in which goals were articulated, unforeseen obstacles appeared, and new possibilities opened up.”

In other words, the “final solution” was not inscribed in advance. Adolf Hitler’s eventual defeat in 1945 dealt a body blow to antisemitism as a political movement that was irredeemably associated with the forces of reaction for generations to come. It is only recently that this has begun to change. But so too has what counts as antisemitism — a question to which we shall shortly turn.

If the war killed off antisemitism as a political movement, antisemitism as a form of hatred and prejudice did not suffer the same fate. How could it be otherwise, asks Mazower, considering how predominant it had become over the previous decade and more, and how much cultural and governmental power remained in the hands of those who had grown up under Nazism?

While the far right was marginalized in most of Western Europe, a broader racism flourished. Although there were variations from one country to the next, overt antisemitism was generally taboo. Racism in its various other forms — particularly against the new immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean — was not.

What was dramatically altered by the war and its aftermath was the geographical dispersion of the Jews. Europe had been their heartland for centuries, but this was no longer the case. More Jews lived in the United States than anywhere else, with Israel emerging as the second-largest concentration. Jewish life was to be increasingly shaped by the dynamics between these two centers, and those dynamics in turn were unfolding in the context of the Cold War.

Although the end of the war had seen an increase in antisemitism in the United States, the period from the 1950s onward was good for American Jews, as “a system of institutionalized discrimination was dismantled with the same surprising rapidity with which it had been constructed,” and barriers in housing, education, and employment fell at every turn. Whatever residual prejudice remained, “on the whole Jews had accelerated faster into middle-class comfort than any other of the ethnic groups that had passed with them through Ellis Island.”

Even the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) considered American Jews to be enjoying levels of unprecedented security and social acceptance. This improvement is not so easy to explain, Mazower remarks, pointing out that historians of antisemitism rarely dwell on the times when the phenomenon subsides. Still less do campaigners against antisemitism ask what they can learn from such periods.

Mazower suggests some lessons. Wartime experience had discredited overt antisemitism, but, more tellingly, Jewish organizations at the time did not see antisemitism as something to be treated separately from other kinds of bigotry. They saw secure employment and public education as central to dealing with all forms of discrimination. Members of the younger generations increasingly viewed the fight against bigotry in action with its other victims as key to improving American democracy more generally.

Of course, Jews in the United States also had one great advantage: in a country where race was an overarching principle, they were white. But above all, it was the emergence of the state of Israel that changed the place of Jews in the United States forever.

Anti-Zionist sentiment had been widespread among Jews, and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) President Jacob Blaustein viewed Zionist propaganda with hostility. This picture only changed from the 1940s on. The main worry was that a Jewish homeland elsewhere would undermine the position of Jews in the United States, and there were angry exchanges on the topic.

With twice as many Jews in New York City as in Israel itself, there was, as Mazower points out, bound to be a tension as to who was to be in control. This battle was won decisively by David Ben-Gurion. Israeli legislation in 1952 affirmed that “the State of Israel regards itself as the creation of the entire Jewish people.” This was a deliberate snub to the AJC, which had argued for the inclusion of a qualifying clause: “the State of Israel, representing only its own inhabitants, regards itself as the creation of the entire Jewish people.”

Ben-Gurion had earlier insisted on the obligation of Jews to aid the Jewish state under all “circumstances and conditions.” This was a statement made during the east European show trials, during which Jews were frequently targeted with accusations of “Zionism,” and thus was quite dismissive of the concerns of Jewish diaspora communities that were then under pressure.

It was the start of a pattern observed far more widely later on. Israeli state interests would be fostered in indifference to (or even in conflict with) those of diaspora communities — most notoriously in the case of Israel’s active collaboration with the Argentinian junta in the repression of the Left, during which many thousands of Jews were murdered.

The decisive turning point in the relationship of American Jews to Israel was the 1967 Six-Day War. In the words of Israeli historian Evyatar Friesel: “Not only was Zionism ‘Americanised’, American Jewry was ‘Zionised.’” It was an emotional as well as a political conversion.

The extent and rapidity of the transformation was extraordinary. Support for Israel in the AJC’s annual report for 1966–67 had come well down on the list of priorities, below the struggle for civil rights and against discrimination and antisemitism. The following year, it headed the list and remained in the place over the years to come. At an ADL conference on antisemitism five years earlier, two issues had simply not come up on the agenda for discussion: Israel and the Holocaust. That was no longer conceivable.

For all the importance Mazower accords to this change, I think he still manages to understate it. As the United States allied itself unconditionally to Israel in support of its regional ambitions, support for Israel became as American as apple pie. In one fell swoop, any fear of dual loyalty disappeared. You could be a loyal American by being an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, you could be a loyal American by being a Zionist, and you didn’t even have to leave your warm, secure home in the United States to do it!

In a world where ethnic identity was becoming an important marker, Zionism provided an important glue. By the mid-1980s, the boundaries of American Jewry were becoming rather blurred, with four in ten married to non-Jews and synagogue attendance in decline. Many feared this signaled the end to Jewish life (a subject explored by Philip Roth in Operation Shylock, for example, as the “silent holocaust”).

It was in these circumstances that Jewish identity acquired new foundations. Israel became, in Nathan Glazer’s words, “the Jewish religion for American Jews,” with the Holocaust rationalizing its existence.

All of this, Mazower points out, took place at the same time as “the rise of Jewish Israel” and a growing contempt for what secular Zionism had once been in the country itself. The far-right outrider Meir Kahane, whose party was banned as a terrorist organization at the time, once complained that Ben-Gurion had created nothing but “Hebrew-speaking goyim” rather than proper Jews (in other words, religious fundamentalists). Derided at the time, Kahane’s views were to be taken up more widely, taking center stage in Israel today through politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. These ideas also colonized American Zionism.

Such changes heralded a shift in how antisemitism was understood, with profound consequences. In discussing this shift, Mazower makes an astute observation: “Words can be used in different ways. They can charm and they can repel. They can open up debate and they can close it down..” All very apposite in a discussion of the sea change in the meaning of a word. As Antony Lerman asked in his recent book, which has clearly influenced Mazower, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?

He cautions readers about the danger of analogies, noting how they can blind us as well as illuminate. The concept of apartheid originated in South Africa, but it was universalized in 1994 to become a crime under international law: in the words of Jacques Derrida, it was the “ultimate racism in the world.” For Mazower, equating Israel with apartheid is misleading, not because it exaggerates, but rather because the analogy “downplays the much more lethal oppression” that Palestinians face compared to anything noncitizens experienced in South Africa.

Equating Zionism with racism can also mislead us, he insists. Apart from the huge range of diverse understandings of the term among those who have called themselves Zionists, the idea of “Zionism as racism” cannot capture the anti-racism of so many Zionists who were heavily involved in the US civil rights movement or the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. If we need a single word to capture its essence, Mazower argues, it would be far more helpful to see Zionism as nationalism (extending his remarks, we can see it as having moved from its civic nationalist connotations in former times to a pure form of ethnonationalism today).

But it is with the larger shift in the meaning of the word “antisemitism” that Mazower is primarily concerned, and this is what he focuses on in the last third of the book. In brief summary, that development is encapsulated in the triumph of a confusing and opaque “working definition” of antisemitism, underpinned by a belief that criticism of Israel, until proved otherwise, is very likely to be a disguised form of antisemitism.

The odd thing about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition is how indefinite it is. It is often hard to get its champions even to remember what it says. When pressed, they generally resort to (mis)stating a couple of the examples of what might (or indeed might not) be illustrations of antisemitism that are appended to the definition. For the sake of clarity, here is the actual text:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Mazower contrasts this new definition with that of the Oxford English Dictionary — “prejudice, hostility or discrimination towards Jewish people on religious, cultural or ethnic grounds” — to underline its shortcomings:

Using nearly three times as many words as the OED, the IHRA says less and does so less clearly. In just its first sentence, the work certain is not needed; perception is an imprecise term; may be is odd since a definition generally tells us what something is; and hatred is not the only and not necessarily even the most important expression of antisemitism.

Despite its ambiguities and sheer hopeless confusion — or perhaps because of its very plasticity — the IHRA definition has taken on a life of its own, with baleful political effect. As its lead drafter, Kenneth S. Stern, said in 2021: “The working definition has been primarily used (and I argue, grossly abused) to suppress and chill pro-Palestinian speech, starting on campus in 2010, and then more broadly, becoming a tool to abridge free speech in quite an open way.”

The one thing that is clear from all this is that the fight against antisemitism is hindered, not helped, by its instrumentalization to serve foreign policy ends and domestic culture wars that are being fought for different reasons entirely. Often it is Jews themselves who are on the receiving end of the accusations of antisemitism: dozens of Jewish members of the British Labour Party were hounded for supposed “antisemitism” as part of the power struggle that followed Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader.

In the process, Jews end up as collateral damage in the struggle that governments and others claim to be waging to protect them! The irony is most apparent in Germany, where the idea of Staatsräson has made protection of Israel a national priority. State-appointed, non-Jewish commissioners against antisemitism have gone so far as to question whether German Jews who are critical of Israel are real Jews at all. A Granta interview entitled “Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew” assesses this development: one of the interviewees suggests that Germany’s memory culture functions as “a discursive Iron Dome.”

For some today, antisemitism is to be found everywhere. This approach stretches the bounds of any concept of antisemitism beyond reason and guts it of any meaning. If everything is antisemitic, why bother to make any distinctions?

Yet Mazower reminds us, referring to the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in the United States and a neofascist rampage in the German city of Halle, that history has not eliminated the threat of real force against Jews. What is remarkable is how debates about antisemitism have so little time for the real thing.

When they do, as after the Bondi Beach massacre, the attack on the Manchester synagogue, or the knife attack in London’s Golders Green district — all of which occurred after the publication of Mazower’s book — the instincts of both Israeli government officials and Jewish communal leaders were, without any evidence to support their assertions, to blame the attacks on hatred generated by pro-Palestinian protests against the genocide in Gaza.

I only wish that Mazower had elaborated more on the threat from the Right and brought his historian’s gaze into providing a coherent overview of the phenomenon, including its associations with the rise of ethnonationalism in general and its affinities with the ethnonationalism of Israel in particular, before which anti-Muslim fascists like Britain’s Tommy Robinson stand in awe.

I wish also that he had engaged more with the effect that the conflation of Jews with Israel is increasingly having on the safety and security of Jews in the diaspora. I have argued the case that there are two distinct forms of hatred at work: a traditional antisemitism hating Jews for what they are perceived to be, and a more recent form that has developed in response to Israel’s war on the Palestinians, conducted by the self-proclaimed Jewish state, which is increasingly perceived as unjust.

It is Israeli claims to be acting on behalf of all Jews worldwide, coupled with diaspora communal leaders giving uncritical support to Israel (such as the UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis talking of “our incredible heroic soldiers” in Gaza), that feed the conflation of Israeli, Zionist, and Jewish identities. M. J. Rosenberg insistently makes this very point in the US context: “You cannot spend decades insisting that Israel represents all Jews and then be surprised when others, including dangerous and hateful people, take that claim at face value.”

We are left wondering if the word antisemitism can be rescued from the hands of those who claim to be in the forefront of fighting it, yet continue to pour oil on the flames. “Will the current confusion of meanings and associations survive,” asks Mazower, “or will some of them be transformed, discarded, or superseded?”

The truth is that the conflicts we are witnessing over definitions are actually about conflicts and power struggles in the real world: over human rights, imperial ambitions, international law, Jewish supremacy, Palestinian survival, and much more. To expect a single word to encompass “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews or “Jewish institutions as Jewish” (in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism’s felicitous phrasing), while at the same time serving Israel’s imperial ambitions, is to expect the impossible.