Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (review)

Two professors, respectively at Baruch College and Manhattan College, col1aborate on a topic on which they have previously edited a similar volume, JewishChristian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue (Peter Lang, 1994). Capable of good historiography, they largely desert its canons for a prose that regularly employs terms such as "vicious," "vitriolic," "violent," "satanic," "irrational," and "lethal." Normal1y, the material thus described is such as to require no verbal qualifiers. Another technique is the quotation of contemptuous remarks of some highly placed person that are then cited in notes "as found in." This is distressing enough if the source is a newspaper or magazine article but if it is a quotation from someone like Josephus or Eusebius, it cannot be checked in the original. Elsewhere the citation scheme is all that one could ask, but the ambivalence is an indication of the uncertainty as to whether the authors have a scholarly or a popular readership in view.

One regrets having to make these observations because of the book's importance as a compendium of Christian antipathy to Jews and Judaism over the centuries. As such it is probably not suitable for use in college, seminary, or graduate school courses, where such a volume is badly needed. Professors are likely to know either too much or too little about the subject to be at ease with portions of the presentation. Thus, while the first chapter on "The Trial and Death of Jesus" correctly describes the gospel narratives as kerygma, the proclamation of religious faith, rather than as a chronicle of historical events, there is the assumption that four writers not themselves Jews were laying responsibility for Jesus' death on the Jewish people. Any speculation as to why the evangelists who wrote from within the people of Israel like the prophets of old chose to exculpate a pagan outsider and charge the pilgrims in Jerusalem with responsibility for Jesus' death, as in Acts, would have been at least helpful. With the writings of Origen, Chrysostom, and other Church fathers, the problem is the same. Their position as gentiles in a religious minority relative to the religious majority of Jews, both engulfed by the pagan populations around them, could have been explored societally and not solely religiously. The book consistently opts for religious motivations, if only because these are the only ones the chosen texts provide. This is not a plea for psychohistory but for a better type of history. In the authors' defense, the many early texts cited are what led to the anti-Judaism of the subsequent Christian ages. It remained for two popes in 1247 and 1272 to identify the myth of the blood libel (Jewish infants' blood mixed with the dough of matzoth at Passover) as rooted in covetousness of the possessions of Jews and thirst for their blood.

A chapter on "The Diabolization of Jews" explores the medieval peasant outlook, the creation of the Aryan myth, and the variety of uses to which the fictitious plan of The Elders of Zion for world domination has been put. The treatment of "The Jews as HomoEconomicus" is better researched than much that went before, recording fully among other matters Henry Ford's active career as an anti-Semite. A chapter on deniers of the Holocaust contains some solid information on how the death-camp killings were carried out based on documents that the SS were not successful in destroying. There is a brief account of the anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam of which Wallace Muhammad assumed leadership at the death of his father Elijah (Poole) in 1975. Having learned what Islam really taught, he terminated the movement's anti-white and anti-Jewish stance, leaving the vacuum of leadership on those terms to be filled by Louis Farrakhan (Walcott). There is a necessarily unsatisfactory summary of "Jewish-Muslim Relations in History" in an appendix of four pages, another on the activities of a...