Longest Hatred

In 1879, when Wilhelm Marr coined the term for the phenomenon that the two volumes under review treat historically, the journalist needed a euphemism. Even then, in Wilhelmine Germany, Judenhass was disreputable — and yet it was also ineradicable, and has remained so. Even after the Holocaust, this malignancy survived on some parts of the planet — among Marxists as well as Muslims, among the ignorant as well as the intelligentsia, among patricians and plebeians, in countries where a Jewish presence has been unknown (like Japan) and others where it is only a memory (like parts of Eastern Europe). Until the Soviet Union itself disintegrated, the Jewish dead of the Second World War were lumped together with other “victims of Fascism,” or were accused of ideological complicity and collaboration with the German invaders. In the Commonwealth of Independent States, Jewhatred has apparently outlasted communist ideology itself. In the Middle East the Protocols of the Elders of Zion recently topped the best-seller list, according to one Lebanese newspaper, and has been translated into dozens of editions in Arabic. Among those recommending the study of this Czarist forgery — which the correctives of historical scholarship never succeeded in quashing — have been Nasser of Egypt, Feisal of Saudi Arabia, and Quaddafi of Libya.

In Christendom the familiar forms of antisemitism have for half a century been effectively stigmatized. But Judeophobia has not completely disappeared; it took new forms. Especially since 1967, a virulent strain of antiZionism denied to the Jews in their ancient homeland the same rights of national sovereignty and expression that are unchallenged when claimed by political entities of far more recent vintage. Jews in the United States have been charged with swindling the public by promoting the “hoax” of the Holocaust, and the Nation of Islam in particular has made Jews the target of invective so creepy that precedents must be sought in medieval superstition and fears of conspiracy. Within recent memory, Gen. George S. Brown, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned of “Jewish influence” upon Congress “so strong you wouldn’t believe.... They own, you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers. Just look at where the Jewish money is.” On Oval Office tapes a Republican president could be heard sneering at “Jewboys”; and at the Democrats’ national convention in 1984, the party could not bring itself to condemn antisemitism by name, presumably because presidential candidate Jesse Jackson would have been affronted. If it remains on the agenda of historians, however, it is partly because such malevolence cannot be confined to the past tense.

A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness and Antisemitism in America constitute the most detailed historical survey from the precincts of the American academy of the implanting, evolution, and enfeeblement of this most ancient and tenacious of ethnic hatreds. Published virtually concurrently, these volumes run at a dead heat: Jaher’s text is 249 pages, Dinnerstein’s one page longer (in addition to a brief prologue on “The Christian Heritage”). Scapegoat is the more handsome in design, and its prose the more elegant. The thrifty Oxford University Press has packed so much of Dinnerstein’s text on each page that some readers may find themselves squinting. Jaher acknowledges Dinnerstein’s help with bibliographic suggestions and with “reading most of the manuscript,” and is among those whom Dinnerstein thanks for reading part of his own work and for sharing his “insights.” The two historians differ, however, on how to spell the very term they investigate. Dinnerstein is correct, since “Semitism” does not exist; and the inserted hyphen validates Marr’s disingenuous aims. Both authors start in the ancient world, and Jaher devotes a lengthy opening chapter to the medieval period; Dinnerstein’s treatment is much more cursory. Jaher stops roughly after the Civil War, arguing that by then antisemitism was fully in place, its...