Do not surrender to words! Mark Mazower on two histories of Antisemitism

Ferenc Laczó delves into Mark Mazower’s forthcoming book, Antisemitism: A Word in History (Allen Lane, 2025), writing that its proposal is to combat anti-Jewish prejudice not in isolation but as part of a broad anti-racist strategy, while safeguarding political debate and free speech – a kind of progressive centrism that, as Laczó notes, is difficult to disagree with.

On Antisemitism: A Word in History, Columbia University historian Mark Mazower’s latest work, is an erudite book that combines historical insight with a thoughtful intervention into urgent debates. It arrives at a time when there may be less consensus than ever on what antisemitism means: what sounds like self-evident truth to some strikes others as evasive or self-serving. How we have come to find ourselves in such a quandary is the central question the author seeks to answer in these pages.

Mazower’s starting point is that concepts are integral to historical processes and acquire different meanings over time. His historical-contextual interpretation shows that the concept of antisemitism originally referred to the rise and fall of a primarily European political movement, but since the 1970s it has also been at the core of a new conceptual paradigm used “largely as a way to rationalize growing international criticism of the State of Israel.” By mixing these historical layers, the current term conflates distinct questions in a rather misleading way, the book argues. Dividing antisemitism from criticism of Israel would be essential, even if developing clear definitions remains elusive, Mazower reasonably adds.

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The book is primarily concerned with political theories, actions, organizations, and outcomes, focusing on the past century and a half. Mazower acknowledges that anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudice have a much longer history – though, as he notes, stereotypes were quite common in earlier societies where such biases tended to be normalized. The terms antisemite and antisemitism were only coined in the latter half of the 19th century. As he persuasively argues, the people and phenomena they refer to could only emerge in the context of political parties, the mass press, and concomitant forms for mobilizing public opinion.

What requires special explanation, then, is how what Mazower calls a “small, venerable sect” – which many, including numerous Jews, believed to be on the verge of disappearing – suddenly found itself, to its great misfortune, at the center of modern European history. The author argues that the principal event was emancipation, which introduced a form of “state indifference” and created a new civic order. Those who wished to reverse emancipation – to emancipate society from Jews, as Richard Wagner infamously put it – sought not merely to reinforce stereotypes, but to persuade others that “the Jewish question” was entangled with broader concerns like capitalism, health, religion, and national identity, and that Jews thus posed a grave threat.

By the late 19th century, a fringe group of obsessives, who can properly be called antisemites, portrayed Jews as racial aliens who acquired power unfettered by morality. They viewed them as both degenerate and dominant. As Mazower reminds us, however, antisemitism was initially more of a literary and journalistic sensation than a political force, better at hurling insults than shaping policy. Antisemites may have temporarily thrived in Austrian elections and Tsarist Russia, but their movement failed to reverse emancipation prior to the First World War and tended to fold under pressure.

Mazower identifies the “long First World War” (1912–1923) as a watershed, during which only the civilian death toll of Armenians exceeded that of Jews. After the First World War, antisemites, who were still associating Jews with all the perceived ills of modernity, began to attract support across the class divide. While they openly rejected equal citizenship and sought to remove Jewish influence, the extent of their ambitions remained unclear – even the Nazis, Mazower notes, gave astonishingly little advance consideration to where their military successes might lead. Once emancipation had been undone in numerous European countries by the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jew-hatred became a kind of common currency, he continues. Still, during the Second World War, states, bureaucracies, geography, and timing all mattered more than attitudes and prejudices, he adds; the Holocaust was motivated by antisemitism but shaped by a host of other factors.

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Though antisemites were defeated in Europe by 1945, it would take much longer to relegate antisemitic attitudes to the margins. 

Systematic research into antisemitism in fact only began after the war and meant “thinking with the Holocaust.” Scholars of antisemitism thus tended to be catastrophists, Mazower writes, whose alarmist analogies assigned the past a rather misleading weight in the postwar present. Antisemitic attitudes in fact gradually became taboo in Western Europe, even as xenophobia remained close to the surface, he points out. Meanwhile, in Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe, officials professed a commitment to eradicating antisemitism – the Bolsheviks were in fact the first to pledge this decades earlier – yet they soon developed their own anti-Zionist variant.

Even more consequential developments unfolded in the United States and Israel, the book shows. The U.S., though a democracy, was founded on a sharp and highly consequential racial dichotomy. For the first time in modern history, Jews had a racial advantage – they were enfranchised upon arrival, just as African Americans were being disenfranchised. This produced an intense and rather fraught relationship between the two groups. It is well known that Jews joined the civil rights movement in significant numbers, but from the mid-1960s, the black/white binary increasingly framed them as part of the oppressor class.

American Jews generally supported the State of Israel from its founding in 1948, but early on, they did not see their own lives as intertwined with its trajectory. The mutual embrace of the two, emotional as much as political, can be dated to the years after 1967 and would generate unstinting support for Israeli policies and much self-righteousness in its defence, as Mazower reiterates the familiar narrative. A genocide of Europeans against other Europeans would soon come to serve as a moral rationale for staunch U.S. support for Israel, he wryly observes. 

The book also shows that back in the 1960s, reports of antisemitism (remarkably enough from today’s point of view) did not necessarily even reference the State of Israel. At the time, Arab opposition to it was widely viewed as political, not prejudicial. Secular Arab nationalists saw Zionists as colonial proxies though, while pan-Islamic anti-colonialists made no distinction between “Zionist” and “Jew.” Ardent Zionists, in turn, saw Israel as the political fulfillment of Judaism and were also intent on erasing that distinction. 

The 1970s introduced the notion of a “new antisemitism”: according to its propagators, the threat now came especially from the activist left’s stance on Israel. In other words, anti-Zionism became the centrepiece of this new framework, which was – as Mazower rightly emphasizes – on the way to becoming a “new Orthodoxy.” In the same decade, the UN declined to issue a specific declaration on antisemitism, viewing it as yesteryear’s problem. In 1975, its General Assembly even equated Zionism with racism, in effect recasting Israelis as heirs rather than victims of Nazism. 

As a combined result of these divergent trends, antisemitism could no longer be discussed without reference to Israel.

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Was the old term being misused in “new antisemitism”? Mazower is cautious on this controversial point. What is clear, he notes, is that in the changed context of the late 20^th century, the word was tied both to the Jewish past and the geopolitical present. Yet the continued usage of the old term with all its frightening associations made it easy to ignore just how much the status of Jews had changed, he adds. 

In the postwar world, Jews in fact emerged as far more powerful; their new sense of influence, especially visible in the U.S., often manifesting in what the author calls “militant public self-assertiveness.” However, the rather comfortable lives many Jews would come to enjoy contrasted rather sharply with their acute sense of being endangered – which was only reinforced by their growing tendency to perceive threats to Israel’s safety as attacks on themselves. 

Interest in antisemitism grew substantially in Israel too in the late 20^th century where the “old secular country” was overtaken by a new Jewish nationalism. As Mazower explains, a majoritarian politics started to dominate there which possessed the mindset of a besieged minority. It believed both in the unique destiny of a people that dwells alone and the persistent animosity of the outside world – an animosity supposedly unlike any other. This staunch nationalism newly presented a repeat of the Holocaust as potentially compatible with the existence of Israel while ignoring the connections between Israeli policies and the tides of anti-Zionist mobilization. 

This melding of history, faith, and politics left little room for diplomacy or political thought, the author concludes.

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Mazower subsequently discusses how our century has brought unprecedented, coordinated global efforts to combat antisemitism through monitoring, lobbying, and legislation. These efforts have been increasingly linked to right-wing attempts to condemn criticisms of the State of Israel as a form of prejudice just when the latter started to face mounting international censure. In our age, the antisemitic label has ever more frequently been redeployed to close debate down. Such efforts have also been supported by various advocacy groups, Mazower points out, which may indeed have a vested interest in disconcerting results and alarmist reports. After all, headlines are not made by the decline of antisemitism. 

These efforts have birthed new kinds of bureaucracies in dozens of countries and some unusual diplomatic initiatives too, including an American special envoy appointed to prevent vilification of another state. Moot questions to emerge in this context, Mazower explains, have been what the connection between religious or ethnic prejudice and the singling out of Israel for blame consisted of, where exactly the boundary between the two could be located, and who was to decide. 

While the State of Israel may be critiqued out of a variety of motivations – Mazower mentions ignorance, third worldism, and a sense of personal responsibility (“not in my name”) – such motives tend to be difficult to tell apart, he soberly adds. In other words, antisemitism and anti-Zionism are at times connected to each other, but it is far from obvious what their precise relationship is. The two are clearly not equivalent though, since you can challenge a state without attacking Jews or Judaism as such. 

By helping to conflate the two, the new uses of antisemitism turn language into an instrument of power, the book argues: instead of battling ethnonationalism, this key word now helps justify its excesses. 

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While definitions need to be bounded, plain, and sum up essential features, the most widely circulating definition of antisemitism – the one originally proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in the mid-2010s – is, on the contrary, both inclusive and imprecise, the author further explains. Its originator, the IHRA, is neither a monitoring nor a research institution and its definition – though it may fulfil administrative needs when it comes to quantitative monitoring – is not really a definition at all, he claims; it is simply too indeterminate, repetitive, and incomplete for that. Providing a working definition that institutions then adopt exercises the privilege of fixing meaning, Mazower continues; such a definition serves to categorize certain views as unwanted or unacceptable and attempts to dictate what citizens can say. The less clear such a definition is, the more it lends itself to opportunistic appropriation – and the more people will err on the side of caution. What is more, such a quasi-definition inevitably focuses on what sets antisemitism apart, instead of offering a more contextualized understanding via reference to issues such as racism, poverty, education, or psychology, Mazower complains. The often rather strict current enforcement of such a problematic definition – which its creators at the IHRA may admittedly never have intended – makes dissent more necessary and more difficult, he asserts convincingly.

If such assertions regarding the contemporary fight against antisemitism clearly sound polemical, the author also makes remarkable efforts to contextualize its massive influence. He points to broader initiatives to legislate inherently political speech, the spread of militarized views of academic and intellectual life, the new inclination to view feelings as truth, and – perhaps most disconcertingly – the apparent collaboration of certain students and professors in the U.S. with intelligence and security services. A key political context the book analyses is the forging of a new coalition between staunch defenders of Israel, those worried about the impact of campus antisemitism, and conservative culture warriors eager to launch a sweeping assault on the Left while neutralizing mainstream liberals. The emergence of such a coalition has led to the current weaponization of antisemitism in the service of Christian nationalism and anti-liberalism, Mazower argues. As the suppression of legitimate speech has come to be prioritized over the threat of racist violence, the exclusionary Right nowadays gets reduced to a secondary concern even when it comes to the fight against antisemitism, he critiques. 

This rebranding of antisemitism has already done significant damage while it has clearly failed to suppress criticism of Israel. As On Antisemitism rightly warns, it now risks discrediting the term itself. 

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Mark Mazower’s learned and fair-minded book shows that the concept of antisemitism can help illuminate aspects of the past (the agenda of Part I, “Europe in the Age of the Antisemites”) but also has the potential to create confusion and misunderstanding (Part II, “On the Battlefield of Ideas”). Intriguingly, On Antisemitism reflects a similar duality between history and politics: while Part I dissects how antisemitism became a “world power” and offers a rather conventional historical account, the second major part of the book is concerned with the growing ambiguities of anti-antisemitism and amounts to a consciously polemical contribution to interpreting the history of the present. What On Antisemitism thus demonstrates is that – contrary to widespread, ahistorical and deeply pessimistic assertions concerning its ‘eternal nature’ – antisemitism is very much time- and context-dependent, which in turn implies that it can be studied, understood and tackled. 

This surprisingly positive assertion might partly be belied by the book’s own approach, though. If the second (and secondary) history of antisemitism recounted here – i.e. the recent use and abuse of the concept by anti-antisemites – has developed on top of and as a reaction to the original, devastating history of antisemitism in modern times, it is not entirely clear why we should believe that human reason would help us overcome these deeply intertwined – though, of course, far from equally problematic – traditions. 

At another point, Mark Mazower sounds more realistic about what nuanced terminological discussions may achieve. They cannot be expected to resolve underlying conflicts, he asserts; the future meaning of terms will much rather be shaped by epochal changes. The proposal this genteel book develops is ultimately more pragmatic and balanced: to combat anti-Jewish prejudice not in isolation but as part of a broad anti-racist strategy while safeguarding political debate and free speech – a kind of progressive centrism that is difficult to disagree with.