From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism—and Back Again?

"The current paradigm prevailing in the study of antisemitism is the view proposed in The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910): “Antisemitism is exclusively a question of European politics.” This approach has afforded important empirical studies, but it contains conceptual problems, not least that it recycles the antisemites’ view of themselves: that is, that they were not concerned with religion but objective issues. This article argues that discursive deployment and political appeal are not the same as social reception and understanding; it proposes that the ways in which the “new” Antisemitismus was actually heard constituted a different matter from what its proponents intended. In the so-called “new antisemitism,” we encounter the omnipresent, strong, but subtle influence of an old trinity of unstated “spiritual” elements: institutional religion (Olaf Blaschke); le religieux in the diffuse, or “metabolized,” sense (Marcel Gauchet); rogue religiosity, in the motives of individual antisemites (Gavin Langmuir). These dimensions may be shown to have suffused the statements and conflicts of “ordinary” political, social, economic, cultural, and “racial” antisemitism. They carried its message to the intellectual and emotional levels in populations that had been bathed in antijudaism for centuries (David Nirenberg). As Nirenberg has analyzed the social imaginary of antijudaism, the question of where and how it joins and quietly underlies political antisemitism must now be posed."