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Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ Frank Ryan was an Irish republican and socialist who fought on the anti-Treaty side of the Irish Civil War. 

He was born into a family of nine in the townland of Bottomstown near Elton, County Limerick to parents, Verne Foster Ryan and Annie Slattery, both national School teachers in 1902. He died in Dresden Germany in 1944, and it is the Dresden connection which has prompted some revisionist and reactionary ( and some not so reactionary) historians to paint an erroneous picture of Ryan, suggesting his views may have changed. Some claim, citing his stay in Nazi Germany, that Ryan switched sides from radical socialist, Marxist, towards an ideological Nazi-style side, claims which are unfounded. 

Frank Ryan was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) Volunteer who fought in the Irish Civil War against the Irish Free State forces and later, in 1934, along with George Gilmore, Michael Price, Nora Connolly O’Brien (daughter of James Connolly) Peadar O’Donnell, and many others formed the left-wing Republican Congress. He left the mainstream IRA due to ideological differences which, in Ryan's case, meant socialism. Frank Ryan fought in the Spanish Civil War against the reactionary fascist forces of General, later Generalissimo, Francisco Franco and was heavily involved in the fighting at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 where his friend and comrade, Kit Conway, met his death. Ryan succeeded Conway taking command of the Connolly Column, part of the XV International Brigade. 

On 31st March 1938 Frank Ryan was captured by Franco's allied Italian forces and imprisoned initially in Mora del Ebro and San Pedro de Cardena before being moved to Burgos Prison and sentenced to death. In October 1938 Ryan was visited in Burgos Prison by the Irish minister to Spain, Leopold Kerney, who secured a lawyer for him paid for by the Irish government. Despite the lawyer's - Jaimie Michel de Champourcin - best efforts the Spanish regime would not grant Ryan's release. His death sentence was commuted, after the intervention of Eamon de Valera, to 30 years imprisonment and he did secure his release by a least expected organisation and certainly unlikely wing of the German establishment.

Frank Ryan was released into the custody of the German Intelligence Service, the Abwehr under the command of Wilhelm Canaris, on 15th June 1940. At the time the Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact was still in play so, albeit cautiously, acceptance of Abwehr hospitality was acceptable to Ryan as a socialist especially when his life depended on it. The situation was not ideal but, by comparison with the alternatives, Gestapo custody and certain torture, Canaris and the Abwehr was the best attainable. Wilhelm Canaris, unknown to Hitler and the Nazi Party, was not a follower of the dictator and was anti-Nazi, something he managed to keep secret for many years, But was eventually discovered and executed by the SS. Canaris was an old-style right-wing Conservative but no Nazi. 

Unlike the Gestapo the Abwehr was aligned with the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, therefore the methods of the Gestapo were usually not adopted by the intelligence service. The Gestapo kept hounding the Abwehr for Ryan to be handed over but Canaris stood his ground. The Gestapo were interested in Frank Ryan's anti-fascist work and his involvement in the International Brigades in Spain and, had they been successful in securing him into their custody, Ryan would almost certainly have been tortured to death. Plus the former IRA Chief of Staff, Sean Russell, had been in meetings with the Nazis, working on the old maxim; ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ which though applicable in the First World War most certainly was not in World War II. Russell died on board a U Boat of a perforated ulcer returning to Ireland. 

While Ryan was in Germany he had no passport, no legal status, and was entirely dependant on the Abwehr for accommodation. Being in the custody of the Abwehr must have seemed fortunate given the alternatives were the SS or the Gestapo, possibly both! As a guest of the intelligence service it was not perfect, far, far from it, but certainly preferable. At this point and perhaps at no other did Ryan know many of his hosts were also anti-Nazi. The head of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Canaris, even managed to smuggle a small number of Jews out of the clutches of the Third Reich but unlikely any of this would have been known to Frank Ryan, Canaris was playing a very dangerous game, one which would eventually cost him his life.

Another ruse the Abwehr played to keep Ryan out of Gestapo custody was denying any such person was in their custody. They had a ‘Frank Richards’ under arrest and this was nothing to do with the Gestapo or the SS Canaris informed his inquisitors. Had Ryan been handed over to the Gestapo they would have, after extensive torture, in all probability executed him as a communist. While in German custody at no point did Frank Ryan change or even modify his political and ideological views in any way. It was simply a battle of survival. And with the Abwehr things were a lot more favourable than the alternatives. 

The protective shield the Abwehr provided for Ryan was invaluable. Remember, the Nazis were not a normal government even by the standards of the day. The concept of the IRA coming firmly down on the Nazi side during the war may have been perceived as beneficial to Sean Russel but highly unlikely that Frank Ryan would have approved. Ryan was aboard the U Boat on which Russell died but was nothing more than a passenger. 

Those who would have us believe Frank Ryan changed his political position while in German custody are wrong. If anything his anti-fascist stance, though kept under wraps, may well have been strengthened. The narrative about Ryan dropping socialism may suit what some reactionaries wish to believe but that does not make such nonsense a fact, it was, and remains at best a myth. It is true he did ‘collaborate’ in the true sense of the word but this was a on a minimal basis as part of staying alive. ‘Collaborate’ had many different guises during the Second World War ranging from sympathetic collaboration of people like Quisling in Norway, Petain in France, to the mildest form adopted by ordinary people under occupation who just wished to stay alive. Those who adopted the latter would not cause any trouble for the Germans and hoped that would be enough to see them through. If Frank Ryan did ‘collaborate’ it was in the mildest sense and there is no evidence to suggest anything different.

Irish republican and International Brigade leader Frank Ryan died on 10th June 1944 at a hospital in Dresden, Germany, at the age of 41. The cause of death was pleurisy and pneumonia and he had been in poor health for many years. He had been living in Germany since 1940 where his remains stayed until repatriation in 1979 when the Irish government successfully repatriated his body. He was reinterred with a large republican funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Frank Ryan 🪶 Myth V Truth

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Eighty Two

 

A Morning Thought @ 3253

Jim Duffy ✍ The West's response is invariably timid and that timidity plays into Putin's hands. 


Autocrats see the world in zero sum ways: win vs lose, where they show determination and are winners and the West shows timidity and are losers. That is how they invariably see things. It is rigidly black and white. Issuing tough statements and shutting down a consulate is in Russia's eyes classic Western timidity. 

The West reminds me of a notorious Irish judge who is endlessly weak on criminals and literally thinks that saying "you are being bold! Now stop it!" is being tough. A robber robbed a house I lived in. The Gardaí caught him. The case went to court, but when they heard what judge they had I remember a guard sighing and saying they had wasted their time. Sure enough the judge told the criminal to "stop being so bold" and gave him a short suspended sentence. The robber already had three suspended sentences having over him, but the Gardaí said to me that they didn't know what crime that robber had to commit to actually get sent to prison. I remember the robber walking out of the court and in the hall outside laughing at the Gardaí and giving them the finger. He knew that judge would effectively let him off. He always did.
 
The West's endless handwringing "tough talk but no serious action" approach is just like the judge.

It is worth reminding people that Putin says he is at war with Europe. Every single country. Not just NATO countries. All the neutrals too - Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus, Malta and Ireland. They are all targets according his ambassadors. The Russian ambassador made it clear that Ireland is a target and "will be dealt with."
 
The West thinks in terms of a gradient up to war, with cyber-attacks, drone attacks, etc as below war level. That is not how Russia thinks. It sees cyber-attacks and drone attacks as an actual war tactic. They saw the cyber-attacks on Ireland as war attacks. Of course the Irish government while knowing definitively Russia was behind them didn't even announce the fact publicly, instead saying they didn't know and investigations "are still ongoing." They actually finished investigations years ago and know precisely where they came from (right down to the building) and who ordered them. At least this time the Germans named who was responsible. Britain did not name who had planted parcel bombs in DHL,  parcels that caught fire in a warehouse in Birmingham thankfully before they had been put on a plane.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

The Timid West

Anthony McIntyre ☠ The UUP leader Jon Burrows was described last month by Tom Kelly in the following unflattering terms:

Self assurance - is meaningless without self awareness. Jon Burrows is a loquacious confident speaker but the output is a word salad of political nothingness, contradictions . . .

The inference is that as a former RUC officer Burrows has brought the force's lack of self awareness into the heart of the political arena with all the self assurance of one of Bertrand Russell's fools and fanatics who are invariably so 'certain of themselves,' while wiser counsel is often 'so full of doubts.'

However we choose to assess him he is neither foolish nor fanatical when denouncing attacks on the Ballymena war memorial in August. Twice over a three day period the memorial was vandalised. Flags were stolen and flag poles broken. 

Mr Burrows castigating the attacks as “despicable and deeply disrespectful” added that he was:
 
absolutely disgusted to learn that this memorial has been attacked and damaged for a second night over the course of this weekend. This is not simply an act of mindless vandalism. It is an attack on a place of remembrance dedicated to those who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Great War.
This memorial provides a quiet place where people can sit, rest and reflect. More importantly, it serves as a lasting reminder of the men and women who gave their all in service and sacrifice . . . To attack this memorial once was disgraceful. To return and target it for a second night shows a level of contempt for our community, for the volunteers who care for this area and, above all, for the memory of those commemorated here . . .
Whatever motivates someone to deliberately target such a place, there can be absolutely no excuse for it.

Whether Great War or Great Waste, hate crime as alleged by the PSNI or clown crime, desecration of space reserved for quiet reflection in memory of lives lost should have as much place in discursive practices as the N word. 

Critics are entitled to view the slaughter of World War 1 with the same contempt that Connolly and others did: an imperialist grab where lions were sent to their deaths by donkeys. That entitlement does not extend to desecration of memorial tributes to the dead of that war. Memorial marauding is as wrong in Ballymena as it is in Twinbrook where the Brendan Hughes mural was defiled by goondas associated with Sinn Fein. It is no different from what the IDF did in Gaza to a war cemetery, where satellite imagery showed:

extensive earthworks in the southernmost corner of the graveyard. Bomb craters can be seen around the cemetery, but in this area the destruction appears to have been more systematic.
Rows of gravestones have been removed, the topsoil has been churned up and a substantial earth berm can be seen running across the middle of the affected area. It is of a size that suggests the use of heavy equipment.

Despise the fallen and what they died for if we wish, but allow the dead to rest in peace and the living to remember them in peace. 

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Desecration

Irish Times 📰 Written by Sinéad O'Sullivan. 

Europe has stumbled into a new growth paradigm with a reliance on the permanent threat of war

At the launch of the White Paper for European Defence – Readiness 2030, Ursula von der Leyen declared the era of Europe’s peace dividend “long gone”. Peace, apparently, was a phase that we have now outgrown.

The EU’s centre of gravity has rapidly moved from a focus on trading to armament, as outlined by von der Leyen in early 2025, and this transfer of meaning is not happening through defence memorandums but through nation state treasuries. Consider the following: the European Commission is in the midst of mobilising €800 billion defence spending by 2030; more than 15 member states have activated “escape clauses” to enable an economic breach of fiscal rules to procure weapons; €150 billion of so-called “bomb bonds” has been raised for collective borrowing; a new multilateral bank – the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank – is targeting hundreds of billions of euro, with Belgium, Greece, Romania, Latvia and Ukraine among its founders; Canada has been admitted as a non-EU member state, in a leadership role, on many of these initiatives.

Continue @ Irish Times.

The Irish Government Is Helping To Usher In A New Wartime Economy In Europe

Shaun Harkin ➤ Burnham is rightly being challenged for his hypocritical "off the table" comment regarding a referendum on ending partition.


He's no democrat or ally of working-class people on the island of Ireland or Britain. 

He says he's opposed to anything that's divisive and wants to focus on addressing issues that matter to people.

The Labour government has been nothing but divisive and incapable of addressing the needs of working-class households, here or in Britain.
Axing the Winter Fuel Payment, imposing paltry public sector workers pay increases, expelling socialists, supporting Israel's Gaza genocide, criminalising Palestine solidarity, punching down on trans people and tailing Reform on immigration have all been tremendously divisive.
 
Supporting a massive spending increase for the arms industry, as Burnham has done, is divisive and prioritises war profiteers over investing in schools, hospitals, housing and renewable energy.
Labour and Westminster's failure to challenge inequality and transform people's lives here, combined with the toxicity of the DUP and much of political unionism, is the very reason a border poll has become an urgent matter.
 
By dismissing the demand for a border poll and the aspiration of many for Irish unity, he couldn't be more divisive.
 
The way Burnham commented was a reminder of Starmer's comments giving Israel the greenlight to slaughter Palestinians.
 
Burnham supports devolution but not democracy.
 
Labour backed devolution as a means of getting devolved areas to take responsibility for implementing austerity.
 
Labour in government has done nothing to undo decades of austerity imposed by Westminster on the North of Ireland.
 
If Burnham was a democrat he would agree people in Ireland should have the opportunity, as people in Scotland had and should have again, to vote on its constitutional future.
 
Burnham has made it clear he will stand in the way of democracy.
 
He isn't a progressive. He's a willing manager of the British state, its present interests and its colonial legacy.
 
Burnham's accusation that a poll to undo partition is divisive is utter hypocrisy. The British Empire imposed division across the world. It imposed division and partition here.
 
Partition was imposed to divide the Irish working-class and to strengthen the power of elites North and South and in Britain.
 
The British ruling class opposes the fragmentation of the UK today because it will weaken its economic and military power. In an increasingly uncertain world, the British state has become more determined to block independence for Scotland and Irish unity.
 
The demand for a border poll is a legitimate democratic demand. It shouldn't be in the gift of a British prime minister or secretary of state to determine if, when or how that will ever happen.
 
The opportunity to redistribute wealth and power across Ireland is linked to ending partition. Burnham has no right to shut that door.
 
There is no guarantee that ending partition would dramatically improve working-class people's lives across the island. It depends how it is ended.
 
There are political, corporate and military forces at work to ensure in the event of a border poll that a New Ireland would pose no threat to the existing status quo.
 
When the nationalist political establishment North and South talks about the need to plan what a New Ireland will look like following a border poll, it doesn’t include a Socialist Ireland.
 
Connolly's Workers Republic envisioned the simultaneous end of British rule and capitalism. This alternative is only possible if the working-class asserts itself independently:
 
No Irish revolutionist worth his salt would refuse to lend a hand to the Social Democracy of England in the effort to uproot the social system of which the British Empire is the crown and apex, and in like manner no English Social Democrat fails to recognize clearly that the crash which would betoken the fall of the ruling classes in Ireland would sound the tocsin for the revolt of the disinherited in England.
But on whom devolves the task of achieving that downfall of the ruling classes in Ireland? On the Irish people. But who are the Irish people? Is it the dividend-hunting capitalist with the phraseology of patriotism on his lips and the spoil wrung from sweated Irish toilers ill his pockets; is it the scheming lawyer – most immoral of all classes; is it the slum landlord who denounces rackrenting in the country and practices it in the towns; is it any one of these sections who today dominate Irish politics?
Or is it not rather the Irish working class – the only secure foundation on which a free nation can be reared – the Irish working class which has borne the brunt of every political struggle, and gained by none, and which is today the only class in Ireland which has no interest to serve in perpetuating either the political or social forms of oppression – the British connection or the capitalist system?
 The Irish working class must emancipate itself, and in emancipating itself it must, perforce, free its country. 
The act of social emancipation requires the conversion of the land and instruments of production from private property into the public or common property of the entire nation. This necessitates a social system of the most absolute democracy, and in establishing that necessary social system the working class must grapple with every form of government which could interfere with the most unfettered control by the people of Ireland of all the resources of their country. - Erin's Hope

⏩Shaun Harkin is a councillor in Foyleside.

Off The Table

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Eighty One

 

Hate Theology @ 14

 

A Morning Thought @ 3252

Gary Robertson ⚽ Ronan Keating, the only member of the band “Boyzone” who along with the late Stephen Gately, had any discernible talent once sang “life is a rollercoaster” and it most certainly is if you’re a football fan.

I’ve gone through several drafts of this trying to express my disappointment without singlehandedly filling every swear jar from Dumfries to Donegal and John O’Groats to Mizen Head.
 
It’s been a trying time to say the least for fans of Scotland’s premier club.

Elated and riding high after a 3-0 home win Celtic managed to capitulate in scenes reminiscent to the Battle of Stalingrad.
 
The wonder goals scored at Paradise were of little comfort on a night that started so promisingly and ended up one of the worst, if not the worst, in Celtic’s illustrious history.
 
Captain McGregor putting the Celts 4-0 up with an early goal for the visitors and it should have been “Goodnight Vienna” but instead the Austrian side turned on a performance that fans will remember forever.
 
Wave after wave of attack, and when Usor scored in the 32 min to draw the teams level on the night no one in green and white could have imagined what lay ahead in the second half.
 
I won’t bore you with details, we’ve all seen it, whether to cry some more, to be enraged or to laugh the Keystone Cops of Scottish football had by the final whistle in 90 mins thrown away a 4-0 lead.
 
4-4 and as I wrote on Bluesky “awaiting the inevitable”. It didn’t take long for LASK to split Celtic wide open and score a fifth in the 109th minute.
 
Champions League dreams over for yet another year. A scenario that’s becoming all too familiar at Celtic Park and whilst dropping into the Europa League isn’t quite the end of days I’m struggling personally to find the necessary appetite to get excited at this when the holy grail for Scottish clubs of a place in the Champions League group stages was well within our grasp. Celtic’s to lose and lose they did.
 
Defeat is painful, incredibly painful, but I’d like to say to the morons who caused Luke McCowan to close his Instagram after abuse including those wishing him dead. Y you’re not football fans you’re idiots grow the fuck up. Sure have a moan, criticise but there’s a line you don’t cross and you did. Absolutely shameful.

So to Thursday and Rangers in Poland. Now after Celtic’s defeat I could make loads of jokes about H*ns in Poland, like the German guy who’s stopped at the Polish border and asked “occupation?” and the German replies “no just visiting” but I’m too depressed.
 
Even the joy of Rangers crashing out of Europe altogether, on penalties, hardly lifted my spirits. There’s no blue pill to raise this mood.

Others fared with mixed results - Hibernian just missing out with a 3-2 home defeat by Belgian side Gent, Hearts doing better in Austria drawing 2-2, with Rapid Vienna qualifying for the Conference League winning 4-3 on penalties.

So with that pain out the way let’s move onto the weekend.

Celtic at home to Falkirk on Saturday. A nervy 2-1 victory for the Celts with a double from Duran. As the old adage says it ain’t over til the fat lady sings and as she was limbering up to laud Celtic with praise a Donovan own goal made the final 20 mins or so agony for the majority of the almost 59,000 crowd.
 
Before the match a banner was unfurled that read “world class embarrassment” - it was hard to argue otherwise.

 ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ ⚽

Other results in the SPL ⚽

A 2-1 victory at home for Hearts over St Johnstone and a 4-0 demolition of Kilmarnock, who sit routed at the foot of the table with a UK Eurovision score of Nul points, by the enigmatic Dundee United.

So to Sunday, and Motherwell throwing away a 2 goal lead at St Mirren found themselves 3-2 down after 3 quick fire goals in ten minutes from the Saints and only a late 93rd min goal from Kanga (a wonder strike by the youngster) rescuing a point for the Steelmen.
 
Elsewhere, Hibernian managed to hold on for a 2-1 victory over Dundee at Dens Park.

The game of the weekend, at least in terms of once former great clubs, saw McInness' Rangers face Robinson's Aberdeen. This wasn’t a game of high quality (I feel I made have said that before about Rangers) the 3 points returning to Glasgow courtesy of a Shankland penalty. Of course I’m sure Rangers fans won’t be too concerned - after all a victory is a victory but this was not a great advert for Scottish football. Sloppy passing, wayward shots and at times disinterested looking players - Gassama who one minute looks like a world class player then disappears from view - add in a card happy referee who issued 9 yellows - 6 to Aberdeen and 3 to Rangers - and what we watched was a game of bizarre decisions, yellows that should have been reds, bookings for innocuous challenges while worse were ignored. Referee Matthew McDermid was determined to make himself the centre of attention.
Aberdeen manager Stephen Robinson said after the match when asked for his thoughts said “if i tell you my thoughts I’ll get six match ban.” Well, no ban for me so I’ll say it instead. Appalling refereeing. Honestly the standards are slipping every week in Scotland and today’s showing was amateurish.

So that’s pretty much it for the summer - meteorological summer ends on the 31st August - it’s been a rough week but one we managed to navigate. Somehow.

So all that remains is for me to say thanks for listening to my moaning, have fun, stay safe be happy

Til next time ……

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Goodnight Vienna

Barry Gilheany 🔖 Reviews an exploration of the history of Jew Hating. 


Part One

The history of antisemitism or hostility to Jews or representations of Jewry and contemporary attempts to define the phenomenon through means like the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition have led to fierce scholarly and political contestation over, in particular, criticisms of the State of Israel and Zionism. 

There is a fair degree of consensus around the amoebic, shape shifting nature of antisemitism with differing meanings and interpretations depending on the motive and ideological hue of the particular antagonist and its conspiratorial, cabalistic themes. Professor Sander L. Gilman takes a novel approach this ancient hatred with the clue very much in the name. He takes issue with those scholars and writers who trace an unbroken and almost primordial lineage of antisemitism from ancient history by conceptualising it in the plural; namely antisemitisms. He sets out his case throughout his book by contending that defining antisemitism is intrinsically linked to their function in time and space, and also in the reactions it engenders from those who identify as Jewish. He argues that the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘left’ antisemitisms, or ‘Islamic’ and ‘Jewish’ antisemitism, or ‘Western’ or ‘Asian’ antisemitism, freezes moments in time and space. He therefore redefines antisemitism in the plural as antisemitisms, for as they are always situational, every specific manifestation of an antisemitism must be understood not as a link in an unbroken chain but is part of a series of isolated moments dependent on their complex formation. Therefore it is impossible to map out a coherent, chronological ‘history of antisemitism’.[1]

So antisemitisms, like all forms of xenophobia, creates their own object, in this case ‘the Jews’ – and this often-contradictory category is then projected onto people who may or may not identify as Jewish, however defined, but who may then respond to such labels as Jews.[2]

As stated already, Gilman challenges the received wisdom of the singular and indivisible accounts of the persecution of the Jews by historians like Robert Wistrich, who developed a unitary concept of antisemitism as the ‘longest hatred,' the title of his 1991 book, to differentiate it from all other manifestations of xenophobia. For Wistrich, antisemitism is ever ‘static and unchanging’ and proves that specific forms of ‘religious or ethnic hatred (are) inevitable’, if contingent. Wistrich’s version of antisemitism became the overdetermined and constant node in public discourse that ‘produced a ‘largely monolithic picture of both the perpetrators and victims of antisemitism’ and homogenised the ‘dominant attitudes of non-Jews towards Jews (as having been) unremittingly hostile.’ [3]

For Hannah Arendt, the idea of an eternal antisemitism resembled the idea of the eternal Jew:

The notion of an unbroken continuity of persecutions, expulsions, and massacres from the end of the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, the modern era, and down to our own time, frequently embellished by the idea that modern antisemitism is no more than a Secularised version of popular medieval superstitions, is no less fallacious (though of course less mischievous) than the
Corresponding antisemitic notion of a Jewish secret society that has ruled, or aspired to rule, the world since antiquity.[4]

Gilman does explain that Wistrich’s schema was reactive to the challenging of such views after the Holocaust by protagonists such as Arendt. However he emphasises that making this simply reactive, as does David Nirenberg’s 2013 Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition and describing it as an unmediated phenomenon that can be traced as far back as ancient Egypt (and the writings of the third century BCE priest Manetho) or ancient Greece and Rome and culminates and is consummated in the Holocaust, does not afford any more clarity. He critiques Nirenberg’s notion of anti-Judaism as ‘evoking the imagined figure of the Jew as an absolute contrast to whatever problems or discomforts that the non-Jewish world needs to resolve.' For, just as in Arendt’s syllogism, by anti-Judaism Nirenberg, ibn Sander’s estimation, means evoking the imagined figure of the Jew as an absolute contrast to whatever problems, crises or discontents that the non-Jewish world needs to resolve. The catchcry  that ‘it is always the Jew’s fault' always receives the mirror image of a rigidly reactive response from scholars writing in thematic unitary accounts of Jewish disadvantage and suffering.[5]

Gilman begins from the premise that when xenophobia becomes concrete in contemporary prejudices, it requires a fixed, unchanging object: a stereotype. For stereotypes reflect the need to concretise our fears of difference and thus reflect our wobbly sense of our Now. There are fewer examples of how glaringly obvious this truism is in the reaction of European and North American populations to the waves of mass migration that are the consequences of globalisation and its malcontents and the multiple returns of the repressed for the colonial empires of the past. Our current temporal-spatial moment implores us to take on board the understanding that regardless of how homogenous or consistent antisemitisms look, this one-dimensional rigidity is a property of the study of antisemitisms which commenced in the age which witnessed the self-conscious move from theology to science. Both these worlds created their own ‘imaginary communities; whether national or religious or both, into which human beings seamlessly insert themselves.'  However, both worlds demand, each in their own way, clearly defined borders, specific ideas of consistency and clear statements of the nature of evidence, all of which simply obscure the innately wobbly nature and lack of certitude of both science and theology.[6]

Throughout the 81 page Introduction to his book (which deserves to have the status of a free-standing piece of scholarship in its own right), Gilman navigates the description of the ‘longest hatred’ from the emergence of the pseudoscience of race which bowdlerised the works of genuine scientists such as Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur to formulate the idea that the Jews were a homogenous category and that all individuals labelled by the ethnography and race science of the day were of a single stock. Most historians of antisemitism trace the origin of the word ‘antisemitism’ itself as arising in the science of the 19th century as a marker of the break between European Christian religious views of the Jews (none of which were ever monolithic) and the new scientific (read: biological) discourse. The common wisdom is that unitary antisemitism evolves from the ethnology of the Enlightenment, where the term ‘Semite’ became a designation of a language group. By the time it appeared in the 19th century with the philosopher Ernest Renan and the Sanskrit scholar Christian Lassen, ‘semitic’ had been converted from a linguistic category into one weaponised by the new science of race. Like many of his contemporaries, Renan argued the language of a people or collective is moulded by their fixed mentality. Such claims on linguistic competence and reductionism came to be the driver for later fantasies of limitations to citizenship, such as in Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s notion of national Geist (spirit).[7]

The popular usage of the word ‘antisemitism’ in the political context that is familiar to today’s audiences in 1879 after the political journalist Wilhelm Marr in his widely read pamphlet attacking the Jews, Der |Weg zum Siege des Germanenthuns uber das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit, 1873). That year Marr founded the League of Antisemites to combat Jewish influence in Europe. His deployment of biology, not language, as a marker of Jewishness laid forth in his Der Judenspiegel (The Mirror of the Jews, 1862) prefigures the discourse and practice of Jew hate that was to climax in the European continent-wide auto de fe of the Nazi Shoah/Holocaust in the 1940s:

It is a fact that every social relationship, in which the Jews get a kind of preponderance over the Christians, cannot persevere. The reason is not religious hatred from one side – such hatred does not exist among educated people; it is, however, the very alien character of his very being, which is – if we may say so – ‘chemically’ unbearable, and which leads to the resolution of the body through, if we may say so, an ‘inorganic process … We can turn the issue around or toss it as much as we would like, yet we’ll always arrive at the point where we must admit that it is not a specific Jew but the Jews as a collective (Judenthum), which is disgusting from our perspective. [8]

Gilman argues that the desire to distinguish modern antisemitism is not only ahistorical but futile, For if antisemitisms are opportunistic, they avail of the underlying belief systems of those who articulate such positions and are congruent with the belief system of their audiences. Religious ‘anti-Judaism’ may well have arisen out of the splintering of religious sects that defined themselves obsessively as not Jewish, in their claims to being a universal, not a sectarian, religion, developing into Christianity (with Paul) and with Islam (with Muhammad). All defined themselves in opposition to their fantasy of a homogenous Jewry rather than to the multiple strands of Jewry and Judaism operating in their time. Antisemitisms in the ancient world, in the world of Islamic expansion and in the explosion of Western colonial expansion were never homogenous, even while relying on conflicting images of economic competition (which linked the Jews as merchants and moneylenders in the image of the covetous ‘Greek’ or ‘Armenian’ as well as local Christian traders and usurers) and blending it when needed with theological claims about the nature of money.[9]

The overarching theme in Gilman’s book is the need of antisemites to define the Jew in such a way that that image could operate in their construction of their ever shifting but supposedly homogenous world view. But another countervailing theme is the dynamic of the responding redefinition not only of Jewishness but of Judaism in modernity and latterly the emergence of Zionism and the role of the State of Israel as the arbiter of who is Jewish. During the upheavals of the early stages of the Enlightenment and the emergence and expansion of modern nation states in the 18th century, three radically different approaches to Jewish religious practice arose in the Global North in response to the diasporic state of Jews: Moses Mendelssohn, the Vilna Gaond the Bael Shem Tov. For Gilman, the antisemitic complexion of antizionism was the denial of the possibility of nation-building to the Jews while other diasporic groups like the Poles, Irish (and later the Armenians) had their historic homelands.

Antizionism was also Jewish when acculturating forces within established Jewish communities from Berlin to New York to Hong Kong saw Jewish state-building or the Yishuv in Palestine as inimical to their own ideological projects whether socialist Bundist, the seeking of Jewish autonomy within European states or participation in global proletarian revolution, at least until the literal incineration of these projects in the Holocaust. Contemporary far-left Jewish antizionist groups like Jewish Voice for Labour in the UK or Jewish Voice for Peace are echoes of this contra-Zionist past. In post-Holocaust Jewry religious Zionism, hitherto a minority voice among political and cultural Zionists, came to define both postwar Judaism as well as postwar Zionism in the Diaspora, but not in the new State of Israel, where legal definitions remained vague notwithstanding the Law of Return in 1950, which states ‘every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh (immigrant). This led to constant revisions always juggling evidentiary categories (religion, peoplehood, ethnicity, ancestry) employed to define or exclude who was to be defined as a Jew. Simply ‘believing’ oneself to be a Jew as an ethnic identity, according to the Israeli Supreme Court, without also claiming to be a follower of Judaism, however defined, was not sufficient. Yet rarely did the courts base their interpretation on any claim that being Israeli was rooted in the divinely sanctioned culmination of biblical prophecy as came to be accepted in the Diaspora among all forms of Judaism, from Reform to Ultra-Orthodox. In addition, the widely internationally criticised re-labelling of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Israel as a nation-state of the Jewish People in 2018 (a Jewish version of Hegel’s Geist) begged the question of the meaning of Jewishness within Israel; from the ultra-Orthodox to the secular, from the ‘Arab’ (Mizrachi) to the ‘European’ (Ashkenazi) to the radical secular but nevertheless Jewish Israeli.[10]

Gilman then introduces two further faux popular and faux philosophical dimensions to antisemitisms and various contingencies; namely lumping and love of imaginary Jews or philosemitism. Lumping entails the collapsing of ‘lumping’ of all shades of Judaism and Jewish identity into one amorphous and undifferentiated mass. Who is Jewish enough to decide who is a Jew? Are Jews adherents of a religion or a theology; are they an ethnicity or have they a shared ancestry; are they are a historical or national entity (this particular question animates Shlomo Sands’ seminal but controversial 2010 work The Invention of the Jewish people and his advocates and detractors; Gilman does not engage with Sands’ enquiry); are they a peoplehood (advocated by Mordechai Kaplan in the 1940s) or pariahs (proposed by Hannah Arendt at the same moment); do they share a collective identity (at the heart of post-Holocaust religious Zionism as claimed by Joseph B. Soloveitchik in the 1950s); are they a genetic cohort (pace Isabel Wilkerson reanimating Hannah Arendt and also evoking the widely disproved Kathar hypothesis about the genetic origins of East European Ashkenazi Jews), or indeed are they all or none of the above. This question is essentially the sub-text to Antisemitisms. And for Gilman, the core is that individuals believe the definition that they ascribe and act upon it. Therein lies plural, not singular definitions of antisemitism(s).[11]

Seeing Jews and Jewry through the frame of ethnicity as defined by Max Weber therefore solidifies the one-dimensional discourses around them which so bedevils the pluralist and historically contingent analyses of antisemitism(s) to which Professor Gilman’s makes such an original and vital contribution. Weber’s 1922 explanation of ‘ethnicity’ is ‘the belief in group affinity, regardless of whether it has an objective foundations’ has significant consequences especially for the formation of a political community and the solidification of amative identity within it. For Gilman, the keyword is ‘belief’. If one believes that they are part of a community, no matter how one chooses to identify it, there is an affective property to one’s identification that then defines the group. Conversely, constituting or ‘othering’ a group to which one does not belong, defined in equally affective terms, as a collective that is one’s antithesis (antisemitisms) or with which one closely identifies (philosemitisms). Neither ethnicity, nor history nor biology, nor national boundaries is primary; belief is core.[12]

In his critique of philosemitism(s) (romantic and projective identification with the Jew or Jews as a collective), Gilman stresses that it is not the automatic antonym to antisemitism(s). Hatred of the Jews is not offset by the love of the Jews. Both lump all individuals adjudged by the speaker or writer as Jewish (enough) into a single, unidimensional category that aids the designs of the anti- or philosemite. In his book Smart Jews: The Construction of the Idea of Jewish Superior Intelligence at the Other End of the Bell Curve, Gilman drew attention to the drawbacks of such claims that Jews were (and are) smarter than everyone else particularly in pecuniary matters. Philosemites in the words of the historian Daniel Goldhagen are ‘antisemites in sheep’s clothing’. To this may be added the notorious ‘chosen people’ trope or calumny. These are the claims, made in falsely benevolent ways, that the Jews as a philosemitic category are more moral or more than just a collective or that they are ‘chosen’ in the sense of being superior or uniformly burdened by their chosenness; a blade that cuts equally in opposite directions: it is a claim on obligation as well as on difference.[13]

Some clarification is needed on the genealogy of the ‘chosen people’ notion. The “chosen people” refers to a group of people selected by God for a special covenant, mission or purpose, most prominently the Jewish people in Judaism. It is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Books of Deuteronomy and Genesis, where God establishes a covenant with the Israelites, promising them a unique relationship and responsibility. Chosenness is not about privilege and superiority but about responsibility; Jews are called upon to uphold ethical teaching, pursue justice and serve as a moral example to the world. The historical experiences of exile, persecution and resilience illustrate the burdens and responsibility associated with this calling.[14]

The ethical imperatives of the Covenant no doubt motivate the opponents of the injustices foisted upon and the war crimes committed against the Palestinian Arab peoples in the West Bank within Judaic traditions.

‘Philosemitism’ as a term had been coined in Imperial Germany in the 1880s as the obverse of political antisemitism but by the 1920s a Jewish reference work, the Judisches Lexikon, recognised that the defenders of the Jews were ‘generally free from an appreciation of Judenthum as such. Rather, philosemitism too had a catalogue of prejudicial positions:

  1. the negative understanding of Judentum implicit in all discussions
  2. the lachrymose language regarding the Jews’ real and purported failings; 
  3. the critical role of the Christian or German Self -preservation in all pro-Jewish discussions
  4. the ambivalent attitude towards positive Jewish characteristics.[15]

The false logics of philosemitisms are illustrated in our times by the ways in which after the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and the consequent brutal onslaught on Gaza by the Netananyu administration in Israel where the charge of antisemitisms became a weapon to attack any and all institutions and individuals especially by the second Trump administration in the US deemed to be hostile to Israel even though opposition to the Gaza war often did not come from an antizionist or pro-Hamas standpoint. 

As a result of the effective right-wing usage of the rigid equivalence between antizionism and antisemitism in the IHRA’s definition of the latter which became state policy, everyone, especially Jews, supporting any of the positions on the spectrum of Palestinian activism, no matter how pacifist and anti-Hamas, became ‘part of a highly organised, global Hamas Support Network and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.' The Trump administration translated these claims into action by arresting and detaining the most outspoken pro-Palestinian activists, especially those on academic visas, as undesirable aliens. Trump also used supposed antisemitism to suspend grants to medical research institutes, which has no conceivable connection to antisemitism as well as to demand the dismissal of members of academic Jewish studies departments whose views his administration found  unpalatable (The Good Jew/Bad Jew dichotomy or binary constitutive of both anti and philosemitism(s) discourse.[16]

The wobbliness of philosemitic and philoIsrael stances on the part of particular adherents is illustrated by the deconstructed belief systems of Christian Zionism. This ostensible anti-antisemitism is in reality a modern evangelical fantasy which sees the ingathering of the Jews, a return to their biblical rootedness in Israel, as the essential stage for the second coming of the Messiah, heralded by the destruction of the Jews (or at least those who do not convert to Christianity). But, of course, it is these Jews who must undergo conversion because of their guilt for the crime of regicide i.e. the crucifixion of Christ. The universal lesson that Gilman asks us to take on board that when people fall in love with collectives, as there are always ulterior reasons for doing so. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre antisemites invent their own Jews and then map their Judeo ego ideals on complex, real, flesh and blood, living cohorts of individuals, with all the complexities of the human condition.[17]

Another complex set of relationships but which are absolutely crucial to the understanding of Professor Gilman’s antisemitisms schematics is that between antisemitism, antizionism and the spectre of the ‘self-hating Jew. This will be the subject of Part II of this review which I intend to publish next week.

References

[1] Sander L. Gilman, Antisemitisms. A History of Jew Hating. London: Reaktion Books pp.12-13

[2] Ibid, p.13

[3] Ibid, p.14

[4] Hannah Arendt (1973), The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA, New York and London) p.xi

[5] Gilman, op cit, p.15

[6] Ibid, p.16

[7] Ibid, pp.19-20

[8] Ibid, p.23

[9] Ibid, pp.25-27

[10] Ibid pp,27-35

[11] Ibid, pp. 39-40

[12] Ibid 99.41-42

[13] Ibid 42-43

[14] Copilot

[15] Gilman, pp.44-45

[16] Ibid, pp.51-52

[17] Ibid. pp.54

Sander L. Gilman (2026) London: Reaktion Books 309pp Ills Index
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

Antisemitisms 📚 A History Of Jew Hating (1)

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