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.
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.
[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
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
- the negative understanding of Judentum implicit in all discussions
- the lachrymose language regarding the Jews’ real and purported failings;
- the critical role of the Christian or German Self -preservation in all pro-Jewish discussions
- 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
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.
