Vocabulary Lesson

Few words in the past 150 years have expanded so far, or been stretched as thin, as “antisemitism.” Coined in the 1870s by an avowed antisemite to name organized opposition to Jewish emancipation on racial rather than religious grounds, it now encompasses nearly every form of hostility toward Jews from antiquity to the present. Social snobbery, stereotypes rooted in Jewish overrepresentation in certain fields, inflated claims about “Jewish influence,” delusional conspiracy theories, genocidal hatred—all have been folded into the modern category. This poses a difficulty for the historian: how to write the history of something whose boundaries have become almost boundless without either emptying the term of meaning or policing it too rigidly.

Mark Mazower’s On Antisemitism: A Word in History presents itself as a history not of antisemitism as a social and political phenomenon but of the word itself—a genealogy of how “antisemitism” has been used, by whom, and to what ends, along the lines of Raymond Williams’s famous study, Keywords. In principle, this might be illuminating, andMazower’s book certainly arrives at a moment when illumination is needed. Unfortunately, it is largely an exercise in polemics, not analysis.

Mazower is a distinguished historian of twentieth-century Europe whose works on the Balkans, Salonica, nationalism, and the international order have made him one of the field’s leading narrative synthesizers. He is not a specialist in Jewish history or the history of antisemitism, but as he recalls in his 2017 memoir What You Did Not Tell, his grandfather was an early Bundist activist in Vilna who remained sharply critical of nationalism and Jewish statehood as betrayals of the European class struggle—a posture that has shaped Mazower’s own skepticism toward Zionism. That Antisemitism: A Word in History appears in the wake of October 7, at a moment when Mazower’s home institution, Columbia University, has become a central arena for disputes over anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and the limits of legitimate protest, only heightens the book’s salience.

On Antisemitism: A Word in History unfolds in two parts. In the first, Mazower traces the “rise and fall of antisemitism” from the late nineteenth century through the aftermath of the Holocaust. In the second, he turns to the 1970s and after, examining how criticism of Israel came to be reframed by Israel’s defenders as antisemitism in a new guise.

Mazower offers a clear and largely conventional narrative of antisemitism’s late nineteenth-century origins. “The invention of the concept of antisemitism in and around 1880,” he writes, “was part of the birth of the modern.” Antisemitism, on his account, emerged as an organized movement in the age of emancipation, mass politics, and ideological mobilization, fueled by anxieties about Jewish visibility, mobility, and power. Conspiracy theories of Jewish domination, racialized notions of immutable difference, and fears of dispossession followed the loosening of legal and social restrictions and the far-reaching acculturation that accompanied it.

Mazower traces the uneven path by which these ideas moved from the margins of European politics to the center. He highlights the catalytic role of World War I, the consolidation of the myth of a “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy, the fragility of liberal democratic institutions in much of interwar Europe, and the rise of authoritarian and fascist movements. The reader is given a clear sense of how large a leap it was from the relatively modest antisemitic movements of the late nineteenth century to what Mazower calls “antisemitism as world power” in the 1930s and 1940s. As a synthetic overview, his account is lucid and competent. Specialists will find little here that is conceptually new, but the narrative is generally careful and accessible. Mazower’s emphasis on contingency usefully resists the temptation to regard antisemitism as inevitable, even if the balance he strikes among ideological, political, and institutional explanations is not always persuasive.

Even in this more restrained opening section of the book, certain interpretive tells appear. Most prominent is Mazower’s effort to contrast his account with the notion of “eternal antisemitism”—a term Hannah Arendt used to name and refute the idea that Jew hatred is a timeless, unchanging, and inexplicable phenomenon. Following Arendt, Mazower treats this as a dangerous fallacy oblivious to the various distinct modern contexts and causes of antisemitism. He traces the notion to sinat yisrael, the “well-established axiom in rabbinic thought that non-Jews invariably hate Jews,” but his real target is what he sees as this supposed rabbinic axiom’s lingering influence in Zionism.

This comes into sharp relief in Mazower’s treatment of the late Robert Wistrich, a scholar at the Hebrew University whose 1991 book Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred is often invoked as an object lesson in what a properly historical account must not be. Mazower writes that Wistrich “popularized the idea that antisemitism was unique, endless, and ineradicable” and aligns him with a broader Zionist tradition and the “Jerusalem School” of Hebrew University historians who emphasized the centrality and durability of antisemitism in galut, or exile.

Yet, in the prologue to Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, Wistrich explicitly rejected the notion that antisemitism is “a natural, metahistorical or metaphysical phenomenon whose essence has remained unchanged throughout all its manifestations over the centuries,” dismissing theories of “eternal hatred for the eternal people” as “quite unhistorical.” The significance of Mazower’s mischaracterization lies in how easily it scales up. Read through the lens of reputational shorthand, Wistrich can be assimilated to the Jerusalem School and, beyond it, to Zionism as such.

This portrayal depends on just the kind of historical flattening Mazower elsewhere criticizes. Early Zionist thinkers actually articulated sharply divergent diagnoses of antisemitism, ranging from Pinsker’s conditional pessimism to Herzl’s political pragmatism to Ahad Ha’am’s refusal to treat Zionism as a solution to Jew hatred at all. To collapse all of these analyses into a single doctrine of inexorable Jew hatred is to imagine unity where there was disagreement and to mistake reasonable arguments about persistence for theological claims about fate.

Recognizing this does not require abandoning the distinction between modern antisemitism and earlier forms of anti-Judaism. A long tradition in Jewish historiography, associated above all with Salo Baron and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, insisted precisely that modern antisemitism was a new phenomenon, a rupture rather than the simple unfolding of a latent theological logic. But, at the same time, Baron, Yerushalmi, and their students did not treat the premodern past as irrelevant to modern Jew hatred. Earlier Christian polemics, social exclusions, and cultural stereotypes remained historically consequential, even as they were transformed by secularization, emancipation, and mass politics. Nor did such transformations begin in the late nineteenth century. Voltaire, for instance, had already recast Christian anti-Judaism into a more explicitly secular and cultural hatred a century earlier.

In treating arguments about partial continuities and long duration as tacitly theological, Mazower conflates persistence with essence. Duration is not eternity, as Spinoza observed: patterns can and do recur without being metaphysically necessary. To insist otherwise is to argue with straw men.

“The muddle we find ourselves in,” Mazower writes in the introduction, “started once the fight against these extremists [far right antisemites] came to be entangled with a question that used to occur to almost no one: When is criticism of Israel antisemitic?” Mazower locates this shift in the 1970s, when “well-established Jewish defense organizations” characterized intensifying international criticism—from Arab and Muslim states, the Soviet bloc, the nonaligned movement, and Western leftists—as “the new antisemitism,” a characterization Mazower almost uniformly rejects, treating most anti-Zionism as political rather than prejudicial.

Mazower’s suggestion that before the 1970s “almost no one” thought animus toward Zionism and Israel could be antisemitic sits uneasily with his own handling of earlier Soviet anti-Zionism. “Soviet Communism,” he writes, “might pride itself on having opposed and purportedly eradicated antisemitism, but what it had actually done was . . . to make overtly antisemitic rhetoric more or less impossible.” So, when Stalin became obsessed with Jews as the enemy within, “anti-Zionism had turned into a code word that signaled Jewish ethnic origins.” It implied that “Jews could not truly be patriots and, worse, that any Zionist sympathy turned them into a potential agent not only of Israel but of the real enemy that stood behind it: American imperialism.”

Mazower sees this clearly. He names the mechanisms: substitution, euphemism, conspiracy, accusations of collective disloyalty. But if he can identify these dynamics in Stalinist antisemitism, why does he ignore them when they appear elsewhere? After all, the Soviet bloc and its satellites remained the primary drivers of international anti-Zionism well into the 1970s and early 1980s. If Soviet anti-Zionism was a euphemism for antisemitism in the 1940s and 50s, how did it turn into legitimate political criticism two decades later? Why does Mazower claim that “the new antisemitism” was invented by American Jewish elites rather than observed by American Jews who recognized prejudice masquerading as principled politics?

Mazower’s model is top down and not a little conspiratorial: American Jewish communal elites, often in concert with Israel, manufactured the concern and ordinary Jews absorbed it. He devotes particular attention to Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein’s 1974 book The New Anti-Semitism, treating it as a founding text of this discourse:

A new orthodoxy—that antisemitism was the same as opposition to Israel, and that it was therefore chiefly a problem of the Left rather than the Right—was being laid down. Thirty years later it would come to seem unassailable common sense to a lot of people, but at this time it was a novel argument.

The formulation is revealing: an orthodoxy “was being laid down.” But by whom? And absorbed by whom—sheeplike Jews awaiting their cues? The passive voice does double work here: It obscures agency while insinuating manipulation.

The passive voice comes back in Mazower’s treatment of United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism. “The resolution came as a shock to Israel and its defenders,” he writes, acknowledging that it allowed Israel “to be treated not as if it were heir to the victims of the Third Reich . . . but rather its successor.” Yet he dismisses the shock and outrage of Israel’s defenders. “Whether or not the concept of antisemitism was being misused exactly by being yoked to Israel is debatable,” he continues, “but we can certainly see it being used in a new way and in a new context.” Actually, neither the form nor the context was all that new.

The New Anti-Semitism appeared in 1974. The UN resolution came in November 1975. Are we to believe that this book—hardly a bestseller—primed American Jews to misrecognize what followed? The UN resolution declared the Jewish state uniquely illegitimate. For many Jews, this registered immediately as an attack on their collective existence. Concepts like “the new antisemitism” gain traction not because institutions promote them but because they resonate. Mazower has little room to accommodate the possibility that ordinary Jews recognized antisemitism when they saw it.

Ironically, Mazower’s book—published under the imprint of a major press, written by a historian of considerable renown, and already lavished with praise in elite venues—is far more likely to shape contemporary understanding of the term “antisemitism” than the obscure 1974 volume he treats as formative ever did.

Last spring at The George Washington University, where I teach, a student held a placard with Israel at the center and spokes radiating outward to other evils: imperialism, white supremacy, even reproductive injustice. This is not garden-variety political criticism of Israel policies or conduct. It invokes a symbolic architecture in which the Jewish state becomes the universal source of global suffering—a structure with deep resonance in antisemitic thought.

No doubt, Mazower saw similar signs at the Columbia protests, but he shows no inclination to analyze such patterns. His sharp distinctions between premodern anti-Judaism, modern antisemitism, and contemporary anti-Zionism miss what David Nirenberg identified in his magisterial 2013 Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition: inherited molds of thinking, archetypal structures, tropes that migrate across contexts. By restricting antisemitism to what he deems its classical modern forms and by ignoring symbolic continuity, Mazower makes pattern recognition itself suspect.

This narrowing of vision has consequences. Mazower closes his book with an epilogue titled “What I Saw,” reflecting on events at Columbia in 2023–2024. What he sees are disputes over language and definition—rhetorical excess among student activists and what he treats as overhasty accusations of antisemitism in response. But equally telling is what he does not see. Columbia’s own Task Force on Antisemitism report describes an Israeli professor’s class being disrupted for studying rather than condemning Zionism and Jewish students being singled out to answer for Israeli policy or excluded from academic spaces unless they disavowed Zionism.

Although Mazower is strict in his policing of the use of the term “antisemitism,” he is far less restrained when issuing comparative judgments of his own. In a chapter titled “Word Weapons,” he reflects on the migration of political terms across contexts:

Words can be used in different ways. . . . They can open up debate and they can close it down. After the demise of white rule in South Africa in 1994, apartheid went from being a descriptor of a specific historical situation to becoming a crime under international law. . . . Floating free of the specifics of time and place, the concept was universalized. . . . The term has been deployed by Israel’s critics against it in the hope perhaps that it would have the same delegitimizing effect that had once helped the anti-apartheid movement. A detailed historical comparison suggests something unexpected: To equate the Palestinians’ situation with apartheid South Africa is misleading not because it exaggerates their predicament but because in reality it downplays the much more lethal oppression they face at the hands of the Israeli state. (italics added)

Mazower doesn’t actually make this “detailed historical comparison,” which would show no such thing, but as he says, words “can open up debate and they can close it down.” The summary judgment of this paragraph, not unlike some of the actions detailed in his university’s task force report, seems to be aimed at closing it down.

Mazower does concede that some anti-Zionism is antisemitic but shows little interest in how to tell the difference. The burden of proof, for him, falls almost entirely on those who claim that an anti-Zionist claim or action is antisemitic: They must demonstrate that it is structurally and ideologically continuous with classical antisemitism and that it intends to target Jews as such. Meanwhile, those who deny the contention need only show political disagreement with Israeli policy or absence of explicit hatred. That accusations of antisemitism can be opportunistic or overbroad is not in dispute; the question is whether this justifies a definitional framework that makes them almost impossible.

This might be defensible as a legal standard. But Mazower isn’t adjudicating cases; he’s writing history, and historical analysis cannot adopt forensic standards without crippling itself. A historian of antisemitism who can register only explicit declarations is like a historian of racism who can only discuss the Ku Klux Klan. When hostility toward Jews is articulated, it is not only through explicit declarations but through structure, symbol, and substitution—and it is these forms, no less than overt ones, that demand analysis.

Mazower is right that words matter—that how we name phenomena shapes how we understand and respond to them. But On Antisemitism: A Word in History mistakes terminological discipline for historical clarity. By focusing so intently on the aptness or misuse of a single term, Mazower repeatedly sidesteps a harder task: tracing how hostility toward Jews actually takes shape, circulates, and becomes recognizable, especially in moments when it has not yet settled into its most explicit or familiar forms.