Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University. When protests began there against Israel’s war on Gaza, a whole swath of American politicians and commentators accused those involved of being motivated by hatred of Jews. Mazower was appalled at this “maligning of students of all backgrounds and creeds for speaking out against the terrible things that were happening in Gaza” which involved the ‘killing [of] innocent people on a scale that dwarfed anything seen previously in the history of the conflict".
Furthermore, he thought “preposterous” the increasingly shrill claims that “American universities were hotbeds of institutionalized antisemitism”. Mazower had written widely on modern Europe, including an outstanding history of Salonika, once home to Greece’s largest Jewish population, most of whom were murdered by the Nazis. He has examined anti-Semitism in many of his books, one of which, What You Did Not Tell, concerned his grandfather, a member of the Jewish Labour Bund, in Tsarist Russia.
But discussing the issue now felt to him like entering a “hall of mirrors. A term that began as a way to describe the hostility Jews faced as a minority struggling for their legal rights is now used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs. Fighting antisemitism once meant battling ethnonationalism; now it often justifies ethnonationalism’s excesses ... even racists these days say they are fighting antisemitism.”
For many, in Ireland certainly, the issue is inevitably framed through the lens of Israel’s brutal slaughter of Palestinians and accusations of anti-Semitism are seen simply as slurs, weaponised to undermine solidarity. At times, the hypocrisy displayed by Israel’s defenders has been breathtaking. Elon Musk’s Nazi salute was excused by the Anti-Defamation League, the main organisation dedicated to opposing anti-Semitism in America, because Musk had pledged to remove pro-Palestinian voices from X.
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Some contend that anti-Semitism is no longer a serious problem and has been superseded by other forms of racism, especially Islamophobia. But anti-Semitism remains a reality. The worst massacre of Jews in American history happened just seven years ago. Conspiracy theories, many of them anti-Semitic in nature, have never been more popular (and sadly not just on the right).
Splits in the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement over Israel are producing an openly anti-Semitic “anti-Zionism”. The cleverer Nazis have used outrage at slaughter in Gaza to promote themselves, while the more obsessive “anti-Zionists” appear happy to share space with them. So discussing anti-Semitism is not only invariably toxic but also confusing. This book is a welcome attempt to offer some clarity.
It is not a study of anti-Jewish hatred throughout history. Instead Mazower identifies the birth of modern anti-Semitism in the 19th century. This, then, is different from the idea of it being the “longest hatred”. Instead modern anti-Semitism, Mazower contends, was a movement against Jewish emancipation, growing in opposition to the granting of civil liberties in the Europe that emerged from revolution and war during the mid-19th century.
Assertions that Ireland’s colonial past mean ‘we’ always side with the oppressed do not withstand examination when it comes to anti-Semitism
This backlash against change was not primarily religious; instead there was increasingly a racial element. Conversion or assimilation would not make Jews Germans, French or British. Elements of older anti-Jewish myths persisted, however, and merged with the new. Noting the birth of the term in 1870s Germany, Mazower asserts that “the invention of the concept of anti-Semitism [was] part of the birth of the modern. It was in fact a reaction against modernity itself, which portrayed the Jews as single-handedly responsible for pretty much every grievance contemporary life presented.”
Those opposed to anti-Semitism regarded it as a “mark of modernity gone astray”. To counter it, liberals might suggest public education, while the left was sure the struggle against capitalism would eventually eradicate this “socialism of fools”. Another reaction was Jewish nationalism, Zionism, which initially, like all nationalisms, offered a “vast range of ideological possibilities”.
While anti-Semites did (and still do) see “Jewry” as a single cohesive force, the Jews of Europe were diverse and often antagonistic towards each other on grounds of class, religious practice and politics. Mazower provides a fast-paced and comprehensive summary of developments across Europe until 1914, tracing both the progress of emancipation and resistance to it in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Austria.
But while Jews in these countries increasingly gained legal rights, the majority of Europe’s Jews still lived in the Tsarist empire, where they faced not only state-sponsored discrimination but brutal violence. Mass emigration from the east produced another aspect of anti-Semitic agitation; the first British immigration controls were aimed at excluding Jews.
But it was the Great War and its aftermath that changed everything. Thousands of Jews loyally served their nation states, more than 100,000 in the German military alone. But the situation for Jews in the Russian empire rapidly deteriorated, with new waves of repression and pogroms. And the postwar world saw a huge resurgence in anti-Semitism.
As Mazower asserts, “views that were extremist in 1918 were mainstream by 1920″. The allegation that Jews were behind Bolshevism spread like wildfire. Conspiratorial texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion reached vast audiences, aided by the largesse of Henry Ford. The triumph of the Nazis in Germany mainstreamed anti-Semitism across Europe; as one commentator noted “Nazism has removed the stigma [and] made Jew-hatred all but respectable”.
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Conversely, Mazower makes the case that war against the Nazis and particularly knowledge of the Holocaust, in the longer run at least, severely discredited anti-Semitism in the west. Zionism had remained a minority current among Jews, many of whom objected to its assumption that anti-Semitism was the natural state of affairs. Mazower approvingly quotes Bundist Henryk Erlich, who asserted that “the darker the world, the brighter it gets in the Zionist tent; the worse for Jews, the better for Zionists”.
Erlich also warned that any Jewish state in Palestine would be a site of perpetual conflict with its Arab population. But the communities in which the Bund was based (it was the largest Jewish party in Poland before 1939) were decimated by Nazism. Jews who survived the death camps faced a new wave of pogroms or years in refugee camps. Theoretical objections to Zionism seemed far less convincing than the promise of safety in Palestine. Erlich himself was murdered on Stalin’s orders during 1942.
Despite the substantial role played by Jews in the Soviet war effort, most of the leadership of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were purged. While the communist states officially outlawed anti-Semitism, several of them cynically turned to it as a safety valve.
Ironically, the Soviet Union had also played a crucial role in supporting the new state of Israel. This is a reminder that the left, and indeed Irish republicans, did not always define Zionism as a settler-colonial ideology; the Provisional IRA’s first leader, Seán Mac Stíofáin, regarded Menachem Begin as a “freedom fighter”.
Mazower’s final chapters focus on debates in Israel and the United States. The narrative here is more polemical and focused on cultural and identity politics, while also perhaps less relevant to debates elsewhere. While we think of the Holocaust and Israel occupying a central place for American Jews today, this was not an automatic process; Mazower notes an ADL conference in 1962 where neither issue was even discussed.
Many of Israel’s founders believed their state would create a “new people, Israelis, unrecognizable from the Jews of the Diaspora”; for them the Holocaust was a reminder of perceived weakness. It was not until the 1970s that invocation of the Holocaust became what Mazower calls an “inescapable historical trope” for Israel’s elite.
Moving to the contemporary, Mazower is critical of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism as too easily co-opted by the right to “clobber dissent and assail civil liberties.’ In contrast he suggests the rival ”Jerusalem Declaration" manages better to “offer tools for combating prejudice while safeguarding political debate and free speech”.
There is a passing mention of the Limerick boycott in Mazower’s book, but otherwise Ireland barely features. Yet this country offers an example of how widespread anti-Semitism can exist in a society with a tiny Jewish community. The 1923 murder of two Jews in Dublin by army officers fits neatly into a contemporary European pattern. In the same period the influential Catholic Bulletin was recycling allegations of Jewish ritual murder, while the liberal Irish Statesman asserted the Protocols contained much truth.
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The Irish State’s representative in Berlin justified Kristallnacht on the basis that the Jews were central to communism and a popular way to deny de Valera’s Irishness was to suggest that he was really Jewish. What is notable about Oliver J Flanagan’s notorious pro-Nazi Dáil diatribe during 1943 was that not one TD dissented.
Assertions that Ireland’s colonial past mean “we” always side with the oppressed do not withstand examination when it comes to anti-Semitism. Acknowledging this does not affect one’s ability to express solidarity with Palestinians; nuance is not a weakness. Books like this can hopefully contribute to the honest discussions that are desperately needed in a new age of racism, war and genocide.
Dr Brian Hanley is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin
Further Reading
The essays in Seán William Gannon and Natalie Wynn (Eds) The Limerick Boycott in Context (Peter Lang, 2025) offer the best background to understanding anti-Semitism in early 20th-century Ireland. In Labour’s Anti-Semitism Crisis: what the Left got wrong and how to learn from it (Routledge, 2021) David Renton gives the most clear-headed examination of the whole sorry mess in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Rachel Shabi’s Off-White: the truth about antisemitism (Oneworld, 2024) and Shane Burley and Ben Lorber’s Safety through Solidarity (Melville, 2024) offer empathetic and humane proposals for a joined-up antiracism. Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust (Saqi, 2011) explores the war of narratives around the Holocaust and the Nakba. Daniel Renshaw’s Socialism and the Diasporic ‘Other’ (Liverpool UP, 2018) examines an often fraught relationship between Irish and Jewish communities in London’s East End but also explains how solidarity between them could be built around class struggle.
