On Antisemitism Historicized and De-Historicized

Exploring a major debate among historians and what it means for definition-making in our own day

Antisemitism, many Jews believe, is on the rise in the United States and around the world.

Amid those fears a debate has erupted among leaders and pundits over how to define the word. Some would like to see a broad definition that encompasses all perceived manifestations of anti-Zionism, while others have sued for more limited definitions that protect the free exchange of ideas, even ones unfriendly to the state of Israel.

Those definitions-debates are predicated on the shared assumption that “antisemitism” has a history that these definitions can capture. The IHRA definition was devised by an organization that is tasked with handling “Holocaust-related issues,” and it surmises that since the Holocaust “humanity [is] still scarred” by antisemitism. The JDA definition’s text begins with an even more explicit disclaimer about the definition’s historical scope: “Conscious of the historical persecution of Jews throughout history…” The one recent definition that avoids bold historical claims is the Nexus definition, though it, to be sure, was conceived by its drafters as an elaboration of IHRA rather than as a stand alone definition.

What is sometimes obscured in the coverage and debates over these definitions, however, is what actual historians have had to say about the origins and changing meanings of the term. Here I’d like to explore a key disagreement between them over how we should understand the history of Jew-hatred and “antisemitism.”

This examination will shed light on the gap between historicizing animosity towards Jews in different times and places on the one hand, and trying to enlist that history into the service of definitions for political purposes in the here and now on the other. Appreciating that gap may, at the least, encourage more humility among definitions partisans over which definition is more historically true.

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One salient approach to studying antisemitism historically can be called the maximalist school.

Adherents of the maximalist school maintain that “antisemitism” is a modern word that signifies an ancient hatred towards Jews. That hatred has taken on different valences in different times and places, but regardless of its outer form the maximalists assume some sort of unifying strand that unites all those manifestations together such that they can be categorized under a single term.

One could associate this approach, which has been around for a long time, with the works of Trachtenberg, Poliakov, and Westrich, among many others. A recent example is offered by David Nirenberg’s magisterial Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), a sweeping account of over two thousand years of Christian and Muslim luminaries using crude and unflattering depictions of Judaism/Jews to think through major social and intellectual problems, or to, in Nirenberg’s words, “think with Judaism.”

Judaism, Nirenberg contended, served a crucial function in “Western thought,” emerging early on as an optic that non-Jewish thinkers could gaze through to make sense of reality as they observed it and comprehend its flaws. The notions of what nefarious thing Judaism represented that needed to be overcome changed over time, Nirenberg allows, but what remained constant regardless of era or culture or who the Jews were and what they did in any given context was that reflexive tendency among leading thinkers to utilize Judaism in this way. Augustine, the Quran, Shakespeare, Marx, Goebbels — all of them are part of Nirenberg’s panoptic account of theorists who, in Nirenberg’s favored metaphor, put Judaism to work to make western thought.

This is why Nirenberg called the book Anti-Judaism and not Antisemitism. The latter was of course only coined in the 19th century. For Nirenberg it is therefore unsuitable as a title because the critique of Judaism that antisemites developed in the late 19th century was part of a much older tradition of anti-Judaism that preceded and encompassed that word’s coinage. Antisemitism, Nirenberg writes, is “a word that captures only a small portion, historically and conceptually, of what this book is about.”

Older maximalist were prone to make overzealous causal linkages between different historical eras, such that the hatred for Jews in the New Testament, for example, predetermined the Nazis’ burning animosities. A judicious scholar, Nirenberg is unwilling to make confident pronouncements about the connection between various intellectual cultures and the historical events they may have fostered. But he concludes that “we need only agree that the difficulty of describing a relationship [between eras] does not mean that a relationship doesn’t exist, or that it isn’t meaningful or important.”

In other words, according to Nirenberg there’s a transhistorical tradition of anti-Judaism that undergirds all those examples of Jew-hatred in different places and eras even if the links in the chain of that tradition remain difficult to comprehend.

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The minimalist school is of more recent vintage.

A leading representative of this approach is David Engel, who, in the interest of full disclosure, happens to have been my doctoral advisor at New York University. Engel formulated a path-breaking critique of the maximalist school in an article titled “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism: An Essay on the Semantics of Historical Description,” appearing in a volume from 2008.

Engel argued there that there is in fact no obvious relationship between manifestations of Jew-hatred in different times and places. He demonstrated this point by exploring the origins of the usage of the term “antisemitism.”

Originally, according to Engel, the term denoted a specific political movement in the German Empire in the late 1870s that sought the rollback of Jewish emancipation. The hodgepodge coalition that comprised the Antisemitic League had little in common beyond that. Jews at the time, however, embraced the term to describe all manner of Jew-hatred, whether it was in a different place — say, pogroms in Russia in the 1880s — or in a separate time period — such as medieval Christian blood libels. This transformed the term from referring to an identifiable political movement into referring to some sort of force that operated across historical eras to imperil Jews.

The reason Jewish writers in the 1880s expanded the term’s meaning, Engel argued, was to discredit the 1870s German political movement by associating it with the worst excesses of the benighted Russian Empire or medieval barbarism. Regardless, these Jewish writers quickly came to forget that the relationship between these examples of Jew-hatred was artificial, spurred as it was by their own political need to defame antisemites rather than any empirical connection. For them, all of these examples came to represent a feature of human nature, a mental state, a psychiatric malady, some sort of thing in the natural world that generated these anti-Jewish animosities since time immemorial.

Historians of antisemitism, Engel argued, have fallen into the same trap, confusing an invented term developed in specific historical period to meet a political need with a natural entity observable in the world. Yet, they have largely failed to make a compelling case for any empirical link between instances of Jew-hatred across space and time to justify this view. “In the end, it seems, ‘antisemitism’ is indeed an invented analytical category, not a discovered one. As such, its boundaries are arbitrary: no statement about what ‘antisemitism’ is or is not can compel acceptance except by social agreement,” Engel wrote.

Engel concluded by urging historians to desist from using the term as a referent for anything other than the original German political movement that bared the name.

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What can we learn from the historiographical debate between the Nirenberg’s maximialism and Engel’s minimalism?

I’d argue that each of the two historians explicated here frustrate the approaches of recent definitions-makers, albeit in different ways.

Engel, as you might have already divined, would argue that anything beyond the original definition of antisemitism — a movement devoted to repealing the emancipation of Jews in 1870s imperial Germany — is ahistorical. Engel acknowledged in his article that Jewish communal leaders derive much polemical benefit from expanding the term’s meaning, but, from a purely historical perspective, there can be no other accurate definition of the term in the 21st century. For Engel, then, neither the IHRA nor JDA definitions has a monopoly on historical righteousness.

Now, you might assume that Nirenberg’s approach, connecting as it does thought traditions of Jewish animosity across cultures and time periods, is more amenable to justifying a search for a broad yet historically valid definition of antisemitism.

Yet Nirenberg too, I’d argue, frustrates attempts at easy definition-making. The debate between IHRA and JDA boils down to what rhetoric about Jews and Israel is a fair and accurate description of reality, and what slips into the realm of fevered conspiracy, or “antisemitism.” They only differ on where that line should be drawn. But one of Nirenberg’s major insights is that this is a false dichotomy insofar as the major expositors of anti-Judaism throughout history sought to conceive of reality and a compelling vision for how to improve their world. Can these definitions be so sure that there’s an easy distinction between reality and antisemitism to be found in our own era?

A definition a la Nirenberg might necessitate an impossible subtlety, but it could also lead to a definition far wider in scope than either what the JDA or IHRA drafters had intended. Nirenberg’s approach reveals how anti-Judaism suffuses a wide array of the categories and tendencies of western thought. This is why the slippage between reality and anti-Judaism in the imaginary worlds of the thinkers that Nirenberg examined often appears to be sub-conscious and pervasive. A definition of antisemitism that is informed by Nirenberg’s work would likely have to be more far-reaching than what the current ones offer, and the outcomes would likely impugn the allies of definitions-makers across the political spectrum. It isn’t difficult to see how some non-Jewish Israel defenders whom Zionists celebrate, and some particularly vociferous critics of Israel whom anti-Zionists defend, could run afoul of a Nirenbergian definition.

This is all to say that a historically-verifiable definition of antisemitism for the 21st century is more elusive, or more unwieldy, than it might initially appear. The arguments over the IHRA and JDA definitions are at this point well-known — the one has been touted as a way to combat anti-Zionism, the other as a way to protect certain iterations of it. Depending on one’s political inclinations, one can decide which of the two’s ramifications for Israel-talk is more preferable.

But our investigation here of how two leading historians have written about antisemitism should, at the least, temper the idea that either of the two definitions is more clinically faithful to a history of the term “antisemitism” or its referents. It seems to me that a more honest debate about the definitions would dispense with historical claims and hash out what the definitions are truly about, which is Israel politics.