The Hatred That Breaks Our Hearts

When historian Deborah Lipstadt was sued for libel in 1996 for calling über-revisionist David Irving a Holocaust-denier, she engaged the services of a British solicitor named Anthony Julius. The defense against Irving’s lawsuit was successful, and Irving himself was officially adjudged to be not only a Holocaust-denier but also a racist and an anti-Semite.

Julius’s credentials in detecting and revealing anti-Semitism, however, are not limited to the law. He is also an accomplished critic and scholar of English literature (“T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form”), and now he has put both his legal and literary skills to work in “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England” (Oxford University Press, $45). The book can be legitimately described as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, but without the irony that Dave Eggers has imprinted on that phrase.

For a work of such daunting size and scope, “Trials of the Diaspora” is a surprisingly readable work, and it reaches beyond an academic readership. Elegant, intimate and lucid, the book is a survey of both English history and English literature, and yet it is so faceted in its scholarship that it also amounts to a short course in world history that starts in distant antiquity and ends with today’s breaking news. But the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is always used as the ordering principle: “[A]nti-Semitism is … among the most versatile of hatreds,” Julius explains.

Julius concedes that English anti-Semitism is a rather subtle phenomenon. “For Anglo-Jewry in general, it is the background noise against which we make our lives,” he writes. But he insists that the threat of anti-Semitism is only getting worse, not better, as anti-Semitism morphs into anti-Zionism, which he regards as a new and updated version of Jew-hatred. “Any Jew writing about anti-Semitism today,” he insists, “is likely to have this version at the forefront of his or her mind.”

Julius has devised a typology of English anti-Semitism that fits into four categories: the exclusionary anti-Semitism of medieval England, the literary anti-Semitism that ranges from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and beyond, the modern anti-Semitism of “insult and partial exclusion,” and the current attitude toward Israel, “which treats Zionism and the State of Israel as illegitimate Jewish enterprises.” These four kinds of anti-Semitism are explored in his new book in varying degrees of detail but always with acuity and clarity, and they provide a useful template for ordering the vast amount of information that Julius has marshaled in his book.

Indeed, the sheer weight of evidence and argument on display in “Trials of the Diaspora” is overawing. For example, I recently reviewed “A Lethal Obsession” by Robert S. Wistrich, a history of anti-Semitism across the ages and around the world that bulked up to nearly 1,200 pages. But Julius devotes more than 800 pages to the history of anti-Semitism in England alone. In a frank and endearing aside, the author admits, “This is a very long book.”

Be prepared to have your heart broken. It’s no secret that a literary lion like T. S. Eliot was openly hostile to Jews, but Julius cites so many other examples that you may never think of Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene or Virginia Woolf quite the same way again. He points out the anti-Semitic stain in works as various as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and John Buchan’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps.” And he reports the alarming fact that “anti-Semitic invective—raw, challenging, tribal” can be heard at soccer matches in contemporary England: “Gas a Jew, Jew, Jew, put him the oven, cook him through” is a chant recorded at a recent match.

Nor does Julius allow for much room for an earnest Jewish critique of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, which is permissible in the Israeli press but apparently not in the Diaspora, at least according to Julius. Anti-Zionism, he writes, “is taken to be continuous with the ‘old antisemitism’ in its principal stratagems and tropes, while novel in its specific focus upon the Jewish State—uniquely evil and without the right to exist.”

He points out, for example, that the medieval blood libel is given a new reading in the campaign of disinformation carried on by the enemies of Israel when it was alleged that “Israeli doctors were deliberately injecting the AIDS virus into Palestinian children.” The vicious lies told by anti-Semites in the guise of anti-Zionists, he insists, turn the critic of Israel into “a prisoner of anti-Semitic discourse.”

“Every new poisoning allegation against Jews or the Jewish State is historically freighted, containing with it every previous such allegation,” he writes. “Anti-Semitism’s discursive history makes this unavoidable. A poisoning allegation, a boycott call, can never be innocent.”

Julius declares himself to be sickened by the subject itself. “Anti-Semitism is a sewer,” he writes in exasperation at the end of the book. “This is my second book on the subject and I intend it to be my last.” But he seems to feel obliged to rouse Diaspora Jews from what he regards as their complacency and self-delusion, even if it reduces us to a kind of despair.

“Anti-Semitism is a form of evil,” he warns us, “and like all evils, being exposed to it can shatter one’s trust in the world.” Indeed, the subtext of his book is the notion that if the Jews are so abused in a place as mild as England, how much worse must it be elsewhere around the world—the very same idea that inspired and motivated the earliest stirrings of modern political Zionism and still provides a convincing rationale for the defense of the Jewish state.

Jonathan Kirsch, author of seven books about Jewish history, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve and can be reached at {encode=”books@jewishjournal.com” title=”books@jewishjournal.com”}.