Letter: The forms of anti-Jewish hate

Pic: Wilhelm Marr, pioneer of racist antisemitism, denounced the older Christian religious-sectarian antisemitism

Daniel Randall’s article “Antisemitism picture is more complex” (Solidarity 765), written in response to “Antisemitic incidents and attacks have doubled” (764), is problematic in a number of respects.

The first part of the original article simply stated empirical facts: instances of anti-Jewish hate in the UK are running at record levels, and this is an international phenomenon. (More diaspora Jews were murdered in 2025 than in any year since 1994, when Hezbollah carried out a suicide bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina.)

The situation has got even worse since publication of the original article. In a matter of weeks we have seen (attempted) arson attacks on two synagogues and the (former) premises of a Jewish charity, plus the daylight stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green.

Daniel’s response suggests that things are not that bad after all. Some statistics indicate a decline in certain categories of Jew-hate incidents. Thus: “The trend is not a simple one of straightforwardly escalating antisemitic violence but something more diffuse.”

Something “more diffuse” may well be going on. In fact, the original article included a lengthy paragraph listing “more diffuse” types of anti-Jewish hate incidents which did not involve physical violence against individuals.

But rather than make the “antisemitism picture more complex” they merely complement the spike in violent incidents. And that spike in violence is real, not merely perceived.

Daniel moves on to criticise an inconsistency in the original article. At one point, he writes, the article states that “today a dominant strand (of Jew hatred) is antizionism”, but subsequently it states that antizionism is “the dominant form” of antisemitism.

Daniel is right to spot that inconsistency. But he should address his complaint to the editor. The original version of the former quote reads: “Today it (Jew hatred) takes the form of antizionism.” If the article is wrong – although it is not – at least it is consistently wrong.

The remainder of the original article goes on to argue that the dominant form of Jew hatred has changed over time and today expresses itself in antizionism.

There is nothing new in that argument. As long ago as 2005 it was contained in a review of Taguieff’s book Preachers of Hatred: “Taguieff summarises the history of Jew-hatred – judeophobia.”

More recently (2024), another review argued that antizionism was the latest iteration of Jew hatred: “[Antizionism is] a totalising ideology that promotes Israel to the role of a demonic historical actor. … [Antizionism] ceases to be a political view. It becomes an instrument for encrypting hostility to Jews by embedding reference to them in an ideological proxy term.”

Over many years Solidarity has carried articles referring to “political antisemitism” and to “absolute anti-Zionism”. All that the original article did was take that argument one stage further. And not before time.

One could go even further and argue that as each form of Jew hatred gives way to another, the new version distances itself from its predecessor.

Today’s antizionism stresses that it is not antisemitic, in the sense of late nineteenth century/early twentieth century antisemitism: It merely opposes Zionism and Israel, not Jews as a race. In fact, the real antisemites, we are told, are the Zionists.

In the same way, in Wilhelm Marr’s The Victory of Judenthum Over Germanenthum, the seminal text of racist Jew hatred, the author stressed that he had nothing against Jews because of their religion (i.e. the earlier medieval form of Jew hatred).

His book, he writes, is “free of any and all [religious-]confessional prejudices.” It is hostile to any “hatred because of [religious belief]”. Marr rejects blaming Jews for killing Christ as “stupid” (because Christ was killed by the Roman authorities). He dismisses medieval claims about supposed Jewish blood rituals.

Indeed, Jews as a religious community have no better friend than Wilhelm Marr: “I hereby unconditionally take the Jews under my protection against any ‘religious’ persecution. I believe that is this respect it is hardly possible to express oneself more clearly than I have here.”

To register the fact that Jew hatred has a long history and has taken different forms in different historical epochs is not, as Daniel claims, to necessarily conclude, nor cede ground to the argument, that Jew hatred is “inescapable” and “tends towards a fatalism which treats bigotries as eternal”.

Just like acknowledging the contemporary levels of anti-Jewish violence – free of the whatabouteries of “complexities” and “diffuseness” – it is simply acknowledging basic facts.

Finally, Daniel writes: “One should not assume that the common forms of antisemitism in our own political milieu are necessarily the dominant forms in wider society.”

True enough. But if antizionism – in which Israel is transformed into the collective Jew of times past, and which functions as an “encrypting of hostility to Jews” – is not the dominant contemporary form of Jew hatred, then what is?

As Eva Illouz’s recent work – reviewed in Solidarity 765 – puts it, antizionism allows Jew hatred (or antisemitism, or whatever you want to call it) to present itself as a “virtuous hatred”. And Illouz is certainly not thereby treating Jew hatred as “a question of individual psychology rather than ideology”.