Bernard Lewis’s classic, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice remains today a powerful illumination of the history and manifestations of antisemitism in an ever-changing world. Published in 1986, the trends Lewis documents and the explanations he presents about hostility toward the Jewish people can add to comprehension of the post-October 7 Jew-hatred afflicting much of global culture.
Chapter Three (“Jews”) focuses on defining the Jewish people and outlining important events of Jewish history, while Chapter Four (“Anti-Semites”) recounts myriad anti-Jewish ideologies that have emerged over the millennia. Chapter two (“Semites”) details the intricate history of “Semitic” peoples of the Middle East and Africa (Jews among them), defined by a shared family of languages. While such granular detail about the history of “Semites” generally may not seem key to understanding hostility toward Jews in particular, Lewis’s goal is clearly to highlight that “semite” as a racial category, a framework contrived to attribute immutable racial characteristics to Jews, is nonsensical.
In fact, a key takeaway of Lewis’s work is that hatred of Jews – which he contrasts with opposition to Israel and Zionism, as well as typical prejudice against an “other” – is invariably rooted in nonsense. As he writes, accusations against Jews including well-poisoning, spreading plague, ritual murder, and world domination, are “manifestly impossible to maintain … on any rational basis of evidence.” Accordingly, “the anti-Semite resorts to another characteristic device – the invention of facts and the fabrication of evidence to support them.” (The fantastical lies about the Jewish state that have circulated widely since October 7 fit precisely Lewis’s observation.)
Reading Lewis’s documentation of such anti-Jewish lies – and accompanying campaigns of violence – reveals another key theme: the worst manifestations of hatred of Jews are primarily phenomena of European origin. “From the time when the Roman Emperor Constantine embraced the new faith and Christians obtained control of the apparatus of the state,” Lewis writes, “there were few periods during which some Jews were not being persecuted in one or other part of the Christian world.” Illustrative examples include the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England and in 1492 from Spain, the latter of which preceded decades of paranoia-driven persecution of Jews, who were compelled to convert. Even prior, the Crusaders demonized Jews as Satanic, and “by the twelfth century [Jews were] accused of poisoning wells, ill-treating the consecrated Host … and of murdering Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes” – the demented accusation known colloquially as the “blood libel.”
In 1648, Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnitsky slaughtered roughly 100,000 Polish Jews during a rebellion against the Polish state, sparing “only those willing to accept baptism into the Orthodox Church.” In Russia, Czar Alexander III declared in 1881 that one-third of Jews would convert to Christianity, one-third would leave, and the final third would die. Horrific pogroms followed. Ultimately, European Jewry would reach its tragic nadir when Hitler’s Nazi Germany meticulously slaughtered six million Jews.
As Europe’s relative power vis-a-vis the Muslim world increased during the 19th century, the former’s age-old anti-Jewish toxicity substantially influenced the latter. As Lewis details, “The real penetration of modern-style anti-Semitism” in the Middle East during the 19th century “began with the Christian Arab minorities, which of all the communities in the Middle East had the closest contacts with the West.” In the second half of the 1800s, “the first Arabic versions of European anti-Semitic writings were published. The earliest … in Arabic were all translations, mostly if not entirely from French originals and by Christian Arab translators.”
During the late 1930s, the Nazis would begin propagandizing within the Arab world, many leaders of which were all too willing to ally with the key force implacably hostile to the British, the French, and the Jews. Eventually, Israel’s growing military power and stunning victories, particularly after the Six-Day War in 1967, gave increasing salience in the Muslim world to European narratives of demonic and cunning Jews bent on exploitation and domination.
The problem became so entrenched that, according to Lewis, hostility toward Jews in the Muslim world is “rarely equalled even in the European literature of anti-Semitism, which only at a few points reached this level of fear, hate, and prejudice.” “Some Arab countries, now joined by Iran,” Lewis writes, “have become the main centers of international anti-Semitism, from which anti-Semitic literature and other propaganda is distributed all over the world.”
Lewis recounts how specific accusations levied against Jews vary tremendously over time. While the broad characteristic of Jew-hatred is accusations of “cosmic evil,” the Jew is accused of whatever specific “evil” sins violate the predominant mores of the time. Thus, Jews were Christ-killers to early Christians, “Bolshevik Zionists” to Nazi-aligned Arab figures, capitalists to socialists, socialists to capitalists, and “Nazis” to the Soviets and their followers. To European assimilationists, Jewish confinement to ghettos was problematic, but then Jews who emerged from ghettos simply encountered new hostile stereotypes about their success in banking and finance.
In the last thirty-five years there have been periods of crisis and pressure on Israel that have waned with changing events. Today’s explosion of antisemitism following October 7 and the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust is clearly of a different dimension.
It is a shame that Lewis is not alive today to probe and critique the anti-Zionist hysteria capturing hearts and minds around the world. Nevertheless, he’s left a valuable compendium of wisdom from which to learn.
