RISING FROM THE MUCK:
The New Anti-Semitism in Europe.
By Pierre-André Taguieff. Ivan R. Dee. 203 pp. $26

THE RETURN OF ANTI-SEMITISM.
By Gabriel Schoenfeld. Encounter. 193 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Samuel G. Freedman

When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in 2001, the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad welcomed him with an invocation of shared beliefs. The Jews, Assad told the pontiff, seek to “kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ.” Perhaps it had escaped Assad’s notice that the Roman Catholic Church disavowed the charge of deicide against Jews nearly 40 years earlier, amid the Second Vatican Council’s reforms. Perhaps Assad overlooked the pope’s remarkable personal efforts to reconcile Rome with Israel, culminating in his pilgrimage to the Western Wall and Yad Vashem. Or perhaps none of these realities mattered much to Assad, a Muslim only too eager to adopt an anti-Semitic doctrine that Catholicism had repudiated.

Both Pierre-André Taguieff and Gabriel Schoenfeld recount the Assad episode in their new books on the resurgence of anti-Semitism, for that moment concisely and vividly represents a passing of the torch of Jew hatred from its traditional home in Christian Europe to its contemporary base in the Muslim world. And because the Muslim world stretches from the immigrant slums of Paris through the Middle East and eastward to Malaysia, this bigotry has burgeoned into a truly global phenomenon. It is indulged by the Western European intelligentsia, accepted by the antiglobalism movement, and tolerated on American college campuses. It is bound ever more tightly to opposition both to Israeli policies and to the American invasion of Iraq.

The revival of anti-Semitism as a lethal force barely a half-century after the Holocaust plainly merits examination and analysis. But the first wave of books and essays to take on the task, such as Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism (2003), betrayed haste and settled for predictable indignation. In articles and public statements all but prophesying a second Holocaust, such normally ex­cel­lent journalists as Ron Rosenbaum and Nat Hen­toff played to the most primal Jewish fears.

These two new books—Rising from the Muck, by Tag­uieff, and The Return of Anti-Semitism, by Schoen­feld—outshine their predecessors and effectively complement each other. A French political scientist, Taguieff directs his attention to anti-Semitism in Europe; Schoenfeld, a senior editor of Commentary magazine, surveys the United States and the Muslim world as well as Europe. Taguieff writes from the standpoint of a supporter of the Oslo peace process, Schoenfeld from the political right. And while Schoenfeld proves himself the superior stylist, Taguieff presents the more supple analysis.

To remark on those differences is not to diminish the congruence of the authors’ theses. Both dem­on­strate how the trappings of Christian Judeophobia—from the blood libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—have found avid exponents and audiences in the Islamic world. Pop songs, television series, religious schools, and intellectual journals traffic in stereotypes and conspiracy theories that would be laughable if so many Muslims did not take them so seriously.

Consider one emblematic example, which Schoenfeld cites from the Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh: “The Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries. . . . The victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course, a non-Jew—that is, a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken and dried into granules. The
cleric blends these granules into the pastry dough; they can also be saved for the next holiday.”

Such libels pervade not only Muslim countries proximate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but those such as Pakistan and Malaysia that practice what Schoenfeld pungently calls “anti-Semitism without Jews.” Most disturbingly, the flow of Muslim immigrants into Western Europe has raised the scale of anti-Jewish agitation and violence there. According to Taguieff, the number of attacks on Jewish people or institutions in France leaped from nine in 1999 to 200 in the 12-month period starting in October 2000. These incidents, he persuasively maintains, were enabled by the French elites with their tut-tutting.

“Here were ‘young people’ living in France who said they were at war with the Jews, who said they hated the Jews and—to all appearances—really did hate them,” Taguieff writes. “What do the new bien-pensants think about this? They say it is not their fault if ‘young people’ behave that way: Such attitudes or actions are, of course, regrettable, but they are also understandable if we remember that those involved are victims of ‘exclusion’ and ‘discrimination.’ To listen to their lawyers, and sometimes members of their family, these ‘young people’ spontaneously identify with Palestinians suffering from the arrogance and cruelty of a ‘racist,’ ‘colonialist,’ or ‘fascist’ Israel. It is necessary to understand them, to enter into dialogue with them, and above all not to humiliate them—to avoid at all costs provoking their just ‘anger.’” A paragraph later, Taguieff goes on to conclude, “Indulgence therefore be­comes the most widespread virtue, and it tends to lapse into a kind of hazy condonation.”

Schoenfeld covers similar ground, and tries to extend the argument to the United States. He wisely avoids sounding the second-Holocaust alarm, even as he correctly points to the latitude given anti-Semitic activity on American campuses, from physical intimidation of Jewish students at San Francisco State University to the coddling of bigoted poet Tom Paulin at Columbia University. Like Taguieff, Schoenfeld shows how anti-Semites have taken on the slogan of “anti-Zionism” as a sort of protective coloration.

Still, Schoenfeld rounds up so many enemies that he weakens his argument. One can agree with him that Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine made a noxious allusion to the Nazis when he disparaged Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories for just “following orders.” Still, when one looks at the body of Lerner’s life and work, including his son’s service in the Israeli Defense Forces, does it really meet the litmus test of anti-Semitism or even Jewish self-hate? A more preposterous target is The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, whom Schoenfeld accuses of “dismiss[ing] fears of a new wave of anti-Semitism as nothing more than ‘ethnic panic.’” Schoenfeld misrepresents an essay Wieseltier wrote—not swatting away all concerns about renewed anti-Semitism but, rather, taking issue with writers such as Rosenbaum and Hentoff who deem America capable of a Nazi-like assault on Jews. One cannot help but think that in targeting Wieseltier and Lerner, Schoenfeld seeks to identify not unpatriotic Jews but Jews who publicly supported the Oslo peace process and a negotiated two-state solution.

In a broader way, Schoenfeld does not grapple with the statistical evidence that incidents of anti-Semitism have increased markedly since late September 2000, when the Al-Aksa intifada began. Those facts are inconvenient, and so he ignores them. One need not blame the upsurge in anti-Semitism on Israeli policy to acknowledge that the anti-Semitism is deeply entwined with the internationalization of the intifada.

Schoenfeld is quite right that classic forms of Jew hatred took root in the Muslim world well before Yasir Arafat spurned peace at Camp David and Ariel Sharon paid his ill-considered visit to the Temple Mount. But that preexisting hatred was like a water table that would rise and fall depending on the climate. The public acceptability of Israel bashing in polite society, an acceptability that plainly has increased in the past four years, has allowed the latent Muslim anti-Semitism to emerge into public view and public violence. To say this is not to blame the victim but to comprehend the villain.