Politics and Resentment : Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union [1 ed.] 9789004190474, 9789004190467

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Politics and Resentment

Jewish Identities in a Changing World General Editors

Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorny, and Judit Bokser Liwerant

VOLUME 14

Politics and Resentment Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union

Edited by

Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps

Leiden  • boston 2011

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politics and resentment : antisemitism and counter-cosmopolitanism in the European Union / [edited] by Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps.    p. cm. — ( Jewish identities in a changing world)   ISBN 978-90-04-19046-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Antisemitism—Europe— History—21st century. 2. Europe—Ethnic relations—History—21st century. 3. Europe, Western—Politics and government—1989– 4. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989– 5. Right and left (Political science)—Europe. 6. Europe— Relations—Israel. 7. Israel—Relations—Europe. 8. Arab-Israeli conflict—Influence. I. Rensmann, Lars. II. Schoeps, Julius H. ( Julius Hans), 1942–  DS146.E85P65 2010   305.892’404—dc22 2010028911

ISSN 1570-7997 ISBN 978 90 04 19046 7 EISBN 978 90 04 19047 4 © Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

Contents Acknowledgements  ....................................................................... Contributors  . ................................................................................

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I.  Foundations Politics and Resentment: Examining Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union and Beyond  . .................................................................. . Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps

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II.  European Comparisons Is There a “New European Antisemitism?” Public Opinion and Comparative Empirical Research in Europe  ...... . Werner Bergmann

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“Against Globalism”: Counter-Cosmopolitan Discontent and Antisemitism in Mobilizations of European Extreme Right Parties  ............................................................................. 117 . Lars Rensmann Antisemitism and Anti-Americanism: Comparative European Perspectives  .............................................................. 147 . Andrei S. Markovits Playing the Nazi Card: Israel, Jews, and Antisemitism  ................ 183 . Paul Iganski and Abe Sweiry III.  Eastern Europe The Empire Strikes Back: Antisemitism in Russia  ....................... 199 . Stella Rock and Alexander Verkhovsky

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Hatred towards Jews as a Political Code? Antisemitism in Hungary  .......................................................... 231 . András Kovács The Resilience of Tradition: Antisemitism in Poland and the Ukraine  ........................................................................ 249 . Ireneusz Krzemiski IV.  Western Europe Beyond the Republican Model: Antisemitism in France  . ............ 277 Jean-Yves Camus The Liberal Tradition and Unholy Alliances of the Present: Antisemitism in the United Kingdom  . ..................................... 307 Michael Whine Political Cultures of Denial? Antisemitism in Sweden and Scandinavia  . ............................................................................. 329 Henrik Bachner Erosion of a Taboo: Antisemitism in Switzerland  ........................ 363 Christina Späti Anti-Jewish Guilt Deflection and National Self-Victimization: Antisemitism in Germany  ......................................................... 397 Samuel Salzborn Between Neo-Fascism, “Anti-Fascism,” and Anti-Zionism: Antisemitism in Italy  ................................................................. 425 Emanuele Ottolenghi V. Epilogue Rethinking Antisemitism, Counter-Cosmopolitanism, and Human Rights in the Global Age: A Political Crisis of Postmodernity?  ......................................................................... 457 Lars Rensmann Index  ............................................................................................. 491

Acknowledgements We are particularly grateful to the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam and the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Both provided an invaluable institutional and intellectual climate and an academic environment that is second to none. This book is also greatly indebted to the ongoing support by the German Academic Exchange Service/DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst). The DAAD helped make this work possible. Without the commitment by the many outstanding scholars who contributed to this project, this volume would not have seen the light of day, either. We owe special thanks to Gideon Botsch, Christoph Kopke, Roswitha Kuska, Stella Rock, and Samuel Salzborn. Anthony Pinnell, Halrun Luppes and Jeffrey Luppes did a tremendous copy-editing job on different parts of the manuscript and deserve our gratitude. We also want to thank the editors at Brill in Boston, and in particular Jennifer Pavelko and Katelyn Chin, for their fabulous, superbly professional work, as well as the readers who managed an unusually speedy and supportive review process. Last but not least we are especially grateful to Elizier BenRafael, Yosef Gorny and Judit Bokser Liwerant for their staunch support and their idea to publish this book in their wonderful, renowned series “Jewish Identities in a Changing World.”

Contributors Henrik Bachner, Ph.D., is an independent scholar in Stockholm. Most recently, he was Researcher for the Swedish Research Council project “Sweden’s Relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust”. Werner Bergmann, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University Berlin. Jean-Yves Camus, Ph.D., is Professor at the Institut Universitaire d’Études Juives Elie Wiesel, Paris, and Associate Researcher at the Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques, Paris. Paul Iganski, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Social Justice at the Department of Applied Social Science at Lancaster University. András Kovács, Ph.D., is Professor of Nationalism Studies at the Central European University, Budapest, and Academic Director of the Jewish Studies Project, Central European University. Ireneusz Krzemiski, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warsaw. Andrei S. Markovits, Ph.D., is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Emanuele Ottolenghi, Ph.D., is the Director of the Transatlantic Institute, Brussels. Samuel Salzborn, Ph.D., is the Interim Professor for Democracy and Democratization Research at the Department of Political Science, University of Giessen.

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Lars Rensmann, Ph.D., is DAAD Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Permanent Fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Center at the University of Potsdam. Stella Rock, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in the Keston Center for Religion, Politics & Society, Baylor University, Texas. Julius H. Schoeps, Ph.D., is Senior Professor of History at Humboldt University and the Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center at the University of Potsdam. Christina Späti, Ph.D., is Lecturer at the Department of Swiss and General Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Abe Sweiry is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Applied Social Science at Lancaster University. Alexander Verkhovsky is Director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, Moscow. Michael Whine is Director of Government and International Affairs, Community Security Trust, London.

I.  Foundations

Politics and Resentment: Examining Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union and Beyond Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps I.  An Unlikely Resurgence of a ‘European Phenomenon’? In the course of history, antisemitism has been an integral part of European modernity. It certainly marked the “short twentieth century,” an “age of extremes” (Hobsbawm 1994). Post-War Europe after 1945, then, emerged against the background of the catastrophe of the Holocaust and the genocidal antisemitism that motivated it. However, by and large post-War European governments and citizens recognized—and at times were forced to accept—the need for a substantial break with the past. This affected first and foremost the democratization of political institutions. Yet, it also entailed facing the legacy of ethnic nationalism’s and antisemitism’s road to destruction and persecution. In particular, Europe’s post-national integration into the European Union evolved—among other things—as a moral and political counter-model to the antisemitic, totalitarian and ethnicnationalist legacy that shaped the first half of the European 20th century. Although coming to terms with the colonial and totalitarian past continues to be a difficult matter for European nations and publics, many significant lessons have been drawn from the continent’s moral and political downfall, and from the crises and mass atrocities that were part and parcel of European political modernity. To be sure, European societies continue to be shaped by ongoing public controversies about their difficult legacies of the 19th and 20th century: namely the continent’s colonial history, two world wars, Stalinism and Nazism, the rise of “totalitarian antisemitism” and in particular the atrocities of the Holocaust (Horkheimer & Adorno 1985). These debates continue to signify a “constant seesaw between learning and forgetting,” as Saul Friedlander (1993) once put it. They also document considerably varying, sometimes only half-hearted efforts by different governments, parties, and elites to address a nation’s

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difficult legacy (Art 2005; Barkan 2004). Indeed, especially the Nazi terror of Auschwitz and Treblinka is not just an “unmastered” but also an unmasterable past (Lowenthal 1987a). Working through this past is by no means an easy task. The process of collective learning in order to overcome century-old legacies of resentments and particularistic enmities is an ongoing, open-ended process. Deep-seated prejudices can dissipate with time. They do not disappear overnight. Political systems can change from one day to the next; political cultures need much time to substantially transform. Significant cross-national variations notwithstanding, however, overall antisemitism and racism had been in decline in post-War Europe and, in particular, since Europe’s politico-cultural cosmopolitanization in the wake of the second globalization (Markovits & Rensmann 2010). By now, such group resentments have become generally discredited among the publics of democratic member states of the European Union, though they are still virulent in significant parts of the electorate. By and large European nations, and first and foremost the EU itself, have turned into political agents of inclusive cosmopolitan agendas (Beck & Grande 2007; Checkel & Katzenstein 2009) that are engaged in struggles against ethnic, social, cultural, or religious discrimination. The shifting memory regimes in relation to Europe’s Holocaust legacy and national remembrance have played a significant role in this process (Fogu, Kantsteiner & Lebow 2006). Furthermore, while latent forms of antisemitism never fully dissipated among considerable segments of citizens and voters, comparative time series survey data from Western Europe demonstrate that post-war European societies also witnessed an overall intergenerational change. Over five decades until the 1990s, there has been a notable, though not necessarily linear decline of antisemitic and racist attitudes in subsequent generational cohorts (cf. Bergmann 2008). These empirical findings are as much a reflection of Europe’s aforementioned institutional democratization as they express cultural modernization and liberalization processes in European societies.1 The European and World Value Surveys indicate that contemporary Europe is shaped by cultural change towards post-materialism, tolerance, self-expression values and   In various respects this process has been belated in Western countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece, which remained military dictatorships until the beginning of the post-industrial age. This also applies to the post-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. 1



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inclusive cosmopolitan preferences generally at odds with old antiJewish and racist hatred. They are part of a “broader shift towards self-expression values that is reshaping orientations toward authority, politics, gender roles, and sexual norms among the publics of postindustrial societies [. . .]—the rise of humanistic norms that emphasize human emancipation and self-expression” (Inglehart & Welzel 2005: 126). The latter are in turn reliable predictors of political democratization; those values generate demands for institutional democratization bringing stronger entitlements to liberty, autonomy, and liberal democracy. Inglehart and Welzel also suggest that post-material cultural change toward self-expression values favoring autonomous human choice over authoritarianism and conventional prejudice is conditioned by low levels of existential security (Inglehart & Welzel 2005: 287). From an neo-institutionalist and from a discourse-theoretical perspective, however, such value change may also be caused by increasingly democratized institutions and rights entitlements, on the one hand; interacting processes of democratic public will-formation leading to changed normative self-understandings of postmodern societies, on the other (Habermas 1996; Rensmann 2004a; 2004b). Be that as it may, in spite of recurring exceptions to the rule, by the 1990s overt racial antisemitism and racism had become more and more illegitimate. They were discredited in post-War West European political cultures. According to European self-understandings, public manifestation of open racism and antisemitism usually experienced negative sanctions or scandalizing (Bergmann 1997). This is a mechanism that right-wing extremists, whose objective is to overcome liberal democracy, often portray as an infringement on freedom of speech and democracy. Nonetheless, these—nationally varying—discursive boundaries that were established in post-War Europe’s democratic publics have had significant impact. They have re-shaped societal selfunderstandings, cultural values, and their public display (Rensmann 2004a). Consequently, public antisemitic and racist agents could only survive on the radical fringes of European societies. Since 1945, antisemitic agitators had little public space to disseminate their views. They were socially and politically marginalized. In spite of several attempted attacks on Jewish synagogues and community centers by left-wing radicals in the name of ‘anti-Zionism’ (Kraushaar 2005) or antisemitic hate crimes by neo-Nazis, radical antisemitism remained predominantly limited to graffiti and isolated incidents of demagogic political speech, or it was pressed into semi-public spheres and camouflaged in

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coded forms of crypto-antisemitism. In the context of the consolidation of democratic political and party systems, extreme right parties became largely politically irrelevant and had little to no electoral success until the mid-1980s; the Movimento Sociale Italiano in post-War Italy being one of few exceptions (cf. Ignazi 2003). In many respects, all of these developments made a significant resurgence of open antisemitism, ethnic nationalism and racism unlikely to occur in the European context. Or so it seemed. II.  Signs of Trouble: New Actors, Issues, and Mobilizations in Transnational Spaces If the quasi-linear narrative of post-War democratization and working through the past—to a varying degree and with diverging speed in different European countries—gave us the full picture, why is there a need to address antisemitism as a pressing concern in contemporary European societies? All the progress within the horizon of the EU’s liberal democracies and the Union’s post-national politico-cultural integration notwithstanding, we witness more than one indicator that points to the ongoing resilience of resentful societal undercurrents, if not to a partial reversal of the presumed collective learning process. As Robert Wistrich points out, the specter of “apocalyptic anti-Semitism” has returned to haunt Europe, “while often assuming radically new forms” (Haaretz, November 3, 2009). This affects individual attitudes as well as public manifestations in national and transnational spaces. To be sure, the political consensus that blatant expressions of antisemitism (and open racism, for that matter) are unacceptable still holds among most established democratic parties and other crucial public agents (Bergmann & Heitmeyer 2005: 84). Additionally, there is little evidence that democratic and cosmopolitan value change is in ‘reverse gear’ (Norris & Inglehart 2009). However, just as organized right-wing extremism and radical right parties experienced an unexpected comeback since the 1980s, in recent years antisemitic manifestations appear to have resurfaced across the European continent, and far beyond the borders of the European Union. Stretching from violent extremism to public invectives and political mobilizations, they are often facilitated by extreme right parties and fringe antisemitic organizations, including Islamist groups. But recent research also shows that antisemitism is by no means limited to these groups. It reaches into, and resurfaces,



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in the political center. In light of new—in various collective self-understandings perfectly “moral”—anti-Jewish hostilities, a much more fractured and contested picture emerges today; one that is signifying an ongoing and new challenge. The Rise of the European Extreme Right Right-wing extremism initially re-entered the political space to a large extent in the form of “anti-immigrant parties” (van der Brug, Fennema & Tillie 2000) in Western Europe more than twenty years ago. They were accompanied by racist sub-cultural movements, which in some places led to a trade-off between electorally successful parties and racist subcultures but often had mutually reinforcing effects (Pedahzur & Weinber 2001). Since then, several parties and movements collapsed and dissipated, or their relevance declined. In some cases predecessor parties were replaced by new competitors. Yet, other actors consolidated their political force as ‘new’ extreme right parties, defined here as post-industrial authoritarian and xenophobic antisystem parties that oppose liberal democracy and civil/human rights but which have ‘modernized’ their ideology and distanced themselves from old fascist identity politics (Ignazi 2003; Mudde 2003). In many cases, such new extreme right parties succeeded in expanding their electoral outreach beyond the small traditional fascist constituencies in post-War Europe. All in all, compared to previous periods in postWar Europe, the extreme right reemerged as political players more or less across Eastern and Western Europe: Modernized radical right and right-wing populist parties that re-mobilize ethnic nationalism and exclusionism have celebrated varying, yet in several cases repeated success in regional, national, and European elections (Kitschelt 2007; Norris 2005; Mudde 2007). Effectively exploiting particularly favorable demand and supply side conditions, some new extreme or “populist” variants even entered national governments as junior partners (Frölich-Steffen & Rensmann 2007). In some cases they are nurtured by racist sub- und youth cultures, i.e. local networks of “uncivil society” (Pedahzur & Weinberg 2001). Among other things, they have led to high levels of violence against ethnic minorities, immigrants, Jews, and asylum-seekers (Mudde 2005). In other cases they have found the favorable environment of an intellectual neo-nationalist New Right that facilitates cultural racism, opposition to the liberal post-materialist and post-national values represented by the New Left, and—in

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countries like France and Germany—subtle anti-Jewish sentiments and Holocaust revisionism (Minkenberg 1992). In the recent 2009 European elections many extreme right parties once again succeeded in increasing their turn-out at the ballot box: The new anti-Islam party, led by Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, received 15% of the Dutch vote, the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party doubled its support, and even the revamped extreme right British National Party (BNP) celebrated large gains and entered the European Parliament, moving from the fringes to becoming the first fascist party in British history to win seats in a national vote. Never before did the BNP gain a seat in the European or the British Parliament.2 We have thus witnessed another breakthrough in a history of many extreme right successes since the French Front National entered the European Parliament in 1984 (Ignazi 2003; Rensmann 2003). A Revival of Antisemitism? Indicators of Change and New Conflicts While the revival of extreme right parties has received broad attention by political science research, turning the radical right into arguably the best studied European party family (Mudde 2007),3 the diagnosed recent rise of antisemitism within and beyond the confines of extreme right mobilizations has so far hardly come under scholarly scrutiny. This void is especially apparent for comprehensive comparative European studies that include quantitative and qualitative approaches aiming at methodologically robust explanatory frameworks. Apparently breaking with the post-War evolution of anti-antisemitic public norms in Europe, however, the indicators of a new wave of renewed and revived anti-Jewish resentments are many.4 They can be found on various levels and in different contexts.

2  This previous lack of success is, of course, also due to internal party factors (the BNP only recently tried to overcome its overtly militant roots) and due to the electoral system: the Single Member District Plurality (SMDP) electoral system in Britain is unfavorable for small parties (Norris 2005; Goodwin 2007) but the European elections have introduced proportional representation in the UK. 3  The isolation of factors and explanatory variables as well as persuasive theorizing on the interaction of supply and demand side conditions are still in many ways controversial and contested (Kitschelt 2007; Rensmann & Miller 2010). 4  Antisemitic resentment, not racism or hostility against immigrants and Muslims, is the primary subject of this volume. Yet while racist resentment is not the special focus of this volume, it will be addressed at various junctures. In fact, one of the general



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(1) Since 2000, comparative surveys point to a rise of antisemitism. Reversing the long-time downward trend evident in pre-2000 time series data, this entails younger generational cohorts in several countries (Bergmann 2008). Contrary to the preceding long-term decline, cross-national surveys show a stable plateau of anti-Jewish attitudes in most European member states over the last decade and a new willingness to display such resentment in polls. While traditional forms of antisemitism have continued to decline in some countries (though at a slower pace), there is a consolidation of antisemitic resentment across Europe and a dramatic rise in some EU member states (ADL 2009). (2) In addition, public manifestations of anti-Jewish slander, hate crimes, and violent attacks directed against Jews, synagogues, and Jewish centers have also dramatically increased in the 2000s. Although data collection by law enforcement and public agencies is of varying quality because they employ unstandardized, in some cases vastly different statistical criteria, comparative data do indicate that such antisemitic incidents have substantially increased in Europe since the turn of the century. In some countries the rise has been quite steep. In January 2009 alone hundreds of Jewish cemeteries were vandalized (or, in the case of the Malmo cemetery, firebombed); Jewish centers and synagogues were attacked in different locations such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, Charleroi, Brussels, London and Helsingborg. In Toulouse, for example, a car filled with Molotov cocktails rammed into the front gate of a synagogue, while in Amstelveen shots were fired at a clinic run by the Jewish community (European Agency for Fundamental Rights 2009: 26ff; EFA 2009: 4ff ). According to the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, data since 2000 reveal fluctuations and national variations. They also point to a substantial rise of antisemitic crimes in several countries, in particular in 2009. In the wellstudied case of France, for instance, there has been a mean increase

hypotheses of this book is the claim that there is a high correlation between antisemitism and racism, though both need to be distinguished as different forms of resentment. Any new mobilization of antisemitic and counter-cosmopolitan resentment tends to entail the resurgence of racist mobilizations against immigrants and other ethnic minorities (Rensmann & Miller 2010). There are several indicators for an increasing relevance of racist exclusion in various European contexts. For instance, a recent study on “Ethnic Profiling in Paris” shows that those who appeared to be of Arab origin were at least 7.5 times more likely than whites to be stopped by police forces, and that those perceived to be black were six times more likely to be stopped—although racial and ethnic profiling by the police is illegal in France (Erlanger 2009).

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of antisemitic hate crimes by 48% between 2001 and 2006. While racist violence also remains at a high level, since 2000 more French Jews than French immigrants have been injured as a result of violent incidents. In 2004, France saw the largest number of antisemitic incidents in recent memory, and antisemitic “actions and threats” have remained at a historically high level since then (Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme 2006). As Robert C. Lieberman points out, this is “hardly a picture of a society in which antisemitism is an insignificant matter.” (Lieberman 2009a: 249) In Germany, the largest member state of the EU, anti-Jewish hate crimes also remain on an extraordinarily high level. It reached a peak of 1,682 in 2005 (European Agency for Fundamental Rights 2009: 22). Those data reflect the ongoing need to have high alert security surrounding virtually every synagogue and Jewish institution in Europe. Furthermore, during the escalating military conflicts in South Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in early 2009 banners and slogans demanding “Jews out” or “Death to the Jews” have become more popular and tolerated on anti-Israel demonstrations across Europe (EFA 2009: 8). According to the European Jewish Congress, European governments and police have “ample evidence that some anti-Israel demonstrations have descended into openly antisemitic tirades” (EFA 2009: 8). At any rate, the list of those incidents and public manifestations, some of them violent, that can be classified as antisemitic has become more extensive in recent years, with annual and cross-national variations and with peaks after specific events such as the escalations of the Middle East conflict or the financial crisis, which have been widely covered by the media. (3) There appear to be some revived anti-Jewish political mobilizations that incorporate new salient issues in the public sphere such as globalization, the global financial crisis, or the Middle East conflict. At times such mobilizations come from nominally different poles of the political spectrum or otherwise different political persuasions. More often than not antisemitism is on display or promoted by some reputable agents in civil society. In 2009, for example, the well respected left-wing trade union Flaica-Uniti-Cub called for a boycott of “all Jewish-owned or Jewish-run stores” in “solidarity with the Palestinians,” the “Jews of today,” and asked its members to draw lists of Jewish shops that should be targeted (Owen 2009). Two years before the extreme right and notoriously antisemitic Italian party-organization Forza Nuova (FN) had attacked the Israeli embassy with tomatoes.



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They were supposed to symbolize the blood of Palestinians. FN took action under the banner “Hezbollah—until victory” (Corriere della Sera 2006). Other European right-wing agitators have adopted the term “Zionist Occupied Government,” invented by American neoNazis, to portray national governments and the United Nations as controlled by “war-mongering” Jews or “Zionists.” Accusing them of running a ‘secret world government,’ extreme right groups charge “the Zionists” with manipulating national governments and orchestrating the UN and America in order to advance their alleged cause: world domination. In Germany, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), which can be classified as an extreme right party with significant links to the militant neo-Nazi spectrum, now mobilizes for “peace demonstrations.” The militarist party calls, ironically, for an “end to war.” It fights against “Zionist occupation,” “warmongering imperialism,” and “Israel’s terror” or “apartheid regime” (cf. www.npd.de). Antisemitism, at times in modernized and populist forms, therefore, seems to recapture its formerly prominent place in the arsenal of (new) extreme right rhetoric, ideology and campaigns, along with neo-racism and anti-immigrant agitation. But often such resentments also transcend the confines of the extreme right. This also applies to hostility against immigrants and, in particular, prejudices against Muslims. (4) A revival of anti-Jewish conspiracy myths, antisemitic cartoons, and free-floating hate speech also appears to benefit from the possibilities offered by the Internet and other new media technologies, where people can articulate resentments anonymously and in an unfiltered fashion. These new media are of increasing relevance in shaping the public spheres of our European post-industrial information societies. And there is a notable increase and flourishing of hate speech against Jews over the last decade that finds an outlet in these new media. Some hate sites openly call for a “new final solution of the Jewish question.” Others deny the Holocaust altogether. Many, however, display other forms of blatant anti-Jewish hatred and racism. For instance, an entire series of antisemitic cartoons showing Jews as cockroaches and insects and making a mockery of the Holocaust—cartoons that were distributed by the Iranian government after an official “Holocaust cartoon competition”—soon found entry into various extreme right and also left-wing websites. They have managed thereby to escape the legal prosecution under laws against instigation of racist hatred that are enforced in several European countries and reflect EU policy.

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(5) Finally, there are indicators of a rising readiness to publicly articulate anti-Jewish resentments, both in blatant and coded forms, within the democratic public space. This is presumably linked to a change in public and political reactions. While antisemitic conspiracy myths appear to experience a European-wide renaissance through various new media, new research also suggests that antisemitic stereotypes are more often articulated in broader national and transnational publics. In some countries, researchers diagnose an “erosion of communication latency” with regard to antisemitism (Bergmann & Heitmeyer 2005). They claim that formerly latent or semi-public resentments have entered the democratic public. Due to more lax public and political responses, such resentments are reiterated with more confidence. Some national studies also suggest that the boundaries of what is viewed as antisemitic or acceptable in the public sphere are changing and eroding, and with it the latency of antisemitism (Salzborn 2008; Rensmann 2004a).5 For example, a wide-ranging report by the British Parliament diagnoses a broadened “antisemitic discourse”: “a widespread change in mood and tone when Jews are discussed, whether in print or broadcast, at universities, or in public or social settings. We are concerned that anti-Jewish themes and remarks are gaining acceptability in some quarters in public and private discourse in Britain and there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream.” The report also concludes that “it is clear that violence, desecration of property, and intimidation directed towards Jews is on the rise since 2000.” (All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism 2006, Summary) This “regained acceptability” along with a rationalizing tolerance displayed by considerable parts of European elites, media, and the “chattering classes” when it comes to various contemporary forms of anti-Jewish hostility may well be the most telling indicator that times

5  As Samuel Salzborn argues, it is long customary in German research “to distinguish four sub-dimensions of Judeophobia: 1) religiously-based Christian prejudice against Jews; 2) a biologically construed racial antisemitism; 3) so-called secondary antisemitism (see below), and 4) anti-Zionist antisemitism. [. . .] The public articulation of attitudes that could be classified as religious or racial antisemitism has slowly but continuously declined in the course of postwar German history—which, of course, says nothing about how widespread such opinions really are. Quantitative studies reveal, however, a relatively high incidence of secondary and anti-Zionist antisemitism in political and social discourse.” (Salzborn 2008: 156)



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have changed for Jews; not only but also in democratic, increasingly cosmopolitan Europe.6 All these observations require more systematic data and research. But in spite of considerable national variations, it appears that it is fair to diagnose resurgent anti-Semitism across the continent. This problem is neither limited to certain national communities, nor does it stop at the European Union’s borders. In fact, antisemitism is no longer exclusively a ‘European problem’, either. It also needs to be viewed in its global context—especially in the age of the second, post-industrial globalization. Although political cultures matter and are often resilient, there is no longer any genuinely ‘national’ or ‘European antisemitism’ in the contemporary world, though antisemitism’s origins may vary. Ethnic national identity constructs or specifically European issues— such as post-colonial and post-Holocaust guilt and the unconscious desire to externalize both—may still play a distinct role as motivational factors. Be that as it may, the Holocaust, the unprecedented atrocities against the European Jews committed by German Nazis and their collaborators, has changed the very essence and meaning of antisemitism. The genocidal judeophobia that motivated the extermination of the European Jews will continue to signify a particular, and particularly important, legacy in post-Holocaust Europe and beyond. The memory of Auschwitz is not a ‘screen’ that shields us from understanding contemporary political realities and genocidal threats; rather, reflecting on this history of the breakdown of civilization is essential if we are to understand the present and draw lessons for the future (Arendt 1963). We also follow Theodor Adorno’s dictum that Auschwitz has forced a new categorical imperative upon humankind, namely to “arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” (Adorno 1966) Hannah Arendt was among the first who recognized the era of the Holocaust as the beginning of a new “global condition,” and of an age of statelessness and genocidal politics. The atrocities and the new global condition force us to take humanity as a political reference

6  This includes the all too often downplayed and rationalized radical antisemitism and mass hate (Kressel 2002) advocated by radical Islamists as well as the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and denied the Holocaust on more than one occasion, thereby turning overt antisemitism into a key element of domestic and foreign governmental policy.

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point, with dramatic consequences for human rights and international law (Arendt 1951; Benhabib 2006; Rensmann 2009; Simmons 2009). More specifically, the Nazi crimes—committed against the Jews and against humanity (Arendt 1963)—are also of key significance if we look at anti-Jewish resentments in contemporary society. Such resentments can only be adequately analyzed against the backdrop of their genocidal past. To be sure, since 1945 racial antisemitism, which culminated in Nazism’s murderous totalitarian ideology and the annihilation of the European Jews, is by and large still profoundly discredited in European democracies (more so than in most other countries in the world); so is any blatantly antisemitic conspiracy myth that serves as an all-encompassing world explanation. As a socially delegitimized resentment (Marin 2000: 112–113), antisemitic ideology had for sometime been banned from public communication and pushed into a “communicative latency” (Bergmann 1997). Nonetheless, there is also new evidence of a resurgence of both overt and subtle antisemitism as an attitudinal pattern and as a political ideology, indicating that anti-Jewish resentments in Europe are by no means just a matter of historical inquiry. III.  Theoretical Models in Contested Terrain: Theorizing Contexts, Classifications, and Dimensions of Antisemitic Resentment and Counter-Cosmopolitanism Until recently, antisemitism in Europe has been almost exclusively the focus of historical research, and of occasional single-case national studies and opinion surveys. Though social and political science research has begun to focus on the subject and produced some important scholarly contributions as of late (u. a. Endelman 2005; Heitmeyer & Zick 2010; Markovits 2007; Taguieff 2004; Wistrich 2005), theoretically guided comprehensive comparative work on contemporary antisemitism is still largely lacking. This also applies to the broader context of counter-cosmopolitanism, which we will theoretically unfold in this essay. There are two plausible reasons why such research has been marginal. First of all, contemporary political science research and models still tend to neglect questions of political ideology. This also applies to party research, even in case of the extreme right, although there are notable exceptions to the rule (e.g. Mudde 2003; Ignazi 2003).



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Neither do the conventional focus on demand-side theories (e.g. ideal policy preferences and voting behavior) or supply-side approaches (party competition and agency in electoral market-places) sufficiently address the broader public environment of politics, i.e. the question of public will-formation through public discourse and political culture beyond the confines of electoral politics or governmental policy. In these research frameworks politically relevant topics such as antisemitism and nationalist opposition to cosmopolitanism tend to be set aside. More importantly, antisemitism—just like Israel—is a subject that regularly causes much controversy, especially against the background of its European legacy. The subject of antisemitism tends to evoke strong emotional and opinionated public reactions, thereby creating a difficult terrain for sober research. This reinforces a remarkable gap between the widespread public attention on issues of antisemitism and the exclusion of minorities, on the one hand, and the relatively small amount of scholarly inquiries, on the other. Recent public discussions have become very heated and are often polarized across the European publics. Some of these controversies have been framed as new “antisemitism debates.” Political editors and op-eds may help to re-generate an already politically and, in fact, legally charged climate. This creates a difficult environment for any research—which is always embedded in societal contexts. While many Jews are affected by antisemitism and feel threatened as a minority by violent manifestations of hostility that many government authorities increasingly recognize, some parties and public agencies argue antisemitism is an historical phenomenon that is irrelevant today or limited to neo-Nazi fringe groups. Public Controversies and Contexts: Europe, Antisemitism, and the Middle East The controversy about antisemitism and its salience is often linked to ongoing public disputes on Jewish identity, Israel, anti-Zionism and the Middle East. They have only increased in intensity over the years. The controversies about Jews and Israel and the heated argument about the extent, use and character of antisemitism by no means stop before the gates of the scholarly community. A few authors claim that warnings about the rise of antisemitism in Europe, especially on the left, are greatly exaggerated and largely unjustified (Beller 2007b). While some scholars detect an alarming new antisemitism mobilized by extreme right, radical left and Islamist agents that express Jewhatred by singling out and demonizing Israel as a ‘collective Jew,’

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others claim that anti-Jewish resentment is marginal, a matter of the past, and has been quite thoroughly replaced by Islamophobia (Bunzl 2007).7 In fact, Martin Bunzl maintains that even most European extreme right parties and groups have become “pro-Jewish” and “proIsrael.” But so far evidence supporting this claim is scarce. Moreover, some international relations scholars argue that there is a powerful “Israel lobby” which operates, for instance, as a de facto foreign government in the United States, which—using the alleged power of its money and its control of the media—deliberately equates anti-Israel sentiments with antisemitism, and which uses inflationary antisemitism charges as their ultimate weapon, so that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions [. . .] stands a good chance of being labeled an antisemite.” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2007, 188; for a critique Fine 2006; Lieberman 2009) They therefore suggest that antisemitism is currently primarily used as a (wide-spread) method to silence criticism of Israel. Authors and publicists who feel that criticism of Israel or Jews is severely restricted and harshly sanctioned in the democratic public also regularly charge critics of antisemitism with being part of a global “network” of a “pro-Israel lobby” or “Zionist lobby.” This “lobby,” which presumably suppresses popular opinion or censors political speech, is therefore accused by such critics for exploiting antisemitism and the Holocaust for political and material purposes, most notably in order to disguise an alleged anti-Palestinian genocide (Finkelstein 2005). Consequently, such critics view “antisemitism” exclusively as a “political weapon” (Cockburn & St. Clair 2003; see also Kovel 2007). The claim that any mentioning of antisemitism as a contemporary problem is part of pro-Israel propaganda apparently also strongly resonates in various European publics. To be sure, the charge of antisemitism (or racism for that matter) is one that should never be made lightly. Yet, claiming that there is a 7  The term “islamophobia” is contested in contemporary scholarly and public debates. It is supposed to point to existing cultural and racist prejudices against Muslim minorities and their religious practices. Yet critics point out that it is also used by Islamists and their supporters to immunize and delegitimize any criticism of radical Islamism, including expressions of homophobia, religious oppression, misogyny, and antisemitism within Islamist ideology and practice. However, it is important to distinguish between reflective criticism of Islamists and of Islam as a political ideology, which is often raised by citizens with a Muslim background as part of struggles within Muslim communities, on the one hand, and generalized hatred of Muslims and Islam on the other, which is racist in nature. This distinction is frequently ignored in public debates and even by scholars on the subject. See also fn. 24.



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general misuse of ‘antisemitism’ is as deeply problematic, if not outright dubious as the analogous claim that “racism” is only a “political weapon” of powerful groups to suppress “the white people.” Both claims also have a long tradition, and are typical of, extreme rightist—and recently New Right—discourses that feed the fantasy that ordinary citizens are persecuted by powerful, hegemonic anti-racists and anti-antisemites (cf. for instance Koch 2006). Such discourse often goes hand in hand with ethnic stereotyping. As Robert Fine (2007) points out, today here is a troubling “tendency to downplay anti-Semitism itself (for example, by arguing that the physical protection of synagogues is unnecessary) and to discredit those who are concerned about anti-Semitism—especially on the grounds that they are not really concerned about anti-Semitism but only about silencing and restricting criticism of Israel.” Often Jews and other critics are also defamed as “oversensitive,” and threats or violence against them are trivialized—contrary to the perception that the threshold for the scandalization of public antisemitism is very low. Moreover, it is important to note that researchers who point out public manifestations of antisemitism and decipher new antisemitic forms of antiZionism and conspiracy theories are themselves exposed to speech restrictions that are induced by massive intimidations through public smear campaigns, and at times by violent threats. By now antisemitism researchers are frequently also confronted with, if not silenced by, libel suits—or the threat thereof—across Europe.8 Plus, the image of an all-powerful, conspirational, string-pulling, global “Zionist lobby” controlling media and politics is itself strikingly similar to traditional resentments against “world Jewry,” “hidden Jewish power” and “Jewish conspiracies.” Most importantly, it is quite difficult to substantiate the claim that criticism of Israel and Zionism is “taboo” or censored in any European public realm. Content analyses rather indicate that in spite of its small size and population Israel is arguably among the most criticized countries in the world. This includes the Western and the European public.9 8   For instance, most recently the Center for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin was successfully sued by a conspiracy theorist (Wisnewski 2009). 9   Political attention on events in the Middles East in general and criticism of Israel in particular certainly exceed public criticism of the governments of Sudan or Sri Lanka, where recent massacres in each case cost more lives than there are casualties in the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as violent as the latter has been.

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Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that any public and scientific conversation dealing with antisemitism today takes place in the context of a highly polarized, contested political territory. In fact, antisemitism research has become a minefield. The argument is often heated. It is shaped by serious and at times hefty political charges, on the one hand, and on the other hand ignorance towards, or the outright denial and lack of reflection/recognition of, the very existence of present-day anti-Jewish resentments or violence. Critical political science research has to face the challenge of a controversial and highly charged political environment. The adequate response to this challenge is critical scholarly inquiry in comparative perspective. Such research, to be sure, should be driven by two goals: (i) to rigorously understand and explain the phenomenon but also (ii) to be publicly relevant in the sense of the “normative turn” (Gerring & Yesnowitz 2006) of political science: in our context this entails the goal of combatting and overcoming antisemitism. What is Antisemitism? Seeking Dependent Variables, Defining the Subject(s) Even within the special field of academic research on antisemitism the subject remains highly contested—as is the very idea of cosmopolitanism, for that matter (cf. Vertovec & Cohen 2002). For a start, it is often controversial what is taken as the dependent variable of inquiry, i.e. what it is that should be explained. The subject can be characterized in a number of different ways. These different conceptions have significant consequences for research designs and findings. “Narrow” definitions recognize antisemitism only in manifest phenomena of racial antisemitism, where Jews are openly defamed or attacked as Jews (Klug 2003); in which they are identified as a collective “race” and blamed for a global conspiracy (as exemplified in the infamous, antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”); where Jews are portrayed as vermin; or in cases where antisemites identify themselves as such. The very existence (let alone significance) of latent antisemitism is dismissed (for a critique, Salzborn 2008). However, under liberaldemocratic conditions, even neo-Nazis usually do not identify themselves as antisemites. They also often avoid blatant public hate speech against Jews and other minorities. Instead, they use coded language.10

10  Today, to be sure, it is common that even extreme rightists who outright attack “Jewish dominance” or other conspiracy theorists who feel persecuted by ominous



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Supported by EU-sponsored anti-discrimination legislation, the threat of legal prosecution for racial incitement puts limits on hate speech in many European countries. Openly antisemitic or racist propaganda in the tradition of Nazi demagogues (as embodied in cartoons portraying Jews as cockroaches) is usually subject to criminal prosecution and effective law enforcement in various European member states.11 Too narrow definitions tend to overlook most current and often coded manifestations of Jew-hatred by classifying only neo-Nazi hate speech as such because those instances fall outside of the scope of the initial definition (and thus they suppose a priori that antisemitism has all but completely vanished). All too broad definitions of antisemitism, however, risk conceptual diffusion of the dependent variable’s boundaries. Definitions with a very broad scope tend to ignore discursive ambiguities and ‘grey zones.’ They also tend to distract from the fact that antisemitism is a collective resentment directed against Jews. That does not mean that Jews could not harbor antisemitic resentments. Antisemitism is not a natural but a socio-cultural phenomenon. This implies that Jews—the primary objects of this hatred—are not automatically free from such collective resentments. In fact, it is a common mechanism of anti-Jewish propaganda to use antisemitic Jews as “token witnesses.” Definitions that are too broad, however, might blur the boundaries and see antisemitism as omnipresent, for instance in any criticism of Israeli policies or the critique of capitalism. Neither are accusations against Israel or speculations about the alleged ‘secret machinations’ of finance capital automatically free of antisemitism, as some suggest; nor is the critique of (finance) capitalism or Israeli policies automatically evidence of antisemitism and resentment against Jews. What, then, is antisemitism? What defines its ‘space’—where does it start and where does it end, and are there ambivalent ‘grey zones’ and borderline cases? What are

Jewish “global networks” or “Zionist lobbies” fiercely reject to be called “antisemites” because the term has long become a politically discrediting label, equipped with the aura of illegitimacy—especially in post-1945 Europe. However, most recently “antisemitism charges” have also turned into a badge of honor among conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists. 11   Via the Internet, such hate speech and cartoons continue to be easily accessible and avoid law enforcement. For instance, such cartoons are published on anti-Israel hate sites such as www.no2israel.de—which claims to be left-wing—or Iranian websites. The former website also displays moral outrage over the “behavior of Jewry” and “Jewish power” as well as “Jew-dominated key positions in media.” Retrieved February 17, 2008.

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the identifiable dimensions, forms and functions of contemporary antisemitism (and, for that matter, counter-cosmopolitanism)? How can we provide robust, theoretically sound dependent and independent variables for empirical studies on antisemitism that illuminate causes and effects while avoiding to simply sample against the dependent variable (i.e. illuminate that antisemitism, the subject of research, exists)? In light of the lack of clarity in much of the public and academic debate, we will suggest some basic definitions and conceptualizations that guide our research. They take both the history and the changing nature of hostility against Jews into account. We will also provide criteria to classify antisemitism and distinguish between antisemitic and non-antisemitic phenomena; the boundaries between the two are too often blurred in public and even academic discussions. In so doing, we will lay the conceptual foundations and the framework of this volume. We will hereby expand the debate on antisemitism by recognizing the specificity of this increasingly transnational, ‘global resentment,’ which in several ways differs from other resentments, and its simultaneous interrelatedness with other resentments and the context of what we conceive as counter-cosmopolitanism. Since the publications by the anti-Jewish ideologue Wilhelm Marr the term antisemitism points to the collective discrimination against and hatred of Jews (it has nothing to do with any actual ‘semitic’ ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ or language origin; cf. Lewis 1999). Similar to other conceptualizations such as ‘anti-Jewish hostility’ or the more psychologically biased but equally useful notion of ‘judeophobia,’ antisemitism is the generic term for group prejudices, stereotypes, and Manichean friend-enemy distinctions through which Jews are collectively devalued as inferior or as “enemies of the nation” (Benz 2004; Rensmann 2004a). According to Helen Fein, antisemitism is a matrix of hostile perceptions, narratives and imaginations about Jews as a collective entity, expressed through attitudes, statements, myths, political ideologies, folklore, images and acts (which include social or legal discrimination, political mobilizations against Jews, as well as individual, collective or state-sponsored violence). It may lead to the exclusion, displacement, persecution, or murder of Jews (Fein 1987). Antisemitism has hereby a special historical record. The term points to a specific history of discrimination reaching back to the pre-Roman and early Christian periods. In the context of this history, multiple antiJewish stereotypes and images have been constructed, re-constructed, and transmitted (Schoeps 1998). They entail centuries old resentments



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about ‘the Jews’ as Christ-killers (Laqueur 2006; Wistrich 2010), ritual murderers and blood libel, conspiring and cosmopolitan wanderers, personified laziness and physical weakness, a decadent group that subverts public norms, cheating salesmen etc. Today, it is unthinkable to understand antisemitism without thinking of its genocidal expression in the Holocaust. Modern antisemitism is, moreover, a specifically modern construction. It identifies Jews as cosmopolitan enemies of the (European) nationstate and, moreover, literally as the embodiment of all problems and ambiguities of the ‘modern condition’ and modern crises. Antisemitism as a projective worldview can be theorized as an anti-modern reaction that is simultaneously part and parcel of modernity. Antisemitism thereby provides a historically, culturally and politically situated form of a modern world explanation that combines various heterogeneous resentments. In fact, it is one of antisemitism’s specific features that it is a special matrix of resentment that cannot be reduced to a fixed set of semantically unambiguous meanings and stereotypes. We argue that there is no immanently coherent logic in the antisemitic perception of the world: In antisemitic discourses, Jews appear physically weak yet unbelievably powerful, as enemies of civilization yet also too far ahead of the very same civilization (Adorno & Horkheimer 1969).12 They embody regression, decay and decline as well as modern progress (Schoeps 1998). Jews are associated with “raw” instincts, unbridled desires, and low creatures (insects or swine), yet they are also seen as too intellectual, displaying an overpowering intelligence and a sneaky talent to maneuver and manipulate the entire modern world. Poor or wealthy, weak or strong, exclusive or anti-nationalist, moderate or radical, communist or capitalist, pariah or parvenu: seen through the antisemitic lens, Jews are damned whatever they are or do. This insight into the nature of antisemitism points back to the early reflection of Jean-Paul Sartre that antisemitism is not an idea or reflection of the real world but “first of all a passion”: “Far from experience producing his idea of 12  Some researchers still suggest that there is a strictly limited and ‘logical’ set of anti-Jewish stereotypes. For instance, in spite of new empirical findings showing how Jews are blamed for the loss of jobs in various public discourses, Jan Weyand claims that there is no historical or contemporary evidence of antisemitic statements that attribute the rise of unemployment to Jews because—Weyand insists—this stereotype is not part of antisemitism’s historic arsenal (Weyand 2006). Such narrow conceptions fail to understand past and contemporary antisemitism, and its effects. And they gloss over empirical findings.

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the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” (Sartre 1948: 10 & 12) In order to conceptualize modern antisemitism it is therefore, on the one hand, necessary to (i) recognize its general dimension. It is a form of collective discrimination directed against Jews, a matrix of resentments against Jewish minorities that is similar to other prejudices against ethnic or cultural minorities or excluded ‘others;’ thus, on the one hand, antisemitism can be defined as a form of racism analogous to other forms of discrimination and exclusionism. It is an “ensemble of resentments, clichés, (re)constructed collective images, binary cultural codes, and categorical attributions as well as discriminating practices against Jews, which can intensify to a full-fledged or partial political ideology and an all-encompassing world-view.” (Rensmann 2004a: 20) We argue that—like other forms of racism—antisemitism is an essentialist and projective matrix that is unrelated to actual behavior of Jews (or other minorities). Yet, on the other hand, it is also important (ii) to conceive anti­ semitism’s specific dimension. There are distinct features that differ from any other racist resentment. They point to distinct traditions and functions in the modern social world. Modern antisemitism is not just a prejudice; it is distinct in that it also serves as a world explanation. Immunizing itself against empirical facts, it is anchored in a quite flexible conspiracy theory that ‘explains’ the origins of all social conflicts, social change, and complexities in the modern capitalist world by projecting them onto Jews. Therefore, there is a significant difference between prejudice and institutionalized racism, which justifies and rationalizes exclusion of ethnic minorities or (post)colonial exploitation, on the one hand, and the anti-modern ideology of antisemitism, on the other, which is not just a form of ethnic stereotyping but attributes secret world domination to ‘the Jews’. Antisemitism views Jews as anti-national, “parasitic,” wandering, “rootless cosmopolitans” and all-powerful but secret “string-pullers” behind the workings of modern society (and today, global society). Thus antisemitism imagines a closed community and hidden conspiracy manipulating the world and pursuing world domination—a ‘fact’ that only the antisemite is capable of exposing. The most striking manifest and lasting expression of this image are the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of propaganda from 1903 that presents the Jews as “a ubiquitous secret society, alien and evil, supernaturally powerful . . . [and] intent upon dominating the world” (Bronner 2000: 71–72).



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As mentioned before, modern antisemitic beliefs construct Jews as lazy, decadent, and ruthless, among other things. In the antisemitic perception they are imagined as greedy agents of finance capitalism, globalism, and cosmopolitanism who subvert the cohesion and values of national communities. A modern antisemitic world-view suggests that the ‘war-mongering Jews’ manufacture public opinion by controlling modern media. And another related, typically antisemitic, stereotype suggests that ‘they’ drive nations and the world into war. Modern antisemitism, hence, is another but a far cry from being just another form of racism that rationalizes ethnic exclusion and oppression; the former is part of a distinct, anti-modern societal movement of the modern world (Longerich 2010). Historically, it marched in step and gained in popularity with the political, social and cultural rise of modern enlightenment, modern capitalist society, and civil-republican rule of law. The rise of modern bourgeois society entitled Jews with rights and increasingly included Jews in its social fabric, with which they where henceforth identified. Thus, different from other forms of racism, it is modern antisemitism’s specific quality to explain the modern world—with all its crises, problems, complex and contradictory developments—by blaming the Jews and their allegedly ‘evil character.’ It is, again, an ideology/movement that explains the world by attributing all the negative aspects of contemporary modern society— including economic crises, transformations, capitalism, and war—to a small minority (of the global community and within the nations) or, more recently, also to the Jewish nation-state of Israel. In the words of some extreme right anti-Jewish publicists, there is a lingering “Israelization of the world.” Unlike other forms of racism against ethnic minorities or ‘others,’ only antisemitism provides for an all-encompassing, personified and objectified anti-modernity. Such objectification does not just devaluate Jews; it also ‘elevates’ them in a stereotypical fashion by attributing enormous ‘secret power’ to them. The underlying structure of modern antisemitism, then, is an encompassing conspiracy theory that ascribes the most heterogeneous societal and political phenomena to Jewish behavior and ‘string-pulling.’ Through this reified personification of social processes, Jews are constructed not just as a generalized other but also as the specific other of the modern world, they embody an endless multiplicity of socio-cultural phenomena as well as, in particular, political modernity’s actual and perceived problems and the cosmopolitan erosion of traditional identities. Conspiracy myths are thereby a central ingredient of antisemitic thought. Serving as the

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primary historical target of conspiracy thinking, there is often a close link between conspiracy myths and the anti-Jewish imagination. In contemporary antisemitic manifestations, too, “the Jews,” “the Rothschilds” or “the Zionists” are often portrayed as secret string-pullers behind immigration, diversity, cultural multiplicity, socio-cultural change, military conflicts, the American and other “imperialist” governments, the global economic crisis, or the presumed decline of national communities and national sovereignty. In a typical fashion, for instance, the American Holocaust denier and violent neo-Nazi James von Brunn claimed: “Obama is created by the Jews” (cf. CNN 2009). It is thereby an integral part of antisemitic ideologies and perceptions to view ‘the Jews’ as “aggressors;” the antisemites, in turn, claim that they are only defending themselves against ‘the Jews’ and their all-powerful “global Zionist network” and that they are a “persecuted minority.” They are, in Adorno’s words, potential persecutors “who pretend to be the persecuted” (Adorno 1964). Criteria and Boundaries: Antisemitism, Racism, and Anti-Zionism We can speak of antisemitism when Jews are directly discriminated against, and thus essentialized. But anti-Jewish stereotypes directed against Jews can be articulated in various, possibly subtle ways. In contested discursive spaces, boundaries of such classifications are not easy to determine; neither are their cultural, political and legal contexts and implications. The working definition suggested by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) [now EU Agency for Fundamental Rights] offers some useful reference points in order to develop a set of robust criteria to classify antisemitism. It runs counter to the polarized political debate on “inflationary” antisemitism charges, on one hand, and the denial of antisemitic phenomena altogether, on the other. But it explicitly includes new forms of anti-Jewish hostility and exclusion, such as forms of anti-Israel hatred in which Israel functions as a “collective Jew,” and collective discrimination of Israelis as rights-bearers, as exemplified in boycotts not just of Israel but of all Israeli citizens.13 According to the EUMC, “antisemitism

13  The Council of Europe’s Europea