For generations of scholars, Sander Gilman’s thought-provoking works are essential resources. Indeed, the academic field of Jewish Studies itself would be unimaginable today without his interdisciplinary body of work. Now, in Antisemitisms: A History of Jew Hating, readers may glean from what he regards as the culminating refinement of his lifelong engagement with the phenomenon. Amidst our growing anxiety and bewilderment that this is proving to be the most inauspicious time for Jews globally since the Holocaust, it is a book we sorely need.
Gilman moves us deftly from century to century across a range of cultures, and up to the aftermath of October 7th, 2023. Antisemitisms is organized around four case studies that he sees as essential to the construction of the imagined Jew: “visible difference (appearance), vulnerability (disease), belonging (rootedness), and boundary setting (self-hatred).” For Gilman, the vexing challenge faced by the scholar of Jew hatred is that, whether deemed nomadic or rooted, the Jewish “target is always shifting and always different, from place to place, from individual to individual, from epoch to epoch.” What most distinguishes Gilman’s nuanced approach is his inherent challenge to the common and reactive view of those like Robert Wistrich who, in labeling antisemitism as “the longest hatred,” insist on a static and eternal paradigm, somehow unlike all other expressions of xenophobia. For Gilman, antisemitisms are always “situational, inherently inconsistent, often contradictory.” A favorite word is “wobbly,” alluding to the ever-shifting, malleable meanings that have accompanied the Jews’ reception by hostile individuals or collectives throughout time.
Whether addressing the fraught role of hats or beards as key signifiers in antisemitic discourse, the physiognomic imagination of Victorian England, or the nuances of contemporary self-critical Jewish discourses, Gilman’s insights are often surprising and always illuminating. Notwithstanding the grim subject matter, this proves an enthralling intellectual adventure, often leavened by his seasoned wit. Even those familiar with Gilman’s earlier close examinations of the contradictory discourses of eugenics and miscegenation anxieties, the fantasies of scientific racism, and stereotypes of the “Jew’s body,” will find much to appreciate, including his attention to popular cultural portrayals in comics, Hollywood films, and television.
At the heart of Antisemitisms is Gilman’s sustained focus on the “contested, contradictory and fluid” nature of both Jewish identities and the social and cultural fantasies of the antisemite. Throughout, he interrogates a vast array of thorny issues— Holocaust denialism, “philosemitism,” “chosenness,” charges of “Jewish dual loyalty,” and the contemporary “antizionism is antisemitism” debates among them — always with historical, political, and even literary acumen. At one point he addresses the category of so-called “Jewish antisemites,” a charge he himself has faced. Gilman accomplishes all this with remarkable economy, as suggested by the laconic titles of his five chapters: “Making Jews,” “Seeing Jews,” “Healing Jews,” “Wandering Jews,” and “Unmaking Jews.” Antisemitisms is generously illustrated with helpful historical images: satanic Jews of the medieval Christian imagination, rabbis of Victorian London, New York bankers in the late nineteenth century, and New Jews of early Zionist postcards.
Like the best of Gilman’s vast corpus, Antisemitisms is dazzlingly erudite yet as accessible to general readers as it is to scholars. Perhaps what most distinguishes Gilman’s approach from his predecessors on the groaning shelf on the subject is his meticulously comparative approach to the examination of ideologies represented in this discourse. He notes diverse ways that menacing distinctions between self and Other have accompanied many other minorities across time and space. The Jews, as it turns out, are perhaps not quite so unique a case as many have concluded, even as dangerous fantasies and dehumanizing tropes about us persist and intensify our growing sense of unease in a time of rising violence.
Ranen Omer-Sherman is the JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville, author of several books and editor of Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond.
