The apparent resurgence of hostility toward Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe; at the same time, the adversities faced by the continent’s Muslim population have received increasing attention. In Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in these ongoing problems. Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it instead offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion.
According to Bunzl, anti-Semitism was invented in the late nineteenth century to police the ethnically pure nation-state. Islamophobia, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. With the declining importance of the nation-state, traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course, while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new, unified Europe. By ridding us of misapprehensions, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia enables us to see these forces anew.
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Matti Bunzl is associate professor of anthropology and history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also directs the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. He is the author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna.
Read this for a college class and Bunzl isn't a bad read. I think it is great that it includes responses from other writers concerning his views on Islamophobia and Anti-Semetism. If you are curious about Muslims in Europe you may enjoy his analysis. Some of his responders disagree and offer different lines of comparison.
