A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad [Hardcover]

Robert S. Wistrich (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 5, 2010

In this unprecedented work two decades in the making, leading historian Robert S. Wistrich examines the long and ugly history of anti-Semitism, from the first recorded pogrom in 38 BCE to its shocking and widespread resurgence in the present day. As no other book has done before it, A Lethal Obsession reveals the causes behind this shameful and persistent form of hatred and offers a sobering look at how it may shake and reshape the world in years to come.

Here are the fascinating and long-forgotten roots of the “Jewish difference”–the violence that greeted the Jewish Diaspora in first-century Alexandria. Wistrich suggests that the idea of a formless God who passed down a universal moral law to a chosen few deeply disconcerted the pagan world. The early leaders of Christianity increased their strength by painting these “superior” Jews as a cosmic and satanic evil, and by the time of the Crusades, murdering a “Christ killer” had become an act of conscience.

Moving seamlessly through centuries of war and dissidence, A Lethal Obsession powerfully portrays the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fateful anti-Semitic tract commissioned by Russia’s tsarist secret police at the end of the nineteenth century–and the prediction by Theodor Herzl, Austrian founder of political Zionism, of eventual disaster for the Jews in Europe.

The twentieth century fulfilled this dark prophecy, with the horrifying ascent of Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet, as Wistrich disturbingly suggests, the end of World War II failed to neutralize the “Judeophobic virus”: Pogroms and prejudice continued in Soviet-controlled territories and in the Arab-Muslim world that would fan flames for new decades of distrust, malice, and violence.

Here, in pointed and devastating detail, is our own world, one in which jihadi terrorists and the radical left blame Israel for all global ills. In his concluding chapters, Wistrich warns of a possible nuclear “Final Solution” at the hands of Iran, a land in which a formerly prosperous Jewish community has declined in both fortunes and freedoms.

Dazzling in scope and erudition, A Lethal Obsession is a riveting masterwork of investigative nonfiction, the definitive work on this unsettling yet essential subject. It is destined to become an indispensable source for any student of world affairs.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

An indisputably serious problem with global ramifications deserves an equally serious and comprehensive treatment. Modern Jewish historian Wistrich has provided just that in his masterful dissection of the origins, the dissemination, and the consequences of anti-Semitism in all of its most blatant and most subtle manifestations. Though the size and the scope of this treatise may be initially daunting, intrepid readers will be rewarded by the clarity of the scholarly presentation. Arguing that anti-Semitism in our post–World War II world has returned with a vengeance and is, perhaps, more widespread and virulent than ever, he traces the ever-broadening roots of what he considers the “oldest and darkest of ideological obsessions.” No matter what political or ideological slants readers might bring to the table, this is a significant, wide-ranging discourse on the topic of anti-Semitism that cannot and should not be ignored. Wistrich has painstakingly done his homework and laid out his analysis, providing plenty of food for thought and discussion. --Margaret Flanagan

Review

"A monumental and encyclopedic work—one of the most compelling studies of anti-Semitism past and present that I have read. It is likely to become the seminal work on the subject—a must for scholars of hate and anti-Semitism." —Irwin Cotler, MP: Former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; Professor of Law, McGill University

"A message of this remarkable work is that the Holocaust did not only discredit anti-Semitism. In a sinister way, the murder of six million Jews has also inspired fantasies of completing what the Third Reich had begun, and has led to widespread defamation of Israel by equating its policies with Nazism. The grim case that Robert Wistrich advances in A Lethal Obsession is overwhelming. In the awesome scale of its research, in its moral and literary force, and in its compelling political urgency, there is no book quite like it."—Stephen J. Whitfield, Professor of American Civilization, Brandeis University.

"This is a splendid work of history. A masterpiece."—Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

"Robert Wistrich's work is a monument to scholarship, precision, and passion. It is likely to become the single most essential treatment of anti-Semitism for all those who seek to understand it and combat it." —Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler

"At the heart of Wistrich's book is a holistic and global approach that seeks to analyze and understand the evolution of a "culture of hatred" that has continued to dehumanize Jews until this very day. Intrigued by its uncanny ability to adapt, the author masterfully explores the various mutations of anti-Semitism where it connects with contemporary social and political crises. This book contains valuable new information and insights and is bound to become indispensable for the study of anti-Semitism world wide."—Jehuda Reinharz, Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History and President, Brandeis University

"In this major work of historical synthesis, Robert Wistrich offers abundant evidence that genocidal anti-Semitism, and apologetics and indifference about is not only a matter of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Rather it remains a key element of contemporary affairs. A Lethal Obsession, the result of years of scholarship, presents a profound and incisive interpretation of anti-Semitism both before and after 1945. Wistrich offers remarkable, and infuriating details of the persistence and permutation of this hallucinatory set of ideas within Europe as well as in the Middle East, North Africa and Iran, He writes with the interpretive grasp of a historian of the first rank as well as with the passion and urgency that is so essential in the face of the genocidal threats made against Israel and the Jews in recent years. It is both a major work of enduring scholarly value as well as a much needed reminder to political leaders and citizens of the profound danger posed by the advocates of the delusions that anti-Semitism has fostered in the past and continues to foster in the present."—Jeffrey Herf, author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust and Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World and professor of Modern European History, University of Maryland, College Park

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1200 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1St Edition edition (January 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400060974
• ISBN-13: 978-1400060979
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 2.4 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #585,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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86 of 109 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Warning to be heeded February 7, 2010

By Barry Mehler

Format:Hardcover

Dr. Mehler's Short Review of this Important New Book
See the posting on ISAR: [...]

Wistrich Speaking About his Book at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington:
[...]

Robert S. Wistrich has come out with his twentieth volume, a thousand page tome, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, (New York: Random House, 2010). The title is a little misleading, this is not a majestic survey of the history of anti-Semitism from antiquity to the present. The focus is on post-Nazi exterminatory anti-Semitism and the bulk of the book is focused on anti-Semitism in the Islamic world.

Wistrich's 30,000 word introduction is entitled, "The Return of Anti-Semitism," but it is clear from his history that Anti-Semitism never went away. Certainly, the shocking revelations of the Holocaust reverberated through many parts of the world, creating a good deal of sympathy for Jews which was translated into sympathetic movies and books about the Jews in the West. It also sustained political support for Zionism for a brief period. And, of course, after the Holocaust Jews were no longer being actively exterminated, but the ideology of exterminatory anti-Semitism that justified Auschwitz was still evolving and spreading to new cultural environments especially the post-war communist block and the Muslem world. Anti-Semitism never went away. It didn't even go into retreat. Wistrich argues that after World War II the baton was passed from the Right to the Left and from Christians to Muslems. This is a humanitarian anti-Semitism aimed at saving the Palestinian people from the hands of the last white-supremacist colonial state practicing apartheid.

The argument that Israeli aggression and occupation is to blame for this situation is itself an anti-Semitic argument. This does not mean that anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite, but the core claim of modern anti-Semites from David Duke to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is that the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by the Jews to justify their aggression in the Middle East. At the same time that they deny the Holocaust reality, they claim that Zionism is the moral equivalent of Nazism and that the Zionist state is engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. When these people call for an end to the Zionist entity they are really calling for the extermination of the Jews. And for the first time since World War II, anti-Semitism is part of a major state's [Iran] core ideology. This is the modern face of exterminatory anti-Semitism and Wistrich believes it is pervasive throughout the Muslem world. His goal is to expose the intensity of the "culture of hatred" that permeates "books, magazines, newspapers, sermons, videocassettes, the Internet, television, and radio in the Middle East on a scale unprecedented since the heyday of Nazi Germany." The demonic images of Jews circulating in much of the Islamic world today "constitute a new warrant for genocide." They combine the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jewish drive for world domination and dehumanizing Islamic quotations about Jews as the "sons of apes and donkeys."

Wistrich presents us with a history of the evolution of a murderous ideology. This is not the history of progress towards a more tolerant world. The three major culprits in the spread of this ideology are Hitlerism, Stalinism and Islamism. In all three cases anti-Jewish demonology has been manipulated in the cause of conspiracy theories which have at their heart the oldest and darkest of ideological obsessions: hatred of the Jews. Anti-Semitism is the hatred that keeps on giving. Wistrich believes the past seven decades have been a golden age for exterminatory anti-Semitism and at no time in the past have the core beliefs of this ideology been as widely disseminated and as widely accepted. He calls the world-wide campaign against Zionism, "a warrant for Genocide." And he believes we are entering a very dangerous period. Specifically, he believes the next two years are going to be among the most dangerous since World War II.

Wistrich four minute clip from the Wilson Center Q&A on YouTube: [...]
The Daily Show clip on Hamas children's cartoons: [...]

Barry Mehler, Ph.D.
Professor of History/Director, ISAR Project
Ferris State University
1009 Campus Drive
Big Rapids, MI 49307
[phone]

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Authoritative compendium...but extremely repetitive July 30, 2010

By A. Jogalekar TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Robert Wistrich's massive 1200 page tome is probably the most authoritative collection of facts about anti-Semitism that you can find. It contains thousands of meticulously documented quotes from newspapers, magazines, television and the popular press, from antiquity right up to 2009. All these sources make it crystal clear that anti-Semitism is still very much alive and riddles many of the world's civilized nations. It is a shameful part of our collective consciousness that we must strive to expunge. And this is irrespective of what your political views about Israel may be, since the instances of anti-Semitism that Wistrich documents go far beyond specific grievances against Israel.

But all this can be said in about 500 pages. I kind of lost interest after that point because Wistrich essentially keeps on repeating facts to convince us about how bad the situation is. This is unnecessary. For instance he spends a gratuitous amount of time documenting Iranian President Ahmadinejad's disgusting rhetoric and rants supporting Holocaust denial. We get it; Ahmadinejad is a deplorable individual who should be denounced in the strongest possible terms. But giving us a hundred instances of his despicable behavior where only twenty instances would have sufficed adds very little to our knowledge. Similarly, Wistrich seems to want to dig up every single source from the last twenty years to support his contention that anti-Semitism is well and alive in Europe and the Middle East and is casually practiced and propagated. But again, stating this fact with a hundred or so pages of examples would have been sufficient. Finally, Wistrich gives exhaustive accounts of anti-Semitism in pre-WW2 Nazi Germany, a subject on which hundreds if not thousands of authoritative volumes have already been penned. Do we really need one more? (On the other hand, Wistrich has a very interesting account of Hitler's anti-Semitic collaboration with The Mufti)

To sum up then, as it stands the book is more a collection of facts than an insightful analysis. It's more like an "Encyclopedia of anti-Semitism". Wistrich makes relatively few efforts to add his own interpretation of the psychology and root causes behind this pernicious ideology. The volume does a great job of demonstrating that anti-Semitism is still a clear and present danger. But in my humble opinion it could have easily been shortened by at least 300 pages. For those who want to dig up every instance of anti-Semitism under the sun from the last thousand years, it is an invaluable reference. But those who want a non-repetitive, fresh source of insight and analysis might want to supplement this book with other readings.

40 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars -- and an Asterisk March 13, 2010

By Werner Cohn VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The rule that requires each review here to specify a given number of stars, from one to five, may sometimes seems restrictive and arbitrary. But in this case I am grateful for it: it allows me to state, over and above anything else that I may to say, my great and unambiguous admiration for this work: five stars without question, more if it were possible to give more.

The author is of course known to all for about two dozen previous works of meticulous and detailed scholarship on modern history. I have read most of these books, and much of what I know about modern Jews I have learned from them. In the present book, the author steps back somewhat from detail and gives an overall evaluation, in the course of which he reviews just about everything that has been written about anti-Semitism in modern times. (The subtitle states that the book goes back to antiquity, but, well, that is not done in any detail.)

The author of course has a point of view, which others have discussed, and I don't have much to say about that, mainly because I find myself in agreement with just about any of the points that may be considered contentious. But no matter what your point of view may be on this or that, this book will be indispensable as a work of reference for anyone with an interest in the subject.

Obviously, no matter how important a work of scholarship may be, it cannot be perfect. If it is as good a books as this, its defects, if discussed publicly, will be part of its great merit by increasing knowledge and understanding.

The author's treatment of at least two subjects illustrates that there are certain -- I would not call them flaws -- but certain gaps:

1) The various Trotskyist movements in Europe and America were for many years significant constituents of the near-anti-Semitism of the Left; in France, this is still the case. Wistrich understands that and gives telling descriptions. But his accounts are ahistorical; they do not take into account the development of the anti-Jewish stance over time. During the whole period in which Trotsky himself was alive, there were no (explicit) anti-Jewish sentiments in the Trotskyist movement. The movement made a sharp turn in that direction only after ca. 1968. The problem is not one of Trotskyism alone but also concerns the whole of the traditional Left.

2) Wistrich's Chapter Twenty, "Hitler and the Mufti," give a good accounting of the pro-Nazi sentiments and pro-Nazi activities of certain Arab leaders during WWII. This chapter will serve as an antidote to the many current attempts to sweep this matter under the rug. But since we know that, in addition to the pro-Nazi factions among the Arab elites, there were also pro-Allies sentiments and activities, it would have been good to have an accounting of the interplay between these two tendencies. It would have made for a more nuanced appraisal.

3) perhaps the most important flaw: in at least two respects, the physical aspects of the book make it inconvenient to scholarly users. Anyone who has done scholarly work will confirm that convenience in scholarly aids is of great scholarly importance. The more difficult something is to find, the less likely it will be actually used even by meticulous scholars. After all, nobody's time is limitless.

Here are the two complaints I have on this matter:

A) The end-notes, an important part of this book, are difficult to locate at the end of the book. Deviating from customary usage, this book does not tell the reader on the top of the notes' pages where he can find a reference for any given text.

B) There is no bibliography. That is a major nuisance to a scholarly reader, for a great many reasons. It would be good to know at a glance whether the author has made use of a certain monograph, for example. Moreover, the bibliographic references -- when and where a book or article was published, by whom, etc. -- are given in the notes (if you can find the notes), but only for the first instance in which the item is mentioned in a chapter. For subsequent mentions, you're on your own.

To summarize: Thanks to Amazon for providing the star system, which in this case allows me to show so clearly that my admiration for the book vastly outweighs my complaints.