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Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice

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I call this book "A must-read" because if you are even considering the subject of anti-Semitism, or the Arab-Israeli conflict, or just plain prejudice regardless of what kind of prejudice is analyzed, its 285 pages are the perfect place to start. Bernard Lewis writes about anti-Semitism in his areas of expertise (the Arab world, the Moslem world, the Middle East) as one would write about an illness, a particularly ugly kind of illness. He is like a compassionate physician called to observe and diagnose a patient who has been infected with a horrible disease that is consuming his (or her) body and soul. As a non-Jew and an immigrant in the United States, I have often encountered Arabs who mistake me for someone who will share their hatred of Jews, simply because we share the immigrant experience in the US. This has happened in far too many occasions to be considered unimportant. The vast majority of Arabs that I've met in eleven years in this country, have assumed (correctly) that I have a Christian education, and (incorrectly) that I have been infected by the anti-Jewish syndrome that has, tragically, been most evident in Christian societies for two thousand years. Bernard Lewis' book has helped me understand this bothersome fact of life in my dealings with Arabs for the last eleven years. It was in part this book what provoked Edward Said's reaction against, and verbal abuse of, Bernard Lewis, and this, in turn, made me interested in the work of Edward Said. I have read now several of Professor Lewis' works and several collected articles by Edward Said, and I cannot find validity in the passionate, but flimsy arguments that Said puts forward to attack Lewis, like claiming that the latter has no knowledge of -or intentionally ignores- the problems of the Middle East in which many of Lewis' examples of anti-Semitism take place. If anyone reads two books by Bernard Lewis, it must become clear that the man understands his subject. So, "Semites and Anti-Semites" is a must-read for those who want to see patterns of hatred in order to fight against them. It also showed me two totally different authors, with a completely different set of ethics: on the one hand, Lewis is serious, methodical, and compassionate of both the victims and the hatemongers. On the other, Said has been unmasked recently in "Commentary", in an article by Justus Weiner, as someone who lied about his past to "make up" a biography as a Palestinian refugee. "Semites and Anti-Semites" deals exactly with this kind of people.

In the wake of September 11, a lot of Americans are only starting to wake up to something known to anyone who has read this book: the Arab world has succeeded Nazi Germany as the global epicenter of annihilationist anti-Semitism.

Bernard Lewis' book was written well in advance of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and it makes essential background reading into the bizarre theorizing that is so replete in the Arab world.

Lewis writes carefully and with sympathy for his subjects, and he is careful to draw a line between criticism of Israel and outright bigotry. Still, his inquiry finds that far too many newspapers and intellectuals in this region are willing to embrace medieval libels and Nazi tracts in their efforts to explain away the perseverance of Israel.

Anyone who holds universal tolerance as a cardinal value - regardless of their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict - should read this book carefully. Unless the world shines the light of truth on the recesses of paranoia and hatred lurking in the Arab world, we will be certain of seeing many more Osama bin Ladens

The most important thing I learned about this book is that Arab anti-Semitism, although not eternal, precedes the current war. Before the Holocuast, the mufti of Jerusalem urged the Nazis to engage in a "Holy War" against world Jewry, to accomplish the "final solution" to the Jewish problem everywhere. (p. 147, 1986 edition). In 1945, 130 Jews were massacred in Libya and 82 more in Aden (p. 205). In 1964, the state-controlled Egyptian press claimed that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish and "armed by the Zionist organization" (p. 214). In the 1970s, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia claimed that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian and Muslim children (p. 194)

These facts disprove the claim of another reviewer that "Far from being intent on annihilating the Jews, the Arab world is hostile towards Israel's brutal occupation of the Palestinians." Before I read Lewis's book, I too thought Arab anti-Semitism must have arisen from the recent Israel-Palestinian wars. But as the above-quoted examples (and many others cited by Lewis) show, Arabs were massacring Jews, supporting Nazis and fomenting Jew hatred before Israel even was formed in 1948, let alone before Israel took over the "occupied terrorities" in 1967.

Another reviewer complained about the "racist" Israeli Law of Return. The Law of Return has nothing to do with race: it allows Jews from around the world to live in Israel -- not just white European Jews, but Jews from the Arab countries (who, according to Lewis at least, comprised a majority of Israelis as of 1986) and black Jews from Ethiopia.

I have studied European anti-semitism for years and recently began following the Arab media, with its plentiful dose of Muslim anti-semitism. The parallels between the two were so striking that I knew there had to be some sort of connection. A lot of Muslim anti-semitism is literally a carbon copy of medieval Christian polemics, even when it produces absurd results. (For example, a Palestinian sermon recently declared that "The Talmud blasphemes about Muhammed." Medieval Christian anti-semites often claimed that the Talmud blasphemed against Jesus, but that was at least plausible; Muhammed, on the other hand, was born several hundred years after the Talmud was written.) I knew there had to be an explanation, but I didn't know what it was until I read this book. The historical connection that Lewis provides (backed up with lots of evidence) seems obvious to me now that I have read it.

As for the reviewer who claims that Lewis is a bigot... he heaps praise on all Lewis's criticism of Western anti-semitism and on his accurate depiction of the relatively better life Jews used to have in the East, but everything Lewis says about current Arab anti-semitism and Israel is rejected. I hardly know where to start in addressing his points.

Lewis does not downplay the Sabra and Shatilla massacres; he merely points out that it wasn't the Israelis who commited the massacres, that similar massacres were happening every couple of months during that era in Lebanese history, and that the news coverage basically ignored those facts. (Even today, Palestinians attempted to sue Sharon for not foreseeing and preventing the massacres, but haven't bothered to sue the Lebanese Christians who actually planned and committed them.)

Even the fact that Lewis says the Palestinians were "compelled" to leave is not exactly biased toward Israel, since there is a strong historical debate about whether they were compelled to leave or whether they fled the warfare as thousands of refugees do during every war. (And I have no idea where he gets the number of "thousands" of people being murdered, unless he considers every Arab soldier who died during the 1948 war to have been the victim of a murder.)

The idea that the Holocaust was unique, while certainly debatable, is hardly "scandalous." And the calm depiction of the fact that Israel didn't personally try to prevent the Armenian genocide -- during a time when Israel didn't even exist, and the Jews in Palestine were struggling to survive under the Ottoman Empire -- as "racist" takes one's breath away. Can I assume that this reviewer considers the entire book moot, since the Arab world is _already_ racist merely for not trying to help the Jews during the Holocaust? And can I assume that since he appears to feel that Jewish nationalism is racist, he feels the same way about all other forms of nationalism -- including Palestinian nationalism?

Incidentally, Lewis's statement about the Armenian genocide in France, while certainly insensitive, was made in the context of explaining the Turkish point of view. In his earlier book on Turkey, he called the Armenian genocide a "holocaust."

This is a book about Arab anti-semitism (of course Arabs can be anti-semites, because, duh, anti-semitism is a particular form of hatred directed at JEWS, not speakers of all Semitic languages... Akkadians that published the blood libel and translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion would be -- you guessed it -- anti-semites).

The discussion of Arab anti-semitism is preceded by a thorough laying of foundations, consisting of chapters discussing the history of the term "semitic", the history of semitic-speaking peoples, the history of the Jews, and the rise of Zionism. Anti-semitism proper is then chronicled, beginning with the 1648 uprising of the Ukrainian Cossacks and following through to contemporary Arab expressions.

Anti-semitism is not, of course, just disliking or being rude to Jews. It's a form of hatred that characterizes Jews as being uniquely and cosmically evil, and that relies on the repetition of certain core tropes: the Jews drink blood, the Jews conspire to take over the world, blah blah.

What Lewis argues is that, while this sort of treatment of the Jews is commonplace in contemporary Arab media, Arab anti-Semitism is a recent innovation, coming into existence over the last half-century. Medieval Arabs stereotyped Jews as well, but merely as cowardly, and some medieval Arab accounts of Mohammed's victories over his Jewish contemporaries paint the Jews as "tragic" figures and accord them "dignity" in their defeat. Medieval Arab treatment of Jews was, Lewis argues, in the middle of the Bell curve -- both the best and the worst treatment of Jews was to be found in the Christian West.

Until now. The rise of the state of Israel has seen a simultaneous explosion of anti-Semitic writing, ranting and posturing in the Arab states. This book, written well before September 11, 2001, is now more relevant than ever as a guide to understanding the crazed rhetoric flowing around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the more general muddled meeting of the Arab world and the West.

Lewis writes a persuasive and detailed account of the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. He credits its emergence to European influences, charts the collaboration between Arab nationalism and Nazism and the disturbing proliferation of anti-Semitic tracts following 1948. This is a well-written, powerful book which must be read in order to understand why the Middle East conflict has gone on so long.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to comprehend the deep passions underlying the Mid-East conflict. In this very readable volume, subtitled "An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice", Bernard Lewis explains how and why hatred of Jews as Jews now inflames the Arab World. First published in 1987 and reissued with a new Afterword in 1999, the book is as timely as tomorrow. In light of subsequent events, the last chapter, "The New Anti-Semitism", and the Afterword are especially chilling.

Where else can you discover that statues of A. Hitler stand in the public squares of countries such as Syria and Iraq? With unusual clarity and driving narrative power, Lewis uncovers the stark anti-semitism that lays coiled like a sick snake in the stomach of Islam. His wealth of detail is breathtaking and his honesty is never in question. He approaches the frightening facts of 50 years of Arab anti-semitism with bold clarity and intellectual honesty. One comes away from this book with the sick impression that virtually every thought and news article published in the middle east has some tinge of anti-semitism in it. Along with Seven Days of War, an essential book on the middle east. Stark frightening anti-semitism derived straight from the Nazis, an historical connection which Lewis also chronicles. EXCELLENT TEN STARS IF I COULD.

The bout of Jew-hate that convulsed Europe until the fall of Hitler was in effect an episode, a long-lived but ultimately futile piece of social pathology dependent not on any positive religion - though Bernard Lewis' opening remarks tend to argue otherwise - but rather on a socio-cultural convulsion due to various kinds of cultural maladjustment (among which I would place very high an unconscious desire to neutralize or destroy the Christian religion by striking at its ancestor). In its essentials, I believe it was an episode and no more. Except for the lunatic fringe, it and all its products have been consigned to the dustbin of culture history, and, but for the horror of what arose from them, the PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION and such things would be a subject for jokes.
In the Arab world, however, what was a craze - and never without opponents; at no point was the wave of so-called anti-Semitism ever without opponents in the West - has become the consensus; and shows signs of embedding itself into the culture too deep to be removed. What is worse, it has been accepted with no discussion, debate or serious opposition. Debate in Arab culture is difficult - due mainly to the tyrannical natures of most states, that makes it difficult to engage in unperturbed opposition of views which may well have official backing - but not impossible; and many things do in fact get debated with earnest intelligence. The legend of the evil Jew, however, is not one of these things: practically no Muslim voice of any importance has challenged it; and even if anyone did, they would be wasting their time, since Arab and Muslim public opinion simply would not listen. The Arab and Muslim world has eaten, swallowed and digested the sin of the West; metabolised the worst of our social pathologies, as though there was anything to gain by doing so.
The excuse for this, of course, is the rise of the State of Israel; but, quite apart from the fact that the new Arab Anti-Semitism (and yes, I know it is a contradiction in terms) has actually made the Arabs less capable of understanding and dealing with their enemy (witness the widespread conspiracy theory that the Israeli troops and aircraft during the Six Days' War were in fact led and manned by Americans), I think this is to some extent a pretext. Arabs had been flirting with German philosophies, with totalitarianism and racism, well before the foundation of the Jewish State - the root of the Baath party, founded in the thirties, is in a typically Fascist mixture of nationalism and socialism leavened with a mystique of group love. These phenomena arose from the failure of the Arab nation to deal with the modern world, and their embedding in the Arab psyche, with their corollary of conspiracy theory, simply diminishes further their ability to do so. Conspiracy theory is not a way, however pathological, to deal with the complexities of the real world; it is a way to deny them.
This horrendous process is documented in quite intolerable detail in this excellent book, and God knows there is enough to be said about it. Bernard Lewis shows himself, if anything, too fair to the Arabs. Perhaps the most frightening feature is the calm, even polite way in which the most vicious drivel is spouted with no understanding either of its odiousness or of its sheer ignorance; what one might call the innocence of evil. This is a deeply troubling book, not only for what it says about any future possibility of peace with Israel, but for the more basic issue of the Arab attitude to a world they perceive as hostile, ranged against them, existing in a monstrous conspiracy to crush and destroy them. It cannot be healthy for one of the great nations of the world to live in a state of permanent fear and hatred.

Violence is often linked to propaganda, incitement, and biased perceptions of others. That is why I think Lewis was right to begin his book by giving an example of a bomb that was exploded in 1980 in Paris, at a synagogue. As Lewis explains, the French Prime Minister said, "They aimed at the Jews and they hit innocent Frenchmen." Now that is clearly not the way he meant to say it. But the implication that to some extent, many French people view the Jews as neither French nor innocent is worth investigating.

Lewis starts by explaining some fundamentals: who the Jews were and are, where they lived in the past and live now, what Zionism was and is, and who the Hebrew-speakers were and are. He then explains the a little of the history of European antisemitism, or Jew-hatred, over the past few centuries. After that, there is a discussion of Muslim relations with Jews.

This background material allows us to understand a major point Lewis makes: that the close relationship between Germany and the Arab leadership that developed between "1933 and 1945 was due not to a German attempt to win over the Arabs but to a series of Arab approaches to the Germans."

This leads to an explanation of the way most Arabs use the word "Nazi" today. They don't mean by it "antisemite." Such an equivalence would make some Arabs applaud the Nazis while it could make others sympathize with the Jewish victims of the Nazis. Instead, the term is used as a term of general abuse, so that it can be applied to Jews.

Lewis then discusses the Arab war first against Zionism and then against the Jews in general. He shows that many Arabs are outraged at the success of the Jews, who had been a traditionally oppressed minority. And some view the existence of Israel as unjust. But even these views are insufficient to explain the many Arab writers who devote plenty of time and effort to reiterate European antisemitic propaganda and distribute it worldwide. Such efforts are so manifestly counterproductive to everyone, Arabs included, that Lewis feels it is appropriate to see what motivates them. And here, Lewis makes a final point: Israel and Zionism are being judged largely not on what they are but on a caricature of what they are that is provided by wild and arbitrary accusations against them.

I highly recommend this book.