In The Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (Routledge Taylor and Francis Group for the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.2025) Jeffrey Herf, professor emeritus of History at the University of Maryland, summarizes his excellent academic books about the various kinds of antisemitism sponsored by governments and by political movements. He shows that much of the current anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric is recycled Nazi, Soviet bloc and extreme Islamist propaganda deliberately generated for purely ideological and political reasons.
Each of the governments and political movements that sponsored antisemitic propaganda from the 1930s on have in common a philosophy that Herf calls ‘reactionary modernism.’
-The Nazis, for instance, were modern in that they were very taken with technology, like airplanes, tanks, machine guns and modern methods of production as well as of extermination of people. But they were completely reactionary in the way they addressed the Enlightenment ideas of free speech, freedom of the press, and free and open intellectual inquiry. Their modernism was technological only and did not extend to politics, society or culture.
-Reactionary modernism was the underlying ideology of the Soviet bloc as exemplified by the East German Communist government during the 1960s-1980s, the West German radical Left of the 1960s and 1970s and of the Islamists of Hamas and Iran.
During their reign in Germany, Nazis argued that they were the victims of ‘International Jewry’ or ‘The Jews’ who, the Nazis claimed, were conspiring to destroy Germany and the German people. Nazi propagandists claimed the Jews were powerful, controlling finance, newspapers, movie-making, publishing and able to oppress the poor people of Germany. That was why the Nazis had to kill all those Jews, including over one million Jewish children. The Nazis claimed they were conducting a defensive war against their enemy.
While they were conducting that war against the Jewish enemy, the Nazis welcomed the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini to Berlin in 1941. Husseini was the father of the Arab independence movement in British Mandate Palestine (before the Arabs began calling themselves ‘palestinians’ in the 1960s).
Husseini had fomented, organized and encouraged Arab murder sprees against the Jews of Jerusalem in 1920 and 1921, in Hebron and Jerusalem in 1929 and a continuing insurrection against the British and a war against Jewish civilians in 1936-1938. Husseini was paid a handsome stipend by the Nazi government to produce pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda for the Arab world including books, pamphlets and frequent hate-filled short wave radio broadcasts to Arab countries in Arabic.
Husseini’s Jew-hatred was not the result of Nazi influence. Husseini ‘learned how to take his ancient hatreds and adapt them to the Nazis’ antisemitic 'conspiracy theories of the twentieth century.’ Husseini argued in the Nazi propaganda he produced for the Arab world that there were cultural and even ‘racial’ differences between Arabs and Jews. Arabs, he contended, were courageous and warlike while Jews were cowardly and fearful and always conspiring against Islam and Moslem people. These differences required an eternal war between the two groups that could only end with one group being eliminated. Of course, while in Berlin, Husseini urged Hitler to bring his troops to the Middle East to murder all the Jews there.
After the war when most of Europe was denazified, Husseini was welcomed back to the Middle East by the Muslim Brotherhood and by other vicious Jew-haters who mourned that Hitler and the Germans had lost. They vowed to continue the struggle against the Jews.
The Arab world was never denazified. The Arab Jew-haters did not have to wait long to find other sympathetic Europeans because after a very short period of the Soviet bloc supporting the existence of the little Jewish state in its infancy in 1948 and 1949, the Communists, also reactionary modernists, turned against Jews and Israel largely due to Stalin’s whims and paranoia.
The East German government, through its intelligence agencies, took the lead in speaking for the Soviet bloc on the matter of Jews and Israel. The East Germans, unlike their former and future countrymen in West Germany, took no responsibility for the Nazi horrors, but made a pejorative association of Jews with capitalism, did not see the Jews as a people but only as practitioners of a religion, and claimed that Nazi-ism was an attempt to crush the working classes and communism.
Therefore, they felt free to attack little democratic Israel. But in that age of de-colonization, when African and Asian countries obtained independence from Europe, the Soviet bloc smeared Israel as colonialist and colonizers. The East Germans falsely claimed that the Israelis were white Europeans (more than half of Israelis are descended from the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East).
The Communist bloc called Israel ‘fascist’ and accused democratic Israel of being like the Nazi regime. The East Germans and Soviet bloc did this as they armed Arab countries to attack Israel while the Arabs were openly declaring that they would kill or expel all the Jews in Israel. The few East German communists who had enough of a conscience to speak on behalf of Jews were tried as anti-revolutionary criminals and sentenced to prison.
In the 1960s and 1970s West German radical leftists took their cues from East Germany and the Soviet bloc. They repeatedly referred to Zionism, the belief that there ought to be a little Jewish state in the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, as a fascist, imperialist and racist ideology. Those radical Leftists declared their ‘solidarity’ with the Arab shooters and bombers who were then planting bombs on and highjacking airliners, kidnapping Jews and murdering Israeli civilians.
Some radical Left Germans even joined in the Arab murder spree, participating in the highjacking of an Air France airliner to Entebbe, Uganda in 1976 and other violent and criminal actions. It should be remembered that in that event the German and Arab highjackers in Uganda, with the aid of the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, separated the Jewish and Israeli passengers from the other passengers and threatened to begin shooting the Jewish hostages unless their demands were met. They did not see a problem with Germans threatening to murder unarmed Jews in the name of ‘liberation.’
Herf also includes valuable essays about Islamist Antisemitism in this volume.
One is an analysis of the Hamas Charter, an analysis made at the time of the 2014 war between Hamas and Israel. Herf was surprised that more journalists did not read and report on what Hamas’s stated aims and goals were. Then, as now, Hamas’ stated goal is destruction of the State of Israel and the imposition of Sharia law on all of the Middle East. Destruction of Israel is, for them, a religious obligation, ‘a response to Allah’s command’ and Hamas therefore dispensed with the lie that the PLO and other secular Arab groups tell, that ‘anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish.’
For Hamas ‘Allah is its guide, the prophet is its model, the Koran is its constitution. Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.' A two-state solution that leaves any part of Israel intact, Herf points out, would be apostasy for Hamas. Diplomatic and peaceful solutions are out of the question.
While the Hamas charter makes killing Jews and destroying Israel an Islamic religious duty, it also adopts many of the ideas and themes of Soviet and Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda.
Article 22 of the Hamas charter, for instance, says this about Jews:
With their money they [Jews] took control of the world media, news agencies and the press, publishing houses and broadcasting stations and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein.
They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about. With their money they formed secret societies such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
So, the Jews are both Communists and capitalist-imperialists, the fomenters of revolutions and the oppressors, exploiters and colonizers of others. They control the media and act in secret. There is hardly an anti-Jewish lie from the Twentieth century, whether from the Nazis, the Communists or the Islamists themselves missing from this package of hate-soaked rubbish.
Herf also shows that ‘Radical, theologically based hatred of Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel is part of the core ideological beliefs of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.’ The world view of the Iranian leadership is so delusional and divorced from reality that if that nation were to acquire a nuclear weapon Iran would not act like a rational state ‘according to the customary norms of what constitutes reasonable behavior in international affairs.’ It cannot be assumed that Iran will value its own survival above eliminating the hated Jewish enemy.
Westerners frequently assume that radical Islamist Jew-hatred is just another form of prejudice and therefore can be worked around. But the irrational, paranoid conspiracy theory that proposes that the evil Jew is part of a satanic design to weaken the solidarity of Islamic people everywhere is a central guiding and operating principle of the Iranian leadership. Even more, according to mainstream Iranian thought, the Jews are enemies of humanity as a whole and not just Islam.
Iran is the first national government since Hitler’s Germany to make hatred of Jews a central ideological principle.
Although many of these essays were written before October 7, 2023 one of the necessary conclusions of reading Three Faces of Antisemitism: Left, Right and Islamist is that almost all the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric one hears today is the product of deliberate political and ideological decisions made by Jew-haters over the last one hundred years or so.
Today’s Jew-haters are parroting the rhetoric of the Nazis, the Soviets and the Islamists. Just as they often don’t know anything about the history of Israel and the Jewish people, so also today’s Jew-haters do not know that they are the heirs of the Nazis, the Communists and the Islamists whose rhetoric has now been all rolled up into one big, ugly, toxic homicidal ball.
Dr. Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.