I have just read two recent books about antisemitism: Robert Spencer’s Antisemitism: History and Myth and Rachel Shabi’s Off White; The Truth About Antisemitism
The term ‘antisemitism’ is a product of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in German-speaking Europe when some German and Austrian nationalists believed that the Jews, who had recently been given full political and civic rights, had accomplished too much by advancing in law, medicine, education and journalism. They used the term ‘antisemites’’ to describe themselves. It was a milder replacement for words they thought less palatable like ‘Jew-hater.’
Arabs and most Moslems are semites, but since the Arab and Moslem invasion of Europe by immigration had not yet begun, the only noticeable group in Europe that had a connection to a Semitic language was the Jews. That kind of antisemitism, ugly as it was, was not a movement to expel the Jews from those countries and certainly not to murder them.
As Robert Spencer demonstrates in his most recent book, Amtisemitism: History and Myth, Bombadier Books (2025) the term ‘antisemitism’ has been used to cover many situations over history other than the political disagreement about Jews having equal rights in Europe. The term has been used for the theological discomfort of the pre-Christian Greek and Roman pagans with the Jews who refused to worship other gods. It has been used to refer to the policies of the early church fathers, like Augustine, whose position was that the Jews should be able to live a degraded and miserable life in Christian countries as a living reminder of their rejection of Christianity. And although Augustine’s vision did not include physical attacks and murder of Jews and in fact prohibited physical attacks, the term has also been used to refer to those who went beyond standard Christian doctrine and who murdered Jews.
Besides the Christian abuse of Jews in the Middle Ages and expulsion from England and France, for instance, the term has been applied to the ‘blood libel,’ the lie that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to bake Passover matzos.
Spencer spends an appropriate effort on detailing the roots of Western Jew-hatred as it developed through the centuries including anti-Jewish riots, murder sprees, staged theological disputations in which the Jews were not allowed to refuse to participate but also not allowed to win on the merits. There were burnings of editions of hand-written copies of the Talmud - and burnings of Jews.
With the invention of Islam in the seventh century an additional layer of Jew-hatred was born into the world. As Spencer shows, Jew-hatred is baked into Islam in the same way that wheat is baked into an ordinary loaf of bread. From the persistent and important quotes in the Koran and the Hadiths to statements from Islamic intellectuals, Spencer shows a broad and deep toxic Islamic animosity to non-Muslims and particularly to Jews.
In Islam a Christian or Jew must be converted, subjected to paying a jizya tax, a protection payment to the Islamic authorities so that he will be left alone and allowed to live as a dhimmi-a third class person with no rights, Islamic doctrine holds. Jews are described as the descendants of apes and pigs in Islamic literature. Moslem Imams and preachers in America and the West more generally routinely make ugly, false and derogatory claims about Jews and about the one little Jewish state, Israel It is the duty of all good Moslems to humiliate and degrade dhimmis - or if the infidel refuses to convert or pay the protection moneym the Jew must be killed.
At the end of days, according to Moslem doctrine, even nature will call out to Moslems to kill Jews. In the modern era, almost all Christian churches and other religious groups have renounced, at least publicly, the idea that Jews should be murdered. There has been no such statement from any leading Islamic authority, not even the Islamic authorities in the West.
Spencer also recounts the history of Nazi, Communist and modern Islamist Jew-hatred and the lies they produced to justify that hatred. In the modern world it is especially the tyrannical, dictatorial, oppressive and unfree regimes and organizations that hate the Jews.
-National Socialism (Nazis) hated the Jews claiming they were not committed enough to the nation and were the enemy of humanity.
-International Socialism (Soviet communists) hated the Jews claiming they were too capitalistic and not committed enough to the proletariat.
-Islamists denounce Jews for not being Moslems, although today they try to hide that behind a thin veneer of caring about ‘palestinians’ and hating Israel and Zionism rather than Jews. They know that when they speak to each other it is perfectly permissible to be an open Jew-hater, but when speaking to the outside world they have to pretend to not be sharia-supremacist bigots.
As it turns out, there is a subculture of Jew-haters of the Left, the Right and the Islamists online who quote small portions of the Talmud, usually incorrectly and usually out of context to justify their hatred of Jews. Spencer refutes those Jew-haters by both quoting relevant portions of the Talmud in context and by engaging serious Jewish scholars and rabbis to explain the texts.
He also does a good job of presenting facts to disprove some of the most common slanders promulgated by Jew-haters. The problem with using facts to refute deeply held, venomous and irrational beliefs is that those beliefs are usually immune to facts. The haters can not absorb facts or be convinced by them any more than steel can absorb water.
Spencer thoroughly catalogues a variety of modern methods and messages of Jew-hatred. These include the continuing blood libel, claiming that Jews in general and Israel in particular delight in killing children; the application of a different standard to the behavior of Israel than to any other country in the world; the ignoring of atrocities in China and Africa, for, instance accusing little democratic Israel of being the worst country in the world; Holocaust denial and minimization.
Add to this, the wildly dishonest and often grotesque claims made by the alliance of Islamic-Leftist Jew-haters, such as the lie that Israel trained American police in methods of oppressing Afro-Americans (a lie repeated by New York City’s new mayor, Mr. Mamdani), ignoring the simple fact that Israel wants to live in peace in its own borders while much of the Moslem world wants to wipe Israel off the map and kill or expel all the Jews there, and - pretending that Israel is the aggressor in Middle Eastern wars.
In contrast to Spencer’s thorough, thoughtful and comprehensive Antisemitism: History and Myth, another recent book which purports to be about antisemitism, but in fact is mostly about other subjects has made its way into print.
Rachel Shabi is an Israel-born child of Iraqi immigrants to Israel who, after a brief sojourn in Israel moved to the United Kingdom. Her family left Israel when she was four years old. She was raised in the United Kingdom and educated at Edinburgh University. She claims to have worked most of her life as a journalist, often for anti-Israel propaganda organizations like Britain’s Guardian, the American far left magazine The Nation and the Jew-hating and Israel-hating Qatari terrorist mouthpiece Al Jazeera English.
Shabi identifies herself as a Mizrachi Jew, a progressive and an anti-racist. Her very odd book, Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism One World Publishing (2025), displays an appalling ignorance of history, of Judaism, of antisemitism and of the basics of an ability to analyze a complex reality. The deficiencies her book display seem closely related to the author’s claim to be both Jewish and a Leftist. Her commitment to Leftism seems far stronger than her commitment to Judaism and in the end the book becomes an attack on Israel, which is the most common form of antisemitism today.
Shabi’s deeply flawed attempt at analysis proceeds from the idea that all important differences and discriminations are racial and about power, ideas at the heart of far Left and progressive race-baiting.
-She gives no indication that she understands that Arabs particularly and many Moslems more generally have conducted a war against Jews and the little Jewish state since long before its founding.
-She seems never to have heard of the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini who was on Hitler’s payroll from 1941 to 1945 urging the death of all the Jews in the Middle East.
-She appears never to have heard of the Communist propaganda machines which vilified Israel as a ‘colonialist’ and ‘imperialist’ power even though it is a tiny country, smaller than some American counties.
-She seems never to have heard of the far Left hatred of successful people as oppressors and of those who are envious and resentful who believe that Jews, being somewhat successful in the West are therefore ‘oppressors.’
-She falsely states that life was historically better for Jews in Moslem majority countries than in Europe-she apparently does not know what a dhimmi is, has never heard of the jizya tax- nor of Islamic blood libels against Jews. She is oblivious to the outbreaks of anti-Jewish rioting, murder, rape and kidnapping over the centuries in Islamic countries and unaware that Islamic theology demands Jihad and expansion of Islam.
-She does not even seem to understand that most Iraqi Jews and almost all the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa were forcibly expelled from Islamic countries between 1947 and the mid-1970s and that more than half of all the Jews in Israel are descended from the refugee Jews of North Africa and the Middle East.
But the stunning and central falsity of Shabi’s book is that it claims that antisemitism, Jew-hatred, in its current form is about race and that Jews are racially ‘off-white.’. In fact, even the most virulent, venomous and vicious Jew-haters of today have largely given up on race as a category of condemnation, knowing that it is no longer acceptable to criticize people for their race. In the place of race, the Jew-haters have substituted ugly and dishonest criticism of the only little Jewish state, Israel, as a way to attack Jews. That is how they express their hatred; not by criticizing any particular policy of Israel, but denying the right of the little Jewish state to even exist. Thus, we repeatedly see the Jew-hating lies that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state, that Israel is a ‘colonizer,’ that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ and that Israel exists on ‘stolen land.’
As an example of the vicious Jew-hatred rampant in the Moslem world, just last week the malicious defense minister of the Islamic Republic Pakistan, uttered the stunning lie that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Lebanon and is ‘a cancer on humanity.’ He did that because he knows that in the Leftist and Moslem world, no lie about Israel is too harsh or will be challenged. Lying about Israel, holding Israel to a different standard than any other country and singling Israel out despite the fact that it is a liberal democracy in a world filled with murderous dictatorships, kleptocratic tyrannies, brutal juntas and third world cesspools is one of the signature techniques of modern Jew-haters.
Shabi is quick to blame what she calls ‘the Right’ for antisemitism although she does seem to understand that there is "some" antisemitism on the Left. She does not propose any meaningful analysis of how that happened or why. She claims that the Right has taken hold of antisemitism as their issue and that it is being used as a sword against the Left. To some extent this is true, but she fails to acknowledge that the reason the Left is blamed for most of the antisemitism in the world today is that the combination of Marxists, other Leftists and their pet Islamists is responsible for most of the antisemitism in the world today.
Some of the publications for which Shabi writes, like Al Jazeera, are institutionally Jew-haters and Israel-bashers. On the Right, antisemitism and Jew-hatred is a fringe idea. On the Left it is not only mainstream but Jew-hatred, expressed as dishonest denunciations of Israel, is a litmus test for acceptance into the group.
Some day, in a world in which factual accuracy is honored and things are called what they really are, Jew-hatred will again be called ‘Jew-hatred’ and we will no longer use the anachronistic term ‘antisemitism.’ In that world, people like Robert Spencer will be honored for writing a good survey of Jew-hatred through the ages in all its many forms. In that world, books like Shabi’s will be rightly forgotten as a waste of paper and a garbled attempt by the author to fit in to the world of Leftists, a world that will only accept her when she has given up the last shreds of any Jewish identity she might have ever had.
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.