Mark Mazower on antisemitism – a review
JVL Introduction
Richard Kuper reviews Mark Mazower’s new book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History for Jacobin magazine and commends it highly.
The book falls into two parts, the first looking more historically at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chiefly European political movement, the second more conceptually at the origins and spread of a new paradigm originating in the 1970s that has turned the original meaning of antisemitism on its head in order to rationalise growing criticism of Israel.
The whole book is infused with Mazower’s enormous historical knowledge and ability to write accessibly and informatively at every point. What runs throughout is his sense of the openness of history, of contingency and possibility.
It is hard to see how a single word – antisemitism – can continue to encompass the range of meanings which people have projected onto it to date: from discrimination and hatred towards Jews as Jews to justification for Israel’s imperial ambitions.
Mark Mazower is Prof of History at Columbia University. His books include Inside Hitler’s Greece, Dark Continent, The Balkans and Salonica, City of Ghosts. His most recent book, The Greek Revolution, won the Duff Cooper Prize.
This article was originally published by Jacobin on Thu 23 Jul 2026. Read the original here.
Israel Is Undermining the Struggle Against Antisemitism
Controversy about the meanings of antisemitism, especially in relation to Israel, has become one of the major flash points in contemporary politics. Mark Mazower’s invaluable history of the concept deserves to be a touchstone in the debate.
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Marr didn’t invent the term ‘anti-Semitism’ but popularised it. That accolade goes to Moritz Steinschneider a German Jewish scholar [see The Forward ‘Should Anti-Semitism Be Hyphenated?’
The debate over the spelling of the word encapsulates the subject of Mazower’s book.
I disagree that equating Zionism is misleading. It is irrelevant what ‘the huge range of diverse understandings’ of Zionism are. There were diverse understandings of Nazism too but we mostly understand it by what it produced – the Nazi holocaust.
Likewise Zionism is best understood by what it has done. If American Zionists were anti-racist that was either because this was before Zionism took off in the community or because the interests of diaspora Jews are different from those of Israeli Zionists not because there are different forms of Zionism. In other words Zionists who live in the diaspora not only live a lie but also have distinct interests of their own. Most Jews in South Africa who were anti-apartheid also happened to be anti-Zionist. The mainstream Zionist community was not anti-apartheid.
Zionism is nationalist in the same way as European anti-Semitic movements were nationalist but it was never a national movement.
I also disagree that there are two distinct forms of anti-Semitism. I have long argued that the Board of Deputies and Zionist organisations are deliberately encouraging anti-Semitism by striving to associate all British Jews with Israel’s crimes.
Traditional anti-Semitism is of the racial kind. The ‘anti-Semitism’ of those who hate Israel for what it is doing and take as read their assertion that Jews are therefore to blame is not racial. However the question is whether it is anti-Semitism.
The review ends up being confusing; I wonder if the actual book is also? There is no discussion of the term ‘Semitic’, which underpins the term ‘anti-semitism’. Edward Said discusses the origins in his magisterial ‘Orientalism’; and it clear that the term ‘Semitic’ suffers from this.
Also, there does not seem to be a clear discussion of Wilhelm Marr, [Wikipedia has a fairly detailed page on him]. It seems he changed the use of ‘Semitic’ from linguistic groups to what we now call ethnic groups. And he focused on only one of the several linguistic groups the term claims to cover; importantly this includes Arab speakers like the Palestinians.
And both aspects have remained problems with the use of ‘anti-semitic’ in its various forms. If we return to the original meaning of ‘Semitic’ then the prejudice shown by, among others, zionists, against Palestinians is ‘anti-semitic’ in the senses used.
I have stopped using the term because it is so problematic.
I am also curious whether Mazower discusses settler -colonialism; the idea that Zionism is a national movement needs to be completely discounted.