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Jewish Capitalists, Jewish Bolsheviks: Conspiracy Thinking and Modern Judeophobia

Review products

FrancescaTrivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)

PaulHanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2020

Jonathan Judaken*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Rhodes College
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: judakenj@rhodes.edu

Extract

We live in dark times, as Hannah Arendt might have said. Just open the Jewish or general press on any given day and you will read about swastikas scrawled on buildings. Or hear about the reiteration of anti-Jewish tropes by members of Congress or by the president of the United States or by any number of European prime ministers. You might discover the latest instance of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries or the burning of synagogues. Or perhaps you will linger on the most recent incident of the beating of Jews in New York or Paris or Berlin. Most spectacularly, white Christian nationalists or militant jihadi terrorists have slain Jews en masse in several horrific events, most famously at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and in the linked attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in Paris.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Arendt, Hannah, Men in Dark Times (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

2 On these incidents see Jonathan Judaken, “White Christian Nationalism and Terrorism in Pittsburgh,” Commercial Appeal, www.commercialappeal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/10/29/white-christian-nationalism-and-terrorism-pittsburgh-opinion/1808434002, accessed 26 Jan. 2020; and Judaken, , “Introduction,” in Judaken, Jonathan and Katz, Ethan, eds., Jews and Muslims in France before and after Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, Jewish History 32/1 (2018), 117Google Scholar.

3 I discuss how I understand the differences between various periods in the history of “Judeophobia” and “anti-Semitism” in Judaken, Jonathan, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism: Introduction,” American Historical Review 123/4 (2018), 1131–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The classic text that historicizes this connection is Trachtenberg, Joshua, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia, 1983)Google Scholar.

5 Wistrich, Robert, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

6 Volkov, Shulamit, “Anti-Semitism as a Cultural Code,” Leo Baeck Yearbook 23/1 (1978), 2546CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Nirenberg, David, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.

8 See, for example, Sorkin, David, “The Port Jew: Notes toward a Social Type,” Journal of Jewish Studies 50/1 (1999), 8797CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sarna, Jonathan, “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts,” Jewish History 20/2 (2006), 213–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of the concept see Monaco, C. S., “Port Jews or a People of the Diaspora? A Critique of the Port Jew Concept,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 15/2 (2009), 137–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

10 Cohen, Arthur A., The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition: And Other Dissenting Essays (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.

11 See Judt, Tony, “Epilogue. From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory,” in Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), 803–31Google Scholar.