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Over at the History News Network, Judith Apter Klinghoffer reproduces Bernard Lewis' latest essay, "The New Anti-Semitism," first published in The American Scholar , Volume 75, No. 1 (Winter 2006). It's well worth the time to read the whole thing, but I take the following passage as the key one. On the topic of rejuvenating Judenhass in Palestine and the Middle East around the time of the Second World War:
It became much more important after the events of 1948, when the humiliated Arabs drew comfort from the doctrine of the Jews as a source of cosmic evil. This continued and grew with subsequent Arab defeats, particularly after the ultimate humiliation of the 1967 war, which Israel won in less than a week.The Nazis aren't dead, you know. In fact, they just got themselves elected as perpetual partners to the Israeli people.
The growth of European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world derived in the main from this feeling of humiliation and the need therefore to ascribe to the Jews a role very different from their traditional role in Arab folklore and much closer to that of the anti-Semitic prototypes. By now the familiar themes of European anti-Semitism—the blood libel, the protocols of Zion, the international Jewish conspiracy, and the rest—have become standard fare in much of the Arab world, in the schoolroom, the pulpit, the media, and even on the Internet. It is bitterly ironic that these themes have been adopted by previously immune Muslims precisely at a time when in Europe they have become an embarrassment even to anti-Semites.
What will we not think of next?
Posted by Toby Petzold
at 2:19 AM CST
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Updated: Monday, 20 February 2006 2:21 AM CST
Updated: Monday, 20 February 2006 2:21 AM CST