Introducing the Holocaust historians who do not understand antisemitism

On the contrary, mass murder appeared to make many in academia keener than ever to downplay its significance.

Six weeks after October 7, the New York Review of Books published an “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory”. It was co-signed by many an eminent and learned Holocaust historian: Omer Bartov and Christopher Browning from American academia, David Feldman of the London Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum of the Berlin Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung.

They expressed “dismay and disappointment at political leaders and notable public figures invoking Holocaust memory to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel”.

Allies of the same academics went on to denounce everyone who used “pogrom” to describe the October 7 killings, arguing that it was a misreading of history.

Why on earth is the comparison misleading? The ancestors of most Jews in Britain fled the pogroms of the Tsarist Empire when death squads moved into Jewish towns and villages raping and murdering.

My family fled from Lithuania and, in a distant echo of their memory, Amit Halevi, the mayor of the ravaged Be’eri kibbutz, said as he contemplated the rape and murder perpetrated by Hamas’s death squads: “What is this, some pogrom in Lithuania?”

I doubt if the mayor would have been overly impressed if a Western academic had popped out of the rubble to wag his finger and tell him off for comparing the past with the present.

The same ecstatic glee in violence against undefended Jewish civilians that we saw in the past was on display is southern Israel.

“Look how many I killed with my own hands!” cried one of the murderers. “Your son killed Jews!” The joy was not confined to Hamas. Swathes of the global left cheered the massacres with the same delight.

It is not fair to say that today’s academic critics of traditional notions of antisemitism are joining them or are attempting to curry favour with the deniers on the progressive left, who can barely bring themselves to admit that anti-Jewish hatred exists.

Rather they don’t understand how history affects us. In their determination to destroy the belief that there is an eternal and unchanging prejudice against Jews, they chop up that past into tiny fragments and blind themselves to the importance of connections.

The tsars and Nazis ran state-sanctioned terror campaigns against an oppressed minority, they say. You cannot compare their old antisemitic pogroms with today’s world, where Jews have a state that subjugates Palestinians in the West Bank.

You do not need to know a great deal of history to spot the glaring flaw in the argument.

Tsarist, fascist and communist states, Arab dictatorships, and Islamists never just portrayed Jews as powerless. As even academics ought to know, Jews were depicted as the elders of Zion, the secret controllers of the world, the bankers, and the usurers. German progressives in the 19th century called antisemitism “the socialism of fools” precisely because it could be crafted to appeal to popular hatred of the powerful as well as popular contempt for a despised minority.

When today’s pro-Palestinian marches target the BBC on the frankly ridiculous grounds that it is secretly controlled by Zionists, they are repeating an ancient lie about Jewish power.

In an important essay just out in the journal Jews, Europe, and the 21st Century, the British political theorist Matthew Bolton uses the memory of the Tsarist pogroms in Lithuania to take on his colleagues.

As well as murdering, the Tsarists forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which inspired European fascism. Its paranoid conspiracy theories aren’t dead. They live on in the official ideology of the Iranian state and in the doctrines of Hamas.

As  Bolton says, you cannot understand Zionism, the creation of Israel, Palestinian and Arab nationalism, Islamic extremism, the rise of the Israeli far right, war, occupation, terror, and catastrophe “without recognising that the very concept of a Jewish state has always carried within it the experience of Lithuania”.

You only have to look at the security measures that make Jewish schools and synagogues in Europe today look more like prison complexes than spaces of communal life to see how the ghosts of Lithuania haunt us here in Europe too.

Karl Marx was right when he said, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” It strikes me that if you want a just peace, then you must accept that nightmares are a living force rather than vainly trying to pretend they don’t even exist.