A historian examines the age-old phenomenon of anti-Jewish hatred and the emergence of a word to define it
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dolf Hitler’s defeat didn’t end prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower’s judgment, “discredit antisemitism as a positive programme for decades to come”.
It is an arresting turn of phrase that makes reckoning with the Holocaust after the second world war sound more like a trend in public policy than a moral imperative. But that is the point. Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, is talking about a particular manifestation of anti-Jewish sentiment that rose and fell in a relatively short time frame.
The operative word, dissonant in the context of mass murder, is “positive”. People didn’t stop hating Jews after 1945, but they found there was an electoral penalty for boasting about it. The loud, proud style of antisemitism was banished from the mainstream.
