By Ranen Omer-Sherman
Guest Columnist
For generations of scholars and general readers, Sander Gilman’s thought-provoking studies (he has authored or edited over a hundred books to date) are regarded as essential resources. Indeed, the academic field of Jewish Studies itself would be unimaginable today without his interdisciplinary beacon. Now, in Antisemitisms: A History of Jew Hating, Gilman has delivered what he regards as the culminating statement on his life-long engagement with the phenomenon. Amid our growing anxiety and bewilderment, the most inauspicious time for Jews globally since the Holocaust, it is a book we sorely need.
Gilman moves us deftly from century to century across a range of cultures, up to the aftermath of October 7. Antisemitisms is organized around four case studies he sees as essential to the construction of the imagined Jew: “visible difference (appearance), vulnerability (disease), belonging (rootedness), and boundary setting (self-hatred).” For Gilman, the vexing challenge faced by the scholar of Jew hatred is that, whether deemed nomadic or rooted, the Jewish “target is always shifting and always different, from place to place, from individual to individual, from epoch to epoch.” What most distinguishes Gilman’s nuanced approach is his inherent challenge to the common and reactive view of those like the late antisemitism scholar Robert Wistrich who, in labeling antisemitism as “the longest hatred,” insist on a static and eternal paradigm, somehow unlike all other expressions of xenophobia. For Gilman, antisemitisms are always “situational, inherently inconsistent, often contradictory.” A favorite word is “wobbly,” alluding to the ever-shifting, malleable meanings that have accompanied the Jews’ reception by hostile individuals or collectives throughout time.
Whether addressing the fraught role of hats or beards as key signifiers in antisemitic discourse, the physiognomic imagination of Victorian England, or the nuances of contemporary self-critical Jewish discourses, Gilman’s exemplars are often surprising and always illuminating. Notwithstanding his grim subject matter, this proves an enthralling intellectual adventure, often leavened by his seasoned wit. Even those familiar with Gilman’s earlier close examinations of the contradictory discourses of eugenics and miscegenation anxieties, the fantasies of scientific racism and stereotypes of the “Jew’s body,” will find much to appreciate, including his attention to popular cultural portrayals in comics, Hollywood films, and television.
At the heart of Antisemitisms is Gilman’s sustained focus on the “contested, contradictory and fluid” nature of both Jewish identities and the social and cultural fantasies of the antisemite. Throughout, he interrogates a vast array of thorny issues; Holocaust denialism, “philosemitism,” “chosenness,” charges of “Jewish dual loyalty,” the contemporary “antizionism is antisemitism” debates among them, always with historical, political, and even literary acumen. At one point he addresses the risible category of so-called “Jewish antisemites,” a charge he himself has faced. Gilman accomplishes all this with remarkable economy, as suggested by the laconic titles of his five chapters: “Making Jews,” “Seeing Jews,” “Healing Jews,” “Wandering Jews,” and “Unmaking Jews.” Antisemitisms is generously illustrated with helpful historical images: satanic Jews of the medieval Christian imagination, rabbis of Victorian London, New York bankers of the late 19th century, and New Jews of early Zionist postcards.
Even those familiar with Gilman’s earlier close examinations of the contradictory discourses of eugenics and miscegenation anxieties, the fantasies of scientific racism and stereotypes of the “Jew’s body,” will find much to appreciate. Gilman’s reminders that not only the Jews are impacted by mid-Pacific or mid-Atlantic “global standards of beauty” are highly instructive. And Gilman leavens his grave subject matter with occasional wit. At one point, he admits his exasperation with a certain question that has dogged him over the years: “I am regularly asked after talks whether there really is a Jewish nose. I answer that, over my long career, I have known thousands of Jews. And each and every one has had a nose.”
Like the best of Gilman’s vast corpus, Antisemitisms is dazzlingly erudite yet as accessible to general readers as it is to scholars. Perhaps what most distinguishes Gilman’s approach from his predecessors is his meticulously comparative approach to the diverse ways that menacing distinctions between Self and Other have accompanied many other minorities across time and space. The Jews, it turns out, are perhaps not quite so unique a case as so many have concluded, even as dangerous fantasies and dehumanizing tropes about us persist and intensify our growing sense of unease in a time of rising violence.
Ranen Omer-Sherman, director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of LouisvilleRanen Omer-Sherman is the JHF Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville and editor of Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond.