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about any period in the previous two centuries, war is now missing in 
action, which is indeed something new under the sun. 
Driving With the Lights Off 
So an imperial era is on the wane, war in absentia, and no rising great 
power contenders on the horizon. Historically speaking, that's a remarkable 
scorecard in an otherwise appalling world. Of course, the lack of old-style 
war hardly means no violence. In the 14th year of this new century, the 
scorecard on internal strife and civil war, often with external involvement, 
has been awful to behold: Yemen (with the involvement of the Saudis and 
the Americans), Syria (with the involvement of the Russians, the Saudis, 
the Qataris, the Iranians, Hezbollah, the Iraqis, the Turks, and the 
Americans), and so on. The record, including the Congo (numerous outside 
parties), South Sudan, Darfur, India (a Maoist insurgency), Nigeria 
(Islamic extremists), and so on, couldn't be grimmer. Moreover, 14 years at 
the beginning of a century is a rather small sampling. Just think of 1914 
and the great war that followed. Before the present Ukrainian crisis is over, 
for instance, Russian troops could again cross a border in force (as in 2008) 
along the still fraying edges of the former Soviet Union. It's also possible 
(though developments seem to be leading in quite a different direction) that 
either the Israelis or the Americans could still launch an attack on Iran's 
nuclear facilities, increasing the chaos and violence in the Middle East. 
Similarly, an incident in the edgy Pacific might trigger an unexpected 
conflict between Japan and China. (Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe 
recently compared this moment in Asia to the eve of World War I in Europe 
and his country and China to England and Germany.) And of course there 
are the "resource wars" expected on an increasingly devastated planet. 
Still, for the moment no rising empire and no states fighting each other. So 
who knows? Maybe we are off the beaten path of history and in terra 
incognita. Perhaps this is a road we've never been down before, an actual 
new world order. If so, we're driving it with our headlights off, the wind 
whipping up, and the rain pouring down on a planet that may itself, in 
climate terms, be heading for uncharted territory. 
Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author 
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End 
of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's 
His latest 
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book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History 
of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. 
Anicic 6 
Foreign Affairs 
Yarmouk and the Palestinian-Israeli Peace 
Negotiations 
Hussein Ibish 
March 7, 2014 -- There is little by way of human cruelty that has not been 
visited on the people of the Levant over the past century. Iraqis, Israelis, 
Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians have all faced massacres, terrorism, 
bombings, and any number of other atrocities, including what are probably 
the only two uses of chemical weapons since World War II. But calculated 
starvation -- the deliberate policy of withholding food from suffering, 
ordinary people on a mass scale -- has very little history in the region. And 
that makes the situation in the Yarmouk camp just outside Damascus, 
where 18,000 Palestinian refugees are slowly and deliberately being 
starved by the Syrian dictatorship, all the more horrifying. 
The Palestinians trapped there can do little to alleviate their plight. And 
humanitarian efforts by the United Nations and the Palestine Liberation 
Organization (PLO) have so far been thwarted by pro-regime forces. But 
the Palestinian leadership and people should recognize that Yarmouk has 
urgent, if indirect, implications for the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli peace 
negotiations. 
Every Arab state has tried, at one time or another, to manipulate the 
Palestinian issue for its own purposes. But the Assad family's Baathist 
regime in Syria has been uniquely hostile to the mainstream Palestinian 
national movement. It has shown time and again that its official 
commitment to the Palestinian cause is a smokescreen for its own interests. 
It has never really accepted the idea that Palestine, or Lebanon for that 
matter, is a separate entity from a greater Syria, which it still aspires to 
create. And its primary concern has been to ensure as much Palestinian 
subservience as possible to the Damascus dictatorship's ideology and 
interests. 
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Syria has always been ready to use force to keep Palestinians in check. It 
made war against the Palestinians in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s, 
most notably in the siege of Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp, which is the 
closest analogy to today's crisis in Yarmouk. And although it poses as a 
bastion of "resistance," Syria has consistently avoided confronting Israel 
directly, even when provoked. Syria has repeatedly endured attacks from 
Israel without direct response and sometimes without complaint. If it 
stands up to Israel at all, it does so through proxies and almost always at 
the expense of others. Its support for Hezbollah has come at a great cost to 
Lebanon; its support for Palestinian proxy splinter groups as well as Hamas 
has come at a great cost to Palestine. The Palestinian residents of Gaza 
suffered heavily from the catastrophic Syrian-backed war between Hamas 
and Israel in 2008 and 2009. 
The ongoing atrocities in Yarmouk are only the latest example of the 
Syrian regime's manipulations. In the early stages of Syria's uprising, one 
of the regime's opening gambits was to distract the public's attention by 
cynically twisting the Palestinian cause. On June 6, 2011 -- the anniversary 
of the 1967 war between Arab states and Israel, referred to by Arabs as 
Naksa Day -- Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had hundreds of 
Palestinians, many of them from Yarmouk, bussed to the demilitarized 
zone in the Golan Heights region that borders Israel. They were 
encouraged, unarmed, to confront Israeli occupation forces, which 
predictably opened fire on protesters, killing 23 of them. It was a cold-
blooded instance of political theater and a cynical exercise in human 
sacrifice. 
Palestinians in Yarmouk were outraged -- at least as much at Assad as at 
Israel. When they protested en masse, pro-Assad thugs affiliated with a 
group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General 
Command shot them, killing 14 and injuring 43. As the Syrian war 
intensified, so did the plight of Yarmouk. Syrian fighter jets and helicopters 
have repeatedly attacked Yarmouk, using missiles and notoriously 
indiscriminate barrel bombs. But in December 2012, when opposition 
rebels entered the camp, the situation became dramatically worse. Yarmouk 
became the scene of intense fighting and a prolonged, and ongoing, siege. 
Efforts to deliver food and other aid have been systematically stymied. 
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What was once a population of at least 200,000 Palestinian refugees has 
dwindled to a tenth of its former size. Anyone who could flee has already 
done so. Those who remain are slowly and cruelly dying. The Syrian 
Observatory for Human Rights estimates that at least 100 people in 
Yarmouk have died from starvation and lack of medical supplies since last 
October. UN officials have expressed shock at what they have seen in 
recent visits to the camp. Filippo Grandi, a UN refugee official, said that 
the people he saw there last week had "the appearance of ghosts." 
The Syrian government is responsible for this situation, and those who try 
to fudge the issue by blaming rebels are deliberately deceiving the public. 
The northern entrance to Yarmouk is under the control of pro-Assad forces. 
But the government has nonetheless insisted that all aid go through the 
southern entrance, which is very dangerous to access because it is a battle 
zone between regime and opposition forces. Although senior government 
figures deny it, military forces on the ground reportedly admit that they are 
deliberately using starvation as a weapon against their "enemies" in 
Yarmouk, including both rebels and civilians. This is a man-made disaster, 
and the responsibility for it lies almost entirely with the leadership in 
Damascus. 
To those familiar with the relationship between Baathist Syria and the 
Palestinian cause and people, the events at Yarmouk will not come as any 
surprise. But the Palestinian people as a whole should draw the obvious 
lesson: As long as they remain stateless, refugees will have no haven and 
no government to represent them. Atrocities will continue to take place, as 
they have wherever Palestinians have found themselves in the Middle East 
since 1948. 
Some pro-Palestinian groups object to such a two-state solution, because it 
will inevitably involve significant compromises on the right of return for 
refugees to Israel. But Israel is simply not going to agree to accept large 
numbers of Palestinians returning from across the region, which would 
compromise the demographic makeup of the Israeli state. A unanimity of 
the Israeli political spectrum flatly opposes any such notion, and there does 
not appear to be any form of leverage or quid pro quo that could alter that. 
But a Palestinian state has much to offer refugees short of the right of 
return to Israel. Among other things, an independent Palestine could help 
protect a long-suffering people against further massacre, siege, or atrocity. 
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Palestinians would finally be citizens in a state of their own and not 
stranded at the disposal of others who can, and have, turned on them with a 
vengeance. 
This is not to suggest that the Israeli government or the PLO is in any 
meaningful sense responsible for addressing the tragedy at Yarmouk. Israel 
is not directly involved, and the PLO lacks the means and leverage to 
relieve the suffering, as it discovered when pro-Assad forces fired on an 
unarmed aid convoy it had organized. 
But Yarmouk does stand as yet another harsh reminder to the Palestinian 
people and leadership of the urgent need to achieve independence through 
peace with Israel, despite the painful compromises that will be required of 
both sides. Palestinians should see in Syria yet another tragic life and death 
drama, another sign that they must unite and mobilize to attain an 
independent state. Until they have it, Palestinians throughout the Middle 
East will be forever liable to find themselves in the next Yarmouk. 
Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. 
Anicic 7. 
The New York Review of Books 
Imagines  Jews 
Michael Walzer 
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition 
by David Nirenberg 
Norton, 610 pp., $35.00 
March 20, 2014 
1. 
In 1844, Karl Marx published his essay "On the Jewish Question." This 
wasn't an engagement with Judaism, or with Jewish history, or even with 
the sociology of German Jews. Its occasion was the contemporary debate 
about Jewish emancipation, but its real purpose was to call for the 
overthrow of the capitalist order. The call was expressed in a language that 
is probably not surprising to readers today and that was entirely familiar to 
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readers in the nineteenth century. Still, it is a very strange language. 
Capitalism is identified by Marx with Judaism, and so the overthrow of 
capitalism will be, he writes, "the emancipation of mankind from 
Judaism." The argument is worth quoting, at least briefly: 
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way...not only 
insofar as he has acquired financial power, but also insofar as, through him 
and without him, money has risen to world power and the practical Jewish 
spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews 
have emancipated themselves to the extent that the Christians have become 
Jews. 
"Through [the Jew] and without [the Jew]"—mostly without him: as Marx 
certainly knew, Jews made up a very small part of the moneyed elite of 
England, the most advanced capitalist country, and an even smaller part of 
the "rising" German bourgeoisie. His own father had converted to 
Protestantism in order to facilitate his entry into bourgeois society, where 
Jews were not welcome in the early nineteenth century. 
What Marx is doing here, David Nirenberg argues in his brilliant, 
fascinating, and deeply depressing book Anti-Judaism, is exactly what 
many other writers have done in the long history of Western civilization. 
His essay is a "strategic appropriation of the most powerful language of 
opprobrium available to any critic of the powers and institutions of this 
world." That sentence comes from Nirenberg's discussion of Martin 
Luther, but it applies equally well to Marx. Still, we should be more 
surprised by Marx's use of this language than by Luther's, not only 
because of Marx's Jewish origins but also because of his claim to be a 
radical critic of the ideology of his own time. He might, Nirenberg says, 
have questioned the association of Judaism and capitalism and written a 
critical history aimed at making his readers more reflective about that 
association. Instead, he chose to exploit "old ideas and fears about 
Jewishness." 
Consider another famous use of this language of opprobrium, this time not 
in support of but in fierce opposition to revolutionary politics. In his 
Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke 
compared what was going on in France to previous revolutions (like 
England's in 1688) that were led by noblemen "of great civil, and great 
military talents." By contrast, he wrote, the revolutionary government in 
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Paris is led by "Jew brokers contending with each other who could best 
remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness 
and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils." 
In Burke's case, the choice of this language was probably not "strategic." 
The choice was structural—anti-Judaism was a feature of the worldview 
with which Burke was able to recognize what Marxists later described as a 
"bourgeois" revolution. "Given the complete absence of Jews from the 
actual leadership, whether political, pecuniary, or philosophical, of the 
French Revolution," Nirenberg writes, the line about "Jew brokers" (and 
also Burke's proposal to help the revolutionaries by sending English Jews 
to France "to please your new Hebrew brethren") may, again, seem very 
strange. In fact, it is utterly common; only Burke's ferocious eloquence is 
uncommon. 
Friendly writers have worked hard to exonerate Burke of anti-Semitism. 
Nirenberg says only that they miss the point. Burke certainly knew that 
Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their friends and enemies among the 
revolutionaries were, all of them, Catholics and lapsed Catholics (plus a 
few Protestants). They were only figurative Jews, imaginary Jews, who 
came to Burke's mind, and to many other minds, 
because the revolution forced him...to confront basic questions about the 
ways in which humans relate to one another in society. These were 
questions that two millennia of pedagogy had taught Europe to ask in terms 
of "Judaism," and Burke had learnt the lesson well. 
2. 
Nirenberg's book is about those two millennia and their pedagogy. It isn't a 
book about anti-Semitism; it isn't a history of the Jewish experience of 
discrimination, persecution, and genocide; it isn't an example of what the 
historian Salo Baron called the "lachrymose" account of Jewish life in 
exile; nor is it an indictment of contemporary anti-Zionism or a defense of 
the state of Israel. The book is not about Jews at all or, at least, not about 
real Jews; it deals extensively and almost exclusively with imaginary Jews. 
What Nirenberg has written is an intellectual history of Western 
civilization, seen from a peculiar but frighteningly revealing perspective. It 
is focused on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an 
explanatory force in Christian and post-Christian thought—though it starts 
with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of 
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early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian 
polemics. Nirenberg comments intermittently about the effects of anti-
Judaism on the life chances of actual Jews, but dealing with those effects in 
any sufficient way would require another, and a very different, book. 
Anti-Judaism is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Nirenberg tells us 
that he has left a lot out (I will come at the end to a few things that are 
missing), but he seems to know everything. He deals only with literature 
that he can read in the original language, but this isn't much of a limitation. 
Fortunately, the chapter on Egypt doesn't require knowledge of 
hieroglyphics; Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are enough. Perhaps it makes 
things easier that the arguments in all the different languages are 
remarkably similar and endlessly reiterated. 
A certain view of Judaism—mainly negative—gets established early on, 
chiefly in Christian polemics, and then becomes a common tool in many 
different intellectual efforts to understand the world and to denounce 
opposing understandings. Marx may have thought himself insightful and 
his announcement original: the "worldly God" of the Jews was "money"! 
But the identification of Judaism with materialism, with the things of this 
world, predates the appearance of capitalism in Europe by at least 1,500 
years. 
Since I want mostly to describe Nirenberg's argument (and, though without 
the authority of his erudition, to endorse it), let me note quickly one bit of 
oddness in it. One could also write—it would be much shorter—a history 
of philo-Judaism. It might begin with those near-Jews, the "God-fearers" of 
ancient Rome, whom Nirenberg doesn't mention. But the prime example 
would be the work of the Christian, mostly Protestant, Hebraists of the late 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who searched in biblical and rabbinic 
texts for God's constitution and produced books with titles like The 
Hebrew Commonwealth. Many of these writers studied with Jewish 
scholars, chiefly from the Netherlands, but (with some notable exceptions) 
remained in most of their references to contemporary Jews conventionally 
anti-Semitic. 
Nirenberg writes about these Christian Hebraists with his usual learning, 
but they don't fit neatly into his book. They were looking for an ancient, 
biblical Judaism (with the rabbis of the talmudic age as helpful 
interpreters) that they could learn from, even imitate. Nirenberg's proper 
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subject is a hostile understanding of Judaism, early and late, reiterated by 
writers of very different sorts, with which the social-political-theological-
philosophical world is constructed, enemies are identified, and positions 
fortified. Philo-Judaism is aspirational; anti-Judaism claims to be 
explanatory. 
What is being explained is the social world; the explanatory tools are 
certain supposed features of Judaism; and the enemies are mostly not Jews 
but "Judaizing" non-Jews who take on these features and are denounced 
for doing so. I will deal with only a few of Judaism's negative 
characteristics: its hyperintellectualism; its predilection for tyranny; its 
equal and opposite predilection for subversive radicalism; and its this-
worldly materialism, invoked, as we've seen, by both Burke and Marx. 
None of this is actually descriptive; there certainly are examples of hyper-
intellectual, tyrannical, subversive, and materialist Jews (and of dumb, 
powerless, conformist, and idealistic Jews), but Nirenberg insists, rightly, 
that real Jews have remarkably little to do with anti-Judaism. 
3. 
Speaking to German students in May 1933, a few months after the Nazis 
took power, Joseph Goebbels proclaimed that "the age of rampant Jewish 
intellectualism is now at an end." Goebbels was a third-rate German 
intellectual (the word is unavoidable: he had a M.; he wrote articles; 
Nirenberg suggests that we think of him as an apostate intellectual). But he 
was making an argument that had been made by many less infamous, 
indeed, more worthy, figures. It begins in the Gospels, with the earliest 
attacks on the Judaism of the Pharisees. Christian supersessionist 
arguments—i.e., arguments about what aspects of Judaism had been 
superseded by Christianity—were based on a set of oppositions: law 
superseded by love, the letter by the spirit, the flesh (the material world, 
the commandments of the Torah, the literal text) by the soul. "I bless you 
father...," writes Luke, "for hiding these things from the learned and the 
clever and revealing them to little children." 
The Pharisees were indeed learned and clever, as were their rabbinic 
successors; the discussions and disputations of the Talmud are a 
particularly revealing display of learning and cleverness. By comparison 
(it's a self-description), the early Christians were naive and innocent 
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children to whom God spoke directly, evoking the faith that brought 
salvation (which law and learning couldn't do). 
The difficulty here is that the Christians very quickly produced immensely 
learned, clever, and disputatious theologians of their own, who were then 
accused, and who accused each other, of Judaizing—thinking or acting like 
Jews. The earliest Christian writers, Paul most importantly, were engaged 
with actual Jews, in some mix of coexistence and competition that scholars 
are still trying to figure out. Nirenberg writes about Paul with subtlety and 
some sympathy, though he is the writer who sets the terms for much that 
comes later. 
By the time of writers like Eusebius, Ambrose, and Augustine, the Jews 
had been, as Nirenberg says, "a twice-defeated people"—first militarily by 
the Romans and then religiously by the imperial establishment of 
Christianity. And yet the threat of Judaism grew greater and greater as the 
actual Jews grew weaker and weaker. According to their triumphant 
opponents, the Jews never gave up their hostility to Jesus and his followers 
(indeed, they didn't convert). They were endlessly clever, ever-active 
hypocrites and tricksters, who mixed truth with falsehood to entice 
innocent Christians—in the same way that those who prepare lethal drugs 
"smear the lip of the cup with honey to make the harmful potion easy to 
drink." 
That last charge is from Saint John Chrysostom, who was such a violent 
opponent of "the Jews" that earnest scholars have assumed that Judaism 
must have posed a clear and present danger to Christianity in his time. In 
fact, Nirenberg tells us, there was no such danger; the people mixing the 
poison were Christian heretics. If Saint John feared the Jews, "it was 
because his theology had taught him to view other dangers in Jewish 
terms." 
The critique of Jewish cleverness is fairly continuous over time, but it 
appears with special force among German idealist philosophers of the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who repeat many of the 
supersessionist arguments of the early Christians. Kant understood the 
heteronomy he sought to overcome—action according to moral law 
externally imposed rather than freely accepted by the agent—in Jewish 
terms, but he was himself considered too Jewish by the philosophers who 
came next, most importantly by Hegel. Kantianism, Hegel claimed, was 
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simply a new version of "the Jewish principle of opposing thought to 
reality, reason to sense; this principle involves the rending of life and a 
lifeless connection between God and the world." According to Hegel, 
Abraham had made a fateful choice: his rejection of the world in favor of a 
sublime God had alienated the Jews forever from the beauty of nature and 
made them the prisoners of law, incapable of love. (Needless to say, 
Schopenhauer, in the next generation, thought that the academic Hegelians 
of his time were "Jews" and followers of "the Jewish God," but I shall stop 
with Hegel himself.) 
It isn't Nirenberg's claim that any of these philosophers were anti-Semites. 
Indeed, Hegel defended the rights of Jews in German universities and 
thought that anti-Semitic German nationalism was not "German-ness" but 
"German-stupid-ness." Nor is Nirenberg arguing for any kind of 
intellectual determinism. He doesn't believe that Goebbels's attack on 
Jewish intellectualism was the necessary outcome of the German 
philosophical identification of Judaism with lifeless reason—any more 
than German idealism was the necessary outcome of Christian claims to 
supersede Pharasaic Judaism or of Lutheran claims to supersede the 
Judaizing Catholics. In all these cases, there were other possible outcomes. 
But philosophers like Hegel used the language of anti-Judaism to resolve 
"the ancient tension between the ideal and the real," and their resolutions 
were enormously influential. The idea of Judaism as the enemy of "life" 
had a future. 
4. 
Judaism's associations with worldly power and subversive rebellion are 
closely linked, for what is rebellion but an effort to seize power? So Jewish 
bankers can rule the world and Jewish Bolsheviks can aspire to overthrow 
and replace the bankers. In some alcoves of the Western imagination, the 
two groups can almost appear as co-conspirators. The populist anti-
Semitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (what August Bebel 
called "the socialism of fools") has a long history. One very early example 
is Saint Ambrose's response to the emperor Maximus, who punished the 
leaders of a Christian mob that burned a synagogue in the Mesopotamian 
city of Callinicum: "That king," Ambrose said, "has become a Jew." What 
made Maximus a "Jew" was not that he defended the Callinicum Jews but 
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that he ranked enforcement of the law over the demands of the spirit (and 
the religious enthusiasm of the mob). 
Often in the Middle Ages, Christian rulers were accused of Judaizing by 
populist rebels; the accusations had a curious doubleness. Tyranny was, 
first of all, imagined as a feature of Judaism, both when there were Jews at 
court (as physicians, advisers, tax collectors, and money-lenders) and when 
there were no Jews at court. The Jewish "seduction" of princes was one 
common way of understanding tyranny. Of course, Jewish seduction was 
often princely exploitation: the Jews were allowed to collect interest on 
loans to the king's Christian subjects so that he could then "expropriate a 
considerable share of the proceeds." It was a kind of indirect taxation, at a 
time when the royal power to tax was radically constrained. The indirectly 
taxed subjects resented the Jewish money-lenders, but, Nirenberg stresses, 
the resentment was politically acted out, again and again, in many times 
and places, though Jews rarely predominated in royal financial affairs "and 
then only for short periods of time." 
Anti-Judaism also had a second and rather different political usefulness. 
Jews were imagined not only as tyrants or the allies of tyrants but at the 
same time, and more realistically, as oppressed and powerless. Given their 
rejection of Jesus Christ and their complicity in his death, the oppression of 
the Jews was justified; but when a tyrannical ruler oppressed his Christian 
subjects, he could be accused of trying "to make a Jewry" out of them, 
which obviously wasn't justified. "We would rather die than be made 
similar to Jews." That last line is from a petition of the city council of 
Valencia to King Peter in 1378. So tyranny was twice understood in Jewish 
terms: a Judaizing prince treated his subjects like Jews. 
Populist rebels obviously did not think of themselves as Jews; the 
construction of subversion and rebellion as "Jewish" was, and is, the work 
of conservative and reactionary writers. Among modern revolutionaries, 
the Puritans actually were Judaizers (focused far more on the Old than the 
New Testament), though with their own supersessionist theology. The use 
of the tropes of philo- and anti-Judaism during the English civil war made 
some sense, even though there were no Jews in England in the 1640s. The 
French revolutionaries were neither Jews nor Judaizers, though Burke and 
others understood them by invoking the "old ideas and fears." But it was 
the Bolsheviks who, more than any other group of rebels, were widely 
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understood as "Jewish." It is true that many of them were Jews, though of 
the sort that Isaac Deutscher called "non-Jewish Jews." Judaism had 
nothing at all to do with Bolshevism and yet, if Nirenberg is right, the 
Bolsheviks would have been explained in the language of anti-Judaism 
even if there had never been a Trotsky, a Kamenev, or a Radek among 
them. 
5. 
The identification of Jews with merchants, money-lenders, royal financiers, 
and predatory capitalists is constant in Nirenberg's history. I will focus on 
one moment in that history, Shakespeare's England and The Merchant of 
Venice, which will give me a chance to illustrate the difference between his 
anti-Judaism and the anti-Semitism that is the subject of more 
conventional, but equally depressing, histories. Anthony Julius's Trials of 
the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England includes a long and 
very intelligent discussion of Shakespeare's play.I Julius calls The 
Merchant of Venice an anti-Semitic drama that is also a dramatization of 
anti-Semitism and the beginning of its literary investigation. Shakespeare, 
as always, writes from opposing perspectives, but he clearly leans toward 
Shylock's enemies. 
Shylock himself is the classic Jew: he hates Christians and desires to 
tyrannize over them; he loves money, more than his own daughter; he is a 
creature of law rather than of love. He isn't, indeed, a clever Jew; in his 
attempt to use the law against his Christian enemy, he is unintelligent and 
inept. (A modern commentator, Kenneth Gross, asks: "What could [he] 
have been thinking?") But in every other way, he is stereotypical, and so he 
merits the defeat and humiliation he receives—which are meant to delight 
the Elizabethan audience. 
Julius doesn't ask Nirenberg's question: What put so many Jews (like 
Shylock or Marlowe's Jew of Malta) on the new London stage, in "a city 
that had sheltered fewer `real Jews' than perhaps any other major one in 
Europe"? His answer—I can't reproduce his long and nuanced discussion 
—is that London was becoming a city of merchants, hence a "Jewish" city, 
and Shakespeare's play is a creative response to that development, an effort 
to address the allegedly Judaizing features of all commercial relationships, 
and then to save the Christian merchants by distinguishing them from an 
extreme version of the Jew. But the distinction is open to question, and so 
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the point of the play is best summed up when Portia asks, "Which is the 
merchant here, and which the Jew?" The play is about law and property, 
contracts, oaths, pledges, and promises. Shylock is the Jew of the gospels: 
"I stand here for law." But he is defeated by a better lawyer and a more 
literal reading of the law: Portia out-Jews the Jew—which is surely an 
ironical version of Christian supersession. 
So Shakespeare understands the arrival of modern commerce with the help 
of Judaism, though he knew no Jews and had never read a page of the 
Talmud. He knew the Bible, though, as Shylock's speech about Jacob 
multiplying Laban's sheep (Act 1, scene 3; Genesis 30) makes clear. And 
Paul and the gospels were a central part of his intellectual inheritance. 
Shylock emerges from those latter texts, much like, though the lineage is 
more complicated, Burke's "Jew brokers" and Marx's "emancipated Jews." 
The line is continuous. 
6. 
Nirenberg's epilogue addresses one major theorist's denial of that 
continuity. In the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt 
mocks what she calls the doctrine of "eternal antisemitism" (this could 
serve, Nirenberg writes, "as an ironic title for my own book") and insists 
that the "specifically Jewish functions" (banking and finance) in the 
capitalist economy made the Jews partly "responsible" (her word) for the 
hatred they evoked.2 This is much like Marx's claim that "the Jews have 
eagerly contributed" to the triumph of their "worldly cult," "Haggling," 
and their "worldly God," "Money." 
Arendt actually draws on the statistical work of Walter Frank, a Nazi 
economist, who headed an Institute for the History of the New Germany, to 
support her account of the role of the Jews in the German bourgeoisie. It 
can't be the case, she argues, that the Nazis, who had "to persuade and 
mobilize people," could have chosen their victims arbitrarily. There has to 
be a concrete answer, a local socioeconomic answer, to the question: Why 
the Jews? 
Nirenberg agrees that the choice of the Jews was not arbitrary; nor does he 
find Arendt's argument surprising—though he rejects all the usual hostile 
explanations: her assimilationist childhood, her long relationship with 
Heidegger, and so on. He does think it remarkable that Arendt "clung" to 
her argument about Jewish responsibility "even after the full extent and 
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fantastic projective power of Nazi anti-Semitism (including its vast 
exaggeration of the Jews' economic importance) became clear." But his 
whole book is a kind of explanation for why she found it so easy to connect 
Jews and finance: the connection was one of "the a priori ideological 
commitments that structured her selection and interpretation of `facts' 
about the Jews." 
The disagreement with Arendt nicely sums up Nirenberg's book. His 
argument is that a certain view of Judaism lies deep in the structure of 
Western civilization and has helped its intellectuals and polemicists explain 
Christian heresies, political tyrannies, medieval plagues, capitalist crises, 
and revolutionary movements. Anti-Judaism is and has long been one of 
the most powerful theoretical systems "for making sense of the world." No 
doubt, Jews sometimes act out the roles that anti-Judaism assigns them—
but so do the members of all the other national and religious groups, and in 
much greater numbers. The theory does not depend on the behavior of 
"real" Jews. 
Nirenberg's history of anti-Judaism is powerful and persuasive, but it is 
also unfinished. It never gets to the United States, for example, where anti-
Judaism seems to have been less prevalent and less useful (less used in 
making sense of society and economy) than it was and is in the Old World 
—and where philo-Judaism seems to have a much larger presence. The 
modern state of Israel also makes no appearance in Nirenberg's book, 
except for one sentence on the next-to-last page: 
We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some 
variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best 
explained in terms of "Israel." 
So we have a partial discontinuity (the US) and an unexplored continuity 
(contemporary Israel) with Nirenberg's history. There is still work to be 
done. But here, in this book, anti-Judaism has at last found its radical critic. 
Michael Walzer is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the 
Institute for Advanced Study and Co-editor Emeritus of Dissent magazine. 
He is the author most recently of In God's Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew 
Bible. (March 2014) 
I. Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 178-192.4-, 
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2. Harcourt, 1968, pp. 5-7, 9. 0 
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