Radical Islam’s favorite Western tradition. 

Since Sept. 11, many Americans have been surprised by the prevalence and depth of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Rumors that we recognize instantly as fabrications—such as the claim that 4,000 Jews were warned in advance about the World Trade Center attacks—are accepted unquestioningly in Arab countries. Reporters undergoing Middle East crash courses are discovering that even states at peace with Israel, such as Egypt, routinely propagate anti-Semitic propaganda of a virulence not seen in mainstream Western politics since World War II.

This anti-Semitism isn’t just the sort of everyday stereotyping or genteel snobbery or even official intolerance that’s familiar, if mostly obsolescent, in the West. No, this is the strong stuff: fantasies that Jews ritually slaughter children and oversee secret conspiracies to rule the world. What’s more, unlike, say, Noam Chomsky, most Arab anti-Semites don’t bother with the protestations about how they only oppose Israel’s Palestinian policies and don’t really hate Jews per se. In their usage, Zionist, Israeli, and Jew are pretty much interchangeable terms.

Finally, and most important, Arab anti-Semitism isn’t confined to the fringes of society. Whereas in Israel, as in other Western countries, overt bigotry is scolded, ignored, or kept out of politics, mainstream Arab culture promotes extreme anti-Semitic ideas through schools, newspapers, television, popular culture, and official ideology. It’s hardly even controversial.

Bernard Lewis’ classic book Semites and Anti-Semites provides insight into how this condition came to be. As he notes, anti-Semitism in Arab countries (and non-Arab Islamic states such as Iran) has risen as Jew-hating in the areas formerly known as Christendom has plummeted. For example, whatever one thinks of the extent of anti-Semitism still extant within the Catholic Church, most Westerners consider the 1964 decision by the Second Vatican Council to repudiate claims that Jews killed Christ to be a mark of progress, to say the least. In Islam, however, centuries of teaching that the Jews didn’t kill Christ have now given way to an embrace of the very claims Christians have renounced. When Vatican II convened, it was Arab and Muslim organizations that most vehemently opposed exculpating the Jews of deicide—the Quran notwithstanding.

Traditionally, Islam did not demonize Jews. In Muslim lore, Jews registered as only minor figures, drawing neither special hatred nor fondness. It was Christianity, in fact, whose teachings first propounded anti-Semitism. At first it was a fairly straightforward business: Jews didn’t view Christ as the messiah, and so they were denounced or oppressed. When times got bad, they were exiled or persecuted.

Over time, Christian anti-Semitism acquired a racial dimension along with its religious thrust. This had significant consequences. After all, when Jew-hating was rooted in religion, a Jew could convert to Christianity and become, as it were, fully kosher. But when states began forcing Jews to convert—or face expulsion or execution—the authenticity of the Jews’ conversions became suspect. After Christians conquered Spain from the Muslims in 1492, they forced Jews and Muslims to convert, flee, or die. Many Jews converted yet practiced their old faith secretly, leading church officials to make new rules discriminating against all so-called conversos.

In the 19^th century, anti-Semitism became increasingly racialized. The Enlightenment certainly made life better for Jews, at least in Western Europe, where religious tolerance took hold. Yet the Enlightenment also brought new “scientific”—or, as we now say, pseudoscientific—notions that human beings belonged to different races, some superior to others. Under these notions, Jews (as well as Africans, Arabs, and others) were deemed to be biologically and thus immutably inferior to white or “Aryan” Europeans.

Alongside racism, 19^th-century Europe also saw the spread of nationalism: the idea that every people deserved its own state. Nationalism served to justify the repression of “alien” peoples, especially Jews—not just in eastern Europe, where Jews lived in ghettos, insulated from their Polish or Russian compatriots, but even in Western Europe, where many Jews were assimilated and considered themselves full citizens of their countries. This new form of ideological anti-Semitism—seeing the Jews as an alien and inferior people amid Christian European nations—finally got its name in 1879, thanks to an Austrian journalist named Wilhelm Marr.

By this point, the ideology of anti-Semitism had bred elaborate theories about the Jewish people’s evil. In some cases, ancient religious bigotries were updated, as in the “blood libel” that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in making Passover matzot. (In Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ukraine, and elsewhere, Jews were actually tried in court on such charges.) In other cases, the slanders were new, as with the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document fabricated by Russian secret police that purported to divulge the Jews’ conspiratorial plans for world domination.

Until the late 19^th century, anti-Semitism as an ideology remained largely absent from Arab and Muslim culture. In the Quran and in Islamic commentary, Jews are significant not for rejecting Muhammad but for succumbing to his followers. In Arab literature, they are sometimes portrayed as hostile or vindictive, but their humility and weakness is a much more common theme. Islamic governments did not often persecute Jews either, the way European states did, and when Jews faced discrimination, it was no different from what Christians endured. Unlike in Europe, Jews in Islamic lands were not expelled or forced to convert or, with a few exceptions, consigned to ghettos.