Antisemitism: Its History and Causes

by Bernard Lazare, Robert S. Wistrich (Introduction)

Bernard Lazare's controversial magnum opus, originally published in France in 1894, asks why the Jews have aroused such hatred for three thousand years. The journalist, though severed from his Jewish upbringing, was fiercely committed to social justice and could not ignore a shocking antisemitism in the fin-de-siècle circles he knew. In search mg for its historic causes, he was also searching for his own roots and place in the world. As biographer Nelly Wilsonhas noted, young Lazare was "constantly engaged in a dialogue with himself" when he wrote Antisemitism, Its History and Causes .

 

Lazare begins his "impartial study" by considering whatever in the Jewish character might be to blame for antisemitism. Then he looks outward to those nations among which the Israelites dispersed, examining the different faces of antisemitism from Greco-Roman antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century. Lazare brings his research and study to bear on whatever form antisemitism has ethnic, nationalist, economic, social, literary, philosophical. Recognizing that antisemitism is fundamentally based on fear of the stranger and the need for a scapegoat, Lazare concludes with a surprising scenario for the future. This remarkable book conveys Lazare's own spiritual growth. France's Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s would galvanize him to a passionate battle against antisemitism.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1894

About the author

Bernard Lazare was a French Jewish literary critic, political journalist, polemicist, and anarchist. He was also among the first Dreyfusards.

In 1888, together with Ephraïm Mikhaël, Lazare wrote La Fiancée de Corinthe, a mythological drama in three acts, where he first adopted his nom de plume, Bernard Lazare. Two years later Ephraïm Mikhaël died of tuberculosis. It was around this time that Lazare became actively engaged in anarchism. Although he never took "direct action", he always continued to support its ideals and his comrades, whose publications and legal defences he financed.

Reviews

[Jesse Cohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often found on antisemitic websites, where it is exhibited as an example of a Jew denouncing Jews as responsible for and meriting their own ill-treatment by Gentiles (by being insular, etc.) -- but the anti-semites conveniently overlook the entire second half. While the first part of the book was written during a period when Lazare considered himself to be not an ethnically distinct "Jew" but an "Israelite," i.e., emphasizing his status as an assimilated French national (he boasted that his family had lived in France since Roman times), the second part, however, reflects a profound shift in Lazare's sensibility, reading antisemitism as a symptom of (and substitute for) class struggle, "one of the last, though most long lived, manifestations of that old spirit of reaction and narrow conservatism, which is vainly attempting to arrest the onward movement of the Revolution." This is the Lazare who became more fully a social anarchist -- and, indeed, the first defender of Alfred Dreyfus.