The book higher ed must read to do better on anti-Semitism: REVIEW
It remains painfully clear that higher education administrators thought they knew what anti-Semitism looked like. They have been wrong for years.
I have never read a history book that meets the needs of the moment with the urgency, clarity, and necessity that Ivan G. Marcus’s How the West Became Antisemitic does. Released in 2024, this is the book Americans needed last year, and that higher education needed last decade.
In the last 11 months, Campus Reform covered countless university administrators who failed to protect Jewish students on campuses because they did not grasp that anti-Semitism is the West’s oldest form of racism.
In recent weeks, select institutions have started to attempt to atone for their negligence with new trainings and anti-discrimination policies.
But it is still doubtful that these administrators have learned their lesson; that these developments are not simply PR moves to stop the bleeding of depressed enrollment and revenue under intense national scrutiny. That is why Marcus’s book is uncannily timely. It lays out in a simple chronology how anti-Semitism evolved in the Middle Ages once Gentile Europeans registered the practitioners of Judaism as a race of outsiders living within and among Christendom. Until university leaders internalize that anti-Semitism is a form of racism—the oldest form of racism—there is no viable solution for the hatred we’ve witnessed on campuses.
Marcus, the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History at Yale University, studies the history of Western anti-Semitism as an evolutionary biologist. He makes several important scholarly contributions in his historical narrative. Most significantly, he divides the Middle Ages into two periods based on shifting cultural practices among Christians, and then shows how that transition triggered Europeans to see Jews as physically distinct with darker facial features they could then describe and depict in contrast to everyone else.
The ability to see and recognize Jews independently of any clothing or other man-made markers continued for centuries in the West. In his 1819 novel Ivanhoe, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott depicts Jews living in medieval England as darker-skinned outsiders traversing among fair-haired Anglo-Saxons and Normans.
Scott composed Ivanhoe in the years leading up to the mid-century nationalist revolutions across Europe. These revolutions, which tried to liberalize monarchical regimes with new national borders and constitutions based on shared ethnicity and language, also accentuated anti-Semitic reactions to the Jewish race living within would-be nation states.
“I don’t observe Jewish customs except as a souvenir of family ties. But to a gentile I am a Jew. There isn’t a gentile anywhere who at one moment or another hasn’t thought, ‘Jew.’”
These words are uttered by a cosmopolitan Jewish resident of 19th century Vienna in Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt. As the multinational Habsburg dynasty resisted nationalist uprisings and ambitions in its Austro-Hungarian Empire, Viennese Jews enjoyed the protections ensured by the monarchy but also faced resentment from neighbors who refused to accept them as Austrian.
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It is the grandchildren of these neighbors who jeered as Jews were made to wash the city’s streets with acid after the Nazis annexed Austria into the Third Reich. It was the Nazis and their collaborators in Poland, France, Austria, and elsewhere that agreed that the extermination of the Jewish race was necessary, and that the ovens and gas showers of Auschwitz were the solution for the centuries-old Jewish question.
Modern-day anti-Semitism is the tethered hatred against Jews’ distinctive religion, culture, and racialized otherness. That entanglement operates independently of ideological commitments to American politics or the Israel-Hamas conflict. The truth that Marcus reveals does not ask the reader to commit to one side or the other.
But it remains painfully clear that higher education administrators thought they knew what anti-Semitism looked like. They have been wrong for years and in their uninformed hubris, have never understood that it is also about race.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
