A Brief History of Antisemitism

Antisemitism is often treated as a footnote to "bigger" histories. A prejudice that flares up from time to time, or a series of isolated eruptions that can be explained away as medieval superstition, far-right pathology, or the aftershocks of the Holocaust.

This book argues for something harder and more unsettling: antisemitism is one of the most persistent, adaptable forms of prejudice in the Western world, and it has repeatedly reshaped itself to fit whatever a society most fears, desires, or needs to blame. In different eras Jews have been cast as Christ-killers and money-lenders, as racial contaminant and revolutionary threat, as rootless cosmopolitans and secret puppet-masters. The costume changes; the underlying structure stays recognisable.

A Brief History of Antisemitism traces that structure across time, showing how older religious myths became modern political ideologies, and how conspiracy thinking migrated from the margins into mainstream culture. It looks at antisemitism on the right and on the left, and at the ways it can hide inside language that sounds principled, progressive, or merely "anti-elite". It is written for readers who want to understand how antisemitism works, why it so often survives contact with evidence, and how it keeps finding new hosts.

The book is also an attempt at clarity. Not every mention of Jews is antisemitic, and not every critique of Israel is antisemitic. But antisemitism is real, it is often missed, and it thrives when people treat it as a smear, a distraction, or someone else's problem. If we want an anti-racist politics that deserves the name, we need to be able to recognise antisemitism in the places we least want to see it, including our own movements.

This page will be updated with more details as publication approaches.

Coming summer 2026.