David Nirenberg's ANTI-JUDAISM: THE WESTERN TRADITION

An immense scholarly achievement. Erudite, persuasive, and gracefully written, it is the kind of intellectual history that changes our understanding of ourselves, our ideas, our cultures, and our world. Yes, it focuses on the strain of anti-Judaism in Western thinking, but it is also about the making and writing of history more generally.

Particularly I learned from its analysis of Marx. That in critiquing the evils of capitalism, Marx not only deployed the hated figure of the Jew, but also claimed the figure's reality in society. He thought he was doing sociology as well as economic theory, and so opened the possibility to future persecution of "real" Jews. It is too easy to slip from capitalism to Jewry in one's thinking. A fault that plagues the Left. 

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