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I would like to begin by thanking my friends and colleagues from Goldsmiths sociology who are here, my friends and colleagues who have responded to my paper, our chair, our hosts at SOAS and everybody else here. I thank them for their kindness to me but more importantly for their support for the work. I believe that appearing at an event like this is not without cost, and I thank the people who are here.

There is a stream of empirical sociology which offers us a clear conclusion: the lower a person’s social class – the less educated a person is – the more likely that person is to hold racist attitudes.

It offers us the image of Jade Goodie insulting Shilpa Shetty. Or it offers us the image of a skinhead – stupid, uncultured, ignorant, ugly, violent.

This kind of racism appears as a manifestation of cultural, economic and social deprivation, exclusion and backwardness.

Another way of picturing bigotry is to imagine it strutting around in a Nazi uniform. To our eyes, with hindsight, this is an image of evident and obvious evil – although it shouldn’t be forgotten that Nazism wasn’t always self-evidently evil.

As Moshe Postone says, “Antisemitism can appear to be antihegemonic” – and Nazism was a critique of bourgeois hypocrisy. Serious and radical people were attracted to Nazism before it became self-evidently evil.

So – two images of racism, the stupid, ignorant, uneducated one. And the menacing and evil Nazi one.


But the antisemitism which I investigate in my paper manifests itself most strongly amongst the most educated rather than the least educated and in the intelligentsia rather than in the underclass. In this respect it is unlike the images of racism which most naturally occur to us – but it is not unlike many previous anti-Judaisms.

Contemporary antisemitism is not self-evident. The type of antisemitism I am addressing is that which is expressed in the language of hostility to Israel and which is not explicitly antisemitic. Antisemitism often begins with a healthy sense of outrage towards Israeli human rights abuses – an outrage which I share.

But it often becomes a hostility to Israel, rather than its actions or policies, and it can then become a hostility to the Jews who live there, and to the Jews around the world, who seem to support it uncritically.

This is a politics which appears to be antiracist. It is therefore necessary to make difficult judgments about what is antisemitic and what is not. Such judgments require knowledge and analysis.

So: an antiracist antisemitism which is not explicitly antisemitic.

Interestingly, it is also an antisemitism which opposes antisemitism and which is not aware of itself. There is no antisemitic intent.

But unintended racism is hardly an unfamiliar concept to sociology. In truth, racism is more often manifested embedded quietly in institutions than in the violence of racist thugs.

I was teaching our first years the other day when I came across a quote by Emile Durkheiim on the question of intent, in his famous work, Suicide.

“Intent is too intimate a thing to be more than approximately interpreted by another. It even escapes self-observation. How often we mistake the true reasons for our acts! We constantly explain acts due to petty feelings or blind routine by generous passions or lofty considerations.

Besides, in general, an act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.”

This, I would argue, is precisely how George Galloway and David Duke end up in the same Syrian TV studio arguing for an almost identical politics.

One could argue that sociology – the sociology of Durkheim and Weber – was itself invented to explain how society worked, without recourse to antisemitic conspiracy theory.

If we’re looking for mad people who do silly walks and who want to kill all the Jews – or if we’re looking for stupid, aggressive football hooligans, then we’ll miss this type of antisemitism – we’ll fail to recognize it.

Unlike Nazism, the kind of antisemitism I’m talking about allows exceptions. In this respect, Nazism was an unusual antisemitism, since most other antisemitisms have allowed for the exceptionally innocent Jew.

Remember religious persecutions of Jews which aimed to convert Jews, to save them, rather than to kill them. Jews who were already “saved” often played key roles in “saving” others.

Remember the quote in my paper from Father Creagh, the leader of the campaign to boycott the Jews of Limerick in 1904: His boycott was only aimed, he said, at those Jews who “grind and oppress those who are unfortunate enough to get into their power”.

The motion passed by Natfhe in 2006 supporting a boycott of Israeli academics offered an exemption to exceptional Israelis when it suggested that the union should backlist only members who “do not publicly dissociate themselves’ from Israel’s ‘apartheid policies”.

So we’re looking at an antisemitism which is not explicit, and which allows for exceptional Jews; it is not recognizable by intent and the people who spread it are not aware of what they are doing.

At the moment, there are exemptions on offer to Jews who are willing
• to deny contemporary antisemitism
• to justify it
• or to designate it as trivial.

We are all so bored of the boycott campaign – and we’re so pleased to see that it is, for the moment, defeated and quiet. But boredom and familiarity shouldn’t let us forget what a scandal it was that the academic unions flirted seriously with it.

Picture it. What was proposed was an institutionalized exclusion of Israelis – and only Israelis – from our campuses. From this room, from SOAS, from Goldsmiths, from Loafers coffee bar.

A classic and central feature of many antisemitisms has been the mission to drive Jews out of public life. Picture what a campaign against the visit of an Israeli academic would have looked like if the boycott was in place. Imagine that you were a local union rep whose job it was to organize the picket, whose job it was to print the leaflet, whose job it was to discipline the person who invited the forbidden Israeli.

The fact that the boycott was passed by the conferences of British academic workers in 2005, 2006 and 2007, should tell us that something is seriously wrong in British public life and in particular in British academic and trade union life.

We might say that the union conferences did not represent academics or union members. But if academics and union members had felt strongly, if the issues had been clear to them, then they would have stopped the boycott campaign in a minute.

The fact that there was a debate in British public life about whether to exclude Israelis from our campuses demonstrates the seriousness of the situation.

The boycott campaign looks dead at the moment. But the underlying politics of demonization are not diminished. They are increasingly respectable in mainstream discourse. It seems to me that the way of the future for antisemitism in Europe and America is conspiracy theory.

A trope of modern antisemitism which manifests itself again and again, is the willingness to blame Jews for war.

Jews start wars in their own interests, in which they are neither, themselves, prepared to kill or to die. They are more loyal to each other than to their neighbours, their communities, their class or their nation.

Clearly those who blamed "the Jews", or the "elders of Zion" or "Jewish Bolshevism" or "Jewish diamond interest" or whatever, for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Boer War, WWI, WWII, the Vietnam war - clearly they were wrong.

But perhaps the “Israel lobby” is responsible for the current war? Perhaps it does have the power to make the only remaining superpower act against its own interest?

That this is the position of a number of serious intellectuals at the moment, that the question of ‘Zionist’ responsibility for the current war is asked seriously in serious newspapers, and in universities, should worry us.

Antisemitism seeks to exclude Jews from public life. Jews are a danger to public life.

In the universities they support Zionism and therefore racism and apartheid; they ‘cry antisemitism’ dishonestly in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel’s human rights abuses.

In politics, they conspire to start wars.

Recently a group of British anti-Zionists tried to construct the problem of Zionists in British public life as a problem of sleaze and of corruption to be dealt with by the committee on standards in public life. That there was no public outrage at their letter should be taken as evidence of a problem of antisemitism in Britain.

Antisemites have always thought of Jews as being central to the world’s ills.

Now, Israel is thought of as being a crucial element in the structure of imperialist domination.

In truth, Jews and Israel are not central to anything and a worldview which finds that they are, is a cause for concern.

I believe that in my paper I have put together significant evidence and analysis which demonstrates that there is a contemporary problem of antisemitism in Britain.

It is related to healthy hostility to Israeli human rights abuses but - only tenuously.

Antisemitism is not a just punishment for Jews who have failed to distance themselves from Israel or who have failed to define themselves as anti-Zionist. Antisemitism is not trivial.

Antisemitism is an evil in itself because it excludes and it bullies Jews.

It is also a clear indication of the presence of totalitarian thinking within contemporary antiracist thought and intellectual life.

David Hirsh