Anthony Julius

Anthony Julius has written a profoundly disturbing book on the history of anti-Semitism and its interrelationships with current anti-Zionism and anti-Israel battlelines. Trials of the Diaspora is both an anatomy and an anthology of anti-Semitisms. It is a demanding journey; 870 pages of which, mercifully, no more than 61% is text in my Kindle edition. The exhaustive footnotes are, for the most part, references to texts and sources, rather than explications. It is likely that anyone who stays the course will engage in a running debate with Anthony Julius. This is both a history and a polemic, written by a lawyer with a keen eye for the most telling exhibit in support of his argument. It should change the way you think and your relationship with the prevailing zeitgeist, more particularly if you are not Jewish. I won't rehearse any of my own argumentative engagements with Anthony Julius. But I will take from his concluding chapter a partial answer to what might seem a naive or simple minded question: After the lessons learned from the Holocaust, does anti-Semitism still matter, really? The final chapter of Trials of the Diaspora begins thus: 'Israel is the only state in the world whose legitimacy is widely denied and whose destruction is publicly advocated and threatened. Israelis are the only citizens of a state whose indiscriminate murder is widely considered justifiable'. There is, of course, a world of meaning in those carefully chosen words, 'widely considered'.… (meer)