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The Life and Afterlife of a Seminal Book
In 1986, Bernard Lewis published a highly influential book, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. For Lewis, who was then the pre-eminent British-American historian of the Islamic world, the book represented a departure from his prior research agenda. Although Lewis was Jewish, his scholarly work had touched little on Jews. In this book (and its companion, The Jews of IslamJ, Lewis portrayed the legacy of Islam as one of broad toleration of Jews, tinged with contempt but void of hatred. He traced the outbreak of virulent antisemitism among Arabs not to the tradition of Islam, but to the influence of European and especially Nazi antisemitism. This interpretation may have been inspired and reinforced by Lewis's own personal exposure to Arab antisemitism during the Second World War and in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Bernard Lewis was a historian of Islam and the Middle East, who once told an interviewer that his abiding interest and specialty was "Islam as a civilization." Over many years, his primary scholarly interests remained constant: Islam in its many permutations, and the attempts of Muslims to come to terms with modernity. Yet, at a late point in his career, he also became an important and influential interpreter of antisemitism. In 1986, he published Semites und Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict und Prejudice, an ambitious and far-ranging work that analyzed antisemitism historically, with an emphasis on its growth among Arabs. The erudition on display in this book was breathtaking and demonstrated Lewis's unique talent for moving effortlessly between the history of the West and of the East, and across the whole chronological range of world history.1
Why did Lewis depart from his scholarly path to write this book? The answer to this question not only reveals much about Lewis, but also about the larger debate over the "new antisemitism," which Lewis was among the first to name and interpret.
Between Muslims and Jews
Bernard Lewis was born in London in 1916, where he embarked on a distinguished career at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. There he established himself as a historian's historian. Lewis had an unparalleled talent for placing the history of Islam...