'Israel is the only place where I could ever carry out this work.'

When it comes to a broad and detailed analysis of antisemitism, the late Robert Wistrich was in a league of his own.

The Israeli flag (photo: Taylor Brandon/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Rabbi Jeremy Rosen.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Many, many books have been written about the Holocaust and antisemitism.

Amongst my favorites is Anthony Julius’ “Trials of the Diaspora” (for an English slant) and David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism” (from an American perspective).

But when it comes to a broad and detailed analysis of antisemitism, and a profound knowledge of history, the late Robert Wistrich was in a league of his own.

He was an unlikely candidate for the pre-eminence he achieved. We were both at Cambridge University at the same time, but apart from a few brief encounters at the Jewish Society, we lived in different worlds, religiously and academically.

I should say right away that I am indebted to a very close and remarkable friend of mine Dr. Winston Picket, former director of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

In a review, Picket wrote that Professor Wistrich had sought to endow the subject of antisemitism with academic respectability after it had been subordinated to studies of racism and the Holocaust, and had fallen out of favor in Israel, “where in a spirit of nation-building and a psychological need to move on, the study of Jew-hatred may have seemed retrograde at best and post-traumatic at worst.”

Dr. Pickett asked Professor Wistrich how he was able to spend virtually his whole career on what a fellow writer sardonically described as “five thousand years of bitterness.”

What sustained him?

“Israel,” he replied, “is the only place where I could ever carry out this work.”

Robert Wistrich was born to Left-wing Polish parents who had moved to Lviv in 1940 to escape the Nazis. But they found that the Soviet regime was unbearable. In 1942 they moved to Kazakhstan, where Wistrich’s father was imprisoned twice by the Secret Police. After World War Two, they returned to Poland. But finding the post-war environment in Poland to be dangerously antisemitic, they moved to France and then England where Robert grew up.

He recalled that, at school in London, antisemitism in the 1950s “was a normal part of the landscape,” he said in the interview. “Jews were ‘bloody foreigners,’ but I wasn’t rattled by it. All the teachers at my grammar school were influenced by anti-Jewish prejudices. So, in order to achieve, you had to outperform.”

In 1962 at the age of 17,  Wistrich won an Open Scholarship to study history at Cambridge University. Between 1969 and 1970, during a study year in Israel, he became the youngest literary editor of “New Outlook,” a Left-wing monthly founded by Martin Buber.

From 1974 to 1980, Wistrich was Director of Research at the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library. He was appointed a Research Fellow at the British Academy and was given tenure at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Between 1991 and 1995, Wistrich held the Chair of Jewish Studies at University College London. He acted as the chief historical consultant for the BBC documentary “Blaming the Jews” which explores contemporary Muslim antisemitism. He also served as the academic advisor for the controversial documentary film, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” from 2005.

He headed the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University and sat on the Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission to examine the wartime record of Pope Pius XII with special reference to the Holocaust.

In 2001, Professor Wistrich was one of three Jewish scholars who said they could no longer work on the committee unless the Vatican opened its archives. In a preliminary report, the panel whitewashed the Pope. They concluded that he “was through and through a diplomat, but that simply didn’t work when confronted with the Nazi machinery.”

In 2014, Wistrich authored an exhibition which was to be entitled “The 3,500-year relationships of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.” The exhibition which was scheduled for display at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) but was canceled under pressure from Arab nations. The exhibit eventually opened six months later after the phrase “Land of Israel” was replaced with “Holy Land.”

In response to the controversy, Wistrich said the cancellation “completely destroyed any claim that UNESCO could possibly have to be representing the universal values of toleration, mutual understanding, respect for the other narratives that are different, engaging with civil society organization. Because there is one standard for Jews and another for non-Jews.”

Nevertheless, he was not shy in excoriating the shortcomings of Israel’s political system.

He likened today’s radical “anti-Zionism” to anti-Jewish sentiments in Europe before the Holocaust. For a 2004 article published in the journal “The Jewish Political Studies Review” he wrote:

“The most virulent expressions of this ‘exterminationist’ or genocidal anti-Zionism have come from the Arab-Muslim world, which is the historical heir of the earlier 20th century forms of totalitarian antisemitism in Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union.”

In his book “Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred” he traced antisemitism’s historic roots in Jewish religious and social exceptionalism — which, he said, antagonized early pagans and rulers who demanded absolute fealty, and which later spread as Christians embraced the divinity of Jesus.

He distinguished between classical “anti-Zionism” (or opposition to a Jewish state) and antisemitism, and also between Islam and Islamist terrorism. His magnum opus “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad” is absolutely essential for anyone seriously interested in the subject. 

Robert Wistrich was an obsessive researcher and brilliant academic. There is of course a great deal of material on this painful subject. But he was a unique, punctilious, and powerful voice.

His early death spared him from the enormous resurgence of antisemitism we see today — but he would not have been the least bit surprised.

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