Reviews for Antisemitism: Its History and Causes

The average rating for Antisemitism: Its History and Causes based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-09-09 00:00:00 Stuart Isacoff Often found on antisemitic websites, where it is exhibited as an example of a Jew denouncing Jews as responsible for and meriting their own ill-treatment by Gentiles (by being insular, etc.) -- but the anti-semites conveniently overlook the entire second half. While the first part of the book was written during a period when Lazare considered himself to be not an ethnically distinct "Jew" but an "Israelite," i.e., emphasizing his status as an assimilated French national (he boasted that his family had lived in France since Roman times), the second part, however, reflects a profound shift in Lazare's sensibility, reading antisemitism as a symptom of (and substitute for) class struggle, "one of the last, though most long lived, manifestations of that old spirit of reaction and narrow conservatism, which is vainly attempting to arrest the onward movement of the Revolution." This is the Lazare who became more fully a social anarchist -- and, indeed, the first defender of Alfred Dreyfus.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-26 00:00:00 Kelley Barber Revilo Oliver: Perhaps everyone who had an intelligent interest in the Jewish problem had been influenced by Bernard Lazare, who was the Jews' most effective apologist, although they show him no gratitude today and even denounce him as "anti-Semitic," using the catachrestic and grossly misleading epithet that he did so much to fix in common use. His L'Antisemitisme (1893) was persuasive because he honestly acknowledged that the Jews have been, since the beginning of their history, the fomenters of sedition and trouble in the nations in which they have lodged themselves; he attributed their hostility toward their hosts and their solidarity to their barbaric religion, which could no longer impose on rational men; and he predicted a peaceful and seemingly reasonable solution to the problem, the eventual absorption of the Jews into our race. Lazare was a learned man and seemed candid, and his book was accordingly influential. It was not generally known that he, after his probably innocent involvement in the Dreyfus affair'", changed his mind and decided that the only feasible solution was the one that Hitler later tried to put into effect, ie, the emigration from the nations of the West of all Jews - or, at least, all unwilling to join the nations in which they were residing - and their establishment in some area of the world in which their international nation would be geographically united and thus become a nation like the others in this world. In Lazare's time the plan that Hitler later tried to carry out was called Zionism by its Jewish advocates."