Book Review: The Devil That Never Dies

The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitismby Daniel Jonah GoldhagenLittle, Brown, 2013 Daniel Goldhagen shot to international prominence - not to say infamy - in 1996 with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, which excited enormous controversy by making an elaborate, substantiated case that the Nazis' monstrous attempt at wiping out the Jews of Europe only got as far as it did with the voluntary participation of thousands of 'ordinary' Germans. That, by gentle extension, an 'eliminationist antisemitism' had pervaded German culture by the early 1930s. That, by gentle extension, most Germans - not just most Nazis - were violently antisemitic.It was a hotly hated book, but it was a bravura historical performance, and Goldhagen's defenses of it in the media were hilariously, maddeningly po-faced. It was also an intensely awkward book, because it leveled very baldly a very uncomfortable charge.His new book, The Devil That Never Dies, does the same thing on an even broader scale. Here his subject is the world-wide resurgence of antisemitism he does his best to document, after first defining his terms in an opening chapter about antisemitism's history that's both sweeping and of course chilling:

It long predates and, until very recently historically, has been more widespread than genuine democracy as an animating ideology and political system. It long predates the Western idea of liberty becoming widespread, which was not until the modern period. Among intergroup prejudices, antisemitism's longevity is unparalleled.

Naturally, a discussion of international antisemitism can't really happen without pretty much immediately mentioning Israel, and this Goldhagen does often and surprisingly uncritically. The completely perfunctory "for all its many flaws" here is typical whenever he's on the subject - as is, unfortunately, the prose's degeneration into turgidity:

Antisemites in the West have turned Israel into their teeming animus' pointed object, which has been that much more inflamed by the simple fact that Israel is a highly successful society where Jews have produced - in the midst of a region of authoritarianism, economic basket-cases, illiberal societies, and antimodern cultures - a vibrant Western democracy that, if people would look, would be seen, for all its many flaws, as admirable and actually would serve as a model for many countries. That the Jews of Israel have managed to do this is something that antisemites desperately want to conceal, and there is no better way to do so than deny that any of this is the primary reality or the relevant criteria by which Israel should be viewed and judged, and then by demonizing the country and its Jews to a degree that renders these admirable achievements and traits (assuming knowledge of them percolated outward) tertiary if not irrelevant.

There are many villains in this new story of groundwater prejudice; the dock, previously filled only with Germans, has now been crammed with a veritable United Nations of accused - including the United Nations. Since Goldhagen rather disappointingly tends to equate all criticism of Israel with antisemitism, any government or institution that makes such criticisms is suspect. That this suspicion even encompasses NGOs like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International is troubling to read in a scholar such as Goldhagen. He writes, "All in all, this extensive NGO network has devastatingly steered the international community and discourse onto an antisemitic fixation on Israel," but he doesn't do much to convince the skeptic (and some of his further characterizations feel distressingly offhand, such as his reference to antisemitism as "the real devil that Christianity spawned," when a glance at the Old Testament would have reminded him that antisemitism was alive and thriving long before Christianity showed up).Ultimately, he resorts to vague, conspiratorial circumlocution of a type that's far more often been used to attack Jews rather than defend them. He makes blurry mention of "the strategic purveyors of antisemitism" who are stoking the fires of the new "redemonization" of Jews around the world, and his description of those purveyors in every case drifts from the multifaceted many to the shadow-cabinet and totally united one:

... a set of powerful institutional actors, from states and political movements to their leaders, to religions and their leaders, to media institutions and their leaders, to educational institutions and their leaders. Better than anyone, they have understood that the global world is a political world with a political worldwide discourse, and to achieve their political goals, they need to devise and pursue political policies to capture that discourse and shape the world's politics in an antisemitic manner.

He calls for a taking up of arms against this new strategic purveyor of antisemitism, but when it comes to actually naming that purveyor, he's far more hesitant and equivocal than he was thirty years ago when accusing the ordinary citizens of Germany. The purveyor he has in mind, the villain of this piece (despite feints at soft targets like Mel Gibson or Helen Thomas), is of course militant Islam. A re-dedication to combating the evil of antisemitism is a worthy rallying-call for a book, but if the evil is a taught thing, it has teachers.