Etymology

The word “anti-Semitism” is constructed using the prefix anti- meaning

“against” and marking the opposition; of Shem which designates one of the sons of Noah in Genesis, and the ancestor of the Semitic peoples; of the suffix -ism used to form nouns corresponding to a behavior or an ideology.

Origin

The term “anti-Semitism” and its derivatives appeared in Germany at the end of the 19th century, although the facts they described were older.

For the historian Alex Bein, the term was used for the first time (in a single article and in isolation), in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish intellectual Moritz Steinschneider in the expression "anti-Semitic prejudices" ("antisemitische Vorurteile") , in order to mock the ideas of Ernest Renan who attributes “Semitic peoples” with cultural and spiritual defects (the designation of the peoples of the Levant under this term dates back to 1781). This isolated use had no legacy.

The specialist in Holocaust denial Gilles Karmasyn recalls that it was the German journalist Wilhelm Marr who truly invented the term "Antisemitismus" in the sense of "hostility to Jews", on the occasion of the founding of an "anti-Semitic league" in 1879 and not, as is sometimes reported, in his anti-Jewish pamphlet Victory of Judaism over Germanness considered from a non-denominational point of view, published the same year but where the expression does not appear.

Definition

After translating hostility based on religion and then on “race theory”, the term “anti-Semitism” designates any manifestation of hatred, hostility or discrimination against Jews or assimilated people.

History

The French translation of antisemitismus as “anti-Semitism” appeared, according to the Le Robert dictionary, in 1886, followed by the epithet anti-Semite three years later. However, Karmasyn brought to light the translations "anti-Semitism" and "anti-Semite" in the newspaper Le Globe in November 1879. The historian Jules Isaac specifies that the term "anti-Semitism" is in itself equivocal, while "its content [...] ] is essentially anti-Jewish. W. Marr in fact uses the word “Semitismus” as a synonym for “Judentum”, which designates Judaism, the Jewish community and Jewishness indifferently.

The word "anti-Semitism" therefore abandons the specifically religious meaning of anti-Jewish hostility to lend itself to the concept of "Jewish race" by which we began by designating baptized Jews, justifying the continuation of discrimination against them while they apostatized. Pseudo-scientific theories on the concept of "race" spread in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, particularly among the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke, whose ideas were taken up in Nazi theories.

Confusions

The term "anti-Semitism" may seem equivocal or even "completely inappropriate", either because it targets other Semitic-speaking populations including Arabs, or because today's Jews are only very partially Semitic, or to drown out the fact by disputing the word.

These discussions in no way prevent the fact that the term “anti-Semitism” was coined to designate the hostility claimed against Jews and their culture, in no way against other speakers of Semitic languages, and that it is still used in this sense. This is how we speak of “Arab anti-Semitism” to designate the hostility of Arabs towards Jews.

Nowadays

Graffiti in Madrid, Spain, 2003.

Today, the weakening of the strictly and openly racist dimension of hostility towards Jews suggests that anti-Semitism encompasses a broader notion than the original racial conception of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is because it has in reality existed in forms which are sometimes based neither on racial conceptions nor on religious foundations, which makes the concept difficult to define precisely.

The philosopher and political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff prefers the term “Judeophobia” to designate all anti-Jewish forms in the world since the Second World War and to distinguish it from anti-Semitism linked to racialist theses. Others prefer to speak of “new anti-Semitism” to describe more recent ideologies which would rely on the denunciation of a “supposed Jewish lobby or Zionism to mask their anti-Semitism”.

Holocaust denial and competition for victims are added to anti-Zionism to define the three axes of the new anti-Semitism, according to Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Nicole Gnesotto, holder of the “European Union” chair at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, suggests distinguishing three sources of contemporary anti-Semitism in France:

“First of all, historical anti-Semitism, based on stereotypes linked to money […]. It has always existed and we could describe this anti-Semitism as popular. There is a second, more political one, which Nonna Mayer talks about, linked to events in the Middle East and to Israeli policy, this one is rather taken up by what we call Islamo-leftism (the defense Muslims against Israeli policies). Finally, there is a third, an identity-based anti-Semitism, based on the illusion of the purity of the nation. This one belongs more to the extreme right, it's the one who came forward against Alain Finkielkraut when we heard things like “we're at home here, go home”. »

Definition of the European Parliament in 2017

On June 1, 2017, the European Parliament adopted a definition of anti-Semitism, accompanied by examples, which it asked all Member States of the European Union to share:

“Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews which can manifest itself in hatred towards them. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism target Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, community institutions and places of worship. »

While anti-Zionism is not explicitly mentioned in this definition of anti-Semitism, it includes in its examples "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example by asserting that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist company.”

As of December 5, 2019, twenty countries including sixteen from the European Union and France have adopted this resolution.

Principles of anti-Semitism

Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Barbara Tuchman identifies three “principles” at the source of anti-Semitism:

1. “It is vain to hope for logic – that is to say the reasoned expression of an enlightened mind”, when it comes to anti-Semitism;

2. Appeasement is futile: “The rule of human behavior here is that giving in to the demands of the enemy is not enough. On the contrary, adopting a position of weakness further increases resentment. Instead of making hostility disappear, submission stimulates it”;

3. “Anti-Semitism is independent of its object. What Jews do or fail to do is not a determining factor. The impetus comes from the needs of the persecutors and a specific political climate.”

“Here on earth, all people hate each other and together they hate the Jews. » -Mark Twain

Forms of anti-Semitism

16th century watercolor depicting a Jew from Worms carrying the rouelle. It is also accompanied by a purse of gold, a motif illustrating the greed attributed to the Israelites.

Even if, in its primitive and strictest definition, the word "anti-Semitism" takes a racial and secular turn, it is now used to qualify all anti-Jewish acts which may have taken place in History, whatever their nature. either the motive, as well as to designate acts hostile to Jews before the invention of the term anti-Semitism.

We can therefore distinguish several distinct forms which evolved in their conception over the course of History, which are not necessarily complementary and are not always based on the same foundations. Anti-Semitism, in its global sense, is therefore not necessarily a racialist ideology (which did not develop until late in the 19th century) and, consequently, is not always a form of racism.

René König mentions the existence of social, economic, religious or political anti-Semitism. He argues that the diverse forms that anti-Semitism has taken demonstrate that “the origins of different anti-Semitic prejudices are anchored in different periods of History”. For him, the various aspects of anti-Semitic prejudices over time and their variable distribution within social classes “make it particularly difficult to define the forms of anti-Semitism”.

The historian Edward Flannery also distinguishes several varieties of anti-Semitism:

· “economic and political anti-Semitism”, giving as examples Cicero or Charles Lindbergh;

· “religious anti-Semitism” or anti-Judaism;

· “nationalist anti-Semitism,” citing Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers who attacked Jews for their supposed arrogance and greed;

· “racial anti-Semitism”, expressed by Nazism.

Finally, the documentary filmmaker Louis Harap distinguishes “economic” anti-Semitism from “political” anti-Semitism, and merges the latter with “nationalist” anti-Semitism within an “ideological anti-Semitism.” » He also adds social anti-Semitism, with the following propositions:

· religious: “the Jews are the murderers of Christ” (deicidal people);

· economic: “Jews are bankers and usurers obsessed with money”;

· social: “Jews are socially inferior” and must be kept apart from the rest of society in ghettos and wear a sign to distinguish them from Christians, such as the rouelle and the Judenhut in the Middle Ages, or the yellow star under the Nazi regime;

· racial: “Jews are an inferior race”;

· ideological: “Jews are revolutionaries plotting to overthrow the power in place” (Jewish conspiracy theory, Judeo-Masonry, Judeo-Bolshevism);

· cultural: “Jews corrupt the morals and civilization of the country in which they live through their culture.”

Cultural anti-Semitism

Louis Harap defines cultural anti-Semitism as a “form of anti-Semitism which accuses Jews of corrupting a given culture and of wanting to supplant or succeed in supplanting this culture”.

For Eric Kandel, cultural anti-Semitism is based on the idea of “Jewishness” seen as “a religious or cultural tradition which is acquired through learning, through distinctive traditions and education”. This form of anti-Semitism considers that Jews possess “harmful psychological and social characteristics that are acquired through acculturation.”

Finally, Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia describe cultural anti-Semitism as an idea focusing on the supposed "haughty attitude of Jews within the societies in which they live."

Cultural anti-Semitism

Louis Harap defines cultural anti-Semitism as a “form of anti-Semitism which accuses Jews of corrupting a given culture and of wanting to supplant or succeed in supplanting this culture”.

For Eric Kandel, cultural anti-Semitism is based on the idea of “Jewishness” seen as “a religious or cultural tradition which is acquired through learning, through distinctive traditions and education”. This form of anti-Semitism considers that Jews possess “harmful psychological and social characteristics that are acquired through acculturation.”

Finally, Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia describe cultural anti-Semitism as an idea focusing on the supposed "haughty attitude of Jews within the societies in which they live."

Religious anti-Semitism

Leaflet distributed in kyiv before the trial of Mendel Beilis, accused of “ritual murder”, recommending Christian parents to watch over their children during Passover.

Religious anti-Semitism (or anti-Judaism) is defined as opposition to Jewish beliefs and Judaism. He therefore does not attack the Jews as a people or ethnicity, and sometimes even advocates their conversion. However, persecution can persist for these New Christians, suspected of remaining secretly faithful to their religion or their traditions, as was the case with the Marranos, Spanish and Portuguese Jews converted to Catholicism from the 15th century.

Jews were also accused of ritual crimes, often through legends of kidnapping children for sacrifice. This is one of the oldest anti-Semitic allegations in history: from the legend of the murder of Anderl von Rinn in 1492 to the Beilis affair in 1911. According to historian Walter Laqueur, there would have had more than 150 accusations and probably thousands of rumors of this type in history.

Anti-Judaism in Europe often came from a lack of understanding of the traditions of the Jewish religion, which were perceived as strange and sometimes evil. For example, the word sabbath, used to speak of a nocturnal meeting of witches, comes from the Hebrew shabbat, a term designating the sacred weekly day of rest for the Jews (the equivalent of Sunday for Christians).

Expulsion of the Jews from Seville, Joaquín Turina y Areal, c. 1850.

In 1391, the Spanish kingdoms were the scene of “bloody baptisms” which saw numerous forced conversions of Jews under the pressure of popular pogroms. In 1492, the Catholic kings, by the decree of the Alhambra, expelled all Jews from Spain, a measure at the origin of the Sephardic Diaspora. Only the converted or those who agreed to become one remained. But word spread that converted Jews continued to practice their religion in secret.

Also, several professions were forbidden to new Christians.

And this although many of these new Christians, educated in the Catholic religion for several generations, were sincere. So much so that, in Iberian families, the custom came to ask for “certificates of blood purity” before entering into marriage, or to exercise this or that profession. Many of them tried to flee the Spanish-Portuguese territories and, once relatively safe in France, Turkey, Morocco, the Netherlands or England from Cromwell, they rediscovered the religion of their ancestors. This was the phenomenon of Marranism, bearer of a secret memory,

underground, hidden, despite the disappearance of synagogues, texts, and the impossibility of following the rites. The Marranos, accused of "Judaizing in secret", retained, for some of them, the memory of their origins, before sometimes returning to it, that is to say when the situation allowed them to do so. Many descendants of Marranos, these forcibly converted Christians, spread across Europe, with varying fates, and as far as America, or even Asia, where the Inquisition continued to pursue them long after their departure from the Old Continent, to trying to make Judaism disappear.

Economic anti-Semitism

Economic anti-Semitism is characterized by the idea that Jews produce economic activities harmful to society, or that the economy becomes harmful when practiced by them.

Commissioner of the Jewish people stealing their country, without regard for the crippled soldier and medalist. Inscription: “Everything is ours!” ". Drawing published in Hungary, Mi. Manno, 1919.

Anti-Semitic allegations often link Jews to money and greed, accusing them of being greedy, enriching themselves at the expense of non-Jews, or controlling the world of finance and business. These theories were developed among others in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a false claim to attest to the project of world conquest by the Jews, or in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper published at the beginning of the 20th century by Henry Ford.

Little by little replacing anti-Judaism, this anti-Semitism took off, like racial anti-Semitism, during the 19th century, parallel to the development of industrial capitalism in the Western world. It is embodied in France by Édouard Drumont in his work Jewish France.

Historian Derek Penslar explains that these allegations are based on the following imputations:

· Jews “are naturally incapable of doing honest work.”

· Jews “dominate a financial cabal seeking to subjugate the world.”

Penslar also puts forward the idea that economic anti-Semitism is distinguished today from religious anti-Semitism, which is “often subdued”, whereas they were linked until now, the second explaining the first.

Abraham Foxman notes six preconceptions common to these accusations:

· “all Jews are rich”

· “Jews are greedy and greedy”

· “powerful Jews control the business world”

· “the Jewish religion advocates profit and materialism”

· “Jews do not hesitate to fool boys”

· “Jews use their power to serve their community”

Ultimately, the myth of the Jew and money is summarized by the following assertion by Gerald Krefetz: "[Jews] control the banks, the monetary reserve, the economy and the business — of the community, of the country, of the world ".

Criticism of this anti-Semitism emerged in France in the 18th century and led under the Revolution to the emancipation decrees of 1790 and 1791. On December 23, 1789 at the Constituent Assembly, Maximilien de Robespierre explained the situation in these terms:

“You have been told things about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contrary to history... On the contrary, these are national crimes that we must atone for, by giving them back the inalienable rights of man of which no human power could strip them. . Vices and prejudices are still attributed to them; the spirit of sect and self-interest exaggerates them. But to whom can we blame them if not our own injustices? After having excluded them from all honors, even from the rights to public esteem, we left them only the objects of lucrative speculation. Let us restore them to happiness, to the homeland, to virtue, by restoring to them the dignity of men and citizens…”.

Robespierre was referring to the discriminatory measures taken in the Middle Ages against Jews, which confined them to commercial professions.

In 2019, the Lemonde.fr site published an article in its Les décoders section, to remind us that contrary to the conspiratorial allegations that abound on this subject, the global banking system is not in the hands of the Rothschild bank, that is- i.e. Jews.

Historiographical anti-Semitism

According to historian Tal Bruttmann, the resurgence of anti-Semitism observed in France dates back to the "early 2000s", when "people found themselves in the virtual world", with the main "vectors of anti-Semitism" being polemicists Dieudonné and Alain Soral. Tensions also manifested themselves shortly after on the political but also historiographical scene, with various controversies crossing over several memorial laws.

A theory of a "Jewish conspiracy", which would have "invented, organized, profited massively from slavery" appears in Europe and "will take root in France" in particular, "propagated by extremists such as Alain Soral or the former acrobat Dieudonné”.

Dieudonné and Soral draw on The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, published by the Nation of Islam, which in 1991 alleged that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. These theories were refuted by the American Historical Association ( AHA) from 1995, the year they failed to establish themselves in France, despite the propaganda.

According to this “proven anti-Semitism”, denounced by the press, historians and intellectuals, the Jews established the sugar industry in the West Indies in 1654 or 1655. But 20 years earlier, the Compagnie des Iles d'Amérique had signed a contract in 1635 to start sugar production with a merchant from Rouen, giving it the sugar monopoly in Martinique in 1639.

In Guadeloupe, the company had also granted tax exemptions and other logistical and financial advantages. In 1642, a royal edict of March 8 established that 7,000 white people had already migrated to the French islands since 1635 for the benefit of the Company of the Islands of America, this time authorized to import black slaves. In Saint-Christophe, the governor's sugar cane plantation had more than 100 black slaves and 200 “servants”, that is to say white indentured laborers, from 1646 onwards. The Carmelite missionary Maurile de Saint-Michel visited it in 1646, writing on his return that sugar was already "the first commodity of our islands" and around 1650, this time it employed 300 slaves and 100 white indentured laborers.

The interpretation of The Secret Relationship distorts the account of Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, published in 1667, which lists only seven to eight Jews from Brazil arriving in Martinique in 1654, without specifying their names or whether they owned slaves. The much more reliable 1664 census counted 22 Jews in Martinique, holding 5 white servants and a total of 20 slaves. Du Tertre took up the text of another Dominican, a religious order practicing slavery and trying to recover its concessions in the Antilles, where the Carmelites and Jesuits were preferred to it in 1650. The two authors published more than a decade after the alleged facts and lived in 1654 in France. The Dutch obtained concessions in Guadeloupe, but well after 1654 and they “were Protestants and not Jews”.

The Dutch were well expelled from Brazil during its reconquest by the Portuguese in 1654, but to go to the United Provinces, Barbados and New Amsterdam (future Manhattan, then Dutch), where the arrival of 23 Jews from Brazil in 1654 was the origin of the Jewish community of New York and the future United States, despite the hostility of Governor Pieter Stuyvesant.

Racial anti-Semitism

Racial anti-Semitism is defined as hatred of Jews as a racial or ethnic group rather than on religious grounds. He considers the Jews to be an inferior race to that of the nation in which they live.

Racial anti-Semitism finds historiographical occurrences in a phenomenon akin to the Spanish laws of blood purity (limpieza de sangre) when, from 1501 until the 19th century, the fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) of the Saffavids of Shiite Persia banned Jews to go out in snowy or rainy weather, for fear of the elements being defiled by them and these elements in turn defiling a Muslim. Due to their intrinsic impurity, they cannot enter a bakery or buy fresh fruit so as not to contaminate the place or the food. In France, the Carmelite Order included in its regulations in the 16th and 17th centuries the ban on accepting any nun of Jewish origin.

Racial theory developed particularly in the eugenics and scientistic movements of the late 19th century and early 20th century which considered that “Aryans” (or Germanic people) were racially superior to other peoples.

At the beginning of the 19th century, laws came into force in certain Western European countries allowing the emancipation of Jews. They are no longer forced to live in ghettos and see their property rights and freedom of worship extended. Yet traditional hostility toward Jews on religious grounds persists and even extends to racial anti-Semitism. Ethno-racial theories such as those in Joseph Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-55) participate in this movement. These theories often placed white European peoples, and particularly the “Aryan race,” above the Jewish people.

It is therefore a secular ideology taking over from the old religious anti-Judaism and replacing it. The new forms of hostility that manifest themselves are therefore detached from any religious connotation, at least in the representation that this ideology has of itself.

Inspired by Gobineau, Romanian Alexandru C. Cuza considers Jews to be a biologically different "race" who poisons his country by their mere existence, and emphasizes the basis of his ideology in the teachings of the Orthodox Church; this new type of anti-Semitism is called “Christian racist anti-Semitism” by the historian Jean Ancel.

Anti-Semitism plays a large part in the Nazi ideology of Adolf Hitler, führer of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Nazis, a neo-pagan movement, made no difference between orthodox and secular Jews, exterminating them whether they practice Judaism or are baptized Christians, or even engaged in a Christian religious life

Political anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitic and anti-Soviet Nazi propaganda poster, written in Lithuanian (top: “A Jew is your eternal enemy”; bottom: “Who imprisoned millions of people in labor camps? A Jew!”), 1941.

Political anti-Semitism is defined as hostility toward Jews based on their supposed desire to seize power nationally or globally, or their desire to dominate the world through an “international conspiracy.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery posing as a plan for world conquest by Jews, is generally considered the beginning of contemporary Jewish conspiracy theory literature. Daniel Pipes notes that the document develops recurring themes of conspiracy anti-Semitism: "Jews are always plotting", "Jews are everywhere", "Jews are behind every institution", "Jews obey a central authority, waves Sages”, and “the Jews are close to succeeding in their plan”.

Political anti-Semitism became particularly democratized during the interwar period following the Russian Revolution of 1917, notably under the influence of the White Russians, before being co-opted by Nazi ideology. It was based on the idea that the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” would attempt to take power by imposing communism or anarchism across the world.

The concept then appears as a renewal of the Jewish conspiracy theory which is superimposed, without replacing it, on the myth developed by economic anti-Semitism of the Jew responsible for capitalism.

It also relies on the fact that a certain number of communist and anarchist thinkers or revolutionaries were actually Jewish or of Jewish origin: the theorists Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Georg Lukacs and Ernest Mandel; or, in Russia, the Bolshevik cadres Trotsky, Martov, Lenin, Sverdlov, Kamenev, Berman, Zinoviev, Kun, Losovski, Radek, or Yagoda. Thus, and for some Russians favorable to the Tsarist regime, the assassination of the imperial family by the Bolsheviks was necessarily the work of a “Jewish plot” and this interpretation contributed to fueling the anti-Semitic climate in Russia.

Inscription: “Judaism tends towards world hegemony”. Jews were accused by the Nazis of seeking to seize power through communist parties, syndicalism or anarchism. 1942.

This fact was also used by the Nazi arguments to justify the existence of a Judeo-Bolshevik plot aimed at dominating Europe, and to violently repress communist activists. The Jews were also accused, after the First World War, of being responsible for the German defeat. This myth, called Dolchstoßlegende in German (“stab in the back”), was an attempt to exonerate the German army from the capitulation of 1918, by attributing responsibility for the military failure to Jews, but also socialists, to the Bolsheviks and the Weimar Republic.

Looking from another side of the political lens, the German socialist, August Bebel, called anti-Semitism “the socialism of imbeciles” – an expression often used by his social democratic friends from 1890 and still today. 'today.

New anti-Semitism

Theorists of the new anti-Semitism argue that anti-Zionism can sometimes hide an anti-Semitic ideology. Here a demonstration against the Gaza war in Tanzania, 2009.

In the 1990s a new concept was born, that of a new anti-Semitism which would have developed in both left-wing and right-wing parties, as well as in radical Islam. For some authors, these “new anti-Semites” are now hiding behind anti-Zionism, opposition to Israeli policy and the denunciation of the influence of Jewish associations in Europe and the United States — and sometimes even behind anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism—to express their hatred of Jews.

Bernard-Henri Lévy refers the new anti-Semitism to three main reasons:

· 1. Anti-Zionism: “The Jews would be hateful because they would support a bad, illegitimate and murderous state.”

· 2. Holocaust denial: “The Jews would be all the more hateful if they based their beloved Israel on imaginary or, at least, exaggerated suffering.” Thus, on May 4, 1961, the Egyptian MP and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Hussein Zulficar Sabri exonerated Hitler of the massacre of the Jews of Europe by declaring "the Zionists made promises but never kept them, to force Hitler to commit crimes and create a legend leading ultimately to the creation of the State of Israel.”

· 3. The competition of victims: The Jews would commit “a third and final crime which would make them even more detestable and which would consist, by tirelessly talking to us about the memory of their dead, in stifling other memories, in silencing the other dead , to eclipse the other martyrs who mourn the world today and the most emblematic of which would be that of the Palestinians.

For historian Bernard Lewis, the "new anti-Semitism" represents the "third wave" or "ideological wave" of anti-Semitism, the first two waves being religious anti-Semitism and racial anti-Semitism. He believes that this anti-Semitism has its roots in Europe and not in the Muslim world, Islam not having the Christian tradition of exaggerating Jewish power. The modern obsession with Jews in the Muslim world is therefore a recent phenomenon that derives from the Old Continent. The emergence in certain educational establishments of this new anti-Semitism would therefore be linked to a rise in Islamic communitarianism and the demonization of the State of Israel.

Sign during a demonstration in San Francisco, United States, 2003.

Critics of the concept of “new anti-Semitism” argue that it mixes anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, that it gives too narrow a definition of the criticism made of Israel and too broad of its demonization, or even that it exploits anti-Semitism in an attempt to silence debate on Israeli politics.

For Norman Finkelstein, for example, the "new anti-Semitism" is an argument used periodically since the 1970s by organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (American equivalent of LICRA) not to combat anti-Semitism, but rather to exploit historical suffering. Jews and the trauma of the Shoah with the aim of immunizing Israel and its policies against possible criticism. To support this thesis, he cites the 2003 report of the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia which includes, in its list of anti-Semitic activities and beliefs, images of the Palestinian flag, support for the PLO, or comparison between Israel and South Africa during apartheid. Finkelstein also maintains that the drifts from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism are predictable and not specific to Jews: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict contributes to the development of anti-Semitism just as the Vietnam and Iraq wars contributed to the rise anti-Americanism in the world.

The difficulty of drawing a precise border between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is illustrated by the fact that the essayist Alain Soral - convicted by the courts for racial insult, provocation and incitement to racial hatred - and the comedian Dieudonné - whose conviction for demonstration of hatred and anti-Semitism in France has been confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights — are accused by the media and part of the French political class of hiding behind criticism of Zionism and the supposed power of a Jewish lobby to spread anti-Semitic ideas. Soral, condemned several times for his comments, defends himself from these accusations by asserting that he does not castigate what he calls "everyday Jews" - or the Jewish community as a whole - or even the spiritual currents of Judaism, but does criticism of the “domination of an organized Jewish community elite” in France and the United States; Israeli policy in Palestine; as well as the values of what he calls “Talmudo-Zionist philosophy”, perceived by the essayist as a “warlike” and “racialist” reading of the Torah.

Alain Soral argues, for example, that if a "spiritualist Jew" translates into the biblical expression "chosen people" an alliance between God and a "chosen people", invited to become a model of morality for other peoples, a " Racialist Jew” would read this as proof of the racial and divine superiority of the Jews over the rest of humanity.

The definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the European Parliament does not explicitly mention anti-Zionism. However, one of the accompanying examples of anti-Semitism is: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination by, for example, asserting that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”

For his part, sociologist Shmuel Trigano considers that “the current use of the word “Jew” in public discourse is often a real pathology.”