by Todd Myers
David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is an extraordinary work of historical inquiry. At nearly 600 pages, it traces how “Judaism”—often more an idea than a living community—has served for over three millennia as a symbol against which civilizations defined truth, order, and legitimacy. This is not simply a catalogue of prejudice or persecution. Nirenberg’s argument is more unsettling: anti-Judaism is woven into the intellectual fabric of the West itself, shaping debates about reason, authority, and freedom that persist to this day.
His concern about anti-Judaism and its future role is not a straightforward argument to sell in the United States. In 1965, the Catholic Church rejected holding the Jewish people responsible for the murder of Jesus Christ. Pope John Paul II became a pivotal figure for improving Jewish/Catholic relations and issued apologies for Catholic complicity and silence during the Holocaust. Prominent voices in the evangelical Christian community have embraced the Jews as God’s chosen people and the importance of the state of Israel in the fulfillment of end-of-day prophesies. Jewish minorities play prominent roles in American electoral politics in the key battleground states of Florida and New York. Jews hold prominent roles in American science, entertainment, politics, and finance, and are one of the wealthier American religious denominations on a per capita basis. Kanye West, when digging up old antisemitic tropes to express frustration with his business deals, received almost universal opprobrium and was promptly dropped by Adidas, a German company. Nevertheless, the residue of these tropes and shifts in how Israel and its relations with the Palestinians are being perceived allows for the rekindling of anti-Jewish sentiments.
The story begins in the ancient world, where Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians perceived Jews as obstinate outsiders hostile to universal order. Christianity absorbed and intensified these images. Paul’s contrast between law and spirit, the Gospels’ polemics against Pharisees, and Augustine’s “witness doctrine” embedded Judaism as shorthand for carnality, literalism, and resistance to truth. Jews themselves were cast as living evidence of error—kept alive, but subordinated.
Across medieval Islam and Christendom, “Judaism” became a flexible metaphor. To accuse rivals of “Judaizing” was to mark them as rigid, hypocritical, or hostile to divine unity. Jews were both tolerated as minorities and vilified as archetypes of greed and deception. Here, as throughout the book, Nirenberg insists that the intellectual role of “Judaism” mattered more than the actual lives of Jews, who served as mirrors for broader struggles within each civilization.
The Renaissance and Reformation only sharpened these dynamics. Christian humanists who turned to Hebrew texts provoked fears of “Judaizing” scholarship. Luther, in particular, moved from cautious sympathy to ferocious denunciation, wielding “Judaism” as a weapon against Catholic “legalism” and Protestant rivals alike.
Even the Enlightenment, so often associated with tolerance and reason, was not immune. Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, and others cast Judaism as the embodiment of superstition, tribalism, and narrowness, the very opposite of universal reason. The irony, as Nirenberg shows, is that the Enlightenment’s commitment to emancipation often relied on inherited stereotypes of Judaism as a foil. In other words, liberal ideals of universality were built on exclusions that contradicted their own principles. By the nineteenth century, these patterns fused with nationalism and racial theory: Marx equated “Judaism” with capitalist materialism, while Wagner and Hegel portrayed Jews as corrosive to authentic community. Such thought prepared the ground for the racial antisemitism of the Nazi era.
Nirenberg’s conclusion is deliberately sobering. Anti-Judaism is not a relic, but a recurring framework for thinking about society’s ills. The charge of “Judaism,” whether associated with materialism, literalism, or subversion, still surfaces in modern debates. From the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and Israel’s war in Gaza, to campus protests and the polarizing 2024 US election, “the Jew” remains a symbol through which ideological conflicts are fought. A combination of factors, including more migrants from the Middle East in Europe and the Anglosphere who are more likely to be suspicious of Israel, academic trends toward anti-colonialist discourses, and a festering war with high civilian casualties and a difficult road to peace, provides fertilizer for the spread of an anti-Zionist variation of anti-Judaism that has deep roots.
What makes Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism so valuable is not only its erudition but its challenge to complacency. He does not reduce anti-Judaism to hatred of Jews or to violent persecution. Instead, he demonstrates how it has functioned as a recurring habit of thought, shaping even those traditions that claim to champion reason and freedom. For classical liberals, this insight is especially resonant. Liberalism, at its best, insists on judging individuals as individuals, not as embodiments of abstract categories. Nirenberg’s work demonstrates how dangerous it becomes when political or intellectual systems reduce people to symbols in larger struggles—whether as “the Jew,” “the capitalist,” or “the globalist.”
Seen this way, Anti-Judaism is not only a historical account, but a meditation on the fragility of open societies. It serves as a reminder that the fight for pluralism and individual dignity requires vigilance against old habits of scapegoating dressed in new clothes. Demanding yet indispensable, this book compels readers to confront how inherited frameworks of thought can distort even the noblest aspirations, and how a freer future depends on resisting the temptation to define truth through the demonization of the other.
Dr. Todd Myers is chair and professor of political economy at Grossmont College and lecturer for the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics at San Diego State University.
