42 No. 57 JUSTICE o define antisemitism is a difficult task, especially so in a way that brings agreement among a wide range of scholars and practitioners. Nevertheless, a widely accepted definition of antisemitism is necessary to enable meaningful data collection of antisemitic incidents, preventive measures, and law enforcement. Ideally, such a definition for practitioners is based on scholarly insights and debates about an understanding of contemporary antisemitism in its different forms and its multiple sources. This is precisely what Kenneth L. Marcus attempts to do in his noteworthy book The Definition of Anti-Semitism. The importance of recognizing antisemitism is beyond scholarly debate. In extreme cases, its recognition can become a question of life and death. Marcus exemplifies this fact with the police investigation into the abduction and torture of Ilan Halimi in 2006. Halimi was abducted in Paris by a group that called itself “the Barbarians.” They selected Halimi as a Jew because they thought that his family, as Jews, was rich, and therefore could pay substantial ransom. The French investigators failed to see the antisemitic dimensions of this crime and thus might have underestimated the risk that Halimi's torturers would eventually kill him. Yet “the Barbarians'” aim to get ransom was not their only and possibly not even their main motivation. Murderous hatred of Jews was also part of it, as well as highly irrational expectations of the amount of ransom they could obtain. Both had to do with “the Barbarians'” antisemitic views of Jews. Ilan Halimi eventually died of his severe wounds and the burns he endured during three weeks of horrendous torture, only hours after he was released, naked and handcuffed near a railway track. The police investigation did not lack for dedication, but their tactics and general approach probably would have been more effective had it taken into account the perpetrators' antisemitism. As this case indicates, nonrecognition of antisemitic acts also effects preventive action. College administrators, for example, might fail to protect Jewish students on campuses from aggression and hate crimes if they fail to recognize the antisemitic dimensions of some of the actions directed against such students on their campuses. Marcus draws on different schools and disciplines in his discussion “toward a definition of antisemitism,” as Gavin I. Langmuir phrased it in his influential book of 25 years ago. The extraordinary strength of Marcus' book is its detailed and sober discussion of the different approaches to and arguments about definitions of antisemitism. He covers the major contemporary debates and objections to different aspects of what might or might not be considered antisemitic today. One need not agree with every detail of Marcus' conclusions, but he surely provides a thorough and clear discussion of the arguments in a most compelling way. The book is organized in six chapters. One of the first questions focuses on how antisemitism can be conceptualized: as a set of attitudes, prejudices, specific behaviors, or as an ideology? Marcus shows that antisemitism involves all of these and argues that we would not be able to understand it if we reduced it to only one of these aspects. We can only observe actions, not attitudes, and we must take actions as indications to decide whether or not we consider them to be motivated by antisemitic attitudes. However, we also need an understanding of the ideologies within a given sociohistorical context that produce, enable, and foster these attitudes to comprehend or even to recognize their forms. Explaining antisemitism on the basis of certain ideologies does not exonerate individuals from responsibility for their actions, even if some scholars make convincing arguments that antisemitism is ubiquitous. It can be argued, and Marcus refers in this context to Slavoj Žižek, that antisemitism “has become so deeply ingrained in the modern West as to be part of what it means to be 'sane' in today's world” (p. 52). However, “the anti-Semite, or racist, makes a personal choice and may be held responsible, even though the speaker should not be assumed to originate or control what is said” (pp. 53-54). This is another reason why describing antisemitism as a disease or pathology is misleading. Antisemitism has often been described as a specific form of racist or anti-religious bias. However, Marcus shows that antisemitism can come in racist or anti-religious T Reviewed byGünther Jikeli The Definition of Anti-Semitism by Kenneth L. Marcus Oxford University Press (2015), 296 pp. ISBN 978 0199375646
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