cover image Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews

Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews

Albert S. Lindemann. Cambridge University Press, $85 (592pp) ISBN 978-0-521-59369-4

This survey of anti-Semitism in the 50 years preceding the rise of the Nazis is sure to generate controversy. Setting himself against a slew of historians--including Daniel Goldhagen, whose Hitler's Willing Executioners caused such a sensation last year by arguing that the Holocaust was simply a natural extension of a long-standing German ""eliminationist anti-Semitism""--Lindemann subjects Western anti-Semitism to the same dispassionate, comparative approach he applied to the European left in his 1993 History of Democratic Socialism. The difference is that he's less successful here. A professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Lindemann displays a wide breadth of history and of the historical literature, weaving together the social, intellectual and political histories of such disparate countries as England, Russia and Germany to buttress his contentions that the intensity and character of anti-Semitism in the West fluctuated over time and geography and that the Holocaust was not inevitable. But his argument that anti-Semitism during this period can be partially understood because Jews were increasing their power reads like a justification, rather than an explanation, of this prejudice. His claim that anti-Semitism played a limited role in much of the period is also unconvincing. And even if either of these points is partially true, they fail to add to our understanding of why so many Europeans tacitly supported--or at least acquiesced to--the most efficient killing machine the world has ever known. (Oct.)