The Life and Afterlife of a Seminal Book

Antisemitism Studies, Volume 8, Number 2, Fall 2024, pp. 255-271. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2979/ast.00018

Abstract: In 1986, Bernard Lewis published a highly influential book, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. For Lewis, who was then the pre-eminent British-American historian of the Islamic world, the book represented a departure from his prior research agenda. Although Lewis was Jewish, his scholarly work had touched little on Jews. In this book (and its companion, The Jews of Islam), Lewis portrayed the legacy of Islam as one of broad toleration of Jews, tinged with contempt but void of hatred. He traced the outbreak of virulent antisemitism among Arabs not to the tradition of Islam, but to the influence of European and especially Nazi antisemitism. This interpretation may have been inspired and reinforced by Lewis’s own personal exposure to Arab antisemitism during the Second World War and in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Bernard Lewis was a historian of Islam and the Middle East, who once told an interviewer that his abiding interest and specialty was “Islam as a civilization.” Over many years, his primary scholarly interests remained constant: Islam in its many permutations, and the attempts of Muslims to come to terms with modernity. Yet, at a late point in his career, he also became an important and influential interpreter of antisemitism. In 1986, he published Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, an ambitious and far-ranging work that analyzed antisemitism historically, with an emphasis on its growth among Arabs. The erudition on display in this book was breathtaking and demonstrated Lewis’s unique talent for moving effortlessly between the history of the West and of the East, and across the whole chronological range of world history.¹

Why did Lewis depart from his scholarly path to write this book? The answer to this question not only reveals much about Lewis, but also about the larger debate over the “new antisemitism,” which Lewis was among the first to name and interpret.

Between Muslims and Jews

Bernard Lewis was born in London in 1916, where he embarked on a distinguished career at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. There he established himself as a historian’s historian. Lewis had an unparalleled talent for placing the history of Islam into a world context, and he did so in elegant and approachable English prose. He had a genius for language, demonstrated by a rare mastery of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew; his hobby was to translate poetry from all four languages.

At the age of 60, he relocated to Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. Over the next 30 plus years, he became America’s leading interpreter of the Middle East. Always a prolific author, he published even more following his retirement at 70. After 9/11, in his mid-80s, Lewis wrote two New York Times bestsellers. He published his memoirs at age 96 and died in 2018 at the age of 101.²

During this very long career, Lewis gained fame among many, and notoriety among some, for his interpretations of Islam generally, and the modern Middle East specifically. But Lewis was also a Jew. At the University of London, this aspect of his identity had not figured much in his choice of research topics. But once he established himself in America, Lewis felt inspired, or liberated perhaps, to turn to Jewish and Jewish-related subjects.

His two most significant works in this area appeared close to each other. In 1984, he published The Jews of Islam, a study of the Jews in the Islamic world from the seventh century to the present.³ In 1986, he published his seminal Semites and Anti-Semites. The latter book, in particular, took him well off his beaten track. The motive for the departure must have been powerful, yet it is also somewhat obscure.

Experiencing Antisemitism

The search might begin with a question: had Lewis himself suffered from antisemitism? Many who studied it in his generation had been its victims and they were anxious to better understand ideas and forces that had threatened and upended their lives. Was Lewis one of them? On the face of it, he was not. Lewis was a child of British-born parents. In no account did he ever reckon with antisemitic bigotry in his native country. To the contrary, he regarded Britain as less afflicted by antisemitism than any other country, and with some reason.

During Lewis’s wartime military service, he had been entrusted with the most sensitive work a Jew could do. He served in British intelligence, and toward the end of the war, in 1944, one of his duties was to translate the intercepted Hebrew communications of the Jewish Agency in Palestine. In Britain, only Jews had the requisite knowledge of everyday Hebrew to do this task. But could British Jews be trusted not to leak the fact of the intercepts to the Zionists? The Arabist James Heyworth-Dunne said no, and he secretly denounced Lewis as a Zionist. In response, the head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, known as “C,” rushed to Lewis’s defense. There had been no leaks, he said, and he dismissed Heyworth-Dunne as “a very tainted source of information. He has an Egyptian wife and is known to be violently anti-Semitic.”⁴

So, when Lewis stood accused of disloyalty by an antisemite, the British establishment stood by him. In later years, Lewis would always regard himself as accepted and trusted in Britain’s inner sanctums, from the Foreign Office to Chatham House.

France was another story, however. In 1936, he went to Paris to study under the French Islamic scholar Louis Massignon, who, Lewis wrote, “had two prejudices against me… sometimes I was not quite sure what my offense was: was it crucifying Jesus (as a Jew) or burning Joan of Arc (as an Englishman)?” Lewis’ relationship with Massignon “deteriorated,” but he otherwise seemed to have enjoyed his stay in France, and records no antisemitic episodes.⁵ It might be recalled that the dominant political party in France at the time was the Popular Front, headed by a Jew, Léon Blum.

In America, Lewis also may have had a brush with a certain brand of discrimination: “On my early visits to the United States [in the early 1950s] I was shocked by the level of institutionalized anti-Semitism which would have been inconceivable in England. It was quite normal at that time for some hotels not to accept Jewish guests. In England, any hotel that did that would have lost its license.”⁶ “Shocking” that may have been, but such restrictive clauses would disappear almost entirely by the end of the decade, when American antisemitism reached its lowest ebb. In Lewis’s account of his American experiences, there are no other comparable observations.

Lewis, then, did not experience antisemitism in Britain, France, or America. His real and most significant brush with it came not in any Western country, but in the Arab world in 1949.

Access Denied

After the world war, Lewis embarked on his career as a full-fledged historian of the Arab world. Indeed, he became almost the only trained historian of the Arabs in the West; others who dabbled in this history were philologists or Orientalists by training. In 1946 and 1947, he wrote The Arabs in History, a slim volume which would become a classic when it appeared in 1950. It later went through countless editions and appeared on every Middle East syllabus for decades to come.⁷

Lewis had travelled and conducted research in Syria before the war, when it was under French control, and no doubt imagined he would resume exploring the Arab world after the war too. But it was not to be, because after 1948, Arab states denied him access—as a Jew. Lewis explained:

Arab governments made it quite clear that people of the Jewish religion, no matter what their citizenship, would not be given visas or be permitted to enter any independent Arab country…. As directed against Jews, this ban was seen as perfectly natural and normal. In some countries it continues to this day, although in practice most Arab countries have given it up. Neither the United Nations nor the public protested any of this in any way, so it is hardly surprising that Arab governments concluded that they had license for this sort of action and worse.⁸

One could lie about one’s religion, and some did. But Lewis was not prepared to hide his identity: “Most of us, even the nonreligious, found it morally impossible to make such compromises for no better reason than the pursuit of an academic career.”⁹ At 33, Lewis was already a full professor, but he faced a threat to his research career because of institutionalized Arab bigotry, and no one seemed to care.

Lewis pivoted: Turkey, though Muslim, was open to Jews. He learned Ottoman Turkish, went to Istanbul in 1949, and became the first Westerner to work in the Ottoman archives. Lewis recalled it was as though he had been let loose in Ali Baba’s cave. Since the Ottomans had ruled the Arabs for 400 years, he could write on many aspects of Arab history from the Ottoman records. This breakout work established him as a pathfinding historian and made him both unique and famous in his field.¹⁰

The fact remained that he had been a victim of Arab prejudice against Jews. And his sense of outrage ran deeper still. As mentioned, late in his wartime service, Lewis was involved in translating Hebrew for British intelligence. For most of the war, however, he had translated intercepted communications from Arab governments. The British had focused their intelligence gathering on the collaboration of the Arabs with Nazi Germany. In his modest way, Lewis helped to uncover a swamp of pro-Nazi sympathy stretching from Egypt to Iraq. This experience gave him direct insight into the ways in which racist ideas, of European origin, penetrated the Arab world. It must have had a sobering effect on a young man, who, before the war, had taken up the enthusiastic study of the Arab peoples.

This, I submit, is the background to understanding Lewis’s two works, The Jews of Islam, and even more so, Semites and Anti-Semites. They are an attempt to reconcile Lewis’s conflicted feelings about Muslim attitudes toward Jews—so tolerant when Islam basked in the confidence of its own power, but so hostile in his own lifetime.

From Tolerance to Hate

The thesis of The Jews of Islam is that Muslims, in their heyday, generally tolerated the Jews as “people of the book,” and often preferred them to the Christian minority, who were sometimes suspected of sympathizing with the Christian empires hostile to Islam.

Tolerance, Lewis pointed out, was not equality by any stretch of the imagination: Jews could never be equal to Muslims in an Islamic polity. That would have amounted to a dereliction of Islam, which promotes the supremacy of Muslims in countless ways. The dhimma, the covenant that governs Muslim-Jewish relations, was in fact codified discrimination.

But this did not amount to institutionalized hatred. The Muslim view of Jews was that they deserved contempt for being “cowardly and unmilitary.”¹¹ This is a commonplace prejudice against the “other” in many times and places, and Lewis regarded it as unexceptional, especially in the Middle Ages. Such Muslim contempt was much more benign than the Christian fear that was attached to Jews in medieval Europe—the notion that the Jews were a sinister force for evil. As Lewis emphasized, the Jews’ experience in Islam compared favorably with their experience in Christendom and much of modern Europe, where a virulent antisemitism ultimately led to their near extermination.

So, what went wrong? When the Arabs discovered that the Jews were not as contemptible and cowardly as they thought, they rushed to embrace the idea of a powerful Jewish cabal, which they adopted from the Nazis and the Soviets, turning the Arab world into a hotbed of antisemitism.

The title Semites and Anti-Semites is an obvious allusion to the claim sometimes made by Arabs that they cannot be antisemites because they are Semites themselves. Lewis deftly demolished this argument in three chapters devoted to definitions of Semites, Jews, and anti-Semites. Lewis demonstrated that the European ideologues who constructed the pseudo-scientific category of “Semites” intended for it to refer to Jews alone, and that the Jew-haters who turned the bogus “Semites” into a racial category aimed it at the Jews, not as a people or religious group, but as an inferior race. What first originated in religious prejudice became the murderous racial doctrine of antisemitism, directed exclusively at Jews. This was self-evident from actual Nazi practice: Nazi Germany had no problem collaborating with Arabs and taking them as allies.

Defining Antisemitism

It is important at this point to consider Lewis’s definition of antisemitism. His approach was not legal or bureaucratic, but historical and semantic. Lewis defined words with precision. He never wasted words, stumbled over words, or misused words. And while he taught Westerners the deeper meanings of words in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew, he also probed the deeper meaning of words in English. Lewis would latch on to a loaded term, uncover its origins, and track its evolution over time. Then he would define it for present-day use, always with the precision of a jeweler.

Antisemitism was just such a term. Lewis believed it should be defined on the basis of a logical distinction. Its definition should not wander, and it should exclude more than it includes. In a talk at Hebrew University in 2007, he surprised his audience with this definition:

I think we have to be careful, in using the word antisemitism or antisemite, to understand precisely what we’re talking about. I will say something which may strike you as absurd. But if you think for a moment, I think you’ll agree that it makes sense. It is perfectly possible to hate Jews, even to persecute Jews, without being antisemitic. That strikes you as nonsense. It isn’t. What I mean is this: hating people who are different, persecuting people who are different, even on occasion massacring people who are different, is part of the normal human condition. We find it all through history, we find it in every part of the world, in every civilization. Antisemitism is distinct in that it attributes to the victim—to the Jews—a kind of quality of cosmic evil, the like of which cannot, as far as I’m aware, be found anywhere else.¹²

Lewis, here, was not repeating the old adage that an antisemite is someone who dislikes Jews more than is necessary. It is not the quantity of his hatred that makes an antisemite, but its quality. And, so, antisemitism is not a conventional prejudice. It is not even the conventional prejudice against Jews. It exceeds and surpasses all other prejudices—much like the Holocaust it produced.

Lewis maintained that antisemitism was itself subject to constant mutation, each mutation being more virulent than its predecessor. The religious form, essentially anti-Judaism, could be traced to antiquity. It became especially destructive in Christian lands where the “eternal” or “wandering” Jew stood forever accused of deicide. But even this idea of a cursed people still belonged more to the category of ordinary rather than extraordinary prejudice, because Christian Europe attached similar curses to others, including Black people. Modern racial antisemitism represented a far more dangerous mutation, for which there were no precedents, and thus no antibodies.

The “New Antisemitism”

The second part of Semites and Anti-Semites addresses a nagging question. The Holocaust, many believed, should have inoculated the modern world against antisemitism, religious or racial. The scale and brutality of the genocide, its industrial character and its documentation through images and film, delivered a shock to the conscience of the world. Yet, as Lewis showed, antisemitism evolved to survive the Holocaust, re-emerging as an obsessive hatred of the state of Israel, which he termed “the new antisemitism.”

The next section of the book, composed of four chapters, leads with “Muslims and Jews,” a succinct restatement of the argument in The Jews of Islam: Jews were generally tolerated within the pre-modern Islamic world. The next chapter, “The Nazis and the Palestine Question,” provides a mass of evidence of the sort that Lewis analyzed during the war, of how Nazi ideas infiltrated the Arab world. Jews were transformed from an object of traditional contempt into a focus of modern fear—master manipulators, whose plans, laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were being implemented at Muslim expense.

The chapter on “The War Against Zionism” shows how anti-Zionism emerged as an almost inevitable form of resistance to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. And the following chapter, “The War Against the Jews,” shows how this resistance transformed itself into an antisemitic juggernaut by ascribing to the Jews everywhere the qualities of “cosmic evil.” Soviet antisemitism then poured oil on the fire and a local political conflict was transformed into a struggle between light and darkness.

There is a grim passage in this chapter that describes the central role played by the Arab world in the post-Holocaust surge of antisemitism: “The level of hostility, and the ubiquity of its expression, are rarely equaled even in the European literature of anti-Semitism, which only at a few points reached this level of fear, hate, and prejudice. For parallels one has to look to the high Middle Ages, to the literature of the Spanish Inquisition, of the anti-Dreyfusards in France, the Black Hundreds in Russia, or the Nazi era in Germany.”¹³ When one considers that Lewis drew almost entirely on Arab examples, and did not yet include the vast corpus emanating from Iran, the conclusion is striking indeed.

A final chapter, “The New Anti-Semitism,” is a kind of handbook for learning how to distinguish ordinary criticism of Israel from an obsessive rage against the Jewish state. It is useful even today in answering the contentious question of when and where anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism. Lewis offered a subtle and nuanced discussion, free of our present-day compulsion to write a definition that is enforceable by bureaucracies and courts. And in answering the question of what constitutes “good faith” criticism of Israel, he touched on the core of the issue. One passage, in particular, draws an important line. Lewis writes that after 1948:

the content and purpose of opposition to the Jewish state changed. To prevent the birth of such a state was one thing; to terminate it, after it was born, another. Some who favored contraception balked at abortion; some who would tolerate infanticide stopped short of murder. Even in the Soviet Union, few were willing to go that far. The critics and opponents of Israel denounced its policies and sought ways of reducing its territories, but with one exception, they no longer spoke of dismantling the Jewish state or driving its inhabitants into the sea. The one exception was the Arab world and its more faithful adherents.¹⁴

On the spectrum of contraception, abortion, infanticide, and murder, there is now a non-negligible segment of opinion in favor of the last option, sometimes disguised as the “one-state solution.” Lewis offered a potent metaphor for recognizing the extreme nature of this position.

Lewis ended on a surprisingly optimistic note: Arab antisemitism, for all its vehemence and ubiquity, is “still something that comes from above, from the leadership, rather than from below, from the society—a political and polemical weapon, to be discarded if and when it is no longer required.” Were these Arab leaders to make peace with Israel, the antisemitic campaign could “fade away, and be confined, as in the modern West, to fringe groups and fringe regimes.”¹⁵

In 2004, Gabriel Schoenfeld, in his book The Return of Antisemitism, wrote that Lewis may have described the situation in 1986, “but from our present vantage point, it appears unduly sanguine.” In the streets of Jordan and Egypt, of the West Bank and Gaza, Jew-hatred had “diffused broadly,” and could not be so easily discarded.¹⁶ Still, almost 20 years have passed since this criticism, so the question needs to be visited anew.

A Seminal Book

The significance of Semites and Anti-Semites is obvious in retrospect. Over a decade earlier, Lewis had written a piece titled “The Return of Islam,” and within a few years, Islam had returned.¹⁷ Semites and Anti-Semites warned against the spread of “the new antisemitism,” and it soon spread. Lewis did not invent the phrase “new antisemitism.” His friend from childhood, Abba Eban, used it as early as 1973, but Lewis was the first to back it up systematically. I have only summarized his argument, but much of the power of the book derives from its examples. The footnotes are replete with sources in Arabic, Turkish, French, German, Spanish, and Italian—substantiating evidence from far-flung sources.

As always, too, Lewis gave a readable account, shorn of polemic, subtle and understated. Lewis, in his memoirs, explained that he was especially cautious to appear objective: “In trying, self-critically, to preserve my scholarly impartiality, I knew I had to watch out for three sources of prejudice, the Western, the British, and the Jewish. If I’m writing on Semites and anti-Semites, then obviously it is the Jewish angle I have to look out for.”¹⁸ And look out for it he did.

This scholarly approach evoked admiration. The non-Jewish reviewer in Foreign Affairs described the book as “a calm and reasoned, but not neutral, discussion of a subject that rarely evokes calm and reason.”¹⁹ Publishers Weekly called it “clearsighted, dispassionate.”²⁰ Saul Bellow noted the “coolness” of its scholarship, even if its conclusions might “engage the passions.”²¹ But, above all, Lewis put the subject in the mainstream. The book was published by a major house: Norton. It carried an endorsement by the former American diplomat George F. Kennan, someone with no particular concern for the topic, who called it “a powerful and important work… based on a range of erudition (in the best sense) that few others, if any, could command. I learned a great deal from it. Many others, I am sure, will do the same.”²² Kennan’s endorsement (coming from someone credibly suspected of bigotry against Jews) helped carry the book beyond Jewish readers.²³

All these factors assured that Semites and Anti-Semites would be widely reviewed. It received two reviews in The New York Times, one during the week and another in the weekend review section. The latter included a boxed profile of Lewis.²⁴ There were reviews in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wilson Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement.²⁵ A summary, entitled “The New Anti-Semitism,” appeared in The New York Review of Books.²⁶ Translations soon appeared in French, German, and Italian. The book also appeared in Hebrew and even in Arabic.

There were also, of course, criticisms of the book. One rested on simple “what-aboutism.” Edward Said, the most notable Palestinian critic of Zionism, admitted that “there is anti-Semitism in the Arab world and elsewhere.” But why did Lewis fail to “mention the fantastic outpouring of official religious and political literature in Israel whose proclaimed attitude toward the goyim is startlingly racist, horrifically exclusivist?… What about the tradition of anti-gentile polemic in historical Judaism?” What about Rabbi Meir Kahane and Gush Emunim? Said asserted that “Lewis is too delicate to do more than allude quickly to them.”²⁷

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, gadfly critic of Israel’s policies, writing in The New York Times, did something similar, if more subtle. There was a missing part to the book: he thought it should have included what he called “a discussion of what the Israeli-Arab conflict is doing to Jews… There is a growing demonology that too easily equates ‘Arab’ with ‘terrorist’ or ‘potential terrorist.’ The Israeli-Arab confrontation is not only harming the integrity of Islam; it is also evoking unlovely emotions in some parts of Jewry.”²⁸

The “what-aboutists” had their own agendas, which they thought vulnerable to Lewis’s findings, so it is difficult to describe these as true critiques of his writing. In any event, Jewish attitudes to Arabs were not Lewis’s topic, or one to which he pretended any expertise. The much more interesting criticism came from another direction: that Semites and Anti-Semites, and The Jews of Islam before it, oversold the influence of imported antisemitism on the Arab and Muslim worlds. Arab antisemitism could be traced directly to the Islamic tradition, without any need for stimulation by the Nazis or the Soviets.

There are different versions of this critique, some more persuasive than others. The most substantial one came from one of the foremost scholars of antisemitism, the late Robert Wistrich. Wistrich was a history professor at Hebrew University, the head of its Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and author of many important books such as Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred and A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism—From Antiquity to the Global Jihad. He reviewed Lewis’s book for Commentary Magazine:

Lewis somewhat downplays the significance of the legal disabilities, humiliations, and persecution inherent in the “protected” (dhimmi) status of the Jews under Islam in the premodern era… Lewis does tend a little too readily to relegate the sufferings of non-Muslims under Islam to the category of common, conventional, or even “normal” prejudice… Lewis has slightly overstated the impact of Christian-European influences on Arab anti-Semitism and neglected its more local and indigenous roots… The entire tradition of religious supremacy and triumphalism in Islam… has profoundly shaped attitudes to Jews and Judaism… Notions of Jewish treachery, subversion, cruelty, and malevolence did not need to be brought in from the outside, neither did they require the emergence of Zionism and Israel for their articulation.²⁹

This is serious criticism, and as Wistrich himself noted, Lewis’s position seemed “ironic,” because “few scholars are as aware as Lewis himself of the centrality of Islam in modern Arab ideologies and cultural traditions.”³⁰

Islam Is Not to Blame

Leaving aside the merits and weaknesses of both positions, I would submit that Lewis’s interpretation complemented his own lived experience in the Middle East. That experience revolved around the contrast between Turks and Arabs. Lewis often said that he first entered Turkey from Syria, and not from the West. Why was this important? He alluded: “Most judgments and evaluations are based on comparison and are inevitably shaped by the elements compared. Mine were markedly different from the usual.”³¹ My translation: you, coming from the West, might look down upon the Turks. To me, coming from Syria and the Arab world, the Turks seemed admirable.

In some sense, Lewis arrived in Istanbul much like those Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, as someone seeking refuge—in his case, research refuge. The Arabs subjected Lewis to an anti-Jewish ban. But the Turks welcomed him, and opened their most secret archives to him, without regard to his Jewish identity. These welcoming Turks were Muslims. Indeed, within living memory, the Turks, not the Arabs, had been paragons of Islam in its Ottoman form. No one could claim they were less representative of Islam than the Arabs.

Clearly, then, the roots of contemporary antisemitism in the Middle East lay not in Islam per se, but in the specific Arab experience in our time. And since, during the war, Lewis had been fixated on Nazi propaganda among the Arabs and their pro-Axis treachery, these seemed to be the crucial variables.

Ultimately, Lewis was writing not about Islamic antisemitism, but about Arab antisemitism. And what distinguished the Arabs was that Nazi Germany had irradiated them with propaganda—especially in those places under the British thumb, such as Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq. When we read Semites and Anti-Semites today, we must do so not only through the lens of 2024, or even of 1986, but of 1942, when Rommel bore down on the Middle East, and of 1492, when wandering Jews found shelter in part of the Islamic world.

Arab Antisemitism Blows Back

Semites and Anti-Semites framed a debate we continue to have today. There are more data points now, cutting in different directions. Unfortunately, the academy itself has become yet another data point. Lewis foresaw the re-export of antisemitism from the Middle East to Europe and America. The carriers have been Arab immigrants, and one main vector has been the academy. When Lewis wrote his book, there were just a few nodes, mostly in Middle Eastern Studies. Now it has spread much wider, and academics have become some of the leading purveyors of the idea that Israel is a “cosmic evil.”

Princeton University was a kind of refuge for Lewis at a moment of personal crisis. But the academy today is overwhelmingly hostile toward his legacy, and one wonders whether or not he would even find a professorship were he miraculously reincarnated. His work, however, remains and cannot be ignored. The only question for the student or newcomer is which book to open first. Semites and Anti-Semites is not a bad place to begin.

Notes

1. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). Back to text
2. For an overview of his career, see Martin Kramer, “The Conflicted Legacy of Bernard Lewis,” Foreign Affairs (web edition), June 7, 2018. Back to text
3. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Back to text
4. John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 559–560. Back to text
5. Bernard Lewis with Buntzie Ellis Churchill, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Viking, 2012), 34. Back to text
6. Lewis, Notes on a Century, 117. Back to text
7. The publication history of the book is discussed by Bernard Lewis, “Rewriting Oneself,” The American Interest 1, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 123–131. Back to text
8. Bernard Lewis, “The New Anti-Semitism: First Religion, Then Race, Then What?” The American Scholar 75, no. 1 (2006): 35. Back to text
9. Lewis, Notes on a Century, 89. Back to text
10. Bernard Lewis, “The Ottoman Archives as a Source for the History of the Arab Lands,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 3/4 (1951): 139–155. Back to text
11. Lewis, “The New Anti-Semitism,” 31. Back to text
12. Bernard Lewis, remarks to a conference on “Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University, January 29, 2007. Back to text
13. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 195. Back to text
14. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 18. Back to text
15. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 259. Back to text
16. Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), 24–25. Back to text
17. Bernard Lewis, “The Return of Islam,” Commentary 61, no. 1 (January 1976): 39–49. Back to text
18. Lewis, Notes on a Century, 147. Back to text
19. John C. Campbell, “Semites and Anti-Semites, by Bernard Lewis (Book Review),” Foreign Affairs 65, no. 2 (1986): 409. Back to text
20. Publisher’s Weekly 229 (April 25, 1986): 60. Back to text
21. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, pre-publication endorsement on the back cover. Back to text
22. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, pre-publication endorsement on the back cover. Back to text
23. For the evidence, from Kennan’s diaries, see David Greenberg, “U.S. Cold War Policy Was Designed By A Bigot,” The New Republic (web edition), April 20, 2014. Back to text
24. John Gross, “Semites and Anti-Semites, by Bernard Lewis (Book Review),” New York Times, June 6, 1986; Arthur Hertzberg, “The Rise of the Dhimmi,” New York Times Book Review, June 15, 1986. Back to text
25. Wall Street Journal, June 27, 1986 (by Daniel Pipes); Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 26, 1986 (by Charles D. Smith); Christian Science Monitor, October 6, 1986 (by Merle Rubin); The Wilson Quarterly 10, no. 5 (1986): 135; Times Literary Supplement, August 22, 1986. Back to text
26. Bernard Lewis, “The New Anti-Semitism,” New York Review of Books 33, no. 6 (1986): 28–34. Back to text
27. Edward W. Said, “Reticences of an Orientalist,” in The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 338–339. Originally published as a review in The Guardian, November 21, 1986. Back to text
28. Hertzberg, “The Rise of the Dhimmi.” Back to text
29. Robert S. Wistrich, “Semites and Anti-Semites, by Bernard Lewis (Book Review).” Commentary 83, no. 2 (1987): 65–67. Back to text
30. Wistrich, “Semites and Anti-Semites,” 66. Back to text
31. Lewis, Notes on a Century, 47. Back to text

About the Author

MARTIN KRAMER is a historian of the Middle East. He is the past director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and the Walter P. Stern Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was the founding president of Shalem College, a liberal arts school in Jerusalem, and first chair of its Middle East and Islamic Studies program. Kramer earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Princeton, where he wrote his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Bernard Lewis.