Feeling a bit flummoxed at the request that I pare a couple of years of research and a complex legal proceeding down to something akin to a sound bite, I found myself momentarily and uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Did my interlocutor think that everything—including scholarship—could be reduced to an answer that would fit in a Twitter post?

As I tried to formulate a short but nonetheless nuanced answer, my friend popped up with another question: “And how does the Eichmann trial relate to all those years you have spent studying and fighting Holocaust denial?”

When he asked his second question, I knew the answer to the first.

***

First, some background. When I began my research on the Eichmann trial I told my colleagues and friends that I felt relieved to be dealing with something other than Holocaust denial. First of all, it was nice—if one can use that term in relation to anything associated with the Holocaust—to move on to another topic. When I first wrote Denying the Holocaust, published in 1993, I never imagined that I would become enmeshed in the topic in not just a scholarly way but also in a legal and personal context.

But having a new topic to investigate was not the only reason for my relief. Writing about the Holocaust is always a difficult proposition. One must analyze horrific events and information while maintaining a requisite scholarly distance. Allowing emotions to intrude only distorts one’s scholarship. It is neither easy nor pleasant. Yet when writing about Holocaust denial I was presented with an added discomforting element: I was not just studying a terrifying historical event. My subject was a movement that was alive, kicking, and working vigorously to distort history and inculcate anti-Semitism. There was immediacy to this issue that was not present when I dealt with events that happened seven decades earlier.

I encountered yet one additional challenge in my study of Holocaust denial. Many people consider deniers “nutters,” as the British would say. They dismiss them as the historical equivalents of flat earthers. These same people told me that I was making a mistake in taking deniers seriously. As I began my work many of my colleagues in the field of Holocaust studies told me that this topic was not worth my time. They said quite bluntly: “You are writing about crackpots, Deborah. Why bother?” In response I explained, generally to no avail, that, while I did not think deniers a clear and present danger, I did think that they were a potential future danger and that therefore it was important that we understand their modus operandi. Furthermore, I thought it crucial that the world recognize the inherent anti-Semitism girding their entire enterprise. Some of them may be nutters, but they are Jew-hating ones. As survivors die and the option of hearing about the Final Solution in the first person singular fades, deniers, I feared, would only find it easier to spread their pseudo-intellectual wares. It was important to expose them, their lies, and their tactics.

I encountered the same skepticism a number of years later when I was sued for libel by David Irving. Many people, among them leading scholars, counseled me to ignore the matter. “You should not take his threat seriously,” I was repeatedly told. I chose to ignore their advice. If I did not fight he would have won by default because British libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant. Once again my explanations were to no avail. “So what if he wins by default?” I was told. “No one takes him seriously, anyway.” (With no sense of irony, some of the same people subsequently congratulated me on my “great victory” against this man and told me that what I did was very important.)

We convinced the court that the “proof” Irving claimed to have to validate his assertions regarding the Holocaust did not prove his claims at all. His arguments were, we demonstrated, a tissue of lies. What then does all this have to do with my work on the Eichmann trial?

***

Thinking about the anti-Semitism, which is the foundation stone of denial and the refusal—denial?—of so many people to take the topic seriously, made the “bottom line” of the Eichmann trial and, by extension, the Holocaust patently clear. It is quite simple and straightforward. Had the world taken Nazi anti-Semitism more seriously from the outset of the rise of the Third Reich the subsequent tragedy might have been quite different.

In the 1930s and 1940s, of course, observers—and the potential victims—could not fathom where Hitler and his cohort’s anti-Semitism might lead. They could, in retrospect, legitimately claim ignorance. Today we do not have that luxury. When anti-Semites speak of their hatred of Jews and their desire to do them harm, we should accept their threats at face value. That does not mean we should panic or declare that the sky is falling at every expression of anti-Semitism. It does not mean that every anti-Semite poses the same potential danger. It does mean that we should not reflexively dismiss anti-Semites as crackpots or the equivalent of flat earthers.

Most of all, the actions of not just Adolf Eichmann but all those who played a role in the Final Solution remind us that we should pay particular heed to threats that emanate from those who have the ability to do real harm. During the past five years we have heard a stream of Holocaust denial, overt anti-Semitism, and threats against Israel emanate from the mouth of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Many people have dismissed him as a deranged person whose crazy comments are best ignored. Some scholars have gone to great efforts to explain away his threats against Israel. That is to engage in a form of self-delusion, if not denial. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial is linked directly to his animus toward Israel. In 2009, after questioning the existence of the Holocaust, he declared it a ploy used by the Jews to get the West to accede to the creation of Israel. This, of course, comes on top of his infamous Holocaust denial conference in 2006. The Iranian Foreign Ministry, which was an official host of the gathering, made common ground with some of the world’s most infamous deniers and anti-Semites. It offered them a chance to express their animus toward both Israel and the Jews. The conference constituted a virtual Who’s Who of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, including Robert Faurisson, one of the leading “theorists” of the movement who lives in Vichy France; Australian Fred Tobin, whose Adelaide Institute is a bastion of denial activities; former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; and Bradley Smith, founder of the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust, which was responsible for placing a series of ads in college and university newspapers denying the Holocaust. The conference itself followed the Iranian contest on Holocaust-denial cartoons, which had the official imprimatur of Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad did not, of course, introduce Holocaust denial to the Middle East and the Arab/Muslim world. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser spoke of the “lie of the 6 million Jews.” Mahmoud Abbas, as a young student, wrote a dissertation that was pure denial, though he subsequently repudiated this view, and while I fully believe his repudiation, the fact that as a young man he could have been seduced by this falsehood is telling. Spokesmen for Hamas have also engaged in Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial themes can be found in newspapers in many parts of the Arab world, including in Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon.

In virtually every other part of the world where Holocaust denial can be found it is relegated to the extreme political fringe. Only in the Middle East can it be found in more legitimate circles. There is no counternarrative to challenge these claims. Young people are growing up convinced that the Holocaust is a myth produced to justify the existence of their enemy, Israel. In Iran, Ahmadinejad’s denial and hatred of Israel are particularly frightening because Iran is close, we are told, to having nuclear weapons. It would be a form of denial—that is, willful blindness—not to recognize the nexus of Iranian leaders’ overt Holocaust denial, threats to destroy Israel, unquestionable anti-Semitism, and possession of nuclear weapons. They are not separate and unrelated phenomena.

Seventy years ago people had an acceptable reason to say, “We could never fathom that Hitler meant what he said.” Today we no longer have that luxury. At the very least it behooves us to take Ahmadinejad and those among his fellow Muslim leaders and opinion-makers seriously. Their Holocaust denial is part of their contemporary political agenda.

Among many other things, that is one of the lessons that both The State of Israel v. Adolf Eichmann and David Irving v. Penguin UK and Deborah Lipstadt taught me. It is what I now know in my gut that I may not have really known before.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Nextbook Press’ The Eichmann Trial, is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.

Deborah Lipstadt on The Eichmann Trial from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
The Trial [Tablet Magazine]

These and other issues form the basis of The Eichmann Trial, a new book by Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt from Nextbook Press. Lipstadt is no stranger to the courtroom or to the perils of anti-Semitism. In 1996, she was sued by David Irving, who’d accused her of libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier. Lipstadt won her case at trial in 2000. She joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the importance of survivor testimony, about the controversy surrounding the 1961 trial, and about how her courtroom experience changed the way she thinks of Eichmann’s. [Running time: 21:26.]

• Community board approval of the Ground Zero Islamic center in May was followed (caveat: Correlation does not prove causation!) by a significant uptick in local U.S. governments’ alleged discrimination against Muslims trying to build mosques. [Ben Smith]

• Holocaust denier David Irving was denied permission to conduct a tour on the Auschwitz grounds. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Remnants of a 1500-year-old Samaritan synagogue were uncovered in the Jordan Valley. [JTA]

• The New Israel Fund has modified donation guidelines so as to try to avoid supporting groups not seen as sufficiently Zionist. [JTA]

• Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, unleashed on midtown Manhattan. Look out, ladies! [Page Six]

Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the Sukkah City competition. Jewcy was there.

It’s easy to believe that it was painful to write the book, since even reading it is—appropriately enough, given the title—a kind of trial. Julius’s survey of anti-Semitic acts and ideas and discourse, from the blood libel of the middle ages to the fanatical anti-Zionism of the 21st century, offers an object lesson in how demoralizing it is to be slandered, even when one knows that the slander is false. Indeed, the wilder and more palpably incredible the slur, the more destabilizing it can be for the victim, since it thrusts him into a world in which the truth simply does not matter.

For many hundreds of years, for example, most English people believed that Jews had a religious obligation to kill Christian children and drink their blood. Julius shows how this crime was charged against the Jews again and again in the middle ages: in Norwich in 1144, Gloucester in 1168, Bury St. Edmunds in 1181, Lincoln in 1255, and on and on, until the Jews were finally expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290. The fact that no Jew ever committed such a murder and that Jewish law is radically opposed to bloodshed, did not stop the blood libel from flourishing. But while no Jews ever ritually murdered an English Christian, Christians inflamed by such accusations did murder very many English Jews. In York in 1190, for instance, 150 Jews died—many by suicide—when a looting mob trapped them in a castle.

In this respect, medieval anti-Semitism followed the same logic as Nazi anti-Semitism—the logic of the big lie, which charged Jewish victims with committing the very crimes that were being committed against them. The victim’s rational instinct in this situation is to reply and rebut, to demonstrate the falsehood of this or that charge against the Jews; but this response is entirely beside the point. As Julius writes, “what characterizes anti-Semites is not so much their falsehoods and their misbeliefs as the malice with which they promote them. They hate Jews. The errors in logic, in history and theology, in politics and sociology, come later.”

Yet this raises a question about Trials of the Diaspora itself. Julius is a respected intellectual, the author of a groundbreaking book on the anti-Semitic tropes in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, and a prominent London lawyer, known for his work as Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer and as defense counsel for Deborah Lipstadt in the David Irving Holocaust-denial case. Why, one might naturally wonder, would he devote so much time and work to documenting English anti-Semitism, if the content of anti-Semitism is null—if his book is, as he puts it, “mostly … the explication of nonsense—pernicious nonsense, at that”? One possible motive is scholarly—the simple desire to make a truthful record of the Jewish and English past—and Julius has certainly done a masterly job of that. It’s hard to imagine anyone needing to write this sorry history a second time.

But the temper of this book is not simply scholarly. Its forensic drive and controlled irony are lawyerly, in the best sense of the word. A case is being made here—but not, as Julius would be the first to insist, a case for Jewish innocence. It is not only unnecessary to make that case, it is degrading: You don’t argue with a sewer. If, knowing this, Julius still felt compelled to write Trials, his purpose was, rather, demonstrative. By so thoroughly documenting and analyzing English anti-Semitism, Julius puts himself in a position of mastery over it. A Jew, he shows, does not have to fear anti-Semitism; just as important, perhaps, he no longer has to fear thinking about anti-Semitism.

This is an especially important distinction when it comes to English history, since English anti-Semitism has been far milder and subtler than that of most other European countries. In part, ironically, this is because the expulsion of the Jews was so effective. Between 1290 and the 1650s, when Oliver Cromwell agreed to allow some Dutch Sephardim to settle in London, there were no Jews in Britain. Even after Cromwell, the Anglo-Jewish community grew slowly, numbering just 30,000 or so by the late 19th century. England had a smaller and less significant Jewish presence than any major European country.

Partly for this reason, English anti-Semitism became a matter of discourse and attitude, rather than violence and persecution. After the middle ages, Julius’s book contains no pogroms or ghettoes, no Dreyfus Affairs or Nuremberg laws, no concentration camps—subjects that would have to appear in any history of French or German or Russian anti-Semitism. On the other hand, English anti-Semitism presents a uniquely troubling literary legacy, since the very greatest English writers have been responsible for embellishing slanders about the Jews. As Julius puts it, “if it is the case that among anti-Semitism’s many products there are only a few literary works that deserve general esteem and thus challenge the self-respect of Jewish readers and spectators, then English literature has most of them.” Chaucer, in The Prioress’s Tale, told the story of a child ritually murdered by evil Jews (minions of “the serpent Satanas,/That hath in Jewes’ heart his waspe’s nest”); Shakespeare, of course, gave us Shylock and the pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice; and Dickens, in Oliver Twist, made Fagin a Jewish thief who preys on Christian children.

The key word in Julius’s description is “self-respect.” It hardly challenges a Jew’s self-respect to read the many obscure scribblers, conspiracy theorists, and crackpots whom Julius has occasion to quote; to be insulted by Shakespeare is another matter. Similarly, for most English Jews in the modern period, anti-Semitism did not inspire fear or dread but social unease, self-doubt, a sense of being unwanted. Julius quotes one writer from the 1930s explaining that Jews “by a thousand signs, and by ways not always conscious, [are] edged on one side, excluded.”

This sense of not belonging persisted even after individual Jews had risen to high positions in government and society. Thus we find paradoxical cases like that of Edwin Samuel Montagu, a Jewish politician who was Secretary of State for India at the time of the notorious Amritsar massacre in 1919. When Montagu sought to censure the British general who had fired on a crowd of Indians, he was attacked, in the words of another politician, as “a Jew, a foreigner, rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves.” Anti-Semitism did not stop Montagu from rising to the heights of power, but neither did his power and status stop him from being viewed, even by his colleagues, through an anti-Semitic lens.

The second motive behind Trials of the Diaspora has to do with Julius’s diagnosis of the present and future of English anti-Semitism. After the Holocaust, in England as throughout Europe and America, overt expressions of anti-Semitism became largely taboo. But this began to change with the Six Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which made the Palestinian cause popular on the political left. Julius’s claim is that criticism of Israeli policies has become, in some corners of English life, an irrational anti-Zionism, with both conscious and unconscious anti-Semitic overtones. This constitutes “the fourth of the English anti-Semitisms,” a successor to the medieval, literary, and social versions.

This argument is responsible for the controversy that Julius’s book has already provoked—see, for example, Harold Bloom’s review in the New York Times Book Review and the letters of complaint it drew in this Sunday’s issue. The obvious objection to calling this brand of new, Israel-centered hostility “the new anti-Semitism” is that, as Julius acknowledges, “it is adopted by people who profess deep hostility to anti-Semitism, [and] self-identified Jews are among its advocates.” Indeed, anti-Zionists often preemptively disclaim the charge of anti-Semitism as a way of discrediting their critics. Nothing is more common in anti-Zionist discourse than the notion that the anti-Zionist is bravely risking persecution by paranoid or malignant Jews.

But Julius is quite cognizant that a distinction must be drawn between criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians—criticism that can be rational and ethical, and that he makes quite eloquently himself—and anti-Semitism, which is inherently irrational and unethical. And he convincingly shows that, in England, anti-Zionism frequently does pass over into anti-Semitism. Readers who follow British publications such as the London Review of Books and the Guardian will be familiar with many of Julius’s examples; those who don’t will find them eye-opening. Take, for instance, the poet Tom Paulin, who wrote “Killed in Crossfire” after the widely reported death in 2000 of Mohammed al-Dura, a young Palestinian boy allegedly shot by Israeli soldiers:

We’re fed this inert
this lying phrase
like comfort food
as another little Palestinian boy
in trainers jeans and a white teeshirt
is gunned down by the Zionist SS
whose initials we should
—but we don’t—dumb goys—
clock in the weasel word crossfire.

In these few lines, all the classic tropes of anti-Semitism are brought together. Jews deliberately murder non-Jewish children; they “feed” lies to unwitting Gentiles, presumably through their control of the media; they mock their dupes as “dumb goys”; they are as bad as Nazis. Yet when the obvious anti-Semitism of this poem was pointed out, Paulin—a highly respected figure in the British literary world—responded with another indignant poem called “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semite Card,” in which he protested his innocence while once again comparing Jews to Nazis (“the usual cynical Goebbels stuff”).

Such rhetoric, which Julius believes is moving from the fringes to the mainstream of English life, helps to explain his feeling that “the closed season on Jews is over.” We have not yet seen this degree of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism become mainstream in American life, but there are signs of its growing legitimation, especially under the guise of criticism of the “Israel lobby”—the contemporary name for the old fantasy of secret, limitless, malignant Jewish power. At such a moment, the judiciousness and confidence that Julius displays are more necessary than ever.

Reached for comment, Irving confirmed that the talk was planned for the Kolping Society. “We have a valid contract, and we’re going to go ahead with that,” he said. “We’ll be there at 7 p.m.” When a similar situation occurred in Toronto, he said, “I turned up, and my entire audience turned up, and that was the end of that. I’m sure that the Kolping Society will see reason.” He said that the Society’s claim of canceling the event was a “smokescreen” and that he will still speak there—as, he added, he’d previously done, in 2004. A Society spokeswoman denied both those claims. “He has no contract at all,” she said. “There’s absolutely no contract. He cannot come in the building.”

UPDATE: New Jersey Residents Against David Irving, a counterpart to the New York anti-Irving group, has announced that an American Legion post in the town of Wayne has canceled a lecture Irving had been scheduled to give there tonight.

Earlier: David Irving to Speak in New York, Secretly

Elan Steinberg, vice-president of a national organization called the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, told Tablet Magazine that Irving is scheduling his engagements this way for another reason. It’s “a way of disguising who he is to hotel managers and others who rent out public venues,” Steinberg said. “Time and time again, hotel managers, bookshops, etc, have allowed him to speak there not realizing who he is.” The American Gathering is therefore alerting the press that Irving will be in town, in the hope that venue managers will inquire into the identity of any mysterious guests who might be renting space on Saturday, Steinberg said. That strategy worked in Jackson, Mississippi, he said, when his group notified the city’s mayor that Irving planned to speak at City Hall, prompting Irving to move his talk to a different location.

In the case of his upcoming New York engagement, a spy-versus-spy situation has emerged: a group called New Yorkers Against David Irving is attempting to infiltrate the lecture; Irving, in turn, said that two of his followers were present at the protest organization’s planning meeting last night. Steinberg said that the American Gathering is not attempting to get on Irving’s email list, but that if he gets a tip on Irving’s whereabouts ahead of time, he’ll send his own email inviting members to go protest.

A talk Irving gave in Palm Beach, Fla., late last month, ended in violence, not between followers and protesters, but between two followers, one of whom police identified as a white supremacist, according to the Jackson Free Press. They got into a knife fight outside the meeting room.

Knife Fight at Holocaust Denier Book-Signing [Jackson Free Press]

On Facebook, a Spy Revealed (Pale Legs, Too) [NYT]
MI6 Chief Blows His Cover [Mail]