• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

If only as a change of pace, then, a book called Philosemitism in History (Cambridge University Press) should be cause for celebration. Never mind that it is a mere 350 pages, and not a continuous history but a collection of academic papers on fairly narrow subjects, from the Christian Hebraists of the 17th century to documentaries on West German TV. At least it promises a chance to hear about Gentiles who admired and praised Jews, instead of hating and killing them. There must have been some, right?

Well, yes and no. As every contributor to Philosemitism in History acknowledges, Jews have never been entirely happy about the idea of philo-Semitism. The volume’s introduction, by editors Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp, begins with a Jewish joke: “Q: Which is preferable—the antisemite or the philosemite? A: The antisemite—at least he isn’t lying.” This may be too cynical; closer to the bone is the saying that “a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.” That formulation helps to capture the sense that philo- and anti- share an unhealthy interest in Jews and an unreal notion of who and what Jews are. Both deal not with Jewishness but with “Semitism,” as if being a Jew were the same as embracing a political ideology such as communism or conservatism—rather than what it really is, a religious and historical identity that cuts across political and economic lines.

This Jewish mistrust of philo-Semitism finds ample support in the history of the word offered by Lars Fischer in his contribution to the book. Fischer’s essay focuses rather narrowly on debates within the socialist movement in Germany in the late 19th century. But since this was exactly the time and place that the words “anti-Semitism” and “philo-Semitism” were coined, Fischer’s discussion of the political valences of the terms is highly revealing. From the beginning, when the word was coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, “anti-Semitic” was a label proudly claimed by enemies of the Jews. In Austria and Germany, there were political parties, trade unions, and newspapers that called themselves “anti-Semitic,” even when their political programs went beyond hostility to Jews.

Philo-Semitism sounds like it would have been the rallying-cry of the opponents of anti-Semitism, a movement with its own political program. But Fischer explains that this was not the case. In fact, “philo-Semitism” was invented as a term of abuse, applied by anti-Semites to those who opposed them. Though Fischer does not draw the parallel, he makes clear that “philo-Semite” was the equivalent of a word like “nigger-lover” in the United States, meant to suggest that anyone who took the part of a despised minority was odious and perverse. “Its obvious implication was that anybody who could be bothered to oppose anti-Semitism actively must be in cahoots with ‘the Jews,’ ” in thrall to the very Jewish money and power that anti-Semitism attacked.

What this meant was that, in Wilhelmine Germany, those who fought anti-Semitism—above all, Germany’s Social Democratic Party, whose leadership included many Jews—had to be careful to deny that they were philo-Semites. In 1891, for instance, the New York Jewish socialist Abraham Cahan, later to be famous as a novelist and the editor of the Forward, attended the International Socialist Congress at Brussels, in order to propose a motion condemning anti-Semitism. Victor Adler and Paul Singer, the leaders of Socialist parties in Germany and Austria—and both Jews—fought against Cahan’s motion, afraid that condemning anti-Semitism would only heighten the public perception of socialism as a Jewish movement. Finally, the motion passed, after it was amended to attack anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in equal measure.

No one, it seems, wanted to be a philo-Semite; and for a long time, on the evidence of Philosemitism in History, almost no one was. Certainly, it takes pathetically little good will toward Jews to qualify for a place in the book. Robert Chazan, looking for “Philosemitic Tendencies in Western Christendom,” finds one in Saint Bernard’s warning to the Second Crusade not to repeat the anti-Jewish violence of the First. “The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world, so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption.”

In this context, philo-Semitism means persecuting Jews to the brink of killing them, but no further. (Paula Frederiksen wrestled with this ambiguous Christian legacy in her excellent book Augustine and the Jews.) Likewise, Chazan shows, the medieval princes who invited Jews to settle in their lands did so not out of any love for Jewish people, but in order to create a taxable commercial class—and they often ended up killing the goose that laid so many golden eggs.

As early as the 11th century, then, we can see the ambivalence that continues to mark Christian philo-Semitism down to the present. Jews are valued, but only as long as they play the role assigned them in a Christian project or worldview. If Jews step out of that role, they are bitterly criticized. During the Renaissance, for example, a desire to read the Bible in its original language drove many leading humanists to study Hebrew. These Christian Hebraists engaged with Jewish traditions more deeply than any Gentiles had done before, even studying the Mishnah and Gemara for clues about historic Jewish practices. As Eric Nelson showed in his recent book The Hebrew Republic, the Israelite commonwealth became a major inspiration to English political theorists in the 17th century.

Three essays in Philosemitism in History focus on the Christian Hebraist movement. Yet as Abraham Melamed writes in “The Revival of Christian Hebraism,” “the big question … is whether the emergence and influence of Christian Hebraism in early modern Europe led to a more tolerant attitude toward the Jews, and additionally to any kind of philosemitism.” Reading Hebrew and admiring the Israelites were all well and good, but did they lead scholars like Johann Reuchlin and William Whiston to have any sympathy with the actual, living Jews of their time? “This is not necessarily the case,” Melamed answers. The English scholar John Selden was referred to, jokingly, as England’s “Chief Rabbi,” for his mastery of Jewish texts, but he seems not to have known any Jews, and he publicly endorsed the blood libel, citing Jews’ “devilish malice to Christ and Christians.”

A more complicated case of Christian philo-Semitism is the subject of Yaakov Ariel’s essay “It’s All in the Bible,” which explores the strong support of Israel by contemporary American Evangelicals. For centuries, but especially after 1967, evangelical Christians have been staunch Zionists, and their friendship has been welcomed by the Israeli government. Yet the premise of that friendship is a millenarian theology, based on a reading of the Book of Revelation, which holds that the establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land is a precondition to the Second Coming of Christ. On the road to the redemption, Christian Zionists believe, the majority of Jews will be wiped out in apocalyptic wars, and the remainder will convert to Christianity.

This philo-Semitism is, at its heart, deeply anti-Jewish, and the attempts of Israeli politicians to court evangelical support have been awkward, to say the least. In 1996, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, he supported a bill, urged by Orthodox members of the Knesset, to ban Christian missionary activity in Israel. When he realized that this would profoundly offend the American Christian Right, Netanyahu changed his mind and thwarted the bill. Here we have the Jewish leader of a Jewish state permitting Christians to try to convert Jews, as the price for Christian political support.

Does this count as “philo-Semitism”? And what about the painfully earnest documentaries aired on West German TV in the 1970s, discussed by Wulf Kansteiner, in which “self-pity and appropriation of Jewish culture went hand in hand with awkward silences”? Or the Jewish kitsch on sale in many Eastern European cities, which Ruth Ellen Gruber writes about? Lodz, in Poland, was once a great Jewish metropolis, and then one of the most lethal Nazi ghettoes. Today it is home to a restaurant called Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof, where you can be served matzoh by a “waiter dressed up in Hasidic costume, including a black hat and ritual fringes.” Gruber is rather indulgent toward this kind of thing, seeing it as a byproduct or precursor of a genuine rebirth of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Seen in a colder light, this Jewish kitsch, like many of the phenomena on display in Philosemitism in History, might seem to call for a paraphrase of Oscar Wilde: Not “each man kills the thing he loves,” but each man loves the thing he killed.

But this is too bitter. There may be little to love about philo-Semitism, and little to be grateful for in its history; but that is because genuine esteem between Christians and Jews, like real affection of all kinds, cannot be grasped as an “-ism.” Ideologies deal in abstractions, and to turn a group of people into an abstraction, even a “positive” one, is already to do violence to them. That kind of violence is what historians tend to record, but most of the time, it is not the way real people think and live.

For instance, one of the most heartening stories in Philosemitism in History comes from 14th-century Marseilles, where a Jewish moneylender named Bondavid was tried for fraud. The trial record still exists, Chazan writes, and it shows that Bondavid called a number of Christians as character witnesses. A priest, Guillelmus Gasqueti, testified that “actually [Bondavid is] more righteous than anybody he ever met in his life. … For, if one may say so, he never met or saw a Christian more righteous than he.” This kind of genuine, personal esteem between Christians and Jews was “unusual,” Chazan writes, “but surely not unique.” And it is the proliferation of such face-to-face friendships in modern America that has made this country, not the most “philo-Semitic” in history, but the one where individual Jews and Christians have actually liked each other most.

The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is a crazy, magical scene. A mixture of Eastern and Western Europe, music and culture, Jewish and not. The closest thing the Jewish world has to Glastonbury, the giant English festival that had ended just days before. The program is a carefully curated, loose yet contagious mix of Jewish sound, ranging from the infectious Sabbath chanting of the Benzion Family, who are like the Jonas Brothers but old and Hasidic, to The Other Europeans, a troop of klezmer and Roma gypsy musicians who spar with their instruments to explore the connectivity of their respective musical cultures.

The only shame is that the festival is such a well-kept secret in the United States. Young Jews in particular would flock to this creative cacophony if only they knew it existed and there are no doubt thousands obliviously Eurorailing in the vicinity. In their absence, the festival is left to an audience of predominantly young Catholic Poles who lap it up voraciously. The majority were born four decades after the atrocities of the Second World War, coming of age in a post-communist Poland. Faced with myriad identity issues, they appear to be using the festival to work out their questions one song at a time.

Krakow is a town in which the Holocaust is everywhere—thanks to the battery of brightly colored wagons, little bigger than golf carts, that litter the streets, energetically competing to lure visitors onto a series of niche tours they market via menus emblazoned on their sides. Trips to Auschwitz, “Kazimierz Ghetto,” and “Schindler’s Factory” are advertised alongside “Pope’s Krakow” and Wawel Castle as if they are all great days out for the whole family, despite the fact that while the last two are national jewels, the former are scars that stretch across the heart of the city. 65,000 Jews lived in Krakow before the war, amounting to 25 percent of the population. They now number a mere 200. Their absence hangs heavy, and if these tour carts were the sole custodians of their memory, they would surely soon be forgotten. But over the past 19 years, the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival has provided a critical public space for its audience to grapple with the stains of their history. This tangled phenomenon has been well-documented by the remarkable Ruth Ellen Gruber in her book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe and our first encounter with it on this evening served to underline just how complex a task it can be.

In the club, the crowd was baying for the band to take the stage, eager to see the musicians ply their trade at close quarters in this intimate setting, but in their stead, a lone American emcee stumbled on, sporting a curly-haired-yet-balding look, like a younger, leaner, less successful Richard Simmons. His attempts to foster witty banter with the crowd fell on deaf ears, as the audience was largely Polish-speaking. This ersatz Simmons floundered until an anonymous American voice from the back of the club reminded him that it was music they had come to see. Relieved to have an English-speaking foil, albeit a hostile one, Simmons relentlessly baited his heckler, demanding he “come up here and tell us what kind of a bad day you have had that gives you the right to be Mr. Rude and bring us all down like that!” The crowd split as the mystery American was goaded to the stage. With the microphone shoved suddenly in his face, the interloper took a deep breath, calmly leaned forward, looked his nemesis straight in the eye and with measured words intoned: “I have had a bad day…because…I went to Auschwitz.”

The room turned still and silent. The scrawny emcee, flustered, was frozen for a beat as his quarry slipped back into the audience, leaving him alone in the spotlight. He staggered to one side and attempted to segue into an awkward monologue about how harsh trumpet playing can be on both your lips and cheeks before limping off, crushed, to exit stage left.

If that performance was appalling, we did not have to wait long for the innate beauty of the festival to reveal itself. Daniel Kahn, the Berlin-based purveyor of Radical Yiddish Song ambled onto the stage armed only with a well-worn ukulele and his low-affect, mischievous charisma, effortlessly using both to make the sorrows of the past speak to the turmoil of the present. He wasted no time in calling New York based songstress Judith Berkson to duet with him, even while confiding that the two had only met an hour before. As he framed the song they had chosen to perform, a Yiddish ballad called “Dem Milners Trehren” (The Miller’s Tears), a lamentation sung by Jews who had been driven from the land they had lived on and farmed for generations, he added that its message felt especially pertinent in the light of the grinding economic woes we face today. The duo launched into a simple yet haunting rendition of the song, conjuring a sound which would not have been out of place on a Jens Lekman album. As they traded harmonies and verses, Kahn occasionally switched into English to lull the audience with the song’s lyricism as well as its tenor, reaching back into the past and hauling it into the present with a ferocity and an emotional power that silenced the room once more. This time, for all the right reasons.

Roger Bennett visited the festival as part of a delegation from Reboot and the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation.