Book Description: Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice

Bibliographic Information:  Lewis, Bernard. Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, 1999. https://archive.org/details/semitesantisemit0000lewi_n3m3.
ISBN-13: 9780393023145

Summary Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) was one of the towering academic scholars of Middle East Studies in the Twentieth Century. His work earned him numerous awards and wide recognition. However, toward the end of his career, his prominent association with support for the Iraq War tempered his reputation. Long before that, he suggested that the Arab World suffers from processes of social decay dating back to the Eleventh Century. His opposition to “Third-Worldism” (which he interprets as blaming all the Third World problems on colonialism), a view held passionately by other scholars earned him vociferous criticism from them.

“Semites and Anti-Semites” was first written in 1986. This edition contains an Afterward from 1999 that seeks to track the development of antisemitism in the Arab World and point to where he feared that civilization was heading.

Lewis argues that anti-Jewish ideas played an important role in Islam since Judaism (and Christianity) were pre-existing religions against which nascent Islam differentiated and defined itself. The result was a permanent kind of second-class citizenship for non-Muslim monotheists. These groups were allowed to accept a compact with the Islamic governing powers that placed them under the protection of the rulers, so long as they obeyed and showed that they knew their place. Lewis suggests the situation of Jews “was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst, nor ever as good as in Christendom at its best” (p.121)

Unlike Christianity’s view of its formative contact with Jews, Islam’s contact with Jews in its formative years ended in the complete defeat of the local Arabian Jews. Lewis suggests that while Christianity had an embedded fear of Jews and Judaizing influences, Islam produced a view that tended toward condescending contempt.

As Western Modernity impacted the region, mainly through the colonialist endeavors of Western European powers and of Russia, European racist ideas seeped in. Over time, Lewis notes, these ideas spread and became commonplace, particularly as they coupled with the impact of the creation of the State of Israel, Arab defeats, and the failure of one proposed system of dealing with Modernity after another. He notes that contemporary discussion of Jews, Israel, Zionism, and Judaism, shows an unusual degree of irrational obsession. He also notes that Islam has lost control of other lands besides Palestine (the Balkan Nations in modern times, Spain) without inciting this obsessive discourse.

Style Lewis writes clearly. His book is highly readable, if at times a bit repetitive. It can be read and used by students from talented high-schoolers to graduate school.

Classroom Students should be made aware of the criticism Lewis faced. They should also learn of the criticism of those criticisms. His work makes for an excellent discussion about a wide range of topics from the study of human prejudice, religious co-existence, antisemitism as a particular prejudice, colonialism, and its impact.