By Denis Prager and Joseph Telushkin
Touchstone Books, Revised edition, 2003 244 pages £9.99 ISBN 978 0 743246 200
The value of this book in a topic which never loses its topicality, is that it is so well researched and so well documented. The two authors, both Jewish, one a highly respected radio show host in America, the other a learned rabbi, offer an original and persuasive explanation for antisemitism.
The explanation explicitly refutes the many stereotypical reasons often given for the enduring hatred of the Jews.
They substantiate their case with wide-ranging evidence from both geographic and historical sources. It is their argument that hatred of the Jews, wherever and whenever it raises its ugly head, almost always with dire consequences for Jews themselves, is too often explained in terms of symptoms rather than by identifying the disease itself.
The disease, if we may call it that, is Judaism tout court – what Judaism represents in terms of its religious belief, its ethical values and its nationhood.
The Biblical record that they were chosen by God as a people or nation gives them, so it is alleged, a status of superiority which, in turn, only adds to the potential and actual scorn, derision, jealousy and hatred as hastily considered reactions.
In truth, one might add that they were chosen for a reason which was to pass on its revelation to the gentile world (the nations), and this is too often forgotten or simply ignored (Isaiah 49 6 ‘I will give you [Israel] as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’)
In three sections, the authors look in detail, firstly, at what they contend is the real explanation for antisemitism. They then present, in the longest section, the historical and geographic evidence for antisemitism and, finally, suggest what is to be done to counteract the endemic hatred of the Jews.
Written from a Jewish point of view means that the belief in the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, that the Messiah has already come in Jesus Christ two thousand years ago and that the Old Testament was completed by the New Testament – all of this is hardly pertinent to the case here so clearly and convincingly presented.