Robert Wistrich’s vast and important book is the most comprehensive account in print of the history of anti-Semitism since 1945 in Europe, the Middle East, and Iran. The reference to antiquity in the title is unfortunate: its treatment of its dark subject before 1945 is very brief; 810 of its 938 pages and twenty-three of its twenty-five chapters deal with the past seven decades. Wistrich is one of the world’s leading historians of the subject, particularly of the continuities and discontinuities in the history of this lethal prejudice, in Europe but also beyond it, particularly in the Arab and Muslim world.

A Lethal Obsession is an encyclopedic—and genuinely alarming—compendium of the new anti-Semitism. Wistrich gathers a massive amount of evidence to drive home the point that we are witnessing yet another significant chapter in the history of anti-Semitism, one that the conventional focus on the history of anti-Semitism before and during Nazism and the Holocaust does not address. Every historian must decide what the proper balance is between argument and evidence. No one can criticize Wistrich for paucity of evidence. The examples are plentiful, overwhelming, at times excessive. And the plenitude of scholarship here is more than is necessary to make Wistrich’s argument, which is that the history of radical and potentially genocidal anti-Semitism did not end with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Hitlerism, understood as hatred of the Jews and of liberal modernity, persisted beyond the destruction of Hitler, in Wistrich’s account, and acquired new political, cultural, religious, ideological, and geographical coordinates. The terminology of the new post-1945 Jew-hatred was no longer predominantly Christian, fascist, or racist. Instead it draws on neo-Marxist, Islamic, or anti-globalist ideologies. Unreconstructed neo-Nazi groups persisted, to be sure, but largely on the margins of European politics, and they ceased to be the most important source of radical anti-Semitism. Instead, the anti-Semitism after Hitler consisted of a mixture of the “old anti-Semitism” with “the new anti-Zionism.” It was expressed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, by the radical left since the 1960s, and above all in the mix of secular and Islamist politics of the Middle East and Iran.While the rallying cry of the old anti-Semitism was the attack on “world Jewry,” the core of anti-Semitism has been the attack on “international Zionism” and on the state of Israel.

Wistrich is certainly aware that not all criticism of Israeli policy is inspired by hatred of the Jews and Judaism, but the “logic” and the structure of influential arguments attacking Israel have been ominously identical to the imputations of vast power and enormous evil attributed to “world Jewry” by European anti-Semites of old. The “lethal obsession” of the recent past, according to Wistrich, has been a melange of the old conspiracy theories of that infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,with Marxism-Leninism, secular third worldism, and Islamism. In this period, the center of gravity of anti-Semitism has shifted from Europe to the Middle East and Iran. Although the cultural sources of the anti-Semitism of recent decades differ from those in Europe, the publicly articulated policies of the government of Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, are no less “lethal.” Far from clearly recognizing the danger, too much of the political mainstream in Europe has failed to acknowledge the anti-Semitic resurgence. And in certain precincts of the Muslim diaspora in Europe, radical anti-Semitism has been re-exported back to Europe and on occasion enters the mainstream of political, journalistic, and intellectual life.

Wistrich presents evidence of a "culture of hatred" in the Middle East in recent years that permeates books, magazines, newspapers, sermons, videocassettes, the Internet, television, and radio on a scale unprecedented since the heyday of Nazi Germany. “Indeed, the demonic images of Jews presently circulating in much of the Islamic world are sufficiently radical in tone and content to constitute a new warrant for genocide. They combine to devastating effect the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jewish drive for world domination and dehumanizing Islamic quotations about Jews as the ‘sons of apes and donkeys.’” Like the Nazis, these anti-Semites see themselves at war with Western decadence, infused as they say it is with evil “Jewish influence.” “Islamofascism today builds on the same mythological figure of the satanic, ubiquitous, immoral and all-powerful Jew that once haunted the European anti-Semitic imagination from Richard Wagner to Adolf Hitler.” I find these claims entirely persuasive.