One of the trickiest but most critical questions of the present day is that of the new guises of anti-Semitism. Though we have been slow to realize it, anti-Semitism has morphed at each step in its history, completely changing its shape, its face, and even its software.

Anti-Semitism was pagan when, during the Roman empire, the Jews were resented for having a religion that took the magic out of the world.

It was Christian during the centuries of the crusades, the Inquisition, the Medieval pogroms, and beyond—when the Jews were blamed for the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

It was anti-Christian after people—following d’Holbach, Voltaire, the Enlightenment, and Voltaire’s slogan, “Let’s crush the infamous” (by which he meant the intolerance of organized religion)—began to reproach the Jews not for having killed the son of God but for having invented the One God, and thus, in a way, the son.

It was socialist, anticapitalist, and pro-worker at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in Paris and of the anti-bourgeois socialism of the founding fathers of French socialism. The deviation laid at the door of the Jews then became their supposed conspiracy, orchestrated from the heights of “Jewish finance,” to oppress those whom anti-Semitic propagandist Édouard Drumont described as the small and humble.