Antisemitism doesn't always come doing a Hitler salute [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

When the Ukip politician Godfrey Bloom referred to "Bongo Bongo land", there were not many who denied the remark was racist. When the same man told women who failed to clean behind the fridge that they were "sluts", most could see the comment was sexist. Yet when the target of an insult is a Jew or Jews, there is rarely such certainty. Unless antisemitism comes dressed in an SS uniform and doing a Hitler salute, we are regularly thrown into confusion. Suddenly we are in the seminar room, calling on experts to tell us whether or not this or that sentence was anti-Jewish, the debate usually ending without clear resolution. To add to the complexity, very often Jews disagree among themselves, with just as many willing to give the disputed word or deed a free pass as to condemn it.

So it has been this week with the Daily Mail's sustained assault on the late Ralph Miliband, the Marxist scholar it branded "The Man Who Hated Britain". Some detect a whiff of anti-Jewish prejudice, some swear there is no such thing. When pressed on the point by the BBC, Ed Miliband himself declined to add antisemitism to his list of charges against the paper.

All of which, I imagine, must make it hard for the open-minded outsider, the non-Jew keen to oppose all forms of racism. They know they're against antisemitism, but how exactly to spot it? When is the line crossed? Where, in fact, is the line? In the spirit of public service, let me attempt an answer.

First, the word itself. So much as mention antisemitism and someone will pop up to tell you that Arabs are semites too so why do Jews insist on hogging, as it were, all the antisemitism for themselves. But the word was not a Jewish invention. It was popularised by a 19th-century German Jew-hater called Wilhelm Marr, keen to put his loathing on a pseudo-scientific basis: he used "semites" to mean Jews and, partly because "anti-Jewish racism" is a mouthful, the word has stuck.

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