I’ve always been a fan of the Jews. My parents enrolled me in a Jewish nursery school, I am well versed in Jewish traditions for a non-Jewish person, and if I had to pick an organized religion to belong to, it’d probably be Judaism. I can’t really suspend my disbelief enough to be part of a religion, but if forced by the state or something, I’d be Jewish.

And honestly, what’s not to like about a non-violent group of educated people who mind their own business and like reading and feasting? Nothing. That’s what.

But as we all know, Jews get a lot of flack from…well, most other groups. They’re blamed for everything from the black plague epidemics in the middle ages to the reason Germany was in such bad shape after World War I. (Spoiler alert: neither of these things were the Jews fault.)

Most things Jews are blamed for aren’t their fault, and so, as a sympathetic gentile, I started listening to The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

I don’t know what I thought I was going to hear, but it wasn’t this.

The book went a lot into historical antisemitism, from the the early days of Christianity through to very recently. The stories from the past, about how Jews were blamed for disappearances, murders, disease during the Middle Ages, and then again during the 20th century where it was believed they were masterminds of a global conspiracy to…I don’t even know what, I was familiar with and understood.

Antisemitism does take a lot of forms and has changed over time, but some of the stuff Goldhagen cites as modern antisemitism I’m not sure is, particularly later stuff. The best example being that policy disagreements with the state of Israel are antisemitic. Sure, a lot of people who oppose Israel’s policies ARE antisemitic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is. There were a lot of blanket statements here I found too broad.

Goldhagen also takes shots at recent scholars but I don’t know enough about them to really form an opinion on whether or not they’re antisemitic. Goldhagen certainly sounds as if they are, but I really don’t know them well enough and his argument is clearly spun to sound like it.

Anyway, some of this stuff was so ridiculous I nearly turned it off (it was an audiobook). I ended up listening all the way through but a lot of it felt like it was a reach and they really could have made a shorter, better book if they’d left some of the later, wilder claims. I believe he was accusing all of Europe and the United States for being antisemitic for…reasons. I’m not denying antisemitism exists, I’ve seen it myself, but this idea that everything is done with antisemitic motivation is over the top.

It also didn’t help the audiobook’s cause that I felt like the person reading it (whose name escapes me now) was practically yelling at me. It sounded more like a political speech than a book, and it went on for hours. Outrage and anger and volume are not really what makes a good audiobook for me.

There was some interesting history in this book. There really was. A lot of the stuff about much earlier antisemitism I didn’t know and was fascinated by its origins, but the whole later part of the book, to me, was a waste of time. I’m sure there are other books on antisemitism out there, and I’d recommend one of those before this one. The last parts of this book felt more like grasping at straws than a lot of enlightening information.

I’d go with a different book.

Tagged: authors: daniel jonah goldhagen, books: the devil that never dies, genre: history, genre: non-fiction