What We Talk About When We Talk About Antisemitism

Few words carry such heavy connotations and are at the same time so prone to misunderstanding, as the word antisemitism. What do we talk about when we talk about antisemitism? British historian and author Mark Mazower discusses how the meaning of antisemitism has changed over time. 

In his latest book On Antisemitism: A Word in History, Mark Mazower traces the long history of antisemitism from its ancient origins to its many transformations in the modern world. The term was coined in the nineteenth century by Europeans who saw assimilating Jews as a threat to their ethnic-nationalist ideals. They combined age-old prejudices with racist pseudoscience, laying the groundwork for the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Nowadays, the Israel-Palestine conflict has re-ignited debates in both Israel, European countries and the United States. The fight against extremists became intertwined with the question: when is criticism of Israel antisemitic? In De Balie, we dissect a loaded term.

About the speaker
Mark Mazower (1958) is a professor of history at Columbia University in New York, specialised in modern Greece, 20th century Europe and international history. He is the author of award-winning best-sellers such as Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century (1998), The Balkans (2000), and Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (2008). He also writes regularly for the Financial Times, The New York Times, and the New York Review of Books, among others.

Nadia Bouras (1981) is associate professor and researcher at the Institute of History at Leiden University. She is also affiliated with the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR), the center of expertise in Morocco studies at Leiden University. Bouras regularly appears as an expert in the media on current affairs in the field of integration and migration. Her latest publication, Een Klas Apart (2020), studied the history of the Arab School in Amsterdam-Zuid.

Emile Schrijver (1962) is General Director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam, which includes among others the Jewish Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue, the Holocaust memorial site Hollandsche Schouwburg and the National Holocaust Museum. Schrijver is also professor by special appointment of Jewish Book History at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Humanities. In January 2025, he and Ruth Peeters published the book Ooggetuigen van het antisemitisme, a collection of eyewitness accounts of antisemitism, from the first centuries to the present.