Anti-semitism today is more often taught as history than examined as a motivating force in current affairs. The assumption is that it was a defining ideology of an earlier era but no longer has any real significance. Those politicians still proclaiming their hatred of Jews can be dismissed as lunatic-fringe activists, irrelevant to any sensible analysis of contemporary politics. Certainly it is difficult to take seriously the rantings of politicians from the extreme right still obsessed by lurid fantasies of global Jewish conspiracies or who are still prepared to give credence to ludicrous and long-discredited documents such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Yet, as the Labour MP Denis MacShane points out in this briskly written polemic, there has been a recent reinvention and renewal of age-old prejudices. There is a more modern version of anti-semitism and it is “like a rat in our entrails preventing just and equitable solutions to key world problems and replacing hope with hate”. MacShane is in a position to know. As the chairman of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into anti-semitism, he has seen the evidence for the renewal of anti-Jewish hatred.

When MacShane makes the statement that fear “has returned as an intimate part of being Jewish in a way that non-Jews can seek to understand but cannot directly experience”, he has the evidence to back it up. His chapter-long catalogue of samples from a year's worth of recent hate crimes and violence against Jews - from the desecration of cemeteries in Romania and the Czech Republic to the kidnapping and torture of a young Jewish mobile-phone salesman in France - makes for deeply depressing reading. Atavistic loathing still lurks in the heart of Europe and it remains dishearteningly resistant to reason and argument.

Even more damaging are the anti-semitism promulgated by Islamic fundamentalism and the anti-semitism that masquerades as solidarity with the plight of dispossessed Palestinians. Some kind of peace in the Middle East is a precondition for a more stable world and, as long as the kind of loathing that MacShane anatomises is allowed its place in politics, it will be impossible to realise.

Stronger on its analysis of the problems than it is on providing solutions to them (the chapter entitled What to Do runs to fewer than 10 pages), Globalising Hatred nonetheless makes a powerful case that the struggle against anti-semitism remains the struggle against totalitarianism it was in the past.

Globalising Hatred by Denis MacShane
Weidenfeld £12.99 pp170

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