The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day By Walter Laqueur - Oxford University Press 240 pp.; $22

Dying for Jerusalem: The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City By Walter Laqueur - Sourcebooks 352 pp.; $27

Walter Laqueur has rightly made a name for himself as one of the most important analysts of recent history. Two new books confirm that reputation, while also demonstrating the historical value of the life Laqueur himself has lived.

"All history is contemporary history," said 20th-century Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, and, despite their professional pretensions to objectivity, all historians view the past through the lens of the present. How then, do they successfully record and interpret contemporary events? Perhaps no living scholar has answered this challenge more compellingly than the inimitable Walter Laqueur. In a life that has now stretched into its ninth decade, Laqueur has personally experienced and chronicled many of the most significant historical events and political movements of the past century.

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, Laqueur spent the years 1938- 1953 in Palestine/Israel, where he studied at the Hebrew University, joined a kibbutz and worked as a journalist. He went on to become an internationally renowned authority on the politics and history of the modern world. Today he lives in Washington, D.C., retired from a professorship at Georgetown University and a research position at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Over a period of half a century, Laqueur has produced a steady stream of books that have proven to be definitive and influential accounts of subjects ranging from Zionism to the Holocaust to Soviet communism and modern terrorism. Even at the age of 85, Laqueur shows no signs of slowing down. In the last year alone, he has released two new books, whose titles suggest their topics: "The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism," and "Dying for Jerusalem: The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City."

What in the way of new insights does the elder statesman of contemporary history have to offer on the well-trod ground of anti- Semitism? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Laqueur's perspective on the dramatic resurgence of Jew-hatred around the world is rooted in a refreshing combination of deep historical knowledge and everyday common sense. Against the bizarre outbursts of Hollywood's finest Christian zealot and the apocalyptic pronouncements of Iran's leader, Laqueur's study offers a healthy voice of reason, a clear- eyed yet dispassionate survey of the entire question of anti- Semitism, past and present.

Was there anti-Semitism before the advent of Christianity? Did Jews fare better under Christian or Muslim rule during the Middle Ages? In the book's early chapters, Laqueur synthesizes the best of recent scholarship to answer thorny and frequently asked questions like these. After tracing the emergence of pagan anti-Jewish prejudices and hatred in the ancient world, he explores the many faces of medieval anti-Judaism, noting how different Christian religious doctrines toward Jews were affected by the political, social and economic forces throughout Europe. For instance, he points out that, despite popular perceptions, during the late Middle Ages, Jews in Eastern Europe fared much better than their compatriots in Western, Central and Southern Europe, because in Poland there was no state-sanctioned and Church-led campaign of conversion, repression and violence, as there was in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere.

Noting the myriad contradictions within the Koran and Islamic theology on the subject, he emphasizes that classical Islam both condemned the obstinate Jewish rejection of the Muslim faith and at the same time praised many of the common Biblical traditions it shared with the "people of the Book." Equally important, he concludes, Islam's major theological opponent was not Judaism but Christianity. Still, despite these insights and Laqueur's obvious erudition, his treatment of pre-modern Islamic anti-Semitism leaves the reader wanting more.

Entering the modern period, Laqueur weaves together an account that manages to illuminate both the obscure 19th-century sources of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and the core ideological features and horrific consequences of the Nazis' Final Solution. In one of the book's most interesting parts, he critiques the famous theory of modern anti-Semitism put forth by Hannah Arendt. A Holocaust refugee herself, the political philosopher argued that the Third Reich's anti-Jewish ideology bore little connection to ancient theological Jew-hatred. Instead, she asserted, it formed part of a modern political and racialist ideology closely related to European imperialism. Dissecting her explanation, Laqueur points out, in part, that Britain, the exemplar of European imperialism, hardly experienced any anti-Semitism in the 19th or 20th centuries. He also criticizes Arendt's decided lack of sympathy toward Jewish suffering and her controversial condemnations of what she alleged to be Jewish weakness and complicity during the Holocaust.

Laqueur also promises to use the past to explain the contemporary resurgence of anti-Semitism. In both the opening and closing chapters of the book, he tackles the problem of the origins and dangers of the "new anti-Semitism," which he defines primarily as a loose, post-World War II synthesis of neo-Marxist ideological rhetoric and European, Muslim and Arab anti-Zionism. While Laqueur evidently views this significant new development as requiring immediate, critical attention, he is careful to eschew polemics of any sort. Instead, he makes a helpful and important distinction between contemporary anti-Semitism as a grass-roots popular ideology and a potentially more lethal form of organized political movement or state policy. In doing so, Laqueur points the way to a more nuanced understanding of how to differentiate between the varied threats facing Jews around the world today. Though individual Jews do remain physically vulnerable to ideologically motivated Islamist (and neo-Nazi) violence in Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Americas today, he argues, this is far different from the Nazi or Stalinist campaigns that challenged the very existence of Jews in these societies. We may shudder at the stories of attacks against Jews on the streets of Moscow or Paris, but the governments of these countries have not only explicitly denounced anti-Semitism but also cultivate strong, sympathetic links to the organized Jewish communities.

The situation is, of course, far more complicated and dangerous when it comes to Israel in the Middle East. Here Laqueur carefully examines what he regards as the ambiguous line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Rejecting any notion of a "monocausal explanation" of contemporary anti-Semitism, he focuses instead on what he terms "irrational and rational" factors fueling propaganda and violence against Jews in the Middle East and around the world. The catalog of the anti-Semitic irrational is hardly new and includes Islamic Jihadism, elaborate conspiracy theories about international Jewish bankers and neo-conservative intellectuals, and other extremist religious and political doctrines. Laqueur's "rational" factors are sure to raise more eyebrows, evoking the specter of the very sort of "Blame the Jews" line of reasoning he so strongly decries in Arendt's account of anti-Semitism. More specifically, he concludes his book with a subtle accusation that post-1967 right-wing Jewish religious nationalism in Israel has fanned the flames of Islamic anti-Semitism and led to a failure to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict. There is no doubt that this brand of Jewish political extremism has often played a negative role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet if we follow his line of reasoning, the left-wing Labor party would be equally culpable for controversial policies such as harsh punitive measures against moderate Palestinian civilians and the unabated growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It is a disappointingly partisan summation to an otherwise extremely evenhanded and judicious treatment of the potentially explosive subject of anti-Semitism.

Given Laquer's evident distaste for any mixtures of religion and nationalism, we might expect "Dying for Jerusalem" to be a companion case study on the theme of religious and political violence in the Middle East. This is not, however, a book about martyrdom or even really about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead it is a collection of loose vignettes drawn from the author's own memories as a frequent visitor to Jerusalem, someone who has lived in the city for stretches of years at a time. If anti-Semitism is a theme that elicits Laqueur's trademark calm, scholarly voice, Jerusalem is a subject that draws out the former journalist's eye for detail, character and history. Using municipal telephone directories from 1940s Jerusalem as his stimulant for a journey of memory, he conjures up a passionate, personal chronicle of the city as seen through the eyes of a Jewish intellectual, alert to the ghosts of the city's history - and his own past.

Arriving in November 1938, straight from gymnasium in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), Laqueur felt little interest in the Zionist politics or religious piety that animated so much of the city's population. Though he briefly joined a kibbutz and published his first book, "Oil and the Middle East," in Hebrew in 1950, by his own admission he remained an "agnostic" when it came to Zionism. Laqueur explains his own political ambivalence by referring to his cosmopolitan, acculturated background, which was typical of many young German Jewish intellectuals of the time. By the mid-1940s, Laqueur had begun a career as a journalist, working at the Palestine (later Jerusalem) Post. From there he bridged out to cover the broader Middle East, before relocating to London in the mid-1950s and later the United States. Although he taught for over a decade at Tel Aviv University in the 1970s and early 1980s and witnessed the birth of his two children in Israel, he clearly does not identify as Israeli. But he is also much more than an outsider or former resident. His book actually transcends the dichotomies of foreigner and native, Israeli and Diaspora Jew. It is rather an intimate, elegant memoir of a long life lived in intermittent dialogue with Jerusalem's history.

Laqueur profiles topics as diverse as the postwar discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the history of the Rehavia and Me'a She'arim neighborhoods, and the fates of the city's old Arab family dynasties. The effect is a kaleidoscope of images of personalities and places that brings a tangled past to life. Laqueur's Jerusalem is not a tortured political or religious symbol, but a diverse, constantly changing city full of strange and vivid lives, as compelling as the larger history they both reflect and shape. A number of these individuals serve as springboards for larger reflections on the seminal events in Israeli history. We learn for instance of his early encounters with Mordecai Shenhabi, the semi- forgotten intellectual architect of Yad Vashem, who struggled valiantly to insert the Holocaust into the consciousness of Israeli politicians and the public. So too in a chapter on the history and fate of Soviet aliya to Israel, Laqueur juxtaposes his present-day conversations with one Russian immigrant family with his recollections of a secret 1958 exchange with Ben-Gurion's right- hand man for Soviet Jewish affairs, Shaul Avigur, on the question of whether and how to pursue a clandestine policy of encouraging mass Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union.

If there is a reason for the book's slightly hyperbolic title, it comes in the introduction and conclusion, where Laqueur offers denunciations of the political and religious extremism that threatens to tear apart the city that he clearly loves. There are multiple ideological dangers to Jerusalem, he argues, ranging from Palestinian terrorism to the self-destructive ideologies of left- wing Israeli anti-Zionism to right-wing Jewish religious nationalism. In his estimation, there will be no peaceful future for Jerusalem until these selective readings of the city's own complex history, and its myopia vis-?-vis its contemporary demographic and political realities, are addressed. But here even the greatest of contemporary historians throws up his hands at the limits of what his profession can do for the cause of peace in Jerusalem. Taking a conflicted stance toward his own professional mission, he laments the "deadly burden" of history, quoting the words of his old friend and swimming partner Yehuda Amichai, whose poem, "Jerusalem Ecology," notes the suffocating, dangerous passions that accompany each "new shipment of history [that] arrives" in the city.

So what is the solution to the future of Jerusalem? Laqueur says relatively little on this matter, other than suggesting that for the sake of peaceful pragmatism, partition would not be impossible. In this vein, he notes that in 1947 even the Zionist leadership had been open to major territorial compromise on Jerusalem. In the final analysis, however, Laqueur is not a politician - nor is he a political scientist. He is a historian, who expends less time prognosticating on the future of anti-Semitism and Jerusalem than on offering up invaluable descriptions of how we have traveled through history to reach the present stage. After all, as his two books amply demonstrate, even if, at the end of the day, all history is contemporary, its gaze is directed to the past, not the future.

James Loeffler is an assistant professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia.

(Copyright (c) 2006. The Jerusalem Report)