Doctrines of Hatred, Part I: Anti-Semitism - Paperback

by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (Author), Richard Robinson (Translator)

Doctrines of Hatred, Part I: Anti-Semitism by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (AD 1842-1912) was originally published in 1902, under the French title of Les Doctrines de Haine: lʼanti-sémitisme, lʼanti-protestantisme, lʼanti-cléricalisme.

Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu was a French historian and essayist. As a practicing Christian, he was in favor of the separation of Church and State. He was the last president of the National League Against Atheism, an association founded in 1886 initially to combat anti-clericalism and socialism. Politically a liberal, in addition to being a French patriot, Leroy-Beaulieu was opposed to anti-Semitism. Thus this book, which could have easily been entitled "What is Anti-Semitism?"

Modern readers should approach this book less as a historical document from over 120 years ago, and more in the context of: a) anti-Semitism in France from the late 19th century, during and after the Dreyfus Affair (AD 1894-1906), when a political scandal rocked France and severely divided the French nation; in the wider context of b) anti-Semitism in Europe as a whole, since the middle ages, since perhaps the Crusades, if not earlier; in a still wider historical context, that of c) the plight of the Jews in the Middle East and Europe since the fall of the Second Temple ("Herodʼs Temple") in Jerusalem, in AD 70, the denouement of the First Roman-Jewish War, together with the resultant diaspora of the Jewish people; and finally, perhaps most importantly, in the context of d) anti-Semitism today, the Jewish peopleʼs plight in our own era, since the Holocaust, WWII, the Zionist movement and its concomitant establishment of the State of Israel in 1948; since also the Gaza-Israeli conflicts, from 2005, with the most recent Israel-Hamas War that erupted on October 7, 2023.