Covering the story of prejudice against Jews from the time of Christ through the rise of Nazi Germany, The History of Anti-Semitism presents in elegant and thoughtful language a balanced, careful assessment of this egregious human failing that is nearly ubiquitous in the history of Europe.

Suicidal Europe, 1870-1933 traces the development of a belief among Europe’s educated classes in an eventual Jewish domination of the West. Revealing the embedded myths about Jewish bankers and Jewish Bolsheviks in European rhetoric and histories, Poliakov demonstrates that the steady rise in anti-Semitism and suspicion of Jews in the late nineteenth century-highlighted by the Dreyfus affair-and its eventual eruption in the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1920s are part of the same thread of fear and hatred that reaches back to the beginning of the first millennium.