Antisemitism as a Semiotic Problem: The Prehistory of the Definitions of Antisemitism

In an attempt to locate the roots of the curious idea that defining antisemitism can be a means of fighting it, this article unearths the post-1945 process by which antisemitism has evolved into a semiotic problem. Historically, this article locates the prehistory of the definitions in a broad but somewhat elusive change in post-1945 European culture and the emergence of ambiguous, but potentially negative, statements about Jews, without which the definitions cannot be understood. Conceptually, this discussion is intended to explain why the issue now takes the form of a semiotic problem. The first part of the article attempts to elaborate an Israeli perspective on antisemitism. The second part reconstructs Shulamit Volkov’s influential conceptualization of antisemitism in Wilhelmine Germany as “a cultural code” in order to show that it is incapable of addressing the post-1945 situation. The concluding part of this article attempts to articulate a way out of the semiotic morass by distinguishing between ambiguity and ambivalence.