Robert S. Wistrich — wrote extensively about anti- Semitism

Robert S. Wistrich, who devoted his fourdecade scholarly career to dissecting anti- Semitism, from the biblical Haman, who warned King Ahasuerus of Persia against strangers whose “laws are diverse from all people,” to modern Islamist extremists who deny Israel’s right to exist, died May 19 in Rome. He was 70.

The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he taught since 1982, said he had a heart attack before a scheduled address to the Italian Senate on rising anti- Semitism in Europe.

Mr. Wistrich was the author or editor of 29 books, including the encyclopedic “Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred.” In that volume he found anti- Semitism’s historic roots in Jewish religious and social exceptionalism, which, he said, antagonized early pagans and rulers who demanded absolute fealty, and which later spread as Christians embraced the divinity of Jesus. He distinguished between classical antiZionism, or opposition to a Jewish state, and antiSemitism, and also between Islam and Islamist terrorism.

But in a letter published posthumously in the Jerusalem Post, he wrote: “The Islamists are the spearhead of current anti- Semitism, aided and abetted by the moral relativism of all- toomany naive Western liberals.”

Mr. Wistrich wrote the text for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s exhibition “People, Book, Land: The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People With the Holy Land,” which was displayed at U. N. United Nations headquarters in New York in February and March.

The exhibit’s debut in Paris last year was postponed after Arab nations protested that it could undermine Middle East peace talks. It finally opened after “Holy Land” was substituted for “Land of Israel” in the title.

Robert Solomon Wistrich was born on April 7, 1945, in Lenger, in what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. His parents had moved there after fleeing Poland on the day the Germans invaded. His father, Jakob, was a doctor and a Zionist. His mother was the former Sabina Silbiger.

Foreboding in 1939

“In September 1939, they took a vacation and, because of a sense of foreboding that they had, they went eastward,” Mr. Wistrich recalled in a 2007 interview with Covenant magazine. “Well, this turned out to be an eight- year vacation in hell!”

His father was arrested twice by the Soviet secret police. After the war, the family was repatriated to Krakow, Poland, “but soon found out that they were living in a Jewish graveyard,” Mr. Wistrich recalled. They obtained Costa Rican passports on the black market, traveled to Paris and eventually settled in London, where he formed his first memory of anti- Semitism.

“In the 1950s, this was a normal part of the landscape,” he said in the interview. “Jews were ‘ bloody foreigners,’ but I wasn’t rattled by it. All the teachers at my grammar school were influenced by anti- Jewish prejudices. So, in order to achieve, you had to outperform.”

He said the nondescript house in which he was raised, at 24 Oxford Road in Kilburn, was where Theodor Herzl embraced the concept of a Jewish state during an 1895 conversation with playwright Israel Zangwill.

Studied at Stanford

Mr. Wistrich studied at Stanford University, returned to Europe to participate in the Paris student revolt in 1968 and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge in England. He visited Israel in 1969, staying 16 months; received a doctorate from the University of London; and was research director at the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London.

In 1982, he was granted tenure at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he held the Neuberger chair for modern European history and had headed the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti- Semitism since 2002.

He married Danielle Boccara, who survives him, as do their children, Anna, Dov and Sonia; seven grandchildren; and his mother.

In 1989, Mr. Wistrich wrote “The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph,” which won the Austrian State Prize in History. Reviewing the book, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, wrote in the New York Times that it “vindicates the centrality of Jewishness and antiSemitism as dynamic and changing forces in the evolution of 19th century Austro- German politics and culture.”

Two years later, his compendious “Antisemitism” was published, inspiring a public television series. He later wrote “A Lethal Obsession: Anti- Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad” and “From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel.”

In 2001, Mr. Wistrich was one of three Jewish scholars who said they could no longer work on a committee exploring the degree to which Pope Pius XII defied the Germans during World War II unless the Vatican opened its archives. In a preliminary report, the panel found that the pope “was through and through a diplomat, but that simply didn’t work when confronted with the Nazi machinery.”

Academic respect

Winston Pickett, a former colleague, said Mr. Wistrich sought to endow the subject of anti- Semitism with academic respectability after it had been subordinated to studies of racism and the Holocaust and had fallen out of favor in Israel, “where in a spirit of nation- building and a psychological need to move on, the study of Jew- hatred may have seemed retrograde at best and post- traumatic at worst.”

Pickett asked Mr. Wistrich how he was able to spend virtually his whole career on what a fellow writer sardonically described as “5,000 years of bitterness”? What sustained him?

“‘ Israel,” he quoted Mr. Wistrich as responding. “This is the only place where I could ever carry out this work.”