Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism & Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich, Hardcover

Hybrid Hate is the first book to study the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Black racism. As objects of racism, Jews and Blacks have been linked together for centuries as peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In this book, Tudor Parfitt investigates the development of antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and race theory in the West from the Renaissance to the Second World War.

Parfitt explains how Jews were often perceived as Black in medieval Europe, and the conflation of Jews and Blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of Black Jews in Loango in West Africa in 1777, and later of Black Jews in India, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa, the notion of multiracial Jews was born. Over the following centuries, the figure of the hybrid Black Jew was drawn into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. Parfitt analyses how Jews and Blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse from the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich, as the two fundamental prejudices of the West were combined. Hybrid Hate offers a new interpretation of the rise of antisemitism and anti-Black racism in Europe, and casts light on contemporary racist discourses in the United States and Europe.

About author(s):
Tudor Parfitt is Distinguished University Professor at Florida International University and Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. He worked in Jerusalem for a year with VSO before studying Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford. After a year as Goodenday Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he completed a D.Phil at Oxford before embarking on an academic career. He was one of the first historians to collaborate with geneticists on matters of group origins. He has travelled widely in Africa, India, Yemen, other Middle Eastern countries, and Papua New Guinea. In all, he has authored or edited thirty books, and presented seven documentaries for the BBC, PBS, Channel Four and the History Channel. He has four children.