Are Jews Black? According to contemporary schemes of ethno-racial classification, obviously not. But it is perhaps equally obvious today that such schemes are historically contingent. In Hybrid Hate: Conflations of antisemitism and anti-black racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich, Tudor Parfitt takes the long view. Medieval texts portrayed Jews as blackened by corruption, their skin dark on account of their turning away from the light of Christ. African Blackness too was read as a punishment, the somatic reflection of a primordial moral darkness associated with the biblical “Curse of Ham”. Although a commitment to scriptural accounts of human origins meant that both groups were sons of Adam, and therefore equally human, in the medieval imaginary both Jews and Black people had been made monstrous by their sins.

Modernity did not fare much better. Piety gave way to rationality as the cardinal virtue of European culture, but the problem was redefined: Black and Jewish people were no longer enemies of Christ, but of reason itself. According to Voltaire, “blind fanaticism” made the Jew an enemy of progress, and the innate brutality of Black people justified enslavement in progress’s name. Emerging sciences offered new ways of justifying old prejudices, and over the nineteenth century the quasi-Linnaean biology of racial classification spread across the world with the global empires. By the time racial pseudoscience became the official policy of the fascist states in the 1930s, it was no surprise to hear Hitler describe Jews as “a negroid parasite on the national body”. The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline was more explicit still: “the Jew is a negro”.

While the early history of anti-Black racism and racialization has become a lively academic topic in recent decades, and a significant body of work exists on the history of antisemitism, these topics have rarely been examined in parallel. Parfitt presents a startling quantity of evidence for their persistent conflation across the centuries, and demonstrates conclusively that the West’s “two fundamental hatreds” have more often than not occurred together.

As a study of racism rather than a study of Jewishness or blackness, Hybrid Hate tells us more about European attitudes than about the subjects of these attitudes. Though it is perhaps unfair to insist that this already information-rich book tackle such questions, it would have been helpful to know more about what Blackness and Jewishness meant to the individuals and groups themselves. How did a…