Antisemitism and homophobia have different histories, but both can cast minorities as threatening, subversive or powerful – and both belong in a broader response to prejudice.

One of the complaints of Jews who are concerned about growing signs of antisemitism across the world is that antisemitism is often excluded from discussions of racism. There are particular reasons for this, which a comparison with homophobia helps clarify.

Most racism assumes inferiority on the part of the other. Indeed, racism as it developed in the western world was necessary to justify slavery, as Black Africans could be deemed less human than their white slave owners. In the shameful case of Australia, the original British settlers not only believed Aborigines were inferior, but talked openly of their dying out in favour of more superior Europeans.

These assumptions linger today in lingering assumptions about people seen as non-white, although rarely expressed in the crudities of a century ago. But Jews, rather like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, are disliked and persecuted precisely because of the fear that they are superior, that they are rich, cosmopolitan and powerful and therefore a threat in a very different way to that posed by........

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