Why did Democratic Party leadership look past a Maine Senate candidate with a Nazi tattoo? The question is striking because Holocaust films have reduced antisemitism in the public imagination to Nazism. If there are no Nazis in the frame, Jews must be fine. Yet here was a man bearing one of its symbols, and it did not register as disqualifying. Does such a view overlook what came before Nazism and what made it possible? Are we now confusing the culmination in the destruction of European Jewry with the disease itself? To understand antisemitism today, we need to look beyond the camps and before Hitler, toward the conditions that made both imaginable. For that, we can turn to a period before Nazism, but still modern, in a country that later opposed the Nazis, France.

In late nineteenth-century France, the journalist Édouard Drumont exemplified modern Jew-hatred in La France juive (Jewish France), his bestselling, forever popular, 1,200-page antisemitic book published in 1886. Drumont matters not because he predicted Nazism, but because he reveals a form of antisemitism that predates Hitler and persists beyond him. Drawing on nearly two thousand years of anti-Jewish........

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