Long ignored by historians, the history of anti-Jewish violence has witnessed a remarkable surge in scholarly interest. This new work, which has illuminated both medieval and modern manifestations of anti-Jewish violence, allows one to conceptualize the tradition of violence and to ask questions about its patterns and significance. As we know from the standpoint of an interpretive study of culture, group violence, no matter how appalling, is almost never senseless, but instead expresses meaning and remains for the historian one of the most promising if disheartening avenues into the popular imagination. Similarly, speech said in the midst of violent acts (a specific category of speech act) represents an opening for a cultural history of anti-Semitism that takes seriously both its diachronic dimension and its contemporary context.

Historians are just now beginning to put this story together. Although the history of anti-Semitism is a rich field, it has tended to ignore the problem of violence, and, where it has not ignored the problem, it has tended to concentrate on explaining the causes of violence as opposed to discerning the significance and meaning, in an anthropological sense, of violent acts and words. Until recently, this was even true of major nation-tearing events, like the Dreyfus Affair. In 1998, Pierre Birnbaum could write in the introduction to The Anti-Semitic Moment: