Abstract

In the course of 20th-century European history Jews and Arabs, as well as Jews and Muslims, were put in the position of a ‘civilizational’ conflict that is not only political but also quasi-metaphysical. This article examines an impact of the conflict on the attitudes towards anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and considers Islamophobic implications of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ discourse. A thesis of the text is that both the struggle against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and the one against the mechanism creating, in certain circumstances, a kind of negative feedback loop between them requires not only opposing the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim prejudices, but also a deep, critical reconsideration of the concepts of Europeanness that lie at their foundation. The author suggests that a good starting point for this reconsideration might be the postcolonial reading of the Jewish intellectual tradition, especially the one focusing on the figure of the Mizrahi Jew.