Anti-antisemitic thinkers conspicuously avoided invoking any predecessors

Evidence

These recent figureheads of the struggle against antisemitism are at once isolated and conspicuously discreet about their precursors, if there were any. Arendt does retrieve out of oblivion the idiosyncratic figure of Bernard Lazare; Horkheimer and Adorno rely, for their part, on Sigmund Freud (though not on his singular attempt to counter antisemitism in Moses and Monotheism); and whereas Fanon could complain about the inadequacy of his predecessors in the struggle against racism and colonialism (Maran, Mannoni), Sartre—who inspired Fanon before writing a preface for The Wretched of the Earth—makes no similar gesture in his famed attack on ‘the antisemite’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1200

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of traditions being invented — Arendt’s retrieval of Lazare echoes the crafted genealogies in Said’s ‘The World, the Text, and the Critic’. — connects to: The Frankfurt School avoided studying anti-Semitism partly to protect its Jewish members. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 432
• QUESTION: Why would Horkheimer and Adorno avoid Freud’s Moses and Monotheism despite relying on him otherwise? Is there something about that specific text—its claims about Jewish identity—that made it unusable for their purposes?