Russian antisemitism tied Jews to modernity while anti-Muslim prejudice did not

Evidence

For all of these commonalities, though, there were important differences between anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim dispositions. Jews haunted the imaginations of Russian thinkers on the right and the left who were gripped by anxieties about Russia’s changing place in the globe and about the novel forces—capitalism, industrialisation, urbanisation and the explosion of commercial culture—that were transforming the empire. On the right, critics imagined Jews to be the source of the revolutionary movements that haunted the empire from the 1870s; on the left, they were to blame for the failure of various radical campaigns. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 507

Categorization

• XREF: This asymmetry — Jew as symbol of modernity, Muslim as symbol of backwardness — recurs across European settings and echoes the book’s comparative thesis.