This book is neither a history of the Jews nor an essay on anti-Semitism. It is a book on pogrom, a study of virulent persecutions of Jews pursued to the point of their destruction.
Nine pogroms have been selected, and the fact that they have been selected means that this book cannot be presented as a work of history. These pogroms deal with Jews in Western Europe, except for the first pogrom in Egypt. There have been pogroms against non-Jews—against Buddhists in Asia, for example, against Ukrainians in Soviet Russia—but this is a study of pogroms against Jews.
The method adopted has been to take our perception of the Jew as it exists in some minds today and to seek for its components in the past to which all of us are heirs. The nine selected pogroms seem to me to explain the imprinting of a certain kind of image of the Jew on the European mind. As such they may not be valid for the historian who sees the record of past events in the precise framework in which they occurred; but they may be illuminating for those of open mind who ponder on their prejudices.
Between any distinctive minority, especially if it is a successful one, and the majority which is its host, group tension is inevitable. Prejudice towards it, I suppose, is unavoidable.
I do think that our consciousness of prejudice should be deepened. The pogroms studied are, in effect, the reductio ad absurdum of prejudice. That we should be conscious of our prejudices seems a matter of importance. Only a short time ago the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Many too are dying more slowly in slave camps in the Urals. It is right that they should be remembered.
Jewish minorities have undoubtedly offered provocation within the cultural framework in which they have lived. Others can write of those provocations. This is a study not in stimulus but in response. Wherever pogrom has taken place it seems axiomatic to me (though not to an historian) that the response has been greater than the stimulus. If we can dissect out the disproportion of that response we shed light not on the Jews but upon ourselves.
Edinburgh, 1960.