The books that are the subject of this review essay comprise three new contributions and one revised edition about a topic that has become paradigmatic in defining scholarly and political approaches to key areas of Middle Eastern history. It has shaped studies of the historical and ideological roots of Arab nationalism, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the emergence and perseverance of authoritarian regimes in the modern Middle East. The ways that politicians, intellectuals, political movements, and the Arab public related to Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism have been used to contest the legitimacy of 20th-century Arab political movements across the ideological spectrum. Historians have theorized about the involvement of individuals such as Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini in the crimes of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann; the roots of Arab nationalist doctrine in German Volk ideas; the mimicry of Nazism in organizations such as the Iraqi al-Futuwwa and Antun Saadeh's Syrian Social Nationalist Party; and Arab public sympathies for Nazi anti-Semitism dating from the 1930s or even earlier.Footnote ¹ Until recently, European and Anglo-American research on these topics—often based on a history of ideas approach—tended to take a natural affinity of Arabs toward Nazism for granted. More recent works have contextualized authoritarian and totalitarian trends in the Arab world within a broad political spectrum, choosing subaltern perspectives and privileging the analysis of local voices in the press over colonial archives and the voices of grand theoreticians. The works of Israel Gershoni have taken the lead in this emerging scholarship of Arab nationalism.Footnote ² This approach was also the common denominator of a research project on “Arab Encounters with National Socialism,” which the Berlin Center for Modern Oriental Studies (Zentrum Moderner Orient) hosted from 2000 to 2003.Footnote ³ Its members included the author of this review and the authors of two of the books under review (Nordbruch and Wildangel). The project used indigenous Arabic sources, especially local newspapers, for a close scrutiny of Arab reactions to the challenge of Nazism in a period when Arabs, especially nationalists, perceived that quasicolonial regimes undermined the ostensibly democratic and liberal ethos of the British and French Mandate powers.

All the books reviewed here deal with the history of Arab–Nazi relations during the interwar period and World War II. All were written by German authors engaged in a discourse that, unlike its North American counterpart, is rooted in contemporary debates about coming to terms with Germany's Nazi past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). In recent years, this process has shifted due to a reassessment of the pro-Palestinian position of the German radical left during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Bordering on and at times endorsing anti-Semitism in its rejection of the State of Israel, the German left-wing terror organization Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion), for example, cooperated closely with the terror brigades of the PLO. Since 9/11, this triangle of a Nazi past, the aberrations of the radical left, and the latter's cooperation with militant Palestinians has become entangled in German debates about Muslims in Western societies, from the Arab–Israeli conflict to the perceived “Clash of Civilizations” between the democratic West and the world of Islam. In this context, some have connected Islamic fundamentalism, Muslim states, and Islamist terrorism to fascism and Nazism, pointing to alleged structural commonalities between Islam and Nazism as such. The Nazi collaboration of actors such as Amin al-Husseini, whose vitriolic anti-Semitic speeches were broadcast over German radio during World War II, plays a central role in this argumentation. A key text promoting the concept of “Islamo-Fascism” as an explanatory paradigm for violence and terrorism in the Muslim world is Jihad and Jew Hatred by the German author Matthias Küntzel, which appeared in 2003 in German and in 2007 in an English translation.Footnote ⁴ Three of the four books reviewed here engage with Küntzel's book either positively (Mallmann and Cüppers, Gensicke) or negatively (Wildangel).

In what follows, I review each of the books individually with numerous cross-references between the sections.Footnote ⁵ The overall schema divides the books into two groups, which I see as representing opposite sides of a spectrum of historical analysis—the work of Mallmann and Cüppers and of Gensicke on one side and that of Wildangel and of Nordbruch on the other. I will close with a discussion, inspired by Nordbruch, of the benefits and drawbacks of research that seeks to understand the reception of political and ideological concepts such as fascism in the framework of their transfer from European to non-European contexts.

Mallmann and Cüppers’ book builds on an article that the authors published in 2006.Footnote ⁶ It presents archival evidence for German plans of an extension of the Holocaust to the Jews of Arab lands in anticipation of a victory over British forces in North Africa and the Middle East. The authors reconstruct the directives for a deployment of SS and SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) troops to undertake “executive measures against the civilian population” in Egypt and elsewhere (p. 138). These “measures” were to be similar to those the SS Einsatzgruppen (Special-Operation Units, or Mobile Killing Units) were carrying out in the Soviet Union, where death squads made up of policemen and SD personnel roamed the countryside in the wake of the German army's advance, systematically murdering Jews and members of other targeted communities. The plans for the Middle East were never carried out due to the German defeat in North Africa. In the Arab world, it was the Jews of Tunisia who suffered most from atrocities committed by German occupation forces, although the majority survived. In the midst of the Holocaust, it is hardly surprising that German Nazis would treat the Jews of Arab lands like those of Europe. Yet the authors’ assumptions of Arab collaboration in a planned Holocaust comparable to the collaboration of local populations in the European theater remain entirely speculative. They are based solely on perceptions and reports of German officials and travelers to Arab lands.

Evidence presented by Mallmann and Cüppers of the limited success of German efforts to recruit Arab exiles as volunteers for the Deutsch–Arabische Lehrabteilung (German–Arab Training Division) tells a different story. The Wehrmacht established the Lehrabteilung in Greece following the fiasco of German support for the Rashid ʿAli movement in Iraq, which was crushed by the British in 1941. They were to serve as support troops and propagandists to win over the Arab population should Germany succeed in occupying the Fertile Crescent (p. 153). Results were disappointing, too, when the Lehrabteilung was deployed to Tunisia in early 1943 to conscript local volunteers (p. 217). Success was again limited when the SS started to recruit soldiers for the Bosnian Muslim division in Yugoslavia the same year (pp. 233–34). This lack of enthusiasm among Muslims—Arabs, Berbers, and Bosnians—stands in sharp contrast to the loyal service of North African Muslim soldiers, including Algerian conscripts and Moroccan goumiers, in the Free French army during the Allied invasions of Italy in 1943 and France in 1944.

The section on the SS Einsatzgruppe for the Middle East constitutes only one, relatively short, chapter of the book. The other chapters reiterate much of what is already known about the Italian–German campaigns in North Africa, the German activities in Iraq and Syria in 1941, and the activities of Arab exiles—especially the mufti and the former Iraqi prime minister Rashid ʿAli al-Kailani—in Berlin after 1941. New archival material, which sometimes seems arbitrarily selected, does little more than spice up the narrative, such as when the authors quote abundantly from the mufti's Berlin speeches and documents.

There is, in addition, a very problematic discussion of links between Arabs and Nazism in Palestine. Despite a disclaimer in the introduction that they do not intend to allege that all Arabs collaborated with Nazis (p. 9), the authors imply a logical link between their findings about German designs for the Jewish population of the Middle East on the one hand and their broad-stroke analysis of the interwar Palestine conflict on the other. In doing so, they suggest that not only Palestinians but also most Arabs were all too willing to enter the Nazi camp. In its basic outline, Mallmann and Cüppers’ account of the attempts by Arab nationalists to gain support from Nazi Germany follows a well-trodden path,Footnote ⁷ but they add highly selective readings from works on Middle Eastern and Palestinian history. They often attempt to discredit well-known Middle East historians as too lenient and apologetic, purportedly for ideological reasons, toward Arab nationalists and the latter's overtures to the Nazis. The account of the interwar period in Palestine follows a teleological narrative of ever-increasing Arab violence, leaving little room for socioeconomic factors. There is an omnipresent claim that the Palestinians acted out of an ideological amalgam of nationalism, Islamism, and anti-Semitism, fueled by a general Arab endorsement of Nazi principles; after the Palestine revolt of 1936 to 1939, the Palestinian Arabs had become deeply ideological and imbued with an “eliminatory anti-Semitism” (p. 55). In contrast, the parallel Zionist military buildup is presented as merely a reaction to excessive Arab violence during the revolt. Altogether, the authors construct a narrative of irrational Palestinian terrorism versus justified Zionist retaliation.

When Mallmann and Cüppers cite primary material as evidence for a pro-Nazi stance among Palestinian Arabs that involved some sort of Final Solution for the Jews of Palestine, they neglect basic rules of source critique. Reports by German diplomatic personnel as well as die-hard Nazi travelers in the Middle East are accepted at face value, as are British reports. The extent of the authors’ faith in the assessments of Nazi journalists writing for a Nazi audience is indeed disturbing. The book does not quote a single Arabic source and generally dismisses previous studies based on in-depth research in Arabic primary sources. Mallmann and Cüppers simply discount the authors of such studies as members of a vaguely defined group of Western apologetic Islamicists whose “love affair” with the object of their research deprives them of all critical capabilities (p. 24). A favorite target is Gudrun Krämer and her History of Palestine.Footnote ⁸ The works of Israel Gershoni are ignored altogether. Indeed, the authors seem unable to identify any solid historiography based on primary Arabic sources, mistaking all of it for tendentious literature glorifying the mufti. Their own preferences in primary-source material are indicated when, for instance, a German-language, Nazi-controlled provincial newspaper from Passau in Lower Bavaria is called upon to fill in factual evidence for a 1942 peasant revolt in Palestine, which is thereby shown to have been inspired by Rommel's victories in North Africa (p. 162).Footnote ⁹ In their epilogue, Mallmann and Cüppers confirm once more their belief that Middle East historians have ignored or downplayed ample evidence for a continuity of pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic trends from the interwar period through 1948 and beyond.

Klaus Gensicke's Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten is a revised edition of his dissertation, which he first published in 1988.Footnote ¹⁰ It is a reliable source of information about the mufti's years in Germany, based on a close reading of the German archives. The new version is largely a reprint but contains some significant alterations that abandon the balanced language of the first edition in favor of more assertive allegations. In the new edition, Gensicke emphasizes what he perceives as the mufti's unconditioned hatred of Jews. The book starts with an assessment of the mufti's years in Palestine before his flight to Iraq via Lebanon during the Arab revolt, and there is a chapter on his return to the Middle East in 1946. However, his years in Germany and Italy from 1941 to 1945 take up the greater part of the book. The intertextuality between the book's new edition and Mallmann and Cüppers' work is notable. The books appeared in the same series, which Mallmann edited, there is a whole paragraph on Mallmann and Cüppers in Gensicke's introduction, and both point to the work of Matthias Küntzel. In fact, Küntzel wrote a foreword to the new edition of Gensicke's book, and Gensicke attributes the initiative for the republication to him. Küntzel's foreword underscores what he sees as Mufti al-Husseini's culpability in the Holocaust. Gensicke writes in a passage new to the revised introduction that unspecified German “Mufti apologists were trying to outdo each other in their one-dimensional approaches, following the principle: ‘What should not be cannot be'” (p. 15).

The original version of Gensicke's book had already evaluated the mufti's behavior, his moral position, and consequently the legitimacy of his actions in light of his involvement in Nazism and especially its murderous anti-Semitism. I consider this a viable position. The mufti's use of Nazi anti-Semitic language in his propaganda speeches to the Arab world and his efforts to prevent the 1943 emigration to Palestine of Jewish children and adults from Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary who were seeking to avoid deportation into extermination camps—Gensicke presents both in exhaustive detail—remain inexcusable crimes against humanity. The book, in both versions, offers little contextualization of the mufti's position in an environment of unusual pressures and challenges, however. They had an effect on his decision making in the 1930s and early 1940s, as did his unquestionable character flaws, especially his obscene opportunism, which trumped the most basic demands of empathy.

It is, moreover, ahistorical to draw a line of direct necessity from the mufti's politics while he was in Palestine to his later stance in Germany, as Gensicke does in his epilogue. His position that the mufti's Nazi propaganda was the root cause of today's anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, directly influencing the Hamas Charter, for example, is also questionable. According to Gensicke, Arab criticism of the mufti's engagement with the Nazis occurred only in the context of 1948. Earlier, the “Arab masses” had been deeply impressed by the promises of the Nazis as these were conveyed in the mufti's propaganda speeches. Neither version of the book, however, uses Arabic sources to back up these claims. The amount of material on the mufti's collaboration with the Nazis that Gensicke presents tends to obscure the fact that Germany's Arab politics were a side show even during Rommel's North Africa campaign. Those who took the mufti seriously—which was often difficult in light of his “embarrassing” insistence (p. 184) on unrealistic plans and projects—probably exploited the fact that Hitler's expansionist goals were entirely focused at that time on the Soviet Union. As a consequence, he had little actual interest in the Middle East. This was a terrain, therefore, in which they did not have to fear much interference from above and were free to further their personal ambitions. The mufti knew very well how to further his own.

The mufti's relationship with Adolf Eichmann has been a source of major controversy since the end of World War II. The former's alleged close association with the ultimate architect of bureaucratized mass murder has been used as evidence of his own support for the Holocaust. The subsection of Gensicke's book on this relationship is an interesting example of the slight but not insignificant changes in the revised edition. Eichmann and the mufti both denied that they ever had a close exchange, but remarks by Eichmann's former aid Dieter Wisliceny suggested that several meetings between the two had taken place. The issue remains unresolved due to inconclusive evidence. In the original edition, Gensicke therefore calls it speculative to assume that the coincidence of the mufti's arrival in Berlin with the beginning of the Final Solution underscored his role in it (p. 164). This remark is missing in the new edition (see p. 112). In 1988, Gensicke included a quote from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she doubted that the rumors about a mufti–Eichmann link were true.Footnote ¹¹ In 2007, Gensicke omitted this as well, without adding new evidence. The 1988 edition contained a synopsis of Simon Wiesenthal's Grossmufti—Grossagent der Achse, which claimed that the mufti had visited Auschwitz and Majdanek, approving the atrocities committed in those places, and that he was friends with Eichmann and other architects of the Holocaust.Footnote ¹² Gensicke had commented that these massive allegations should be based on stronger evidence to become credulous.Footnote ¹³ In the 2007 version, both the synopsis and the critique of the report are gone, but Gensicke is nevertheless certain that the mufti knew about Eichmann's activities and that he endorsed them (p. 113). The point of highlighting these differences is certainly not to disprove that the mufti had knowledge of the Final Solution, which he may well have had. Rather, the differences represent a shift in the debate about the mufti between 1988 and 2007. Apparently, it seemed appropriate in 2007 for Gensicke to edit out a number of cautious remarks that had seemed pertinent in 1988.

René Wildangel's study responds to many of the questions that Mallmann and Cüppers and Gensicke leave open. Palestinian reactions to Nazism are the core of the book. Wildangel explicitly rejects Mallmann and Cüppers’ theses. The book traces German–Arab relations and perspectives from the late 19th century (the Kaiser's visit to the Holy Land stands out) through the Weimar Republic to the Nazi period (including early diatribes by Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg against “racially inferior” Arabs) and World War II. To some extent, this comprehensive approach risks constructing an overdetermined continuity from cooperation with and admiration for the German Empire (Germanophilia) among Ottoman elites to Nazi sympathies in the post-Ottoman Arab world.

The best and most substantial sections of the book are chapters 4 and 5. Here, Wildangel covers in great detail the different political and intellectual encounters between Palestinians and Nazi Germany and places them in the broad context of the Palestine conflict. He starts by reconstructing the minutiae of German Middle East policy from 1933 to 1939. In this, his account is not essentially different from that of Mallmann and Cüppers, or of Gensicke, but it is much richer in detail. Wildangel relies less on the overused documents of the German Foreign Office and more on intelligence and press-report files located in the German archives, the British Public Records Office, and the Central Zionist Archive. He provides ample evidence, even before he delves into contemporary Palestinian newspapers, that Arabs before and during World War II were not uniformly pro-German. In fact, opinions were nuanced and more often than not, it seems, pro-British. Both British and Zionist reports confirm this. Even when Wildangel uses the same source material as Mallmann and Cüppers, the outcome can be quite different. For example, the latter authors quote from a report written by SD functionary Herbert Hagen on his 1937 journey with Eichmann to Palestine and Egypt that “the common Arab . . . listens attentively when he hears Hitler's name and overflows with joy” (p. 60). Wildangel uses a more complete version of the same quote: “National Socialism and its creator have no political or ideological meaning to the common Arab, who listens attentively when he hears Hitler's name and overflows with joy. It is fair to say that both are as remote to him as Allah, who he worships according to custom in exchange for the promised reward in the hereafter . . .” (p. 102).Footnote ¹⁴ Apparently, even Nazi agents in Palestine had an ambivalent perception of Arabs and may have been less enthusiastic about the depth of Nazism's appeal to the local population than Mallmann and Cüppers suggest. Of more importance, however, is that Wildangel does not draw any definitive conclusions about Arab attitudes from the accounts of German Nazis.

What is more interesting for us is therefore Wildangel's analysis of Palestinian primary sources. The representation of Hitler and Nazi Germany in the Palestinian press was, according to Wildangel, also ambivalent, fluctuating from enthusiastic endorsement to rational criticism and outright rejection. After Hitler's assumption of power, Palestinian newspapers criticized the “Führerkult,” or the violence of the Nazi movement against Communists and Jews (some held the persecution of the former, but not the latter, to be justified). Similar assertions were made in the broadcasts of a Palestinian Arab radio station during World War II. The broadcasts, which were sponsored by the British to counter German and Italian propaganda, were apparently quite popular. According to Public Records Office records, the Arab journalists working for the station had a significant degree of freedom.

Wildangel presents Palestinian society during World War II as exhausted from the Arab revolt and sometimes embracing the economic opportunities of the war economy. It seems that the majority of Arabs who participated in public debates in Palestine opted for an uneasy acquiescence, if not partnership, with the Mandate power. The war exacerbated British suppression and censorship of both Arab and Jewish publications and organizations. The British censor did not directly command what could be written but instead banned newspapers either temporarily or permanently after the publication of objectionable material. The Palestinian press thus unquestionably represented a more limited spectrum of public opinion during the war than before it, but, as Wildangel notes, it was still a genuine, in this case liberal, Arab voice. The newspapers must have had some credibility for those who continued to buy them. There were strong voices in the Palestinian Arab press, clearly moved by earlier Italian atrocities in Libya and Abyssinia, condemning the Axis powers’ campaign in North Africa as an imperialist war. They attacked Italy for its air raids on the port towns of Palestine and praised the heroism of the (relatively few) Palestinian volunteers fighting for the British army—all signs diametrically opposed to Mallmann and Cüppers’ paradigm. A December 1941 issue of Filastin printed a photograph of Serbian civilians—among them a woman—hanged by the Germans (p. 278ff.). Such hints at German atrocities were relatively rare, however. The Palestinian newspapers instead endorsed the British war effort in support of a victory of democracy over dictatorship. The war in fact strengthened these pro-British and anti-German voices in the Palestinian press, even if this was related to the increased pressure of British censorship.

Wildangel covers topics as diverse as the Palestine revolt from 1936 to 1939, the competition of British and German propaganda in Palestine, the labor movement and the Communist Party (which, like other Communist parties in the Arab world, rejected fascism before and during the war), and the relationship between Palestinians and the local German “Templer” community. He also recounts the mufti's years in Berlin, largely following Gensicke's storyline but adding a detailed analysis of the Arabic-language German propaganda newspaper Barid al-Sharq, which spread crude anti-Semitic stereotypes. Of particular interest are the excursions into topics of contemporary concern. Wildangel takes the risk that his account might lose focus by stepping out of the rigid framework of historical analysis in order to tackle crucial problems. In a brief evaluation of the presence of anti-Semitism in Palestine, Wildangel juxtaposes the general absence in Islam of racial rejection of Jews with the growing presence of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the Arab press starting in the 1920s. This, he says, happened in the context of escalating tensions in the Palestine conflict. The stereotypes were received through European channels (but not necessarily German ones), including missionaries, and were not indigenous.

On an analytical level, Wildangel assesses Palestinian extremist nationalism in the light of comparative-theoretical approaches to fascism. It would have been worthwhile for the author to ask some of the conceptual questions of this subsection, which comes late in the book, in the introduction, because he makes some of his most important observations here. Palestinian militants, he writes, adopted some elements of European fascist movements, such as military-party discipline and uniform shirts, the use of swastika-like symbols, and forms of organization, including male youth groups that could be dispatched to project power and violence in the streets. The constant supervision by the Mandate power and competition with the Yishuv, however, prevented the emergence of a unified leadership and structure to maintain internal cohesion and movement discipline. Admiration for Nazi Germany, Wildangel concludes, reflected on themes such as the charismatic Führer, the dictatorial projection of power, the cult of violence, and Nazi anti-Semitism—all of which were subject to critical investigation too. Palestinian Arab nationalists and militants did not, however, develop their own “style” of fascist representation, which for Wildangel crucially distinguishes their movement from contemporary European fascisms. There was no singular “Führerkult” in Palestine because of the antagonism between different groups, especially the pro- and anti-mufti factions, which increasingly damaged the internal cohesion of Palestinian society in the late 1930s and throughout the war.

In another section, Wildangel reflects on the knowledge that both Jews and Arabs in Palestine had of the Final Solution. Information traveled between the two groups, so this knowledge must have been quite substantial. Yet Wildangel points out that the knowledge of Arab Palestinians could not have produced the same moral and political dilemmas that it produced among Jews or the allied powers, who identified either with the victims or the enemies of the perpetrators. Before the war, many Arabs had already condemned fascist violence against Jews on moral grounds, and as the situation in Europe deteriorated a component of self-interest was added, namely, that the escalation of Jewish suffering would cause more Jews to settle in Palestine. Quite logically, this stance did not lead to an endorsement of the Nazi terror but often to its rejection, at least in the Palestinian press. Altogether, Wildangel's account neither hides nor overemphasizes Palestinian sympathies for Nazism but places them in context.

Goetz Nordbruch's Nazism in Syria and Lebanon, the only of the four titles available in English, has similarities to Wildangel's approach in its chronological analysis of reactions to Nazism in the public spheres of Syria and Lebanon between 1933 and 1945. This territory is not as contested as it is in Mandate Palestine, however, and Nordbruch remains strictly within the confines of historical inquiry, avoiding excursions into politicized debates. He makes extensive use of newspapers from the French Mandate territories, integrating them very persuasively with detailed readings of the French colonial and German archives to produce a survey of Arab–Nazi relations in Syria and Lebanon that has both breadth and depth. The result is a nuanced and fair picture that gives preference neither to the voices supporting Nazism nor to those who rejected it. The conclusions are therefore not clear-cut but delineate a broad range of visions of the meaning that modern totalitarian rule, such as that in Nazi Germany, could have for the creation of a modern Levantine society. In this sense, the intellectual debates were quite similar to those in Palestine.

Nordbruch also examines concrete links between political circles in Syria and several German agencies during the interwar period. As in Palestine, the latter were generally reluctant to give open support to Arab nationalists, seeking to avoid interference with Italian, French, or British interests. But when the outbreak of war put this principle into question and opened up new strategic opportunities, German, French, and local actors embarked on sometimes frantic, and often badly coordinated, efforts to rally support for their particular goals during the war. Nordbruch presents these activities masterfully, relying heavily on French colonial sources to present the impact of propaganda on the Syrians and Lebanese. The question of source critique is a problem that runs through the arguments of all the books presented here, including the nuanced conclusions of Nordbruch. To what extent is the intelligence information gathered and processed by the French Services Speciaux reliable? In the absence of other sources, Nordbruch may have been compelled to use them, but a word of caution here and there might have been warranted.

In elaborating the theoretical premises of his study, Nordbruch rejects the notion that the attraction Nazism sometimes had for Arab nationalists was purely phenomenological. By this he means that such attraction should not be treated simply as an instance of the zeitgeist, in which the mimicking of Nazi forms of organization and symbols in the fascist practices of Arab youth movements or in the views of party leaders such as Pierre Gemayel was merely a matter of fashion. A phenomenological approach would emphasize the fact that this “Fascist Imagery”Footnote ¹⁵ did not reflect a true integration of fascist principles into Arab political and social thought but rather was an element mobilized in the competition between domestic political contenders and in the rejection of the colonizer. If we follow Nordbruch instead, the cult of violence of these movements, as well as contemporary intellectual debates about totalitarian principles, should trigger historiographical explorations of a typology (in my own words) of fascism in the Middle East or even the entire non-European world. Such a typology could help us understand the roots of militarism and authoritarianism in many non-European societies after World War II.

To put this question another way, were the fascistic parties and youth movements that we find in India and Pakistan as much as in Egypt and Iraq in the interwar and postwar periods simply bound to each local context of decolonization, or do they represent some kind of long-lasting non-European type of fascist ideology and system? Wildangel addresses similar issues, and so have other authors.Footnote ¹⁶ The pervasiveness of authoritarian regimes and ideologies such as Baʿathism after 1945 does raise questions about whether an authoritarian-fascist “type” struck roots in the minds of future ideologues, party organizers, and military men during the 1930s, as the formative period of ideologies in the Middle East. This is a more viable question than one about the “Nazi roots of Arab Nationalism,” or about the foundations of Arab anti-Zionism in Nazi anti-Semitism, that some of the works discussed in this review essay seem to ask.

In spite of his own position on this question, however, Nordbruch's very rigorous chronological approach to the topic itself provides support for a phenomenological perspective. He demonstrates that the reception of Nazism in the Levant was strongly context bound and can only be assessed in its proper geopolitical location. Admiration for Germany and Hitler was strongest in the Arab world until 1941 and plummeted afterward. Apparently, the appeal of Nazi ideology in the Middle East was not very deep. I would therefore still argue for a phenomenological interpretation of Middle Eastern regimes in the second half of the 20th century, each within the limits of its own sociopolitical circumstances, as more rewarding than an emphasis on the commonality of type and ideological origins of these regimes. The different natures of the constituencies and carefully balanced legitimacies of the Syrian and Iraqi Baʿath regimes are cases in point. Obviously, this does not rule out research on the discursive and sociopolitical conditions for the repulsive trends of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism in the media and politics of the Middle East today. Both Wildangel and Nordbruch show that anti-Semitic language was present in the media language of the interwar period but that it was not pervasive and that there were strong voices rejecting it. This changed, however, with the end of World War II, the first Arab–Israeli war, and the emergence of military dictatorships in the Middle East—a change of paradigm in regional politics that undoubtedly had a deep impact on internal and intra-Arab political and cultural discourses. This is no excuse for vitriolic anti-Semitism, but to document its occurrences and to try to understand it in appropriate contexts are probably good ways to fight it.