The anthropologist Matti Bunzl argues that, leaving aside historic animosities aimed at Jews and Muslims by Europe’s Christian majority, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have served two different functions in modern European history. Anti-Semitism reflected an attempt to secure ethnically pure nation-states by recourse to a racist ideology that targeted and excluded Jews from the national community. German nationalism, for example, relied on anti-Semitism and the supposed racial inferiority of Jews to rally support for a strong German nation. Other European countries also experienced strong waves of anti-Semitism and arguments about the incommensurability of Jewish and national (English, French, Norwegian, and so on) identity. Islamophobia, by contrast, reflects a different project of exclusion, one in which the desire to protect and maintain European civilization and anxieties over what it means to be European manifest themselves through anti-Muslim prejudice. The preservation of European identity, as opposed to national identity, is at the heart of Islamophobia.

DEFINE: Provides a conceptual distinction: anti-Semitism targets ethnic purity of nation-states; Islamophobia targets preservation of a supranational European civilization.

Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Intro…, loc. 98