Israel Shahak's book "Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3,000 Years" is all the more important for being a document by a a knowledgeable Jew about the beliefs and behavior of his fellow Jews. Born in Warsaw in 1933, Shahak spent a portion of his childhood in the concentration camp in Belsen, from which he immigrated to Palestine in 1945. He grew up in Israel, served in the Israeli military, and became a chemistry professor. Like all Israelis, he became fluent in Hebrew. He also became acclimated to the peculiar moral atmosphere of Israeli society: a combination of overweening arrogance and deceit, a mixture of pugnacious self-righteousness and duplicity. It is a call for modern Jewish people to abandon the extremely chauvinistic beliefs that have historically put them at odds with others. As the Zionist and Dreyfusard Bernard Lazare (who given those allegiances, could hardly be called an "anti-Semite") noted in his book Antisemitism: Its History and Causes, "Wherever the Jews settled after ceasing to be a nation ready to defend its liberty and independence, one observes the development of antisemitism, or rather anti-Judaism; for antisemitism is an ill chosen word, which has its raison d'etre only in our day, when it is sought to broaden this strife between the Jew and the Christians by supplying it with a philosophy and a metaphysical, rather than a material reason. If this hostility, this repugnance had been shown towards the Jews at one time or in one country only, it would be easy to account for the local causes of this sentiment. But this race has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled. Inasmuch as the enemies of the Jews belonged to divers [sic] races, as they dwelled far apart from one another, were ruled by different laws and governed by opposite principles; as they had not the same customs and differed in spirit from one another, so that they could not possibly judge alike of any subject, it must needs be that the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it.": http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/jewish/lazare-anti.asp#Chapter%20One The work of Shahak (as well as Lazare) begins to give insight into the reasons for historical antisemitism. Douglas Reed's book "The Controversy of Zion" provides a more thorough overview: http://archive.org/details/TheControversyOfZion