Abstract
At the turn of the century, circa 1900, the art historian Ab gamma Warburg became interested in the atavistic-how over long stretches of time the seemingly irrational persisted and reemerged in new forms in the modern era. Ritual murder accusations provided a prominent example, and these examples, the article argues, were at the heart of his own conception of cultural history. Using Warburg as a starting point, the article suggests that we have yet to develop a fully articulated cultural history of anti-Semitic violence, and that our explanations remain bound to immediate context and to contemporary politics. This is certainly the case with Shulamit Volkov's famous concept of 'anti-Semitism as cultural code,' which lacks sufficiently sharp tools to understand how the long history of anti-Semitism, entangled as it was in Christian -Jewish relations, continued to shape anti-Semitic violence in the late nineteenth century. J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, by contrast, allows us to consider both the synchronic dimension of anti-Semitic violence, and its connection to the diachronic, or long-term. This approach also has important implications for our understanding of hate speech more generally.