The first conference to compare antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe was held in London this week — but without any Muslim speakers.
The aim of the conference, held at University College, was to explore the “connections, commonalities and differences between” antisemitism and Islamophobia from both geographical and historical perspectives.
But the organisers failed to find any Muslim academics who were free to participate.
Co-organiser James Renton, senior lecturer at Edge Hill and honorary research fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL, said: “It surprised me, as we put things together, how really tough it was to find people working in this area doing academic research. There were Muslims who wanted to come on board but they couldn’t, for one reason or another.
“It was difficult to find people working on this full stop, whether Jewish, Muslim, Christian or atheist. It was a lot of work, but we managed to bring together some of the scholars who are the pioneers of this research.”
In the event, Dr Renton and his fellow co-ordinator, Ben Gidley of Goldsmith’s College, London, assembled a strong cast of academics from America, Canada, Israel and Britain. They were led by Prof Sandor Gilman of Emory University, Atlanta, who delivered the keynote speech on Sunday evening in which he discussed how both Jews and Muslims had suffered for centuries as a result of their mode of dress, food and religious practices such as shechitah, halal and circumcision.
Dr Renton said: “Not only was this the first international conference to focus on these subjects, it was also the sheer wide-ranging scale of what we were doing. No-one has ever carried out such a comparative study on these two subjects in such depth. In terms of time, we went back as far as the Crusades and up to the present day; geographically, from Britain to the Balkans.”
In the coming months, an international network of academics is to be created to carry out a comparative study of racism, while a set of essays from the conference, held at University College London this week, will be published.
The two initiatives have come from the colleges behind the conference — Edge Hill University in Liverpool, University and Goldsmith’s Colleges in London.
The three colleges will hold another conference next year that will deal with race and the end of European empires, which will include Palestine and the British empire, the birth of Israel and the Arab-Israel conflict.