The phenomenon of anti-Semitism without many—if any—Jews has again been placed in the spotlight by a survey of Polish middle school students about Jews in relation to the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The finding that the children’s knowledge about the Uprising was “extremely weak” has been disputed by Magdalena H. Gross in “The Tablet” (“Do Polish Kids Hate Jews?,” May 7, 2013). She also questions the other findings that were played up in Don Snyder’s story in “The Forward” (“Half of Polish Students Don’t Want Jewish Neighbor,” April 22, 2013): 60.7% would be unhappy if their girl friend/boy friend turned out to be a Jew. 44.1% would be unhappy if a Jewish family moved into his/her neighborhood. 45% would be unhappy if it was found there was a person of Jewish origin in his/her family. Why is Gross skeptical? Because “the personal preferences of high-school students about Jewish neighbors or sexual partners [do not] seem to be all that relevant, in a country that is overwhelmingly Catholic and where Jews are largely an abstraction.” Gross’ skepticism is, in my view, rooted in her ignorance of the history of “anti-Semitism without Jews.” The virulence of Polish anti-Semitism became more extreme just as the Nazis’ liquidated Poland’s 3.2 million Jews—there are 7,500 today—possibly peaking when Jews in hiding or in exile resurfaced to try to remake normal lives in immediate postwar Poland. Of course, there were distinctive explanations for Polish history during and after the Holocaust. However, the phenomenon of anti-Semitism without many—if any—Jews is not unique to Poland. It is precisely the Jew as “abstraction” that has the power to generate an anti-Semitism all its own. The best known contemporary example is, of course, the Arab and Muslim world where the liquidation of historic Jewish communities has gone hand-in-hand, not only with the creation of a new religion of “anti-Zionism,” but with the recrudescence and intensification of the anti-Jewish attitudes deriving from the Quran and hadiths. (See, for example, Neil J. Kressel’s “The Sons of Pigs and Apes: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence” [2012].) Medieval Spain and Shakespeare’s England provide historical examples I won’t discuss here. Let me focus instead on a less-studied example: Japan which, unlike China and its tiny but persevering Jewish community, has pretty much been Judrenrein throughout its history, with a few hundred exceptions following Commodore Perry’s mission in 1853 and perhaps 2,000 today. One of the great ironies of the Holocaust is that Japan was viewed as a safe haven both for its miniscule Russian-origin Jewish minority and for some of the 6,000 Polish Jews given visas by Japan’s Consul to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara. Despite this, as John Dower has demonstrated (and the Simon Wiesenthal Center has remonstrated about), anti-Semitism has remained a significant staple of Japanese attitudes before, during, and after the Holocaust. In War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986), Dower relied on a number of little-known studies to show “especially in the early years of the war . . . an outburst of anti-Jewish race hatred which has no explanation beyond mindless adherence to Nazi doctrine”—though Saul K. Padover at the time suspected Japan angling to please Arabs and obtain a potential Mideast oil supply. A famous writer, Tokutomi Ichiro, pictured American democracy as a fraud controlled by “an evil an ugly plutocracy” of Jews. In cartoons, the U.S. was portrayed as a king wearing a jeweled crown topped with the letter “J.” Nazi racism—with the anti-Japanese strictures deleted—was quoted verbatim about Jews. There were two Japanese translations of Mein Kampf during the war years, and translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1924, 1935, and 1959. In 1973, The Great Prophecy of Nostradamus—also based on The Protocols—became a best-seller in Japanese. David Kranzler, in Japanese, Nazis & Jews: Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938-1945 (1976), argued that Japanese anti-Semitism lacked Christian roots and that—unlike Nazi anti-Semitism—emphasized, not annihilating Jews, but “harnessing” Jewish power. Looking at the lurid cartoons in Dower’s book suggests the need to qualify Kranzler’s generalizations. After the war, sensationalist books, called tondemo, focuses ambivalently on the Jews in relation to Japanese. The three Japanese Red Army members who attacked Lod Airport in 1972 clearly were not admirers of the Israelis. In 1979, Masao Kubota used a pseudonym identifying him as a rabbi to argue that “Enola Gay” means “Kill the Emperor” in Yiddish. Two other best-sellers, also indebted to The Protocols, arguing it is “Jewish power which controls the world” became popular in the 1980s, while a magazine article blamed Watergate on the Jews. Some of this spurious literature was produced by prominent politicians and academics. In the 1990s, the radical Buddhist Aum Shinrikyo peddled anti-Semitic theories. Reportedly, cult leader Hideo Murai uttered “Yudaya ni yarareta (“Jews got me”) when he was stabbed to death. Subsequently, Aum Shinrikyo changed its name to “Aleph,” from the Hebrew alphabet. The Wiesenthal Center came into the picture in 1995 when Dr. Masanori Nishioka denied the Holocaust in Marco Polo, a popular magazine. After protests, the publisher apologized and the magazine ceased publication. Since 2000, Ryu Ota has translated into Japanese the work of Eustace Mullins, an American anti-Semitic theorist from the 1920s. “Hitler chic” has also invaded the Japanese islands. The popular rock group, “Kishidan” has appeared in both a video performance and interview on MTV Japan wearing SS-like uniforms. Making the best of a bad situation, SONY responded to criticism with a press release: “We have duly received the words of advice from Simon Wiesenthal Center and take them very seriously. Kishidan will never again use this costume and it will be disposed of immediately.” In 2009, journalist Soichiro Tahara told television viewers that her father, former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, was “done in by America [and] by the Jews,” as was Democratic Party head Ichirō Ozawa. The Wiesenthal Center again protested. Keep tuned for further developments.