Recently, he was praised for his role in the defence of Deborah Lipstadt against the revolting David Irving.

Julius has spent many years studying antisemitism in all its varieties. He concludes it has felt like swimming through a sewer.

His book Trials of the Diaspora (Oxford University Press) is magisterial. Some of the critical reviews have been predictably nitpicking and Harold Bloom's positive review in the New York Times brought the secular anti-Zionists out in force so it must be good.

No Judaica library should be without it.

The disease has proved uniquely persistent, mutating from religion to religion and from nation to nation.

It exists even where no Jews are present. What every outbreak has in common is illogicality mixed with paranoia and politics.

There is nothing new in Julius' chapters on English history. England gave the world the blood libel.

The Crusaders slaughtered Jews as the easily accessible heretics. Jews were blamed for everything from the Black Death to famine and war, just as later they were blamed for being capitalists and Marxists, internationalists and nationalists, too weak and too strong.

In England, Jews were used and abused and then expelled in 1290. Yet hatred of Jews persisted even when there were none around.

When, under Cromwell, the question of readmitting Jews was discussed, sections of the Anglican Church raised the spectre of Jews destroying churches, killing Christian children and banning pork.

Merchants argued that the Jews would simply swindle everyone else and put them out of business. Similar charges were made in 1753 when Parliament passed a Jew Bill and King George actually signed it, giving Jews equal rights. The uproar was so great the bill was repealed!

In antisemitism, every one of the medieval calumnies has a modern equivalent. Julius' specialised contribution is how antisemitism is deeply embedded in English literature.

From Chaucer to Marlowe, from Shakespeare to Dickens, and on to Eliot, the Jew is invariably depicted as the dangerous, malicious symbol of evil and everything good Christians oppose.

All of this makes the exceptions all the more amazing.

There are those in the field who think Julius exaggerates antisemitism in English literature right up to modernity. But Julius makes a powerful case.

In the most relevant part of this book, he examines current antisemitism in England in general, and specifically in the context of anti-Zionism, which is now commonly used as a surrogate.

A major factor is Islam which, like Christianity, always had a problem with Jews precisely because they stubbornly persisted with their "old" ways.

Perhaps under parts of Islam Jews suffered less at certain times, but the Jew was always regarded as the outsider, the Dhimmi. One can, of course, understand the modern political antagonism.

When two nations fight over the same home there will be a lot of bitterness and violence on both sides.

But it is the completely irrational hatred and demonisation of the other, regardless, which betrays the disease.

Rwanda illustrates how easily "the other" can be dehumanised. Most disturbing because it is inflammatory and has led to violence against Jews around the world is the medieval antisemitism that floods the Muslim world underlines how easily human minds can be distorted by manipulators.

The Church remains problematic. Catholicism has tried to eradicate antisemitism. But mainstream Protestantism (as opposed to the Southern Baptists) has adopted an anti-Israel narrative as the biased language of the recent Methodists report illustrates only too well.

To make matters worse, too many acculturated Jews have always co-operated and conspired with prejudice in order to secure their own positions in society. Julius demolishes secular Jewish anti-Zionism.

The issue once again is not whether Jews or Israelis deserve criticism or condemnation. It is the assumption that all evil is on one side only and that only Palestinians deserve a homeland, not Jews.

Some ultra-Orthodox Jews have long opposed secular Zionism. Nevertheless, most of them still wish to live in the Holy Land and perpetuate their ancient link with it.

But secular and left-wing anti-Zionism goes back to the struggles within Communism.

Much of Russian Jewry opposed the very idea of a Jewish state (ironically so too did the majority of Anglo-American Jews). They fed the left-wing and labour movements of Russia, America and Europe, and their grandchildren are the secular Jews who today feel embarrassed by the Jewish religion and Jewish particularism.

For a while some could identify with a secular socialist Zionist agenda. But as Israel proved to be as fallible as any other democracy, abandoned its socialism and allied with the great capitalist USA, many of them turned on Israel to cleanse themselves of their embarrassing Jewish identity, and reject the idea of a specifically Jewish homeland.

Now that the Communist "god has failed", all that is left is anti-Americanism and anti-globalisation.

Israel is an easy target.

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