Matthias Küntzel

German political scientist and historian (born 1955)

Matthias Küntzel (born 1955), is a German political scientist and historian. He was an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 2004 to 2015. Currently, he is a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations DGAP, of the German Historical Association (VHD), of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa ASMEA and of the advisory board of UANI (United Against Nuclear Iran).

In 2003, he delivered the keynote address at the at Yale University. In 2005, he discovered antisemitic tracts at the Iranian stands at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an incident he wrote about in the Wall Street Journal. In 2006 he joined the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, serving until 2011. He was a panelist at the 2006 Paris conference "Les démocraties face au défi islamiste" ("The democracies in the face of the Islamist challenge"), organized by the Center for Security Policy and the Institut pour la Défense de la Démocratie. In 2007, Telos Press (New York, NY) published his book Jihad and Jew Hatred. Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. In 2008, he presented "Jihad and Jew Hatred in the USA" at numerous universities (Stanford University, Columbia University, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, SUNY Buffalo, University of Maine, and the Cooper Union). The book was criticized by Gilbert Achcar as "a fantasy based narrative pasted together out of secondary sources and thirdhand reports; it aims to demonstrate that there is a direct line of descent from Amin al Husseini and Hassan al Banna through Gamal Abdel Nasser to Osama bin Laden." Alexander Flores has critiqued the book for lacking context about Palestinians' relationship to Zionism: "he draws a grotesquely distorted picture of the general strike and subsequent rebellion of the Palestinians from 1936 to 1939. According to this picture, the rebellion was brought about by the machinations of the mufti who just followed his lust for power and his anti Semitic leanings and who already at that time colluded with the Nazis. The real background of the revolt, the Palestinians' apprehension at enhanced Jewish immigration, accelerated Zionist upbuilding and the possible loss of their homeland, is absent from this picture." Jeffrey Goldberg reviewing the book in the New York Times called it a "bracing, even startling, book" and an "invaluable contribution": "Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. Küntzel marshals impressive evidence to back his case, but he sometimes oversimplifies." He also spoke at conferences organized inter alia by the American Enterprise Institute, the Israel Project, the Anti Defamation League, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and at the "Global Forum For Combating Antisemitism" at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He participated in an international academic workshop on "Antisemitism in the 21st Century: Manifestations, Implications and Consequences", organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Museum. In 2009, he spoke at the "London Conference on Combating Antisemitism", organized by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom, and published his book The Germans and Iran: The Past and Present of a Fateful Friendship (German publisher: Wolf Jobst Siedler, Berlin). 2012 the Persian translation of this book by Michael Mobasheri was published in Cologne Germany(Forough Publishing Cologne). In 2010 he became a guest commentator on Germany's main public radio station, Deutschlandradio Kultur, and addressed the "Second Conference of the Interparliamentary Coalition on Combating Antisemitism" in Ottawa, Canada. In 2011, he received the ADL's Ehrlich Schwerin Human Rights Prize and spoke at the international scholars conference on "Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives", organized by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University. In 2012, he spoke on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society to Britain's House of Commons on the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, and at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Brussels on the current meaning of the Auschwitz day of remembrance. He was the main speaker at a rally against the award of the Adorno Award to Judith Butler, held in front of St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt. The Germans and Iran was republished in Persian Translation by Michael Mobasheri. He also published Germany, Iran and the Bomb (LIT, Münster), which was also a reply to Günter Grass. In 2013 he joined Rabbi Abraham Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center at a press conference in Berlin about the anti Semitic remarks of Jacob Augstein, a popular German journalist. His most recent book "Nazis and der Nahe Osten. Wie der islamische Antisemitismus entstand" (Nazis and the Middle East: How Islamic antisemitism came into being) was published in 2019 by Hentrich & Hentrich (Leipzig/Berlin). "Through numerous publications, Matthias Küntzel has become the most important German voice in this field," says a review of this book, edited by Michael Wildt and written by Philip Henning. "With this book, he is making an overdue contribution to the education and awareness of a topic which, as the author rightly complains, plays too little a role in scientific and general public discourse." In 2023, Routledge published "Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East. The Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II", an expanded English version of "Nazis und der Nahe Osten“.

On 14 March 2007 Küntzel was due to address University of Leeds in England on the topic ‘Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.’ The university's student Islamic society complained about what they called the lecture's "provocative" title and the university removed the words "Hitler" and "Islamic" with the title amended to read: "The Nazi Legacy: The Export of Anti Semitism to the Middle East." However, several hours before the talk was due to take place, the talk was unexpectedly cancelled due to "security concerns," following protest e mails from some of the university's Muslim students claiming the lecture was an "open racist attack". Dr. Küntzel said he had given similar addresses (at Yale University, as well as universities in Jerusalem and Vienna) around the world and there had been no problems. "I know this is sometimes a controversial topic," he said, "but I am accustomed to that and I have the ability to calm people down. It's not a problem for me at all. My impression was that they wanted to avoid the issue in order to keep the situation calm. My feeling is that this is a kind of censorship." Dr. Küntzel also said that the contents of emails described to him did not overtly threaten violence but "they were very, very strongly worded". He added: "It's stupid, because I also talk about Christian anti semitism." Members of the German department at Leeds accused the university of "selling out" academic freedom.