Excellent article by Brenton Sanderson. I read this book around the same time and it is as he says.

‘Mendes proposes that “anti-Semitic allegations of Jewish political power and repression constructed a reversal of cause and effect, in that Jewish leftism was almost always a response to, and consequence of, rather than objective cause of right-wing anti-Semitism.” Mendes here engages in what Andrew Joyce has dubbed the “cropped timeline version of Jewish history” where the historical chain of cause and effect invariably begins with non-Jewish malevolence; this despite the fact that Jews have elicited a strongly negative reaction from their hosts virtually everywhere they have dwelt over the two thousand years of the Diaspora.

For Mendes, it is natural and laudable that Jews would mobilize politically in defense of their common interests, claiming that “Jews have as much right to lobby and seek power as any other ethnic or religious groups.” However, in responding to Jewish economic predation and political subversion, rather than following this example by mobilizing politically in their collective interests, Europeans should instead have introduced “social and political reforms which ended discrimination against Jews.”’