Britain is to get its first academic institute for the study of anti-Semitism, London Univesity has announced.

The institute, which will be established at Birkbeck College, will offer courses in anti-Semitism to undergraduates and graduates as well as short courses for teachers, public officials and community leaders.

It will be located beside the world’s oldest Holocaust memorial library, the Weiner Library, which will move to Birkbeck to enhance the institute’s research and teaching capacity despite remaining independent.

The institute will be funded by a £1.5 million donation from a charitable body, the Pears Foundation, which was set up in 1992 by the family which owns a private property group, the William Pears Group.

It will recruit a professorial director in the spring, with the longer term aim of developing a team, and become part of Birkbeck’s school of social sciences, history and philosophy, whose staff will share the building on its Bloomsbury campus.

In addition to teaching, it aims to carry out research and contribute to policy debate. Undergraduate study will comprise modules in broader courses such as in nationalism and ethnic conflict, religion, society and politics, race and ethnicity, and psychosocial studies.

Professor David Latchman, the university’s master, said: “Birkbeck commands an unparalled combination of expertise in the field of anti-semitism and intolerance in a wide range of disciplines, from political sciences to psychosocial studies and from history to law.

“It is this singular mix that will provide the institute’s foundation for research, teaching and its contribution to public policy and debate.”

Trevor Pears, executive chairman of the Pears Foundation, said the institute aimed to fill a gap it had indentified in British universities.

“We are setting up the institute with Birkbeck at this particular time because our foundation considers that this strategic approach to the study of antisemitism is not being sufficiently addressed elsewhere and is long overdue,” Mr Pears said.

“We believe that the study of anti-Semitism is vital to the understanding of all racism and xenophobia. Our concern is that antisemitism is misunderstood and viewed solely as a Jewish issue. We believe anti-Semitism is a ‘societal illness’ – a rise in anti-Semitism signals something is wrong or worsening in society.”

The foundation has been in talks with Birkbeck for several years over the move and the university’s separate agreement to lease adjoining premises to the Weiner Library was a condition of its decision to go ahead. It will move in spring 2011.

The library owns Britain’s largest collection of Holocaust material, including many Nazi propaganda books for schools and children, manuscripts relating to the Nuremberg trials, correspondence from Jewish refugees.

It also has a collection of eye-witness accounts, particularly of 350 testimonies of the November pogroms in Nazi Germany in 1938 and of 1,300 Holocaust survivors. It is expanding its collection to other 20th century genocides such as those in Rwanda, the Balkans, Armenia and Cambodia.

Ben Barkow, director of the library, said: “We hope it will bring more students, undfergraduates and post doctorates, into the place. We are a little off the beaten track where we are.”

Warnings of a rise in anti-Semitism have been issued by several prominent figures this year. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, told The Times in January that the internet had produced a “virulent” new strain of global anti-Semitism.

In the first half of this year 609 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in Britain by the Community Support Trust, which minitors attacks on Jews, which was more than double the number of an average year. It blamed a backlash against Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

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