In recent days, I’ve seen a number of people accuse Jews of “redefining” antisemitism to “silence” critics of Israel. While it’s true that any individual or group – Jewish or not – can weaponize accusations of bigotry, accusing us of “redefining” antisemitism is ludicrous given that the one constant about antisemitism, throughout the past three millennia, is that it always mutates and evolves to adapt to any given society and time period.
In fact, the term “antisemitism” itself is a 19th century redefinition of the previously-used term, “Jew-hatred” (more of that on slide 8).
THE ANTISEMITISM FORMULA
To understand how and why antisemitism consistently reinvents itself, I think it’s useful to look at what I like to call the “antisemitism formula.”
Naturally, different societies across different time periods have different problems. In order for the formula to always land on the Jews, antisemitism must consistently evolve to survive.
"Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.
It takes different forms in different ages. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the 19th and early 20th century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, the state of Israel.
It takes different forms but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings."
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
IN THE BEGINNING: TERRITORIAL CONFLICT
In antiquity, there was nothing particularly exceptional or different about anti-Jewish persecution. Rather, Jews, and before us, the ancient Israelites, were persecuted in the context of the territorial conflicts occurring in the region; for example, when the Neo-Assyrian Empire invaded the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, the Assyrian King Sargon II reportedly took some 27,290 Israelites captive to Assyria as slaves.
Likewise, when the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah in 587 BCE, they burnt Jerusalem to the ground, destroyed the First Jewish Temple, and took 25% of the Judahite (i.e. Jewish) population captive to Babylon. Archeologist Avraham Faust calculates that due to the political upheaval, deportations, and famine, only about 10% of the population survived.
FORCED ASSIMILATION
In antiquity, when an empire conquered another people, they often instituted policies of forced assimilation, hoping that the conquered population would assimilate into the identity of the conqueror. The idea was that that the conquered population would start speaking the conqueror’s language, adopt the conqueror’s gods, and start identifying with the conqueror’s national identity and culture, as opposed to their own.
The Ancient Greeks, particularly under Alexander the Great, were notorious for instituting policies of Hellenization. While many indigenous nations eventually completely assimilated into Greek identity, Jews largely resisted such efforts, which resulted in animosity against us. In fact, that’s exactly what the Maccabean Revolt, recounted every year during Hanukkah, was about.
RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY
After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in 380 CE, anti-Jewish persecution largely became religious in nature. Jews were collectively targeted on the basis that we had rejected Jesus on the cross and were thus considered subversive to Christendom.
Antisemitic stereotypes, tropes, and conspiracies took on a religious tone. For example, Jews were now persecuted based on the antisemitic conspiracy of deicide; that is, the assertion that we are collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Likewise, Jews were murdered in response to blood libels, or false claims that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes.
SCIENTIFIC RACISM
During the Enlightenment, religion in Europe drastically declined in importance. Thus, persecuting Jews based on religious motivations seemed, to the enlightened European, archaic and superstitious. At the same time, a new field, scientific racism, rose in prominence. Scientific racists believed, among other things, that people’s race defined their character.
In the 1870s, a scientific racist named Wilhelm Marr infamously argued that while hating Jews for our religion was wrong, hating Jews based on our defective race was not only natural, but entirely justified. Thus, he coined the term “antisemitism,” which sounded more “scientific” than the previously used term, “Judenhass,” meaning Jew-hatred. He said this as in “I’m not a Jew-hater! I’m just an antisemite!” Sound familiar?
ANTI-ZIONISM
After World War II, antisemitism became highly associated with Nazism. For this reason, the Soviet Union, which had been heavily oppressing its Jewish population, enacted a giant, international propaganda campaign against Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” instead.
However, the Soviets were never exactly covert about the fact that their anti-Zionism was nothing more than repackaged antisemitism. In the 1960s, Soviet newspapers made claims such as “The character of the Jewish religion serves the political aims of the Zionists,” “Zionism is inextricable from Judaism, rooted in the idea of the exclusiveness of the Jewish people,” and more.
For more, I recommend you read my post “Anti-Zionism.”
THE JUSTIFICATION CHANGES, BUT THE HATRED REMAINS LARGELY THE SAME
Different societies, across different time periods, value different things. Thus, it’s the justification for antisemitism is always shifting, but the antisemitic conspiracies, tropes, and stereotypes themselves largely remain the same.
In Medieval Europe, for instance, Christendom – that’s to say, religion – was the most important thing. In this case, let’s consider as an example the idea that Jews are manipulative, deceitful, and/or conniving. According to Medieval antisemites, our conniving nature could be explained due to our blasphemous religious beliefs and rejection of Christendom.
After the Enlightenment, however, religion sharply declined in importance in Europe, and instead, religion was replaced with logic, reasoning, and science – both legitimate and pseudoscience (including race science). European antisemites, however, still regarded Jews as manipulative; the difference was that they now felt that Jewish manipulation was a result not of our rejection of Christendom, but of our so-called defective racial characteristics.
Today, among many circles, antisemitism may not necessarily be justified away with religious or scientific rhetoric, but rather, through the rhetoric of so-called human rights. In this view, “Zionists” are manipulative because we are morally defective and irredeemable.
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