Thank you for this! Whenever people talk about anti-Semitism as some supernatural force, it drives me nuts. But more specifically, how on earth can you refer to Jews as the most persecuted people on earth when they are literally the most successful people on earth, if only because no other Ancient ethnic groups even survived? The rest of them are all dead or assimilated out of existence! I'm not historian, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there is basically no other Ancient group of peoples from as far back in history as the Jews, who still exist as a distinct group. And since history is full of brutality and genocide, of course the Jews have been through more because they've been around way longer and in more places.
To the extent there is still anti-Semitism today in the US at least, other than a bunch of conspiracy theorists and people who desire some grandeur in their boring lives and have barely even met an actual Jewish person, Ive always just assumed it's purely envy.
There are, but the the irony is, they are hated too. Like "Never trust a Jew, but trust a Jew before you trust a Greek, and trust a Greek before you trust an Armenian."
There are other ancient groups, albeit all (?) are incredibly marginal. In Iran, for instance, there's still an estimated couple tens of thousands of Zoroastrians.
What makes Jews so prominent, I'd argue, is a combination of the following components:
1. The dramatic population growth among Ashkenazi Jews as part of Europe's wider demographic explosion just prior to and throughout the Industrial Revolution.
2. The Haskalah and Jewish emancipation in Europe, which opened up opportunities for Jews to integrate and advance socially within their host countries.
3. High average Jewish (at least, Ashkenazi) IQ which, well, helps to succeed in general. When combined with the first (demographic weight) and second (social prominence among the leading states of the era) components, it explains their disproportionate influence over the 19th - 21st centuries... As well as why a movement as long-shot as Zionism succeeded.
This is somewhat controversial take: but the original “Jews”; the Israelites certainly have assimilated into the general population. Modern day Jews make up a different but related gene pool. Second, Jews have only been this successful as a group in the modern era,before the enlightenment yes there were wealthy jews but the vast majority were peasantry
My impression is that contemporary Jews are of Israelite ancestry mixed in with host populations, i.e. significant Italian ancestry for Ashkenazim, etc.
But based on numerous modern genealogical studies of today’s Jewish population, I am fairly certain that many Jews today may not necessarily descend from the Israelites, but may have married in to various Israelite communities
I think the idea of the "ordinariness" of historical antisemitism is a bit half-baked. You acknowledge "Christian (and Jewish) antagonism" but isn't there a bit more to it? Jews are a key element of the foundational Christian text, essentially a negative one. And negative in an intergenerational, eternal way. "His blood be upon us and our children" and all that. You can't compare the character of The Jews within the Christian narrative to the character of Joan of Arc in the English one. And from this outsized role in Christianity, Jews have been mythologized into a kind of cosmic force. This isn't to deny the ordinariness of the other factors you mention (or downplay how causal they may have been), but this is a kind of unifying and amplifying special sauce that does seem unique. I mean the Albigensians weren't kept around as a permanent but wretched testament to the truth of Christianity. They were simply dispatched. Antisemitism is special because Christians consider Jews special.
Thankyou for the thoughtful response. My argument isn't that medieval anti-Judaism isn't weird. It was definitely weird, but then a lot of stuff about Judaism in medieval Europe was weird. Aaron of Lincoln was the richest man in England - that's pretty weird. Bishop Rudiger invited Jews to live in Speyer to 'increase its glory a thousand fold', that's pretty weird. In general, medieval Europe was a really strange place, and this comes down largely, I think, to its unique position on the ruins of a great civilization that hadn't quite been ruined, but also because Europeans have genetic personality quirks, on average.
We can characterise the treatment of Jews as one of both unusual indulgence *and* unusual virulence. It's true that Augustine came up with this concept of keeping the Jews around as a wretched testament, but he wasn't actually in charge of public policy (though he could influence it) and, to a certain extent, was engaged in cope.
With all that said, I actually don't think it's unreasonable to expand the concept of antisemitism to include anti-Jewish thought/action in the Middle ages and, definitely, modern antisemitism grew out of that. How much continuity vs. contrast one identifies there is a legitimate academic dispute. It's just that's where it has to end. Antisemitism is maybe 2 things, but definitely not more than that.
If I had written this as an academic article, I would have put all that in, but then no-one would have read it. 🤷
You say: "It is true that some things exist long before there is a word for them, like gravity, the planet Mars, or stalactites. Other things, however, come into existence at the same time as the label, or relatively shortly beforehand, like Monster Munch, monophytism, or socialism."
Also:
"Augustine ... was engaged in cope."
Is it truly possible that Augustine was engaged in cope? Did "cope" even exist prior to the internet?
I know this isn't the point of your article ... but as a former theology scholar and an amateur theorist of language, I really need to think this through.
I think Augustine would have understood the concept of a theologian writing a theological justification of a policy that was actually a product of non-theological motives, even if he would not follow the barbarous internet slang I used to describe it.
Anti-Semitism exists mostly where Jews take over or are invited to take over important positions in society, and then ruthlessly exploit those below them (Jew vs. Goy attitude), leading eventually to a reaction that often was curtailed by the Christian nobility or clergy.
Christianity and Islam essentially protect and enable Jews, whereas they struggled to assert any kind of dominance in non-Abrahamic regions like India or China (equally skilled and high assabiyah merchant groups).
The USSR is a great example of Jewish activism and leadership in a society, and the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as U.S. involvement in both the Great Wars were closely connected to High Jewish Finance.
Neoliberalism Feudalism did a great writeup on how Jewish oligarchy uses the unique psychology of Judaism to rile up and exploit the less powerful Jews as a kind of sword and shield.
This argument completely bypassed the concept of bechira. I don’t have the sources at hand, but I’m sure you are familiar with the concept that the messengers sent to oppress the Jews at various times in history overdid it (see the elaborate discussions regarding how the mitzriim were punished, etc). It’s all very well to say “well, we are all being punished for our sins”, and another to confront the glee in someone’s face when they murder an entire family. Yes, Hashem is sending the punishment through them, but they are also *choosing* to do it. The concept of antisemitism comes into play to try to explain that choice, and try as we might, we cannot explain it.
That’s the whole thing—it’s the attempt to explain the unexplainable. People can understand hating others in an abstract sense, but the depth and consistency of the hate, especially when it comes down to details, is awful to the point of it being unbelievable. You can’t find a rational reason why a people would do such a thing, so you revert to “they just hate us.”
I’ll also note that it’s only frum Jews who rely on it—lots of non-frum and straight up atheist Jews rely on it too. You can’t explain a supernatural phenomenon with God if you don’t believe in Him.
This might come off condescending, but I feel you just think that because you haven't read enough history of different groups killing other groups. There's a lot of it, and all of it is incomprehensible for someone with little experience of violence. None of the persecutions of Jews are historically unusual. What is unusual is the total number of them and the diversity of places it happened. But my argument is that this is function of the unusual persistence of the Jews in a wide variety of places.
I think that you are so focused on the data trends here that you are missing the human reaction to them.
Sure, you can point at various factors and say that actually, antisemitism is only unique in the sense that Jews are still around, and you are sorry of right. It’s the same thing as economists saying “well, ACTUALLY, this is the greatest economy of all time because of xyz” when people still feel like everything sucks. Two things can be true at the same time.
Jews have always tried (and failed) to understand why people they live alongside can view them as subhuman despite the obvious fact that we’re all the same (and yes I saw your race science comments in other posts, we’re just going to leave that aside for now because I honestly don’t even know how to address that). How can you wrap your mind around the fact that a neighbor you saw every day and had perfectly good relationships with is happy to machine gun you into a ditch? How can you explain the person you saw at cafe for years murdering your children? How do you explain happy families cheerfully moving into a murdered family’s home? You can’t, and so you fall back on irrationality, aka antisemitism. Saying something like “well, we were really annoying by running a town bakery monopoly” doesn’t really cut it.
I am certain that other persecuted groups come to an explanation like this as well, but we don’t really get to see it develop because they generally disappear. We, for some reason, haven’t, and antisemitism is the way we explain (or perhaps fail to explain) why we suffer such things every few generations.
I don't think this is what really happened. Where do you see a pre-modern Jewish source that talks about something analogous to anti-semitism?
What I think happened is that people took the modern ideology of antisemitism and then retrojected it back into the Middle Ages, which was not totally crazy because there is a historical connection and then lost the plot and started projecting it throughout Jewish history thus generating a nonsense anti-concept.
I think Jews, historically, viewed the awful things they experienced as a message from God *overall*, but were still bewildered by the people who chose to inflict it. This is a somewhat awkward metaphor, but I think you can compare it to a child getting punished by a dispassionate parent, and a child getting punished by a parent who clearly enjoys hurting them. The first child will be upset about the punishment, naturally, but they won't take it personally in the way the second child will.
I think the way you see commentators delving into how punishments for various oppressors were middah k'negged middah is an example of Jews trying to understand what we would call antisemitism. The first example that comes to mind is the extensive discussion regarding how the degree of torture the mitzriyim suffered at the yam suf was commensurate to the amount of suffering they inflicted (google says the Vilna Gaon, but I'm not so sure).
Finally, this is the line that ticked me off: "One - I think sufficient - reason is that the term antisemitism in its meaningless sense is omnipresent in Jewish discourse and always a tool not to think, not to analyse, not to make sense of reality so as to manipulate it with prudence. If you can’t stop talking none-sense for yourself, then maybe do it for me." I'm with you on the way that people can antisemitism as a way to deflect criticism, but I can't sign on to the idea that Jews just magically accepted what was done to them pre-1879 was just God punishing them and nothing else. The narrative of antisemitism *is* what Jews use to try to understand it! The issue is is that *you can never understand* what drives normal, regular people to do awful things like push entire families into crematoriums, so you just end up with ad nauseam discussions of it instead.
What I meant by that is that Jews don't just use the concept of antisemitism to understand persecution, but as basic category in how they think the world works, and thus how to act. There are literally tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of DLs who think that it is pointless to do *any* actions to get better relations with our neighbours because they will just hate us anyway because antisemitism. That would be a joke except they are in the government. With Charedim, a similar problem crops up that they think the entire concept of מפני איבה just doesn't apply because antisemitism makes it pointless.
I've read your thoughtful article. You make good points, but frankly I think you are dismissing how profoundly weird and unusual antisemitism really is.
You make a comparison with the "anti-Englishness" of Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, Vinayak Savarker, Leopoldo Galtieri, Braveheart. But all those figures lived in countries that were at war with England, or under English occupation. Of course they would hate England, that's how the world works!
Antisemitism seems to me quite unique in the way that it brings together people from all kinds of different backgrounds who have never actually clashed with Jews as a group, and very often have never even met a Jew in person. We currently have extreme right-wingers in the US chanting "the Jews will not replace us", Hungarian nationalists convinced that globalisation and mass immigration are a plot by George Soros (who just so happens to be Jewish), millions of people throughout the Muslim world (and further afield) convinced that there were no Jews in the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they had been warned, Maduro in Venezuela blaming "international Zionism" for the protests sweeping his country, etc, etc, etc....
It sometimes feels like any set of extremists that has a problem with liberal democracy will at some point zero in on the Jews as the ultimate problem. This just cannot be explained by anything Jews have actually done, or any power they might actually have. The are all kinds of historical explanations one could give (envy, Christian anti-Jewish theology, Jewish success etc..) but to me nothing really seems to justify the hatred Jews get. The best explanation I can give is that the image of Jews as scheming, very powerful, out to harm the gentiles and all in all just evil has taken very profound root in Western civilisation (and from there, it now radiates to the rest of the world). That's unless one wants to find explanations rooted in Jewish theology.
1) Various scrapes and conflicts that Jews have been involved in that have nothing in particular in common except that Jews were involved, and which therefore need no unifying concept.
2) An ideology dating from the 19th century which posits that Jews are the chief problem in the world, and that the way to improve the world is to fight Jews. This ideology is properly known as antisemitism.
Of the examples you give, 2 are simple examples of what I believe should accurately be called antisemitism. Strictly speaking Arab opposition to Israel needn’t be based on antisemitism, but in practice what has happened is Arab opinion formers imported antisemitism, so that is also an example. I don’t know about Maduro. Is this a big thing of his, or is he just adding it to the ‘capitalist, imperialist, American’ list because it’s topical?
As regards how normal or weird antisemitism is, I don’t address that in this article. The next two articles are partly about that though.
P.S. I think you are being unfair to Orban and his anti-Soros campaign, but it’s a side issue.
I am pretty sure that Soros becoming the target of so many conspiracy theories is not unconnected to him being Jewish, just like it wasn't with the Rothschilds. I don't know much about Orban, I'll admit
As for Venezuela, one only needs to look at the openly antisemitic attacks that were directed by the state press a decade ago against Hugo Chavez's opponent Henrique Capriles, who was Catholic but had a Jewish mother. But really, there is no point in wondering whether a dictator who blames his domestic problems on something called "international Zionism" is antisemitic or not. Back in the 1930s it was the "international Jewish banking cabal", now it's "international Zionism". When Zionism becomes synonymous for a shadowy global conspiracy that doesn't exist, it's antisemitism.
I agree with your general point that antisemitism as we know it today was born in 19th century Europe, although it was still influenced by older Christian tropes.
In general, focussing on Soros as opposed to Leftist NGOs in particular is likely a tell, but in Hungary the fact is that he was behind like 90% of it and by cutting him off they semi-permanently defeated leftism in Hungary. You can critique the political order Fidesz has put in place in various of ways, but the bottom line is not having mass 3rd world immigration makes it all worth it. Not the least important result of this is that Hungary is now the safest European country for Jews.
As someone growing up in a society where Anti-Semitism was kind of normalized (1990's Hungary), I always had the feeling that it is not about real flesh and blood Jews, but they are used as the symbol for something else.
One thing one noticed that there was much more fear from assimilated Jews (because yes, all hatred is fear), and the Orthodox with their black hats were treated with much more respect and tolerance.
I am not sure I entirely understood the symbolism, but it is something like this: the secret agent, someone who pretends to be something else than what they are, someone who is succesful at camouflage and misdirection. The Orthodox were in their eyes not trying to “hide” their Jewishness, their otherness, outsideness, strangeness.
Notice how it how it works completely the opposite from every other kind of racism, that sees Thomas Sowell way more positively than the “ghetto” Blacks. Assimilation is almost always taken well, because all other kinds of racism are about actual people, and the issue of the racist is that they are too different.
Not for Anti-Semitism, which sees the invisible, perfectly assimilated Jew as the most dangerous secret agent or conspirator.
Also, lol, the uses of authoritarianism. This went on in Hungary until Orbán visited Netanjahu, liked the guy and the whole Israeli nationalism project, decided that they are perfect role models, and at home told everybody to shut up about Jews.
The irony. It turned out authoritarians have a good side as well: when the boss tells them to stop some shit, they do.
I like this article and don’t disagree with it. But I have to say that I’m still very struck by the extent to which elements of the Old Testament seem to prefigure modern pop anti-semitism. The story of Esther/Purim feels highly familiar. From the standard of anti-Semitic stereotypes, so does the story arc in Egypt - Joseph comes as a poor immigrant, works his way into the confidence of the Pharoah, then uses inside information to corner the grain market as a financial middleman and get fantastically rich. There are some social patterns that don’t feel so much like the wrath of God as characteristic social tensions created by highly successful and bureaucratically skilled minority groups. This is all pre-Christian too. (I’m Jewish btw)
I appreciate this comment because I think this is a common mistake that also needs correction. Let's first take the case of the Joseph story. First, it's important to note that Jews were not stereotypically employed in such professions until the early Middle Ages, so, therefore, if the story is to be interpreted in the sense of מעשה אבות סימן לבנים, it had to wait 2,500 years for this to be realised. Bearing this in mind, if we return to the story, we see that it's not true that Joseph becomes rich through being a financial middleman (it happens the other way round), and it's not true that this created tensions with the Egyptians (the story says the precise opposite, the tensions started when a new Pharoah literally forgot about Joseph). The funeral of both Jacob and Joseph indicate they were very popular figures in Egypt. By the time tensions arise, the text gives no indication Jews are working as middlemen, the most likely interpretation is that they are shepherds.
Biblical narrative, as a rule, is written in a sparse style with very light editorial voice, which allows for a wide variety of interpretations to be read in, hence the Midrashic tradition. Sometimes, a particular (neo-)midrashic interpretation has become so prevalent that everyone assumes it's just there in the text, but really it isn't at all. In this case, the first place I am aware of where an interpretation of the Joseph and other stories of the Avot as prefiguring modern antisemitism appears is in the writings of Rav Hirsch, who, for obvious reasons, spent a lot of time ruminating on the matter.
The Megilah story, I admit, at first seems to indicate something more like antisemitism, but again there is the interesting fact that this does not seem to have been at all present in Jewish exegesis until the modern era. While the archetypes of Esau and Yishmael are used extensively to refer to the Christian and Muslims worlds respectively, I am not aware of Haman being used as an archetype this way. I think the connection actually came about via a totally different route. Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet towards the end of his life called 'The Jews and Their Lies' which is the most antisemitism-like premodern text there is. Interestingly, the Lutheran church largely downplayed the pamphlet on the not unreasonable grounds that it made their founder look like something of a maniac (and, as a matter of fact, he may well have been suffering from some kind of early-stage dementia) but the pamphlet was revived in the 1800s and became a foundational text of antisemitism. In this pamphlet - and in stark contrast to the entire catholic Christian tradition - Luther advances the radical thesis that the Book of Esther is a bad Jewish book that shouldn't really be part of the Bible and demonstrates the Jewish spirit of bloodlust and ethnocentrism. Thus, I think the Haman-like nature of modern antisemitism actually comes from early antisemites literally taking Haman as a model. But this is something I need to research more, and this isn't supposed to be an antisemitism blog!
Good post. It seems like if you want to find the causes of something it's important to analyze what is happening when and where it's not present. Even those who truly believe in the transcendence of Jew hate admit such times exist.
Just some poor white middle aged Anglo-descended Australian here so not a great deal of skin in the game. I believe the human mind looks for something or someone outside itself in the phenomenal universe (the world) to blame for its decision to identify with a corruptible seperate physical body. It simply must find a baddy. The ego looks constantly for blame for its own secret desire to kill.
What else can it do? If it did not seek in that way it would begin to see less differences and more sameness and it’s special identity would decrease in value to itself.
Anti semitism offers a smorgasbord of blaming scapegoating options but is fundamentally bonded to a seperate and vulnerable body.
Very insightful, especially as to the ubiquity of Jewish misfortune being a function, in some substantial part, of the persistence of Jews and Judaism.
I would say the connection between medieval and modern antisemitism need not be as forced and artificial as your hypothetical union of anti-English villains (which is a great analogy, even so.) I think a more compelling explanation is: it's bigotry. Depending on the place and time, it can be more religious bigotry or more racial/ethnic bigotry. It shifts around freely because bigots aren't scientists; they are operating out of clear, logically consistent definitions.
Ancient Jewish misfortunates, it should almost go without saying, are not traceable to any kind of antisemitism and are easily explainable by the expected highs and lows of a tiny tribe pushed around by various larger and better-organized polities, who tell and retell their stories, as we are all prone to do, in ways that emphasize the unfairness of our misfortunes.
Ardent's "Origins of Totalitarianism" explores antisemitism in a critical way I think you would appreciate, if you haven't read it. It discusses, for example, how Jewish communities for pragmatic reasons often ended up aligned with the monarch against his subjects, and the role that played in stoking popular hostility.
These are fair points, but they push in different directions. There is definitely a historical connection between medieval anti-Judaism and antisemitism. Whether you look at these two as essentially one thing, or as two things one of which grew into the other is within the legitimate range of historical dispute. It is only the attempt to expand the concept further that necessitates engaging in metaphysics. (I made this point in a response to someone else's comment, but I forget whether it was on this article or one of the follow ups). I suppose that I am adopting the stronger version of the thesis partly as a reaction to the extreme nonsensicalness of mainstream understandings of antisemitism. I have not read Arendt, but I was making a broadly similar point in number 6 on the list, though I phrased it in a somewhat different terminology based on de Jouvenel.
The claim that antisemitism is just generic bigotry applied to Jews is an opposite argument. The logical consequence is to do away with the term antisemitism altogether, and when necessary say 'anti-Jewish bigotry'. I think this is what should be done for most of history, but I also think - and it is plainly true - that modern antisemitism is an ideology distinct from general bigotry that is a meaningful historical concept.
It can be that it is fundamentally a form of bigotry, bigotry is its animating principle, but that it has developed unique features that make it a meaningful historical concept -- Orientalism, anti-Catholic bigotry, and anti-Black racism are similarly both specific historical phenomena and instances of bigotry.
This is great and illustrative. I do wish, as you know I always say, that you would dig into the roots of antisemitism in the Islamic Middle East. That is a powerful force that has influenced the west historically (the Moors rule southern Europe for a few centuries), contemporaneously and is spreading to non MENA Islamic countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. We ignore this force at our own peril and your writings could illuminate us.
I've already responded to this, so I'll just copy and paste:
This is a mistake. The correct girsa in Sifrei (found in all MSS without exception) is והלא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב not והלכא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב. It isn't telling you anything about gentiles in general. It's saying that even though Esav hated Yaakov (and for good reason), Yakov successfully won him over (in the opinion of Rabi Shimon). In as much as there is a general message here, it's the opposite to the one commonly claimed.
I have to be somewhat delicate about this, but, apart from being a diyyuk on a fake girsa, I think this is an incredibly unhealthy and poisonous mindset to hold and is responsible for a lot of the problems in orthodox Judaism.
Almost exclusively anti-whitism or, if you want to put it in a less inflammatory way, generic leftism. In fact, it is pretty clear that reticence to overlap into antisemitism has meant Israel gets lighter treatment than a non-Jewish country in the same situation would.
This is confused a bit because there are parts of the Left that are willing to tolerate Muslims who are genuinely antisemitic (antisemitism in the precise historical sense was extensively transmitted to the Arabic world) on the grounds that brown people can do no wrong, but mostly its because Jews prefer to think that Leftist criticism of Israel is antisemitic than having to grapple with it on its own terms.
I am a bit confused about your thesis. The unflattering comparison to Brad the Jerk honestly sounds exactly like what John Exum said? Maybe we really are just nasty people? My own thesis is that people see us as selfish, because maybe from a certain (warped and distorted) perspective, we are. I wrote about this in my review of Jud Süß here. https://irrationalistmodoxism.substack.com/p/a-review-of-jud-su-veit-harlan-1940
My claim is a version of the second interpretation. Jews have been through a lot in a lot of different places, but that is just because they have been around for a lot in a lot of different places. Each individual instance can be explained historically without recourse to the metaphysical concept of antisemitism.
Conversely, from around 1820-1945, and to a much more limited extent afterwards, there is an actual ideology called antisemitism that we can also see historically and people acted on it, like they act on other ideologies.
Thank you for this! Whenever people talk about anti-Semitism as some supernatural force, it drives me nuts. But more specifically, how on earth can you refer to Jews as the most persecuted people on earth when they are literally the most successful people on earth, if only because no other Ancient ethnic groups even survived? The rest of them are all dead or assimilated out of existence! I'm not historian, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there is basically no other Ancient group of peoples from as far back in history as the Jews, who still exist as a distinct group. And since history is full of brutality and genocide, of course the Jews have been through more because they've been around way longer and in more places.
To the extent there is still anti-Semitism today in the US at least, other than a bunch of conspiracy theorists and people who desire some grandeur in their boring lives and have barely even met an actual Jewish person, Ive always just assumed it's purely envy.
There are, but the the irony is, they are hated too. Like "Never trust a Jew, but trust a Jew before you trust a Greek, and trust a Greek before you trust an Armenian."
There are other ancient groups, albeit all (?) are incredibly marginal. In Iran, for instance, there's still an estimated couple tens of thousands of Zoroastrians.
What makes Jews so prominent, I'd argue, is a combination of the following components:
1. The dramatic population growth among Ashkenazi Jews as part of Europe's wider demographic explosion just prior to and throughout the Industrial Revolution.
2. The Haskalah and Jewish emancipation in Europe, which opened up opportunities for Jews to integrate and advance socially within their host countries.
3. High average Jewish (at least, Ashkenazi) IQ which, well, helps to succeed in general. When combined with the first (demographic weight) and second (social prominence among the leading states of the era) components, it explains their disproportionate influence over the 19th - 21st centuries... As well as why a movement as long-shot as Zionism succeeded.
This is somewhat controversial take: but the original “Jews”; the Israelites certainly have assimilated into the general population. Modern day Jews make up a different but related gene pool. Second, Jews have only been this successful as a group in the modern era,before the enlightenment yes there were wealthy jews but the vast majority were peasantry
My impression is that contemporary Jews are of Israelite ancestry mixed in with host populations, i.e. significant Italian ancestry for Ashkenazim, etc.
You subscribe to the Khabarovsk theory?
I do not subscribe to the Khezehr hypothesis
But based on numerous modern genealogical studies of today’s Jewish population, I am fairly certain that many Jews today may not necessarily descend from the Israelites, but may have married in to various Israelite communities
*Khazar...autocorrect
Yitz is right on the facts here. Converting into or out of the Jewish faith are significant phenomena, as is intermarriage.
I think the idea of the "ordinariness" of historical antisemitism is a bit half-baked. You acknowledge "Christian (and Jewish) antagonism" but isn't there a bit more to it? Jews are a key element of the foundational Christian text, essentially a negative one. And negative in an intergenerational, eternal way. "His blood be upon us and our children" and all that. You can't compare the character of The Jews within the Christian narrative to the character of Joan of Arc in the English one. And from this outsized role in Christianity, Jews have been mythologized into a kind of cosmic force. This isn't to deny the ordinariness of the other factors you mention (or downplay how causal they may have been), but this is a kind of unifying and amplifying special sauce that does seem unique. I mean the Albigensians weren't kept around as a permanent but wretched testament to the truth of Christianity. They were simply dispatched. Antisemitism is special because Christians consider Jews special.
Thankyou for the thoughtful response. My argument isn't that medieval anti-Judaism isn't weird. It was definitely weird, but then a lot of stuff about Judaism in medieval Europe was weird. Aaron of Lincoln was the richest man in England - that's pretty weird. Bishop Rudiger invited Jews to live in Speyer to 'increase its glory a thousand fold', that's pretty weird. In general, medieval Europe was a really strange place, and this comes down largely, I think, to its unique position on the ruins of a great civilization that hadn't quite been ruined, but also because Europeans have genetic personality quirks, on average.
We can characterise the treatment of Jews as one of both unusual indulgence *and* unusual virulence. It's true that Augustine came up with this concept of keeping the Jews around as a wretched testament, but he wasn't actually in charge of public policy (though he could influence it) and, to a certain extent, was engaged in cope.
With all that said, I actually don't think it's unreasonable to expand the concept of antisemitism to include anti-Jewish thought/action in the Middle ages and, definitely, modern antisemitism grew out of that. How much continuity vs. contrast one identifies there is a legitimate academic dispute. It's just that's where it has to end. Antisemitism is maybe 2 things, but definitely not more than that.
If I had written this as an academic article, I would have put all that in, but then no-one would have read it. 🤷
You say: "It is true that some things exist long before there is a word for them, like gravity, the planet Mars, or stalactites. Other things, however, come into existence at the same time as the label, or relatively shortly beforehand, like Monster Munch, monophytism, or socialism."
Also:
"Augustine ... was engaged in cope."
Is it truly possible that Augustine was engaged in cope? Did "cope" even exist prior to the internet?
I know this isn't the point of your article ... but as a former theology scholar and an amateur theorist of language, I really need to think this through.
An excellent, excellent article, by the way.
I think Augustine would have understood the concept of a theologian writing a theological justification of a policy that was actually a product of non-theological motives, even if he would not follow the barbarous internet slang I used to describe it.
Anti-Semitism exists mostly where Jews take over or are invited to take over important positions in society, and then ruthlessly exploit those below them (Jew vs. Goy attitude), leading eventually to a reaction that often was curtailed by the Christian nobility or clergy.
Christianity and Islam essentially protect and enable Jews, whereas they struggled to assert any kind of dominance in non-Abrahamic regions like India or China (equally skilled and high assabiyah merchant groups).
The USSR is a great example of Jewish activism and leadership in a society, and the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as U.S. involvement in both the Great Wars were closely connected to High Jewish Finance.
Neoliberalism Feudalism did a great writeup on how Jewish oligarchy uses the unique psychology of Judaism to rile up and exploit the less powerful Jews as a kind of sword and shield.
Unfortunate for everyone.
This argument completely bypassed the concept of bechira. I don’t have the sources at hand, but I’m sure you are familiar with the concept that the messengers sent to oppress the Jews at various times in history overdid it (see the elaborate discussions regarding how the mitzriim were punished, etc). It’s all very well to say “well, we are all being punished for our sins”, and another to confront the glee in someone’s face when they murder an entire family. Yes, Hashem is sending the punishment through them, but they are also *choosing* to do it. The concept of antisemitism comes into play to try to explain that choice, and try as we might, we cannot explain it.
How does antisemitism explain it?
That’s the whole thing—it’s the attempt to explain the unexplainable. People can understand hating others in an abstract sense, but the depth and consistency of the hate, especially when it comes down to details, is awful to the point of it being unbelievable. You can’t find a rational reason why a people would do such a thing, so you revert to “they just hate us.”
I’ll also note that it’s only frum Jews who rely on it—lots of non-frum and straight up atheist Jews rely on it too. You can’t explain a supernatural phenomenon with God if you don’t believe in Him.
This might come off condescending, but I feel you just think that because you haven't read enough history of different groups killing other groups. There's a lot of it, and all of it is incomprehensible for someone with little experience of violence. None of the persecutions of Jews are historically unusual. What is unusual is the total number of them and the diversity of places it happened. But my argument is that this is function of the unusual persistence of the Jews in a wide variety of places.
I think that you are so focused on the data trends here that you are missing the human reaction to them.
Sure, you can point at various factors and say that actually, antisemitism is only unique in the sense that Jews are still around, and you are sorry of right. It’s the same thing as economists saying “well, ACTUALLY, this is the greatest economy of all time because of xyz” when people still feel like everything sucks. Two things can be true at the same time.
Jews have always tried (and failed) to understand why people they live alongside can view them as subhuman despite the obvious fact that we’re all the same (and yes I saw your race science comments in other posts, we’re just going to leave that aside for now because I honestly don’t even know how to address that). How can you wrap your mind around the fact that a neighbor you saw every day and had perfectly good relationships with is happy to machine gun you into a ditch? How can you explain the person you saw at cafe for years murdering your children? How do you explain happy families cheerfully moving into a murdered family’s home? You can’t, and so you fall back on irrationality, aka antisemitism. Saying something like “well, we were really annoying by running a town bakery monopoly” doesn’t really cut it.
I am certain that other persecuted groups come to an explanation like this as well, but we don’t really get to see it develop because they generally disappear. We, for some reason, haven’t, and antisemitism is the way we explain (or perhaps fail to explain) why we suffer such things every few generations.
I don't think this is what really happened. Where do you see a pre-modern Jewish source that talks about something analogous to anti-semitism?
What I think happened is that people took the modern ideology of antisemitism and then retrojected it back into the Middle Ages, which was not totally crazy because there is a historical connection and then lost the plot and started projecting it throughout Jewish history thus generating a nonsense anti-concept.
I think Jews, historically, viewed the awful things they experienced as a message from God *overall*, but were still bewildered by the people who chose to inflict it. This is a somewhat awkward metaphor, but I think you can compare it to a child getting punished by a dispassionate parent, and a child getting punished by a parent who clearly enjoys hurting them. The first child will be upset about the punishment, naturally, but they won't take it personally in the way the second child will.
I think the way you see commentators delving into how punishments for various oppressors were middah k'negged middah is an example of Jews trying to understand what we would call antisemitism. The first example that comes to mind is the extensive discussion regarding how the degree of torture the mitzriyim suffered at the yam suf was commensurate to the amount of suffering they inflicted (google says the Vilna Gaon, but I'm not so sure).
Finally, this is the line that ticked me off: "One - I think sufficient - reason is that the term antisemitism in its meaningless sense is omnipresent in Jewish discourse and always a tool not to think, not to analyse, not to make sense of reality so as to manipulate it with prudence. If you can’t stop talking none-sense for yourself, then maybe do it for me." I'm with you on the way that people can antisemitism as a way to deflect criticism, but I can't sign on to the idea that Jews just magically accepted what was done to them pre-1879 was just God punishing them and nothing else. The narrative of antisemitism *is* what Jews use to try to understand it! The issue is is that *you can never understand* what drives normal, regular people to do awful things like push entire families into crematoriums, so you just end up with ad nauseam discussions of it instead.
What I meant by that is that Jews don't just use the concept of antisemitism to understand persecution, but as basic category in how they think the world works, and thus how to act. There are literally tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of DLs who think that it is pointless to do *any* actions to get better relations with our neighbours because they will just hate us anyway because antisemitism. That would be a joke except they are in the government. With Charedim, a similar problem crops up that they think the entire concept of מפני איבה just doesn't apply because antisemitism makes it pointless.
I've read your thoughtful article. You make good points, but frankly I think you are dismissing how profoundly weird and unusual antisemitism really is.
You make a comparison with the "anti-Englishness" of Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, Vinayak Savarker, Leopoldo Galtieri, Braveheart. But all those figures lived in countries that were at war with England, or under English occupation. Of course they would hate England, that's how the world works!
Antisemitism seems to me quite unique in the way that it brings together people from all kinds of different backgrounds who have never actually clashed with Jews as a group, and very often have never even met a Jew in person. We currently have extreme right-wingers in the US chanting "the Jews will not replace us", Hungarian nationalists convinced that globalisation and mass immigration are a plot by George Soros (who just so happens to be Jewish), millions of people throughout the Muslim world (and further afield) convinced that there were no Jews in the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they had been warned, Maduro in Venezuela blaming "international Zionism" for the protests sweeping his country, etc, etc, etc....
It sometimes feels like any set of extremists that has a problem with liberal democracy will at some point zero in on the Jews as the ultimate problem. This just cannot be explained by anything Jews have actually done, or any power they might actually have. The are all kinds of historical explanations one could give (envy, Christian anti-Jewish theology, Jewish success etc..) but to me nothing really seems to justify the hatred Jews get. The best explanation I can give is that the image of Jews as scheming, very powerful, out to harm the gentiles and all in all just evil has taken very profound root in Western civilisation (and from there, it now radiates to the rest of the world). That's unless one wants to find explanations rooted in Jewish theology.
My claim is that there are two separate things:
1) Various scrapes and conflicts that Jews have been involved in that have nothing in particular in common except that Jews were involved, and which therefore need no unifying concept.
2) An ideology dating from the 19th century which posits that Jews are the chief problem in the world, and that the way to improve the world is to fight Jews. This ideology is properly known as antisemitism.
Of the examples you give, 2 are simple examples of what I believe should accurately be called antisemitism. Strictly speaking Arab opposition to Israel needn’t be based on antisemitism, but in practice what has happened is Arab opinion formers imported antisemitism, so that is also an example. I don’t know about Maduro. Is this a big thing of his, or is he just adding it to the ‘capitalist, imperialist, American’ list because it’s topical?
As regards how normal or weird antisemitism is, I don’t address that in this article. The next two articles are partly about that though.
P.S. I think you are being unfair to Orban and his anti-Soros campaign, but it’s a side issue.
I am pretty sure that Soros becoming the target of so many conspiracy theories is not unconnected to him being Jewish, just like it wasn't with the Rothschilds. I don't know much about Orban, I'll admit
As for Venezuela, one only needs to look at the openly antisemitic attacks that were directed by the state press a decade ago against Hugo Chavez's opponent Henrique Capriles, who was Catholic but had a Jewish mother. But really, there is no point in wondering whether a dictator who blames his domestic problems on something called "international Zionism" is antisemitic or not. Back in the 1930s it was the "international Jewish banking cabal", now it's "international Zionism". When Zionism becomes synonymous for a shadowy global conspiracy that doesn't exist, it's antisemitism.
I agree with your general point that antisemitism as we know it today was born in 19th century Europe, although it was still influenced by older Christian tropes.
In general, focussing on Soros as opposed to Leftist NGOs in particular is likely a tell, but in Hungary the fact is that he was behind like 90% of it and by cutting him off they semi-permanently defeated leftism in Hungary. You can critique the political order Fidesz has put in place in various of ways, but the bottom line is not having mass 3rd world immigration makes it all worth it. Not the least important result of this is that Hungary is now the safest European country for Jews.
As someone growing up in a society where Anti-Semitism was kind of normalized (1990's Hungary), I always had the feeling that it is not about real flesh and blood Jews, but they are used as the symbol for something else.
One thing one noticed that there was much more fear from assimilated Jews (because yes, all hatred is fear), and the Orthodox with their black hats were treated with much more respect and tolerance.
I am not sure I entirely understood the symbolism, but it is something like this: the secret agent, someone who pretends to be something else than what they are, someone who is succesful at camouflage and misdirection. The Orthodox were in their eyes not trying to “hide” their Jewishness, their otherness, outsideness, strangeness.
Notice how it how it works completely the opposite from every other kind of racism, that sees Thomas Sowell way more positively than the “ghetto” Blacks. Assimilation is almost always taken well, because all other kinds of racism are about actual people, and the issue of the racist is that they are too different.
Not for Anti-Semitism, which sees the invisible, perfectly assimilated Jew as the most dangerous secret agent or conspirator.
Also, lol, the uses of authoritarianism. This went on in Hungary until Orbán visited Netanjahu, liked the guy and the whole Israeli nationalism project, decided that they are perfect role models, and at home told everybody to shut up about Jews.
The irony. It turned out authoritarians have a good side as well: when the boss tells them to stop some shit, they do.
I like this article and don’t disagree with it. But I have to say that I’m still very struck by the extent to which elements of the Old Testament seem to prefigure modern pop anti-semitism. The story of Esther/Purim feels highly familiar. From the standard of anti-Semitic stereotypes, so does the story arc in Egypt - Joseph comes as a poor immigrant, works his way into the confidence of the Pharoah, then uses inside information to corner the grain market as a financial middleman and get fantastically rich. There are some social patterns that don’t feel so much like the wrath of God as characteristic social tensions created by highly successful and bureaucratically skilled minority groups. This is all pre-Christian too. (I’m Jewish btw)
I appreciate this comment because I think this is a common mistake that also needs correction. Let's first take the case of the Joseph story. First, it's important to note that Jews were not stereotypically employed in such professions until the early Middle Ages, so, therefore, if the story is to be interpreted in the sense of מעשה אבות סימן לבנים, it had to wait 2,500 years for this to be realised. Bearing this in mind, if we return to the story, we see that it's not true that Joseph becomes rich through being a financial middleman (it happens the other way round), and it's not true that this created tensions with the Egyptians (the story says the precise opposite, the tensions started when a new Pharoah literally forgot about Joseph). The funeral of both Jacob and Joseph indicate they were very popular figures in Egypt. By the time tensions arise, the text gives no indication Jews are working as middlemen, the most likely interpretation is that they are shepherds.
Biblical narrative, as a rule, is written in a sparse style with very light editorial voice, which allows for a wide variety of interpretations to be read in, hence the Midrashic tradition. Sometimes, a particular (neo-)midrashic interpretation has become so prevalent that everyone assumes it's just there in the text, but really it isn't at all. In this case, the first place I am aware of where an interpretation of the Joseph and other stories of the Avot as prefiguring modern antisemitism appears is in the writings of Rav Hirsch, who, for obvious reasons, spent a lot of time ruminating on the matter.
The Megilah story, I admit, at first seems to indicate something more like antisemitism, but again there is the interesting fact that this does not seem to have been at all present in Jewish exegesis until the modern era. While the archetypes of Esau and Yishmael are used extensively to refer to the Christian and Muslims worlds respectively, I am not aware of Haman being used as an archetype this way. I think the connection actually came about via a totally different route. Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet towards the end of his life called 'The Jews and Their Lies' which is the most antisemitism-like premodern text there is. Interestingly, the Lutheran church largely downplayed the pamphlet on the not unreasonable grounds that it made their founder look like something of a maniac (and, as a matter of fact, he may well have been suffering from some kind of early-stage dementia) but the pamphlet was revived in the 1800s and became a foundational text of antisemitism. In this pamphlet - and in stark contrast to the entire catholic Christian tradition - Luther advances the radical thesis that the Book of Esther is a bad Jewish book that shouldn't really be part of the Bible and demonstrates the Jewish spirit of bloodlust and ethnocentrism. Thus, I think the Haman-like nature of modern antisemitism actually comes from early antisemites literally taking Haman as a model. But this is something I need to research more, and this isn't supposed to be an antisemitism blog!
Good post. It seems like if you want to find the causes of something it's important to analyze what is happening when and where it's not present. Even those who truly believe in the transcendence of Jew hate admit such times exist.
Just some poor white middle aged Anglo-descended Australian here so not a great deal of skin in the game. I believe the human mind looks for something or someone outside itself in the phenomenal universe (the world) to blame for its decision to identify with a corruptible seperate physical body. It simply must find a baddy. The ego looks constantly for blame for its own secret desire to kill.
What else can it do? If it did not seek in that way it would begin to see less differences and more sameness and it’s special identity would decrease in value to itself.
Anti semitism offers a smorgasbord of blaming scapegoating options but is fundamentally bonded to a seperate and vulnerable body.
‘It’s the Jews’!
Very insightful, especially as to the ubiquity of Jewish misfortune being a function, in some substantial part, of the persistence of Jews and Judaism.
I would say the connection between medieval and modern antisemitism need not be as forced and artificial as your hypothetical union of anti-English villains (which is a great analogy, even so.) I think a more compelling explanation is: it's bigotry. Depending on the place and time, it can be more religious bigotry or more racial/ethnic bigotry. It shifts around freely because bigots aren't scientists; they are operating out of clear, logically consistent definitions.
Ancient Jewish misfortunates, it should almost go without saying, are not traceable to any kind of antisemitism and are easily explainable by the expected highs and lows of a tiny tribe pushed around by various larger and better-organized polities, who tell and retell their stories, as we are all prone to do, in ways that emphasize the unfairness of our misfortunes.
Ardent's "Origins of Totalitarianism" explores antisemitism in a critical way I think you would appreciate, if you haven't read it. It discusses, for example, how Jewish communities for pragmatic reasons often ended up aligned with the monarch against his subjects, and the role that played in stoking popular hostility.
These are fair points, but they push in different directions. There is definitely a historical connection between medieval anti-Judaism and antisemitism. Whether you look at these two as essentially one thing, or as two things one of which grew into the other is within the legitimate range of historical dispute. It is only the attempt to expand the concept further that necessitates engaging in metaphysics. (I made this point in a response to someone else's comment, but I forget whether it was on this article or one of the follow ups). I suppose that I am adopting the stronger version of the thesis partly as a reaction to the extreme nonsensicalness of mainstream understandings of antisemitism. I have not read Arendt, but I was making a broadly similar point in number 6 on the list, though I phrased it in a somewhat different terminology based on de Jouvenel.
The claim that antisemitism is just generic bigotry applied to Jews is an opposite argument. The logical consequence is to do away with the term antisemitism altogether, and when necessary say 'anti-Jewish bigotry'. I think this is what should be done for most of history, but I also think - and it is plainly true - that modern antisemitism is an ideology distinct from general bigotry that is a meaningful historical concept.
It can be that it is fundamentally a form of bigotry, bigotry is its animating principle, but that it has developed unique features that make it a meaningful historical concept -- Orientalism, anti-Catholic bigotry, and anti-Black racism are similarly both specific historical phenomena and instances of bigotry.
*aren't
This is great and illustrative. I do wish, as you know I always say, that you would dig into the roots of antisemitism in the Islamic Middle East. That is a powerful force that has influenced the west historically (the Moors rule southern Europe for a few centuries), contemporaneously and is spreading to non MENA Islamic countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. We ignore this force at our own peril and your writings could illuminate us.
As for weather or not "timeless antisemitism" is a traditional belief, see this article: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%95_%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%90_%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%A7%D7%91
I've already responded to this, so I'll just copy and paste:
This is a mistake. The correct girsa in Sifrei (found in all MSS without exception) is והלא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב not והלכא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב. It isn't telling you anything about gentiles in general. It's saying that even though Esav hated Yaakov (and for good reason), Yakov successfully won him over (in the opinion of Rabi Shimon). In as much as there is a general message here, it's the opposite to the one commonly claimed.
I have to be somewhat delicate about this, but, apart from being a diyyuk on a fake girsa, I think this is an incredibly unhealthy and poisonous mindset to hold and is responsible for a lot of the problems in orthodox Judaism.
I like your writing—keep it up!
What the heck did they have against Department Stores?
They put small shop owners out of business and were disproportionately owned by Jews.
Ha, so the same gripe as the complaints about Wal-Mart, except Sam and his progeny aren’t Jews.
Or so the Lamestream Media would have you believe!
(Sorry.)
Is the creep of pro Palestine views in the youth anti semetism or anti whiteism?
Almost exclusively anti-whitism or, if you want to put it in a less inflammatory way, generic leftism. In fact, it is pretty clear that reticence to overlap into antisemitism has meant Israel gets lighter treatment than a non-Jewish country in the same situation would.
This is confused a bit because there are parts of the Left that are willing to tolerate Muslims who are genuinely antisemitic (antisemitism in the precise historical sense was extensively transmitted to the Arabic world) on the grounds that brown people can do no wrong, but mostly its because Jews prefer to think that Leftist criticism of Israel is antisemitic than having to grapple with it on its own terms.
I am a bit confused about your thesis. The unflattering comparison to Brad the Jerk honestly sounds exactly like what John Exum said? Maybe we really are just nasty people? My own thesis is that people see us as selfish, because maybe from a certain (warped and distorted) perspective, we are. I wrote about this in my review of Jud Süß here. https://irrationalistmodoxism.substack.com/p/a-review-of-jud-su-veit-harlan-1940
My claim is a version of the second interpretation. Jews have been through a lot in a lot of different places, but that is just because they have been around for a lot in a lot of different places. Each individual instance can be explained historically without recourse to the metaphysical concept of antisemitism.
Conversely, from around 1820-1945, and to a much more limited extent afterwards, there is an actual ideology called antisemitism that we can also see historically and people acted on it, like they act on other ideologies.
You only say that because you haven't tasted my wife's cholent. Come for a Shabbos meal and you'll be singing a different tune.
I have no idea what “cholent” even is.