A Unified Theory of Jew-Hatred

Anti-Semitism is a mysterious creature—present, surreptitious, always lurking. Jews may be hypersensitive to its expression, but history warns us that there is reason for vigilance. The optimistic text of the Passover seder assures us that we will celebrate “next year in Jerusalem,” but it also knows about the perils of our experience: “In every generation they have risen to destroy us.” On more than one occasion, “they” have nearly succeeded.

One of the most common questions I hear is from Jews who are mystified by the force of this hostility and the fact that it has endured for centuries. Our community spends a fortune combatting it. For a while, the idea was that “education” was the answer, that a liberally educated, well-schooled citizenry would be able to feel the folly of Jew hatred. All we had to do was teach our history, and people would see that the Jewish presence was positive, and that we were not the source of the evils of the world. Unfortunately, this ran up against the established reality that well-educated elites designed gas chambers and crematoria, and were among the most ardent and violent of National Socialists.

The Church, of course, had something to do with this. It built out the story of a supernatural savior from the raw materials of the Hebrew Bible. But because those who claimed an allegiance to that Bible refused to embrace the story of the new savior, the church vilified the Jews and damned them to Hell. The story here is a combination of disappointment and rage, along with a political need for differentiation. In its first century of independence, the Church had to establish that it was not the exhausted civilization of Moses and Sinai. It was something new and fruitful and truly redemptive. It also inherited a much larger world of hungering gentiles open to the story of Jesus.

But all of us would say that it’s more complicated than that. The Church was not the first to hate the Jews. That motif is already present in the literature of Rome. If anything, anti-Semitism is a story of layering, deposit after deposit of causes and contributors. Societies move through moments of ethnocentric tribalism. Authoritarians need tools to divide and dominate. Jews have been especially useful to would-be dictators in campaigns of suppression and political mobilization. The Trumpists have been notable for their use of Jews as the point of the spear in their campaign against the universities. By claiming widespread anti-Semitism, they have forced many institutions to set aside free speech, not to mentions millions of dollars in settlements.

Eventually all of this leads to murder. That is the story of Europe in the 30s and the extermination of the Jews in every corner of the continent. The pot can only simmer so long. Eventually someone turns up the heat, the hostility boils over, and it overwhelms the Jews. There is a hydraulic force to the phenomenon of Jew hatred. When the conditions are right, the result is a fire on the stovetop.

But here is where things get still more complicated. It has been barely eight decades since Treblinka and Majdanek. You would think that we would still be in a period of quietude, that the destruction of the Jews would have led to an interval of empathy. Instead, anti-Semitism has reached a new level of ferocity. It’s an ascending pattern of malevolent assault, coming at us from the Right and the Left, a hypercritical rejection of Jews and Judaism.

Part of this has to do with the conduct of the Israeli government. It will be decades before the world reconsiders Gaza. Israel’s ferocity in avenging the sins of October 7 makes it difficult to imagine that there will be a resolution, especially when it is closing down Palestinian life on the West Bank and contemplating exile for Gazans to South Sudan. The world will never tolerate such behavior, not in our time or the foreseeable future.

But other nations have also committed such sins and the outcry is never as sustained or severe. Is China required to answer for the Uighers? Is Pakistan required to answer for the Afghans? There is a sharp, special something when it comes to the Jews, currently focused on the State of Israel and its willingness to rain down death on the Gazans.

Why this disparity, this extreme imbalance? I think it takes us back to the Sho’ah. In the eighty years since Treblinka and Majdanek, the Jews have done the work of remembrance and commemoration. Every large community (and some small ones, like Tulsa) has a museum of the Holocaust and a framework of recollection. The liturgical year is studded with events that bring to mind the trauma and honor the suffering.

And together with this, we have been pointed and accusatory. We say that the Germans perfected industrial slaughter and gave their most sophisticated talents to liquidating the Jews. Roosevelt and the West stood by apathetically, unwilling to mount even a token rescue, except for an occasional trainload of adorable orphans. The nations of the world hummed a few bars of elegy while quietly celebrating the extermination of troublesome Kikes.

We said all those things right after the war and continue to say them with justice and conviction. Now imagine that you are on the receiving end, not a perpetrator exactly, but the child or descendent. It’s the nature of life in the human family that people get tired of being constantly accused, especially if they did not commit the crime, themselves. They become irritated and quarrelsome and wonder when it will end, like some German historian who calls for an end to atonement and the “normalization” of Germany’s place in the world (see Ernst Nolte, neo-fascist). How long, he might ask, will the accusations continue and what about Israel’s own behavior in Gaza? Yes, Israelis were killed on October 7, but is the slaughter in Gaza going to go on forever?

The answer, of course, is not forever, but it is likely to go on for a very long time. Netanyahu needs it and sees no reason to stop. But that, together with the overhang of the Holocaust, is likely to make things increasingly difficult for the rest of us. There are two things at work in the current situation: Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians and the world’s exhaustion with our disapproval. Both together spell trouble for the Jews.