Center for Israel Education, May 31, 2024
Introduction — A unique hatred
If the Bible nearly 3,000 years ago described the Jews as “a people who shall dwell alone,” Jewish history has since validated this as prophecy. Some of the Jews’ own customs have contributed to making them “a people apart,” but it is a hatred that stands alone, more than anything else, that has made the Jews a people that dwells alone.
Antisemitism is indeed unique among the group hatreds of the world. It is the oldest bigotry, its documented history stretching back some 2,400 years. It is the deadliest bigotry. Demographers estimate that if antisemitism had not claimed so many Jewish lives over the ages, at least one hundred million Jews would be alive today instead of only 16 million. It is a bigotry most eclectic in its appeal. No other hatred has been embraced by so many who are so different. Illiberal leftists, isolationist rightists, Islamic extremists, white nationalists and black separatists move in different circles with very different beliefs, but when it comes to hating Jews, they converge on common ground, sometimes even making common cause. To take one example: As improbable as it may seem that a Muslim zealot, a white supremacist and a Black feminist/LGBTQ activist could find any rapport with one another, shared antisemitism inspired cooperation among former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former KKK leader David Duke and former Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney.
The strange bed fellowship of these and other antisemites derives from another characteristic unique to Jew-hatred: its adaptability. Like an ever-mutating deadly virus that regularly produces novel strains, antisemitism can lie dormant or break out violently, but because of its adaptive power, it resists eradication. It survives by making Jews out to be the embodiment of whatever society, at any given time, hates most. The Jews, in other words, are all things to all enemies — the perfect scapegoat. Because of the plasticity that allows this bigotry to be stretched, compressed or otherwise manipulated into conformity with whatever hatred is in fashion, antisemitism has even suggested contradictory reasons to hate Jews. Jews have been hated for being communists and capitalists, non-whites and white oppressors, foreign exiles from Palestine and foreign invaders in Palestine, godless secularists and God-fearing believers, cosmopolitans and ethnocentrists, and superhumans and sub-humans.
Religious, racial, and political antisemitism
The strains of this deadly, ancient virus are many, but they can be reduced to three main forms: religious, racial and political. The other varieties of antisemitism are, with few exceptions, outgrowths of one of the three, even if their connection is not obvious.
The earliest form of antisemitism was religious. The scriptures of the two religions that sprang, one after the other, from Judaism — Christianity and Islam — are dense with unfavorable references to and depictions of Jews. The Book of Revelation characterizes the Jews as forming “the synagogue of Satan,” while the Gospel of Matthew portrays the Jews as the eternally cursed killers of Christ. The Qur’an, for its part, likens Jews to apes while casting them as slayers of prophets and schemers against Mohammed. Mistreatment was the norm for Jews in Christian and Muslim lands alike, but in Christian Europe, violent persecution was constant, while in the Islamic world it was sporadic.
Under Christianity, Jewish life was embittered by, among other evils, false accusations, forcible conversions, mass expulsions, mandatory segregation and mass killings. Under Islam, the lot of Jews was better if still bleak. Jews, like all non-Muslim monotheists under Muslim rule, were officially considered inferior and subject to legal, fiscal and social disabilities. Among the Muslims’ religious inferiors, however, Jews were generally regarded as the lowliest of the lot and were treated accordingly. Thus, when Jews in Muslim societies rose above their humble station to achieve wealth or, much less commonly, power, their success was seen as provocation in itself and sometimes led to anti-Jewish violence, even massacres. (The fact that it is not just any state, but the state of the lowly Jews that has inflicted defeat after defeat on the Palestinians and the Arabs since 1948 partly explains their acute sense of humiliation and their burning hatred of Israel.)
While religious antisemitism is ancient, racial antisemitism is quintessentially modern. Before the modern era, what one believed (i.e., religion) was all-important, while what one was (i.e., ethnicity) was generally insignificant. But the Enlightenment — the philosophical revolution in 18th-century Europe that exalted science and de-emphasized religion — brought about a role reversal. Unhappily for the Jews, Europe’s new secular and scientific enthusiasms combined to produce racial antisemitism, a novel form of antisemitism even more dangerous than its religious counterpart. Whereas Christian antisemitism had attributed the Jews’ supposedly undesirable characteristics to their religion, racial antisemitism blamed them on their biology. Religion, however, is changeable; biology is not. It was this novel strain of Jew-hatred that moved a German writer named Wilhelm Marr to coin the word “antisemitism” in 1879 expressly to distinguish it from the older religious bias against Jews. In the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment, antisemites of Marr’s era labored to give an empirical basis to this bigotry and produced a vast body of pseudoscientific literature on the biological defects of the Jews. Things took an even more dangerous turn as the 19th century advanced and nationalism swept Europe. Nationalism and its evil twin, xenophobia (hatred of the other), soon mixed with the new antisemitism’s racism and pseudoscience, producing a deadly cocktail that intoxicated Europe and fueled the Holocaust.
Anti-Zionism as antisemitism
The most recent strain of antisemitism and the most common today is political: hatred of the Jewish people expressed in the form of hatred for the Jewish state. Political antisemitism is often laundered under the name of “anti-Zionism” or disguised as support for the Palestinians. However, it is not the Palestinians, but the Jews who interest the political antisemites. The “poet of the Palestinians,” Mahmoud Darwish, candidly explained this to a French Israeli actress in 2004: “Do you know why we, the Palestinians, are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest in us stems from the interest in the Jewish question. Yes, the interest is in you, not in us.” Political antisemitism posits that the state of Israel is an illegitimate settler colony built on the ruins of Palestine, a country to which the Jews have no claim whatsoever. As the political antisemites see it, the only satisfactory solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the destruction of Israel. In pursuit of this objective, they have been waging a multi-pronged war against Israel since 1948. The fronts in their war are not just military, but also diplomatic, legal, economic, and psychological, and their weapons are not just munitions, but also divestment, lawsuits, government lobbying, economic and professional boycotts, and propaganda, among many others. Until they achieve their ultimate objective–the destruction of Israel–the political antisemites seek to make the Jewish nation-state the Jew among nations–a state that dwells alone for a people that dwells alone.
Arab and Muslim antisemitism
Muslims and Arabs contend that all the land that Israel holds is part of the Muslim/Arab land. The modern political claim against Zionism and Israel is that Jews are not entitled to a state because they are only a religion and not a people, and the area where Israel is situated has been wrongly taken from Arabs. Arab state anti-Zionism presented itself in the perennial Arab economic boycott of Israel and efforts to delegitimize Israel at the United Nations, reaching a crescendo in the infamous 1975 U.N. “Zionism Is Racism” resolution. It asserted “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” As a resolution it was repealed in the early 1990s, but the phrase remained central to the lexicon of avid antisemites.
Arab and Muslim calls to militant and terrorist action against Zionism and prevention of Israel’s establishment from the 1920s onward aimed to thwart Jewish presence and development in Palestine; then from the 1950s forward terrorist attacks and armed struggle continued against Israel, Israelis and Jews worldwide. Violence, demonization and degradation of Jews and Israel remained tactics and strategies during Israel’s 75-year-plus history, highlighted by the killing of Jewish athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Violence and war were the accepted viable reply to Zionism in part because Jews had interest in Jerusalem, and it as a Muslim holy city had to be protected from Jewish encroachment or control. The growing Jewish presence in Jerusalem, though all religions have had freedom of worship since 1967, has for 90 years eaten at the marrow of religious Muslims and many Arabs.
Palestinian Arabs engaged in a three-year revolt against Zionism from 1936 to 1939 to thwart the establishment of a Jewish state and any Jewish political presence in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. In 1931, the Mufti of Jerusalem called upon Arabs and Muslims across the Middle East to defend Jerusalem against Jewish presence; then though the Mufti was promised in 1939 a majority-Arab state by the British in a decade, he declined the offer despite strong support for the notion from the vast majority of his Arab colleagues. He could not tolerate Jews in Palestine even as a minority. Again two months before the U.N. partition resolution to establish two states in Palestine at the end of the British Mandate, Arab leadership rejected any compromise with the Zionists. In September 1947 the head of the Arab League, Abdulrahman ‘Azzam Pasha, said that no compromise could be possible with Zionism. “We may lose Palestine,” he told three Jewish Agency officials, “but war is our only option.”
To many Arabs and Muslims, Zionism’s success, Israel’s very existence, is a stain on their histories. Pre-modern anti-Judaism existed within Islam, which saw Judaism as an inferior religion. If inferior, how did Jews succeed in establishing a state in 1948? The answer given was and remains that Jews succeeded only because the Europeans felt guilt for what they did to the Jews during World War II and had to make amends. A reputedly core reason for Israel’s success was the regular support from outside powers. The belief that endorsement by European powers for the establishment of a Jewish national home in the 1922 League of Nations was unlawful, as was the United Nations’ vote in 1947 for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Moreover, the argument continues that Zionists and Israel would not have succeeded in war against Arab and Muslim countries since 1948 if they did not have political, diplomatic, economic and military support from countries such as Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and France. The support Israel received after October 7, 2023, from the U.S. and Western European countries is again proof from these profound anti-Zionist adherents that Israel ‘artificiality’ is sustained only by outside support. Many Arab newspaper writers and politicians found confirmation of this view when France, Britain, the U.S. and several Arab states neutralized the massive missile/drone attack on Israel on April 13, 2024. Many Arabs, Muslims and others still maintain and articulate the beliefs that Judaism is inferior and that Israel is fake and artificial.
Delegitimizing Zionism and Israel was a core element in the pan-Arab nationalist policies articulated in Arab capitals from the 1950s forward, until Egyptian President Sadat recognized Israel diplomatically in 1979. Before that, the PLO refused to accept Israel as a reality. The 1964 PLO Charter stipulated that “anything based on the Palestine Mandate (Israel) is null and void.” It also said that “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the Zionist invasion (1880s or 1917) will be considered Palestinians,” thus Jews who came after those dates had no right to be in the land. Core to the PLO belief is liberating Palestine and repelling Zionism, a view reinforced by the 1988 Hamas Charter, which reiterated the liberation of Palestine as an obligation for every Muslim. Before the June 1967 Middle Eastern war, Egyptian President Nasser’s speech in May 1967 gave one of several pronouncements advocating Israel’s destruction. In preparing his country for war against Israel, he said, “We are not only confronting Israel, but also those who created Israel and who are behind Israel. We are confronting Israel and the West as well.” Anti-Zionism and antisemitism became the clarion calls of the Iranian Islamic Republic from 1979 onward, easily radiating to Arab leaders who refused to accept or recognize Israel’s legitimacy as Sadat did in 1979. In the years before Hamas’ genocidal attacks on Israel in October 2023, Hamas leaders regularly championed Israel’s destruction. In May 2021, Yahya Sinwar proclaimed, “We support the eradication of Israel through armed jihad and struggle. This is our doctrine. The occupation must be swept from all our land.”
During the first quarter of the 21st century, Arabic newspapers regularly refer to Israel as “the occupation state.” Occupation in their view refers to the whole of Israel, not merely a part of it. And yet six Arab states have recognized Israel diplomatically. Meanwhile, political and ideological antisemites see the only satisfactory solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the degradation of Zionism and the destruction of Israel, and they often seek to disconnect Israel’s supporters from Zionism by demeaning not just Israeli politicians or contemporary politics, but the very legitimacy of Jews as a people, like all others entitled to the inalienable right of self-determination. In 2023 and 2024, chants on college campuses across the world and banners declaring “Free Palestine” or “From the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea” reflect more than one hundred years of it takes place and in whatever formats are individually and collectively representative of classical, historical and modern antisemitism.
The ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world
Since the Second World War, the Middle East has emerged as the world’s most inhospitable place for Jews, a distinction formerly held by certain countries in Europe. Whereas the fires of antisemitism had burned constantly in the Middle East ever since the advent of Islam, they had generally smoldered, flaring up only occasionally in blazes of mass killing, forced conversions, and collective expulsions. But antisemitism in the postwar Middle East has raged with such ferocity that to remain a Jew in an Arab country has been to accept harassment at best and to risk murder at worst.
The dangers of continuing to live in Arab countries were impressed on their Jewish residents in a series of postwar pogroms in Tripoli, Libya (November 1945, June 1948), Aden, Yemen (December 1947), Manama, Bahrain (December 1947) Aleppo, Syria (December 1947), Tripoli, Oujda and Djerada, Morocco (June 1948), and Cairo, Egypt (June 1948). Amid this vulnerability, there began the mass Jewish exodus from Arab lands where Jewish roots had run so deep they predated the Arabization and Islamization of the region. The story of this ethnic cleansing is starkly told by a comparison of Jewish communal numbers seventy years apart: In the late 1940s, there lived almost a million Jews in the Arab world, but today, there remain fewer than ten thousand. Another comparison related to this mass depopulation is telling. While the Palestinian Arabs uprooted in 1947 and 1948–mostly peasants eking out a meager subsistence–were displaced in a war that their community had initiated, the Jewish refugees displaced from Arab lands, who were both more numerous and more wealthy than the Palestinian refugees, were uprooted solely for being Jewish.
Antisemitism in Asia
Although antisemitism may have been the scourge of Europe historically and of the Arab world recently, it is far from confined to these places. Nor is it even limited to places where Jews have lived. Indeed, antisemitism stands alone as the only group hatred that can survive, let alone thrive, without the presence of the hated group. Such is the case in Northeast Asia. In China, Japan, and South Korea, there are no more than 5,000 Jews altogether, yet conspiratorial antisemitic ideas have found wide currency in these countries. Ironically, the foundation of this conspiratorial antisemitism is a claim that flatters those about whom it is made: namely, Jews are supremely intelligent. The flattery is backhanded, though, because the by-product of this Northeast Asian belief in superior Jewish intelligence is the claim that Jews are endowed with a genius for making money, whether ill gotten or legitimately earned. The popular acceptance of this myth in East Asia is reflected in book sales. The Talmud has been a best seller in South Korea, sending many Koreans leafing through its pages in search of supposed secrets to Jewish money-making. In China, a book that promises to initiate the reader into the same sort of privileged information also landed on the best-seller list. The author of this volume, whose previous works include a Chinese edition of the Talmud, designates the Jews “the most intelligent, mysterious, and the wealthiest people in the world.” Perhaps this, like the claim of superior Jewish intelligence, may seem innocuous, but the underside of this myth is the sinister claim that Jews have harnessed their superior intellects not only to amass great wealth, but also to amass great power. The Jews, the claim has it, have wielded this power to nefarious ends, serving their own needs at the expense of the rest of the world’s wellbeing. Here, East Asian antisemitism loses any distinctive character it may have had and becomes no different from the classic conspiratorial antisemitism of Europe and the Middle East. This is the antisemitism that sees–behind governments, banks, and other powerful institutions–the hidden hand of Jewish puppetmasters pulling the strings.
It is no coincidence that conspiratorial antisemitism, the most common variant in Asia, resembles, without the least difference, the antisemitism of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This late-nineteenth-century hoax, fabricated by the secret police of the Russian tsar (and endorsed in the Hamas Charter), purports to be the minutes of a secret conclave of eminent Jews plotting their domination of the world. The Protocols became the prooftext for the claim of a global Jewish conspiracy and has engaged the fascination of many in Asia ever since the Japanese were first made aware of it by Russian POWs in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Under the inspiration of Protocols-style antisemitism, Imperial Japan even drew up a plan for the resettlement of Jewish refugees from Europe in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Known as the “Fugu Plan,” this scheme called for settling 50,000 Jews in Manchuria to harness their talents in the service of the empire. In an allusion to the danger posed by Jews, the Fugu Plan took its name from the pufferfish (Fugu in Japanese), a poisonous fish that, once detoxified by a trained chef with painstaking care, is eaten as a delicacy in Japan. To the plan’s authors, the metaphor captured the danger of the scheme because, if it backfired and the Jews became Japan’s masters instead of its servants, the outcome would be like consuming an improperly prepared pufferfish: fatal. As one Japanese naval officer behind the plan observed, “If we are ever alert to the sly nature of the Jews, if we succeed in our undertaking, we will create for our nation and our beloved Emperor the tastiest and most nutritious dish imaginable.”
For all the popularity of such antisemitic conspiracy-mongering in Northeast Asia, nowhere on the continent has conspiratorial antisemitism found as much acceptance as in the two great Muslim countries of Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Protocols has been published in the Malay language for decades, and is a title reportedly carried by many bookstores in the Malaysian capital. And of all modern Asian leaders, none has been a more enthusiastic evangelist of Jewish conspiracy theories from the Protocols than Malaysia’s longest-serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamd, an avowed admirer of Hamas. Mahathir’s habit of denouncing the Jews in international forums, no matter the subject under consideration, has earned him much notoriety.
Antisemitism in Latin America
In contrast to East Asia, Latin America is home to a substantial Jewish population (perhaps a half-million strong), but in common with East Asia, antisemitism has found a congenial habitat there too. Traditional Latin American antisemitism is, like much else in continental culture, an import from the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish and, in the case of Brazil, Portuguese Empires that imparted their culture to their colonies in the New World transmitted their Catholicism to the natives and, along with it, their distinctively Catholic antisemitism. For Jews who made their home on the continent, the Catholicism of Latin America, as opposed to the Protestantism of North America, was a religious distinction of no little significance; in both doctrine and experience, Protestantism has shown the Jews much greater tolerance throughout history. Whereas an element of philosemitism even runs through Protestant denominations that embrace dispensationalism (i.e., Jewish chosenness), the Catholic Church has been a major force for antisemitism throughout history. It was not until the 1960s, for instance, that the Church absolved the Jews of responsibility for Christ’s murder. Not for nothing, then, have the Jews of Protestant former colonies throughout the world (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) known less antisemitism than the Jews of Catholic Latin America. Catholic governments’ harsher treatment of the Jews was made plain early in Latin America’s colonial history. When Brazil changed hands in 1654, passing from the tolerant rule of the Protestant Dutch to the antisemitic tyranny of the Catholic Portuguese, Jews fled the country without delay. (Twenty-three of these refugees made their way to New Amsterdam’s harbor, becoming the first Jews to settle in North America.)
For centuries, traditional Catholic antisemitism was the dominant–and almost the exclusive–form of Jew hatred in Latin America. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Vatican’s anticommunism, which emphasized that Judaism and Bolshevism were kindred spirits, only aggravated popular hostility to Jews. In 1919, anticommunism and Catholicism united to unleash the only pogrom in Latin American History, the 1919 massacre of Argentinian Jews carried out by the government and a proto-fascist movement, the Argentine Patriotic League.
Both before and during the Second World War, in Latin America, as elsewhere in the world, antisemitism moved governments throughout the continent to deny safe haven to Jews fleeing the horrors of Europe. Only Bolivia, El Salvador, and, to a much more limited extent, the Dominican Republic, allowed these homeless Jews sanctuary. Yet, after the Second World War, many of the same Latin American Countries that had closed the doors of immigration to Jewish refugees from genocide now opened them for Nazi fugitives from justice. In the years following the war, almost ten thousand Nazi officers and Nazi collaborators found refuge in Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. But nowhere did Nazis receive a warmer welcome than in the Latin American country with the largest Jewish community, Argentina. The accession to power of Juan Peron, an admirer of the Nazis, in 1946 would be a boon for Nazis in search of a new life. Although Peron was no longer president in 1960, the Mossad’s capture that year of the most notorious of these Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, still caused a backlash against Argentinian Jews, provoking attacks against the Jews of Buenos Aires.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Jews of Latin America often found themselves squeezed by a pincer of antisemites on both the left and the right. Certainly the nastiest of the antisemitic governments was the fascistic junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Under the junta’s military dictatorship, Jews, whose loyalty was suspected and whose national belonging was questioned, were hunted down, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Among the thousands of desaparecidos (people seized and “disappeared” by the regime, never to be heard from again), Jews figured disproportionately, the proportion of Jews among the missing Jews far exceeding the Jewish share of the general population.
But not all right-wing militarists in Latin America were ill disposed to Jews. While Jews were being persecuted by the Argentinian junta, they were flourishing under the autocracies of Augosto Pinochet in neighboring Chile and the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua. Indeed, the overthrow of right-wing military dictatorships by left-wing revolutionaries spelled disaster for the Jews of Cuba in 1959 and of Nicaragua in 1979. Whereas the Jews in Castro’s Cuba were targeted less for being Jewish than for being bourgeois–at least initially–the leftist Sandinistas who took power in Nicaragua in 1979 did little to conceal their hostility to Nicaragua’s small Jewish community.
In twenty-first-century Latin America, the menace of antisemitism has come much more often from governments on the left than from those on the right. On the Latin American left, Third World solidarity, class warfare, and anti-Zionism have mixed together to form a particularly potent antisemitic concoction that leftist leaders have drunk with abandon. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and his successor, Rafeal Maduro, Chile’s Gabriel Boric, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva–among others–have repeatedly made antisemitic remarks or speeches. Chavez and Maduro went further, inciting Venezuelans against Jews and sheltering Hamas and Hezbollah. While the leaders of Argentina have not, like their counterparts in Venezuela, made de facto alliances with these terrorist groups, two Argentinian presidents (Carlos Menem and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) did help cover up Iran and Hezbollah’s bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Until the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, the 1994 attack against the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, which claimed 85 lives, was the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust.
Scott Abramson, May 2024