Antisemitism: The World’s Oldest Hate

Antisemitism is unlike almost any other form of prejudice in human history. It has outlived kingdoms, empires, political movements, and entire civilizations. It has changed its language and its arguments countless times, yet somehow the object of its hatred has remained the same. Jews have been condemned for being too religious and for being too secular, for remaining separate from society and for supposedly exercising too much influence over it, for being poor and for being wealthy, for being capitalists and for being communists, for being nationalists and for being cosmopolitans. The accusations contradict one another because antisemitism has never depended upon consistency. It depends upon the need to find someone to blame. Across thousands of years, the Jew has repeatedly been chosen for that role.

The origins of this hostility reach deep into antiquity. The Torah preserves the memory of Israelite slavery in Egypt, where Pharaoh looked upon the growing Hebrew population not as neighbors or contributors to Egyptian society but as a potential threat. Fear became suspicion, suspicion became oppression, and oppression eventually became an attempt to destroy the next generation. Later, the Book of Esther would tell another version of the same story. Haman did not merely resent Mordecai personally. He sought to destroy an entire people because they maintained their own identity, customs, and loyalties. In both stories we encounter something that would repeat throughout Jewish history: the Jewish refusal to disappear into the surrounding culture could itself become the reason others resented us.

Jewish distinctiveness has always been visible. Jews lived among other peoples while keeping Shabbat, circumcising their sons, maintaining dietary laws, observing festivals, studying Torah, praying in their own tradition, and remembering that they belonged to a covenant extending across generations. None of this required hostility toward the surrounding world. Torah repeatedly commands justice, compassion, honesty, and concern for the stranger. Yet societies that demanded religious or cultural conformity have often found Jewish persistence unsettling. A people capable of living among others without becoming identical to them could be interpreted as stubborn, alien, or even disloyal. What Jews understood as covenantal faithfulness was sometimes interpreted by their neighbors as rejection.

With the rise of Christianity, this ancient suspicion acquired a powerful new theological form. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the gradual separation of Christianity from Judaism, disputes that had once occurred within the complicated religious world of the first century became increasingly sharpened into a conflict between two distinct communities. As Christianity gained political power within the Roman Empire and later became the dominant religion of Europe, theological arguments about Judaism were no longer merely religious disagreements. They could shape laws, institutions, popular attitudes, and ultimately the physical safety of Jewish communities.

For centuries, Christians were taught that Jews collectively bore responsibility for the death of Jesus. Jews were sometimes portrayed as a people rejected by God, whose continued suffering supposedly demonstrated divine punishment. The belief that the Church had replaced Israel in God’s covenant became deeply embedded in Christian thought. Once Jews were imagined not simply as religiously mistaken but as spiritually cursed, persecution became easier to rationalize. Theological language moved from pulpits into the streets. Jews were excluded from occupations, expelled from cities, confined to restricted neighborhoods, forced into public humiliations, pressured to convert, and periodically massacred.

The Crusades demonstrated how quickly religious hatred could become bloodshed. Jewish communities in the Rhineland were attacked and destroyed by mobs supposedly traveling east to fight for Jerusalem. During the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, conversion itself often provided little protection. Jews who had accepted Christianity, frequently under intense pressure, could still be accused of secretly practicing Judaism. Conversos and their descendants were treated with suspicion because Jewishness was increasingly imagined as something deeper than belief. Long before modern racial ideology emerged, European society had begun moving toward the idea that Jewish ancestry itself carried a permanent stain.

Even the Protestant Reformation did not free Europe from these ideas. Martin Luther initially expressed hopes that Jews might accept his interpretation of Christianity, but when they did not, his attitude deteriorated dramatically. His later writings contained vicious attacks on Judaism and advocated measures against Jewish synagogues, homes, books, and religious life. Centuries later, Nazi propagandists could draw upon this older Christian tradition of hostility when constructing their own antisemitic worldview. Modern Christianity has changed considerably, and many churches have formally rejected teachings of collective Jewish guilt and repudiated antisemitism. Those changes matter and should be recognized. Yet ideas repeated for centuries do not disappear from culture simply because official doctrine changes. Their echoes can survive in language, assumptions, sermons, art, literature, and popular prejudice.

Even friendship toward Jews can occasionally carry uncomfortable theological assumptions. Some modern Christian communities strongly support Israel because Jewish return to the Land of Israel occupies an important place in their expectations concerning the Second Coming of Jesus. Jews may appreciate sincere friendship and political support while still asking an important question: Are we valued as Jews, or are we being assigned a role within someone else’s prophecy? Genuine respect for the Jewish people requires allowing Judaism to exist on its own terms. Jews are not merely characters in Christian eschatology. We are a living people with our own covenant, history, faith, responsibilities, and hopes.

Medieval Europe added increasingly grotesque accusations to the existing theological hostility. Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading disease, desecrating Christian religious objects, and murdering Christian children for ritual purposes. The infamous blood libel claimed that Jewish religious practice required Christian blood, an accusation rendered especially absurd by the Torah’s prohibition against consuming blood. Yet absurdity did not make the accusation harmless. Blood libels repeatedly produced torture, executions, riots, and massacres. Once people have been conditioned to believe that a minority is fundamentally evil, even the most irrational allegations can seem believable.

Economic stereotypes developed through a similarly cruel process. Christian governments restricted Jews from owning land in many places, participating in guilds, holding certain offices, or entering many professions. Moneylending became one of the economic activities sometimes available to Jews, particularly because medieval Christian restrictions on lending money at interest did not apply to Jewish communities in the same way. Jews were therefore pushed into a narrow range of economic roles and then despised for occupying them. The society that created the Jewish moneylender subsequently used the Jewish moneylender as evidence that Jews were greedy.

These stereotypes entered European imagination so deeply that they became part of literature and folklore. Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice remains one of the most famous Jewish characters in Western literature. Shylock is more complex than a simple villain, and scholars have long debated how sympathetic Shakespeare intended him to be, but the character nevertheless stands within a long tradition that associated Jewishness with moneylending, greed, and social alienation. Similar figures appeared throughout European stories and art, until generations of people who had little or no personal contact with Jews nevertheless possessed elaborate ideas about what Jews supposedly were.

The ghetto intensified the irony. Christian authorities confined Jews to restricted neighborhoods and then treated Jewish separation as evidence that Jews preferred isolation. Jews were made outsiders and then blamed for being outsiders. They were prevented from fully participating in society and then accused of having secret loyalties. This pattern would appear repeatedly in later history: restrictions imposed upon Jews would eventually be cited as proof that Jews were somehow incapable of belonging.

The Enlightenment and the political emancipation of European Jews offered hope that these old hatreds might finally disappear. In many places Jews entered universities, professions, political life, science, literature, business, and the arts in ways that had previously been impossible. Yet antisemitism did not vanish. Instead, it transformed itself again. As European thinkers became less comfortable with explicitly religious prejudice, older anti-Jewish ideas were translated into the language of race and pseudo-science. Jewishness came to be portrayed not merely as a religion that one might abandon but as a permanent biological identity.

This transformation created one of antisemitism’s most dangerous forms. Under racial antisemitism, conversion offered no escape. A baptized Jew could still be considered Jewish by ancestry. The Jew could therefore be imagined as an invisible racial enemy living inside European society. Political movements accused Jews of manipulating capitalism while other movements accused Jews of creating communism. Jews were blamed for revolutionary politics and for international finance, for undermining nationalism and for possessing too much ethnic solidarity. Again, the contradictions did not matter. The purpose of antisemitism was not to accurately describe Jews. It was to explain the frustrations and fears of those who hated them.

That long history reached its most horrific expression in Nazi Germany. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, not because of anything they had done, not because of what they believed, and not because they could have altered some behavior and thereby saved themselves. Religious Jews and secular Jews died together. Children who had never made a religious or political decision in their lives were murdered beside their grandparents. Wealthy Jews and poor Jews, conservatives and socialists, scholars and laborers, citizens who felt profoundly German and refugees who had already fled persecution—all were marked for destruction because Nazi ideology defined Jewish ancestry itself as a crime worthy of death.

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with ideas. Before Auschwitz there were books, speeches, jokes, conspiracy theories, newspaper cartoons, political slogans, and laws. There was a long process through which Jews were transformed in the public imagination from neighbors into parasites, conspirators, and enemies. Only after people had been taught that Jews stood outside the boundaries of ordinary human sympathy could mass murder become thinkable. The Nazis then combined ancient prejudice with modern technology. Bureaucracy, railroads, government records, industrial engineering, mass communication, and administrative efficiency were turned toward genocide. Human beings were cataloged, transported, robbed, stripped of their names, reduced to numbers, and murdered on an industrial scale.

For that reason, the Holocaust should never be regarded simply as an eruption of primitive barbarism. It was also a warning about what an educated, technologically advanced civilization can become when it surrenders its conscience. Doctors participated. Lawyers drafted laws. Engineers designed systems. Civil servants processed paperwork. Ordinary people took jobs vacated by Jews, moved into Jewish homes, watched neighbors disappear, or convinced themselves that whatever was happening was none of their concern. The machinery of destruction required murderers, but it also required silence.

It is therefore especially disturbing that Holocaust denial continues despite overwhelming historical evidence. Nazi documents survive. Photographs survive. Camps survive. Mass graves survive. Survivor testimony, perpetrator testimony, military records, correspondence, deportation lists, and countless other sources document what happened. Holocaust denial is rarely an innocent historical disagreement. It is generally an ideological attempt to minimize Jewish suffering, rehabilitate antisemitic movements, or suggest that Jews invented or exaggerated the Holocaust for political advantage. In that sense, denial becomes another form of antisemitism: after Jews were murdered, they are accused of lying about their own dead.

The internet has given such falsehoods new life. Conspiracy theories that once circulated slowly through pamphlets and fringe publications can now cross continents within hours. A teenager with little historical knowledge can encounter sophisticated-looking propaganda on social media without ever entering a library or speaking to a historian. Algorithms reward outrage and controversy, and hateful ideas can be disguised as humor, political analysis, historical revisionism, or merely asking questions. Holocaust education, survivor testimony, museums, historical scholarship, and the preservation of memory therefore remain indispensable. Remembering what happened is not an exercise in remaining trapped in the past. Memory is one of the defenses that protects the future.

Modern antisemitism presents another difficulty because it cannot be conveniently confined to one political movement. People frequently recognize antisemitism among their opponents while excusing similar behavior among their allies. Those on the political left may easily identify white supremacist antisemitism while becoming reluctant to confront antisemitism within movements whose other causes they support. Those on the political right may condemn antisemitism associated with radical anti-Zionism while overlooking conspiracy theories circulating within nationalist, Christian, or populist movements. Jews cannot afford that selective blindness. Antisemitism is antisemitism regardless of who speaks it.

On the extreme right, Jews remain central villains within white nationalist and conspiratorial ideologies. Jews are accused of controlling governments, manipulating financial institutions, orchestrating immigration, destroying Western civilization, controlling the press, or secretly directing social change. These ideas are not merely offensive abstractions. They have inspired violence. Eleven Jewish worshippers were murdered at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. In 2019, another gunman attacked the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California. Both attacks emerged from a larger ideological environment in which Jews were imagined as conspirators responsible for social problems.

Antisemitism can also emerge from the political left, particularly when legitimate criticism of Israeli governments is transformed into collective accusations against Jews or hostility toward Jewish identity itself. Israel, like every country, can be criticized. Israelis themselves engage in fierce disagreement over their government’s policies, and there is nothing inherently antisemitic about opposing a particular Israeli leader, military action, settlement policy, or political program. The problem begins when Jews around the world are treated as collectively responsible for the actions of Israel, when ancient conspiracy theories about Jewish power are merely rewritten using the word “Zionist,” or when Jewish people are required to denounce Israel in order to be accepted into political or social spaces.

The distinction matters because criticism of government policy belongs to ordinary political discourse, while collective guilt belongs to the language of prejudice. A Jewish student in California, London, or Paris is not personally responsible for every decision made by a government thousands of miles away. Holding that student accountable because they are Jewish repeats precisely the logic that minorities throughout history have suffered under.

The digital age has made these boundaries even more difficult to navigate because antisemitism constantly disguises itself. Sometimes it appears openly with Nazi symbols and explicit racial hatred. More often it hides behind jokes, memes, coded expressions, conspiracy theories, economic language, or political rhetoric. Jews are blamed for pandemics, wars, immigration, cultural change, banking crises, sexual liberalization, communism, capitalism, globalization, and nearly every other social anxiety imaginable. The delivery mechanism is modern, but the accusation is ancient.

All of this raises the question Jews have asked for generations: Why us? Why has this particular hatred endured for so long?

There is no single answer. Jewish distinctiveness has certainly contributed to suspicion. For centuries Jewish communities lived among larger populations while maintaining Shabbat, dietary practices, Hebrew prayer, circumcision, festivals, communal institutions, and a strong sense of shared ancestry and destiny. In societies where conformity was expected, survival without assimilation could appear threatening. Religious conflict contributed as well. Judaism rejected the pagan gods of antiquity and later rejected central theological claims made by Christianity and Islam. Jews therefore became an enduring reminder that not everyone accepted the dominant religion’s understanding of truth.

Economic resentment also played a role. When Jews achieved success despite discrimination, that success could be interpreted not as evidence of perseverance but as proof of conspiracy. Political scapegoating perhaps provides the broadest explanation. Whenever societies confront economic hardship, war, disease, rapid cultural change, or political instability, people naturally search for explanations. Unfortunately, simple explanations are often more emotionally satisfying than complicated ones. Blaming a visible minority can give frightened people an enemy around whom they can organize their frustration.

The remarkable thing about antisemitism is how completely the imagined Jew can change according to what the surrounding society fears. When capitalism is unpopular, Jews are capitalists. When communism is feared, Jews become communists. When nationalism dominates, Jews are accused of having international loyalties. When nationalism itself is criticized, Jews are accused of being excessively nationalistic because of their attachment to Israel. Jews have been condemned for being too poor and too successful, too isolated and too influential, too traditional and too modern. These contradictions reveal something essential. Antisemitism has never really been about Jews. The imaginary Jew exists inside the imagination of the antisemite and changes according to whatever grievance needs an explanation.

It is easy to speak about all of this historically and forget what antisemitism feels like when you are the one experiencing it. For me, this subject has never been merely academic. I remember hearing casual expressions such as “Don’t Jew it” when people were negotiating prices, as though Jewish identity itself were synonymous with greed or dishonesty. Such comments were often said casually, perhaps even by people who would never have considered themselves antisemites. But a child hears what adults sometimes dismiss. You quickly understand when your people’s identity has become a joke.

Sometimes the hatred was far less subtle. When I was ten years old, I was beaten badly enough to require hospitalization. The boy attacking me repeatedly said that “the Jews killed Jesus.” He was a child himself, which in some ways makes the story even more disturbing. A child that young had not independently developed a theological theory about Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion. Someone had taught him that accusation. He had absorbed it from adults, religious teaching, cultural assumptions, or some combination of them, and eventually those words were expressed through his fists.

The institutional response hurt in a different way. The school did essentially nothing. The police treated the incident as little more than children fighting, another case of “kids being kids.” Yet children do not invent hatred from nothing. They learn the stories adults tell them, the jokes adults laugh at, the insults adults tolerate, and the categories through which adults teach them to see other people. Hatred does not become harmless merely because it comes from the mouth of a child.

Years later, I encountered another form of marginalization while serving in the Army. Christian services on Sunday provided soldiers an opportunity to leave the barracks for a while, and I sometimes attended even though I was Jewish simply because it offered a break. I asked whether Jewish services could be made available on Saturday, our Sabbath and traditional day of worship. The request was met with ridicule. People laughed. The implication was not that arranging services was logistically difficult; it was that the request itself seemed somehow absurd, as though Judaism did not deserve the same seriousness or accommodation granted automatically to Christianity.

None of these experiences can be compared in scale with pogroms, expulsions, or genocide, nor should they be. But they belong to the same moral landscape. Antisemitism is not always dramatic. It is not always a swastika painted on a synagogue or a gunman entering a sanctuary. Sometimes it is a joke. Sometimes it is an assumption. Sometimes it is the moment you realize that your religious needs are considered less important than those of someone else. Sometimes it is a teacher or administrator deciding that what happened to you is not serious enough to address. Those smaller moments reveal how prejudice survives between the great catastrophes recorded in history books.

For Jews, the answer to this history cannot be perpetual fear. Judaism does not teach us to respond to hatred by disappearing. If anything, Jewish history teaches precisely the opposite. Our ancestors survived because they continued being Jews when surrendering their Jewishness might have made life easier. They circumcised their sons when circumcision was forbidden. They studied Torah when Jewish books were burned. They kept Shabbat despite economic punishment. They whispered Hebrew prayers in ghettos, prisons, concentration camps, and hiding places. They rebuilt communities after expulsions and massacres. They married, raised children, celebrated festivals, and taught the Shema again and again.

Jewish survival itself became an act of defiance.

Traditional Judaism reminds us that our purpose is not simply to earn the approval of whatever culture happens to surround us. We are part of an ancient covenant. We are called to study Torah, perform mitzvot, pursue justice, practice compassion, build families and communities, remember those who came before us, and hand something living to those who will come after us. None of that requires hostility toward non-Jews. Torah teaches concern for the stranger and insists upon the dignity of human life. But respect for others should never require the abandonment of ourselves.

The answer to antisemitism is therefore neither isolation nor assimilation. It is Jewish confidence. We should study Torah because Torah belongs to us. We should keep Shabbat because Shabbat has sustained Jewish homes for generations. We should celebrate our festivals, teach our children, strengthen our communities, support one another, and welcome Jews who are trying to find their way back into Jewish life. We should never allow the internal divisions of Jewish society to make us forget that we belong to one people.

That last point is especially important. An observant Jew should not look upon a less observant Jew as somehow less worthy of solidarity, dignity, or protection. A secular Jew does not become less Jewish because he does not keep Shabbat. A Reform Jew does not cease being Jewish because an Orthodox Jew disagrees with Reform theology. A Jew who knows almost nothing about Judaism remains part of the Jewish people. When antisemites attack Jews, they rarely pause to ask about denominational affiliation, level of observance, synagogue membership, or personal theology. To the antisemite, we are simply Jews. We might learn something from that terrible simplicity and remember that beneath all our arguments, movements, customs, and disagreements, we are still one people.

“Never Again” therefore cannot simply be a phrase spoken once a year at Holocaust memorials. It must represent a way of thinking. It means noticing hatred before it turns violent. It means challenging conspiracy theories even when they come from people whose politics we otherwise share. It means refusing to excuse antisemitism because the speaker belongs to our preferred ideological camp. It means defending synagogues, Jewish schools, cemeteries, students, families, and communities. It means teaching history honestly and refusing to allow either Holocaust denial or historical distortion to become respectable.

Yet “Never Again” must mean something else as well. It must mean refusing to surrender the richness of Jewish life to those who hate us. Jewish history contains tremendous suffering, but suffering is not the whole of Jewish history. We are not simply the people who were persecuted. We are the people of Torah and Shabbat, Passover and Sukkot, weddings and circumcisions, argument and learning, family tables and ancient prayers. We produced poetry, philosophy, law, music, scholarship, humor, mysticism, science, literature, and generations of ordinary families who kept Jewish life alive.

Antisemitism wants the Jew to disappear. Sometimes it has attempted to accomplish that through murder. Sometimes through forced conversion. Sometimes through intimidation. Sometimes through exclusion. Sometimes through the quieter pressure that tells Jews they will be more acceptable if they simply make their Jewishness less visible.

Our response remains that we are still here.

We will continue to study Torah. We will continue to pray. We will continue to argue, because Jews have always argued. We will light Shabbat candles and Hanukkah lamps. We will retell the Exodus every Passover. We will mourn our dead and celebrate our weddings. We will raise Jewish children. We will welcome Jews who have become distant from Jewish life and help them find their way home without humiliation or judgment. We will rebuild what others have destroyed. We will disagree among ourselves while refusing to forget that we remain family.

Most importantly, we will teach our children that being Jewish is never something for which they must apologize.

The struggle against antisemitism cannot belong to Jews alone. A society that accepts antisemitism has accepted a way of thinking in which conspiracy, collective guilt, dehumanization, and scapegoating become legitimate tools for understanding other human beings. History teaches that hatred rarely remains confined to a single victim forever. The defense of Jews is therefore also a defense of the moral foundations of civilization.

Whether the world learns that lesson remains uncertain. Jewish history gives us little reason for complacency, but it also gives us extraordinary reason for hope. Empires that once ruled over us have disappeared. Monarchs who expelled us have become footnotes in history. Governments that attempted to erase Jewish life have fallen. Movements that promised a world without Jews have passed away.

And still a Jewish child learns the Shema.

Still a family sits around a Shabbat table.

Still a Torah scroll is lifted before a congregation.

Still Jewish parents teach their children the stories their grandparents taught them.

Still Hebrew is spoken in the Land of Israel.

Still Jews throughout the world gather to celebrate, study, mourn, pray, argue, laugh, and remember.

Perhaps that is our most powerful answer to antisemitism. Not hatred in return. Not fear. Not withdrawal from the world. Simply the stubborn, joyful continuation of Jewish life.

We remember because memory is sacred. We endure because generations before us endured. And we live because Judaism has always insisted that life itself is holy.

Am Yisrael Chai.