Anti-Semitism

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.
Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish
individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

----------------International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)

Antisemitism is prejudice against or hatred of Jews

-------------United States Holocaust memorial museum

An ancient tradition of hatred

The word “antisemitism” was popularised by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr. His polemic, Der
Sieg des Judentums über das Germentum (The Victory of Jewry over Germandom), was published in
1879. Outwardly, Marr was a thoroughly secular man of the modern world. He explicitly rejected the
groundless but ancient Christian allegations long made against the Jews, such as deicide or that Jews
engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children. Instead, he drew on the fashionable theories of
the French academic Ernest Renan (who viewed history as a world-shaping contest between Jewish
Semites and Aryan Indo-Europeans). Marr suggested that the Jewish threat to Germany was racial.
He said that it was born of their immutable and destructive nature, their “tribal peculiarities” and
“alien essence”.

Antisemites like Marr strove for intellectual respectability by denying any connection between their
own modern, secular ideology and the irrational, superstitious bigotry of the past. It is a tactic which
is employed by some contemporary antisemites who align themselves with “anti-Zionism”, an
ideology whose precise definition consequently excites considerable controversy. But this continuing
hostility towards Jews from pre-modern to modern times has been manifest to many.

HISTORY - Antisemitism in antiquity?

Some scholars would look to the pre-Christian world and see the origins of an enduring hostility in
the attitudes of ancient Greeks and Romans. Religious Studies scholar Peter Schäfer believes the
exclusive nature of the monotheistic Jewish faith, the apparent haughty sense of being a chosen
people, a refusal to intermarry, a Sabbath observance and the practise of circumcision were all things
that marked Jews out in antiquity for a particular odium.

Finding examples of hostility towards Jews in classical sources is not difficult. The politician and
lawyer Cicero, 106-43BC, once reminded a jury of “the odium of Jewish gold” and how they “[stick
together]” and are “influential in informal assemblies”. The Roman historian Tacitus, c.56-120AD, was
contemptuous of “base and abominable” Jewish customs and was deeply disturbed by those of his
compatriots who had renounced their ancestral gods and converted to Judaism. The Roman poet
and satirist Juvenal, c.55-130AD, shared his disgust at the behaviour of converts to Judaism besides
denouncing Jews generally as drunken and rowdy.

These few examples may point towards the existence of antisemitism in antiquity. But there is little
reason to believe that Jews were the objects of a specific prejudice beyond the generalised contempt
that both Greeks and Romans exhibited towards “barbarians” – especially conquered and colonised
peoples. Juvenal was every bit as rude about Greeks and other foreigners in Rome as he was about
Jews. He complained bitterly: “I cannot stand … a Greek city of Rome. And yet what part of the dregs
comes from Greece?” Once the full extent of Juvenal’s prejudice has been recognised, his snide
remarks about Jews might be understood as being more indicative of an altogether more sweeping
xenophobia.

The ‘Christ killers’

It is in the theology of early Christians that we find the clearest foundations of antisemitism. The
Adversus Judaeos (arguments against the Jews) tradition was established early in the religion’s
history. Sometime around 140AD the Christian apologist Justin Martyr was teaching in Rome. In his
most celebrated work, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin strove to answer Trypho when he
pointed to the contradictory position of Christians who claimed to accept Jewish scripture but
refused to follow Torah (the Jewish law).

Justin responded that the demands of Jewish law were meant only for Jews as a punishment from
God. Although still accepting the possibility of Jewish salvation, he argued that the old covenant was
finished, telling Trypho: “You ought to understand that [the gifts of God’s favour] formerly among
your nation have been transferred to us.” Yet Justin’s concern was not really with Jews. It was with
his fellow Christians. At a time when the distinction between Judaism and Christianity was still
blurred and rival sects competed for adherents, he was striving to prevent gentile converts to
Christianity from observing the Torah, lest they go over wholly to Judaism.

Vilifying Jews was a central part of Justin’s rhetorical strategy. He alleged that they were guilty of
persecuting Christians and had done so ever since they “had killed the Christ”. It was an ugly charge,
soon levelled again in the works of other Church Fathers, such as Tertullian (c.160-225AD) who
referred to the “synagogues of the Jews” as “fountains of persecution”.

The objective of using such invective was to settle internal debates within Christian congregations.
The “Jews” in these writings were symbolic. The allegations did not reflect the actual behaviour or
beliefs of Jews. When Tertullian attempted to refute the dualist teachings of the Christian heretic
Marcion (c.144AD), he needed to demonstrate that the vengeful God of the Old Testament was
indeed the same merciful and compassionate God of the Christian New Testament. He achieved this
by presenting the Jews as especially wicked and especially deserving of righteous anger; it was thus,
Tertullian argued, that Jewish behaviours and Jewish sins explained the contrast between the Old
and the New Testament.

To demonstrate this peculiar malevolence, Tertullian portrayed Jews as denying the prophets,
rejecting Jesus, persecuting Christians and as rebels against God. These stereotypes shaped Christian
attitudes towards Jews from late antiquity into the medieval period, leaving Jewish communities
vulnerable to periodic outbreaks of persecution. These ranged from massacres, such as York in 1190,
to “ethnic cleansing”, as seen in the expulsions from England in 1290, France in 1306 and Spain in
1492.
Although it was real people who often suffered as a result of this ugly prejudice, antisemitism as a
concept largely owes its longevity to its symbolic and rhetorical power. American historian David
Nirenberg concludes that “anti-Judaism was a tool that could usefully be deployed to almost any
problem, a weapon that could be deployed on almost any front”. And this weapon has been wielded
to devastating effect for centuries. When Martin Luther thundered against the Papacy in 1543 he
denounced the Roman Church as “the Devil’s Synagogue” and Catholic orthodoxy as “Jewish” in its
greed and materialism. In 1790, the Anglo-Irish conservative Edmund Burke published his manifesto,
Reflections on the Revolution in France, and condemned the revolutionaries as “Jew brokers” and
“Old Jewry.”

From Marxism to Hollywood

Despite Karl Marx’s Jewish ancestry, Marxism was tainted at its very birth by antisemitism. In 1843,
Karl Marx identified modern capitalism as the result of the “Judiasing” of the Christian:

The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner not only annexing the power of money but also
through him and also apart from him money has become a world power and the practical spirit of
the Jew has become the practical spirit of the Christian people. The Jews have emancipated
themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews … Money is the jealous god of Israel before
whom no other god may stand … The god of the Jews has been secularised and has become the god
of the world.

And there remain those, from across the political spectrum, who are still ready to deploy what
Nirenberg referred to as “the most powerful language of opprobrium available” in Western political
discourse, commonly using the language of conspiracy, webs and networks. In 2002, the left-leaning
New Statesman included articles by Dennis Sewell and John Pilger, debating the existence of a “pro-
Israeli lobby” in Britain. Their articles, however, proved less controversial than the the cover
illustration chosen to introduce this theme, which drew on familiar tropes of secret Jewish
machinations and dominance over national interests: a gold Star of David resting on the Union Jack,
with the title: “A Kosher Conspiracy?” The following year, veteran Labour MP Tam Dalyell accused the
then prime minister, Tony Blair, of “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers”. It is still
language that is being used now.

On the far right, white supremacists have been quick to project their own time-honoured fantasies of
Jewish malfeasance and power onto contemporary events, however seemingly irrelevant. This was
quickly apparent in August 2017, as the future of memorials glorifying those who had rebelled
against the union and defended slavery during America’s Civil War became the focus of intense
debate in the United States. At Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstrators protesting against the removal
of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee, began chanting “Jews will not replace us”. When
journalist Elspeth Reeve asked one why, he replied that the city was “run by Jewish communists”.

When accusations of serious sexual misconduct by Weinstein were published by The New York Times
in October 2017, he was quickly cast by the far right as a representative of the “eternal conspiratorial
enemy” of American society as a whole. David Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan, would write on
his website that the “Harvey Weinstein story … is a case study in the corrosive nature of Jewish
domination of our media and cultural industries”.

‘The hatreds of our time …’

Responding to such language, The Atlantic’s Emma Green astutely commented on how “the
durability of anti-Semitic tropes and the ease with which they slide into all displays of bigotry, is a
chilling reminder that the hatreds of our time rhyme with history and are easily channelled through
timeless anti-Semitic canards”.

There is real danger here as the spike in antisemitic hate crimes shows. This peculiar way of thinking
about the world has always retained the potential to turn hatred of symbolic Jews into the very real
persecution of actual Jews. Given the marked escalation of antisemitic incidents recorded in 2017,
we are now faced with the unsettling prospect that this bigotry is becoming “normalised”.

For example, the European Jewish Congress expressed “grave concerns” over an increase in
antisemitic acts in Poland under the right-wing Law and Justice government which won the 2015
parliamentary election with an outright majority. The group said the government was “closing …
communications with the official representatives of the Jewish community” and there was a
“proliferation of ‘fascist slogans’ and unsettling remarks on social media and television, as well as the
display of flags of the nationalist … group at state ceremonies”.

In response to these fears, a survey investigating antisemitism within the European Union will be
undertaken in 2018, led by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. The agency’s
director, Michael O'Flaherty, commented, correctly, that: “Antisemitism remains a grave worry across
Europe despite repeated efforts to stamp out these age-old prejudices.”

Given the phenomenon’s deep historical roots and its epoch defying capacity for reinvention, it
would be easy to be pessimistic about the prospect of another effort to “stamp it out”. But a
historical awareness of the nature of antisemitism may prove a powerful ally for those who would
challenge prejudice. The ancient tropes and slights may cloak themselves in modern garb but even
softly-spoken allegations of conspiratorial “lobbies” and “cabals” should be recognised for what they
are: the mobilisation of an ancient language and ideology of hate for which there should be no place

Phillips, Gervase. “Antisemitism: How the Origins of History’s Oldest Hatred Still Hold Sway Today.” The
Conversation, theconversation.com/antisemitism-how-the-origins-of-historys-oldest-hatred-still-hold-sway-
today-87878. in our time.