Since Hamas members attacked a Peace Festival in Israel on October 6, 2023, the subsequent Israel-Hamas war — resulting in the deaths of a reported over 70,000 Palestinians and over 2,000 Israelis, and many more injuries on all sides — antisemitic incidents have spiked worldwide.

The latest and most visible violent and deadly attack occurred on Bondi Beach in Australia as Jews and other celebrants attended a First Night of Hanukkah festival on December 14. Two men shot and killed at least 15 people while injuring another 40.

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Anti-Jewish hatred, while a mainstay of political, religious, and social discourse across the planet appears to be on the rise.

“Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”

The estimated 1,500 neo-Nazis and white supremacists blared out this disgusting chant as they marched — with tiki torches in hand — through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia during the August 11-12, 2017 “Unite the Right” protest rally, scheduled over the planned removal of a statue commemorating Civil War General Robert E. Lee. This march was reminiscent of similar events held throughout Germany, and particularly in Nuremberg during the Nazi era.

So why do people all along the political spectrum — from far left to far right, from self-described “white supremacists” to many who are otherwise well-intentioned — often target Jews, many who appear “white”?

The answer, stemming from a long and complex history, is quite involved: Though Jewish people are members of every so-called “race,” even Jews of European heritage (Ashkenazim) have been and still continue to be “racially” othered by some communities of predominantly Christian-European heritage.

And some people blame all Jews worldwide for the Israeli government’s brutal policies against the Palestinian people, even blaming Jews who have never supported the Zionist project.

Antisemitism: The longest hatred

Antisemitism refers to the deep-seated hatred, discrimination, fear, and prejudice against Jews as individuals or as a group. This phenomenon is rooted in age-old stereotypes and myths that target Jews based on their ethnicity, religion, and perceived connections to the state of Israel. Antisemitism has a long history and has manifested in various forms, including verbal attacks, violence, and discriminatory policies.

Some scholars and social justice workers prefer the term “anti-Jewish hatred” or “anti-Jewish oppression.” Firstly, Jewish and Arab peoples are all considered “semites” (descendants of Shem, son of Noah).

And secondly, “antisemitism” was coined by a rabid hater of the Jewish people, Wilhelm Marr, an architect and writer in Hamburg in 1878, who first employed the term in his pamphlet The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, in which he warned of the imminent final Jewish victory to conquer and enslave the Western world.

I have studied the stereotypes and tropes used to maintain and perpetuate oppression. Regarding those employed again Jewish people, I have complied a partial list, which includes:

• Killers of God

• In Service of / Fathered by the Devil

• Host desecrators (both of the body of Christ and of those who welcome them)

• Poisoners of drinking wells & transmitters of diseases

• Usurers (people who lend money at unreasonably high rates of interest)

• Ritual murderers & abusers of Christian children (a trope also known as “blood libel”)

• Forced circumcisers of mon-Jews

• Immature / Inadequate religious consciousness

• Clannish

• Alien “race”

• Wanderers / “Stateless”

• Holders of dual / multiple loyalties

• Proselytizers to Judaism

• Freedom-Killing Communists

• Super capitalists

• Sexually perverse

• Oversexed or sexually frigid females

• Lecherous males targeting Christian women

• Feminized and non-athletic males

• Controller of world economic systems

• Greedy for wealth

• Financially cheap and cheaters

• Controllers of the media

• Exaggerators of the extent of anti-Jewish oppression

• Exploiters of the oppressed

• Colonizers

Members of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups engage in religious, ethnic, and racial bigotry against all groups they consider non-white, including Jews. In other words, anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination (a.k.a. antisemitism) is a form of racism.

In Christian religious texts, Paul and other leaders in the Christian Bible assert that Jews killed Jesus and that Jews descended from the Devil. For example:

• 1 Thessalonians 12:15-16 (according to Paul) – “[T]he Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out, the Jews who are heedless of God’s will and enemies of their fellow man….All this time they have been making up the full measure of their guilt, and now retribution has overtaken the good of all.”

• John 8:44 – And Jesus said: “If God were your father, you would love me…[but] your [Jews’] father is the devil and you choose to carry out your father’s desires.”

• Revelation 2:9 – The Jews … are Satan’s synagogue.

• Revelation 3:9 – I will make those of Satan’s synagogue, who claim to be Jews but are lying frauds, come and fall down at your feet.

• Titus 1:14-16 (according to Paul): “Do not give heed to Jewish fables and commandments of merely human origin that turn men from the truth… Nothing is pure to the tainted minds of disbelievers…. They [the Jews] profess to acknowledge God but deny him by their actions. Their detestable obstinacy disqualifies them for any good work.”

During the Middle Ages, for example, Christians characterized Jews as having tails concealed beneath their garments and a peculiar smell. This led to reports that they were in the service of the Devil (actually that the Devil was their father).

The “Judensau,” an anti-Jewish motif that was used in medieval texts and even carved on several churches in Central Europe, depicted a Jew sexually entwined with a pig, sucking the sow’s udder and eating and drinking its excrement.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) — a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who has come to be referred to as “the father of scientific racism” — developed a system of scientific hierarchical classification. Within this taxonomy under the label Homo sapiens (“man”), he enumerated five categories based initially on place of origin and later on skin color: Europeanus, Asiaticus, Americanus, Monstrosus, and Africanus.

Linnaeus asserted that each category was ruled by a different bodily fluid (or humors: “moistures”), represented by blood (optimistic), phlegm (sluggish), cholor (yellow bile: prone to anger), and melancholy (black bile: prone to sadness). Linnaeus connected each human category to a respective humor, thereby constructing the Linnaeus Taxonomy (1735/1758) in descending order:

• Europeanus: sanguine (blood), pale, muscular, swift, clever, inventive, governed by laws;

• Asiaticus: melancholic, yellow, inflexible, severe, avaricious, dark-eyed, governed by opinions;

• Americanus (indigenous peoples in the Americas): choleric, copper-colored, straightforward, eager, combative, governed by customs;

• Monstrosus (dwarfs of the Alps, the Patagonian giant, the monorchid Hottentot): agile, fainthearted;

• Africanus: phlegmatic, Black, slow, relaxed, negligent, governed by impulse.

Although Linnaeus’ naturalist descendent Charles Darwin himself did not assert this, some of Darwin’s successors (referred to as “Social Darwinists”) hypothesized that Jews no longer were simply a separate religious, ethnic, or political group, but rather extended the idea that like Black Africans and other groups (including homosexuals), Jews were throwbacks to earlier stages of religious and human development. These Social Darwinists embraced a so-called “racial” hierarchy placing “Aryans” on the top, Black Africans at the lower end, and other “races” (including Jews) at various points in between.

In Europe, by the late 19^th century, Judaism had come to be viewed by the scientific community as a distinct “racial” type, with essential and immutable biological characteristics — a trend that increased markedly into the early 20^th century. Jews were increasingly constructed as members of a “mixed race” (a so-called “mongrel” or “bastard race”), a people who had crossed racial barriers by interbreeding with Black Africans during the Jewish Diaspora (the scattering of Jewish people from their ancestral land of Israel across the globe).

British psychologist, Francis Galton (1822-1911) — Charles Darwin’s cousin — was a founder of the “eugenics” movement. Eugenicists purportedly attempt to improve the qualities of a so-called “race” by controlling human breeding. In 1883, Galton argued that genetic predisposition determined human behavior. He asserted that Jews were of a lower racial form, and that they could be easily recognizable by their appearance. He also talked about a supposed cold and calculating “Jewish gaze.”

U.S. writer Madison Grant (1865-1937) codified this supposed “racialization” of the Jews in his influential book, The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis for European History (1916), in which he argued that Europeans are comprised four distinct races:  

• The “Nordics” of northwestern Europe sat atop his racial hierarchy, whom Grant considered as the natural rulers and administrators, which accounted for England’s “extraordinary ability to govern justly and firmly the lower races.”

• Next down the racial line fell the “Alpines” whom Grant referred to as “always and everywhere a race of peasants” with a tendency toward “democracy” although submissive to authority.

• These he followed with the “Mediterraneans” of Southern and Eastern Europe, inferior to both the Nordics and the Alpines in “bodily stamina,” but superior in “the field of art.” Also, Grant considered the Mediterraneans superior to the Alpines in “intellectual attainments,” but far behind the Nordics “in literature and in scientific research and discovery.”

• On the very bottom he placed the most inferior of all the European so-called “races”: the Jews.

Referring specifically to Polish Jews, Grant asserted, “The Polish Jews, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest” present themselves in “swarms.”

As we know, the Nazis used contrived “racial” arguments as a philosophical cornerstone for justification of their persecutions of Jews, as well as most people of color, people with disabilities, Jews, and others whom they considered to be descendants of inferior “racial blood.” Nazi leadership argued vehemently that Jews were polluting the so-called “Aryan race.” They forced Jews to wear the yellow Star of David as a signifying marker, since to the Nazis, yellow represented a sign of “race pollution” as well as an obsession for wealth (gold).

This sentiment extended far beyond the borders of the Third Reich. For example, in 1939, the United States Congress refused to pass the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which, if enacted, would have permitted 20,000 children from Eastern Europe (many of whom were Jewish) entry to the United States, overriding existing quotas. Laura Delano Houghteling — cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration — sternly warned, “20,000 charming children would, all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

“Race” then must be seen as socially constructed not as a binary with “white” on one side and “people of color” on the other, but rather as a continuum. Ashkenazim are primarily constructed in the U.S. today on the “white” side of the line within this continuum, though this was not always the case, and today we definitely have white privilege vis-a-vis “people of color.” 

Ashkenazim do not have, however, the degree and extent of white privilege in many sections of this country as white mainline Protestants do. In fact, in some Eastern European countries today, we are not constructed as “white.” Obviously, so-called white supremacists believe this as well.

A short history of anti-Jewish propaganda in Europe and the U.S.

In addition to the supposed “racialized” other, Jews have been represented as dominators and controllers of national and international banking and economic systems, the media, politicians, and other centers of power. Antisemitism is presented as a conspiracy theory, sometimes as warnings relayed in coded and not-so-coded language.

While the dominant society has frequently been concerned that Jewish individuals can “pass” without detection into the mainstream, they have also historically portrayed Jews as invaders, controllers, manipulators, and destroyers of society.

A 13^th-century law, for example, forwarded the idea that Jews were less than human by explicitly stating that Christians who had sex with Jews were the same as Christians who had sex with animals.

The ravages of the Black Death throughout Europe, which wiped out an estimated one-fourth to one-half of the population in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, were also blamed on Jews, who were accused of poisoning drinking wells.

Christians charged Jews with transmitting other diseases as well, most notably syphilis, which they referred to as “the Jewish disease” throughout Europe in the 19^th century, even though the incidence of syphilis within the Jewish community had been no higher than in the larger population.

Medical literature of the time alleged that syphilis was spread to newly circumcised Jewish infants through the practice of metsitsah, the sucking of the penis by the mohel (the ritual circumciser) to stop bleeding. Fellatio thus became not only a marker of “perversion” but also a sign of the Jewish transmission of disease.

A crucial point in the psychology of stereotyping and scapegoating is the representation of minoritized groups as, in historian John Boswell’s words from 1980, “animals bent on the destruction of the children of the majority.” In this vein, dominant groups have long alleged that Jews act as dangerous predators of young people.

In 1144, the so-called “Blood Libel” began in England when Christian leaders accused Jews of slaying William of Norwich, a Christian male child, to use his blood in the making of the sacred Jewish matzos. Many Christians believed that Jews used the blood of Christian youth because it was virginal and innocent and, therefore, was the most potent medication to heal hemorrhoids, to relieve pain during circumcision, to increase fertility, and to cure the so-called “stink of the Jews.”

Also — connecting to the assertion made by Christian leaders that Jewish men were feminized and menstruate due to circumcision — antisemites believed that Jewish men and Jewish women both need the blood from Christian youth to replenish their bodies of the blood lost during menstruation.

In 1475, Simon of Trent in Northern Italy, the son of a tanner and barely three years old, was allegedly killed by the Jews for his blood. Christians also accused Jews of slaughtering Christian male youth because they wanted to symbolically re-execute Jesus. Local leaders falsely indicted several Jews in Trent for Simon’s death and killed Jews in the area.

Christian clergy have also accused Jews of inflicting circumcision on Christian infants as a means of inflicting involuntary conversion to Judaism (“recruitment”). This charge of ritual murder continued into the 20th century.

Jews, who were excluded from land owning and from most professions during the Middle Ages, increasingly became moneylenders, especially since the Catholic Church forbade Christians from practicing usury.

Functioning at times as royal moneylenders and tax collectors, Jews were scapegoated by local princes as alien “bloodsuckers” and despised by the populace. Officials marked Jews in the Middle Ages with yellow identification badges, which Hitler’s Nazis replicated, for Jews’ alleged relationship with wealth and for Christians’ charge of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for money.

By the 14^th century, usury incurred severe penalties in canon (church) law equating it with sinning against “natural law” by charging interest in lending, which was considered as making money unnaturally. Wrote Bernadino Ramazzini, an Italian physician in 1700, “They do not plough, harrow, or sow, but they always reap.”

Jews and money they likened to prostitution, a degradation of the higher values of love and beauty. According to historian Sander Gilman in his book The Jewish Body, “The Jew becomes the representative of the deviant genitalia, the genitalia not under the control of the moral, rational conscience.”

In the notorious Protocols of a Meeting of the Learned Elders of Zion, the Protocols were a fabricated antisemitic text dating from 1903 that was widely distributed by Russian Czarist forces to turn public opinion against a so-called “Jewish Revolution” for the purpose of convincing the populace that Jews were plotting to impose a conspiratorial international Jewish government.

The protocols are the alleged minutes of a late 19^th-century meeting where Jewish leaders planned to subvert the minds, morals, and cultures of non-Jews by controlling politicians, the press, and world economies for world domination. The Protocols was translated into many languages and circulated throughout the world.

In fact, the antisemitic U.S. automotive pioneer Henry Ford argued that Jews controlled world leaders, international finance, and the media. He had the Protocols translated into English in 1927, and published it in his newspaper, The Dearborn (Michigan) Independent, thereby introducing the text to a large U.S. audience.

Beginning in 1920, Ford chronicled what he considered the “Jewish menace” in his paper. Every week for the next 91 issues, Ford exposed some sort of Jewish evil. He chose to reprint the most popular and virulent of his articles into four volumes, entitled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.  

Adolph Hitler bestowed on Henry Ford the highest award given to a non-German, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938. At the Nuremberg Trials following World War II, Baldur von Shirach, leader of Hitler Youth, stated that Hitler had become “Jew-wise” by reading Henry Ford’s writings about the Jews.

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister for Propaganda and Public Education, wrote and spoke continually of an alleged “Jewish conspiracy” to undermine German culture and civilization itself. Speaking at the September 1935 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, for example, Goebbels connected Bolshevism (the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist ideology to overthrow capitalism) with international Jewry.

He warned Nazi party members of a supposed international Jewish conspiracy to snuff out Western civilization. Goebbels headed efforts to purge all Jews and other so-called “un-German” influences from Nazi German cultural institutions. He and other Nazi leaders blamed Jews for starting World War II by controlling politicians, the media, and world finances for their own ends.

The 1940 Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, equated Jews with vermin who spread infection and degeneracy, which, if allowed to continue, would result in the eventual collapse of civilization and its institutions. In The Eternal Jew, Jewish people were said to commit 47% of all robberies and to make up 98% of those involved in prostitution.

“The Jews,” according to the film’s narrator, “are only 1% of the population” but they know how to “terrorize a great, tolerant nation” by controlling finance, the arts, education, and the media.

On one hand, Jews have been portrayed as weak in body and mind. On the other hand, they have been depicted as wise and manipulative, and strong in will and body. Jews have been simultaneously and contradictorily stereotyped as “super capitalists” whose inordinate wealth enables them to manipulate world banking systems and to control politicians and the media through well-financed lobbying campaigns.

They are perceived as a “privileged class” highly educated and disproportionately represented in the “cultural elite.” On the other hand, they are seen as radicals who are attempting to overthrow the capitalist system and the dominant culture.

During the “McCarthy Era” at the height of the Cold War, for example, several U.S. congressional leaders declared that Communists (associated in the public mind at the time with Jews) corrupted the minds of “good upstanding Americans” as well as the integrity of the governmental system, and, therefore, they must be purged from their positions.

At the other end of the political spectrum Karl Marx, a Jewish antisemite, wrote in 1869, on “the Jewish question”: “What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value.”

Later, The Protocols was translated into many languages and distributed worldwide. The French version, for example, depicts a caricature of an animalistic mean and ugly Jew grabbing the Earth with his bloodied fingers. Above the title is written in extra-large letters, “Le Peril Juif” (The Jewish Peril). At least 20 cover versions translated into several languages represent classic antisemitic motifs of enormous hook-nosed “Jewish” male faces attached to the bodies of snakes, arachnids, octopi, and squids encircling and smothering the globe.

“The Longest Hatred”

Antisemitism has been called “The Longest Hatred,” for it transcends time and place, ethnicity, religion, economic status, and nationality.

Jews have been used as the scapegoats of societies throughout history. Blaming all Jews for allegedly killing Jesus of Nazareth represents historical revisionism and mindless adherence to mythological events that can never be proven. It has resulted in millions of murdered Jews over the last 2,000 years.

Blaming all Jews throughout the world for the Israeli government’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is as invalid and bigoted as blaming all U.S. citizens for the murders perpetuated by the Trump regime of people on small boats off Venezuela and the ruthless tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on the streets of the United States.

I understand that I cannot speak for all Jews, but I declare in the strongest terms that we Jews refuse to be the world’s scapegoats. We refuse to be the objects of your hatred and bigotry — never Again!!

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