Antisemitism

Antisemitism is discrimination against, or prejudice toward, Jewish people. Although the term antisemitism was first used in the late 1800s, prejudice against Jewish people has existed for thousands of years. The term antisemitism has, itself, become controversial, as some scholars use it to convey nearly all forms of anti-Jewish discrimination in parts of the world throughout history. However, other scholars argue that discrimination against Jewish people has taken many different forms in different periods and in different places, and they believe that using more precise language helps people better understand the discrimination. Although scholars disagree about the use of the term, many works that attempt to chronicle Jewish discrimination use the term. Modern antisemitism can take many forms, including blaming Jewish people through conspiracy theories, denying the Holocaust, and holding all Jewish people responsible for the actions of the state of Israel. Some people call antisemitism the “oldest hatred,” as anti-Jewish discrimination has occurred throughout much of religion’s history.

Overview

Antisemitism is generally defined as discrimination against Jewish people. However, organizations committed to the rights of Jewish people have developed more complex definitions. For example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” The definition also indicates that antisemitism can be directed toward Jewish people and non-Jewish people and toward entire communities or institutions.

Some scholars believe it is useful to view antisemitism as a historical phenomenon, with incidents happening in different times and places being linked, or at least related, to each other. Scholars with this historical view believe that discrimination against Jewish people can be traced back through Jewish history. In their view, the history of antisemitism is necessarily linked with Jewish history in general. Jewish historiography developed in the 1800s, which helped scholars trace discrimination targeted at Jewish people throughout history. The development of Jewish historiography helped scholars create a historical account that seemingly connected various forms of discrimination that happened in different cultures and at different times. Historians and scholars have disagreed about the usefulness of linking various incidents of discrimination, though many historians believe that it can be useful to document the incidents of anti-Jewish discrimination that have happened throughout history. Many historical accounts of antisemitism examine discrimination that happened in ancient, medieval, and modern times.

Judaism is one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions, originating roughly four thousand years ago in what is today called the Middle East. Judaism was revolutionary for its belief in one God. Furthermore, the religion developed specific rules, such as its adherents abstaining from eating pork. Some scholars believe that these unique aspects of the religion made it a target for misunderstanding and discrimination, and Jewish people faced discrimination in ancient Egypt and eventually under Roman rule. Early Roman rulers respected the older religion and made exceptions for Jewish religious practices, including exempting Jews from emperor worship, which was required of Rome's polytheistic subjects. Later Roman leaders became particularly harsh against Jewish people. Some scholars believe that some ancient Jewish writings gave Jews some leeway to relax some of their normal religious practices around non-Jews at certain times—a strong suggestion that others, particularly Romans, were unfriendly toward Jewish ways.

When the Christian religion first originated early in the first century, many of its adherents were Jews who followed Jesus, who was also Jewish. As Christianity spread outside the Jewish community, however, it gained many Gentile (non-Jewish) members. This development led to increasing division over Jewish religious practices such as following kosher dietary laws and requiring male circumcision. Eventually, the Christian and Jewish communities split, and Christians lost the protections their association with Judaism had conferred under Roman rule. As early Christians began to experience persecution by Roman authorities, early Christian writings began to contain anti-Jewish references. In the 300s CE, writings from Christian leaders even referred to Jews as being responsible for Jesus’s death. Eventually, the Roman emperor Constantine converted himself, and Roman persecution of Christians ended.

Although Jews lived throughout medieval Europe, they were often seen as outsiders. Many countries had laws against Jews becoming citizens, and they were often barred from joining the military or other social groups. The perception of Jews as Other helped position them, at times, as neutral parties amid European Christian politics, facilitating their success in trade and lending. These individual successes gave rise to a myth of Jews being elite merchants and financiers, contributing to a stereotype of Jews being greedy.

Jews also faced harsher treatment, including violence and harmful conspiracy theories, in some areas. For example, Jews in different parts of Europe were accused of blood libel, which is the idea that Jewish people ritually killed children and consumed their blood. Furthermore, medieval Christians continued to claim that Jews had killed Jesus, and they used this claim and other falsehoods—including accusations of blood libel—to justify violence against Jews. Some Christians also continued to use violence and intimidation to try to get Jews to convert to Christianity, and many Jews did convert to avoid discrimination, during the Spanish Inquisition and even earlier. Jews also faced mass expulsions, including from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492.

Antisemitism remained an important force in the world, and especially in Europe, after the Middle Ages. The term antisemitism was coined in the late 1800s in Germany. Disdain for Jewish people remained and festered in Germany and other parts of Europe. This antisemitism laid the foundation for what would be become one of the most infamous examples of antisemitism in history—the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, in part, by blaming Germany’s hardships on German Jews. Soon after the Nazis took power, they began enacting harsh laws that limited Jews’ rights and freedoms. The Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and these laws classified Jews as a separate race and mandated that people of different races stay separate from each other.

The Nazis maligned Jewish people and used antisemitism that had been present in European society for hundreds of years to turn more non-Jewish Germans against them. They also inflamed and spread that underlying antisemitism using propaganda and new technology, such as films. In late 1938, Kristallnacht—a night during which Nazis started riots, destroyed Jewish property, and attacked Jewish people—marked the beginning of a different form of antisemitism that eventually led to the genocide of approximately six million Jews during the Holocaust. The Holocaust became, in part because of its massive scale, the most well-known and most-referenced instance of antisemitism in history.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish population of Europe plummeted because so many had been murdered by the Nazis. Many more Jews wanted to leave Europe after World War II, fearing that they would again be targeted by unfair laws and genocide. Since the 1800s, some European Jews had been involved in the Zionist Movement, which called for creating a Jewish state in the Middle East. Great Britain, which controlled Palestine in the early 1900s, wanted to create a Jewish state in the area. Even before World War II, skirmishes broke out between Arabs of the region and an increasing Jewish population there. After World War II, Great Britain helped create the state of Israel in Palestine. The creation of Israel caused political, military, and social upheaval in the Middle East. Millions of European Jews moved to Israel, further decreasing Europe’s Jewish population, and increasing the Jewish population of the Middle East.

After World War II and the creation of Israel, antisemitism in the West decreased significantly, and it became socially unacceptable to hold antisemitic beliefs in much of Western society during the late twentieth century. At the same time, however, certain subcultures in Western countries continued to embrace antisemitism. Neo-Nazis existed in parts of Europe, North America, and South America. Furthermore, Holocaust denial became another form of antisemitism accepted by various groups around the world. Although antisemitism had mostly decreased in some parts of the world, anti-Jewish discrimination and antisemitism remained strong in the Middle East and parts of Asia. For example, the majority-Muslim country of Indonesia had high levels of antisemitism, even though the country had an extremely small Jewish population.

In the early twenty-first century, antisemitism saw a resurgence in many places around the world, including Europe and the United States. The increase brought with it more open antisemitism in society and increases in hate crimes committed against Jewish people. For example, in 2019 France saw widespread protests against the government, and some of the protestors used antisemitic language. At the same time, old conspiracy theories, stereotypes, and tropes became repopularized in North America and other parts of the world. For example, the QAnon conspiracy theory, which originated in American politics, built on the old blood libel trope, spreading the idea that some Jewish people were eating babies and drinking their blood.

While not all antisemitic conspiracy theories relied on such outrageous claims, other theories, namely the idea that Jewish people controlled numerous institutions in society, particularly the economy and media, also gained traction with many around the world. Sometimes, these theories were endorsed by politicians or celebrities, helping fuel their spread. For example, in October 2022, American musician and business mogul Kanye West, also known as Ye, who had already become a controversial figure due to his endorsement of right-wing conspiracy theories and other divisive comments, was harshly criticized for a series of antisemitic statements; among other things, he claimed that Jewish people controlled the media and were persecuting non-Jewish people around the world. These statements, which also included a veiled threat of violence against Jewish people, severely damaged West's reputation and led to Adidas and several other corporations ending their business partnerships with him. Similarly, serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk faced censure and pressure to resign from his companies after personally endorsing antisemitic conspiracy theories. Major companies including IBM, Apple, and Lions Gate Entertainment pulled their advertisements from Musk's social media platform X (formerly Twitter) after the revelation that their ads had appeared alongside antisemitic posts in November 2023.

Another form of antisemitism that became more prominent in the early twenty-first century was to blame the world’s Jewish population for the divisive actions taken by the nation of Israel. Social scientists who studied antisemitism at the time pointed out that the rise in antisemitism happened, in part, because it grew more common among people in far-right and far-left political movements. It was also common among violent radical Islamists.

In the early 2020s the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a longstanding Jewish civil rights organization, noted that antisemitic incidents in the United States had risen since the late 2010s. In 2022 the ADL recorded 3,697 antisemitic incidents in the United States, a 36 percent increase over 2021 and the highest number since the ADL had begun collecting this data in 1979. These incidents included acts of assault, vandalism, and other hate crimes. The following year, the ADL reported 832 incidents between October 7 and November 7 alone, a year-over-year increase of more than 300 percent, after Hamas militants launched a massive attack on Israel and Israel began a retaliatory campaign in the Gaza Strip; among those incidents, the ADL counted 200 rallies expressing support for Hamas or anti-Israeli violence and 124 incidents on US college campuses. The US Education Department subsequently launched civil-rights investigations into antisemitism and Islamophobia at a Kansas public school district and six prominent colleges and universities. Antisemitic incidents also spiked in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Russia during that period. Antisemitic and Islamophobic comments proliferated on social media platforms, including X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, as well.

Further Insights

Antisemitism is discrimination against Jewish people, and it is related to anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias. Although these concepts are related in some ways, they are not the same things. Anti-Zionism is opposition to the movement for Jewish people to have their own country, and anti-Israel bias means having extreme hostility toward the country of Israel. Sometimes these three terms are conflated, but they are different. At the same time, some have contended that anti-Zionism should be considered a form of antisemitism, and people and groups have sometimes disagreed about where actions may cross from one type of discrimination into another. For example, in the early twenty-first century, some people around the world called for world governments to stop trade with Israel and for consumers to boycott Israeli goods, as the activists believed that Israel’s policy toward Palestinian residents of Israel and the occupied territories was discriminatory. They argued that boycotting products made in Israel was a way to protest the Israeli government, and compared it to boycotts of South Africa's racist apartheid government during the 1980s. Some people believed that the criticisms of the Israeli government and calls for boycotts and bans could be considered antisemitism. Others countered that they were valid criticisms of the country's politics and that actions such as boycotts did not necessarily demonstrate any unfair prejudice against Jews.

Viewpoints

The term antisemitism was first used in the late 1800s in Germany. Since that time, scholars have disagreed about the concept of antisemitism, and even the word’s spelling. In 1871, German Jews achieved political and legal equality; however, some non-Jewish Germans opposed this equality. New ideological movements defined by hostility toward Jews developed. A German writer and political agitator named Wilhelm Marr coined the term antisemitism when he wrote in support of the ideology. Jews and their supporters also started using the term to describe the discrimination they experienced. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the term antisemitism was used mostly to describe the anti-Jewish discrimination of that time. Over time, however, the word began to be used to describe all forms of anti-Jewish discrimination throughout history.

Changes in the meaning of antisemitism happened around the same time that scholars developed ideas about rights for marginalized groups in general. In the 1930s, social scientists developed new concepts about ethnic prejudice. For example, in the book The Nature of Prejudice, psychologist Gordon Allport urged readers to think about prejudice against entire groups based on ethnicity. Furthermore, the meaning of antisemitism was influenced by the development of modern Jewish historiography in the 1800s. The development of Jewish history also helped develop new understandings of the discrimination Jewish people faced at different points in history. In the 1960s, Canadian historian Gavin I. Langmuir published the book A Definition of Antisemitism, which explored historical occurrences of anti-Jewish discrimination and considered whether antisemitism was the best term to describe them.

Although the term only began to be used to describe all anti-Jewish discrimination in the twentieth century, by the end of that century scholars had already begun to question the utility of the term to express all types of anti-Jewish discrimination. Scholars had numerous different ideas about antisemitism by the early twenty-first century. Some scholars believed that linking historical periods of antisemitism was appropriate because they believed that incidents of antisemitism throughout history are related to each other. For example, historians may point out that certain stereotypes or conspiracy theories about Jews would happen in different places and during different historical periods.

Nevertheless, other scholars believed that linking all historical incidents of anti-Jewish discrimination with one word was unhelpful. These scholars believed that using more specific descriptions of the types of prejudice would be helpful for people studying, or experiencing, discrimination. For example, David Engel, a scholar of antisemitism, said that he avoided using the term in his work for decades and instead used descriptions of the types of discrimination people experienced. Even when Engel wrote about Nazi discrimination and the Holocaust, he avoided using the word antisemitism to describe the discrimination. Engel and other scholars who had the same beliefs asserted that using the same term to describe all types of discrimination against Jews could encourage people to make connections between different instances of discrimination that may actually be unrelated. These scholars have argued that using more precise terms may encourage people to think more deeply about the various causes and effects of specific instances of anti-Jewish discrimination. However, scholars who support using the term have argued that anti-Jewish discrimination is unique and differs from other types of racism. They have argued that the uniqueness of this discrimination makes it useful to use a particular word to describe it.

In addition to disagreements about the use of this term, scholars have also disagreed about the term’s spelling. Some people spell the term antisemitic, and other people use anti-Semitic. These alternate spellings have developed, in part, because the term antisemitism relates to Semitic languages. The term uses the root “semitic” to refer to people who speak Semitic languages. No one group of Semitic people exists, however. Instead, Semitic languages include Hebrew and Arabic, as well as other languages. Nevertheless, the term antisemitism has never been used to describe prejudice against the people who speak these languages. Instead, it has always been used to describe prejudice against Jewish people. People who believe that the spelling “antisemitic” is more appropriate argue that capitalizing the term Semitic gives credence to the idea that the term refers to people other than Jews. Scholars who prefer the lowercase spelling argue that since no one group of “Semitic” people exists, the term should not be capitalized.

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