Never in the history of mankind have the Jews been anything other than a minority among the nations, a dwarf in the shadow of passing empires and great powers. The Jews have never conquered a world empire like the Persians, Greeks and Romans, like the Mongols or the British. Even compared to the power of the United States, the Chinese, or the Arab world today, no one has to fear being overrun and conquered by Jews. Nevertheless, there is no other people that has been so hated for thousands of years. Throughout the ages, millions of antisemites have repeatedly wished the Jews extinction.
How is it possible to explain this phenomenon? It certainly cannot be reduced to ‘anti-Judaism.’ This is the term used to describe the hostility of Christian groups towards the Jews with reference to their alleged guilt in the crucifixion of Jesus. This form of antisemitism in the name of the Gospel has caused great damage, which must not be trivialised. But hostility towards Jews existed even before Christianity. It dates back to antiquity and came to a head during the Roman Empire. After the emergence of Islam in the 7th century, Islamic antisemitism also spread, which needed neither Christianity nor the European Middle Ages to justify its hostility towards Jews.
In modern times, antisemitic narratives about an allegedly hidden world domination by the Jews became acceptable in Europe through texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or respected thinkers such as Voltaire and Hegel, who accused the Jews of inventing monotheism as the cause of existing world problems. In one of his writings, Voltaire addressed the Jews: “You surpass all nations with your impudent fairy tales, your bad behaviour and your barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your fate.” A seething antisemitism that was by no means rare in the Age of Enlightenment and prepared the ground for the later Nazis. However, hostility towards Jews also came from the Left, as the history of the early socialists, the European labour movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and the Marxist classics shows. 1880 was the year of the great pogroms in Russia, and after the Second World War there were Stalinist campaigns and show trials “against Zionism and cosmopolitanism.” Before his death, Stalin had planned to deport all Jews to the autonomous region of Birobidzhan and to kill a third of them on the way.
Even decades after the Holocaust and communist persecution, antisemitism is not a marginal phenomenon in Europe. On the contrary, it is on the rise again, largely due to immigration from Islamic countries and a post-colonial wokeism that dominates large parts of Western education and culture and courts Islamism under the label of anti-colonialism and contempt for Israel. There is also a smaller but growing neo-fascist circle that indulges this form of bigotry. The relativisation of the Holocaust is combined with Islamic hatred of Israel and left-wing depictions of the country as a white colonial project.
At the same time, the UN misuses its resolutions year after year for anti-Israeli propaganda. If you add up all the resolutions against China, North Korea, Syria, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and terrorist organisations such as Hamas, Israel still appears to be the most inhumane of all places for the UN. Double standards are systematically applied, seconded by many media organisations. Antisemitism obviously does not need a Roman empire, Christian fanaticism, Islamic terror or any left-wing or right-wing ideology to survive the centuries. It transcends temporal and political-religious boundaries. And this is precisely a fact that is regularly overlooked. This is currently evident in discussions about Israel and Palestine, for example. The narrative of territorial conflict dominates, leading people to assume that the conflict can be resolved by redividing the territories. This reading remains on the surface, without any sense of the root of the problem. Quite independent of the foundation of modern Israel, Islamism hatred of Jews has been raging for centuries and would continue to exist even if the Middle East belonged entirely to the Arabs. It is a hatred with the declared aim of wiping out all Jews worldwide. Incidentally, Islamism is not a reaction to the imperialism of the United States, because it is itself imperialist and was already in the world long before the U.S. was born.
In answering the question as to why hatred of Jews has constantly resurfaced over the centuries and cultures, antisemitism research draws on the ‘envy theory,’ among other things. The above-average level of education of Jews and the success of their culture, whether economic, scientific-technological or moral, is said to arouse the envy of non-Jews. In the words of the famous author H.G. Wells in an essay from 1936: “The Jew seizes property, he secures his position. The gentile senses that he is being cheated of his chances by all this nimbleness. He is baffled and finally becomes angry.”
However, as there have always been antisemites who were themselves successful and respected without hating Judaism any less, there must be deeper causes. These could touch on the fundamental relationship between the antisemite and God. The God of the Bible declared the Jews to be the chosen people and entrusted them with the 10 commandments, which are among the foundations of Christianity and Western civilisation. In 2010, on the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Pope Benedict XVI stated:
In the deepest sense, by destroying Israel, by exterminating this people, one wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke at Sinai and there established the permanently valid measures of humanity … If this people, simply by its existence, is a witness to the God who spoke to man and takes him into responsibility, then this God should finally be dead and dominion should belong only to man.
The fact that man has the desire not to be a creature, but to be a creator himself, is as well known as the story of Adam and Eve. Judaism can be understood as a testimony against this desire. As a sign that God sets the rules of life and that the Jews, as the priesthood among the nations, as the Bible says, are especially called to remind the world of these rules. This is a nuisance for some other religions, as well as for atheist and technology-believing groups who refuse to see life as something that is owed to a God whom we should love and whose commandments we should keep—a nuisance to all those who want to sit in the executive chair of existence themselves. By eradicating Judaism, they want to eradicate this nuisance. They want to forget that no human being has control over their birth, over the gift of love and freedom, over their biological sex or over the ultimate meaning of life. And they want to forget that Judaism, together with Christianity, is the soul of the free world.
In this sense, antisemitism contains the desire for a civilisational patricide. Hatred of Jews becomes hatred of the West. The West must disappear because it is not seen as an achievement. Left-wing and Islamist circles see it as a racist-imperial cancer of the world, neo-fascist circles see it as a haven of decadence and degeneracy, against which only a nation of the strong and pure can help.
However, if Western civilisation as we know it today, for all its weaknesses, represents the best of all possible foundations for a life in freedom and dignity, for human rights and the rule of law, then its disappearance would be a catastrophe. Then antisemitism is a danger to liberalism. Then, in the end, it is not friends and enemies of Judaism who are facing each other, but friends and enemies of freedom—friends and foes of a wisdom that reminds us that God is not an invention of man, but that man is an invention of God. Thus, antisemitism remains a warning against the arrogance of forgetting this and relying solely on worldly ideologies and technologies, on a belief in self-optimisation and self-redemption. Those who fight against antisemitism are also fighting against this destructive illusion. They are fighting for a civilisation that is aware of the limits of human beings and is therefore able to protect and guarantee the dignity of the individual.
