Antisemitism and its Roots in Religious Rhetoric

Key Findings:

This paper argues that antisemitism functions rhetorically, and that it manifests discursively and visually. Explaining antisemitism ultimately as an exercise in manipulating image, language and symbolism around Jews and Judaism makes evident that antisemitism cannot be reduced to a “racial” or “religious” prejudice only, nor to an existing category of intersectionality, and that “social justice” will not bring about its end.

Initially, antisemitism was enshrined in theological and mythic precepts, and disseminated persuasively to argue the superiority of Christianity. Later, the same was done by Islam, though Muslim antisemitism is primarily post-hoc. Political events and developments in the Near East after World War I, as well as Christian and Nazi influence, brought Islamic thinkers to search back into the religion’s foundations for reasons to hate Jews. In recent decades, Islamists have adopted the strategy of transforming the Jewish strategic evil counteragent into a pariah, seeking to unify the Islamic world around one cohesive narrative.

At every historical juncture over the past twenty centuries, a new “reason” to hate Jews emerges. Jews have been charged with the killing of Christ, as murderers of Christian children whose blood they supposedly need for the Passover ritual, as the poisoners of wells, as a plotters and seekers of world domination, of espousing radical thoughts, of being Bolsheviks, Communists, usurers, capitalists, and more recently, as the attackers of Muhammad and colonizers of their own ancestral land. Self-identified progressive groups in the West now campaign for Jews to “return to where they came from” — here, they mean the Europe of the Holocaust, not Israel (the land they actually come from and hold sacred).

The litany of vitriolic accusations leveled against Jewish people are but rhetorical devices. They are intentionally designed, depicting and implying original, inherent sin within a Jew for ease of argument that Jews deserve all the punishments inflicted upon them throughout history. Moreover, these accusations around Jews are not sold merely as facts, but as values.

That this happens cyclically and repetitively proves that in actuality, there is no real “cause” nor “reason.” Jews are therefore sentenced to serve as the eternal scapegoat for various misfortunes that befell on different communities at different times and places. There is no other comparable hatred in human experience.

Christianity and Islam have had difficulty in acknowledging how much has been borrowed from Judaism in terms of their foundational tenants, the primacy of their narratives, their rituals and holy places, whilst at the same time historically sustaining enormous efforts to humiliate it. That religious antisemitism exists exclusively in these two religions must be understood as borne of a uniquely hostile relationship to their mother religion. Their failures to suppress Judaism (Christianity) or fully eradicate it (Islam) translate to a frustrating inability to claim uniqueness or originality.

The corrective to antisemitism should reflect how along the lengthy road of hatred, religious narratives piled on accusations against Jews to the point that Jews began to effectively function as the historical scapegoat par excellence, used for any societal ill or setback.

When the ur-text of Christianity and Islam has the Jew as the ultimate enemy, any narrative thereof is vested with so much persuasive power, symbolism, and legitimating theology, that the possibility of separating truth from myth and fiction is nearly impossible. It took Christianity almost two thousand years to see its foundation more accurately and, in that process, the Vatican came to terms with its responsibility for centuries of antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust. 

The same reflection in Islam would likely yield a more accurate account of its origin and its relationship with Jews and Judaism. Islam needs a more expansive view of Judaism that is not constrained by its stance on Israel. The Arab-Israeli conflict is less than a century old, while Islam’s relationship with Judaism covers some thirteen centuries, including an initial productive relationship during the Prophet Muhammad’s time. With such a corrective (recently seen in statements coming from Gulf states, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia) Muslim antisemitism may subside.