Why Does Antisemitism Exist?

An outline of its history and some other takes

Anyone who has an answer to this question is lying or confused, and the simpler and more coherent the answer—the more confidently and readily they assert it—the more deluded they likely are as to the actual history and nature of antisemitism. The vagueness of the question itself only encourages people to speculate however they want, concocting pet theories often intentionally indifferent to reality and thus useless when attempting to explain its historical manifestations any rigorously.

The fact antisemitism is not, as the question presupposes, some continuous historical entity for which one single explanation or theory can suffice should be obvious enough, but is in practice all too often rejected by both Jews and their enemies. To antisemites, antisemitism is always present, and always and everywhere the simple result of Jewish misbehavior, a proof of their case. To Jews, antisemitism is sometimes overtly a religious phenomenon, but even seculars will frequently speak of it as something almost metaphysical, forever haunting the Jewish people, though occasionally lingering “underground” until it decides to re-exert itself.

As such both groups tend to agree on the much-belabored theme of Jewish historiography known as the “lachrymose conception,” understanding diasporic Jewish history through the exclusive lens of persecution, as simply a long tale of suffering. When my eponym Salo Wittmayer Baron coined this phrase, he was writing against the so-called Leidensgeschichten (~“suffering-tales”) of the earlier historian Heinrich Graetz and critiqued the whole approach for its distortionary effects. For example, Baron believed overemphasizing the mistreatment of the Jews in the Middle Ages warps one’s sense of perspective, arguing that “the medieval Jews at their worst were [still] better off, both politically and economically, than the masses of villeins who usually constituted the majority of each European nation”¹—an idea not often considered.

There are other limits to this view of things, meaningful not just to historians or history buffs but to anyone with a stake in the legacy of antisemitism. The overemphasis on persecution in Jewish history runs the risk of flattening antisemitism into something one-dimensional, ignoring its historical variations—between Islamic and Christian, Gothic-Arian and Nicene, Early and Late Medieval, etc.—and glossing over the periods of relative stability. With a belief in “eternal antisemitism,” as Arendt puts it in the first pages of Origins, “[o]utbursts need no special explanation because they are natural consequences of an eternal problem.”

But “antisemitism,” or “a specific hostility to Jewishness,” describes an emotional state, not a law of nature or a singular force of history; expecting a generic reason for its existence is nearly as pointless as asking a question like “Why does joy exist?” or “What causes fear?” As with all these questions the context matters foremost, and the answers for one instance don’t necessarily hold true for another. Antisemitism is ultimately a social phenomenon like any other, produced at times by the frictions of historical circumstances and intergroup conflict, and the unwillingness of many Jews to treat it as such hinders our ability to actually understand let alone mitigate what everyone now recognizes is again a growing problem in contemporary society.

The reason for this reluctance is clear enough. Rather than some dead historical topic, how one discusses the questions around antisemitism obviously has ramifications in the present. In taking it out of the realm of historical normalcy, alternative explanations can be advanced that are both simpler and more convenient, but ultimately selected to perform specific psychological or communal functions rather than disinterestedly pursue truth.

Many Jews understandably gravitate toward conceptions of antisemitism as something uniquely irrational or even inexplicable, fundamentally non-correspondent to real Jewish behaviors or actions; unfalsifiable psychoanalytic analyses of “the antisemite” are common, as are quick-and-easy answers like “Christianity,” “jealousy,” or “scapegoating.” Each of these possesses some explanatory power of course but nevertheless leaves a lot unanswered. To finish Arendt’s quote: “just as antisemites understandably desire to escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked and on the defensive, even more understandably do not wish under any circumstances to discuss their share of responsibility.”

And these antisemites, no less invested, take the opposing view, intent on always convicting rather than acquitting; to Kevin MacDonald, e.g., antisemitism is an evolutionary response to unceasing Jewish aggression. Where the lachrymose conception of Jewish history may overstate Jewish passivity or underplay the Jews’ contribution to their own story, the lachrymose conception of gentile history similarly denies agency or responsibility to the non-Jews, ever victimized and hoodwinked by the omnipresent Jew. Any and all historical anti-Jewish accusations are to be taken at face value—yes, the Jews did ritually murder that Christian child²; yes, instances of “coin clipping” are a fine justification for razing the entire ghetto. After all, the idea goes, every people in history to encounter the Jews could not all be wrong in their (supposed) impression of them.

A Briefish History

To some the question may be better expressed as follows: “Prejudice may be banal and experienced by every group or minority, but why has antisemitism been so uniquely recurrent and severe throughout history?” How unique antisemitism has actually been historically is a subject of debate, and the perception of its unique intensity is obviously aided in retrospect by the severity of specifically modern antisemitism, culminating in a singularly large, systematic genocide. Since the only meaningful way to analyze antisemitism is not as a whole but in stages, what follows is a brief overview of its history per my understanding.

In antiquity, contrary to some depictions, antisemitism was not particularly unique or in need of much explanation. The tensions that did exist were usually due either to outright political conflict—one of the most “normal” sources of intergroup tension in history—or religiously-inspired Jewish separatism and other cultural practices found distasteful, but on the whole weren’t that salient. The occasional caustic quote notwithstanding, Jews “were evidently of little interest to the intellectuals” among non-Jews. I’ll source from the Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism, whose essay on the topic by Dr. Erich Gruen puts it as follows:

The evidence shows that hostile outbursts were quite rare and unrepresentative, engendered by contingent circumstances and brief in duration. For the vast proportion of the time Jewish practices and beliefs went unhindered, synagogues flourished, advocacy for Jewish causes was generally successful, many gentiles embraced Jewish observances and rituals, and Jews maintained a network of connections among themselves between Jerusalem and the far-flung diaspora. Antisemitism, whether on religious, ideological, racial, or political grounds, was, on the whole, conspicuous by its absence.

When people speak of the antisemitism of the Middle Ages, what’s meant is that of specifically Christendom, and, even more specifically, of the High Medieval Period onward (i.e., post-1000). There was obviously “hostility to Jewishness” in the Islamic world prior to Zionism or European colonial influence, but this was fundamentally part of the broader Islamic treatment of their dhimmis, not specifically anti-Jewish:

The legal and social status of Jews in the Muslim world was no different qualitatively than that of Christians and other protected non-Muslim communities … Jews endured many hardships living among Muslims in the Middle Ages, but they were not referred to as a pariah community relentlessly and unavoidably stamped for evil and slandered as having been totally rejected by God, as occurred to them in the Christian world. … the position of Jews (and Christians) under Muslim rule was considerably better than the position of Jews under Christian rule.

That more noteworthy treatment of the Jews by Christians is of course to be expected from the greater significance of Jewish guilt in historic Christian theology, born out of the early Christian clash with Jews and appeal to gentiles. But Western antisemitism is not at all simply a function of Christianity, as many have it.

Nor was that the case even for medieval antisemitism, which is said to truly begin with the rise of the northern European economies post-1000, resulting in a northward migration of ur-Ashkenazim along with their consolidation into a moneylending niche shortly thereafter. According to Robert Moore’s thesis in The Formation of a Persecuting Society, the High Middle Ages also saw the development of certain organizational structures that incentivized the top-down persecutions of “heretics, Jews, lepers, sodomites and others” in parallel. And certainly much Christian hostility was generalized, as seen in such things as the extermination of the Cathars, the expulsion of the Moriscos, or the famous dress code of the Fourth Lateran Council, which not many seem to understand was imposed on both Jews and Muslims.

But High and Late Medieval antisemitism was both top-down and bottom-up, and undeniably influenced by the organic cultural and religious impact of the Crusades of 1096–1291. By the 12th and 13th centuries you get the development of a “chimerical antisemitism,” the litany of anti-Jewish rumors that strongly echoed similarly-fantastical slanders against dissident Christians simultaneously but that were, by contrast, instigated much more often by the laymen than the clergy. As I emphasized in my history of the blood libel, rumors like the blood libel, host desecration, and “Jewish male menstruation” all spawned in the 13th century,³ and all directly related to the theme of Holy Blood not by any coincidence. How Christians conceived of Jews was directly influenced by the changing religious atmosphere.

Bottom-up medieval antisemitism on the whole was mostly two-pronged: religious and economic. On the one hand, Christians clearly tended to think of Jews through this antagonistic religious lens, especially given the recency of their presence in the North.⁴ The Rhineland massacres of the First Crusade, a traditional starting point for classic medieval antisemitism, were explicitly motivated by a popular hatred of Jews as enemies of Christ. Jews in turn generally viewed Christianity, unlike Islam, as avodah zarah, and the Ashkenazim in particular harbored an intense bitterness toward it especially after 1096. The extent to which this was strictly reactive to such persecutions or partly theologically-preexistent is another debate. But when considering the difference in the Jewish experience under Islamic versus Christian rule, both sides of the cycle of mutual hostilities played a role to consider, the Christian side albeit a much greater one.

On the other hand, Christian religious preconceptions were complicated by real-world interactions with Jews, which sometimes reinforced them—as again with the perception of genuine anti-Christian sentiments, the Disputations coming to mind—and sometimes mitigated them—as any benign, day-to-day experiences probably do. (Just as there were Christians who slaughtered Jews in 1096, so there were other Christians with whom Jews took refuge.) But due both to internal customs and imposed policies of isolation like those of Lateran III (1179) and IV (1215), the extent to which Jews and Christians interacted was primarily economic, and it’s highly relevant that the transformation of economically-diversified European Jews into a predominantly moneylending minority also occurred in the HMA.

Popular conceptions of Jewish moneylending and how it came to be are usually ill-founded, a subject for another time. (Chapter 8 of Botticini’s and Eckstein’s The Chosen Few explains it best.) Suffice it to say, particularly in premodern economies middlemen, and thus middleman minorities, are derided for engaging in “unproductive” labor—connecting supply and demand or providing credit rather than growing crops or crafting tools. Moneylending was obviously bound to result in further, more serious resentments especially with a peasantry whose ability to repay was often due to arbitrary circumstances like the fruitfulness of the harvest. On another level, it put Christians in a subservient or vulnerable economic position with respect to Jews, seemingly contradicting the traditional Augustinian doctrine of Jewish subordination, and usury itself was famously a sinful deed increasingly subject to regulation or outright prohibition by the 12th century.

So if we’re to moralize for a second, who was “in the wrong” here? Well clearly the people doing the vast majority of the killing. But the moral question shouldn’t be confused as it often is with the empirical question of “why did antisemitism exist” in the Middle Ages, and really through the early modern period, which isn’t something that can be answered purely with respect to the Christians. Medieval antisemitism simply put was the interaction of the preexisting beliefs of the majority with the actual religious and economic characteristics of the minority.

Modern Antisemitism

I’ll only provide an outline here of the position I support, which is most aligned with the views of works like Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears, Chua’s World on Fire, WD Rubinstein’s paper, “Jews in the Economic Elites of Western Nations and Antisemitism,” and others.

By “modern antisemitism” I mostly mean the antisemitism of the areas of 19th- and early 20th-century Europe most affected by the intellectual and cultural trends that distinguish modernity. Not so much the East, which was, in a word, retarded, and as Engels once wrote, “anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture.” Tellingly enough, there the chimerical version of antisemitism remained pervasive and easily gave way to its modern conspiratorial counterpart; I’ve pointed out elsewhere how the few rumblings of the blood libel in America were largely a phenomenon of Polish immigration, unable here to cause the same bloodshed. But in much of Western and Central Europe the secularizing influence of the Enlightenment had sufficiently undermined the prior structuring of things such that the religious and economic sources of antisemitism given above were no longer the determinative factors, though the lingering influence especially of Catholicism in places like France and Austria certainly still had important effects.

But the most useful paradigm for understanding modern antisemitism is what Lindemann calls “the rise of the Jews,” or, more concretely, the resentments of the majority toward entrepreneurial minorities that amplify with the development of capitalism and nationalism. The Jewish rise has various aspects, one being simply the increased salience and visibility over the 19th century of a people formerly relegated to the ghetto—their greater tendency to urbanize especially into capital cities, their entry into what were exclusively gentile labor markets in both the East and West, the greater fertility of Ostjuden and their tendency to emigrate westward from the Pale and Galicia by the latter part of the century, etc. It’s obviously true what Scholem writes in “Jews and Germans,” that “[a]s the area of contact between the two groups widened, the possibilities of friction widened as well,” and there was that additional sting of the contact being with a formerly subservient religious group.⁵

Because the period of Jewish emancipation coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism, existing human capital differentials practically necessitated the emergence of the Jews as a market-dominant minority in much of Europe. Over the course of the century as Europe industrialized, Western and Central European Jewry transformed into solidly middle class communities—far more affluent than Protestants and Catholics—and Central and Eastern Jewry became vastly overrepresented in the professions and overall economic elites, primarily in finance and commerce and largely as a function of their share of the population.

Naturally this was most prominent in Austria-Hungary, where Jews were 4–5% of the total population but 10% of Vienna and a quarter of Budapest and at least half of the professional class of each city; per Rubinstein, 62.3% of the fin-de-siècle Hungarian economic elite (the “virilists”) was Jewish. Germany somewhat less so, given a population that hovered around 1%, mostly in Prussia; W. Mosse’s introduction to Jews in the German Economy has them at maybe a fifth of all 19th-century economic elites (Kommerzienräte), but nearly a third of the wealthiest families (9/29) and 30-40% of the early-20th-century “corporate elite.” At the same time Jews were negligible in the Anglosphere, both demographically and economically.

There are a number of well-known examples of the basic phenomenon of entrepreneurial minorities in modernizing economies, as well as of the hostile, often violent reactions to them by the majority. The “bamboo network” of Overseas Chinese—who, according to the figures Chua provides, are to this day basically Hungarian Jews on steroids in some Southeast Asian economies—is just the most analogous case. This quite basic sociological context nevertheless provides the core of the Judenfrage, which when paired with the specifics of 19th- and 20th-century European racial and nationalistic baggage explains most of the severity of modern antisemitism.

Simply enough, because Jews were sufficiently associated in the popular mind with the bourgeoisie, all the grievances of the disoriented masses toward capitalism and its drivers and beneficiaries that accompany painful economic transitions were easily directed their way. What really gave modern antisemitism its force was this element of class, the blending of class conflict with ethnic conflict. To some, then as now, basically all untoward aspects of modernity could be pegged on the Jews in some vague way, as modernity and the rise of the Jews went hand in hand. This is essentially the main idea of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by the way, and explains Henry Ford’s quote about them—“The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on”—as well as the popularity in Germany of slogans like “die soziale Frage ist die Judenfrage,” the social question is the Jewish question. (This despite the paucity of Jewish industrialists or the scant involvement of Jews in the industrial revolution’s country of origin.)

The insecurities and inequity aversion of the underclass toward their socioeconomic superiors, too, become collectivized in this scenario, now bristling up against national pride and often exacerbated by a genuine snobbery or chauvinism on the part of the elite minority. As such antisemitism was and still to an extent is what Lindemann calls an “ideology of revenge,” aimed at intellectually delegitimizing Jewish success. In The Jews and Modern Capitalism Sombart notes back in 1911 how “[i]t has often been asserted that the Jews have no inventive powers; that not only technical but also economic discoveries were made by non-Jews alone, and that the Jews have always been able cleverly to utilize the ideas of others,” which to his credit he rejects. The high average Ashkenazi IQ is still denied by a great many JQers, just as “Jewish creativity” used to be the subject of attack, or as “East Asian creativity” still to many is. In this specific way is “envy” or “jealousy” an important source of antisemitism.

But while there are parallels to contemporary populism, this kind of class conflict isn’t nearly as much of an issue as it once was, and thus is not a major motivator of antisemitism in its current form. A final dimension of the modern antisemitic grievance that holds true now as it did then is the conflict between the core principles of nationalism and the very existence of a minority holding significantly disproportionate power. (I won’t however be dealing with the full picture of contemporary Western antisemitism in this piece.)

Altering the demographics of a national elite will of course alter all that flows from elites, and because minorities have their own distinct interests and values their collective power is necessarily a means to express them against those of the majority demographic. It’s therefore a truism that as the appeal of nationalism and the national identity of the majority grow, so will the objections to the influence of any perceived outgroup. Racialism doesn’t necessarily cause antisemitism by itself, but the particular racial conception of the underlying Jewish question that took root by the end of the 19th century especially among Germans/Austrians of course played into this. It intensified and made permanent the distinctiveness of the Jews as an outgroup, nullifying assimilation or baptism as potential solutions and ultimately substituting totalizing “biological” answers in the place of the aforementioned Augustinian doctrine of subordinated preservation that was at least officially the framework of medieval Jewish-Christian relations.

The rise of the Jews and all the illiberal hostility to it were definitely the most noteworthy modern developments as far as the Jewish situation is concerned, preceding anti-Semitic racism or the Jewish association with socialism; the Jewish association with liberalism is thus, to me, the most important source of modern antisemitism, though of course not the only one. While this basic idea should be acceptable if not already obvious to many, it’s clearly still lacking in many analyses. In an article by one of the greatest (late) Jewish historians, Jacob Katz, he reiterates many of my earlier points about the unhelpfulness of over-generalizing and non-correspondent theories of antisemitism, emphasizing the contingency of historical and ideological developments. And yet none of the above receives a mention when he finally turns to his own portrayal of the history.

But all of these interpretations of medieval and modern antisemitism are of course fallible and the subjects of much legitimate disagreement and debate. What’s most important in all this is how we decide to think about antisemitism, which is annoyingly-often just an exercise in rhetoric or communal self-assurance. Offering superficial messaging for public-facing or propagandistic purposes is one thing—not everyone can “appreciate the nuance” of such things—but it clearly introduces the cost of deluding ourselves about a serious problem, and I wouldn’t be running the risk of sounding so cringily above-it-all if I didn’t think that cost were real. If understanding the past is to be more than a platitude then it requires actual understanding. What’s needed most desperately in all this frenzied discourse of late is for antisemitism to be demystified before it can be addressed in an actually realistic, clear-eyed way.

What exactly that means and how it can be pulled off, however, will have to be questions for another time.

1. Continued: “We may be allowed to repeat here the paradoxical statement that medieval Jewry, much as it suffered from disabilities and contempt, still belonged to the privileged minority of every country insofar as it was tolerated at all.” From his 1942 paper, “The Jewish Factor in Medieval Civilization,” written in response to contemporary comparisons of the Nazis to medieval barbarism. To be fair the editor’s footnote calls the lines “obviously unorthodox views” which “would not readily be accepted by the majority of Jewish scholars.”

2. MacDonald accepts the blood libel, calling it “an extreme manifestation of normative Jewish hostility toward the surrounding society” in his preface to The Sword of Christ. The reconsideration of the blood libel by JQers represents an ideological regression of antisemitism, as even Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term, dismissed it in his 1879 manifesto, attempting to deliberately take his movement beyond embarrassing medieval hysterias.

3. The “ritual murder accusation” as distinct from the blood libel was probably first made in 1144 in my judgment (i.e., likely not just the first recorded instance, and I don’t buy Gavin Langmuir’s argument about Thomas of Monmouth creating the narrative years later, or others who suggest his dating is faulty, but these are minor details). But it first begins to involve blood in 1235 in Germany and the proper blood libel emerges by the end of the century.

4. This is an important point; Robert Chazan opens one of his books noting that “[t]his newness influenced its limited size, its restricted economic outlets, and the broadly hostile views widespread among the Christian majority. Failure to recognize this newness and its impact on northern Europe's Jewish minority and Christian majority can only result in considerable misreading of the innovative anti-Jewish stereotypes spawned in the exciting young civilization of the north.”

5. St. Augustine laid out the idea that the Jews acted and should be treated as servants to the Christians, which was apparently formative, and reaffirmed by the Church’s periodic Sicut Judaeis bulls. The sting of a Jewish rise also of course applied to the traditional Islamic view of the Jewish dhimmi with the emergence of Zionism, which really served to discredit both Christian and Muslim ideas.