What Really Is Antisemitism?
Not just hate, but a habit of thought
On December 14, 2025, 16 people were killed when a father and son opened fire on a Chanukah celebration in peaceful Bondi Beach. The Australian Jewish community is reeling, and in shock. In the Diaspora, our minds obviously go to “Could that happen here?” In Israel, they are flipping the script, calling their friends and family overseas asking if they’re OK, rather than getting the calls themselves after a terror or rocket attack.
It’s only been two days and much has already been written and said about what happened. At times like this however, I find some education is important so that we can better understand where things like this come from. How it can happen. Why it happens, rather than just blaming two deranged family members who committed themselves to the death cult of ISIS and Radical Islamism.
Several months ago, I finished reading historian David Nirenberg’s triumphant 2014 book Anti-Judaism: A Western Tradition. It’s worth reading but below - in something I’ve been writing for several months - I’ll try my best to summarize his conclusions here given that they are important for this moment.
Most people think of antisemitism as simply the hatred of Jewish people - bigotry, scapegoating, violent prejudice. But Nirenberg argues that something much deeper and stranger lies at its core. In his book, Nirenberg shows that “the Jew” has long been more than a real group of people: it’s been an idea, a symbol used for over two millennia to talk about everything a society considers wrong or threatening. In other words, Western culture has repeatedly used an imagined Judaism as a negative mirror, or a way to define what it is not by denouncing “Jewish” things. And here’s the kicker: this pattern doesn’t even require actual Jews to be present. Antisemitism isn’t just a prejudice but a recurring habit of thought in Western civilization.
Not Just Hatred of Jews: The Idea of “Jewishness” as Evil
Nirenberg draws a sharp distinction between antisemitism (hatred of real Jews) and what he calls anti-Judaism - a mode of thinking that sees “Judaism” as a sinister force in the world. Anti-Judaism is not about actual Jewish religion or people at all, but about what they symbolize in the imagination. It views “Jewish” as shorthand for whatever a society deems false, corrupt, or dangerous. It doesn’t require the presence of real Jews at all. A nation or movement can have few or no Jews and still rail against “Jewish” influences. As Nirenberg puts it, this mindset (and now the hive-mind on Twitter/X) will happily attack anything – the media, money, Marxism, or capitalism – by branding it “Jewish,” without caring whether any flesh-and-blood Jews are involved. In anti-Judaism, “Jewishness” is an abstract enemy, a kind of conceptual bogeyman under the bed. It’s the idea that behind whatever you hate lurks a Jew. And because it’s about an idea and not actual people, it can thrive even where no Jews live.
This means antisemitism (as a broader term) isn’t just one prejudiced attitude among others – it’s been built into the way Western societies explain the world’s evils. Time and again, political and religious thinkers have reached for “the Jews” as a handy explanation for why things are going wrong. Nirenberg argues that anti-Judaism has been a basic tool in the construction of Western thought itself. In other words, whenever Western culture has defined its nightmares and enemies, the image of “Jewish” opposition has never been far away. This makes antisemitism uniquely persistent and shape-shifting. It’s not a relic of the medieval past or the Nazi era and it certainly isn’t new since the establishment of the State of Israel 77+ years ago – it’s a pattern, a logic, a strategy that keeps resurfacing in new forms throughout history.
2,000+ Years of the “Jew” as Symbol: From Pharaohs to Philosophers
Pre-Christianity
As described in remarkable detail by Nirenberg, the idea of “the Jew” as an all-purpose villain goes back to the ancient world. Centuries before Christianity, Egyptian writers were already recasting Jews as the embodiment of impiety and disorder. The Greek historian Hecataeus of Abdera recorded an Egyptian tale that flipped the biblical Exodus on its head: instead of escaping slavery, the Hebrews were expelled from Egypt as diseased troublemakers, “strangers…practicing different rites” who were led out by Moses to live in an “unsocial and intolerant” way. A later Egyptian priest, Manetho, even claimed the Jews were literally lepers: “impious…‘lepers and other unclean people’” revolting against the Pharaoh. In these legends, we see the template forming: Jews were portrayed as hateful outsiders, carriers of corruption. Nirenberg notes that the traits ancient Egyptians pinned on the Israelites such as misanthropy (hatred of mankind), lawlessness, and godlessness, all stuck in the cultural memory. Long after, later societies forgot, rediscovered, and put to new uses those same accusations. In other words, the idea of the Jew as a symbol of subversion was already available for anyone to borrow.
Christianity
Early Christianity supercharged this symbolic use of “Jew.” The first Christians were eager to distinguish their new faith from its Jewish roots. The Apostle Paul – himself a Jew – framed “Judaism” as a mindset of error that true Christians had to reject. He contrasted the literal versus the spiritual: Jews, he argued, stuck to the “letter” of the law, missing the divine spirit. To be “Jewish,” according to Paul, meant to be overly attached to rules, the material world, and superficial meaning, rather than embracing faith and love as expressed by early Christianity. In fact, Paul coined the term “Judaize” as a kind of insult – meaning to slavishly follow ritual and ignore higher truth. From this view, Judaism wasn’t just theologically wrong, but it was a fundamentally wrong way to be in the world. Every time Christians emphasized grace over law or spirit over flesh, they defined it against a “Jewish” opposite. Before long, Christian leaders were accusing each other of falling into “Jewish” error whenever disputes arose. In the early Church debates, both sides would hurl the epithet “Jew” at their opponents to claim the high ground of true faith. As Nirenberg observed, “If Judaism was an error, every error could potentially be thought of as Jewish.” In other words, “Jewish” became Western shorthand for wrong. This habit survived for centuries in Christian thought.
Islam
Nor was this pattern limited to Europe. Islam too, from its earliest days, absorbed some of this symbolic anti-Judaism. The Qur’an and early Islamic literature often cast Jews as the archetypal hypocrites and enemies of Prophet Muhammad. Islamic tradition tells stories of Jews scheming against the young Muhammad – even warning that a Jewish plot sought to kill him as a child. To devout early Muslims, the “People of the Book” (Jews) were acknowledged as possessors of earlier scripture, yet were accused of corrupting it and acting treacherously. The very word “Jewish” came to imply duplicity and corruption. In fact, in Islamic rhetoric, “to Judaize” meant to be a hypocrite, to have a diseased, insincere faith. A Muslim who was insufficiently devout could be slammed as having “caught the Jewish disease.” Thus, even in places and times where Jews were few, the idea of the Jew as a treacherous influence was planted early on. Being “Jewish” in this sense meant embodying the vices that true believers despised.
Middle Ages
Throughout the Middle Ages, as Christianity became the dominant force in Europe, anti-Judaism shifted shape again. Real Jewish communities existed on the margins of medieval society – often as moneylenders or traders – but they were tiny in number. Still, the idea of “the Jew” loomed large whenever people looked for someone to blame. Medieval Christians frequently saw Jews as the hidden hand behind earthly misfortunes. If the king raised taxes or the harvest failed, popular anger might erupt at the local Jewish minority as if they were the cause of society’s ills. It became common to protest a bad ruler by accusing him of being in league with Jews – or even secretly being a Jew. In one country after another, waves of paranoia would sweep through: rumours of Jews poisoning wells, Jews kidnapping children, Jews conspiring with the Devil. These fantasies often had little to do with anything actual Jews did; rather, “Jewishness” became a label for evil itself. As historian Adam Kirsch put it, such “accusations of Jewishness have little to do with actual Jews” – they were a product of non-Jews’ internal feuds and fears, using ‘the Jew’ as a scapegoat. Princes and churchmen, peasants and poets – all could invoke Jewish perfidy to discredit their rivals or explain disasters. In effect, medieval Europe turned the Jew into a sponge that absorbed every anxiety: Heretics? Jews. Plague? Blame the Jews. Unfair laws? The king must be under Jewish influence. It was a demonology that required almost no actual Jews at all.
Reformation
The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, led by Martin Luther, kept this ugly tradition alive in new ways. Luther famously raged against the Catholic Church’s rituals and power – and tellingly, he smeared the Church as being, you guessed it, “Jewish.” In his view, the Pope’s Church was obsessed with laws and ceremonies (indulgences, penance, etc.), making it no better than the Biblical Pharisees. Luther quipped that the Roman Church had become “more ‘Jewish’ than the Jews” in its legalistic mindset. This was quite a twist: a Christian reformer calling other Christians Jews as the ultimate insult. But it shows how ingrained the habit was: “Jewish” = bad, so both Catholics and Protestants hurled it at each other. Across the English Channel, radical Puritans during the English Civil War even looked to ancient Israel for political models, while their foes accused them of Judaizing their politics (like, not in a good way). Once again, “Jew” was a flexible symbol for both good and bad. In all cases, it wasn’t about real Jewish people at all, but Christian-on-Christian shadowboxing with “Jewish” as the punch.
Enlightenment
Of course, one might think that the Enlightenment and rise of secular reasoning in the 17th and 18th centuries would have broken this pattern. But you’d be wrong. Voltaire, a fierce critic of the Church, denounced religious intolerance – but he equated intolerance itself with Judaism, sneering that “Intolerance is Jewish” in spirit. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, a champion of reason, likewise declared that enlightened modernity required the “euthanasia of Judaism” – in other words, killing off every trace of the dogma and legalism that he associated with Jewish mentality. To Kant, true Christianity was pure moral reason, and anything superstitious or ceremonial was a “Jewish” leftover to be shed. To these intellectuals, Judaism = backwardness. The irony is thick: these men often prided themselves on tolerance, yet they eagerly perpetuated the oldest intolerance of all – turning “the Jew” into a metaphor for whatever they hated (be it ignorance, fanaticism, or the burdens of the past). Modern secular thought was not the antidote to anti-Judaism but was, in many ways, a new theatre for it.
Marx
Even revolutionaries on the left were not immune. Karl Marx – himself famously descended from Jews – wrote “On the Jewish Question” (1844), which essentially blamed “Judentum” (Jewry) for the capitalist mentality. Marx wasn’t talking about synagogue-going Judaism; he was using “the Jew” as code for money power and exploitation. He argued that as long as Western society was ruled by money, it would keep “producing Judaism from its own entrails,” and that the only way to free humanity was to achieve “the emancipation of society from Judaism.” To Marx, “Judaism” had become the spirit of commerce – a dehumanizing force to be expunged. Thus, even as he critiqued potentially real injustices, Marx fell back on the age-old trope: equating “Jewish” with greed. His rhetoric cast the capitalist system as a “Jewish” problem, implying that getting rid of the Jew (as an idea) was the cure for society.
This is anti-Judaism in a nutshell: invoking “the Jew” even when talking about abstract systems. Little surprise, then, that later anti-capitalists and anti-communists alike would echo this language of Jewish blame.
Holocaust
All these threads converged in the most extreme form in the 20th century with Nazi ideology. The Nazi movement in Germany didn’t just persecute the Jews it could find – it built an entire conspiracy theory around the idea of “the Jew” as the invisible puppet-master of everything evil. In Nazi propaganda, “the Jew” was simultaneously behind capitalism and communism, behind modern art and liberal democracy, behind every social ill. The actual Jewish population in Germany was tiny, but that didn’t matter. Hitler and his followers convinced themselves and millions of others that an abstract Jewish force was the real enemy of the German nation. This paranoid fantasy led to genocide. Nirenberg calls the Holocaust the ultimate “application of anti-Judaism in genocidal obsession”. The Nazis took the old habit of blaming a mythical Jew for society’s woes to its deadly conclusion by physically annihilating millions of real Jews. As Nirenberg notes, the Holocaust is “inconceivable…unexplainable without that deep history of [anti-Judaism] thought” that paved the way. In short, Nazi antisemitism was not some new mutation that fell from the sky but was the poisonous fruit of ideas planted long before. They simply made the metaphor into reality, turning an imagined cosmic war against “Jewishness” into actual war against Jews.
The Pattern Endures: From Anti-Zionism to Modern Conspiracy Theories
This centuries-old habit of thought is still very much alive today. Though Anti-Judaism was published in 2014, it gives us all we need to understand the current moment.
Anti-Judaism as an idea has proven endlessly adaptable – it mutates into new forms to fit new anxieties. In the 21st century, you might not hear people ranting about Pharisees or quoting Martin Luther’s diatribes. But the core idea – that some nefarious “Jewish” influence explains the world’s problems – keeps resurfacing. Think of the pandemic and how Jews were blamed for both the virus and the vaccine. Think about Kanye’s antisemitism, and the way Jews were suddenly being charged with racism and being in control of the slave trade. Nirenberg himself warns that “we now live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily” to arguments that whatever challenges they face are best explained in terms of “Israel.” That is, the Jewish State. Think about that. Turn on the news or scroll through social media, and you’ll see it: Complex political conflicts reduced to the schemings of a demonic Israel, economic hardship blamed on hidden Jewish bankers, pandemics spun as plots by Jewish philanthropists. The weather being caused by Jewish space lasers. Classic anti-Judaism, updated for the globalized era.
Antizionism
One obvious arena is modern antizionism (I’ve started using Adam Louis Klein’s non-hyphenated term). Criticism of Israel’s policies is perfectly legitimate, of course. But there’s a strain of antizionism, especially in parts of the Middle East and far-left or far-right circles in the West, that reproduces the old “Jew = cosmic evil” narrative almost verbatim. In this view, Israel isn’t just a country but the embodiment of all imperialist, colonial, capitalist, and racist evil on Earth. Every misfortune, from wars in Africa to police brutality in Ferguson to economic inequality, somehow gets linked back to Israel or “the Zionists.” This is why we hear wild claims that Israel orchestrates global conflicts or controls governments behind the scenes. It’s why protest movements in totally unrelated countries sometimes fixate on “the Jewish state” as a singular source of injustice. This obsession only makes sense as the latest twist in the anti-Judaism tradition: People turn “the Jew” (now cast as Israel or Zionism) into a symbolic scapegoat for everything they hate. The irony is that many places where antizionist conspiracy theories thrive have few or zero Jewish residents. Like earlier eras conjuring Jewish boogeymen, today’s agitators don’t need real Jews to stoke their fervour – the idea of a malevolent “Jewish power” is enough.
Conspiracy Theories
Beyond Israel, consider the resurgence of conspiracy theories about global Jewish influence. The Internet swirls with age-old tropes repackaged: the mythical “cabal” of Jewish bankers controlling international finance, or “Soros” as a puppet-master of migrant crises and liberal politics, or “Rothschild” (now Soros) as shorthand for secret world government. When a pandemic or a financial crash hits, how quickly do whispers spread that it’s all a Jewish plot? These theories are absurd – Jews make up a tiny fraction of the world (0.2% of the global population) and are hardly monolithic or all-powerful. Yet that tiny minority is often painted as a colossal hidden hand guiding world events. This disproportionate fixation only makes sense in light of anti-Judaism’s long history. It’s the same script with new casting: Label whatever scares you as ‘Jewish’ and you’ve found your culprit. It’s lazy, and predictable. As Nirenberg writes, medieval Christians blamed Jewish usury for social ills, and Enlightenment writers blamed Jewish “superstition” for holding back progress. Today, extremists blame Jewish “globalists” for undermining nations. The target is still an idea, not a reality. It’s the imagined Jewishness of an enemy – international finance, media, communism, you name it – that gets attacked. All too often, real Jews pay the price for these fantasies, whether it’s the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter blaming Jews for bringing migrants into America, or the shooting at Bondi Beach, presumably, as a protest against Israel. The pattern endures.
Why does this keep happening?
Because antisemitism, in Nirenberg’s view, is not a weird anomaly but a structural element of Western thought. It’s the old habit of making the Jew a stand-in for whatever a society fears most. During plagues, the Jew was plague; during economic turmoil, the Jew was greed; during ideological wars, the Jew was subversion. It’s a tried-and-true (and lazy, I should add) formula for simplifying complexity: find a Jewish explanation. This means whenever society is anxious or divided, there’s a ready-made narrative that blames “the Jews” (or “Israel” or “Zionists” today) for it. The script is so ingrained that people fall into it often without even realizing – it feels obvious to them that, say, financial corruption must be the work of “Jewish bankers,” because that cliché has been circulating for ages. It’s the stuff discussed at polite dinner parties when Jewish neighbours are absent. As a result, antisemitism proves alarmingly adaptable. It can come from the far right (white supremacists ranting about Jewish “elitists”) or the far left (activists claiming Israel is behind police violence or so-called “colonization”) or anywhere in between. The content changes, but the form – the Jew as the universal scapegoat – stays the same.
Challenging the Old Assumptions
All of this should force us to rethink what antisemitism really is. It’s not just a prejudice like any other. It doesn’t belong on a t-shirt with Islamophobia, or racism, or xenophobia. It’s a persistent cognitive framework, a default setting in the West’s cultural software. Understanding this is crucial if we want to combat it. Too many people assume antisemitism is only a problem among uneducated racists. Nirenberg’s work blows up that assumption. He shows that some of the most educated, influential thinkers in Western history – from theologians to philosophers to revolutionaries – have actively participated in this tradition of defining evil as “Jewish.” That legacy doesn’t disappear easily. Especially not in today’s social-media-driven world. It is, as Nirenberg says, “the marrow of [the West’s] bones” – baked into how we explain the world.
The takeaway is both provocative and enlightening: antisemitism is not a freakish anomaly but a recurring idea that Western society has used to process its anxieties and crises. It’s a shape-shifting myth that always finds a way to feel relevant. By recognizing this fact, we can start to challenge it. We can catch ourselves when we see “the Jew” or “Israel” being turned into a cosmic culprit, and ask: What’s really going on here? What complexity or failure are we trying to simplify by dragging out this old specter? Ultimately, answering “What is antisemitism, really?” means looking in the mirror of our own civilization.
Antisemitism is the bad habit of blaming an imaginary Jew for very real problems – a habit we’ve all inherited, a habit that leads to dead Jews on beaches, and one we absolutely must break.
Some of the sources used for the above include:
David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W.W. Norton, 2013)
Anti-Judaism: book review from Jewish Book Council, by Michael Dobkowski
Adam Kirsch, “A World Without Jews,” Tablet Magazine (Feb. 13, 2013)
David Nirenberg, interview in Jews, Europe, the 21st Century (Sept. 15, 2022)