Opinion | Is Antisemitism Eternal?

Does the world hate Jews? Is antisemitism the unchanging condition of Jewish life? There’s certainly a line of traditional Jewish thought that takes that view. We learn from Genesis that Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing Isaac gave Jacob instead of him and “said in his heart, ‘The days of mourning for my father are at hand, then I will slay my brother Jacob.’”

The Mishnah-era rabbi Shimon bar Yochai took from this that “It is a well-known halacha (law) that Esau hates Jacob.” In modern times Rabbi Moshe Feinstein expanded this idea to say that “Esau’s hatred of Jacob never changes. Even in those [nations] that behave well [toward Jews], their hatred [of Jews] is actually strong.” In other words, it is in the nature of Esau—that is, all gentiles—to hate Jews.

This view is not fringe. Medieval Judaism referred to Christianity as “Edom”—the nation descended from Esau. Later, the renowned 20th-century Orthodox theologian and rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik argued in an iconic 1964 essay, “Confrontation,” that the deep theological structure of Christianity is antagonistic to Judaism; that is, Christianity by its nature views Judaism as an inferior religion and would not be Christianity if it did not treat Jews as inferior. He was writing before Vatican II revised many of Catholicism’s explicitly antisemitic doctrines, but his opposition to interfaith dialogue was absolute, not contingent on either history or sociology.

This approach—which we might call “essentialist”—continues to be influential, and not only in religious circles. It has been expressed by many after the Shoah and even more so after October 7. In a recent book, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, now President Biden’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, suggested that when it comes to hatred of Jews “medication may alleviate the symptoms, but the infection itself lies dormant and may reemerge at an opportune moment in a new incarnation, a different ‘outer shell.’” The novelist Dara Horn writes in a recent book of essays, “People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much,” and journeys through different cultures, times and places to make her case. It is as if antisemitism is built into the DNA of the universe.

Many Jews have reacted to the present explosion of antisemitism by embracing the idea that antisemitism is universal and eternal. As the Haggadah puts it, “In every generation they rise up to destroy us.” But this kind of essentialist argument, though in an odd way comforting (It’s not us, it’s them!), is dangerous.

As none should know better than Jews, painting one class of humanity, or its beliefs, with a single brush can lead to tragedy.

When you say that all Christians by their very nature view Jews as inferior, you imply there can be no such thing as a truly good, non-bigoted Christian. Writ larger, the binary approach does not even reflect the realities of social life or of history, in which antisemitism fluctuates based on a variety of external causes. The economic turmoil of the 19th century, for instance, led to fear of socialism and to competing stereotypes—on the right, of Jews-as-revolutionaries; on the left, of Jews-as-plutocrats. But as subsequent history makes evident, neither anti-plutocrat socialists nor anti-socialist Tories are ineluctably antisemitic. All have evolved non-antisemitic varieties over time.

Likewise, while Jews were deemed dhimmis in Islam, the meaning of that term changed with different sects and different eras. Bernard Lewis, the neoconservative Islamic scholar, argued that while Jews were sometimes persecuted in Islam, we cannot say antisemitism is essential to Islam—there are too many competing texts and historical counterexamples, from Iraq to al-Andalus, to support the facile views about Islam that many contemporary Jews hold.

And what about the preoccupation of the day—anti-Zionism? While I can’t guess at the thought processes of Western intellectuals or progressive politicians, I’m convinced that for most of the Global South it is the settler-colonialist paradigm, not essentialist antisemitism, that shapes hatred of Israel. I lectured at a provincial college in the Philippines some years ago on the state of international relations. To a person, all the students and faculty declared themselves anti-Zionists and peppered me with questions about Israel and Palestine. Were they antisemites? I very much doubt it. They told me they did not hate any Jews, and probably none of them had ever met one before me. Their views on settler colonialism and Israel came not from anti-Judaism but from theories about world politics that spoke to their lived experience and to which Jews and even Israel were merely incidental. I suspect that many of those protesting in anti-Israel encampments at universities draw from this well also.

Marginalized groups in society often come to be seen as the “other” and to be blamed for societies’ ills. It is far too simple, however, for Jews to see themselves as “eternal victims” (à la Hannah Arendt), for it suggests that there is something about the Jews that evokes hatred over time, culture and place. If antisemitism is built into the structure of the universe, there is not much anyone can do about it. We would do far better to study what social pathologies cause persons to fall into this way of thinking and what strategies can dampen their effect.

Marshall Breger is a professor of law at Catholic University.