Demystifying Antisemitism: A Critical Historiography

Terri Ginsberg

This article problematizes the question of antisemitism that is raised, seemingly inevitably, whenever the question of Palestine is presented in Europe and its historic settler colonies, including not least the United States. In the face of the impending U.S. legislative adoption, and presidential endorsement, of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which falsely equates criticism of Israel and Zionism with Jew-hatred and thus effectively criminalizes it, such problematization is urgently necessary for enabling us to argue clearly and unabashedly that the IHRA definition is not only aligned with Zionist political aims – that is, that its aim is to stifle sustained critical analysis of the anti-Palestinian structures and relational practices of the Israeli entity (an easy enough conclusion to draw, even as it may be contested by IHRA proponents) – but that the definition is patently incorrect, based as it is on historical mystification.  Perhaps recognizing this fact, in March 2004 the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) (now European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights [FRA]) rejected a similar definition of antisemitism in its Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002–2003,¹ and in November 2023, the FRA highlighted the Council of the European Union’s qualification of the IHRA definition, which it nonetheless endorsed, “that the working definition must not be used to ‘stifle, or stigmatise as antisemitic, legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies…in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.’”²  I believe furthermore that without a correct historical narrativization and in turn re-understanding of antisemitism, the necessary theorization and advancement of a counter-position against the IHRA and its implicit anti-Palestinian offensive remains limited to understandings of antisemitism that may serve actually to rehearse ideologically, rather than mitigate through critique, the nefarious conditions that gave birth to Zionism in the first place and continue to enable its deleterious effects.  

What follows is a brief critical historiography of antisemitism, a re-narration of that unfortunate ideological phenomenon for the purposes of providing an alternative to the longstanding practice, familiar within the post-World War II epoch, of defining and explaining Jew-hatred in ways that not only condemn and deplore discrimination against Jews but that concomitantly support the Zionist domination of historic Palestine. That practice, to be clear, entails a belief, widely accepted in the West since at least the Six Day War of 1967, that the carving out and establishment of a Jewish settler colony in historic Palestine is the antidote to antisemitism, notwithstanding the fact that Israeli settler colonialism is consistently reinforced via the ongoing dispossession, expulsion, and massacre of the indigenous, non-Jewish Palestinians already living there as a landed population for thousands of years. Within this framework, antisemitism is generally defined as an irrational hostility towards persons identified as Jewish, who are believed to have been subjected, whenever they have lived among non-Jews, to everything from legalized discrimination, including dispossession and apartheid, to expulsion from their homes and home countries, to massacres and outright genocide.  Mainline scholarly histories of the Jews – and, I should add in this context, the Nazi holocaust³ – have at their best endeavored to situate this hostility as an effect of socio-economic resentment: whether wealthy, working class, or impoverished, Jews, according to these historical narratives, have regularly been scapegoated for the political and economic crises of their so-called “host” countries and punished in various ways for their perceived role in fomenting such crises. In this context, Jews are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. However, these mainstream histories have categorized the Jewish targets of antisemitism incorrectly, positioning them not as a religiously rooted, if often secularized, social grouping of diverse ethnic and geographical composition but, instead, as an identifiable and separable “people” whose national, ethnic, and socio-economic differences are ultimately reducible to a perceived uniformity that renders Jews distinct from the non-Jewish populations of the countries in which Jews also live. On this view, which cannot be substantiated historically, the vastly different realities of Jewish communities around the world, including their vastly different experiences of antisemitism – sometimes minimal or all but absent – are elided, and antisemitism, defined largely from within a Eurocentric framework, becomes an abstraction, indeed a totalizing lament: Jews are hated; Jews have always been hated; Jews will always be hated, presumably on the basis of their misrecognized cultural idiosyncrasies and the delimitations these are thought to enforce around Jewish opportunity and socialization anywhere in the world. The preferred solution to antisemitism that emerged from this hollow and geo-culturally near-sighted narrative sets up a (false) dilemma for Jews: either they resign themselves to live in fear and uncertainty, whether by assimilating into or separating from the “host” country’s dominant culture, or they migrate to a reportedly less precarious country or locale. Situating Jews thusly into a perpetual fight-or-flight mode opened the door for the deployment against them of the racialist identitarianism, already forged within European white supremacism at its colonial capitalist matrix, towards a resolution to the dilemmatic “Jewish question”: the establishment of a Europe-friendly, Jewish-led settler colony in “biblical” Palestine.

Palestinian historians and political and cultural writers and theorists have long been critical of the Zionist narrative.⁴ The most widely circulated critiques, however, are those written by a loose array of Israeli academics associated retrospectively with a post-Zionist, revisionist historiographic turn in scholarship regarding Palestine/Israel that began to consolidate in the years following the 1993 Oslo Accords but originated during the period of Camp David.⁵ Most of these “new historians” have not questioned, much less challenged the Eurocentric framing of antisemitism, thus opening themselves to interpretations that justify the Zionist project through the back door. Instead, the majority erase or greatly marginalize the history of Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian civilization, including the history of the Jewish Arabs (or Mizrahim) and of the Sephardic Jews. Antisemitism in this context is not only generalized from the European experience to that of the entire world. Antisemitism also comes to serve as a means of masking the projection of European structures of racialized class onto the broader world and, in turn, of rationalizing European-Jewish-dominated Israel as a means of continuing to exploit the indigenous brown and Black peoples of Palestine (including the Mizrahim and the Black Jews of the Middle East and North Africa) in the false name of providing a safe haven for Jews subjected to hatred and discrimination in Europe.⁶ In fact, it is commonly opined within critical Zionism studies circles that there is no place on today’s Earth more unsafe for Jews than Israel, insofar as the real roots of antisemitism have never been sufficiently critiqued there or elsewhere. This is because the policies and practices of Israel have, until today, not only served European and North American interests but also enabled the nation-states of those regional power-blocs to disguise their imperial aims in philosemitic garb – about which more below. For now, I would like to draw attention to a related but largely neglected register of Zionist rationalization that, in order to be understood, requires a revised understanding and historical narrativization of antisemitism.

At the heart of this proposed revisioning is an explication of the relationship between the Eurocentric framing of antisemitism and the nexus of racialized class that lies at the root of the Zionist project recognized and promoted by Theodor Herzl in his 1896 book Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State]: the formation of a “petty-bourgeois Jewish state.”⁷ Here, I am not suggesting a closer consideration of Israeli political economy, which has been covered in the extant scholarship.⁸ I am referring instead to the question of how the systemic racialization of historic class structures has not only served to rationalize and facilitate the ongoing Nakba but, much earlier, to overdetermine the composition and character of the Jewish communities in Europe and West Asia who were most conducive to Zionist interpellation, in ways that have functioned to obscure the origins of the very antisemitism deployed in those regions for the purposes of fomenting a Zionist project that might not have been conceptualized or realized otherwise.

What then, we should here ask, are the real causes of the “Jewish question”? Since the watershed moment of September 11, 2001, only a few very brave academic scholars have attempted an answer.  One of them is a critical geographer from Mauritania named Mohameden Ould-Mey, who wrote an important article, published first in 2002 and then republished in 2005, entitled “The Non-Jewish Origin of Zionism.”⁹ In this rare and almost entirely ignored intervention, Ould-Mey relocates the history of Zionism from the commonsense belief, propagated in most North American and European educational systems and media institutions, that Zionism originated within the oppressed, often ghettoized Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and West Asia during the later nineteenth century, to the much earlier, globally transformative conditions that would enable the hegemonic rise of both capitalism and antisemitism in Western Europe. These conditions were set not by Jews, as rightist positions hold, but by non-Jewish positionalities vying for class power during the centuries-long transition from feudalism to capitalism. In Ould-Mey’s words:

Many schemes of colonial “Restoration” or Zionist colonization were conceived and developed by non-Jewish Europeans (religious as well as atheist), well before [such founding Zionists as] Yehuda Alkalay (1798–1878), Moses Hess (1812–1875), and Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), whose emergence actually marked only the beginning of the Zionization of the Jews themselves and their direct involvement with the originally and essentially non-Jewish idea of Zionism.¹⁰ 

Ould-Mey’s critical trajectory begins with the European Reformation and Counter-reformation conflicts in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminding us that these were not fundamentally a matter of religious differences, but struggles for economic control of the labor and resources of contested imperial colonies. These colonies, most at the time in the Americas, were key to the valuation, extraction, and reinvestment of surplus-value by an emerging capitalist class and the nation-states that would come to represent their interests. Ould-Mey traces this class rivalry from the rise of the Puritan industrial class in England and the ensuing commercial wars between England and Holland; to the rivalry between England and France, when Napoleon attempted to estrange Jewish bankers from the European and Ottoman rulers whose wars they were helping finance in order to weaken the Ottoman hold against Napoleon’s imperial advance; to the British imperialism that would eventually employ Anglicanism to exploit Jew-hatred as a solution to the empire’s political-economic growing pains.¹¹ Although the word Zionism was not yet in use, the European ruling classes had already begun to transform earlier iterations of Jew-hatred into an opportunistic modality known as philosemitism, a competitive, supersessionist Protestant ideology that promotes identification with, and appreciation of, Jews and Judaism, on the prejudicial claim that all Jews are industrious. Philosemitism’s deployment in Germany and, more preponderantly, in England (where, at the time, no Jews were actually yet residing on account of their having been expelled in 1290) supplied a convenient rationale for these imperial nation-states’ early efforts to colonize the non-European peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Its core belief in manifest destiny (an early version of what is now known as Christian Zionism) drew from christological interpretations of the Bible and were later intercalated with newly theorized racialist pseudo-science in order to justify the super-exploitation of largely non-white peoples in the European colonies.¹² The Puritans who colonized New England, for example, described themselves as a lost Hebrew tribe returning, evangelically, to the Promised Land.¹³ Some Jewish members of the European bourgeoisie also saw philosemitism as an opportunity; although Ould-Mey does not specify them, they included investment in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (this, too, has been subject to controversy¹⁴) and in the profits derived from it for European capital, and in the financial backing of the Seven Years War, fought largely in and over the American colonies.

As Napoleon rose to power and challenged British hegemony in Europe and the colonial arena, he deployed philosemitism to emancipate ghettoized Jews in France, Germany, and Austria and in turn to coopt Jewish liberty from prior fealty to the respective crowns into his own sphere of influence. His goal was to preempt impending British and Austro-Hungarian control of Arab lands in a hoped-for defeated Ottoman Empire, where Jews were also being called upon by France to shift their loyalties from Russian to French interests. According to Ould-Mey, 

Despite or because of his Jewish policies of emancipation, Napoleon seems to have been determined to use the Jews as a fifth column throughout Europe and even within the Ottoman Empire.  His invasion of Egypt and Palestine in 1798–99 was encouraged by his belief in the imminent fall of the Ottoman Empire and was part of a plan to destroy English power.¹⁵

Thus, as Napoleon extended his imperial reach into the Arab world, where he had even contemplated conversion to Islam, the modern concept of Zionism as an actual colonizing effort in Palestine, to be enacted in the name of the Jews but for the surrogate purpose of French enrichment, began to take hold.  

Ultimately Napoleon was defeated in his quest, however, and when that resulted in some German and Austrian Jewish communities being returned to the ghetto, a precarious British Empire, having lost its American colonies and now looking eastward to India, took up the Zionist call, with ideological and logistical support from evangelical Protestant missionaries.¹⁶ In fact, the European Jews emancipated by Napoleon were not interested in Zionism, whereupon England had to work hard to convince what by then was its renewed Jewish citizenry that establishing and relocating to a Jewish-led colony in Ottoman Palestine was a good idea. Nor did the Jews of Turkey, whom Napoleon had also courted for this purpose, have any interest in shifting their loyalties; they knew that doing so meant making it easier for the British to colonize South Asia by helping to weaken the Ottoman Empire, which stood as a bulwark between East and West. In the end, England was able to bring over some wealthy British Jews to the Zionist cause by emphasizing its potential profitability and, toward that end, supporting the establishment of multiple philosemitic societies ostensibly to lend redress to the several centuries during which Jews had been barred from residing in England. In contrast to Napoleon, though, the British establishment opposed Jewish assimilation. Whereas Napoleon had welcomed emancipated Jews as long as they integrated culturally into French society, England asserted that Jews are a unique people who should therefore live and work separately from non-Jews. On this argument, England was eventually able to convince not only its own population, Jewish and non-Jewish, but that of other European countries and of the Ottoman Empire, of the right-headedness of establishing a Jewish settler-colony in historic Palestine. 

Ould-Mey’s re-narration of Zionist history puts antisemitism in a very different light than the one with which we are familiar. He shows that the antisemitism which purportedly motivated Zionism is not simply the vehement right-wing Jew-hatred of the sort later expressed by Nazis and other fascist formations, but instead an ostensibly liberal-minded Christian appreciation of Jews and Judaism. Within this view, it becomes possible to say – as does the late decolonial scholar Patrick Wolfe in his 2016 book chapter, “Not about the Jews: Anti-Semitism in Central Europe”¹⁷ – that antisemitism as we know it today is a mode of racialized inequality brought about historically not by the repression but by the emancipation of the European Jews. Not unlike Ould-Mey, Wolfe is also interested in the ways that Jew-hatred was utilized by the Europeans in order ultimately to establish a Zionist entity in historic Palestine. Although he makes only passing reference to the relationship between European expansionism and Ottoman history, his social and class analysis of Jewish populations in the Western European countries in which Zionism emerged implies his recognition of that relationship while adding dimension to Ould-Mey’s theory that antisemitism and Zionism are integrally related. His argument therefore intersects that of Ould-Mey in productive ways.  

For example, Wolfe brings a theoretical lens to Ould-Mey’s revisionist historiography by problematizing the received concepts of assimilation and emancipation. Wolfe is particularly interested in how the emergence of colonial capitalism and, in turn, European nation-statism, spawned the very concept of race that would frame modern Europe’s love/hate relationship with its Jewish inhabitants, recruiting them as professionals and workers, on the one hand, and expelling and/or killing them off, on the other. Wolfe adds to Ould-Mey’s argument in this respect by ensuring that when we consider the effects of Jewish emancipation, we distinguish between the small echelon of bourgeois Jews who, once liberated from the ghettos, invested in and became enriched by colonial projects, and the broader mass of working-class and peasant Jews, who would come either to challenge their class oppression through labor and revolutionary organizing or seek reactionary solutions to same, most noticeably with the formation of Jewish ultra-orthodoxy (e.g., Hasidism, haredism, etc.)¹⁸ and, eventually, the theorization and promotion of modern Jewish Zionism.  

For Wolfe in this context, antisemitism may be explained neither from within the political Zionist framework for which a Jewish national entity is justifiable on the questionable claim that Jewish assimilation into certain European societies (especially German) was not possible on account of so-called eternal Jew-hatred, nor within the soft Zionist framework, exemplified by Hannah Arendt’s renowned essay on antisemitism,¹⁹ for which collaboration between Jewish elites and non-Jewish feudal aristocrats sparked resentment toward all Jews within the emergent bourgeois classes and prompted those classes to scapegoat Jews in exchange for the perceived military-industrial advantages of constitutional monarchy. Wolfe knew what Ould-Mey did before him: such explanations are partial because they are overdetermined by the class and racialized structures of “free” labor necessary to the formation of capitalist nation-statism, itself borne of the concomitant European colonization and enslavement of Africa and the Americas, as a particular mode of social consolidation conducive to the development of liberal political economy. In the case of emancipated European Jews, an abstract, “displaced colonial surrogate”²⁰ was conceived and permitted to function within the new nation-state formations, a “Jewish” social subject who became what the elitist Arendt all but ignores: at one and the same time a displaced “worker-gone-wrong”²¹ – what Arendt condescendingly and superficially refers to as “the rabble,” but what is really, allegorically speaking, the prospectively vibrant socialism she finds threatening to an already unstable globalizing capitalism – and to a displaced national bourgeoisie who, alienated as well, in this case from the laboring and colonized classes who are its contradictory (anti-)foundation, became the very, imperial colonizer of Palestine.  

On this dialectical explanation, Wolfe theorizes antisemitism as the ideological means by which liberal emancipation’s “liability for difference”²² is at once preserved for European nation-statism and integrated into the conceptualization of the modern Zionist settler colony onto which abstract Jewish “freedom” is externalized as a rationalized Palestinian/Arab subjugation – and, at fascist moments, elimination – within the parameters of modern racialized capitalism.  Considering the intellectual profundity evidenced by this re-understanding, and by Ould-Mey’s crucial insights portending it, the fact that the IHRA would surely position such revisionist narrativizations as antithetical to its definition of antisemitism speaks miles to the historical ignorance continuing to prop up that definition’s popular welcome, and to the disingenuousness of its neoliberal transnational propagators.