David Feldman in The Ideas Letter: Over the last 100 years, the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against racism have at times appeared inextricably connected, firmly allied in a single fight against bigotry. Today, it is the disconnections that appear most visible.
The standoff is now stark, thanks to divergent responses to Oct. 7, 2023 and its aftermath — to Hamas’s attack on Israel and the killing of civilians and hostage-taking, and to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and the death, displacement, and privation it has brought. These events have not only had grievous consequences for Palestinians and Israelis; they have also been divisive globally. And they have accelerated and amplified a split between anti-racism and anti-antisemitism that was already advanced.
For some, the attack of October 7 was an act of specificallyantisemiticterror. “What is this, some pogrom in Lithuania?” asked Amit Halevi, the chairman of Be’eri, a kibbutz that lost 10 percent of its civilian population in the massacre. Others have drawn connections between October 7 and the Holocaust, finding “the antisemitism of extermination” expressed by Hamas today, as it was by the Nazis before.
Yet much of the anti-racist Left presents these events in a different key. In Britain, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign reacted immediately, on Oct.7: “The offensive launched from Gaza today can only be understood in the context of Israel’s ongoing, decades long, military occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land and imposition of a system of oppression that meets the legal definition of apartheid.” Amnesty International denounced Hamas’s attacks on civilians, but it located the roots of the violence in Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza and the discriminatory system it imposes on all Palestinians. By invoking apartheid, these groups, among others, affiliate Palestinian resistance with the resistance against the former racial state in South Africa. This war of words pits Hamas’s genocidal antisemitism against Israel’s reinvention of apartheid, a crime against humanity.
These conflicting visions also divide responses to Israel’s assault on Gaza. With heavy symbolism, it was the government of post-apartheid South Africa that brought the charge of genocide against Israel before the International Court of Justice late last year. Demonstrations across the globe have accused Israel of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. In court and on the street, Jews and Israel, the Jewish state, no longer feature only as victims of a foundational genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their allies, but are accused of perpetrating a genocide of their own.
Israel’s ministers and mainstream diaspora Jewish organizations, for their part, focus on antisemitism. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies issued this statement in January: “Global Jewry are united that the charges have at their root an antisemitic worldview, which denies Jews their rights to defend themselves.” Israel’s leaders and mainstream Jewish organizations elsewhere regard the demonstrations against Israel and in solidarity with Palestinians as expressions of rising antisemitism—and of indifference to the genocidal threat they identify not only with Hamas but also, more broadly, with the Palestinian demand for freedom “from the river to the sea.”
In short, some Jewish people are locked in a conflict with others who identify themselves as anti-racists. The disagreement is bitter. It is no trivial matter to tell someone they are an antisemite or a racist. And the conflict worsens as it reverberates in myriad local contexts. Since October 7, there has been a sharp spike in recorded antisemitic incidents in many countries; Jewish leaders have called this surge unprecedented. But others caution against scaremongering and suppressing protests in support of the people of Gaza and other Palestinians.
How did anti-antisemitism come to be separated from anti-racism in this way? To answer this question, first we must ask what we mean by “antisemitism” and “racism.”
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As the historian David Engel points out, antisemitism is a way for people to group and categorize a variety of phenomena that they believe share a quality and so belong together. When they call something “antisemitic,” they are not holding a mirror to the world so much as interpreting it.
Because “antisemitism” — as well as “racism,” for that matter — are ways of comprehending the world, it follows that these concepts have a history: There is a moment when they came into use, after which they evolved. Antisemitism did not mean in the 19th century what it has come to mean today. So, too, the relationship between anti-antisemitism and anti-racism hinges on the history of these terms, and it changes as their meanings change.
Jewish people have experienced adversity and antipathy for millennia, but it was only in the second half of the 19th century that the terms “antisemite,” “antisemitism” and “antisemitic” were coined. And it was only after 1880 that the new terminology began to circulate widely, first in Germany and then across the globe. In 1879, Wilhelm Marr created the League of Antisemites. Jews in Germany had been granted equal rights, finally, in 1871, and for Marr and others this was a grave error. To protect Germans and German culture from domination by Jews, they called for an end to equality for Jews in the Reich. This was the onset of the antisemitic political movement.
Jews and their allies, in turn, swiftly adopted the terms “antisemitism” and “antisemites” to refer to Marr’s self-proclaimed movement. In a long essay published in 1910 in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lucien Wolf contrasted the modern anti-Jewish campaign in Germany with pogroms in Russia in the 1880s. The latter were not an example of antisemitism, he argued, but “essentially a medieval uprising” animated by “religious fanaticism” and “gross superstition.” Just before World War I the German-Jewish Zionist Arthur Ruppin reflected, “the anti-Semitic movement grew up on German soil; it is almost as old as the enfranchisement of the Jews.” In other words, he believed antisemitism reached back no further than the late 19th century, and the campaign against antisemitism was a campaign for equal rights for Jewish people.
Within two decades the Third Reich in Germany would commence a radical assault on the rights of Jewish people. Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime issued 400 decrees and regulations to that end, beginning in April 1933 with the Jews’ exclusion from the civil service. Then in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws formally excluded Jews from citizenship. By 1941, the Nazi regime had embarked on its attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews. The assault on the rights of Jews had reached the right to life itself.
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And what of “racism”? The term can be traced to the beginning of the 20th century, but it was only after the triumph of National Socialism in Germany that it became widely used in the English language — to refer to the biologically based doctrines promoted by the Third Reich.
The first book in English reportedly to include the word in its title — Racism, in fact, was its title — was written by Magnus Hirschfeld in German, translated, and published posthumously in 1938. Hirschfeld examined the theories underpinning the doctrine of race war proclaimed by the leaders of the Third Reich. He regarded those as irrational. He wrote that he could see throughout Europe and the United States the “germs” of what in Germany had turned into “paroxysms of racism.” Racism, Hirschfeld argued, was based on a myth whose force conquered the heart not the head. He hoped to combat the mysticism of racial theories by subjecting them to unprejudiced scientific scrutiny.
This critique of race was integral to the project of reconstructing the world after 1945. In particular, it was a task undertaken by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. UNESCO’s constitution stated that “the great and terrible war which has now ended” had been made possible by “the doctrine of the inequality of men and races” and “ignorance and prejudice.”By taking the Nazi regime as the paradigmatic case, UNESCO helped to establish an influential postwar understanding of racism as something driven by bad ideas. Its official statement on race — entitled “The Race Question” — published in 1950, held that biological races were real but also that there was no evidence to connect these differences to the mental characteristics and cultural achievements of different human groups. UNESCO’s approach carried the hope that racial prejudice and discrimination would collapse once the erroneous nature of racial doctrines had been exposed.
At that point, the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against racism appeared as twin fronts in a single war. Both fights were seen as reactions to prejudice, and prejudice was based on myth. This interpretation reached far beyond the United Nations. It appeared, for example, in the writing of the Black American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois. In his 1952 essay on “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” Du Bois reflected on his shocking encounters with European antisemitism. He concluded that “the Negro problem” — namely, “the problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States” — was not “a separate and unique thing” but one part of a “race problem” that was “a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice.”
And if the problem of prejudice lay in pseudo-science, and in an aversion to difference to which some personality types were particularly vulnerable, then a remedy could be found in good science, education and the promotion of equality before the law. The fruits of the Black-Jewish allyship were visible in the American civil rights movement. In Britain, Holocaust memorialization in the 1960s was the occasion for Jewish leaders to voice support for legislation designed to counteract discrimination against immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia.
For a time, support for Zionism and a rose-tinted perception of Israel sat comfortably within this conception of anti-racism. The leaders of diaspora Zionism presented the nascent Jewish state as a step forward not only for Jews, but for humanity as well, compatible with the reassertion of equal rights that would make the world safe for all. Cosmopolitanism was the dominant sensibility among these diaspora Zionists. The leader of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein, once proclaimed, “the rights of Jews will only be secure when the rights of peoples of all faiths are secure.” How the Jewish state would deal with its own minorities was a vital question. In a 1952 speech, Maurice Perlzweig, a senior official of the World Jewish Congress, stated eloquently that, “Just as the liberty of every individual must in justice be limited by the equal right of other individuals, so the emancipation of a national group must be limited by the right of other national groups, however small or feeble.” In 1967, he claimed that Israel had passed this test: “every Arab citizen, as an Israeli citizen, has exactly the same rights as every Jewish-Israeli citizen.”
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