Antisemitism: A Genealogy 

Antisemitism is back. It never really left, but after the Holocaust it dramatically subsided in the West. Now, as the generations that lived through World War II fade away, growing numbers of non-Jews are intimidating Jews or doing violence to them. Other gentiles are voicing fears of secret Jewish conspiracies, orchestrated by the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and the state of Israel, which is blamed for crimes like the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It does not matter that Epstein’s activity has already been thoroughly examined in court (with no such conspiracy found); or that Charlie Kirk was a friend of Israel and was praised by its leaders; or that many accusations against the Israeli government do not fit the facts of what it has done; or that many Jews do not approve every policy of whichever coalition currently governs Israel. Many people are still inclined to conclude from little evidence that the Jewish people on the whole, in Israel, America, and elsewhere, are secretly in league to guide the course of human affairs to bad ends.  

Even if others don’t know what to think of the conspiracy theories, they might suspect the theories could be true. As the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism, there is a strong tendency in human beings “to believe that violent hatred or sudden rebellion”—in this case against Jewish people—“spring necessarily from great power and great abuses [of the accused] and that consequently organized hatred of the Jews cannot but be a reaction to their importance and power.” On the other hand, some opponents of antisemitism might make matters worse by claiming that antisemitism is utterly incomprehensible, something that arises by chance. Such mystification prevents the rational analysis that could refute antisemitism as the moral offense that it is. Also unreasonable is the belief that there is an “eternal antisemitism,” by which, in Arendt’s words, “Jew-hatred is a normal and natural reaction to which history gives only more or less opportunity.” This theory yields the horrific conclusion that “Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation, and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument”; it “would absolve Jew-haters of crimes”—such as the Holocaust—“greater than anybody had ever believed possible.” The persistence of the idea, Arendt laments, reflects the fact that, ever since the appearance of totalitarianism, humanity has come to suspect that there is no justice in the world: terror strikes everyone equally, with the same arbitrariness with which the Nazis and Soviets ruled their victims, “regardless of what they had done or omitted to do, regardless of vice or virtue.” In this view, the perpetrators of evil are always as innocent as the victims.  

The best way to refute antisemitism, Arendt argues, is to do real historical work, showing how it arose not from the causes that antisemites allege—a moral or racial flaw in the Jewish people—but from the complicated intersection of separate historical trends. The sophists of Plato’s time, Arendt says, “destroyed the dignity of human thought” by “manipulat[ing] … logic”; the sophistic ideologues of our time, including many antisemites, are “manipulators of facts.” Ancient sophists “were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth”; they had to be refuted by philosophers. Modern sophists “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality”; they “destroy the dignity of human action.” Their lies must therefore be refuted by the historian. Arendt’s Origins provides an outstanding such refutation of the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust. She argues not that antisemitism caused totalitarianism, but that the former was one of the key “elements which crystallized into totalitarianism” (as she said in reply to Eric Voegelin’s critique of the book). Her arguments are still useful today, both to refute antisemitic lies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that are reappearing, and to help us identify the roots of today’s antisemitism.   

Surviving Without a State 

Many ancient and medieval Christians hated Jews in the name of Christianity, even though Christianity in fact does not support antisemitism. The dying Jesus forgave both the gentiles and Jews who were historically responsible for his death. Peter, the head of the Apostles, declared that the Jewish leaders “acted in ignorance” when they crucified Jesus. And Christianity clearly teaches that every human being, gentile or Jew, is in need of forgiveness; all our sins, not just any one set of people’s actions in one particular time in history, were the ultimate reason for Jesus’s atoning death. Nevertheless, many early Christian bishops—Athanasius, John Chrysostom, and others—could be extremely hard on Jews in their preaching, even unjust. And the occasional peasant mobs that took their anger out on the Jews (often egged on by preachers, as during several of the crusades) claimed to act in God’s name. Because of that sad history (and in light of the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis and many Christian collaborators) the Catholic Church felt called in the last century to repudiate antisemitism, more clearly than ever, as contrary to the Gospel.  

But such “religious Jew-hatred,” as Arendt prefers to call it, is different from modern antisemitism. The latter was born not of Christianity, but of complex economic and political developments over centuries.  

From the early Middle Ages until the reform of western European laws during and after the French Revolution (and until much later in many places), Jews were segregated from the rest of European society. As scholars other than Arendt have discussed in greater detail, medieval and early modern Jews occupied a distinct, second-class legal category. They existed at the pleasure of the larger political community, clustered in separate villages or neighborhoods within cities (if they were allowed into a country at all), and they were not allowed to bear arms. Unlike the other nations of Europe, they had no government of their own to advocate for them. Their religion was similar enough to Christianity to earn the resentment of many of their Christian neighbors, because Jews did not enter the Church themselves. 

Contrary to later stereotypes, most Jews were poorly educated. Early on, they were mostly peasant farmers—more like the humble Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof than the brilliant Jewish-American statesman Henry Kissinger. In eastern Europe that pattern continued well into modern times; in western Europe, Jews were so often displaced from their land that a high proportion gave up agriculture to live in cities. Over time many of the latter became respectable members of the middle class, but very few were rich or influential. The fact that today many gentiles associate Jews with above-average wealth, cultural achievements, and political influence has less to do with anything intrinsic to Jews racially or culturally than with historical accidents external to Judaism. Jews, like any cultural group, are mostly ordinary people; although a more visible few, with greater talent and ambition, disproportionately shape non-Jews’ views of the Jewish people.  

Before Jews gained legal equality, and even after as anti-Jewish prejudices persisted, Jews who wanted to improve their lot had few options open to them.  

One was to serve as bankers and merchants for princes and kings. Many activities of government (as Adam Smith points out) cannot support themselves financially; an army does not earn back the goods it uses (unless it unjustly sets out to conquer its neighbors). Such activities, however, are vital for government, and they require a good deal of upfront capital investment, sometimes more than what the government already has. The lesser nobility seldom contributed such funds voluntarily, since national affairs were thought to be the king’s sole responsibility. Hence kings often needed loans. But lenders rightly expect interest in recompense for parting with their capital temporarily, and for much of the Middle Ages, many Christians thought they could not take loans at interest from other Christians—although they could from Jews. Many Jews, in turn, believed they could not charge interest to other Jews, but they could to Christians; thus Christian kings often took loans from Jews.  

Recent scholarship has suggested that this account of Jewish moneylending (which Arendt presumes) was more complicated (in fact, Christians were also lending money, but Jewish lenders were more often the object of popular resentment). However, Jews’ connections to other Jewish communities in foreign countries did give them an advantage in banking, because, as Arendt points out, it gave them a wide, reliable network through which to raise funds. It also gave them an advantage in trade, which European princes wanted to foster to increase the wealth in their lands. Jews had access to luxury goods in Muslim lands that were less accessible to most Europeans, ever since Islam’s conquest of the Mediterranean Sea. 

Jews also had an important incentive to earn the king’s good will: he could protect them from the violence of anti-Jewish peasant mobs. Although many European kingdoms expelled Jews from their borders in the Late Middle Ages, before then most states had protected their Jewish communities; violence against Jews was normally the work of spontaneous popular uprisings. Religious leaders and popes condemned such violence and the spread of myths like the blood libel (the gruesome claim, which is reappearing today, that Jews sacrificed Christian infants in secret rituals), often with little effect. Lamentably, however, many Christian leaders also made Jews wear special clothing; and after the tumult of the Reformation, many Catholic countries forced Jews to live apart in walled-in ghettos. Although these measures protected Jews from mobs, they also penned them inside, exacerbating the division between Jews and Christians, and emphasizing Jews’ second-class, servile status. Nevertheless, across history many Christian rulers did protect Jews in their realms, whether purely out of economic interest, or also from gratitude for the services of Jewish bankers, or even (one might hope) out of genuine pity or kindness. These rulers earned loyalty and gratitude both from the more educated Jews who worked for them and from the larger Jewish community. 

Another career open to ambitious Jews was diplomacy. The same international networks that gave Jews an advantage in banking and commerce, when combined with their presence in most European courts (to serve as court financiers), made these so-called “court Jews” ideally situated to act as diplomatic mediators between the princes of Europe. These elite Jews easily formed bonds with each other across political boundaries, thanks to their common ethnicity, religion, and social status. Moreover the princes could rely on them, because Jews had less interest in national politics directly, given that they belonged to a different (and stateless) nation; their loyalty to their prince was entirely personal, and therefore often intense, hence they were often faithful agents of their lord’s will.  

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the figure of the court Jew had become common across Europe. This was true even in countries that had expelled Jews in the Middle Ages: as religious toleration spread, many princes invited Jews back to their realms (albeit often for the economic reasons already discussed). Court Jews (and the so-called “port Jew” traders in key commercial cities) were able to secure wealth and legal privileges that their poorer brethren did not enjoy. But by winning their prince’s favor, these Jewish leaders did win the prince’s promise to protect their Jewish coreligionists in his territory. Those rulers changed as dynasties died off or were supplanted by outside conquerors; but then Jewish leaders usually transferred their loyalty to the new prince to ensure that they continued to be protected. Jews were not out to dominate the world; they were rather seeking the best for themselves that they could hope for in very difficult circumstances, offering their services to the state in return for permission to live and serve God as their ancestors had done. 

Genesis of a Genocide 

But in time, Arendt argues, this strategy turned against the Jews, as the political establishment with which they were closely allied alienated more and more people. 

In the early modern period, government became increasingly complicated, requiring the expansion of the state apparatus. And yet, as theories of royal absolutism flourished, kings gradually reduced the status and privileges of many aristocratic ministers in favor of more loyal and competent experts, including the Jews in their employment. The loss of royal favor made aristocrats resent the state and the Jews who replaced them. Separately, Enlightenment intellectuals began to despise Jews as a holdover of the Dark Ages: they adhered to a “patriarchal” religion and were ministers of the ancien régime. 

After the French Revolution, court Jews transferred their loyalty to the new, more democratic regimes in order to win their protection. This shift earned Jews the anger of many who lost public influence after the Revolution, including many Catholic prelates, as James Patterson and Thomas Howes have related. The new governments still needed Jewish bankers, however. The aristocracy was less willing to help the state financially than ever, now that they no longer dominated government ministries; and the new industrialists, who were mostly non-Jews, were interested in investing only in business. The early 1800s therefore saw the continued rise of great Jewish banking houses, above all that of the Rothschild family.  

But governments’ reliance on Jewish loans lessened toward the end of the century, as states became so well organized, and as domestic markets became so exhausted, that gentile industrialists got the idea of using their states’ armies to open new markets via colonization. Governments from then on could rely on investments from businessmen. But this era of imperialistic international competition then devolved into the Great War, which shattered Europe’s international order and its remaining monarchies. Old monarchical Europe’s pursuit of “the balance of power,” which recognized each state’s right to exist, devolved into postmonarchical Europe’s policy of, as Arendt calls it, “victory or death” in pursuit of “the complete annihilation of the enemy.” International diplomacy as Europe had known it came to an end. Therefore, the role of the court Jews, who had been key to the old “Concert of Europe,” became obsolete, and Jews no longer had an obvious role to play in the gentiles’ world. 

Yet many Jews remained more visible than ever. The house of Rothschild—with five branches, each based in a major European capital—underwrote many wars and other state projects. After they gained legal equality with gentiles in the early 1800s, the children of Jewish merchants and diplomats became ambitious for success in new, more publicly visible fields, such as the arts and intellectual life. And because they could not escape their Jewishness entirely, they had to present it as an asset, therefore emphasizing their ethnicity even more.  

Yet these Jews presented Judaism in terms not of religion but of the racialist ideas that had spread throughout an increasingly secular Europe. This secularization of Jewish identity had already begun in the early modern period, as both Jews and gentiles began to think that religion was less important in distinguishing peoples than, as Arendt puts it, the “inner nature” of each nation. (The breakup of Christendom had facilitated this change of view.) The least religious and most worldly Jews therefore became some of the most public representatives of their people. Their greatest exemplar, Arendt argues, was Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister of the United Kingdom. He was baptized (by his Jewish father, so that Benjamin would have greater social opportunities), but he was not religious as an adult, and he emphasized his membership in the Jewish race strongly. (Disraeli also fostered European racialism generally, Arendt contends, because it helped justify the existence of the British empire, which he so strongly supported.) Like any politician, he yearned for power and influence, and he could not believe that not all Jews felt the same way. Early in life he even believed in and spread the idea that an ambitious, secret Jewish cabal existed, because he, like many at the time, presumed that secret societies (aristocrats, the Catholic Church, the Jesuits, the Masons) ran the world. (In Disraeili’s case the theory also helped him explain why he encountered so much resistance as he tried to climb up Britain’s social ladder.) After confronting the banal reality, he concluded (in the words of other authors) that “the aims of the Jews … were, in his day, largely divorced from the assertion of political nationality in any form.” 

Disraeli and other nonreligious Jews helped create the stereotype that came to be used against their own people: by playing into the secular, racial ideologies of their time, and arguing that Jews were more intelligent and successful by nature, and hence worthy of being accepted into elite society, they set up the racialist backlash against Jews of which Nazism became the leading element. Because of Disraeli and others, the likes of Hitler could more easily argue that all Jews were cunning and bent on global domination.  

And yet most Jews remained far from the halls of power, many still living as poor farmers like the ones in Tevye’s village. Even economically powerful Jews like the Rothschilds had no global political ambitions, either for themselves or for the Jewish people as a whole. In the nineteenth century, the wealthiest Jews tried to distance themselves from the Jewish masses to get accepted into society. Like other elite Europeans, they had become secularized and uninterested in religion or in traditional Jewish eschatological hopes—like the coming of the Messiah and returning to the Holy Land. Their greatest loyalty was more to their particular family than to the Jewish people. (The Rothschild banking empire was emphatically a family business, each branch started by a different son of the founding patriarch.) 

But the new Jewish stereotype, combined with the disintegration of the early modern state, created a perfect storm. The various groups that had been alienated by the state over the preceding centuries—impoverished aristocrats, politically weakened churches, the “déclassés of all classes” as Arendt puts it—coalesced around anger at the state establishment. “[A]nd the only social group which seemed to represent the state were the Jews,” many of whom retained the wealth they had earned in the state’s service in times past, a fact that exacerbated antisemites’ bitterness. The Nazis were precisely the party of these alienated groups: in them, the mob, from which states had once protected the Jews, itself became the state.  

At first Jewish leaders tried to placate the new regime the same way they had won over the old ones: by offering their services to the government as a show of goodwill. But Nazi antisemitism was not mere appearance, or a passing fad, or the distortion of a fundamentally good religion like Christianity; it was a deep hatred, born of neopagan, racialist ideology, and fueled by bitter, irrational grievances. By the time the truth of the matter became clear, it was too late for many. Millions of Jews were slaughtered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and the rest; or by the Einsatzgruppen firing squads, which followed the German armies as they marched east into Ukraine and Russia. 

The Mystery of Evil 

As I suggested earlier, antisemitic conspiracy theories are seductive in part because, when a belief is so widespread and persistent, many presume it must be true. But Arendt’s genealogy of antisemitism shows that, in fact, antisemitic theories have a shallow and simplistic understanding of reality. Hatred of Jews in the West has not stemmed from any intrinsic moral trait of all Jews or all gentiles but from the complicated vicissitudes of human history. Antisemitism, like any conspiracy theory, is an affront to common sense and to the moral freedom and responsibility of every individual, Jew or gentile. Man’s agency cannot fit into simple categories; it can only be understood by a careful examination of how that agency plays out in time. Arendt is an admirable champion of such moral realism. 

That said, even serious scholars like Arendt have their flaws. Arendt’s Origins became infamous among many of her fellow Jews for her criticism of the European Jewish community for not foreseeing the dangers of its survival strategy. As Samantha Powers notes in her introduction to Origins: “Arendt’s critique of European Jewry’s ‘political ignorance,’ combined with her later charge in Eichmann in Jerusalem that certain Jewish community leaders had been too acquiescent in the Holocaust, earned her the wrath of several generations of critics.” On such points, Arendt’s sense of moral responsibility and her stress on historical analysis, which elsewhere are great strengths, may go too far.  

On one hand they push her, rightly, to find the explanation for hatred of Jews not in intrinsic racial characteristics of Jews or non-Jews, and not solely in exceptionally bad men like Adolf Hitler, but also in what she called, in Eichmann, “the banality of evil”: much of the evil in the world derives not from forces beyond our control, but from common human failings, which are in our power to resist if we but take our own agency seriously.  

And yet Arendt’s lack of religious sensibility (she called herself an agnostic) may explain why, in places, her account seems to underestimate the nature of evil, including in relation to modern antisemitism—as though it were merely the product of human agency. With a more religious perspective, Arendt might have incorporated better into her account the truth that human cowardice, irresponsibility, or even human sins, cannot explain certain evils entirely. They certainly cannot account for Hitler’s effect on history.  

As the Catholic theologian, and later pope, Joseph Ratzinger recalled (echoing others), before his rise Hitler “had loafed around not doing much of anything and had no real education.” He was “really just a quite banal hoodlum” (words that Arendt herself might have used). But the fact that precisely such an unimpressive man “could set a century in motion, that he could make political decisions with demonic insight and could make people listen to him, even educated people,” suggests that something superhumanly evil was also at work in him. He showed a strange ability to foresee exactly how certain events would go; indeed, “there are reliable reports by eyewitnesses that suggest he had some kind of demonic encounters, that he would say, trembling: ‘He was there again,’ and other such things.” (And the highly erudite Ratzinger was not a man given to superstition.)  

Pious Christians and Jews should have little difficulty imagining why the prince of darkness should have an interest in using pawns like Hitler to torment the Jewish people. For one, the Jews have been specially chosen—loved—by God (the devil’s nemesis) before all the nations of the world, to be his first witnesses; and God’s love is everlasting. And if Christians are correct, when the Jewish people embrace—freely, never forced by anyone—what Jesus proclaimed to be the fullness of God’s will for humanity in himself, not only will they perhaps experience greater joy than even gentile Christians can, but then all the biblical prophecies—of both Old and New Testaments—about the reign of the Kingdom of God on earth will come to fulfillment. Then the Messiah will come, for the final time, and bring “life from the dead,” as Paul put it—an end to the last remnants of evil’s reign on earth. Surely the powers of malice would wish to delay that day as much as possible by sowing enmity between gentiles and Jews through such nightmares as the Holocaust. Against such evil (and against the masses of Germans who supported Hitler, and against the unwillingness of other countries to resist Hitler until it was too late) many Jewish leaders, not to mention the masses of ordinary Jews, understandably felt overwhelmed.  

Evil is one of the great mysteries of human history; reason cannot fully comprehend it, especially the mystery of what purpose God has in allowing evil to have its way in an event as horrifying as the Holocaust, in which both Jews and Christians were murdered on an unimaginable scale. Religious Jews know from the prophet Isaiah that the sufferings of the servants of God are a source of atonement and healing for the world’s sins. Christian Jews like Edith Stein—a victim of Auschwitz—were also able to find meaning in their suffering as a participation in the sufferings of Jesus, in whom Isaiah’s prophecy, Christians believe, found perfect fulfillment.  

Equality, Transcendently Understood 

That said, Arendt is right that there is never nothing we can do in the face of evil; nor can we blame evil entirely on mysterious, supernatural forces, and absolve ourselves of all guilt in our bad choices. Religious believers know that evil cannot succeed in the world unless bad men choose to cooperate with it and good men choose not to cooperate with God to overcome it. In Arendt’s spirit, in our own day we might consider seriously why antisemitism has reemerged on the left and the right in the United States, and what we should do in response.  

Why might the Jewish people become an object of suspicion in today’s America? American Jews were never bankers and diplomats to powerful kings and princes as they were in Europe, nor were their numbers historically as large as in the Old World before the Holocaust. However, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, “equality of conditions” is the “primary fact” of American democracy; in it the whole modern Western democratic movement finds its strongest expression. But Arendt warns that equality is also “among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind.” “The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people.” In a society predicated on equality, people can tolerate some differences provided that they recognize a most fundamental level on which all are equal. In the West that foundation historically has been every man’s equality before “an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death.”  

But what if a critical mass of people stop taking God and human immortality seriously, either from apathy or by outright denial of those truths? Then, in Arendt’s words, “equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained.” It will be treated as “an innate quality of every individual”—the normal condition of human beings. That assumption, however, flies in the face of reality, because each individual has unique characteristics. Inevitably, those who want to believe in human equality, but who ignore or reject man’s transcendent condition, will be inclined to treat people who differ from the majority as “abnormal.” In the United States, which, Arendt says, has “the most unequal population in the world” (made up of people of all races and nations, of a broad spectrum of economic achievement) the potential for social antipathies to emerge, once religiosity declines (as it has done in recent decades), is very high. Arendt speculated that Jews could one day become the object of such suspicion in America on account of “the simple reason that they, alone among all other groups, have themselves, within their history and their religion, expressed a well-known principle of separation,” on account of their being made “holy” (literally “set apart”) by God. And indeed, some contemporary American critics of Jews (critics who often claim to be Christian but have an attitude far different from that of Jesus) speak this same language—alleging that the religion of Judaism gives rise to “blood and soil nationalism.” 

There are also growing numbers of Americans who are looking for some kind of object on which to vent their anger. Now, as in the Europe of a hundred years ago, many people feel aggrieved at their inability to escape cycles of suffering: poverty, broken families, drug addiction, pornography addiction, underemployment, and other ills are today making more and more people feel alone and bitter. Their feelings of resentment and helplessness make them ready to believe that the causes of their problems are forces “out there” that are programming “the system” against them. Such people may need the help of better social policies on the part of government. They also need help to see that, as Arendt counsels, the cause of much of the ills of life is not in systemic ills or conspiracies, but in the failure of each of us to take seriously our agency and responsibility. But perhaps most of all they need help to see that in their sufferings they are never alone: a superhuman, transcendent power, infinitely greater than the evil that influenced Adolf Hitler, is always at their side and able to help them overcome evil. Indeed, he will do most of the heavy lifting, if only we persevere in seeking his aid, striving to act justly toward him and our neighbor, and fleeing from sin. Even if God does not do away with the sufferings of this life, he can at least help us to see a meaning to them, which we will understand fully only in the life to come.  

If we regain an appreciation for this transcendent perspective on our lives, it will be much easier to recognize that each of us, whether gentile or Jew, deserves respect, justice, and mercy; because we are made in the image and likeness of the God who created all men equal. Such religious conversion, aided by a more serious study of history, as Hannah Arendt offers us, will help our society keep at bay antisemitism and whatever sinister ideology wayward human minds may devise. 

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