The night finally arrived. After more than two centuries of slavery, the moment of liberation was at hand. For an entire year, the Egyptians had endured a series of devastating blows. We watched, waited, and prepared. Now it was time to leave.
But there was one final task before we departed; one last instruction we were commanded to fulfill. We were told to “borrow” gold, silver, and clothing from our Egyptian neighbors. We were instructed to ask for them, not to seize them – despite generations of unpaid labor and abuse. Redemption would not arrive through force or vengeance but through request and restraint.
When slavery began, we were cast as a threat to society. Pharaoh could only sell his genocidal policy to the broader Egyptian public by turning us into a symbol of danger. We were portrayed as a fifth column – living apart, culturally insular, clustered in our own enclave, and allegedly poised to align with Egypt’s enemies and displace the native population. We were depicted as a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
This narrative of fear allowed Pharaoh to demonize us. We were transformed into the enemy, made to embody the darkest anxieties and unspoken insecurities of Egyptian society. Suspicion curdled into hostility, and hostility made oppression feel justified and even necessary.
By the time of the Exodus, our standing had shifted dramatically. In that altered climate, it was natural for Egyptians to offer gifts as we prepared to depart into the desert. Moses had become a public figure who confronted a tyrant no one else dared challenge.
The plagues struck Egypt while passing over our homes. The devastation of the night of Passover (Pessah – “jumping over,” “bypassing”) spared our firstborn entirely. It became unmistakable that we were a people protected by God. Where we had once been treated as a lower class, we were now regarded with awe and respect.
That reversal was essential for our own national self-understanding. After centuries of abuse and ridicule, we could finally see ourselves as worthy bearers of God’s message in the world. A people once vilified and feared was now recognized as favored, protected, and watched over.
Slavery began with our being cast as society’s threat. Tragically, it would not be the last time a hostile culture would project its fears onto us and cast us as the cause of its troubles and instability.
Same fear, new forms
Throughout Christian history, we were repeatedly targeted on theological grounds. It was deeply unsettling for Christians that the original chosen people did not accept their new faith. That refusal was recast as rebellion against God itself. We were portrayed as a cursed people, condemned to lives of poverty and disgrace so that our suffering could serve as supposed proof of Christian truth.
After the Black Plague ravaged Europe in the 14th century, the pattern returned with brutal force. We were accused of poisoning wells. In 15th-century Spain, the charge shifted but the underlying logic remained unchanged. Once again, we Marranos were falsely accused – this time, of secretly undermining Christianity while outwardly conforming to it.
The dynamic that began in Egypt reappeared across generations, in different lands and under different guises, but always driven by the same fear and the same need to assign blame to a convenient target.
In the modern world, the tone of antisemitism shifted. For centuries, we lived as an underprivileged class, pushed to the margins of society – often confined to ghettos and burdened by legal and social restrictions. We held little power or influence. When societies sought a defenseless target, we were again an easy and familiar choice.
That changed with our emancipation in Europe from the late 18th to early 20th centuries. We then gradually became equal members of society. Given opportunity, many of us rose to positions of prominence and influence. This transformation unleashed a darker fantasy. No longer despised for weakness, we were now feared for the opposite: supposed power. We were accused of secretly controlling banks and governments – and later, the media and culture itself.
'Protocols of the Elders'
The most infamous embodiment of this fantasy was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a crude forgery that peddled the myth of a clandestine Jewish cabal manipulating institutions under the guise of public good. Ironically, some Jewish communists themselves repeated these myths. In trying to dismantle old orders, they lent credibility to fantasies that portrayed Jews as manipulators of the very systems they claimed to oppose.
During World War II, Hitler portrayed the conflict as something forced upon him by shadowy Jewish power operating in the West. Nazi aggression was recast as self-defense. Even the United States, he claimed, had been dragged into the war against its will. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was depicted as a puppet, an instrument of Jewish interests steering America into catastrophe.
According to these baseless claims, we were no longer merely disloyal citizens or economic exploiters but became the hidden architects of global calamity. World wars themselves were recast as Jewish creations and Jewish plots.
This final mutation – the belief that Jews engineer wars while others do the fighting – is reemerging today. As the United States has grown more assertive in confronting Islamist extremism and aligned regimes, familiar accusations have resurfaced.
Once again, intervention is portrayed not as a response to danger but as the product of Jewish influence and pressure. The fantasy persists: We are cast as the invisible hand behind history’s violence, blamed not only for crises but even for resisting them.
While they are wrong, in one narrow sense, they stumble onto something true.
Not our war alone
We have never drawn foreign nations into war on our behalf. We have never coerced empires into conflict for Jewish interests. What is true is that the battles we fight are often battles against forces that threaten humanity itself. Our enemies – and now the enemies of the Jewish state – are not merely anti-Jewish: They are forces that seek chaos, cruelty, and destruction on a global scale.
At some point, larger nations recognize this danger. They understand that such threats will not remain contained. And when they act, they do so not because Jews compel them but because liberty, freedom, and human dignity require defense.
The Nazis did not threaten us alone: They threatened civilization itself. Western nations eventually grasped this and mobilized – not out of loyalty to Jews but out of moral necessity and self-preservation.
Communism, too, was not merely a danger to Jewish survival. It undermined the foundations of a world desperate for stability after two devastating wars. And though we had no army, Jewish refuseniks were among the first to challenge Soviet authority. Years later, when Natan Sharansky crossed the Glienicke Bridge to freedom, the Russian people soon followed with the fall of the Iron Curtain.
For decades, we have confronted the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism and the corrupted notion that God desires death and bloodshed. We warned of an aggressive culture that shows little regard for human life or religious freedom. Those warnings were often dismissed or minimized.
Now the world is finally absorbing the lesson we learned through pain. The effort to confront this violence is not being undertaken in the service of the Jewish state. It is undertaken in defense of what is right, what is moral, and what preserves civilization itself.
These values are not uniquely Jewish; they are human values. They simply align with Jewish history and with our long struggle against forces that glorify cruelty and sanctify destruction.
The pattern is not Jewish manipulation; it is moral recognition. When we are targeted, it is often because we stand up early, visibly, and stubbornly against dangers that will eventually threaten. And when others finally join the fight, it is not because they were coerced but because they have come to see the truth.■