Decades ago, when we commemorated Tisha B’Av at Young Judaea’s Camp Tel Yehudah, we related to the long list of Jewish traumas as historical events that afflicted our unfortunate ancestors, forever ago, in ghettoized galaxies far, far away. Born into the post-Auschwitz covenant, we considered Jew-hatred passé, doomed, like racism. Alas, today, it’s surging.
Jew-hatred spikes when societies are under stress and totalitarian thinking spreads, Left and Right. Antisemitism is humanity’s totalitarian swamp thing. This creature thrives when people start mistrusting one another, thinking in all-or-nothing terms, seeking scapegoats, or being stirred by demagogues.
Over centuries, this swamp creature acquired certain characteristics; that’s why Jews keep getting accused of being devilish, committing the most hated acts of the moment, seeking power and money. While each bigoted act is uniquely despicable, Jew-bashers often build on slurs festering in the swamp. That makes antisemitism particularly useful to haters: from this foundation of familiar lies, it can be constantly updated – as we see with today’s anti-Zionist antisemitism abroad, and Jew-hating, anti-Zionism against Israelis.
In my forthcoming book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jew-Hatred, I define antisemitism as an obsessive hatred exaggerating the centrality and supposed wickedness of Jews and anything Jewish – the Jewish people, Jewish tradition and values, Jewish institutions, and Israel, the Jewish state. The disproportionate hatred is often expressed through demonization, delegitimization, and double standards – Natan Sharansky’s “3 Ds.”
Since October 7, 2023, I have added the word “obsessive.” Millions are preoccupied, exaggerating one country’s alleged sins, while leftists and rightists each find much to hate in the Jewish state or the Jews. I also now distinguish between “Jew-hatred,” when bullies beat Jews, versus “antisemitism” the obsessive conspiracy-minded ideology that even lovely professors embrace, perpetually lambasting the Jew or the Jewish state.
A history of tragedy
The many calamities Jews endured on Tisha B’av, the ninth day of the month of Av, reveal antisemitism to be the longest hatred and the most plastic hatred – moldable, artificial, often toxic. When the fast starts this Saturday night, Jews will time-travel throughout bloody centuries, while noting today’s hostilities too.
Putting Jewish tragedy in perspective, the First Temple’s destruction in 586 BCE was devastating, but it probably wasn’t “antisemitic.” The Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar conquered Israel. Destroying the Temple hurt the Jewish religion, but other conquered nation-states endured similar fates.
A rapacious empire also destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. But the Romans escalated their war against Judea into a pagan war against Judaism and the Jews, reflected in their obsession with defiling the Holy Temple.
After the Romans crushed Bar Kochba’s revolt – on Tisha B’av, 132 CE – they committed “historicide,” trying to kill the Jews’ ties to Israel by renaming Judea, “Syria Palaestina.” One year later, on the ninth of Av, Turnus Rufus plowed over the destroyed Temple’s site as the Romans christened Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina.”
During the chaos, a monotheistic rival to Judaism formed – Christianity. In spreading throughout the empire before Rome fell in 476, distancing themselves from their Jewish roots but still enmeshed in Roman pagan power-plays, some Christians honed a new anti-Jewish, theologically based bigotry.
As the Catholic Church dominated key monarchies, and Jews settled in Christian Europe, Jews became the favorite scapegoat. In 1095, when Pope Urban II declared the first Crusade on Tisha B’av, the murder of 10,000 Jews symbolized the growing intensity of the medieval church’s Jew-hatred.
Such bloodiness, from the Crusades through the Holocaust, fed a myth that Islam was not antisemitic. If the only mode of bigotry is mass murder, Muslims rarely descended that low – until recently, alas. But Islamic law deemed Jews, “Dhimmis,” like Christians, born inferior. And as Jews lived for centuries in North Africa and the Middle East, including in Ottoman-era Palestine, they suffered periodic riots and ongoing oppression.
On Tisha B’Av 1290, the Jews’ expulsion from England added another dimension to antisemitism. The haters seized the Jews’ books and property. Increasingly, greed, sometimes economic jealousy when Jews prospered, intensified the theologically based hatred.
Although Arabs attacked Jews increasingly as Zionism flourished, Arabs rioted with particular intensity when Jews prayed at the Western Wall on Tisha B’av, 1929. Now, Islamist Jew-hatred fed by nationalist venom spawned Arab Jew-hatred, today’s bloodiest form of antisemitism.
The Nazis updated their antisemitism by adding pseudo-scientific “racial” dimensions.
Targeting Jewish bloodlines, they persecuted German Lutherans raised by Protestant parents, if even one grandparent was Jewish. On Tisha B’Av 1942, the Nazis killed their first Jews in Treblinka. By year’s end, they murdered 713,555 people there, making it the second deadliest death camp, following Auschwitz.
In 1994, Hezbollah terrorists, trained by Iran’s anti-Zionist Revolutionary Guards, blew up the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. By murdering 86 people and wounding 300 others, they blurred Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism, as haters so often do today.
Antisemitism is the longest hatred partly by sheer longevity; Jews have survived since ancient times, to be targeted still. But the plasticity of antisemitism, far Left to far Right, among pro-Trump white supremacists and progressive universalists, among monotheistic Islamists and atheistic Marxists, is more vexing. Although constituting only a sliver of the world’s population, Jews are prominent enough to be hated for standing out and fitting in. That made them excellent targets, then and now.
Contemplating this Tisha B’av litany, it’s easy to despair. Instead, learn from some religious Jews in Jerusalem. They stop fasting at 5 p.m., and read quotations from the prophets envisioning a time when children, laughter, and light will return to Jerusalem’s streets… because we’re living that dream now!
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath, were just published.