FACT SHEET
Despite the long history of violence against Jews and a genocide in which nearly two-thirds of the Jewish population were murdered, contemporary anti-Semitism is often under-recognised.
History
Anti-Semitism – hostility against Jews based in their faith and culture – is known as history’s oldest hatred, and can be dated back to the Hellenistic age. Over history, the narratives which generate anti-Semitism have altered, mutating from distrust of their culture and tendency towards isolationism, blame for the Crucifixion from Christians, and ‘racial science’ purporting to indicate that Jews are biologically inferior to other human beings.
Throughout the middle ages, Jewish people were denied citizenship and restricted to ghettoes. Many were massacred in pogroms in Russia from the 1880s. Outlandish myths about Jewish religious practices circulated, including the infamous ‘blood libel.’ During WW2, a dual narrative developed, in which Jews were depicted as both genetically inferior to those of ‘Aryan heritage’, yet simultaneously possessed of a sinister power and malicious intentions. This fantasy culminated in the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered.
Ideology
The conspiracy theory around Jewish power endures: despite being less than 0.2% of the global population, Jews are considered to control finance, the media and politics within the anti-Semitic imaginary. The source of this belief is a document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery circulated by Tsarist secret police in the early 20th century. These tropes have been repeated by world leaders such as Recep Erdoğan in Turkey and Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia. Viktor Orban’s 2017 campaign for the presidency of Hungary featured thousands of posters which used anti-Semitic imagery, insinuating that powerful Jews intended to flood the country with Muslim migrants.
White supremacists chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ at the University of Virginia – a reference to ‘the Great Replacement’, a theory which states that Jews seek to increase immigration in order to outnumber the white population – a manoeuvre that frequently combines anti-Muslim rhetoric with anti-Semitism. Yet in the Muslim world, Jewish populations have all but vanished. There had historically been a population of around million Jews in the Middle East and North Africa around the end of the 1940s, but hundreds of thousands were expelled or migrated to avoid persecution after the founding of the Israeli state.
Impact
Anti-Semitism is often overlooked as a serious form of discrimination. As David Baddiel writes in Jews Don’t Count, discourses based in ‘privilege’ tend to erase the prejudice which can be faced by groups which are not recognised as facing material disadvantages. The championing of the Palestinian cause has frequently been used to obscure a significant issue with anti-Semitism with the political left, yoking age-old prejudices to contemporary political concerns, and holding individual Jews responsible for the actions of the state of Israel.
As a result, Jewish populations often feel precarious – and remain at risk of violence. In 2018, a white supremacist massacred 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and in 2019, another killed three Jews in California, claiming inspiration from Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the massacre in two mosques in New Zealand. Yet this risk is often dismissed: 60% of all hate crimes in 2018 in the USA had Jews as their targets – over three times as many attacks as on Muslims, despite being a smaller population.