Antisemitism: The Oldest and Most Enduring Form of Bigotry
Today’s Democratic Socialists, Groypers, and radical Islamist are Johnny-Come-Lately bigots espousing age-old antisemitic canards, tropes and libels.
As far back as a 3rd-century BCE, Egyptian priest and historian Manetho, wrote a history of Egypt that distorted the Biblical Exodus story. He wrote a counter-narrative to the Biblical Exodus in his work Aegyptiaca that shaped early pagan anti-Jewish thought. Instead of depicting the Israelites as oppressed slaves liberated by Divine power, he portrayed them as a diseased, outcast group expelled from Egypt to appease their pagan gods.
He claimed that the Israelites were a group of diseased lepers who were expelled from Egypt for being unclean and hostile to the local gods. Later Greco-Roman writers in Alexandria expanded on these themes. Because Jews refused to worship pagan deities or assimilate into Hellenistic culture, the ancient pagan denizens accused them of being antisocial, misanthropic, and separatist.
Over time, hatred shifted into religious anti-Judaism and blood libel myths (the false accusation that Jews used Christian blood for rituals) starting in 12th-century England.
The actual word antisemitism was coined much later in 1879 by German agitator Wilhelm Marr, shifting the prejudice from a religious framework to a pseudo-scientific racial ideology.
Today, antisemitic attitudes are extraordinarily prevalent in many Muslim-majority countries, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, with three-quarters or more of adults in many countries accepting many classic antisemitic stereotypes.
The ever-changing landscape of antisemitic rhetoric poisoning today’s social media takes many forms, but it all filters down to a single, exhausting refrain far-leftist, far-rightist and Islamist, chant in unison: “everyone hates the Jews.”
Can their consensus be right, or is that trifecta of anti-Semites simply echoing the script du riguer
Shockingly, according to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z’l, the hatred of Jews by that unholy trinity is structural. He argued that antisemitism is woven directly into the very fabric of their ethos and not merely a transient prejudice. It is a deeply embedded, mutating virus that failing organizations and cultures repeatedly deploy to cope with their own crises and internal deficiencies.
It is an old story.
From the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to the early Romans and the Holy Roman Empire to modern nation-states, Western civilization has always been obsessed with empire, conformity, and forcing everyone into the exact same box. Universalism was and is still the goal of civilizations, manifested in the worship of one pharaoh, one emperor, one dictator. But there was always that stubborn, highly visible minority, the Jews, who refused to blend in and held fast to their particularism. We stood our ground, insisting on the “right to be different.” To a culture that demands total assimilation, a group that maintains its own distinct identity, faith, practices and laws is an existential irritant and threat.
Because the elements of the West never truly accepted this right to exist on our own terms, antisemitism became the ultimate escape valve for societies in freefall. Whenever the West experiences a massive internal crisis it cannot solve—whether it’s economic collapse, social decay, or a loss of identity—it panics. Instead of looking in the mirror and taking responsibility, the culture looks for a scapegoat. The West has, and still, automatically reaches for the Jews.
To survive for thousands of years, this virus had to be incredibly adaptive, always hijacking the highest moral language of the era. Historically, it was driven by the ruling center—the Church or the State. But today, the virus has mutated into a global pandemic, weaponized simultaneously by three different factions who claim to hate each other, yet find common ground in targeting us.
On the extreme left, the language is sociological and economic. They are obsessed with power dynamics, dividing the world strictly into oppressors and the oppressed. In their narrative, the Jew—and by extension, the Jewish state—is stripped of historical trauma and cast as the white, colonial, capitalist oppressor.
On the extreme right, the language remains biological and tribal. They are obsessed with preservation, blood, and soil. To them, the Jew is the eternal outsider, an international puppet master orchestrating the “great replacement” to dilute their culture and destroy their nation from within.
And feeding into both is radical Islamism, which fuses ancient religious grievances with modern geopolitical rage. They view the Jewish presence in the Middle East not just as a political dispute, but as a theological defilement of Islamic land, validating violence under the guise of holy resistance.
Look at how the virus loops: The extreme left blames the Jews for hyper-capitalist imperialism. The extreme right blames the Jews for Marxist globalism. Radical Islamists blame the Jews for Western decadence. Three wildly conflicting worldviews, yet they all reach for the exact same scapegoat.
Today, the West’s highest temples are Human Rights and International Law. Its devotees drop the explicit rhetoric of race or theology when addressing the public and instead use the high-minded language of justice to cast the single Jewish state as the ultimate, unforgivable violator of human rights.
But Rabbi Sacks left the world with a chilling warning: the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. Antisemitism is a diagnostic tool for a dying culture. It is the first sign that a society is losing its grip on freedom, tolerance, and truth.
The West may think it is attacking only a small minority, but every time it permits that ancient hatred to flourish, it weakens the moral and cultural foundations upon which its society stands. A civilization that tolerates such decay invites its own rot and ultimate demise.
