Does Antisemitism Have a Cycle?

Perhaps antisemitism does not return because we fail to learn from history. Perhaps it returns because, eventually, we forget why we learned the lesson.

I have been thinking about a disturbing pattern. It is not quite a theory, and certainly not a mathematical one. History is too messy for that. But when looking at the history of Jews, particularly in Europe, something resembling a cycle begins to appear: hatred, persecution, catastrophe, shock, remorse, reparation, human rights, integration, assimilation, Jewish success and visibility, resentment, and eventually hatred again.

At first I wondered whether there was something close to a century-long rhythm to it. There are enough dates to tempt us into seeing one: the massacres of Jewish communities during the Crusades; the expulsions from England, France and Spain; the massacres of the seventeenth century; the Russian pogroms; and ultimately the Holocaust. But the dates do not cooperate neatly enough. England expelled its Jews in 1290. France did so repeatedly, including in 1394. Spain followed in 1492. Eastern European Jewry suffered devastating violence in the seventeenth century. Pogroms swept parts of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then came the catastrophe that makes every comparison inadequate: the Holocaust. There is no hundred-year clock ticking underneath Jewish history. Yet I increasingly wonder whether there is a mechanism, and that may be more important than a cycle.

From catastrophe to integration

Consider what happens after a society witnesses the consequences of extreme hatred. There is horror, shame and the realization that boundaries once considered unthinkable were crossed, usually after years in which smaller boundaries had already been crossed. After the Holocaust, this process occurred on an unprecedented scale. Six million European Jews had been murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. Antisemitism had not merely produced discrimination or sporadic violence; it had become a central component of an industrialized project of extermination. Europe emerged from the war physically destroyed and morally traumatized.

Three years later, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaiming that human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and establishing a framework that would influence subsequent international human-rights law. Something profound had happened. The world had looked into an abyss and attempted to build barriers around it. Antisemitism became socially toxic in much of the West. Racial theories were discredited. Explicit discrimination gradually became unacceptable. Jews entered universities, professions, politics, science, business, culture and public life on terms that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

This was an extraordinary achievement, but there is a paradox hidden inside that achievement: success can gradually erase the memory of why protection became necessary. The generation that experiences catastrophe does not require a history lesson; it remembers. Its children grow up among people who remember, and their children inherit stories. Eventually, however, we reach a generation for whom catastrophe is no longer memory at all but history. The photographs, museums, ceremonies and books remain, but the emotional knowledge changes. This is not particular to Jews or to the Holocaust. It is simply what time does.

Protections created because a minority was once terribly vulnerable can then begin to look unnecessary precisely because those protections worked. The formerly excluded minority becomes integrated; integration creates opportunity; opportunity produces achievement; achievement produces visibility; and visibility can eventually be mistaken for power. The question subtly changes from “How could society have done this to the Jews?” to “Why are we still talking so much about the Jews?” and, in some quarters, “Why do the Jews get so much attention?” The transition is important because it suggests that the success of historical memory may contain the seeds of its own erosion. The taboo survives longer than the memory that created it, and eventually people encounter the taboo without fully understanding what lies beneath it.

Emancipation and resentment

The nineteenth century provides an instructive example. Across much of Europe, Jewish emancipation removed longstanding restrictions on residence, occupations and participation in civic life. Jews increasingly entered professions and institutions from which they had previously been excluded. This was progress, but emancipation also produced backlash. Rapid economic and social change coincided with Jewish integration, and some Europeans who felt displaced or left behind came to believe that Jews were disproportionately occupying newly accessible professions in finance, medicine, law, journalism, industry and the arts.

There is something particularly perverse about this pattern. For centuries Jews had been told that they could not own certain land, enter certain professions, live in certain places or become fully part of the societies surrounding them. Then the restrictions began disappearing. Jews adapted, and many succeeded. Their success itself could then become evidence against them. The Jew who remained separate was accused of refusing to integrate; the Jew who assimilated was accused of infiltrating society. The poor Jew was undesirable and the wealthy Jew dangerous. The revolutionary Jew threatened the established order while the capitalist Jew supposedly controlled it. The nationalist Jew was tribal; the cosmopolitan Jew had no loyalty. Antisemitism possesses an extraordinary ability to survive contradiction, and that may be one of the secrets of its longevity.

For much of European history, Jews also occupied a peculiar social position that made this possible. They were neighbors yet outsiders, speakers of the local language who maintained their own traditions, often deeply rooted in a country while maintaining family, religious and commercial relationships elsewhere. They were simultaneously familiar and different. This made them particularly useful when societies needed someone to blame. During the Middle Ages Jews could be accused of causing calamities they obviously could not have caused; during the Black Death, for example, Jewish communities were accused of spreading the plague. Modernity did not eliminate this mechanism. It modernized it. Religious accusations became racial accusations, racial accusations became political ones, theological conspiracies became financial conspiracies. The language changed while the role remained surprisingly familiar.

Crisis and the search for a hidden hand

None of this means that societies simply become tired of Jews every few generations. That explanation is too easy. Something else usually happens: crisis. Economic dislocation, war, political instability, rapid technological change, migration, loss of confidence in institutions and a widespread feeling that decisions affecting ordinary lives are being made somewhere people cannot see and by actors they cannot identify all create fertile conditions for conspiracy.

Complex societies produce complex problems, but human beings often prefer simple explanations. Conspiracy theories provide extraordinarily satisfying ones because they turn systems into people. The economy becomes “bankers,” political change becomes “elites,” cultural change becomes “the media,” and international complexity becomes “globalists.” Once society begins searching for a hidden hand, centuries of antisemitic mythology provide a ready-made answer. The remarkable thing is that the conspiracy does not even require a significant Jewish population. Antisemitism has flourished in places with very few Jews because, at that stage, the Jew is no longer merely a person. He has become an abstraction onto which a society can project its anxieties.

This helps explain why antisemitism cannot comfortably be assigned to either the political left or right. It adapts. On the nationalist right, the Jew can appear as the rootless cosmopolitan undermining the nation. On the revolutionary left, he can appear as the financier or representative of global capital. In religious societies he can be the unbeliever; in aggressively secular societies he can represent tribal religion. Antisemitism knows how to dress for the occasion.

Israel changes the equation

There is, however, one enormous difference between our age and previous periods: Israel exists. For most of the history I am describing, Jews existed primarily as minorities inside other civilizations. Today there is a Jewish state, and states possess governments, armies, borders, intelligence services, political parties and foreign policies. States also make mistakes. Governments can be criticized, wars can be opposed and policies can be condemned. Israel must not be exempt from this. Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic any more than criticism of France is inherently anti-French, and criticism of an Israeli government does not make someone hostile to Jews.

But the existence of Israel also provides something historically new: a political vocabulary into which much older ideas about Jews can sometimes migrate. The distinction is crucial. Criticizing an Israeli military operation is politics. Arguing about settlements is politics. Condemning a prime minister is politics. Debating Zionism is politics and history. But when Jews everywhere become collectively responsible for what an Israeli government does, when Jewish institutions thousands of kilometres away are treated as legitimate proxies for Israel, or when familiar fantasies of secret Jewish control reappear with merely updated terminology, we are no longer discussing Israeli policy alone. Old software can run on a new operating system.

This makes our present moment particularly difficult to interpret. Some hostility toward Israel is precisely what it says it is: hostility toward Israel, its government or its policies. Some of it intersects with broader arguments about nationalism, colonialism, religion and the Palestinians. But some unmistakably reproduces older patterns in contemporary language. Treating all criticism of Israel as antisemitism prevents us from understanding the first phenomenon; refusing to recognize antisemitism when it adopts the language of the second prevents us from understanding the latter.

Perhaps the cycle is not exclusively Jewish

There is another possibility that should be taken seriously. Maybe what I am describing is not fundamentally a Jewish cycle at all. Minorities throughout history have experienced periods of acceptance followed by suspicion, persecution, remorse and renewed acceptance. Armenians, Roma, religious minorities and many others provide obvious cases for comparison. Perhaps Jews simply provide an unusually long historical dataset. Jewish communities have existed as minorities across numerous civilizations for more than two millennia, giving anti-Jewish prejudice an unusually long time to mutate, adapt and survive.

Perhaps, then, what we call “the longest hatred” is also the longest continuously observable example of a more general human tendency: when societies become frightened, they begin deciding who really belongs. Minorities living simultaneously inside and outside the majority identity become vulnerable. This does not diminish the specificity of antisemitism. On the contrary, it makes understanding it more useful, because antisemitism can function as a warning light for processes that threaten others as well.

So is there a hundred-year cycle? Probably not. History refuses to be that elegant. There is no invisible timer producing an antisemitic explosion every century, and connecting 1290, 1492, the pogroms and 1933 into one continuous periodic process would flatten enormous differences between countries, political systems and historical circumstances.

But I think my original intuition survives in another form. Perhaps the sequence is not one hundred years, hatred, catastrophe, another hundred years, hatred. Perhaps it is catastrophe, remorse, protection, integration, fading memory, renewed visibility, resentment, crisis and scapegoating. Its duration would therefore never be fixed. It would depend on generations, institutions, economic conditions, political leadership, technology, war and, above all, memory.

That would also explain why antisemitism can disappear from respectable public discourse without actually disappearing from society. It can become dormant. Its vocabulary becomes embarrassing while some of its assumptions remain available. Then circumstances change, and someone discovers that the old machine still works.

The dangerous moment

We tend to imagine historical progress as cumulative. Humanity learns. We abolish slavery, expand suffrage, establish civil rights, create international institutions and teach the Holocaust, and therefore assume that the next generation begins where the previous one finished. But perhaps moral knowledge does not work that way. Perhaps every generation inherits institutions but must rediscover the reasons for them. A young person can inherit freedom without remembering oppression, tolerance without remembering persecution and human rights without remembering what human beings did before those rights were articulated.

Eventually, protections can look excessive because the danger they were designed to prevent is no longer visible. That may be the most dangerous point in the cycle — not when everybody hates the Jews, but much earlier: when society begins asking why anyone is still so concerned about antisemitism; when the warning itself becomes irritating; when memory starts being interpreted as privilege; when vigilance is characterized as manipulation; when people become sufficiently distant from catastrophe that they can play with the ideas that preceded it without feeling their historical weight.

The people doing this need not be Nazis. They need not want violence. They may genuinely believe they are challenging power, fighting injustice or breaking an outdated taboo. That is precisely why historical analogies must be used carefully. History rarely repeats itself by producing people who consciously decide to reenact the previous catastrophe. It produces new people, responding to new circumstances, who may rediscover surprisingly old explanations.

If there really is such a mechanism, the solution cannot simply be to remind people indefinitely that Jews suffered. Collective guilt has a short half-life and eventually produces resistance. Nor should Jews require permanent victimhood to justify their place in society. The more durable lesson is broader: we need to understand how societies manufacture outsiders; how legitimate frustration becomes conspiracy; how economic anxiety becomes ethnic suspicion; how political disagreement becomes collective guilt; how a person becomes a category, a category becomes a threat, and a threat eventually becomes something against which previously unacceptable actions can be justified.

That process is not exclusively Jewish history. It is human history. Jews simply know it unusually well.

So perhaps there is no hundred-year cycle of antisemitism. Perhaps there is something more unsettling: a recurring human mechanism that periodically rediscovers the Jew.

And if that is true, the task is not merely to remember what happened the last time. It is to recognize the mechanism before we reach the part everyone remembers.