From Mount Sinai to October 7
On this Shavuot, 3,338 years ago, a people unlike any other in human history was born at Mount Sinai. Not a people built around territory, dynasty, or military power, but around a book, learning, and faith passed down from generation to generation despite exiles, persecutions, and wars.
Here begins the answer to the oldest question in Jewish history: why are the Jews specifically hated?
Antisemitism is a phenomenon unparalleled in human history. For thousands of years, it has crossed empires, religions, continents, and ideologies. It appeared in pagan, Christian, and Muslim societies; among kings, revolutionaries, nationalists, and progressives. Fascists accused Jews of communism. Communists accused them of capitalism. Poor Jews provoked contempt; wealthy Jews provoked envy. Jews in exile were accused of dual loyalty; Jews in their own land became “colonialists.”
The pattern is clear: in every generation, in every political reality, and at every historical moment, a new reason was found to hate the Jews.
In this sense, antisemitism is not just another ordinary ethnic hatred. It is unique in that it has never remained confined to a particular geographic region, culture, or era. The renewed eruption after October 7 on campuses, in the streets, and across social media in the West is the same phenomenon continuing to reappear in new forms.
The real question, then, is not when antisemitism erupts, but why the Jews specifically? What caused hundreds of millions of people throughout history to believe that Jews drank the blood of Christian children, poisoned wells, and plotted to control the world?
What caused the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition, the Soviet regime, Nazi Germany, Shiite Muslims, and Sunni Muslims, entities with virtually nothing in common, to see the Jews as their greatest enemy?
Circumstantial explanations such as economics, politics, or fear of the outsider are insufficient. True, they may explain when and where antisemitism erupts. But they do not explain why it exists in the first place. Economic collapse in 1930s Germany does not explain gas chambers. A Soviet struggle against Zionism does not explain banning the baking of matzah. And the loss of an Arab village in 1948 does not explain the Iranian desire to destroy Israel in 2026.
Shavuot offers an explanation that is neither political, economic, nor racial. It is cultural.
From its earliest days, Judaism presented a demanding claim to the world: that there is a universal morality given at Mount Sinai, binding upon all people, and that the Jewish people have a role in bringing change to the world. “Tikun Olam – To repair the world” was not meant as a slogan, but as a program that places moral demands upon others. This poses a profound challenge to all who differ religiously, politically, or culturally, and has been a constant source of tension.
As a result of this moral commitment, Jews lived almost everywhere in ways that provoked envy: high literacy rates while surrounded by illiteracy, stable family structures amid social chaos, and mutual communal responsibility unmatched by surrounding societies. This was not accidental. It stemmed directly from a Jewish culture of learning and morality that developed over centuries, and it generated backlash.
Even Nazi antisemites, who developed racial theory against the Jews, argued that a Jew could never truly cease being Jewish, even if he fully adopted German culture, because Jewish values and spirit were supposedly embedded in him from birth. In this sense, Nazi racial theory did not create hatred of Jews; it was constructed to justify it. First came antisemitism, and only afterward the racial doctrine.
Yet precisely on this holiday, we should remember that despite harsh conditions of survival, the Jewish people continued to sing their unique melody on the stage of history. Across thousands of years of dispersion and persecution, they did not merely survive. They continued to offer the world a moral and cultural voice wherever they lived. A voice that is universal in its appeal to all humanity, deep in its spiritual and ethical roots, and consistent in its expression generation after generation. In doing so, they left an indelible mark on world civilization. That story is still being written today by each and every one of us, wherever we may be.
Happy Shavuot
