From Suffering Object to Political Actor: Europe’s Cultural Issue with the Jews
In contemporary Europe, antisemitism is in fact treated only as a political or security issue. Yet it is fundamentally a cultural problem and, in the fullest sense, an aesthetic one: Jews are rarely perceived as living subjects in their own right, and much more often as symbols of the Western imagination.
Indeed, it is not correct to speak of Jews, but rather of “the Jew”: an abstract concept, defined by stereotypes and tied to a specific role imposed by non-Jewish society. “The Jew” in the context of Western structural antisemitism functions less as a neighbor, colleague, or citizen, and more as an imaginary figure shaped by centuries of Christian and European culture.
Culture, moreover, does not arise in isolation, but is transmitted and learned through socialization and enculturation. Symbolic frameworks are not just rules or customs, but ways of thinking and feeling that take root in society. Thus, over generations, Europe has handed down images of the Jew as scapegoat, conspirator, eternal foreigner.
Antisemitism is therefore an adaptive phenomenon, which renews itself while keeping intact its original symbols and meanings. The medieval accusations of deicide have never disappeared, but have been translated into new forms: from conspiracy theories about global finance to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Jew, however much he has changed historically, has never been seen as an individual, but as a cultural artifact responding to symbolic models handed down from generation to generation.
The suffering Jew and the Christian projection
At the heart of this symbolic construction lies the figure of the “suffering Jew.” The Jew is loved only when he suffers, preferably with a salvific function for the benefit of universal values promoted by the majority Gentile society. Its symbolic prototype lies in a fundamental figure of the Christian West’s symbolic narrative: Jesus of Nazareth.
In this sense, the West has never looked at Jewish suffering as an autonomous reality: it has projected it onto the mental screen already occupied by the figure of Jesus. The suffering Jew thus becomes a degrading replica of Christianity’s central figure: useful to confirm the Christian narrative of sacrifice, functional to aestheticizing pain in images, rituals, and symbols. In this framing, Jewish suffering never belongs to the Jews: it is always “other,” always transformed into a mirror, a parable, or a justification for the European–Christian world.
Art, aesthetics, and the transformation of suffering
Art is a game with forms, a transformation-representation that produces outcomes culturally recognized as significant. The West has treated Jews according to this aesthetic logic: not as a concrete reality but as a symbolic form.
The aesthetic canons of art — style, medium, shared recognition — have also shaped the perception of the Jew. The style: the constant repetition of iconographic patterns (the usurer, the deicide, the martyr). The media: from medieval painting to nineteenth-century newspapers to caricatures on the web. The aesthetic function: not to represent, but to transform the Jew into a symbol.
This dynamic shows that we are not dealing only with prejudices, but with a true aestheticization of the Jew: a process by which the real experience of individuals and communities is deformed into abstract, repeated, codified, and consumed images.
Pain as symbol, not as experience
Here emerges hypesthesia: the cultural numbness before pain. The more Jewish suffering is represented, exhibited, monumentalized, the less it is felt as the pain of concrete people. The memory of the Shoah in Europe is the most evident example: having become an identity pillar, it functions for the Gentile majority as an act of expiation and moral regeneration.
Yet the Shoah is not a universal symbol, but the apex of a continuous history of exile, persecution, and vulnerability. And yet Europe prefers to abstract it, to transform it into a metaphor of “evil in general,” once again reducing Jews to instruments for non-Jewish narratives.
From object to subject: breaking Europe’s narrative
What destabilizes Europe is that the Jew no longer wants to remain a symbol, an aesthetic object of others’ history. Zionism was the radical rupture: the passage from the Jew as an aestheticized figure to the Jew as a political subject. Israel embodies this transformation: the Jew who no longer accepts suffering as an aesthetic destiny, but exercises agency, self-determination, and defense. This explains why the very continent that erects memorials to murdered Jews looks with suspicion at living Jews who exercise power. In other words: the suffering Jew is acceptable, the sovereign Jew is not. Behind much criticism of Israel lies not only a political judgment, but a profound cultural difficulty: Europe’s inability to recognize the Jew as a subject and not as a symbol.
Beyond numbness
If antisemitism persists, it is because Europe is trapped in a worldview that continues to transform and represent Jews only as symbols. The memory of the Holocaust has not dismantled this logic; it has reinforced it: it allowed Europe to rework its guilt, but not to recognize Jews as human beings. And when we dared to go beyond the imposed role — building a state, claiming sovereignty — Europe reserved for us a new hostility, no longer aimed at our suffering, but at our self-determination.
If Europe truly wants to fight antisemitism, it must renounce the comfort zone of aestheticized memory and recognize that we Jews are neither metaphors nor mirrors, but people. Neighbors, citizens, communities, and — in Israel — a sovereign people. Only then will it be possible to move from seeing the Jew as an abstract figure of Western culture to encountering Jews as living subjects of history.
