IHRA Gives the Right Definition to the Wrong Word

As one of the members of New York City’s Jewish community, which comprises 11% of its population and more than 50% of the victims of hate crimes within its borders, I’m tremendously grateful for Mayor Adams and his announcement Sunday of an executive order recognizing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Words should never be decoupled from their meanings and in taking on this issue, Mayor Adams continues to prove himself to be an ally to New York’s Jewish population.

But there is also a less widely discussed problem with the word “antisemitism” itself. No definition will ever quite fit because we use the word in a way that stretches it beyond recognition from its original meaning. In the late 1800s, German Wilhelm Marr, proud, self-described antisemite, founder of the “League of Antisemites,” and author of such works as “The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism” coined the term “antisemitism.”

Marr’s desire was to sell the concept of Jew hatred to an increasingly secular German audience. To achieve that, Marr eschewed the conventional German word for Jew hatred, “Judenhass,” because it carried religious undertones. Instead, he referred to an eighteenth-century language analysis that differentiated “Aryan” languages from “Semitic” languages and he incorrectly extrapolated from there an “Aryan” race as separate and distinct from Jews, a “Semitic” race. He thus couched hatred of Jews as “antisemitic,” in reference not to their religion (which they could change) but instead to their supposed race (which they could not change). This is why, while the Spanish Inquisitors spared the Jews upon whom they forced conversions, the Nazis neither spared nor converted. Marr called for resistance against Jews as a foreign race determined to destroy German civilization and replace it with their own. Jews as an inferior race bent on world domination, the concept underlying “antisemitism,” was the basis for the Holocaust and its ashes continue to smolder.

Today, antisemitism has come to refer to the hatred of Jews in a very broad sense, but the incongruity is apparent. First, Marr’s “antisemitism,” by its nature, describes only a specific, racial hatred of Jews that began in late 1800s Europe. Moreover, Marr’s “antisemitism” was something to be proud of, akin to being an “antiracist” today. Semites were bad, so antisemites were good. Racists are bad, so antiracists are good. Defining antisemitism is extra challenging because the word was never meant to signify something to stand against, but rather something to stand for. This is why, in today’s lexicon, to be opposed to the hatred of Jews requires the double negative of being anti-antisemitism.

The word “antisemitism” poses the additional challenge of genericity. This was, of course, by design – Marr sought to obfuscate the simple concept of Judenhass by introducing a more general word. Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic are all self-evidently descriptive. But what is a “semite”? Simply one who speaks a semitic language. In that sense, it is both overinclusive and underinclusive in reference to Jews, as there are Jews who do not speak such languages and there are non-Jews who do. It also gives credence to the absurd notion that an Arab cannot be an antisemite because he speaks Arabic, which is, like Hebrew, a semitic language.

This history of the word antisemitism also speaks to the need for and power of the IHRA definition, which accounts for the shapeshifting hatred of Jews. Marr succeeded in priming a population to accept the extermination of six million of its own neighbors and friends by making a thousand-plus-year-old hatred palatable in a new way. This is the nature of antisemitism. It is a virus. And like any virus with such longevity, the key to its survival is its ability to mutate and adapt to new hosts.

The earliest form of Jew hatred was theological and arose in the Middle Ages. Christian doctrine held that Jews killed Christ and were subject to an eternal and divine punishment for this. Islamic teachings similarly referred to Jews as “killers of prophets.” During this time, the original “blood libel” arose—the belief that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children for religious rituals, as well as the scapegoating of Jews for natural catastrophes, like the Black Plague.

As society transitioned away from reverence of religion and towards reverence of science, the virus of Jew hatred mutated and adapted to a new host. There arose Marr’s “antisemitism,” the hatred of Jews for the inferiority of their supposed race, normalized through the false “science” of eugenics.

It is not by accident that many on the left of society would have the definition of antisemitism end there. But the IHRA definition is expansive enough to recognize an additional mutation—and it is the one that generally encompasses the extreme left’s hatred of Jews (for their state) as much as the extreme right’s hatred of Jews (for their race).

Today, it is socially unacceptable to openly hate people for their religion or for their race. To survive, antisemitism had to morph again, this time for a society that venerates civil liberties and human rights. Thus, the hatred of Jews morphed into a hatred of the only Jewish state, singled out and delegitimized as uniquely violative of civil liberties and human rights from among all the nations. Antisemitism transmuted to anti-Zionism. A proper definition must account for all of this hatred.

Make no mistake, this all the same hatred. Zionism is part of Judaism. To claim to hate Zionists but not Jews is like hating feminists but not women. Zionism, the belief in the Jewish right to self-determine in their ancestral homeland, the yearning for Zion (as the land of Israel is referred to in the Torah) is embedded in Jewish practice and history. There are Jews who do not believe in Zionism, sure, but that does not change that it is part of their religion. Just as, though there are Jews who eat pork, that does not change that laws of kashrut are part of their religion. A prerequisite that Jews disavow Zionism to participate in today’s society is no different than inquisition Spaniards forcing Jews to eat pigs if they wanted to participate in that society. This is all the same hatred.

Mayor Adams recognized and harnessed the power of the IHRA to encompass all of these forms of hatred. He got the “meaning” correct. Perhaps the IHRA can next recommend a new word to match its definition. But until then, despite its imperfections, antisemitism is the English word that we have and the best we can do is give it a proper definition. The irony should not be lost on anyone that an antisemite coined the term “antisemitism” and antisemites today seek to control its use. I applaud Mayor Adams for standing up to such nonsense.