The New Frontier of Hate—Peoplehood Antisemitism

The murder by a depraved anti-Israel lunatic of a pair of Israeli Embassy staffers about to be engaged is the latest in a series of horrific attacks against Jews dating to well before 2018, when the current wave of antisemitic killings is supposed to have begun. At this point, Jews and their allies should have no doubt about the source of these attacks. They are the outcome of the new antisemitism.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks identified three types of antisemitism: religious, racial, and peoplehood antisemitism. The first dates back to Jews’ experience of oppression and persecution under the pagan, Christian, and Islamic empires of the ancient and medieval worlds. The second took shape during the early modern period and culminated in the Holocaust. The third is the current dominant model. Peoplehood, or nationhood, antisemitism has roots in the previous two models; they are intermixed with it. But in an increasingly secular world, where scientific racism is thoroughly discredited, this third model—hatred of Jews as a collective, focused especially on the political form that this collectivity takes in the Jewish nation-state—provides a contemporary, legitimizable outlet for the world’s oldest hatred.

How did peoplehood antisemitism take shape? The nature of antisemitic activity was briefly in flux in the mid-twentieth century. After the Holocaust antisemitism wasn’t a respectable hate in any but the most fringe and depraved spaces. Gone were the days when you could be an industry titan like Henry Ford, a respected professor of philosophy like Martin Heidegger, or a world-famous writer like Voltaire—and also be openly antisemitic. This rule was not without exceptions of course (the Muslim world heightened rather than repented of its oppression of Jews after the Holocaust), but in broad swathes of the world hating Jews became a social and professional liability.

While hatred of Israel existed from the moment of its founding, before there was ever a Palestinian national movement, it wasn’t at first clear that Israel could be the locus of a new form of antisemitism. Israel was recognized by both the world’s superpowers, it belonged to the tradition of nation-states, and its story of return to sovereignty after 2,000 years, despite the efforts of colonial powers, stirred the hearts of onlookers. What was required to make Israel the centerpiece of a new form of antisemitism was a systematic delegitimization of the concept of nationhood. And that is precisely what occurred over the past sixty years.

The road to the rejection of nationhood, like all such roads, was paved with good intentions. Noble-minded men and women, including many Jews, were appalled by the death-spiral that sucked Europe down between 1914 and 1945. Two world wars had jolted them into a suspicion of all national movements, the apparent cause of the horrors that had unfolded. These writers, scientists, philosophers, statesmen, and legal scholars promoted universalist international organizations—legal, political, nongovernmental—to siphon power away from nations, to force them to mediate and deliberate. A fair response in its way. However, the most disillusioned of these intellectuals, like Hans Kohn, went further. They promoted an ideological program to delegitimize nationhood tout court.

The same disillusionment with nationhood would spread among intellectuals in the rest of the world during the latter half of the twentieth century. The anti-colonial liberation movements in Asia and Africa, the wave of regime-changes in South America, however nobly conceived, wreaked devastation, jading their would-be intellectual heirs. Politicians in these countries often parroted the language of nationalism while embracing transnational capitalism (indifferent to nations), or Islamism, or other nation-degrading ideologies. Nation-states continued to exist, but national interests increasingly became a pretext for trans- or anti-national ones. Although its history has been quite different, even the US shows signs of these trends. The North American Free Trade Agreement was hawked as a booster of trade though it was known that countless jobs for Americans would be off-shored as a result.

(Central Europe is a telling exception to this trend, as the Czech writer Milan Kundera explored. Having experienced submission to a purportedly universalist project, Communism, their peoples have no interest in giving up autonomy again. The friction between a universalism-promoting European Union and countries like Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Czechia derives from their Cold-War history.)

Meanwhile Israel shone as a beacon of nationhood. At its founding, the State of Israel became arguably the chief example of the peoplehood movements that began with the Spring of Nations a century earlier. A people, refused acceptance as full-fledged members of any other nation (the US, a nation of ideas, the exception that proves the rule), had returned to their ancestral homeland and reconstituted their political and cultural sovereignty after countless attempts to ground out of existence their desire for return. And once established, Israel unapologetically defended its Jewish character. It enshrined the rights of minorities in its Declaration of Independence, but it did so knowing that such rights depend on the right of the majority to preserve its character.

Such unapologetic nationhood enraged the missionaries of the new global order. That rage linked up with the oldest hatred to birth the new antisemitism. A fusion of hatred of Jews and understandable disillusionment with nationalism has brought us to the current stage of antisemitism.

Consider the character of the antisemitic attacks that have come to the fore since the 1960s. Immediately after World War II, the defining acts of antisemitism resembled what had come before. In 1946, the Kielce pogrom erupted in Poland. The attackers were motivated by the old forms of hatred, theological and scientific; they didn’t want to live near Jews, they wanted to rid themselves of contamination by what they viewed as essentially foreign elements. But attacks like this became rarer as the years passed. What began to motivate attacks on Jews was a hatred of Jews as a political collective with collective political power.

An often overlooked attack in 1970 set the tone. On February 13, 1970, a group of German left-wing extremists set fire to a Jewish retirement home in Berlin, killing seven Holocaust survivors. The group, identified as Tupamaros West-Berlin, had tried the year before to set off a bomb at a Jewish Community Center on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Their ideology was explicitly anti-Zionist. They rejected the legitimacy of nations, fighting on behalf of Communism and the Palestinian movement (understood as a step toward Communism in the Middle East, not as a nation-building effort).

How did burning alive elderly Holocaust survivors further their ends? It was a blow against Jews as a community, as a collective. It didn’t matter that the retirees had no influence on Israeli policy, damage to one part of the Jewish people, they reasoned, would be felt by all.

While traditional prejudices still motivate antisemitic murders, as in the slaying of Blaze Bernstein and the Monsey Hanukkah stabbing, contempt for and perception of Jews as a unified political collective has become the defining trait of contemporary antisemitism. In Colleyville, didn’t the hostage-taker demand to speak to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl because he considered her the chief figure in a transnational Jewish power collective? Likewise nationhood antisemitism motivated the 1980 Antwerp summer camp attack, the 1985 Copenhagen bombings, the murder of Dr. Joseph Wybran in 1989, the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting, and the Ozar Hatorah Day School Shooting in 2012. All these attacks were committed by individuals who intended their attacks to strike a blow against Jewish nationhood or who believed that Jews represented a unified political collective.

Hatred of a unified Jewish people is now the primary motivation for antisemitism. The defining attack of 21st-century antisemitism (prior to October 7th), the Tree of Life massacre, was committed because the perpetrator believed that Jews, as a whole, had taken coordinated political action against the United States.

It goes without saying that the October 7th attacks had the same rationale. A blow was meant to be landed against Jews as a collective, not just the Israeli military. This understanding explains why Hamas terrorists live-streamed their brutal slayings of civilians, children, and partygoers. As a military tactic it was bound to be used against them, providing location data to analysts. But as a tactic of terror aimed at Jews as a whole, it was effective. It essentially put any viewer on notice that Jews, rather than the IDF, were the target of their rampage.

That the terrorist who murdered the embassy staffers did so outside the Capital Jewish Museum was key to the nature of his attack. He aimed not to annihilate racial inferiors or exact retribution for Jews’ refusal to bend the knee to Christ or Muhammad. He intended to land a blow against Jews as a collective, at a location that enshrines their collectivity. His goal was to murder stand-ins for the People and Nation of Israel, concepts not exhausted by their political manifestation in the form of a nation-state but intimately intertwined with it.

We now live in the era of peoplehood antisemitism. For as long as this era endures, Jews will be attacked for participating (whether or not they know it) in the projects of nationhood and peoplehood. Jewish spaces—from museums to synagogues to retirement homes and summer camps—will be treated as legitimate targets for any grievance over what Jews do anywhere. And just as conversion and assimilation couldn’t save Jews, denying peoplehood won’t save us either.

So what is to be done?

We can look to the past for an answer. Despite the fact that Jews in the Middle Ages were forced by social exclusion to embrace each other, community gave them a means to grapple with their oppression. In the modern period, rejection of assimilation forced many Jews to embrace Jewish nationalism, whose end result was the revival of a homeland where they could seek refuge. Our strength has always been found in what gives rise to the greatest ire. That is, our bonds to each other and to values and political projects that promote human flourishing.

There can be no answer to peoplehood antisemitism other than peoplehood. Jews must deepen their commitment to the political project of peoplehood, which in our time has no viable expression besides nationhood. Hebrew, Israel, prayer, Zionism, and Jewish study—these are the building blocks of Jewish being from which all else follows. From these materials, we must build and be built, in exile and at home.