The Blogs: The Sentimental Ethos of Antisemitism

Antisemitism has always called itself justice. In some sense, we shouldn’t be surprised. This isn’t the first time antisemitism has cloaked itself in sentimentalism and lofty ideals of justice and humanity.

Christian antisemitism did exactly this: it opposed the love and compassion of Jesus to the supposed cruelty of the Jews—the killers of children, the enemies of grace. But not only that: Jews were cast as cold, legalistic, spiritually barren—bound to the letter of the law rather than its spirit. In this narrative, Jewish faith became a foil for Christian mercy, and violence against Jews could be framed as a defense of love itself. It was never just hate; it was moral theater.

Enlightenment antisemitism followed the same pattern. Jews were accused not only of wickedness, but of failing to rise to the universal ideals of reason and emancipation. And now, the left repurposes those same ideals to purge Jews from their spaces—once again accusing us of being too particular, too stubborn, too committed to our own inheritance. The very fact that we have an ethnostate is cast as a moral scandal—despite the existence of dozens of Arab and Muslim ethnostates that provoke no such outrage. Jewish difference, uniquely, is framed as a crime.

Nietzsche saw this clearly. He wrote vividly about the sentimentalism of early German Romantic antisemites—figures like Wagner—whose syrupy morality masked a deep, festering resentment. That moral aestheticism paved the way for what would follow. We see echoes of it today in the keffiyeh-clad activist, cosplaying the romanticized indigenous victim while denouncing Jewish survival as oppression. It’s a performance—a pseudo-revolutionary theater of grievance—that feeds off the same ressentiment Nietzsche diagnosed, dressed now in the language of decolonization and solidarity.

So yes, the “humanitarians” may be seething with bitterness and corrosive envy—but they believe themselves righteous. In this respect, nothing has changed.