What is unique about Jewish experience?

“Antisemitism cannot be explained by any one social or economic condition, because it has appeared under almost all of them.”
— Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction (1980)

This essay grew out of an online dispute with a Facebook “friend”, a respected professor of Jewish history. In that exchange, my interlocutor argued that Jewish historical memory often slides into a victimhood syndrome: a tendency to foreground persecution while neglecting long periods of prosperity, influence, prominence, and cultural development. Central to this claim was the insistence that there were no straight, continuous line running from the Crusaders to Auschwitz, no unbroken chain of violence that would justify treating Jewish history as uniquely or persistently persecutory.

The professor does have a point here – such teleology oversimplifies the history and replaces complexity with a fixation on persecution that is all too evident in many discussions of Jewish fate. Jewish history is not a monotone sequence of pogroms and expulsions.

The disagreement, however, was not about denying contingency, prosperity, or historical complexity, but about identifying what, if anything, is structurally distinctive about the Jewish experience as compared to other persecuted minorities – a phenomenon sadly too common in human history.

I am fully aware that my decision to get involved in a dispute about Jewish history with an a professional historian can be viewed as an act of ultimate hubris. After all, if someone who never completed a university physics course would try to lecture me about physics, I would shrug them off without hesitation. To make matters worse I am going to invoke the ideas of yet another physicist, one far more prominent than myself – David Deutsch of Oxford University.

In my defense I can only say this: experts can become so accustomed to their conceptual framework, so immersed in the minute details of their subfield that they  lose awareness of underlying assumptions shaping their thinking, much like fish lose awareness of water they swim in. This may be an arrogance often ascribed to physicists, but I do think that history is a bit different from highly specialized and very technical disciplines as physics or math and thoughtful contributions from outside of the discipline may after all be useful, particularly when the question is not archival or factual details but conceptual framing.

Let me begin by stating what Jewish uniqueness is not. The Jewish experience is not unique because Jews “suffered more than anyone else” in some abstract moral sense. It is the sad fact of human history that many ethnic groups have endured catastrophic violence, displacement, and near-annihilation. Armenians, Roma, Yazidis, African Americans, and many others have endured horrors that deserve full moral and scholarly recognition.

Jewish history is distinctive for a different reason: the structure and duration of hostility directed toward Jews. What distinguishes the Jewish case is not exclusive suffering, but the combination of diasporic dispersion, long‑term statelessness, and a trans‑civilizational moral narrative that replaces presumption of innocence with expectation of guilt.

Several features, taken together, are historically unusual. While most persecuted minorities suffer intensely in specific places and times, Jews were persecuted under pagan empires, Christian kingdoms, Islamic polities, nationalist states, regimes shaped by racial pseudoscience, and totalitarian ideologies. The justifications changed dramatically, but the target remained constant. No other minority has been simultaneously theologically demonized, racialized, economically scapegoated, politically excluded, and periodically expelled or annihilated across two millennia and multiple civilizations.

Jews faced hostility in societies where they were tiny, marginal minorities and in societies where they were well integrated and culturally prominent. This universality matters. Unlike most minorities, Jews were not accused merely of being inferior, foreign, or disloyal. They were subjected to profoundly metaphysical accusations repeatedly cast as cosmic antagonists: killers of God, corrupters of society, racial poison, or global conspirators. Other minorities are often dehumanized or excluded, but rarely assigned such a quasi‑metaphysical role of omnipresent antagonists across centuries and cultures. This metaphysical dimension helps explain why hatred against Jews survives across many ideologies so effectively. It is not contingent on any single political or theological framework and it quickly adapts when the framework changes. The Jewish pattern is unusually portable: it reproduces itself under incompatible political systems and moral paradigmes.

The universality of persecution does not contradict an undisputed historical fact that Jews experienced extended periods of prosperity and cultural brilliance: in Abbasid Baghdad, in medieval Iberia, in early modern Poland‑Lithuania, in nineteenth‑century Central Europe, and in twentieth‑century America. Jews produced philosophers, scientists, financiers, artists, and legal scholars, often achieving prominence disproportionate to their numbers.

However, this observation does not undermine claims of exceptional vulnerability. Regardless of how successful and prosperous Jews were to become, this prosperity was typically conditional rather than embedded in the structure of the societies they lived in. It depended on revocable toleration, elite patronage, or narrowly defined economic niches rather than sovereign power or secure political inclusion. Crucially, prosperity did not dissolve the underlying perception of Jews as a morally suspect collective. Instead, success itself was frequently absorbed into accusations of corruption, domination, or subversion.

Historically, Jewish flourishing often coincided with, rather than eliminated, latent hostility. When political or social conditions shifted, prosperity was rapidly reinterpreted as evidence of guilt, triggering confiscation, expulsion, or violence. The repeated boom‑and‑rupture pattern suggests that the decisive variable is not material success but moral standing in the eyes of the host populations and their elites.

Taken together, these features suggest that the relevant continuity in Jewish history is not a linear chain of events, but a recurring structure of reinterpretation of the place of Jews in the society. To make sense of that structure, David Deutsch, an Oxford physicist introduced the notion of a “pattern.” Deutsch uses the term not to describe recurring events, but to identify stable explanatory frameworks that persist across changing circumstances. A pattern exists when outcomes vary, but the way they are interpreted and justified remains constant.

Applied to Jewish history, the pattern is not that Jews are always attacked, but that harm to Jews is always justifiable. Violence against Jews, when it occurs, rarely appears as a moral anomaly. Instead, it is framed as understandable, provoked, corrective, or necessary. Even when violence is absent, the justificatory narrative remains latent, ready to be activated.

This pattern operates independently of specific ideologies. Religious antisemitism, racial antisemitism, nationalist antisemitism, and contemporary political antizionism differ in content but share a structural feature: Jews are positioned as a legitimate object of collective moral judgment and, in some cases, violence. The explanatory burden shifts away from the perpetrator and toward the victim. This shift defines the most distinctive feature of the pattern – its moral asymmetry. Violence against most minority groups is typically treated as self‑evidently unjust, requiring perpetrators to justify themselves against a prevailing moral norm. In the Jewish case, the moral logic often runs in reverse: harm to Jews is pre‑justified by whatever conditions the Jews live in. It is justified if they are poor and backward (Voltaire), or when they are prominent and successful (Luther and The Protocols), when they are distinct (Russian pogroms) or when they are integrated (Wagner and the movements for pure Aryan culture).

The so-called Jewish Question, discussed obsessively by “liberal” intelligentsia in Europe and Russia since the Enlightenment, arises largely from a moral contradiction internal to modern societies themselves: the gap between their enlightened morality and their continued dismal treatment of Jews. Jewish emancipation, conceived as a rational and humane attempt to resolve this contradiction, repeatedly failed to eliminate the underlying hostility, even when genuinely well intentioned. Instead of dissolving the problem, emancipation often forced antisemitism to reinvent itself, shifting from older religious or corporate forms into new secular, racial, or political justifications. Often, this transition marked a movement from latent hostility to overt violence, now rationalized by whatever explanatory framework happened to be available at the time.

This asymmetry explains why Jewish integration does not neutralize hostility, why enlightenment does not reliably diminish antisemitism, and why antisemitic tropes survive ideological revolutions. The content of accusation adapts, but the moral posture endures.

The Holocaust by its sheer barbarity seemed for a time to reverse this pattern (Hitler gave antisemitism bad name is a widely quoted phrase though its precise origin remains elusive) – the humanity was genuinely horrified by the scale of annihilation. Yet, the composer Karol Rathaus, a subject of my upcoming documentary “Discovering Karol Rathaus”, wrote presciently in 1942 in his letter to the writer Soma Morgenstern that the antisemitism in Europe would quiet down for a while, only to flare up again as the fate of Jewish masses will come to the fore. Speaking in physical language the life-time of after-Holocaust revulsion turned out be unsurprisingly short, less than 70 years. Today, the world is once again engulfed in justifications for why the atrocities of October 7 were a “response” to alleged Jewish or Israeli transgressions. As David Deutsch remarked in a recent conversation with Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast, we are witnessing something akin to a “worldwide pogrom,” triggered by the perceived threat posed by Jewish sovereignty and success to the underlying pattern.

Importantly, this framework does not deny contingency or variation. Antisemitism has waxed and waned, taken different forms, and been resisted in different contexts. What persists is the readiness to make sense of harm to Jews in ways that minimize moral rupture of the enlightened public.

The charge of a Jewish “victimhood complex” often confuses rhetorical excess with historical structure. Collective memory can certainly be instrumentalized, simplified, or politicized. Yet the existence of such distortions does not invalidate the underlying pattern they imperfectly reflect. Moreover, accusations of over‑emphasized victimhood are rarely applied symmetrically. Groups are generally permitted to center formative traumas without being accused of pathological self‑pity. The suspicion directed at Jewish memory itself may be another expression of the same moral asymmetry under discussion.

To conclude – Jewish history is not unique because Jews were always persecuted, nor because they lacked agency or achievement. It is distinctive because Jewish presence has repeatedly generated a standing moral framework in which harm to Jews is explainable, excusable, or even anticipatorily justified. Periods of prosperity do not contradict this pattern. They coexist with it and are often retroactively folded into it.

Understanding the world attitude toward Jews at the level of the pattern rather than events allows us to reconcile historical nuance with structural persistence. The dispute, then, is not between history and myth, but between event-based empiricism and an attempt to articulate a broader framework that, even if it does not explain the phenomenon, nonetheless reveals it by bringing to the foreground the essence of the Jewish experience in the world.