Why Antisemitism Defies Natural Explanation

Antisemitism is the world’s oldest and most persistent hatred. No other form of prejudice has crossed as many civilizations, reshaped itself across so many centuries, or survived so many moral revolutions. What began as a religious accusation later became racial ideology, then political doctrine, and today disguises itself in the language of human rights. Each era reinvents the justification, yet the hostility remains. Historians can trace its evolution, and sociologists can map its patterns, but the deeper question—why this hatred endures with such supernatural resilience—cannot be answered by material analysis alone. Antisemitism is not just a social disease; it is a spiritual rebellion. To face it truthfully, one must look beyond psychology and politics to the moral and metaphysical drama that has shaped it since antiquity.

Losing the Sense of Evil

The persistence of antisemitism cannot be understood apart from modern humanity’s loss of a moral vocabulary. Cultural historian Andrew Delbanco observed that modern societies have lost the language to speak meaningfully about evil. We still witness cruelty and destruction, but we explain them away as social dysfunction or psychological damage. Evil, once seen as rebellion against divine order, is now treated as pathology, misunderstanding, or accident. This shift has stripped moral clarity from public life. Without the framework of transcendence, the concept of sin evaporates, and all behavior becomes morally negotiable.

That loss has profound consequences. When evil cannot be named, it cannot be resisted. Antisemitism thrives in precisely such moral confusion because it disguises itself as virtue. Modern people who reject the idea of objective moral truth often find themselves vulnerable to moral inversions—forms of hatred cloaked in the language of compassion or justice. When societies lose their belief in good and evil as real, metaphysical categories, they also lose the ability to recognize the oldest manifestation of evil in their midst. The hatred of Jews, therefore, survives because it finds refuge in a culture that no longer believes evil exists.

The Nature of Evil in Modern Form

This moral blindness helps explain why Israel and the Jewish people provoke such unease in the modern conscience. Political commentator Ben Shapiro has noted that Jewish history represents the claim that morality is objective, history is purposeful, and God has not abandoned the world. These ideas challenge every worldview that places human autonomy above divine authority. Ancient empires, medieval inquisitions, and modern ideologies all share a desire to silence the reminder that life has transcendent meaning and moral accountability. Israel’s very existence stands as testimony to that truth—and for those who resist it, the Jewish people become an unbearable symbol.

Each age reinterprets its hostility to fit the moral language of its time. The Middle Ages saw religious accusations. The nineteenth century cloaked antisemitism in racial science. The twentieth century dressed it in totalitarian ideologies, both left and right. Today it appears in political and humanitarian clothing, portraying Israel as a moral villain rather than a moral witness. The constant reinvention of this hatred shows that it is not bound to any one doctrine. It is a deeper moral disorder—humanity’s recurring attempt to erase the covenantal sign of divine purpose in history.

Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz has described antisemitism as a kind of moral pathology driven by envy and projection. Envy might explain resentment toward Jewish success, but the hatred often intensifies precisely when Jews prosper. This suggests that the target is not material success but what Jewish identity represents: divine election and moral order. From a theistic perspective, antisemitism endures because humanity is uneasy with transcendence. The Jewish people remind the world that moral law does not originate from human will, and that reminder becomes intolerable to those who would be their own gods.

Theologians Timothy Keller and William Lane Craig offer philosophical clarity to this moral inversion. Keller teaches that evil is not the absence of good but its distortion. It enters the world disguised as justice or righteousness, claiming to repair what is broken while actually deepening the wound. Modern antisemitism works in this way. It presents itself as a moral crusade—against oppression, power, or privilege—while reviving the same ancient hostility under new labels. Craig, building on Augustine, defines evil as a parasite that feeds on the good, unable to create anything of its own. Antisemitism mirrors that description precisely: it draws its energy from Israel’s sacred vocation, twisting holiness into accusation. Like Cain resenting Abel, the world resents Israel because her existence testifies to divine favor and moral calling.

This distortion now manifests most visibly in the digital world. The internet, once hailed as a tool of enlightenment, has become an amplifier for moral confusion. Online platforms reward outrage, cultivate suspicion, and spread dehumanizing narratives at unprecedented speed. Antisemitic ideas thrive in these spaces, often cloaked in humor, irony, or pseudo-intellectual posturing. The virtual world functions as a spiritual arena where old hatreds mutate and multiply. In this sense, the internet has become a theater for the same moral drama that has defined history—the rebellion of evil against the sacred.

The Covenant and the Shadow of Evil

This rebellion reaches its climax when directed against the people through whom God chose to reveal Himself. Delbanco’s insight about blindness to evil becomes especially poignant here: when societies lose the ability to perceive moral reality, they also lose the ability to recognize the spiritual nature of antisemitism. Within the biblical worldview, the Jewish people are not chosen for privilege but for purpose—to carry divine revelation and bear witness to moral order before the nations. That election, which gives history its moral axis, also makes Israel a target for the forces that oppose divine will. Evil, in its essence, sets itself against what God intends for good.

Understanding antisemitism as spiritual does not mean it is mystical in the sense of irrational; rather, it means that the hatred is anchored in humanity’s moral rebellion. The Jewish people stand as a visible sign of God’s covenant, and evil seeks to erase that sign. Wherever God’s covenant is remembered, opposition arises. This opposition is not merely political—it is metaphysical. It is the world’s refusal to accept divine sovereignty in human affairs. Israel’s calling both sanctifies and provokes because it exposes the tension between holiness and rebellion that runs through all human history. Antisemitism, then, is not just an unfortunate prejudice; it is the mirror in which humanity’s resistance to the sacred is revealed most clearly.

Recovering Moral Imagination

Recognizing antisemitism as spiritual does not absolve human responsibility; it intensifies it. Timothy Keller emphasizes that evil cannot be confronted unless it is first diagnosed. Treating antisemitism as a political problem alone addresses symptoms but not causes. Laws and education can suppress hatred, but they cannot transform the heart. The true remedy begins with recovering belief in objective moral truth. A society that denies good and evil as real will inevitably misunderstand the Jewish story, because Israel’s very name—“one who wrestles with God”—is a testimony that moral struggle lies at the center of human existence.

Dershowitz and Shapiro both observe that antisemitism reveals more about those who hate than those who are hated. Societies invoke it when they seek a scapegoat for their own moral failure. Scapegoats may change, but the need for them persists wherever guilt is denied. Yet despite this recurring hatred, Jewish survival testifies that evil never has the last word. Every empire that sought to annihilate the Jews—Egypt, Babylon, Rome, Nazi Germany—has vanished. The Jewish people remain. Their survival is not merely historical resilience but theological witness: proof that divine purpose endures beyond human malice.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks deepens this understanding by showing that antisemitism always expands beyond the Jews who first suffer from it. The hatred that begins with the covenant people eventually consumes every society that nurtures it, because hatred of Jews is ultimately hatred of the moral order itself. For that reason, combating antisemitism requires more than awareness or policy; it demands moral renewal. It requires recovering what Delbanco called the moral imagination—the ability to see evil not as abstraction but as spiritual reality intertwined with history.

To rebuild that imagination, courage and faith must return to public life. Courage allows truth to be spoken; faith restores the conviction that history has meaning. When societies rediscover transcendence, they can finally see antisemitism for what it is: not merely hostility toward a people, but rebellion against the God who speaks through their endurance. The oldest hatred persists, yet it is continually met by the oldest promise—that truth, goodness, and holiness remain real. The Jewish story stands as proof that moral order is not a human invention but a divine covenant woven into the very fabric of history.

References (APA Style)

Craig, W. L. (2010). On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. David C. Cook.
Delbanco, A. (1995). The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Dershowitz, A. (2003). The Case for Israel. John Wiley & Sons.
Keller, T. (2008). The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Dutton.
Keller, T. (2009). Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power. Dutton.
Sacks, J. (2015). Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Schocken.
Shapiro, B. (2019). The Right Side of History. Broadside Books