Antisemitism – the oldest hatred in history

Wherever political, social, or economic dislocation manifests, the longest-standing hatred in history – antisemitism – rears its ugly head, and unless we do something about it, nothing will change.

So said historian and Holocaust educator, Trudy Gold, at a virtual conference held on Sunday, 22 November. Gold was the keynote speaker at the 36th national conference of the Women’s International Zionist Organisation of South Africa.

“Antisemitism is a form of racism like any other, but has unique qualities,” said Gold. “Like any disease, it mutates from time to time, and much of its horror is now directed at Israel.

“Because we live in such uncertain times and because we have more time to think, we need to come up with a strategy to combat it. If we have knowledge, we can devise ways to change it.”

Most historians trace the hatred of Jews back to the birth of Christianity. Although Jews had been an issue for the polytheistic Greek and Roman empires, true conflict really began when Christianity entered the religious arena.

“In the world of monotheism, the problems arose,” said Gold. “Jews are central only because Christianity and later Islam see Judaism as a parent religion.

“The accusation that Christianity makes about the Jews is that they killed Joshua of Nazareth. The Gospels, written 14 years after his death, share very little about the origins of Christianity and are a propaganda document which tell the story of a wonder rabbi who preached goodness and love and was murdered by the Jews.”

Consequently, the Jewish people are seen as guilty of committing the most heinous sin in all of history. So deep is the negative stereotype this engenders that it penetrated the psyche of the West for centuries to follow.

Said Gold, “Written into Christianity’s creed is the negative image of the Jew. Jews were squashed out of most professions, and became moneylenders and traders as a result. The Catholic Church forbade moneylending to Christians, and Jews were useful to secular rulers because they weren’t Christian.”

It was only during the Enlightenment that matters improved. New ways of thinking encouraged society to include Jewish people, resulting in their emancipation in most places barring Eastern Europe.

“The Jew could become part of society, part of the modern world,” Gold said. “They helped to take the new world forward.

“The modern world is Freud, Marx, and Einstein, who came from the Jewish religion. Jews developed much of modern society, were involved in revolutions, and people started to ask what it really meant to call someone a Jew.”

Tragically, the changes wrought by modernity led to insecurity and a rise in nationalism across Europe, ultimately leading to Jews being targeted for a variety of reasons.

“People didn’t like change, and they looked for a scapegoat. They noticed the Jews, who had entered trades such as medicine and law, and while they had no real power, they had become visible.”

Out of an aggressive nationalism came the idea of race and racial identity, the insider and outsider.

“That’s where antisemitism came in,” said Gold. “It’s a modern racial term, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a Rothschild, a pious Jew, a Karl Marx, or a convert. It’s Jewish blood.

“This ultimately led to the most evil moment in mankind’s history, a time when the most educated people murdered a third of world Jewry. Yet at the end of it all, antisemitism didn’t disappear.”

This time, however, it would become a feature on both the right and left of the political spectrum.

“There had previously been a widely held belief that Jews were capitalist,” said Gold. “But in 1948, the second country to recognise Israel was Russia, and Stalin put his support behind the Jewish state. The London-based communist paper lauded Israel for fighting feudalism, and it seemed the Soviet bloc would support Israel.”

This support stemmed from the fact that Israel, a left-wing socialist state, had more in common with Russia than the Arab states, a group of mainly feudal countries comprising kingdoms and kingships.

“It all changed when many old monarchies fell and socialism and nationalism rose in the Arab world,” said Gold. “Nasser became receptive to Nazism and socialism, and gradually, the Soviet press became anti-Zionist and accused Russian Jewry of putting Israel before Russia, and selling out socialism.”

Because of socialism’s alignment with the left, antisemitism stopped being the preserve of the right-wing, and found its way into the liberal camp.

“The Palestinian Liberation Organisation was founded in 1964 alongside all the civil-rights movements,” said Gold. “Anti-Jewish propaganda seeped into the left through Russian youth movements all marching against the bomb, promoting brotherhood, and espousing the Palestinian cause.”

This was coupled with a trend of demonising Israel. Pernicious lies took off about Zionists collaborating with Nazis in order to create a Jewish state, penetrating even the minds of politicians in the British parliament.

Said Gold, “With time, it developed into a world Jewish conspiracy, saying that Jews work together to topple Western society. Today, the nasty right has been joined by a nasty left, and we can see that with Jeremy Corbyn. It’s not over.”

Gold stressed the need to rethink education of our children about Jewish history if we are to have a hope of making a difference.

“You will never destroy Jew hatred, but I don’t believe every non-Jew is antisemitic. You can get through to some people with a reasoned argument, but it demands that we educate our children.”