Antisemitism

Overview

Antisemitism is hostility toward Jews as Jews. It includes prejudice, exclusion, persecution and violence, as well as beliefs that assign collective guilt or sinister power to Jewish people. Despite its name, it does not mean hostility toward all peoples who speak Semitic languages. The term refers specifically to Jew hatred. Its targets may be Jewish religious practice, ancestry, communities or national identity. Its expressions range from insults and discrimination to organized propaganda, attacks on synagogues and genocide.

Antisemitism has changed its stated reasons while retaining familiar patterns. Jews have been condemned for their religion, portrayed as a biological threat, accused of controlling governments and blamed for unrelated crises. Conspiracy theories can make contradictory claims: Jews are depicted as both outsiders and hidden rulers, or as responsible for both capitalism and revolutionary politics. The persistence of such accusations matters more than their internal consistency. They turn Jews into a collective explanation for events and make individual Jews answer for acts they did not commit.

Antisemitism also appears in attacks framed as opposition to Israel. Criticism of any Israeli government policy is legitimate. Rejecting Jewish self-determination while accepting that right for other peoples, substituting “Zionist” for “Jew” in claims of secret control, or directing anger at Israel toward Jewish civilians crosses into antisemitism. The distinction concerns what is said and done, including whether Jews are treated as a collective target. BDS, the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, seeks its diplomatic, financial, academic and cultural isolation. Its tactics and arguments warrant assessment on those same grounds.

Origins

Anti-Jewish hostility long predates the modern word. In Christian Europe, religious polemic cast Jews as collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. The Gospel account of Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus for thirty silver coins was used over centuries to portray Jews as greedy and treacherous. Augustine argued that Jews should be kept alive as witnesses to Christian claims, but within a theology that assigned them a degraded status. Religious authorities and rulers also imposed restrictions, expulsions and forced conversions. The Catholic Church’s 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate rejected collective Jewish responsibility for Jesus’s crucifixion and called for an end to antisemitism.

The blood libel falsely accused Jews of abducting and murdering Christian children to use their blood in Passover matzah or other rituals. Such charges provoked persecution across centuries and survived in later propaganda. The 1840 Damascus blood libel was one prominent case. In 1543, Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies urged the seizure of Jewish books, the burning of synagogues and schools, forced labor, confiscation and expulsion. These were calls for persecution, not harmless theological disagreement. Modern images of Jews or Israeli leaders as blood-drinking child murderers revive the same fabricated atrocity charge.

Anti-Jewish persecution also occurred under Muslim rule, though Jewish experiences varied by time and place. In 1839, following a blood libel, Shiite Muslims massacred Jews in Mashhad and forced survivors to choose between outward conversion to Islam and death. Some continued Jewish practices secretly, including baking matzah in cellars. Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism brings together Islamic texts and historical records of Jewish life under Muslim rule. Claims about Islamic doctrine require attribution to the scholar making them; the conduct of particular rulers and mobs does not define Muslims as a whole.

Doctrine

Antisemitism has no single founding text or coherent doctrine. Its recurring ideas portray Jews as inherently disloyal, greedy, dangerous or powerful. These claims turn a diverse people into an imagined collective actor. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery, claims to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination. Its circulation in best-selling Arabic editions spread conspiracy theories that portrayed Zionism as part of a plot against the Arab world. During Ebrahim Raisi’s chairmanship, Iran’s Astan Quds Razavi produced a 50-part film promoting the forgery. Such material gives an old fabrication new audiences.

Modern propaganda also adapts older religious imagery to politics. Claims that Jews control finance, media or governments, or that Israel secretly directs other states, repeat the puppet-master conspiracy. Stories blaming Jews for the September 11 attacks do not become evidence because an individual worker happened to be absent that day. The “Hitler was right” online trend has recycled claims of Jewish control and questioned Holocaust documentation. In 2024, Myron Gaines praised Hitler and blamed Jews for supposedly declaring war on Germany, repeating a Nazi propaganda falsehood rooted in the boycott of German goods. Calm presentation, polished broadcasts and digital distribution do not change the content of such claims.

Religious anti-Judaism, racial antisemitism and anti-Zionist antisemitism differ in language and setting, but can draw on the same stereotypes. An accusation that Jews are treacherous because of Judas, biologically harmful because of ancestry, or secretly directing events through Israel assigns guilt to Jews as a people. Criticism of Israeli decisions need not involve any of these claims. Conversely, calling Jews “Zionists” does not make threats, blood libels or collective blame into ordinary policy debate. The distinction is visible when Jewish students, worshippers or businesses become targets for events in which they had no part.

History

In nineteenth-century Europe, older hostility acquired a racial vocabulary. Jews were increasingly described as an inherited threat rather than people whose religion could change. Pogroms in Russia in 1881 followed other episodes of persecution, including Mashhad and Damascus. Physician Yehuda Leib Pinsker analyzed antisemitism as a persistent social condition. Anti-Jewish persecution also shaped the political work of Theodor Herzl. Zionism is the Jewish people’s national movement for self-determination in their historical homeland, the Land of Israel. Jewish longing for Zion predates modern political Zionism: Zion appears in the Bible, and return to Zion has remained part of Jewish prayer and practice for millennia.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Nazi rule introduced anti-Jewish measures and built a state system of exclusion, dispossession and murder. Jewish organizations in the United States and Britain called for a boycott of German goods; Nazi propaganda later distorted that boycott as a declaration of war. The murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust followed years of propaganda and normalized public antisemitism, alongside failures abroad to stop Nazi persecution. In late June 1941, Romanian authorities and forces murdered nearly 14,000 Jews in the Iași pogrom over two to three days after Ion Antonescu labeled Jews a fifth column. Extermination camps became the endpoint of a wider process, not its beginning.

Survivors made the genocide’s human reality visible. Auschwitz survivor and writer Yehiel De-Nur, known as K. Tzetnik, testified at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and described Auschwitz as another planet; his prisoner number was 135633. Another Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor kept his camp number visible as a mark of survival. Remembering the Holocaust as the systematic murder of six million Jews preserves the identity of those targeted by Nazi ideology. The experience also strengthened Jewish insistence on security and self-determination, although Jewish ties to the Land of Israel were far older than the Holocaust.

Anti-Jewish violence in the region preceded Israel’s establishment. It included riots in 1920 and 1921, the 1929 massacre in Hebron and violence during the Arab revolt of 1936. Amin al-Husseini, leader of the Arab Higher Committee, lived in Nazi Berlin for three years during World War II and met Hitler and senior SS officials. In Iraq, the 1941 Farhud brought deadly violence against Jews. The 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo struck the Jewish community of Aleppo before Israel’s founding. These events form part of the history of insecurity that contributed to the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world.

Political role

After World War II, antisemitism remained a political instrument. In 1965, the Soviet Union sought to equate Zionism with racism and Nazism during negotiations over the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Such rhetoric reversed the history of Nazi persecution while attacking the Jewish national movement. Arab political rhetoric has likewise sometimes used “Jews,” “Zionists” and “Israelis” interchangeably, conflating a people, a movement and citizens of a state. The distinction matters: no Jewish person is responsible for every act of Israel, and no political disagreement licenses hostility toward Jews.

Contemporary antisemitism arises across political settings. Neo-Nazis openly celebrate Nazi symbols and violence. Some actors on the political left reject Israel’s existence as a Jewish state or use older antisemitic tropes in anti-Israel campaigning. Jihadist organizations have targeted Jewish institutions. Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations; their violence and antisemitic incitement must be assessed through their own acts and statements, without assigning their beliefs to Muslims generally. Research on violent online networks has found antisemitic narratives crossing ideological boundaries, including conspiracy theories that can connect hostility toward Jews with wider antidemocratic views.

The BDS campaign organizes work across fronts including culture, local councils and legal action targeting Israel, Israel Defense Forces officers and supporters of Israel. A boycott of a government policy and a refusal to serve a person because that person is Jewish or supports Israel’s continued existence are different acts. At a Martha’s Vineyard farmers market, a vendor refused to sell Alan Dershowitz pierogi after learning that he was a proud Zionist; Dershowitz pursued public and legal action. When political campaigns become harassment of Jewish students, exclusion of individuals or attacks on synagogues, their practical target is Jewish life.

Governments and civic institutions have responded through security, education and public policy. In 2008, Israel established a government and Jewish Agency forum to assist diaspora communities during crises involving anti-Jewish incidents. Brazil’s Porto Alegre made Holocaust education mandatory in its schools in 2009. The United States later adopted a national strategy to counter antisemitism, treating conspiracy theories and attacks on Jewish communities as threats to democratic society. Australia established the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion to examine Jew hatred, ideologically and religiously motivated extremism, radicalisation and public safety. Protecting expression and acting against incitement to violence are compatible duties of democratic government.

Relationship to Israel and the Jewish people

Jewish identity includes religion, peoplehood, history and connection to the Land of Israel. Political Zionism organized the modern return and pursuit of self-determination, while older prayer and practice preserved that connection across centuries. Antisemitism can target any part of this identity. Denying Jews a right to national self-determination granted to other peoples is antisemitic; disagreement over an Israeli leader, law or military decision is not inherently so. This distinction allows direct criticism of policy while recognizing attacks on Jewish identity and collective rights.

Violence against Jews outside Israel has repeatedly followed events involving Israel. In January 2009, two Chicago-area synagogues and a Jewish school were vandalized with graffiti attacking Israel over its Gaza operation. That month, a synagogue in Caracas was vandalized, religious objects were desecrated and records identifying local Jews were stolen. A synagogue in Třebíč, Czech Republic, was marked with an accusation that Jews murdered children and a demand concerning Gaza. In March 2009, Jewish students at the University of Toronto and York University were physically assaulted during Israel Apartheid Week events. None of these acts was a form of criticism directed at an Israeli decision-maker.

Threats have also invoked the Holocaust directly. At a restaurant in Europe, an assailant told Israelis to go to the gas chambers while invoking Israel and Zionism. At the Oxford Union on February 9, 2010, a protester shouted “slaughter the Jews” during an address by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. A demand for Jews to face Nazi murder or an incitement to kill them is antisemitic, whatever political slogan accompanies it. Jewish communities respond through reporting, documentation and security measures as well as public argument.

Some attacks on Jewish institutions have been deadly. The 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and wounded hundreds. In 2009, former Argentine president Carlos Menem was charged with obstructing justice in the case. In France, Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 2006; French authorities prepared in 2009 to try gang leader Youssouf Fofana and his followers. The 2018 attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the deadliest attack on Jews in United States history. In 2022, an armed attacker held a rabbi and three worshippers hostage during Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. Such attacks have made security a routine concern at synagogues, schools and community centers.

Present day

Contemporary antisemitism spreads through public spaces and digital platforms. A Tel Aviv University study counted 1,129 antisemitic incidents worldwide in 2009, up from 559 in 2008. AJC’s 2021 surveys found that 90% of American Jewish respondents and 60% of general-public respondents regarded antisemitism as a problem in the United States. In its 2022 survey, 38% of American Jewish respondents said fear had caused them to change their behavior at least once during the preceding year; among respondents affiliated with synagogues or other Jewish institutions, 19% did not generally feel safe attending them. These figures measure perceptions and behavior, not the number of recorded attacks.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, or FRA, conducted a third survey of Jewish experiences after surveys in 2012 and 2018. In the latest survey, 96% of respondents reported encountering antisemitism in the preceding year, 80% felt it had grown worse in recent years, about half worried about their own or their family’s safety, and more than 70% sometimes hid their Jewish identity. Such findings show how fear can affect ordinary life even when an individual has not reported a crime. Survey percentages describe the people and questions sampled; they should not be read as incident counts.

Recorded incidents answer a different question. ADL counted 1,162 antisemitic incidents at United States K–12 schools in 2023 and 860 in 2024, and reported a 434% increase since 2020. In exploratory research among independent-school parents, 45.3% reported that their children had experienced or witnessed Jew hatred since October 7, 2023; 25.2% reported exposure to anti-Jewish symbols, and 31.7% reported troubling classroom content concerning Jews or Israel. Incident monitoring depends on reporting rules and access to reports, while surveys depend on question wording, sampling and respondents’ experiences. Reading both together gives a fuller account than treating either measure as the whole phenomenon.

Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel were followed by a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents and fear among diaspora Jews. In the following 17 days, Britain’s Community Security Trust recorded 600 incidents, a 641% increase over the comparable period in 2022; 185 occurred online. Germany’s RIAS recorded 202 incidents in the following week, up 240% from the comparable period. AJC’s 2024 survey found that one in three American Jewish respondents had been personally targeted during the preceding year. Most reported increased security at their institutions, and more than half reported changing their behavior because they feared antisemitism.

Online channels carry old accusations at new speed. Among American Jewish respondents targeted online in AJC’s 2020 survey, 62% encountered antisemitism on Facebook and 33% on Twitter. ADL’s work on platform content shows both the reach of explicit Jew hatred and the limits of measuring text alone when images, audio and video also carry it. Antisemitic conspiracy theories do not remain confined to screens: threats reach schools, campuses, businesses and neighborhoods. In Munich in 2025, Jewish children needed police escorts to travel home safely from school amid threats to Jewish institutions and communities.

Antisemitism therefore remains both an immediate danger to Jews and a wider challenge to democratic society. Its history shows how fabricated accusations can move from sermons, pamphlets and state propaganda into everyday exclusion and violence. Its present forms require careful distinctions: between opinion surveys and recorded incidents, between criticism of policy and hostility to Jews, and between evidence-based criticism of doctrine or political ideology and hatred of people. Preserving those distinctions helps identify antisemitism accurately and protect Jewish life without narrowing legitimate debate.