How the Bible Reveals the 3 Types of Antisemites

The motives for hating Jews are the same as they were in the ancient world - which is why I don't expect the global antisemitism problem to improve at all.

Dec 23, 2022

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This post is the fourteenth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:

These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

In the second article in this series I explained what I regarded as the primary reason to understand why someone becomes an antisemite: which cultures have most influenced them? I then mapped out the world by continent, pointing out which cultures had much higher levels of antisemitism than others.

This theme has thus far guided the series as I’ve sought to explore how antisemitic ideas move through the cultural conduits of humanity from conspiracy theories to technology to academia to political philosophies and Middle East states.

But now it’s worth digging deeper: what reasons do some of these cultures cite for why they hate the Jews? How do the cultural claims for antisemitism differ from place to place?

Broadly speaking, most forms of antisemitism fall into one of 3 categories, though of course often multiple categories may be embraced at the same time or blended together:

Religion. People hate Jews because they hate the Jewish religion, the Jewish idea of a monotheistic God, Jewish moral values, and the Jewish Bible.
Politics and Economics. People hate what they perceive to be Jewish people’s roles in political leadership and the world of commerce.
Race. People see Jews primarily as an ethnic group and then hate them similarly as they might blacks, Latinos, or any number of minority groups of other “tribes” around the world.

It’s not hard to see examples of these three categories in history. For most of Western Civilization, Christians persecuted Jews under the mistaken belief that they bore collective responsibility for the death of Christ. In a secular context, frequently Jews have been the target of conspiracy theory ideologies which cast them as secret manipulators of politics, media, and finance. And, of course, the Nazis sought to exterminate the Jewish people under the idea that they were less than human, a totally different race.

As I’ve noted throughout this series, I particularly appreciate the opinion columns published by Jewish News Syndicate - so much so that I’ve started contributing news and investigative articles to them. I plan to submit my own op/eds to the section soon. Yesterday my favorite piece was one by Steve Lipman - apparently his first published article - titled “The biblical roots of antisemitism” which offered a fascinating analysis I’d never heard before:

According to Jewish tradition, God offered the Torah to all the nations of the world, in order to prevent them from becoming jealous of the Jews as God’s “Chosen People.” The Talmud tractate Avoda Zara cites three nations, representing the world’s most dominant groups and their ways of life, which refused the divine offer.
The Talmud states that all three nations, descended from biblical figures, turned down the offer because the Torah proscribed certain practices they were unwilling to give up: The brothers Amnon and Moab, who were descendants of Lot and his daughters, did not want to forgo their devotion to sexual immorality. Descendants of Ishmael, Isaac’s half-brother, wanted to retain their tribe’s reliance on theft. Descendants of Esau, Jacob’s brother, refused the offer because of their forefather Isaac’s blessing to Esau—“by the sword thou shalt live.”
This is the origin of 3,000 years of antisemitism. According to experts, there are three dominant strains of antisemitism: religious, political-economic and racial. The Crusades and the Inquisition were motivated by religious antisemitism, pogroms by political-economic antisemitism and the Holocaust by racial antisemitism.

Lipman then explains how these 3 groups connect with the ancient expressions of antisemitism:

These three types of antisemitism align with the three biblical antecedents: Amnon-Moab would not give up their “religious” behavior, a form of idolatry that used sex to attract converts. Ishmael’s propensity for robbery and violence was political and economic, with crime systemically instituted on a national level. Esau’s pledge to “kill my brother Jacob” was racial in nature, connected to the biological family ties with Jacob.

Lipman explains that he certainly means this more in a thematic sense than a literal, genealogical one. Ammon and Moab, Ishmael, and Esau - these figures are all symbolic of tendencies within everyone, which all have the choice whether to embrace or oppose.

As Douglas Rushkoff has laid out in his exciting book on Judaism, Nothing Sacred, and his Testament comic series: the stories of the Bible didn’t just happen in ancient times, they are perpetually happening in various forms and versions repeatedly. By reading the Bible and studying the broader history around it then hopefully as we’re reliving it in our own lives we can avoid making the mistakes of those who came before us. We don’t have to live out these stories the same way they did. We can rewrite the Bible as we live it across our own lives.

However, as much as we can make changes without ourselves, we are so limited in how much we can change others and the broader world around us. In so many ways our world today is not all that different from the much more primitive time of the biblical patriarchs. Men still wage war on one another and rape women. Men still seek to conquer other people’s territory and enslave rival tribes to serve them. Idols of all forms still capture our lives and steal our worship away from the one true God. As I’ll explain in an upcoming essay, I’ve grown deeply cynical about human nature and question to what extent we as a species can collectively evolve beyond the level of cruelty and primitivism still dominating around the globe and within our hearts.

And so one of the big conclusions I’ve developed over the years about antisemitism is especially unpleasant: I don’t believe antisemitism is ever going to go away and in fact I anticipate it only getting worse in the coming years.

Why? Because the three general reasons for antisemitism above and symbolized in the biblical characters Lipman highlights, are innate to human nature. It is natural for humans to worship sex and the other powers of the natural world. It is natural for humans to covet their neighbor’s wealth and seek to take it from them. It is natural to despise the other nearby tribe and see them as a threat rather than family.

So yes: antisemitism is natural. It is normal to embrace the primitive cultural values which then lead one to scapegoat a whole group of people.

Thus, antisemitism globally is going to get worse for a pretty simple reason. More people are going to be born. The population is going to increase over the course of the 21st century. Thus the number of Jew haters compared to the number of Jews is only going to increase higher and higher.

Let’s go over the numbers again: 0.2% of the world - 15.3 million - is Jewish. And 26% of the adult population in the countries surveyed - over one billion - is antisemitic. So the number of antisemites is going to increase much faster than we’ve ever seen. And new technologies are only going to enable antisemites to spread their ideas faster and faster.

This is among the reasons why I made the decision last year to refocus my career on Zionism and antisemitism awareness, rather than continuing as a foot soldier of right-wing media. (I’ll explain the other reasons in an upcoming essay.) This is a problem that is going to just get worse and require more work to sound the alarm bells to wake up more people to be aware of how bad it is.

Will you join me in this fight to defend our Jewish brothers and sisters?

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