Keith Rankin Essay – Judaism, Antisemitism, and Israel

Analysis by Keith Rankin.

To understand antisemitism, we need a meaning for ‘semitism’, and another -ism to contextualise semitism.

Literally, semitism means the promotion of the Semitic people, whoever they might be. The most appropriate comparator for ‘semitism’ is ‘hamitism’, relating to the ‘hamites’ or ‘Hamitic people’; analogous to the ‘Semitic people’. These are archaic terms, befitting the nineteenth century pseudo-sciences of eugenics, physiognomy and phrenology; semitism is a bible-derived concept of a preferred race, and of racism.

Our particular interest in 2024 is in two subsets: a racial subset of the Semitic people known as the ‘Jewish People’, or the Jewish ethnos or ‘nation’ (ie where a nation is a ‘people’ rather than a sovereign territory; and a racial subset of the Hamitic people, known today as ‘Palestinians’. Semite is named after Noah’s son ‘Shem’; hamite is named after Hoah’s son ‘Ham’. The biblical ‘curse of Ham’ was invoked in particular with regard to Ham’s youngest son Canaan, the putative father of the Canaanites, especially including today’s Palestinians.

While the Palestinian Arabs have been deemed by some Christians and Jews to belong to a cursed ethnicity, the mythistorical Jewish ethic line – descended from Shem – came to be known as a (or ‘the’) chosen people. Hence semitism (or philosemitism) is the presumption of the exceptionalism of the Jewish ethnicity. Antisemitism, then, can be regarded as a dislike or disapproval of the Jewish ‘race’. (For a few though, antisemitism seems to mean a denial of this presumption of exception.) Likewise, antihamitism, while it could be understood as a denial of the curse, is probably best understood as an analogue of antisemitism; as a dislike of or disapproval of the Palestinian ‘race’. In their most extreme forms, antisemitism and antihamitism are both presumptions in favour of the expulsion or genocide of an ethnic people. Both forms of discriminatory hatred need to be equally condemned.

While there is no scientific evidence that there was ever such a thing as a Jewish race or a Palestinian race, there are Jewish ethnicities (plural). Many people who have taken DNA tests will have some of their ancestry defined as Sephardic Jewish or Ashkenazi Jewish; but never simply ‘Jewish’. (Nobody will have Christian or Muslim as an ‘ethnicity’.) These Jewish ethnicities show in these tests because of widespread historical exclusions, within Jewish communities, of non-Jews as marriage partners; thus these initially religious communities may be classified as ancestral endogamies and, on that basis, as ethnicities. We should not be distracted; Judaism is the foremost (ie progenitor) of the monotheistic religions. Jewishness is a meme, not a gene. A ‘secular Jew’ – or a ‘secular Muslim’ – is an oxymoron; a non-religious adherent to a religion.

Endogamy cultures can be problematic, not so much because of inbreeding within a limited gene pool, but mainly because of the antipathies caused by self-segregation. In some places there has been widespread and mutual self-segregation; the West Russian ‘Pale of (Jewish) Settlement‘ which lasted formally for over a century (until World War 1; and informally for much longer) was one such territory in which endogamy bred hatred and hatred bred endogamy. Reciprocal apartheid. Further, the lands of that former Pale were particularly coveted in the 1930s by the German National Socialists for the realisation of their Lebensraum policy.

Antisemitism as a panoply of Christian Judeophobias

Orthodox Antisemitism

In the years between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the Eastern Mediterranean was politically and then culturally, a ‘Hellenic’ (ie Greek) empire; a cultural empire which gained two unofficial capital cities, Byzantium and Alexandria. That empire was Romanised from the first century BCE; ie subject to the political (but not cultural) hegemony of Rome.

Judaism, as the vanguard for monotheism – a novel religio-cultural phenomenon – became a successful proselytising religion, especially within the Hellenic cultural sphere. In say 200 CE, by far the majority of Jews in the world were converts. Judaism’s spiritual home city was Jerusalem, the principal city of Judah/Judea. There were also many Jewish converts in the territories to the north and east of Jerusalem; and there were still rabbinical Jews in Babylon (in modern Iraq), which is where early Jewish intellectuals decamped to after the fall of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE.

With the rise of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century CE, this new aggressive monotheism largely displaced Judaism in the Roman empire; many Eastern Mediterranean Jews either converted to Christianity, or emigrated. Many of the emigrants travelled west; with many migrating Jews converting many of the ‘pagans’ (especially Berbers) of the Western Mediterranean to monotheism. These people, initially mostly in the African ‘Maghreb’, became the Sephardic Jews.

Just as in the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth century, the new aggressive faith used the rhetoric of cultural-racism against Judaism, the hitherto established faith. Thus Orthodox archbishops such as John Chrysostom of Constantinople waged a vicious rhetorical war against the Jews. (Refer Simon Schama, Story of the Jews, episode 2.) Central themes of this rhetoric were the alleged complicity of the Jewish priesthood in the execution of Jesus Christ (by Christians deifying Jesus, his crucifiers therefore became guilty of deicide); and a greater tolerance for the practice of moneylending, in particular the usurious practice of ‘making money from money’.

In turn, those loyal to Judaism saw the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity as a ‘slippery slope’ away from monotheism; ie, away from the First Commandment of Moses.

Schisms

Christianity may be understood as the first of the great schisms. Islam later became the second schism from the Jewish branch, and Roman Catholicism the second schism of the Christian branch. After that, Protestantism became the great schism from the Catholic branch, during the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Just as Calvinism became the most anti-Catholic form of Protestant Christianity around the year 1550, 1,200 years earlier the emerging Greek Christian Orthodoxy (based in Byzantium renamed Constantinople, now Istanbul) became the most virulently anti-Jewish form of Christianity. In contrast, the Islamic schism from Judaism did not promote a hatred of the parent religion. Islam was never antisemitic in the way that Orthodox Christianity was.

The Islamic – or Koranic – variant of ‘Abrahamic’ monotheism rapidly proselytised in North Africa and Southwest Asia; this process – both cultural and military – was known as ‘Jihad’. While Islam proved popular, in part because of its tax advantages in Islamised territories, it was tolerant towards monotheistic non-converts; Jews with Muslim overlords generally prospered. (Muslims became known as Ishmaelites, in reference to Ishmael, the eldest son of Abraham, the mythical father of the Islamised – largely ‘Hamitic’ – races.) Christianity was the least tolerant of the three monotheist branches of biblical Judaism.

The Russian Jews

In the second half of the first millennium, all three monotheisms were seeking converts among bordering polytheist populations. Judaism continued to make progress in two main areas, in addition to the Western Mediterranean. These were Yemen (and subsequently Ethiopia), and Khazaria.

Khazaria (the Khazar Khaganate; see map) was a mixed European and Turkic territory to the north of the Caucasus Mountains, in modern-day southwestern Russia; mountains which include Europe’s highest, Mt Elbrus.) It is this region that gave to people of European ethnicity the label ‘Caucasian‘.)

The Khazar Khaganate dates from 650 CE, and lasted in some form until the early 13th century.

In the eighth century, the Khazarian people – especially the ruling class, realising that it was not a matter of whether to convert to monotheism but to choose which faith to adopt – had three to choose from. Realising that they would have less socio-political autonomy if they adopted either of the two religions on their doorstep, they chose Judaism. As converted Jews, they were deemed subsequently to be descended from Ashkenaz, a son of Noah’s other son Japheth. The Khazarites became  the Ashkenazi Jews (albeit not a popular view within the twentyfirst-century Israeli secular priesthood; refer Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People). In the year 1000 CE, for example, this was the most populous Jewish community in the world.

Around the year 1220, the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish polities in those steppe-lands were erased by the Mongol invaders. The predominantly Jewish population of Khazaria fled into the emerging Russian territories; Slavic lands whose people were then consolidating their faith as Orthodox Christians. (Religious ‘water’ and ‘oil’ didn’t really mix; there would be minimal assimilation between these two populations.)

In later centuries, these Ashkenazi Jews almost certainly mixed with other Jewish groups who had moved east, especially from the Central Europe. (In The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses, Eran Elhaik, using DNA analysis, establishes the ethnic predominance of the Khazarites within those Jewish communities of the Pale.)

Catholic Antisemitism

The schism between the (Greek) Orthodox and (Roman) Catholic churches was a slow-moving affair, which covered most of the second half of the first millennium CE. By and large, Catholicism acquired the same antisemitism, though developed a greater degree of pragmatism towards Judaism.

Orthodox Christianity and Islam emerged as much bigger geopolitical threats than Judaism to Catholic western Europe. Judaism receded to the periphery of monotheistic West Eurasia (to use the sensible name adopted by James Belich in his 2022 book The World the Plague Made, noting that North and Northeast Africa also belonged to this geopolity).

The basics of the European geopolitical fracture that still stands today were established during the reign of the Frankish emperor, Charlemagne. By the early ninth century, Catholicism prevailed across the entirety of Western and Central Europe. (There were still ‘pagan’ pockets – eg, in Scandinavia; otherwise, the border established by Charlemagne is that of today’s European Union. We note that the Catholic parts of the former Yugoslavia are in the European Union, and the Orthodox and Muslim parts of that former union are not. We also may note that Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus are exceptions; they are more Orthodox than Catholic. And we note that the post-Catholic Protestantisation of northern Europe occurred many centuries after Charlemagne.)

Simon Schama (in his Story) notes that Judaism came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066; this suggests that the Frankish kingdoms (which became France) had been a significant recipient of the racially diverse Jewish refugees from the Eastern Mediterranean. And it suggests that the (still relatively small) Rhineland (western German) population of Jews in Medieval Europe also arrived via that French route.

In the centuries either side of 1000 CE, the fusion of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures seems to have created a synergy, creating a cultural high tide of tolerance and intellectual osmosis. An interesting consequence may have been the emergence of modern banking. Pure banking developed in a Mediterranean world in which money-lending (usuary; charging interest) was prohibited by Christian and Muslims, though was pragmatically tolerated when the money-lenders were Jews. (Early banking was a side-hustle of rich Italian and Spanish merchants, who made written promises – promissory notes – and ‘cleared’ them among each other. They invested the money in their possession – their mercantile profits – to finance ventures; as financier shareholders of each venture, they would take a share of the profits or losses.)

It was Christian Kings and Princes who did much of the borrowing from Jewish moneylenders; these entitled overlords had a propensity to turn to antisemitism when they become insolvent. The Catholic world became especially prickly towards its cultural rivals, including Judaism, in the later decades of the 12th century.

Antisemitism in western Europe seems to have emerged around the same time that Catholic Crusader groups had conquered much of the ‘Holy Lands’ (the Levant; modern Syria/Lebanon and Israel/Palestine) from both Muslim and Orthodox overlords. Tolerance and pragmatism towards Jews largely fell apart in Spain, England and France in the twelfth century, leading to expulsions of Jews from those countries; and the boosting of the Rhineland population of Jews. Shama mentions the problem of antisemitism emerging in England during the reign of the Crusader King (Richard ‘Lionheart’; 1189-1199); indeed, Richard’s mother Eleanor had been responsible for expelling Jews from her ancestral territory of Aquitaine. Jews were expelled from Spain in stages from the 12th to the 14th centuries; and from England during the 13th century.

This is about the same time (early twelfth century) as when the Khazarite Jews had to flee (northwest into West Russia) from the Golden Horde established by the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan.

Neither Shlomo Sand nor Simon Shama mentioned the terrible atrocities committed upon Jews – especially in western Germany and Switzerland – during the first and biggest round of the Black Death (1348 to 1352; the ‘Plague’). But it’s true. Many Jews were scapegoated and grotesquely murdered; accused of having poisoned the wells in many central European towns.

Christian Poland, which was less affected by the Black Death than Western Europe, gained a reputation for relative tolerance towards Jews. So, it is likely that Eastern and Western Europeans converged in the territories we today call Poland, creating a relatively cosmopolitan population of Jews; Jews who practiced their faith while also mixing more easily with their Catholic (and later Protestant) neighbours; that is, more easily than the larger populations of Jews further east were able to integrate with their Orthodox neighbours.

Protestant Antisemitism (including Christian Zionist Antisemitism)

While the Bible (Old Testament) became more important for Jewish populations in recent centuries, the newer Talmud was a substantially more important text in the practice of Judaism in the medieval period.

It was the Protestant Christians during and after the Reformation who first took to the Bible – both Testaments – as literal statements of history and prophecy. Jews suddenly played an affirmative role as the spiritual and biological ancestors of Christians; of particular importance, they played an important role in Christian prophecy (including apocalyptic prophecy), especially in the momentum to re-establish an ethnoreligious state called ‘Israel’.

Further, Protestantism – especially the more Evangelical forms (eg Calvinism) – was attractive to the expanding Plague-recovery mercantile communities of Northwest Europe. Under the auspices of the reformed Church, the sanctions against usury – sanctions against making money from money – were increasingly downplayed. Christians could do business with Jews again; soon enough though, these two mercantile-religious communities became rivals. While Jews were no longer proselytisers, the mercantile Protestants (especially the Dutch) were eager expansionists, expanding their new capitalist domains throughout the much of the world; although only encroaching on the coastal communities of the Islamic World of the Indian Ocean rim, and of the ‘Far East’.

Protestant antisemitism was born out of capitalist rivalry; and out of the new Christian racial tropes, which facilitated the acceptance of intensely racist forms of slavery. In the nineteenth century – in the era of emerging ethno-nationalism within Europe, and emerging racial supremacism – the Jewish ‘nation’ became a rivalrous irritant to increasingly nationalist Christianity. Further, as Shlomo Sand observed, in Eastern Europe, a more dangerous form of ethno-nationalism emerged; one which built on the original Orthodox tradition of antisemitism. This eastern rivalry had morphed from being mainly religious to mainly ethnic; especially Slavs versus Jews.

To the west of Europe, in the now geopolitically dominant United Kingdom, Christian Zionism became a thing. While (Protestant) Christian Zionism had its roots in the Puritan era of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s and 1650s, by the 1830s the upper crust of even Anglican society wanted Jews to be ‘over there’ rather than ‘over here’. Although the United Kingdom elected a Jewish Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli – in the 1860s, this only reinforced latent antisemitism amongst his dour political rivals. (Queen Victoria found Disraeli to be more personable than his political opponents.)

Anyway, through that century, there was increasing (mainly Christian) talk in the United Kingdom and Western Europe about re-establishing a Jewish homeland, though not necessarily in Jewish biblical home-lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. The possibility of an expansion of Jewish settlement in Palestine emerged, however, as the then overlords of the Levant – the Turkish Ottomans – appeared to be presiding over of a dying empire. The European ‘great powers’ were lining up to divide the ‘Middle East’ – an annoyingly Britocentric term – between them.

This possibility didn’t stop the British ruling-class antisemites from concocting (just after 1900) a plan to establish a Jewish ‘homeland’ in Uganda. While Uganda is a pleasant and fertile territory in Africa, this resettlement proposal tells much about the irredeemable racism of West Europeans towards the presumed ‘inferior’ races; especially but not only Africans. And it shows zero sensitivity to Jewish sensibilities regarding their biblical homeland.

Meanwhile the antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe – mainly in the then Russian Empire – continued as Slavic nationalisms were gaining pace. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to their destinations of choice: United States and United Kingdom.

For European Jews, the interwar crisis began in 1924 when the United States closed down their immigration from Europe; and the United Kingdom pretty much did the same thing. The United States’ near-prohibition of Jewish immigration lasted until the mid-1950s. It was only after 1924 that large numbers of Eastern European Jews looked to emigrate to (British Mandatory) Palestine; that’s where British and American immigration policy deflected them to.

Then, in the 1930s, the German National Socialists (Nazis) started both scapegoating their Jewish residents (effectively blaming them for the Great Depression, on account of apparent Jewish overrepresentation in the finance industry) and coveting their lands in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the newly independent Baltic States, and especially Soviet Russia.

The new Jewish residents in British Palestine recreated the segregated lifestyles they had known in Russia, creating much animosity between them and their new Palestinian neighbours. Pretty much by definition, these settlers were Zionists, because they were recreating the biblical promised land of Zion, even though they would rather have gone to the United States. The indigenous Palestinian population resented the new settlers; not because of their ethnicity, but because of their insensitivity and exclusiveness; an insensitivity comparable with many prior experiences of other indigenous peoples in the face of settler-colonisation.

Many immigrants from the west Russian territories were Socialist Zionists; indeed, it was that leftish faction which largely ruled modern Israel from its formalisation in 1948 until the mid-1970s. Other interwar settlers included the fascist Zionists of the Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang. Still others – including the Irgun, which became Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party – were on the less-extreme political right. All of these settler-Zionist factions formed resistance militias that became anti-British (ie anti- the new post-Ottoman overlord of the southern Levant) and (after the 1929 uprising) anti-Palestinian. (Just as Hamas is a resistance militia today.) The anti-Palestinian aspect of this settler militancy became, over time, increasingly racist; it became antihamitic, a racial prejudice as problematic as antisemitism.

Around 1940, the Lehi fascists tried to do a deal with Adolf Hitler. Both the Nazis and the Lehi wanted the European Jews to leave Europe. The Lehi wanted a mass transfer of that population to their new Zion in the Levant. Great Britain, in particular, was in the way. From the British point-of-view, the time to create an exclusively Jewish homeland had passed; the logistics of a mass resettlement programme during World War Two were impossible, and racism had passed its peak in the United Kingdom.

For Hitler, those logistics of a mass transfer to Jews to Palestine were always going to be problematic; exponentially more so once Germany was at war with Britain. Instead, Hitler reconsidered the British antisemitic plan to transfer the European Jews to Africa. After May 1940 there was a pro-Nazi puppet government installed in Southern France – the Vichy regime – which had control over France’s imperial territories. Hitler formulated a plan to settle the Eastern European Jews to Madagascar! While never practical, Winston Churchill certainly made such a transfer quite impossible. The United Kingdom invaded and conquered the Vichy French territory of Madagascar in 1942. (Who said the British military was overstretched in 1942? In that year, Winston Churchill argued that Australian troops should stay in Europe. John Curtin, the new Australian Prime Minister, wanted those soldiers to return home to defend Australia.)

Hitler’s options for the Jews substantially narrowed. His antisemitism and desire for lebensraum had left him committed to the removal of this population, but with no destination to remove them to, and few resources to do the removing. The rest became tragic history – from 1942 to 1945 – of the worst possible kind.

Still – even after the Holocaust – the pro-Israel antisemitic United States denied immigration entry to Jews, except that is for a few handpicked ones. Most holocaust survivors of World War Two were left with only one option; to migrate to British Palestine or (after 1948) to Israel. The Lehi (who fought the British during WW2), the Irgun, and the socialistic Haganah all served as ‘freedom fighters’ from 1946 to 1948. This was a successful militant insurgency. The British departed as soon as the United Nations was formed; they couldn’t wait to leave. The United Kingdom supported the creation of an ethnocratic sovereign state as the eventual solution to its longstanding antisemitic project of resettlement, indeed hoping that large numbers of British-resident Jews would join the refugee Jews in the new state of Israel.

Israel had been a longstanding antisemitic project, with the object of both cleansing Europe of Jews and creating a Europe-ish sovereign state in the ‘Middle East’, a state that would help to project a European-style foreign policy in a region which was set to undergo full decolonisation.

Conclusion

Israel today has arisen as a consequence of two millenniums of antisemitism in its various Christian forms. Israel is a nation-state, which – if it wishes not to be a pariah state – must abide by the same rules as any other nation state. It is not exceptional – the rules do not allow for exceptionalism – and the rules do not allow for the new nation to promote an alternative form of racism that’s as bad as antisemitism.

Jews are an ethnically diverse people with a shared cultural heritage; Judaism is a culture rather than a nation. A significant number – though not a majority – of the Jewish people live in the nation-state of Israel, a nation state that’s 76 years-old and counting. It’s a nation which presently pursues a relatively soft form of antihamitic Apartheid within its internationally accepted boundaries, and a much harsher form of antihamitism within its occupied territories. There is a clear analogy between the occupied territories of Palestine today and the occupied (and client) territories of Europe’s belligerent powers in the 1940s.

All nation states’ governments are equally able to be criticised; by those countries’ citizens, by residents and by non-residents. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism; it’s criticism of the way that nation-state projects itself across the wider world, and about how it racially and culturally discriminates (sometimes with extreme violence) against people or peoples over which the Israeli authorities have a duty of care.

Past victims of racism have more reason than most to avoid being present perpetrators of racism.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.