Jonathan Judaken
Reckoning with Postcolonial Judeophobia after October 7 and the Gaza War
“Racial reckoning” was the global watchword after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. October 7 and its aftermath marks another watershed for reckoning with racism, revealing two stark facets of the fight against antisemitism that must be addressed if this moment is not going to spiral into a new era in the history of Judeophobia. First, exceptionalist narratives about antisemitism must be recognized as historically inaccurate and politically moribund; they contribute to sidelining antisemitism in the anti-racist struggle. Second, scholars of antisemitism must understand that the anti-racist movement is a key resource, along with education and interfaith work, in aiding the long-term struggle against Judeophobia. We need to engage the core narratives of anti-racism not just as critics, but also by reframing them, starting with making clear the pivotal role played by Judeophobia as the scaffolding in the creation of racism.
The divides between Israelis and Palestinians and Jews and Muslims feel more pronounced than ever. While views on the conflict are more disparate and split, riven by rivalry and mutual distrust, the stigmatization and targeting of both Jews and Muslims has increased dramatically. In data shared on CNN, “The Anti-Defamation League found that in the eight weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, antisemitic incidents in the US increased 337% . . . The ADL cited 2,031 antisemitic incidents between October 7 and December 7, 1,411 of which were linked to the fighting in Israel and Gaza and 400 of which occurred on college and university campuses.” Likewise, CNN highlighted that “The Council on American-Islamic Relations also reported an increase in Islamophobic incidents. Between October 7 and December 2, CAIR recorded 2,171 reports of bias or requests for help—172% more than the 2022 two-month average” (Tori Morales Pinales, “How Reports of Hate Crimes in the US Were Already at Record Highs, In 4 Charts,” CNN, December 11, 2023). It is evident from this precipitous increase in hate crimes against both groups propelled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that these racisms are entangled.
This entanglement was already evident before October 7 and the Gaza war. The terrorist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in October 2018 was not an isolated event. The “White genocide” conspiracy theory animated by the Great Replacement myth chanted at the Unite the Right torchlight rally in Charlottesville plainly ties together the hatred aimed not only at Jews, but Muslims, Hispanics, and Blacks. The same ideology underpinned the attacks on the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and in El Paso in 2019, and in Buffalo in 2022, and in 160 other kindred killings.
Despite the clear evidence of entanglement, racisms are often treated as discrete histories: scholars most often study White supremacy or anti-Black racism, or they study antisemitism, or they concentrate on Islamophobia or xenophobia in isolation. This problem is particularly pronounced in the study of antisemitism. Indeed, key voices continue to maintain that Judeophobia is unique and needs to be understood as such. To cite just two prominent voices, Deborah Lipstadt in Antisemitism: Here and Now, for example, writes that “Antisemitism is different in structure, history, and contemporary impact than other forms of racism” (91). Bari Weiss in How to Fight Anti-Semitism also claims, “The logic of anti-Semitism is very different from the logic of xenophobia or racism” (32).
This exceptionalist narrative goes back to a transformative moment in the study of antisemitism: the Holocaust. By 1943, just as the scholarly subject began to emerge, a particular Zionist narrative arguing that antisemitism was an eternal hatred within Western culture shaped some of the foundational texts in the field. Conjoined to this claim was the idea that antisemitism differed fundamentally from other racisms. It was articulated by groundbreaking historians like Joshua Trachtenburg, and trumpeted most prominently in the last generation by Robert Wistrich.
In The Devil and the Jews (1943), Trachtenburg wrote, “[The Jew] is the archenemy of Western civilization. He is alien, not to this or that land, but to all Western society, alien in his habits, his pursuits, his interests, his character, his very blood” (3). He also argued that the demonizing of Jews over the long history of Western culture made Judeophobia different from other forms of racial bias “in expression and intensity” (xv).
As is the case with every form of racism, there are elements that make Judeophobia distinctive. But an expanding group of scholars have come to understand that if we repeatedly think about each form of racism as separate and unique, then we not only get the history wrong, but we also fail to adequately navigate the politics of anti-racism in this moment of racial reckoning.
For it is not only the social effects of Judeophobia and Islamophobia post-October 7 that indicate their racial entanglement. The political framing among those supportive of Palestinian liberation has been set by the history of the struggle against anti-Black racism. Since at least the passing of the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” the Palestinian movement has been shaped by anti-racist strategies formed in the anti-apartheid, civil rights, and anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. Today, a key motif of the global Palestinian movement is that the struggle with and against the state of Israel is a fight against an apartheid-like version of White supremacy. This has been abetted by the explicit support of the Palestinian cause on the part of the post-apartheid South African government, symbolized by their current case accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza now before the International Court of Justice.
That a cornerstone of Zionism and the state of Israel is connected to longer anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles has been almost totally silenced, no less than by scholars of antisemitism. We know that the term Antisemitismus was first popularized by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 when he articulated a racial, conspiratorial, and programmatic response to the Jewish problem. Less known is that the incubator for Marr’s White supremacy and eugenic theory was the time he spent among pro-slavery Americans in the 1850s. Marr’s Antisemiten Ligawas meant to unite Germans against the emancipation of Jews, which had granted them legal, equal, civil rights. Marr’s ilk were akin to Jim Crow southerners after the American Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Political Zionism, in turn, emerged as a response to the racialization and politicization of Judeophobia. Little is also said today of the state of Israel emerging as part of an anti-colonial struggle against the strictures of the British Mandate, fought in parallel and against the Arab anti-colonial struggle. Muffled as well is that half the Jews in Israel are Middle Eastern or North African Arab Jews, often there because they were pressured to uproot or flee during the wave of decolonization struggles in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Along with the obvious role played by the Holocaust in legitimizing Zionism and Israel, pundits on antisemitism guided by one-eyed views on Judeophobia fail to trumpet these factors, abetting an anti-Israeli narrative within the anti-racist framework.
Indeed, as scholars have shown, the entanglement of Jews, Muslims, and Blacks in the history of racism goes much deeper than the recent past. It was emphatically wrapped together in the formative cauldron that shaped modern European history, the era of the Spanish Inquisition (1391-1492), when the largest Jewish community living among Muslims and Christians was ethnically and religiously cleansed. The century-long process that led from the 1391 massacres and mass conversion of Jews through to the passage of the first limpieza de sangre (blood purity) legislation in 1449 was the scaffolding for modern racism.
The same year that gave rise to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 was also the year that Columbus sailed to the Americas, beginning the era of Spanish and European colonization of the New World. Columbus’s second expedition would be paid for in part with money expropriated from Jews. By the sixteenth century, as Europeans turned evermore toward Africa as a source of slave labor for the new plantation system that emerged in the Caribbean and in the Americas, a new Spanish word, raza, would begin to circulate.
Shortly after the expulsion of Moors from Spain began in 1609, the Castilian dictionary of Sebastián de Covarrubias would define the new word. Raza (race) referred to “the caste of pure-bred horses” or the pure lineages of animals. Applying it to humans, the dictionary noted that raza also meant having the lineage of Moors or Jews (“tener alguna raza de moros or judíos). Negro already circulated in Spanish discourse associated with ideas of bestiality and barbarism. These notions were wound together in works like the biography of the emperor Charles V by Fray Prudencio de Sandoval: “who can deny,” he wrote, “that in the descendants of the Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in the Negroes [there persists] the inseparable quality of their blackness [negrura]” (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models [New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982], 16). The historical construction of the social category of race thus wound together Jews, Muslims, and Blacks at the dawn of European modernity.
Two recent works of history are at the forefront of a slate of scholarship that has highlighted the consequences of this entangled history both forward and backward in time. Building on the scholarship of George Frederickson, George Mosse, Léon Poliakov, Albert Memmi, and Sander Gilman, among others, Tudor Parfitt’s recent book Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich has now plumbed the archive more deeply than any prior work to show that the development of modern racial theory thoroughly entangled together Judeophobia and Negrophobia.
Parfitt underlines that from 1480 to 1520 more discoveries were made about the world than in the prior thousand years. This led to new speculations about human origins and variation, starting with Renaissance scholars who disputed the biblical monogenetic account in favor of polygenesis, which speculated that there were multiple origins to humans, accounting for human group differences. When this quarrel was picked up by Enlightenment philosophes like the naturalists Carolus Linnaeus, George-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, or social critics like Voltaire, or philosophers like Immanuel Kant, the rage to divide the world into sub-species of the human species unfolded. Albeit in different ways, both polygenesists and monogenesists divided humanity into distinct “races,” adopting the term first used in this modern sense by François Bernier in his 1684 work Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l’habitent (A New Division of The Earth By the Different Types or Races of Men Who Inhabit It).
Systems of racial classification were fully birthed during the eighteenth century Enlightenment as Europeans sought to describe, classify, order, and label the world. Racial systems legitimated slavery and colonial domination as natural at precisely the moment when Europeans were rethinking their own social order along the lines of representative government that reflected the people’s general will. As industrialization propelled Europe to global hegemony in the nineteenth century, racism became a central axis of European identity as European nations defined themselves against their colonized others and against Jews internally. “The construction of a depraved, monster image of the black/Jew in the race factories of the nineteenth century,” writes Parfitt, “foreshadowed the years of racial lunacy that would soon engulf Europe” (175), reaching its crescendo in the Nazi racial state.
This entangled history was not only a product of modernity, as Christine Heng and other medievalists are showing with new clarity in works like The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Heng and others have definitively pushed the debate about the historical and social construction of racism back to the High Middle Ages, indicating how attitudes toward Jews, Muslims, Mongols, Native Americans, Roma, and Blacks were racialized in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.
Magda Teter’s recent monograph, Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism pushes these linkages much earlier into medieval history. Her important book traces the theological and legal discussions of the idea of “servitude” within the Church. She shows how the Church Fathers interpreted biblical stories, especially Jacob and Esau, which indicated that the older would serve the younger, as typological tales about Jews that Church doctrine sought to institutionalize. These notions would later be applied to Black bodies in the context of slavery and racial subordination.
The Hamas attacks on October 7 and the subsequent Gaza war mark anew a reckoning with how Judeophobia, Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia are entangled. For scholars, it should be patently clear that rethinking how antisemitism is entangled with other racisms is not only central to the history of anti-Jewish persecution and oppression, but that telling this more acute and contextually interrelated story also makes evident why antisemitism must be taken seriously by the anti-racist movement if it is not to fall short of its own self-proclaimed aims. That the anti-racist framework requires wrestling with how Israeli discourse, practices, institutions, and legal systems operate is unavoidable. But continuing the narrative of Jewish exceptionalism and uniqueness not only belies the truths of the past, it leaves Jews bereft and sidelined, or even aids in their being targeted not only by White supremacists, but also by other racialized groups in the struggle against racism.
Now, six months after October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza, Israeli and Palestinian and Jewish and Muslim lives are more entangled than ever. Scholars of antisemitism can alleviate the profound sense of isolation Jews feel in this moment by explaining how the long history of Jewish persecution was always bound to that of other stigmatized groups, just as the fate of Muslim and Black oppression was entangled in the targeting of Jews. Ultimately, this is the racial reckoning this moment demands.
Jonathan Judaken is the Gloria M. Goldstein Chair of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of over 50 academic articles on the history of antisemitism, racism, existentialism, critical theory, and on post-Holocaust French Jewish thought. He has written, edited, or co-edited seven books, including Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, May 2024).
The divides between Israelis and Palestinians and Jews and Muslims feel more pronounced than ever. While views on the conflict are more disparate and split, riven by rivalry and mutual distrust, the stigmatization and targeting of both Jews and Muslims has increased dramatically. In data shared on CNN, “The Anti-Defamation League found that in the eight weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, antisemitic incidents in the US increased 337% . . . The ADL cited 2,031 antisemitic incidents between October 7 and December 7, 1,411 of which were linked to the fighting in Israel and Gaza and 400 of which occurred on college and university campuses.” Likewise, CNN highlighted that “The Council on American-Islamic Relations also reported an increase in Islamophobic incidents. Between October 7 and December 2, CAIR recorded 2,171 reports of bias or requests for help—172% more than the 2022 two-month average” (Tori Morales Pinales, “How Reports of Hate Crimes in the US Were Already at Record Highs, In 4 Charts,” CNN, December 11, 2023). It is evident from this precipitous increase in hate crimes against both groups propelled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that these racisms are entangled.
This entanglement was already evident before October 7 and the Gaza war. The terrorist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in October 2018 was not an isolated event. The “White genocide” conspiracy theory animated by the Great Replacement myth chanted at the Unite the Right torchlight rally in Charlottesville plainly ties together the hatred aimed not only at Jews, but Muslims, Hispanics, and Blacks. The same ideology underpinned the attacks on the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and in El Paso in 2019, and in Buffalo in 2022, and in 160 other kindred killings.
Despite the clear evidence of entanglement, racisms are often treated as discrete histories: scholars most often study White supremacy or anti-Black racism, or they study antisemitism, or they concentrate on Islamophobia or xenophobia in isolation. This problem is particularly pronounced in the study of antisemitism. Indeed, key voices continue to maintain that Judeophobia is unique and needs to be understood as such. To cite just two prominent voices, Deborah Lipstadt in Antisemitism: Here and Now, for example, writes that “Antisemitism is different in structure, history, and contemporary impact than other forms of racism” (91). Bari Weiss in How to Fight Anti-Semitism also claims, “The logic of anti-Semitism is very different from the logic of xenophobia or racism” (32).
This exceptionalist narrative goes back to a transformative moment in the study of antisemitism: the Holocaust. By 1943, just as the scholarly subject began to emerge, a particular Zionist narrative arguing that antisemitism was an eternal hatred within Western culture shaped some of the foundational texts in the field. Conjoined to this claim was the idea that antisemitism differed fundamentally from other racisms. It was articulated by groundbreaking historians like Joshua Trachtenburg, and trumpeted most prominently in the last generation by Robert Wistrich.
In The Devil and the Jews (1943), Trachtenburg wrote, “[The Jew] is the archenemy of Western civilization. He is alien, not to this or that land, but to all Western society, alien in his habits, his pursuits, his interests, his character, his very blood” (3). He also argued that the demonizing of Jews over the long history of Western culture made Judeophobia different from other forms of racial bias “in expression and intensity” (xv).
As is the case with every form of racism, there are elements that make Judeophobia distinctive. But an expanding group of scholars have come to understand that if we repeatedly think about each form of racism as separate and unique, then we not only get the history wrong, but we also fail to adequately navigate the politics of anti-racism in this moment of racial reckoning.
For it is not only the social effects of Judeophobia and Islamophobia post-October 7 that indicate their racial entanglement. The political framing among those supportive of Palestinian liberation has been set by the history of the struggle against anti-Black racism. Since at least the passing of the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” the Palestinian movement has been shaped by anti-racist strategies formed in the anti-apartheid, civil rights, and anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. Today, a key motif of the global Palestinian movement is that the struggle with and against the state of Israel is a fight against an apartheid-like version of White supremacy. This has been abetted by the explicit support of the Palestinian cause on the part of the post-apartheid South African government, symbolized by their current case accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza now before the International Court of Justice.
That a cornerstone of Zionism and the state of Israel is connected to longer anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles has been almost totally silenced, no less than by scholars of antisemitism. We know that the term Antisemitismus was first popularized by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 when he articulated a racial, conspiratorial, and programmatic response to the Jewish problem. Less known is that the incubator for Marr’s White supremacy and eugenic theory was the time he spent among pro-slavery Americans in the 1850s. Marr’s Antisemiten Ligawas meant to unite Germans against the emancipation of Jews, which had granted them legal, equal, civil rights. Marr’s ilk were akin to Jim Crow southerners after the American Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Political Zionism, in turn, emerged as a response to the racialization and politicization of Judeophobia. Little is also said today of the state of Israel emerging as part of an anti-colonial struggle against the strictures of the British Mandate, fought in parallel and against the Arab anti-colonial struggle. Muffled as well is that half the Jews in Israel are Middle Eastern or North African Arab Jews, often there because they were pressured to uproot or flee during the wave of decolonization struggles in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Along with the obvious role played by the Holocaust in legitimizing Zionism and Israel, pundits on antisemitism guided by one-eyed views on Judeophobia fail to trumpet these factors, abetting an anti-Israeli narrative within the anti-racist framework.
Indeed, as scholars have shown, the entanglement of Jews, Muslims, and Blacks in the history of racism goes much deeper than the recent past. It was emphatically wrapped together in the formative cauldron that shaped modern European history, the era of the Spanish Inquisition (1391-1492), when the largest Jewish community living among Muslims and Christians was ethnically and religiously cleansed. The century-long process that led from the 1391 massacres and mass conversion of Jews through to the passage of the first limpieza de sangre (blood purity) legislation in 1449 was the scaffolding for modern racism.
The same year that gave rise to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 was also the year that Columbus sailed to the Americas, beginning the era of Spanish and European colonization of the New World. Columbus’s second expedition would be paid for in part with money expropriated from Jews. By the sixteenth century, as Europeans turned evermore toward Africa as a source of slave labor for the new plantation system that emerged in the Caribbean and in the Americas, a new Spanish word, raza, would begin to circulate.
Shortly after the expulsion of Moors from Spain began in 1609, the Castilian dictionary of Sebastián de Covarrubias would define the new word. Raza (race) referred to “the caste of pure-bred horses” or the pure lineages of animals. Applying it to humans, the dictionary noted that raza also meant having the lineage of Moors or Jews (“tener alguna raza de moros or judíos). Negro already circulated in Spanish discourse associated with ideas of bestiality and barbarism. These notions were wound together in works like the biography of the emperor Charles V by Fray Prudencio de Sandoval: “who can deny,” he wrote, “that in the descendants of the Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in the Negroes [there persists] the inseparable quality of their blackness [negrura]” (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models [New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982], 16). The historical construction of the social category of race thus wound together Jews, Muslims, and Blacks at the dawn of European modernity.
Two recent works of history are at the forefront of a slate of scholarship that has highlighted the consequences of this entangled history both forward and backward in time. Building on the scholarship of George Frederickson, George Mosse, Léon Poliakov, Albert Memmi, and Sander Gilman, among others, Tudor Parfitt’s recent book Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich has now plumbed the archive more deeply than any prior work to show that the development of modern racial theory thoroughly entangled together Judeophobia and Negrophobia.
Parfitt underlines that from 1480 to 1520 more discoveries were made about the world than in the prior thousand years. This led to new speculations about human origins and variation, starting with Renaissance scholars who disputed the biblical monogenetic account in favor of polygenesis, which speculated that there were multiple origins to humans, accounting for human group differences. When this quarrel was picked up by Enlightenment philosophes like the naturalists Carolus Linnaeus, George-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, or social critics like Voltaire, or philosophers like Immanuel Kant, the rage to divide the world into sub-species of the human species unfolded. Albeit in different ways, both polygenesists and monogenesists divided humanity into distinct “races,” adopting the term first used in this modern sense by François Bernier in his 1684 work Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l’habitent (A New Division of The Earth By the Different Types or Races of Men Who Inhabit It).
Systems of racial classification were fully birthed during the eighteenth century Enlightenment as Europeans sought to describe, classify, order, and label the world. Racial systems legitimated slavery and colonial domination as natural at precisely the moment when Europeans were rethinking their own social order along the lines of representative government that reflected the people’s general will. As industrialization propelled Europe to global hegemony in the nineteenth century, racism became a central axis of European identity as European nations defined themselves against their colonized others and against Jews internally. “The construction of a depraved, monster image of the black/Jew in the race factories of the nineteenth century,” writes Parfitt, “foreshadowed the years of racial lunacy that would soon engulf Europe” (175), reaching its crescendo in the Nazi racial state.
This entangled history was not only a product of modernity, as Christine Heng and other medievalists are showing with new clarity in works like The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Heng and others have definitively pushed the debate about the historical and social construction of racism back to the High Middle Ages, indicating how attitudes toward Jews, Muslims, Mongols, Native Americans, Roma, and Blacks were racialized in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.
Magda Teter’s recent monograph, Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism pushes these linkages much earlier into medieval history. Her important book traces the theological and legal discussions of the idea of “servitude” within the Church. She shows how the Church Fathers interpreted biblical stories, especially Jacob and Esau, which indicated that the older would serve the younger, as typological tales about Jews that Church doctrine sought to institutionalize. These notions would later be applied to Black bodies in the context of slavery and racial subordination.
The Hamas attacks on October 7 and the subsequent Gaza war mark anew a reckoning with how Judeophobia, Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia are entangled. For scholars, it should be patently clear that rethinking how antisemitism is entangled with other racisms is not only central to the history of anti-Jewish persecution and oppression, but that telling this more acute and contextually interrelated story also makes evident why antisemitism must be taken seriously by the anti-racist movement if it is not to fall short of its own self-proclaimed aims. That the anti-racist framework requires wrestling with how Israeli discourse, practices, institutions, and legal systems operate is unavoidable. But continuing the narrative of Jewish exceptionalism and uniqueness not only belies the truths of the past, it leaves Jews bereft and sidelined, or even aids in their being targeted not only by White supremacists, but also by other racialized groups in the struggle against racism.
Now, six months after October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza, Israeli and Palestinian and Jewish and Muslim lives are more entangled than ever. Scholars of antisemitism can alleviate the profound sense of isolation Jews feel in this moment by explaining how the long history of Jewish persecution was always bound to that of other stigmatized groups, just as the fate of Muslim and Black oppression was entangled in the targeting of Jews. Ultimately, this is the racial reckoning this moment demands.
Jonathan Judaken is the Gloria M. Goldstein Chair of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of over 50 academic articles on the history of antisemitism, racism, existentialism, critical theory, and on post-Holocaust French Jewish thought. He has written, edited, or co-edited seven books, including Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, May 2024).