Theme
“Antisemitism: three shapes of one hatred”
Hatred of Jews has changed its reasons many times while keeping its target. Understanding its shapes is the only reliable way to tell it apart from criticism of Israel, and to see where the two are being blurred on purpose, in both directions.
The picture
Three shapes: religion, race, nation.
The anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein distinguishes three forms of Jew-hatred, each speaking the dominant language of its age: anti-Judaism, hatred of Jews for their religion (the charge of deicide, forced conversions, the Church's and early Islamic polemics); antisemitism, the racial and conspiratorial hatred of the 19th and 20th centuries that ended in the Holocaust; and antizionism, in which the Jewish state becomes the collective Jew, the one people whose self-determination is illegitimate. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put the same idea in one line in 2016: 'In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state.' Critics answer fairly: scholars at ISGAP argue the three categories are less distinct than Louis-Klein says, with the same libels recurring across eras; and others object that anti-Zionism is a political position many Jews have held, from the Bund to the Haredi opponents of Zionism (see 'Anti-Zionism before 1948'). The framework's test is therefore not whether someone criticises Israel, but whether the old libels reappear in national dress: blood libel as 'child killers', the Protocols as 'Zionists control the media', deicide as 'crucifying Palestine'.
Traps here:◆ Which Zionism?
Why it keeps coming back: blame instead of solve.
Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Anti-Semite and Jew' (1946) described antisemitism not as an opinion formed from experience but as a passion that explains experience in advance: 'If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.' René Girard's work on the scapegoat mechanism and Gordon Allport's 'The Nature of Prejudice' (1954) describe the same pattern: a group in trouble finds relief in a culprit rather than a solution. Each shape of Jew-hatred offers a ready culprit for a real problem, salvation, the upheavals of modernity, the wars of the Middle East, and the culprit ends the search for solutions. The same mechanism turned on Palestinians or Muslims ('they are the problem') is the same trap; the alternative, on this site and anywhere, is the harder work of solving (see the solutions page).
Traps here:◆ The strict enemy frame
Right and left: every utopia needs someone to blame.
Totalitarian projects on both ends needed an enemy to explain why their promised world hadn't arrived. Nazism blamed the Jews for communism and for capitalism at the same time, 'Jewish Bolshevism' and 'Jewish finance'; the contradiction is the scapegoat's signature. On the left, antisemitism ran from Proudhon to the 'socialism of fools' (a phrase associated with the Austrian Ferdinand Kronawetter and the German socialist August Bebel ⚠) to Stalin's campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitans', the Night of the Murdered Poets (1952), the Slánský trial (1952) and the Doctors' plot (1953), and then Soviet 'Zionology' after 1967 (see the timeline's Soviet Union filter). The counterweight matters too: socialists such as Jean Jaurès fought antisemitism in the Dreyfus affair, and Jews were prominent in both movements' early years. The point is the mechanism, not that every socialist or nationalist was antisemitic (see 'Allies in destruction').
All three shapes at once, from above.
In much state-sanctioned and movement material in the Middle East the three shapes appear together, used deliberately rather than spontaneously: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion quoted in Hamas's 1988 charter (Art. 32) and dramatised on Egyptian state television in 'Horseman Without a Horse' (2002); the blood libel in 'The Matzah of Zion' (1983) by Syria's then defence minister; Holocaust distortion in Mahmoud Abbas's 1982 doctoral thesis and in his remarks in 2023 on why Hitler killed Jews; Iran's state Holocaust-cartoon contests; sermons calling Jews 'apes and pigs' ⚠. This is the blame mechanism run by regimes and movements to turn anger away from themselves. It describes rulers, movements and their media, not 'Arabs' or 'Muslims' (see '"They all…"'): Morocco names its Jewish heritage in its constitution, the UAE added Holocaust education after the Abraham Accords ⚠, and many Arab voices oppose it. The mirror exists too: anti-Arab racism used as a political tool by Kahanism and parts of the Israeli right.
Traps here:◆ "They all…"
Where the alliances show their seams.
In Western activism the line is usually 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism; nobody here says that'. When allied voices say it anyway, openly, the answer tends to be denial, reinterpretation ('they mean Zionists') or silence (see 'Allies in destruction'). Jewish people who don't pass the test are often the first to be pushed out, including Jewish LGBT people from queer spaces: the Chicago Dyke March in 2017 expelled marchers carrying rainbow flags with a Star of David, and similar exclusions from Pride events and queer venues have been reported since 2023 ⚠ (see ''Queers for Palestine' is like chickens for KFC.'). The mirror: queer Palestinians and Arab queer people are often pushed out of both communities.
Traps here:◆ The purity loop
Where it leads if pressed
The definitions fight, and the opposite abuse.
Two definitions compete. The IHRA working definition (2016), adopted by many governments and institutions, includes examples involving Israel, such as denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination or holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel's actions, while saying that criticism of Israel 'similar to that levelled against any other country' is not antisemitic. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), written by scholars critical of IHRA's use, sets narrower tests and treats boycott and anti-Zionism as not antisemitic in themselves. The opposite abuse is real too: calling any criticism of Israel antisemitic, to end a discussion rather than to name hatred, cheapens the word and makes real antisemitism harder to call out (see 'That's hasbara — Israel pays people to post this.' for the mirror move). The honest test is the one in the first section: does the argument need Jews to be what the old libels said they were?
Traps here:◆ Which Zionism?◆ Holocaust inversion