Anti-Semitism: The Intra-Semitic Disease

Anti-Semitism did not emerge from the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, or Shinto mind. It was not born from Athens, from Rome, from the Upanishads, or from the Tao. It came from within the monotheistic family itself — an autoimmune disease of the Semitic conscience, the children of Abraham turning upon one another and then upon the world. Anti-Semitism is not the hatred of the “other.” It is the hatred of the rival claimant to the same revelation.

Judaism began as the declaration that one tribe had been chosen by one God to bear one truth. Christianity was born from the rebellion of that truth against itself. The first Christians were Jews who claimed to fulfill the law and to transcend it simultaneously. From that paradox flowed two thousand years of resentment. The Jew who rejected Christ was accused of rejecting God; the Christian who accepted Christ believed he had inherited the covenant. Thus, a new religion was built on a denial of its parent.

The Church could not forget its origins, nor forgive them. Its theology required Judaism to exist as a witness to its own obsolescence. Augustine described the Jews as condemned to wander the earth, living proof that they had refused their savior. Their continued survival was tolerated only as divine punishment. By the time of Luther, theological contempt had curdled into homicidal hatred. His pamphlets called for synagogues to be burned, homes destroyed, rabbis silenced. That venom flowed directly into the bloodstream of European Christendom.

The Middle Ages institutionalized the hatred as law. Jews were confined to ghettos, forced to wear badges, barred from professions, accused of poisoning wells and murdering children for ritual blood. Each accusation reflected the Christian fear that its own story rested upon the rejection of another. The crucifixion became not an event of redemption but an eternal accusation. Anti-Semitism was not incidental to Christian civilization; it was its hidden sacrament.

Islam inherited both the Scriptures and the syndrome. The Qur’an reveres the prophets of Israel and even Jesus, yet the Jewish refusal to accept Muhammad as the final prophet was interpreted as cosmic defiance. The Jews became “those upon whom God’s wrath has fallen.” Under Muslim rule, they were tolerated but degraded — taxed as dhimmi, forbidden to build new synagogues, required to show public humility. It was a subtler cruelty than the Christian variety, but born of the same psychology: the need for theological closure. Once God has spoken the final word, every other voice must be muffled.

When the Enlightenment came, it promised to end these divine feuds by enthroning reason. But reason itself was infected by the old absolutism. The same Europe that proclaimed human equality also developed the pseudoscience of race. The monotheistic idea of the “chosen people” reappeared as “the superior race.” The Jew once accused of killing Christ was now accused of killing progress. Theology became biology, and the persecution persisted.

Nineteenth-century Germany, intoxicated with nationalism, translated biblical myth into racial myth. The Old Testament became a story of “Semitic decadence,” the New Testament a moral tragedy of contamination. The German Romantic philosophers who despised the Church nevertheless absorbed its contempt for Jews. Hegel dismissed Judaism as a “religion of sublimity without reconciliation.” Wagner ranted about the “Jewish spirit” corrupting art. They were not rebelling against Christianity; they were re-enacting its anti-Jewish reflex under new names.

Nazism emerged from this lineage. It was Christianity turned inside out — the cross replaced by the swastika, the resurrection by the blood myth, the elect by the Aryan. It was a secular monotheism with one race in place of one God, one Führer instead of one Messiah, one gospel of purity instead of salvation. Hitler’s hatred of Jews was theological in structure even when it denied theology in language. The Final Solution was a baptism in fire — an attempt to erase the people whose scriptures had birthed both Christianity and Islam. The ovens of Auschwitz were the final convulsions of the Semitic mind against itself.

Marxism, on the other hand, replaced God with history but preserved the same totalitarian logic. Marx, the descendant of rabbis, turned his own alienation into theory. In On the Jewish Question, he reduced “Judaism” to a metaphor for commerce and egoism, arguing that humanity would be emancipated by transcending its Jewishness. The revolution became revelation; the Party became the Church; heresy was punished with excommunication, exile, or death. Soviet anti-Semitism was not an accident. It was the old theological hatred reborn in dialectical language — the eternal suspicion that the Jew carried a different allegiance, a rival truth, a competing scripture.

Thus, Christianity, Islam, Nazism, and Communism — the theological, the theocratic, the racial, and the secular — all spring from the same psychological seed: the fear of plurality. The monotheistic imagination cannot rest until every competing version of truth is silenced. Whether in the name of God, nation, or history, it demands unanimity. It cannot coexist; it must convert, conquer, or cleanse.

By contrast, civilizations untouched by this fever developed entirely different reflexes. India, with its bewildering multiplicity of gods and philosophies, saw truth as a spectrum rather than a monopoly. Buddha and Mahavira rejected the Vedas, yet their followers were never annihilated. Shankara debated the Buddhists, not exterminated them. China balanced Confucian order with Taoist spontaneity; Japan blended Shinto spirits with Buddhist compassion. None of these civilizations invented “heresy” because none believed in “revelation.”

Where monotheism saw error, polytheism saw diversity. Where the West built inquisitions, the East built debates. The Jewish people, when they finally encountered these cultures through exile or trade, found no persecution — only curiosity. There were no pogroms in Varanasi, no ghettos in Kyoto, no inquisitions in Nanjing. The absence of anti-Semitism in Asia is not accidental; it is structural. Hatred requires a metaphysical exclusivity that Asian thought never conceived.

The real civilizational divide, therefore, is not between East and West, or Jew and Gentile, but between those who believe truth is singular and those who know it is plural. The monotheist cannot coexist with the pluralist because the very existence of the pluralist negates his revelation. The Jew rejected Jesus; the Christian condemned Muhammad; the Muslim anathematized both; the atheist revolutionary denounced them all — yet each inherited the same architecture of certainty.

Anti-Semitism is the self-consumption of revelation. It is the price the monotheist pays for claiming monopoly on truth. A god who tolerates no rival inevitably turns His followers into rivals. A civilization that worships one truth must produce endless heresies. Europe, after centuries of burning Jews and witches, learned this too late. When it finally abandoned God, it built the same altars under new names — Nation, Race, Revolution, Market. Each declared itself universal, infallible, final. Each produced its own heretics to persecute.

Modern secularism congratulates itself on having transcended religion, but its moral psychology remains monotheistic. Its ideologies demand faith, purity, and submission. Its wars are waged in the name of liberation; its persecutions are justified by science or progress. The rhetoric changes; the revelation persists. Even Zionism, born as a reaction to centuries of persecution, mirrors the same exclusivist reflex — one people, one land, one divine promise. Thus, anti-Semitism and its counter-reactions form a closed circle of Semitic absolutism, endlessly reenacting the drama of exclusion and entitlement.

The East, for all its faults, stands as proof that civilization need not pass through that tunnel. Hinduism could absorb Buddhism without extinction; Japan could blend foreign deities into its own. A Buddhist can pray in a Shinto shrine without apostasy; a Hindu can honor Jesus as an avatar without surrendering his philosophy. This elasticity is not relativism but maturity — the recognition that truth does not need to be jealous to be real.

The West’s tragedy lies in confusing universality with uniformity. The one God who was supposed to unite mankind divided it into warring camps. The one truth that promised peace produced crusades, jihads, and genocides. The Jews suffered most not because they were outsiders, but because they were insiders — the original claimants to the revelation that everyone else wanted to inherit. They were punished for being first.

Today’s world still breathes the air of that quarrel. When a Muslim preacher calls Jews “apes and pigs,” when a Christian fundamentalist invokes “Judeo-Christian civilization” while denying Jewish distinctness, when a neo-Nazi marches under the cross of purity, or when a Marxist pamphleteer denounces “Zionist capital,” all are speaking dialects of the same ancient language. It is the grammar of the desert: one God, one truth, one enemy.

The cure for this disease cannot come from within the Semitic framework, for that would be like asking fire to cool itself. It must come from the rediscovery of plurality — the acceptance that truth, like light, refracts through many lenses. The rational humanist, the Buddhist empiricist, the Hindu pluralist, the Confucian ethicist — these traditions offer an exit from the theology of exclusivity. They replace revelation with realization, faith with understanding, dogma with dialogue.

Anti-Semitism will not die through interfaith conferences or Holocaust memorials alone. It will die when humanity abandons the psychology of the “one and only.” It will die when the world learns to see difference not as blasphemy but as enrichment. It will die when we cease to believe that God wrote a book and begin to believe that truth writes itself through experience. Until then, the monotheistic mind will continue its quarrel with itself — a civil war of revelation that has lasted three thousand years and cost millions of lives.

The final liberation of the Jew — and of the world — will come not when he is accepted as God’s chosen, but when the idea of chosenness itself is buried. The only covenant worth keeping is the one between reason and compassion. Every other covenant has produced only war.

Citations

St. Augustine, City of God, Book XVIII.
Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543).
David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013).
Karen Armstrong, A History of God (1993).
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844).
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (2015).
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972).
Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (2013).