Approaches to understanding and fighting Jew-hatred, including the widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition, should focus more on the ways that antisemitism today may be traced back to centuries of rabbinic writings and to the Torah, according to a new scriptural guide on the subject.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JNS that major Jewish organizations weren’t formed by Orthodox Jews, and the latter had “long been regarded as an afterthought, until crime statistics from New York and New Jersey made it obvious that visibly observant Jews were extraordinarily likely to be targeted.”
“I don’t think that was deliberate,” said Menken, who is a member of the advisory board of religious leaders to the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission. “It’s just that these very well-motivated Jewish people were not likely to refer to biblical or rabbinic sources.”
The coalition shared an exclusive copy of its new, 32-page scriptural guide “The Jew-Hatred Mindset,” which took six months to compile, with JNS. Menken penned the guide with Rabbi Moshe Baruch Parnes.
“Many Jewish organizations basically reinvented the wheel on antisemitism, which was trivial when anti-Jewish bias was open and blatant,” Menken told JNS. “Nazis characterized Jews as an inferior race.”
But Jew-hatred today is “dressed up as a human-rights cause, and examples mentioning Israel, such as found in the IHRA definition, are dismissed by antisemites as politically motivated,” according to Menken.
“Whether or not one is religious, it is impossible to claim that models of antisemitism from millennia ago were written to support Israel,” he said.
The coalition’s publication notes that Sinai, the mountain at which the Torah was given, was selected, per the Talmud, because its name sounds like sin’ah, the biblical Hebrew for “hatred.”
“What the sages meant by this is that antisemitism is not simply an ethnic hatred of Jews but begins from hatred of Judaism and the teachings that Judaism brought to the world,” per the guide.
Menken told JNS that it is “quite empowering” to understand Jew-hatred that way.
“The people who hate Jews have it out for values and civilization. Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Un are both fanatically anti-Israel. Why? Because totalitarian dictators don’t like to acknowledge an authority greater than themselves,” he said.
“At the same time, every person has to make their own choices,” Menken told JNS. “We hope this document will help steer people, including young Christians and avowed atheists, away from hate. That is more easily accomplished when they realize that the rants of Rep. Ilhan Omar, Tucker Carlson and Adolf Hitler share a lot in common.”
Twin foundations of Jew-hatred
Among the scriptural texts that the guide discusses are those related to the Passover—the idea that Jew-hatred endures in every generation—and Purim stories, and Laban’s efforts to trick Jacob, believing that all Jewish property is stolen.
It traces claims that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has made about Israel “occupying” Palestinian land to ideas about antisemitism that Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, known as the “Netziv,” laid out in the 19th century.
It isn’t known when the rabbi penned “The Remnant of Israel,” but “we know the term ‘antisemite’ was so new at that time that he was compelled to define it,” per the guide.
“The Netziv described the antisemitic outlook of Laban as resting upon two fundamental falsehoods: that Jewish property is inherently stolen and that due to the special service of God that Jews do, Jews feel entitled to treat others as lesser humans and to swindle, deceive and defraud them,” according to the guide. “In the Netziv’s view, it is upon these twin foundations that all the lies of antisemitism rest.”
Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, “despite having a degree in international relations, disclaimed any knowledge of the Middle East or foreign policy except that Israel (the Jews) is taking land away from non-Jews, and Israel is trampling the rights of non-Jews,” according to the guide.
“These are, of course, the two root lies of antisemitism as identified by the Netziv, a leading rabbinic scholar writing a century before her birth, conveyed to her in modern language by the Democratic Socialists of America, which selected and trained her to run as its candidate for New York’s 14th District,” the guide states.
Menken told JNS that although the guide argues for more focus on the Torah and rabbinic writings when understanding Jew-hatred, that doesn’t mean that antisemitism spares Jews who aren’t Orthodox.
“Biblical and rabbinic teachings about antisemitism don’t speak about religiosity,” he said. “On the contrary, it’s pretty obvious that entirely secular IDF soldiers are being targeted with precisely the antisemitic invective that has followed Jews throughout history.”
Jew-hatred is “a virus,” according to the rabbi.
“It’s that they begin with the same hateful ideas, finding a new facade to make the same grotesque ideas palatable and even appealing to a modern audience,” he told JNS. “That’s not a ‘new antisemitism,’ as some have said. It’s precisely what we were taught to expect.”
The word “antisemitism” comes from the German “pretense that they disliked Jews not due to religion, which was acknowledged as bigotry due to the European Enlightenment, but rather due to their ‘inferior, semitic’ race,” Menken added. “That euphemism was merely a good way to make Jew-hatred appealing again.”
