From Pharaoh to Hamas: the four faces of Jew-hatred

Evil comes in ever-changing forms. But anti-Semitism is a perpetual revenant throughout history. Its guise varies, but the core remains the same: suspicion and ostracism, expulsion and annihilation. Since when? One automatically thinks of the Nazis' "Final Solution." But Adolf Hitler doesn't own the copyright.

4,000 years old, it belongs to the biblical pharaoh. At its beginning, as in all subsequent cases, there is the cosmic fear of the despicable Jews. Why, on earth? They were a powerless minority. Not in the mind of the God-King. For "the children of Israel," it says in Exodus 1:7, "were fruitful and multiplied. They became more numerous and mightier than we."

As in the Third Reich, a classic case of Jew-hatred followed: segregation, disenfranchisement, forced labor, and ultimately genocide. First, newborn sons were thrown into the Nile. It didn't help that the Israelites themselves defused the "population bomb" through mass exodus. Pharaoh chased his army after them, intent on exterminating them all. Their god, as we know, thwarted this plan by drowning the army in the Red Sea.

Salvation in the Promised Land, however, did not resolve the "Jewish Question" (Karl Marx). After the Romans conquered the territory, calling it "Palaestine" (after the "Philistines" who had immigrated from the Aegean), the Children of Israel once again fell into exile, scattered among the nations. There, the pattern repeated itself: ostracism, persecution, and expulsion.

They had killed Jesus, it was said in Christian Europe, desecrated the Host, poisoned the wells, and committed ritual murder. Theodor Adorno was right with his dictum: Antisemitism is the "rumor about the Jews" – that's who they are and will remain – a general suspicion that cannot be refuted. Adolf Hitler wrote the third variation as if he had copied the Pharaoh. The Jews were poisoning the body of the nation, they were fattening themselves on the blood of the Aryan race. They had to be eradicated once and for all. He almost succeeded.

The fourth iteration is now underway, and it's unfolding in the guise of "From the River to the Sea" – away with the Jewish state! Not yet genocide, but "stateocide." But where should the eight million Israelis go, into the sea? Even these supermen, who humiliated Iran, 70 times larger, in twelve days, can't grow gills overnight to survive in the depths of the ocean.

What does the slogan "Globalize the Intifada" mean? Sigmund Freud would suck on his cigar and muse: "The Intifada is directed against the Jews in Israel. If it were globalized, 16 million worldwide would be affected." The students, wearing keffiyeh and holding the Palestinian flag, would angrily reject the accusation.

Because they are only concerned with the "settler colonialists" in the narrow strip between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. The fact that half of them are descendants of expelled Arab Jews is irrelevant. It's not about a tragic entanglement, but rather about self-exoneration, which provides a light footing.

This is what the neocolonialist narrative serves. The enemy is not the Jew, but the imperialist Zionist; the driving force is not anti-Semitism, but anti-Zionism. This subtle distinction is no rhetorical accident. It is based on a post-Holocaust taboo that, although it has faded since 1945, remains powerful. Professor Freud would be lecturing here about "sublimation." Because since Hitler, anti-Semitism has been out of place. Anti-Zionism is the anti-Semitism of a clear conscience.

Unfortunately, the subconscious doesn't cooperate with this differentiation. Otherwise, Jewish students in Los Angeles, London, and Leipzig wouldn't be hiding their kippahs and Stars of David and following classes via Zoom. In the strongholds of anger, at Harvard and Columbia of all places, it only subsided when Trump withdrew billions of federal funds—using cash as a club.

It's sobering to note that it's not just Israeli institutions abroad that are being targeted. Across the Western world, it's primarily Jewish institutions. Synagogues and community centers now have to be guarded more closely than ever before.

In good old Germany, the anti-Semitism rate is still lower than elsewhere in Europe; the taboo persists. Yet the RIAS research center documented a total of 8,627 anti-Jewish incidents last year. This represents an increase of almost 77 percent compared to 4,886 incidents in 2023. Statistically, there were just under 24 anti-Jewish incidents per day in 2024, compared to 13 per day in 2023. Anti-Zionism, one might therefore assume, is a misnomer.

The new interpretation goes under the term "Israel-related anti-Semitism." Indeed, the outbursts of anger cannot be separated from Israel's unbridled war against Gaza, where Hamas has taken its own people hostage: the more of its own dead, the "better," because it turns the world against the "Zionist entity." "We are proud to sacrifice our martyrs," trumpeted Hamas Politburo member Ghazi Hamad after the massacre on October 7. "We will do it again and again," because "everything is justified." The interviewer asked him whether that meant the destruction of Israel. "Yes, of course." Hamad had fled to Lebanon in time before October 7.

The death cult's cynical plan worked. Yet that doesn't simply exonerate the Netanyahu government. Those who don't set their own limits become rogue states. Nevertheless, it's a change of perspective that stimulates reflection and draws attention to selective morality. There's no doubt that Israel has sinned. On the other hand, Putin bombs hospitals and apartment blocks in Ukraine every day. But the outrage is limited compared to the anti-Israel protests. In the two Chechen wars, the Russians are said to have killed 300,000 people; in any case, they flattened Grozny. Genocidal violence rages from Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Myanmar) to Africa (Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sudan), but the world has taken little notice.

In contrast, Israel fills the newspapers and evening news – the Jewish nation as a criminal state, yesterday's victims as today's killers. A recent example: On the BBC, a high-ranking UN official accused Israel of child murder. He claimed that 14,000 Gaza babies would die of starvation in the "next 48 hours." It was an absurd fake, and the BBC quickly retracted the atrocity news, which the global media had eagerly embraced. It remains in the world, nonetheless. Because it "fits."

Adorno's rumor becomes pure truth, like the medieval ritual murder that the Jews allegedly used to stir the blood of innocent Christian children into the matzo dough. Why is the "rumor about the Jews" so persistent, 4,000 years after Pharaoh and 80 years after Hitler? It's not really explainable.

After Adolf Hitler, scientific theories fill entire libraries. The familiar factors: upheaval and uprooting, war and impoverishment. Among the losers of the First World War, mass unemployment and national humiliation prevailed. Mussolini and the Eastern European dictators – those terrible simplifiers – also grew up on this fertile soil. Who was to blame for the national catastrophe? In a single sentence: "The Jews are our misfortune." It comes from the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke and became the slogan of the Nazi propaganda newspaper "Der Stürmer."

But what drives this hatred of Hebrews disguised as "anti-Zionism"? The pathological conditions that fuel these common theories are nowhere to be found today. Where does the poison of the day before yesterday lurk in the modern welfare state? By comparison, there is neither mass misery nor nationalistic anger. Instead, unprecedented welfare and personal freedom prevail, which grants maximum self-realization.

We don't need mass demonstrations as a distraction. We have Netflix, Prime Video, and the like. If we feel isolated, we don't have to chase after charismatic seducers who lure us into a false sense of community. Instead, we snare ourselves through social networks that connect us with like-minded people. If we fall, a generous state catches us. There's no threat of the Gestapo. We can rely on the constitutional safeguards.

The common citizen needs neither leaders nor seducers. They have never been as autonomous and secure as they are today. Even more puzzling. It's not those threatened by social decline who take to the streets to look for scapegoats. The activists are privileged students at Harvard and Columbia, at European universities. Like the Nazi foot soldiers, the Blackshirts in Italy and the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary were made up of losers.

The mystery deepens because Jews no longer make good targets. The prime example is Germany. Until 1933, around 500,000 Jews lived there. They had experienced rapid growth after the founding of the Reich. They filled the universities and law firms, the media and stages. They were visible. Consider the Jewish Nobel Prize winners, who made up a third of Germany's until 1932. Today's Jewish Nobel laureates no longer stand out—around 90,000 members of the community live in Germany—neither as celebrities nor as tycoons. They exude no morbid fascination, yet they still have to hide.

Those who fail to make progress with the tools of science turn once again to Dr. Freud and his "Return of the Repressed." Antisemitism, then, would be a perpetual revenant, always appearing in a new guise.

But Jews wouldn't be Jews if they didn't laugh at their ever-present fear. A succinct joke: "The Jews and the cyclists are to blame for everything," one person proclaims. The retort: ​​"True, but why the cyclists?"

Josef Joffe is a German publicist. He has taught politics at Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins Universities. He is also the author of the book "Don't Make Yourself So Small, You're Not So Great: Jewish Humor as Wisdom, Wit, and Weapon." Random House, Munich, 2015.