The tenacity of antisemitic hatred may be related to misunderstanding of the complexities of Jewish identity.

Jewishness is defined, sometimes inaccurately, in racial, religious, or cultural terms.

Due to misunderstandings about their identity, Jews have long been vulnerable to persecution and violence.

Since the October 7, 2023, attack on Jewish residents of Israel, there has been both a rise in concern about antisemitism, its sometimes violent outcomes, and an increase in antisemitic sentiment being expressed publicly.

Those who hold strong anti-Jewish views have been emboldened to share those views in public spaces, especially on college campuses, on social media, and in podcast interviews. In some cases, academic leaders who worked to constrain free speech around other social issues (e.g., COVID response, transsexualism, conservatism) suddenly insist that antisemitic students have absolute freedom to express these views, despite the fear and harm it demonstrably causes.

Antisemitism isn’t limited to one side of the political spectrum. It’s found most often on the extreme left or extreme right, but also to some extent, in the moderate middle.

An atmosphere of antisemitism seems to give way to various conspiracy theories about Jews—that they are engineering cultural and political shifts, or are controlling the media and the global economy. This serves to breed much suspicion about Jews as a people group, often without presenting evidence of these alleged malign machinations.

As stated in a previous post, prejudice tends to evolve in the same way. It is a learned behavior starting in childhood, when children cognitively place people, places, and things in categories based on what they are taught by the adults around them. The individual can then develop an irrational, hostile attitude against a particular individual or group based on the stereotyped characteristics they have used to categorize people. This can lead to terrible consequences for both the hater and the hated.

My question here is whether antisemitism differs in any way from hostility and prejudice against other identity groups.

After discussing this with Roger Barnes, an emeritus professor of sociology, we concluded that prejudice against Jews is not significantly different than other prejudices. The only true distinction we could point to is the tremendous, often confusing complexity of how Jewish identity is defined.

Because of this complexity, Jews have historically been blamed and scapegoated more often than most other groups.

Antisemitism is ancient and pervasive

Antisemitism is an ancient hostility that has manifested in nearly every major culture that has included even a small Jewish population. The Jews’ biblically-based claims to land, progeny, and the blessing of their God have provoked the hatred of other cultural groups who see themselves as rivals for those assets.

With the emergence of the Christian church in the first century, the divisions between Jews and Gentiles grew deeper. The first Christians were mostly Jewish, and the Jewish religious authorities pushed back vehemently against what they perceived to be a threat to their power and influence.

With widespread evangelism, the balance in the church shifted toward Gentiles. Now it was the Roman Empire that was threatened by the Christians’ refusal to bow the knee to the emperor, resulting in brutal persecution of both Jewish and Gentile Christians until the 4th century. When the emperor Constantine exalted Christianity as the state religion, Jews were further marginalized and excluded.

Jumping forward to the Reformation, we see that though Martin Luther revolutionized the understanding of the Scriptures, he was also rabidly antisemitic. He advocated for eliminating portions of what he saw as overly Jewish portions of both the Old and New Testaments, and for destroying Jewish synagogues.

This animosity toward Jews persisted into the twentieth century, when Reich-allied German Lutherans began using Mein Kampf in place of the Bible as their guide for faith. Fighting against Jews was justified and even commanded as their service to God.

With so many centuries to establish itself, this anti-Jewish bias has seeped deep into the root structure of many cultures, in Europe, in the Arab world, and in nations sympathetic to Arab causes.

Is Jewish identity based on race?

According to the National Institutes of Health, the notion that Jews constitute a distinct biological race is an artifact of the Enlightenment. No genetic marker of Jewishness has been identified:

In recent decades, ever-increasing efforts and ingenuity were invested in identifying Biblical Israelite genotypic common denominators by analysing an assortment of phenotypes, like facial patterns, blood types, diseases, DNA-sequences, and more. It becomes overwhelmingly clear that although Jews maintained detectable vertical genetic continuity along generations of socio-religious-cultural relationship … in spite of considerable consanguinity, there is no Jewish genotype to identify.

In recent decades, ever-increasing efforts and ingenuity were invested in identifying Biblical Israelite genotypic common denominators by analysing an assortment of phenotypes, like facial patterns, blood types, diseases, DNA-sequences, and more. It becomes overwhelmingly clear that although Jews maintained detectable vertical genetic continuity along generations of socio-religious-cultural relationship … in spite of considerable consanguinity, there is no Jewish genotype to identify.

The Enlightenment of the 18th century brought about the concept of Jewishness as a racial identity, and not simply a religious one. This meant that even the most secularized, assimilated Jews would never erase their “Jewishness,” because it was now defined as a biological reality. This had the effect that individuals already predisposed to bias against Jews because of some other perceived characteristic might now justify their animus on racial differences. This has brought untold confusion and false racial hatred that persists today.

Is Jewish identity based on religion?

Many Jewish educational websites agree that a Jewish person is someone who either has a Jewish mother or who has converted to the Jewish religion.

Sammy Davis Jr., a Black man, and Connie Chung, an Asian woman, identified as Jewish because they had converted to the Jewish religion. This illustrates that people from many races and ethnicities can identify as Jewish.

These ambiguities and false beliefs about Jewish identity have historically allowed people of ill will to claim contradictory stereotypes of Jewish people. For instance, they might say that Jews are weak and powerless, and later say that they are too powerful. Or that they are too communist or too capitalist. Or that they are needy parasites and also privileged manipulators. Or that they are like repulsive animals (the Nazis compared Jews to rats) and also disproportionately—and unfairly—intellectually gifted and vocationally successful.

Over time, this use of contradictory stereotypes gives great linguistic and sociological flexibility for fomenting antisemitic hatred, using whatever works best to provoke contempt or envy in a specific cultural context. Jews become cultural scapegoats, easy to blame for society’s ills. This is exactly what Adolf Hitler did, convincing millions of Germans that Jews were inferior and should be eliminated.

It is fair to say that antisemitism, compared to other prejudices, has led to a disproportionate number of attempts at the genocide of Jews, the Holocaust being the most dramatic example.

So, though many people perish in tribal and national wars based on race, culture, or religion, the case of the Jews is that they have persecuted because of all three factors, and because of deep misunderstandings about who they are and what they believe.

Peresky, Pamela. (2023). Campus Antisemitism Is Making Free Speech Fashionable Again: Antisemitism is Quashing Safetyism. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit-of-le…

Falk R. Genetic markers cannot determine Jewish descent. Front Genet. 2015 Jan 21;5:462. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2014.00462. PMID: 25653666; PMCID: PMC4301023.

Anthony D. Kauders, “The ‘Longest Hatred’ Explained: Confirmation Bias and the Persistence of Antisemitism”, Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (2025

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