Why Antisemitism Persists : A Psychological and Spiritual Lens

A student once came to his Rebbe in the middle of the night, trembling.

“I saw a mob outside the shtetl,” he said. “They carried torches and shouted terrible things. Rebbe… why? Why do they hate us when we have done nothing to them?”

The Rebbe was quiet for a long moment. Then he said:

“When a man looks into a dirty mirror, he does not see himself clearly. He sees something distorted and frightening. He blames the mirror. But the problem was never the mirror.”

I have thought about that story often. I have thought about it more in the months since October 7, 2023, as antisemitism surged globally to levels not seen in generations—on university campuses, in major cities, in places where Jews once believed themselves secure.

The student’s question is ancient. But today, we have new tools to examine it. We can look at antisemitism not only through history and theology, but through behavioral science, neuroscience, and the deep symbolic language of Jewish thought.

And when we do, something unsettling—and clarifying—emerges.

Two Names for an Ancient Disorder

Leon Pinsker, a 19th-century physician, chose the word Judeophobia deliberately. He recognized something clinical in the hatred of Jews: it behaves like a phobia—irrational, persistent, resistant to evidence.

Later, Wilhelm Marr introduced the term antisemitism, dressing that same hatred in the language of race and “science,” stripping away even the theoretical possibility of escape. Conversion no longer mattered. Identity became fixed, biological, inescapable.

In psychological terms, Pinsker described the underlying mechanism. Marr described the ideological expression.

One is the brain’s reaction. The other is the story it tells about that reaction.

What the Brain Is Actually Doing

From a neuroscience perspective, antisemitism is not mysterious. It is disturbingly predictable.

The human brain is a prediction machine. Its primary job is not truth. It is survival.

When the world becomes unstable—economically, politically, socially—the brain experiences this as threat. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, becomes........

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