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2026-10-27 19:41:54 UTC

Why do people hate Jews?
A few years ago, a clubbable gentleman defined anti-Semitism as hating Jews more than is necessary. He said that in jest, but, goes the popular adage, there is a grain of truth in every joke.
My interlocutor’s claim to a grain of truth was his assumption that a certain amount of anti-Semitism is both inevitable and socially acceptable. I don’t know what kind of mental callipers he used to gauge what amount stays within the permissible range and what goes beyond it.
But it’s undeniable that anti-Semitism is pervasive, widespread and indifferent to social class, education, nationality and occupation. No attempt to pigeonhole it within a narrow rubric has so far succeeded. For example, in his book on the subject Sartre defined anti-Semitism as “a poor man’s snobbery”.
Perhaps. But this doesn’t begin to explain the virulent anti-Semitism of, say, Henry Ford or J.P. Morgan, neither of whom was especially poverty-stricken. Then Sartre added that anti-Semitism may also arise from spiritual poverty.
That too is delinquent in not taking account of – off the top of my head – Eliot, Chesterton, Belloc, Dostoyevsky or, in Sartre’s own country, Céline or Maurras. None of them suffered from spiritual poverty; all of them hated Jews ‘more than is necessary’.
A deeper thinker than Sartre, Thomas Sowell operates largely in economic and sociological categories. He developed the concept of a ‘middleman minority’, a small diaspora of successful businessmen from elsewhere who are universally hated by the indigenous majority in the host country.
This group includes diasporic Jews but isn’t limited to them. Sowell mentions oversees Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in Africa, Lebanese in Brazil and so on. Such diasporas tend to be more successful than the ambient population, and they mostly act in intermediary roles, such as retail, financing, money-lending or trade.
Sowell correctly points out that animosity to such groups is illogical for they provide the indispensable service of connecting producer with market. Then again, neither love nor hatred usually springs from reason. In any case, Sowell covers one facet of anti-Semitism, but there exist many others.
Christian anti-Semitism is also illogical. It’s true that some Jews rejected Christ and even forced the Romans to execute Him. However, some other Jews, starting with the apostles, carried Christ to the world, building on His person and His teaching a great religion and a magnificent civilisation.
However, such early Fathers of the Church as John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo ignored that second part, accentuating instead collective Jewish guilt. Jews, they taught, were condemned to suffer for rejecting Christ.
At a more popular level, the Church prohibited Christians from charging interest on loans. Hence Jews monopolised that activity, drawing thereby the kind of hatred Sowell described and also the old religious kind.
That hatred was far from tacit: though the word ‘pogrom’ boasts a later Russian derivation, the concept existed throughout history. For example, the 1096 Crusaders were avidly massacring Jews on the way to the Holy Land.
Closer to home, an anti-Semitic massacre took place in York in 1190. The mob first broke into the Minster and destroyed all the promissory notes kept there. Some 150 Jews, the city’s entire Jewish population, tried to save themselves by taking refuge in a timber tower, but the mob stormed it and murdered everyone inside.
The Spanish Inquisition was also busy during the reign of Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, although its score of victims was small by the standards of the progressive twentieth century.
The Reformation made things even worse, largely due to the innermost feelings of its leaders. For example, in his ranting tract On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther explained that Jews were “devil’s children” whose synagogue was a “defiled bride… an incorrigible whore and an evil slut.” Jews were full of the “devil’s faeces… in which they wallow like swine.”
Luther’s remedy for rectifying such hygienic disasters would be these days considered somewhat radical if hardly unfamiliar. He advocated burning synagogues to cinders, destroying Jewish scrolls and prayer books, banning rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews’ money and property, smashing up their houses and forcing these “poisonous envenomed worms” into hard labour or else banishing them “for all time.”
Having thus presaged the Kristallnacht, Luther swiftly moved on to a longing for the final solution. With praiseworthy self-deprecation he admitted an oversight committed by himself and his contemporaries: “We are at fault in not slaying them.” Four centuries later his compatriots tried to correct that fault, with well-known results.
Calvin, who regarded wealth as a sign of divine grace, added nice touches to Luther’s animus, such as: “[The Jews’] rotten and unbending intransigence deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without limit, and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone.”
But Calvin’s anti-Semitism was brought on not only by his visceral feelings but also by his assessment of the economic picture that emerged from his teaching.
Since Calvin regarded money-lending not as a sin but rather as a facilitator of divine grace, his followers could indulge in it to their hearts’ content. Therefore, rather than being despised as usurers, Jews could now be loathed as business competitors. Calvin was thus channeling the resentment already felt at the grass roots, and in this he used the stratagem of every successful rabble-rouser.
As Christianity lost its prominence in European life, Christian anti-Semitism was complemented and largely replaced by the racial kind. Hence, if in the past Jews could save themselves from persecution by converting, they now lost even that refuge. “It’s not your identity papers but your mug that gets punched,” sums up the Russian saying.
Another strand of anti-Semitism owed its existence to Marx’s animadversions. He detested Jews as a ‘middleman minority’, which was par for the course. However, he hated not just the intermediary aspect of capitalism, but capitalism as such. Hence Marx began to use the words ‘Jew’ and ‘capitalist’ interchangeably, thus establishing an inseparable fusion in the minds of his followers.
When people talk about rising anti-Semitism in today’s Britain, they mainly have in mind the Left-wing variety feeding off Marx. This hatred extends to Israel, which is seen as both capitalist and Jewish, meaning the devil incarnate as defined by Marxist scripture.
There our socialists converge with the sizeable Muslim presence in Britain, where hatred of Jews enjoys a scriptural sanction. Israel acts as the focus for Muslim anti-Semitism, but it’s merely a pretext for it, not the reason.
Since our government is Marxist in all but name, it continues to utter bien pensant words about racial and religious equality, while being more protective of the Muslims than of the Jews. Perversely, Muslims are seen as today’s answer to downtrodden proletarians, whereas Jews have never shaken off the stigma of Marxist opprobrium.
Another strand of anti-Semitism comes from the understandable human suspicion of otherness, non-PLUs (People Like Us). Since in our godless time, British Jews’ lives are indistinguishable from those of their gentile neighbours, again the logic is rather understated. But old biases never die, and neither do they fade away.
Add to this the snobbish Tory anti-Semitism evinced by my clubbable interlocutor I mentioned earlier, and now we have a benign counterpart to Left-wing malignancy. Our upper classes often look down on Jews as gauche upstarts, and they have never really countenanced the concept of Haute Juiverie. As far as they are concerned, Juiverie is never Haute enough.
If you expected a short and exhaustive answer to the question in the title, you must feel let down. It’s just that complex questions seldom invite short and exhaustive answers. If these are offered, they are almost certainly wrong.
The question of anti-Semitism is complex and multifarious, to be answered in a long scholarly study. I’ve read a few books on the subject, such as the one by Sartre, but they only succeed in flinging the door open for more questions – some of which I’ve tried to elucidate.
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