As a child and adolescent in the former Soviet Union, Greenfeld was no stranger to the scourge of antisemitism, having experienced this phenomenon not only in her immediate environment but also at an institutionalized level. In December 1970, for example, when a group of Leningrad Jews was put on a show trial for attempting to hijack a plane to flee to Israel, KGB officers raided the Greenfeld residence in the Black Sea town of Sochi in search of “counterrevolutionary propaganda.” “The officer in charge, who had searched my room, happened to be the father of one of my mother’s patients — a little boy with tuberculosis — and my mother’s patients held her very dear,” Greenfeld recalled.
The officer found a notebook with my poems, some of them quite politically incorrect, especially in connection with the Leningrad Trial. He took my mother aside and told her, “You know that your daughter should not be writing things like these.” She said she knew. “You must forbid her to do this,” he said and gave her the notebook.4
Of course, it has long been a staple of antisemites to argue that they have never had anything against Judaism or Jews but only against Zionism and Zionists, and that their Israel-bashing is to be understood as an expression of frustration with Zionism. Yet, for all their protestations to the contrary, opponents of Zionism and Israel have never really distinguished among Zionists, Israelis, and Jews, and often use these terms interchangeably.
When in June 1967 the Israeli government ignored a French warning against preempting the imminent pan-Arab attack, President Charles de Gaulle lambasted the Jews — not the Israelis — as “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.” Seven years later, the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George S. Brown, vented his ire at Israel’s supposed stranglehold of U.S. foreign policy in no less indiscriminate terms. Making no distinction between Israelis and American Jews, he bluntly claimed that “they own, you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers, you just look at where the Jewish money is in this country.” And Anis Mansur, one of Egypt’s foremost journalists and a one-time confidant of President Anwar Sadat, put the same idea in even blunter terms: “There is no such thing in the world as Jew and Israeli. Every Jew is an Israeli. No doubt about that.”5
“Today, non-Israeli-Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn’t do,” the late New York University European history professor Tony Judt lamented amid the growing number of antisemitic hate fests in the early 2000s. “The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel.”6
Antisemites, of course, have never been short of excuses for assaulting and killing Jews, and infinitely larger numbers of Jews were exterminated shortly before the founding of the State of Israel than during its near-80 years of existence, not to mention the millions massacred in Europe and the Middle East since antiquity. Neither did European Jew-haters await Israel’s establishment to unleash on the remnants of the Holocaust. Antisemitic sentiments remained as pronounced as ever, especially in Eastern Europe, which witnessed a few vicious pogroms shortly after the end of World War II. Even in Allied-occupied Germany, Jews found themselves attacked and abused in public, with 60 percent of Germans condoning overt anti-Jewish acts of violence.
Yet if this bleak record failed to prevent an astute student of European history like Judt from falling for the canard that Israeli actions are the cause, rather than the pretext, for the hitherto worst wave of attacks on Jews and Jewish targets in Europe since the 1930s, why should one be surprised by its thoughtless dissemination by the international media and masses?
The truth of the matter is that since Israel is the world’s only Jewish state and since Zionism is the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, anti-Zionism — as opposed to criticism of specific Israeli policies or actions — means denial of the Jewish right to national self-determination. Such a discriminatory denial of this basic right to only one nation (and one of the few that can trace their corporate identity and territorial attachment to antiquity) while allowing it to all other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and unadulterated racism. Yet it is precisely because it has been tacitly construed as epitomizing the worst characteristics traditionally associated with Jews that Israel has attracted the full brunt of anti-Jewish bigotry and hatred hitherto reserved for individuals and communities, not least because it has reversed the millenarian Jewish condition of dispersal, minority status and powerlessness. If prior to Israel’s establishment Jews were despised because of their wretchedness and helplessness, they have hitherto been reviled because of their newly discovered physical and political empowerment. So much so that nearly 80 years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, the Jewish state remains the only state in the world whose right to self-defense, indeed to national existence, is constantly challenged.
But why has antisemitism been such a central, distinguishing trait of Christianity and Islam throughout their history? Having touched on the issue in some of her writings, Hamas’s 10/7 massacres and the attendant explosion of global antisemitism spurred Greenfeld to delve head-on into the problem. The outcome was a groundbreaking text, “A new explanation of antisemitism: Jew hatred as a civilizational phenomenon”7, that connected antisemitism to the borrowed monotheism of these two religions and the psychological dynamics of envy and inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Jews this borrowing of God has produced.
According to Greenfeld, “Western civilization,” which includes Muslim societies as much as Christian, is derived from and defined by monotheism and should therefore be properly called “monotheistic” (even when secular). All the creative qualities of this civilization were conditioned, if not directly caused, by monotheism and would not be possible without it, having emanated from the Jewish civilization, which preceded its formation by some 3,000 years and was later incorporated into it, never losing its formative influence.
Judaism, or more precisely, the Hebrew Bible, constitutes the foundation of this civilization: all its basic values and modes of thinking and feeling (which are believed to be universal, but which distinguish its members from members of other civilizations) stem from it, and it is still within the framework provided by it that its separate specific traditions develop and mutate. And while today’s monotheistic civilization is shared by over 4 billion people, more than half of the human population, for ninety-nine percent of them monotheism is not original, their own, but borrowed from the Jews, something that is recognized in the Holy Scriptures (such as the Bible and the Qur’an) and by the faithful.
Knowing that God — your God — appeared to the Jews first, that He has a favorite people, and that this is not your people (which is what the acceptance of the Bible as the sacred text or tracing the roots of one’s people to Ishmael logically imply) necessarily breeds a deep sense of inferiority vis-à-vis, and existential envy — ressentiment, hatred — of the Jews. Both Christians (as a separate religion) and Muslims had to cope with this from day one. That’s why the desire to humiliate the Jews, to prove to themselves (members of the derived religions) that they are not inferior, that Jews are not the chosen people, runs like a red thread through the history of monotheistic civilization. Jewish iniquity becomes a trope, an argument to be immediately and unreflectively accepted. The exceptional success of Jews in modern times, and the miracle of Israel, have only served to reinforce this civilizational dynamic, with every Jewish achievement reinforcing the sense of inferiority among other monotheists (and post-monotheists) and every slightest transgression (against the Jewish values!) magnified out of all proportion and comparison. In a civilization based on envy of the Jews, Jews (or the Jewish state for that matter) can never do right. Antisemitism, in other words, is implicit in the monotheistic civilization, and there is no way to combat this phenomenon without revealing this dynamic.8
Religious Christian antisemitism first appeared in the polemics “adversus Iudaeos” — “against the Jews”; this was, in fact, its first name. “Polemic” means “war” (from the Greek polemos), thus adversus Iudaeos polemic clearly and openly announces itself as “War against the Jews.” And with this war constituting the main preoccupation of early Christian theology, the tremendously important era between the 2nd and the 7th centuries CE was in effect a history of antisemitism. For if Jew-hatred constituted the key aspect of Christian theology of this formative period, remaining at least a central part of Christian thought in the subsequent 5–6 centuries with the greatest theologians (from St. Augustine in the 4th century to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th) participating in the development of explicit antisemitism, a thousand-year-long continuous tradition was created by the best minds and the most authoritative cultural figures of a millennium, by preachers and teachers of the largely illiterate masses for whom they constituted the only source of knowledge.
None of the Christian antisemitic tropes has had more devastating and lasting consequences than the portrayal of Jews as the killers of Christ. This racist and irrational image that justified every Jewish massacre in Christian and post-Christian Europe, including to a very large extent the Holocaust, has proved ineradicable. It was only in 1965 that the Catholic Church, recognizing the contribution of this notion to the Holocaust, renounced the idea of collective Jewish guilt transmitted from generation to generation by blood. Yet so deeply had this millenarian calumny been entrenched that the Papal renunciation made very little impression on its worldwide followers.9
Similarly, Islamic antisemitism was born together with the new faith as Prophet Muhammad’s failure to win over the Jews of Medina, to which he fled from his hometown of Mecca in 622 CE, led to the destruction of the town’s three Jewish tribes and the dissociation of Islam from its Jewish origins: The direction of prayer was changed from Jerusalem to Mecca, Friday was substituted for Sabbath as the holy day of rest, and Ramadan was designated as a month of fasting, etc. Moreover, reflecting Muhammad’s outrage over the Jewish rejection of his religious message, both the Qur’an and later biographical traditions of the prophet (hadith) abound with negative depictions of Jews. In these works, they are portrayed as a deceitful, evil, and treacherous people who, in their insatiable urge for domination, would readily betray an ally and swindle a non-Jew. They tampered with the Holy Scriptures, spurned Allah’s divine message, and persecuted His messenger Muhammad just as they had done to previous prophets, including Jesus of Nazareth. For this perfidy, they will incur a string of retributions, both in the afterlife, when they will burn in hell, and here on earth where they have been justly condemned to an existence of wretchedness and humiliation.10
Given this institutionalization of anti-Jewish bigotry in the Qur’an and the hadith, it is hardly surprising that the vilest Christian/European antisemitic tropes were quickly adopted by Muslim societies when they made their way there over the course of the centuries. This ranged from castigation of the biblical notion of the chosen people as the quintessence of “Judaism’s perception of the Jews as… masters of the universe… to whom all other peoples are but servants,” 11 to the “blood libel,” that medieval Christian fabrication according to which Jews use Gentile blood, and particularly the blood of children, for ritual purposes, to the theory of an organized Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination, particularly as spelled out in the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — the virulent antisemitic tract fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth century.
Through these malignant tropes, among others, religious Jew-hatred percolated into the consciousness of Christian and Muslim populations and then seamlessly acquired the national/racial dimension. Religious existential envy also became national/racial existential envy, and the sense of religious inferiority was compounded by that of national/racial inferiority. Nationalism secularized thinking within monotheistic societies in the sense of focusing it on this world. It reduced the significance of the transcendental in everyday life and made the collective aspects of the everyday (politics, in particular) the sphere of the sacred. Turned political with nationalism, antisemitism found welcome on the left as well as on the right; it was at home, therefore, everywhere in modern politics. There it was reinforced by the envy of Jewish achievement in modern societies.
Antisemitism thus, Greenfeld claims, is a built-in, inherent, central and defining strand of the existential makeup of the monotheistic civilization and remains as important an excitant for thinking and acting today as it was in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: then it spurred on theological cogitations which created tropes that lodged themselves in the consciousness of the masses, and now it galvanizes politics. Antisemitism is common to all the constituent parts of this civilization, uniting Christianity and Islam, otherwise opposed to each other, rival denominations of Christianity and conflicting interpretations of Islam, and, upon secularization, the contradictory, Left and Right, political persuasions.12
By addressing antisemitism as a phenomenon characteristic of the monotheistic (“Western”) civilization, Liah Greenfeld has successfully explained both its ubiquity across many societies and historical periods constituting this civilization, and the absence of native antisemitic traditions throughout the very long histories of China and India. Making a major contribution to the study of antisemitism, or indeed to the study of Jewish and world histories, this novel theoretical framework becomes all the more indispensable for combatting the “longest hatred” at a time when this surges to unprecedented heights and intensity, unknown since the rise of Nazism a century ago.
1 See, for example, Liah Greenfeld, “The Formation of the Russian National Identity: The Role of Status Insecurity and Ressentiment,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32/3 (July 1990), 549-91.
2 Greenfeld, Mind, Modernity, Madness, 628.
3 Liah Greenfeld, “A new explanation of antisemitism: Jew hatred as a civilisational phenomenon,”
Israel Affairs, 30/4 (August 2024), 579.
4 Liah Greenfeld, “Living History,” Bostonia, Summer 1994, 39 (https://liahgreenfeld.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/livinghistoryc.pdf).
5 Efraim Karsh, “The War Against the Jews,” Israel Affairs, 18/3 (July 2012), 320.
6 Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 2003.
7 Israel Affairs, 30/4 (August 2024), 579-99.
8 Greenfeld, “A new explanation of antisemitism.”
9 Liah Greenfeld’s interview with Faculti, Sept. 25, 2024, https://faculti.net/a-new-explanation-of-antisemitism-jew-hatred-as-a-civilisational-phenomenon/.
10 Efraim Karsh, “The Long Trail of Islamic Anti-Semitism,” Israel Affairs, 12/1 (Jan. 2006), 2-3; Greenfeld’s interview with Faculti.
11 Karsh, “The Long Trail,” 4.
12 Greenfeld, “A new explanation of antisemitism.”