Antisemitism

Antisemitism is hostility toward, prejudice against, or discrimination directed at Jews as Jews. It has persisted across two millennia, shifting from religious to racial to political and conspiratorial forms, and it culminated in the Nazi genocide of roughly six million European Jews between 1941 and 1945. Conservatives regard antisemitism as a moral evil and a solvent of the civilisation that produced it, and serious conservative thinkers have condemned it without qualification.

The conservative case against antisemitism rests on the same grounds as the conservative defence of ordered liberty: the dignity of the person, the rule of law applied equally to all, and gratitude for the Judeo-Christian inheritance on which Western moral and legal order was built.

Key Takeaways

• Antisemitism predates Christianity and has taken religious, racial, economic, and conspiratorial forms across history.
• The Holocaust murdered about six million Jews, the deadliest expression of antisemitic ideology.
• Conservative thinkers condemn antisemitism as incompatible with the dignity of the person and the Judeo-Christian roots of the West.
• Contemporary disputes centre on how antisemitism is defined, including where criticism of the state of Israel ends and anti-Jewish hatred begins.

History And Context

Hostility to Jews appears in the ancient world, but its most durable European form was medieval Christian anti-Judaism: the blood libel, forced conversions, ghettoisation, and mass expulsions, including Edward I’s expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and the Alhambra Decree that expelled them from Spain in 1492. The nineteenth century produced a racial reformulation. The German agitator Wilhelm Marr popularised the term Antisemitismus in 1879 to recast religious prejudice as biological doctrine.

Two episodes mark the modern descent. The Dreyfus affair (1894 to 1906) split France over the false treason conviction of a Jewish army officer. The forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, circulated from around 1903, fabricated a Jewish plot for world domination and fed conspiratorial antisemitism across Europe and beyond. These currents reached their end in Nazi Germany, whose Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and whose “Final Solution” industrialised murder. After 1945 antisemitism survived in Holocaust denial and in newer conspiratorial and political forms.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives root their rejection of antisemitism in the conviction that every person bears equal dignity and that the West owes its moral grammar to Hebrew scripture. Paul Johnson’s history of the Jews treats their survival and contribution as central to Western civilisation, not marginal to it. The most consequential conservative act against antisemitism in recent memory was internal policing of the right’s own fringe: in December 1991 William F. Buckley Jr. devoted a 40,000-word National Review essay, later published as In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992), to confronting antisemitic voices on the right and reading them out of respectable conservatism.

Conservatives also note that antisemitism shares a structure with the ideologies they oppose. It is conspiratorial, treating a hidden cabal as the cause of social ills; it is collectivist, judging individuals by group membership; and it is resentful of commerce and achievement. Hannah Arendt traced how antisemitism served as a building block of totalitarian movements that conservatives reject on every other ground.

Differing Positions

Most serious disagreement today is not over whether antisemitism is evil but over how to define its boundaries. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a working definition in 2016 that treats certain forms of anti-Israel rhetoric as antisemitic. Critics, including some civil libertarians and scholars who drafted the rival Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism in 2021, argue that an over-broad definition can chill legitimate criticism of the Israeli government.

Defenders of the broader definition respond that much contemporary antisemitism travels under anti-Zionist cover, recycling old conspiracy tropes about Jewish power in new language. The honest position grants both points: criticism of a state is not bigotry, and bigotry does not become acceptable when aimed at a state rather than a synagogue. Distinguishing the two is the substance of the modern argument.

References

1. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (Harper & Row, 1987).
2. William F. Buckley Jr., In Search of Anti-Semitism (Continuum, 1992).
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, 1951).
4. Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (Pantheon, 1991).