My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.”
Thirty-one years later, everyone’s thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who’s the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus, deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders. “I want you to kneel down and touch the stone which paved the grounds of Auschwitz,” the Oregon Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer declared at a hearing in May, urging a visit to D.C.’s Holocaust museum. “I want you to peer over the countless shoes of murdered Jews.” She gave no indication of knowing that one of the leaders she was addressing had been a victim of antisemitism or that another was the descendant of Holocaust survivors.
It’s no accident that non-Jews talk about Jews as if we aren’t there. According to the historian David Nirenberg, talking about the Jews—not actual Jews but Jews in the abstract—is how Gentiles make sense of their world, from the largest questions of existence to the smallest questions of economics. Nirenberg’s focus is “anti-Judaism,” how negative ideas about Jews are woven into canons of Western thought. But as I learned that summer in Tennessee, and as we’re seeing today, concern can be as revealing as contempt. Often the two go hand in hand.
Consider the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which the House of Representatives recently passed by a vote of 320–91. The act purports to be a response to rising antisemitism in the United States. Yet the murder of Jews, synagogue shootings, and cries of “Jews will not replace us” are clearly not what the bill is designed to address. Nearly half of Republicans believe in the “great replacement theory,” after all, and their leader draws from the same well.
The bill will instead outfit the federal government with a new definition of antisemitism that would shield Israel from criticism and turn campus activism on behalf of Palestinians into acts of illegal discrimination. (Seven of the definition’s eleven examples of antisemitism involve opposition to the State of Israel.) Right-wingers who vocally oppose the bill—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk—have little problem with its Zionist agenda. They just worry that it will implicate those who believe the Jews are Christ killers.
The G.O.P. is not the only party whose solicitude for the Jews betrays an underlying unease. President Biden has said repeatedly that without Israel no Jew in the world is safe. It sounds like a statement of solidarity, but it’s really a confession of bankruptcy, a disavowal of the democratic state’s obligation to protect its citizens equally. As Biden told a group of Jewish leaders in 2014, nine months before Trump announced his Presidential campaign, “You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States . . . there is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the State of Israel.” I’ve lived most of my life in the United States; three of my four grandparents were born here. If the President of my country—a liberal and a Democrat, no less—is saying that my government can’t protect me, where am I supposed to go? I’m Jewish, not Israeli.
Some Jews might feel cheered by Republican crusades against antisemitism or Democratic affirmations of Israel. But there is a long history to these special provisions and professions of concern. Repeating patterns from the ancient and medieval world—and abandoning the innovations pioneered by Jews in the United States—they are bad for democracy. And bad for the Jews.
Contrary to popular myth, the history of Jews and Gentiles is not one of unremitting hostility or eternal antisemitism. It is a chronicle of oscillation, Hannah Arendt argued, a cycle of “special discrimination” and “special favor,” with sovereigns bestowing—then revoking—power and privilege upon the Jews. Jewish leaders, lacking sovereignty of their own, eager to defend their brethren from twitchy neighbors, made themselves indispensable, providing resources to Popes and emperors, lords and kings. They used their favored status to create autonomous communities for their people. Despite their success, or perhaps because of it, they never erased the fine line that separates persecution from protection.
Texts sacred and secular tell the story. A seldom discussed chapter in Genesis lets slip that long before the Israelites were enslaved by Pharaoh, Joseph was ensconced in Pharaoh’s court. As Pharaoh’s right-hand man, Joseph compelled Egypt’s farmers to sell their land for food during a famine, effectively rendering them serfs of the state. Not long after, Exodus opens with a report that “there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” This new king turned the Egyptians against the Israelites.
After the Greeks conquered Egypt, the Jews of Alexandria were largely denied citizenship in the Hellenic empire. They still managed to curry favor with rulers, which placed them above native Egyptians in the social hierarchy. Centuries later, after the Romans took over, the new regime continued this tradition, adding the envy of the Greeks to the hatred of the Egyptians, stirring up a riotous stew.
Christianity, the child of Judaism, introduced a dangerously Oedipal ingredient to the mix. Despite Christian teaching that the Jews were responsible for Christ’s death, Augustine explained that the Jews should be treated as a people of witness, suitable for preservation rather than punishment. Alive, they testified to the truth of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels’ predecessor. Dispersed and miserable, they proved the peril of refusing Christ. It was the obligation of Christian rulers to look after the Jews, Augustine claimed, to maintain them “separate in their observance and unlike the rest of the world.”
By providing a theological gloss on an old idea, Augustine put Jews in the crosshairs of Christian politics. At moments of calm, they received privileges and charters granting them levels of autonomy, access, and security that not all groups enjoyed. In thirteenth-century Poland, the historian David Myers writes, Christians could even be fined if they “failed to heed the cries of Jews in the middle of the night.” At moments of change, they were targets of persecution and slaughter. Either way, their fortunes were tied to that of the sovereign, who could be accused of granting the Jews too much protection or not enough.
That left Jewish leaders forever scanning the horizon for trouble—usually from the sovereign or the Gentiles surrounding them, and sometimes from their own people, who were suspicious of their contacts outside the community. As they came to play the role of the “court Jew,” advising the rulers of the medieval era and financing the treasuries of early modern states, they accumulated power and incurred resentment. But with the consolidation of modern nation-states, which claimed to speak for peoples rather than through kings, the hard-won lessons of Jewish élite politics grew increasingly obsolete. Across the Atlantic, a new, more democratic, model beckoned.
Not a single Jew signed the Declaration of Independence or deliberated at the Constitutional Convention. That probably had more to do with numbers—they were a mere twenty-five hundred of 2.5 million people—than with animus. For long before America’s revolutionaries affixed their names to the ideals of freedom, equality, and republican governance, Jews in America had been learning the arts of democracy.
Throughout the eighteenth century, Jews petitioned colonial governments for the democratic rights of membership and participation, responding to leaders like Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who saw the polity as “a receptacle for people of several Sorts and Opinions.” They built a coalition with the Huguenots of South Carolina to demand their rights. Even before the Revolution, they secured the right, with Quakers, to affirm their allegiance to the government without taking an oath of Christian faith. After the Revolution, they were primed to convert that victory into the right to hold government office. They avowed no special virtues, disavowed no special vices, invoked no high connections. They simply stood by the Constitution, which prohibits religious tests for federal office, and their service to the revolutionary cause.
In Europe, emancipation was often conditioned on cleaving the citizen from the Jew. “The Jews should be refused everything as a nation,” one delegate to the French National Assembly declared, “but granted everything as individuals.” Many American Jews sought to avoid that separation. Instead of abandoning Judaism or relegating it to the private sphere, they designed their institutions in the image of the democracy they were helping to build. As the historian Hasia Diner has shown, synagogues wrote their own constitutions, with democratic procedures, a bill of rights, and provisions for amendment. Government officials were invited to address congregations rather than negotiate with individual élites. Where Jews in modern Europe worked with states to anoint one body to represent them all, continuing the medieval tradition of a single interceding voice between sovereign and Jewry, Jews in America created a multiplicity of organizations, some more democratic than others, none with the power or authority to speak for the whole.
The climax of this distinctively modern approach to Jewish politics came not in defense of the Jews but in support of the New Deal and the Black Freedom struggle. This may seem paradoxical, instances of Jewish do-gooders acting on behalf of others. The protagonists saw things differently. As the Jewish Community Relations Council of Cincinnati declared in 1963, “The society in which Jews are most secure, is itself secure, only to the extent that citizens of all races and creeds enjoy full equality.” This was the opposite of the lesson that Jews had learned across the European millennia.