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Antisemitism

Antisemitism is hostility toward, or discrimination against, Jews as Jews, whether directed at individuals, the religion, the people, or the Jewish state. It is often called the world’s oldest hatred because it predates the word describing it by nearly two thousand years, running from ancient expulsions through medieval blood libel to the Holocaust and into a live, mutating threat today.

Etymology

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The word “antisemitism” (Antisemitismus) was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who founded the “League of Antisemites” to give Jew-hatred a pseudo-scientific, racial veneer distinct from older religious anti-Judaism, per the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The term is a misnomer taken literally: “Semitic” is a language family that includes Arabic, and Arabs are themselves Semitic speakers, a point sometimes raised in bad faith to deflect the charge. See the glossary entry on “Semite” for why the etymology does not change the meaning: the word has always denoted hostility to Jews specifically, never a broader category.

History of the term’s usage

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Before Marr, the hatred took religious form: the deicide charge that Jews collectively killed Christ, the blood libel accusing Jews of ritual murder, and the medieval well-poisoning libel during the Black Death. Marr’s 19th-century coinage reframed the hatred as racial rather than religious, a shift that fed directly into Nazi ideology and the Final Solution, which murdered six million Jews. Forged texts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) supplied the conspiratorial myth that Jews secretly control banks, media, and governments, a claim addressed directly in this glossary myth entry and still recycled today. In the Middle East, antisemitism predates 1948 and Zionism, as the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad shows: two days of mob violence against Iraqi Jews, encouraged by the Nazi-aligned Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, well before Israel existed. It is not, contrary to a common claim, a Nazi invention; see that myth debunked.

Since the Holocaust, antisemitism has not disappeared, it has adapted. What scholars and institutions now call “new antisemitism” blends the old tropes, dual loyalty, conspiracy, collective guilt, with hostility to Israel as the collective Jew, a pattern documented at Wikipedia: New antisemitism.

The IHRA definition and its use today

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In 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a working definition of antisemitism, now used by dozens of governments and institutions per the European Commission. It names specific examples, including calling for the killing of Jews, Holocaust denial, and applying double standards to Israel not expected of any other nation, alongside the caveat that criticism of Israel comparable to that leveled against any other country is not antisemitic. See the full entry at IHRA definition and Wikipedia: Working definition of antisemitism.

Misused both ways, and the test that resolves it

Section titled “Misused both ways, and the test that resolves it”

The word is misused from both directions. It is genuinely weaponized as a slur, with real antisemitic incidents undercounted or dismissed, documented at scale in the ADL’s 2024 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, which recorded record highs in the United States. It is also invoked, in reverse, to dodge legitimate criticism, a maneuver known as the Livingstone Formulation, and critics call this a “weaponization” of the term itself to shield Israel from scrutiny, examined at Wikipedia: Weaponization of antisemitism. That charge does not hold up as a blanket dismissal, because a working line exists and it does not move depending on who is asking: Natan Sharansky’s 3D test, demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. Whether opposition to Zionism itself crosses that line is addressed directly at Is anti-zionism antisemitism?, and the test settles individual cases; it is not evidence that the category itself is fake.

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Sources

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