The ‘ancient desire’ to kill Jews is not Hamas’s. It’s the West’s.

In his May 7 speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance Ceremony, President Biden claimed that Hamas’s October 7 attacks were “driven by ancient desire to wipeout [sic] the Jewish people off the face of the Earth.” While President Biden is right to condemn antisemitism, he rewrote the history of antisemitism to make a political point. Biden ignored Hamas’s own affirmation that “its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion” to repeat his belief that Israel has the right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it. In fact, Israel’s purported need for self-defense against antisemitism is a deviation from the historical trajectory of Jewish life in the Middle East. The truth is, that a longer view of Jewish history shows that antisemitism is a Western problem. 

As Christianity spread across the Roman Empire, early theologians such as Tertullian, Augustine, and Ambrose all condemned Jews for not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah. Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (c. 560 CE- 636CE), believed that Jews should be barred from holding public office. During the Crusades, Christian soldiers regularly committed pogroms against Jewish communities on their way to the Middle East. Christian communities falsely accused Jews of kidnapping and sacrificing Christians like William of Norwich. Jews were expelled from France in 1182 after centuries of ostracization and violent attacks. In England, Jews were subject to surveillance, heavy taxation, limited employment, and repeated pogroms, to the point that Geraldine Heng referred to England as the first racial state. They were expelled from England in 1290. The Catholic Church’s Fourth Lateran Council (1215) ordered Jews to wear special clothing to identify them as Jews, and some attendees of the Council called for Jewish enslavement. 

By contrast, Muslims granted Jews religious toleration. The Cairo Genizah, a storehouse of Jewish manuscripts discovered in the late nineteenth century, provides a wide panorama of Jewish life in the Islamic world, where they were merchants, lawyers, doctors, and more, who befriended, intermarried, and collaborated with Christians and Muslims. Jews held important positions, like Hasdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915-970), the court physician, minister, and financier of Caliph of Cordoba Abd al-Rahman III, and Judah ibn Tibbon (1120-1190), who translated texts from Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew into Latin. 

Back in Europe, Jews were executed after being falsely accused of infecting Christians during the 1348 Plague. During the fourteenth-century Castilian Civil War, Christians scapegoated Jews for the war, and in 1391, Christians committed pogroms that decimated Spain’s Jewish population. And the Spanish Inquisition policed Jewish converts to ensure conformity. Then, in 1492, Jews were expelled from Spain and, in 1496, from Portugal. 

Iberian (Sephardic) Jews found refuge in Muslim cities like Izmir and Constantinople. Ottoman Salonika—modern-day Thessaloniki, Greece—was a Jewish-majority city in the sixteenth century. It would possess a large Jewish population until World War II, when the city’s Jews were shipped to Nazi concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Venice established the first Jewish ghetto in 1517, replete with high taxes, squalid conditions, and curfews. And Venice put Sephardic Jews in a separate ghetto after 1541. Other Italian cities followed suit—Rome established its ghetto in 1555. As Emily Michelson has shown, Jews attended compulsory conversionary sermons; and as I argued in my 2019 book, Jewish converts who became priests faced constant scrutiny, and after 1593 the Jesuit order barred anyone of Jewish descent from joining. 

In the Enlightenment, European scholars linked Hebrew as a semitic language to Jews as a people (they did this with Arabs as well), in contrast to Indo-Europeans, i.e., white European Christians. Yoking medieval antisemitism to modern race science would become the ideological basis for the mass extermination of six million Jews. And many did little to stop it, such as how the United States turned back 900 Jews who fled Germany aboard the SS. St. Louis; the Nazis would murder over 250 of them.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while many Arab Jews were Arab nationalists, Zionism emerged as an answer to Europe’s antisemitic “Jewish Question.” Some Jews, like Theodore Herzl, believed that Jews needed to escape Europe’s racism, pogroms, and ostracization. In his Der Judenstaat (1896), Herzl proposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But many Jews disagreed: Samson Raphael Hirsch was against Jewish migration to Palestine. A vocal critic of the 1917 Balfour Declaration—the British Empire’s statement of its commitment to the foundation of the State of Israel—was Edwin Montagu, a Jewish MP who saw Zionism as a European nationalist political movement. 

After World War I and the establishment of British Mandatory Palestine, Jewish migration from Europe increased, causing tensions between native Palestinians and the British-favored Jewish immigrants. After the violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, Jews from Europe and Arab countries migrated to the newly established Israel. Many European Jews fled the horrors of the Holocaust and Europeans’ refusal to confront their own antisemitism. And while there is no excuse for the violence meted out against Arab Jews, their neighbors drove them out not because of a Nazi-style antisemitism, but because they perceived them as agents of Britain or Israel who aimed to further European colonialism. 

Yet, when Arab Jews arrived in Israel, they faced a similar type of European-style racism that facilitated Zionism, such as being placed in squalid transitional camps or Orientalized by the likes of David Ben-Gurion. Likewise, Israel has been accused of disappearing thousands of mostly Yemeni Jewish children and the secret sterilization of Ethiopian Jewish women.

Biden’s speech omits all this. Rather, his “commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state,” conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and ignores Europe’s antisemitic history that birthed Zionism. Biden has also repeatedly claimed that no Jew is safe unless Israel exists, and stated that if Israel did not exist, he would invent it. 

Biden’s historically ignorant, wildly antisemitic statements fly in the face of Jewish anti-Zionists, and this dangerous linkage between antisemitism and anti-Zionism ignores the fact that, numerically speaking, most Zionists are fundamentalist Christians who support Israel for their own antisemitic, supersessionist ends. Christians United for Israel, a right-wing evangelical Christian Zionist organization, boasts 10 million members; there are only c.16 million Jews worldwide.

Some of Israel’s loudest defenders are figures like New York Representative Elise Stefanik, who has grilled numerous university administrators about Jewish safety. Yet, Stefanik repeated what’s known as the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that leftists and Jews aim to replace white people. And this was on full display in Charlottesville in 2017, when white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us”; yet it was not they, but pro-Palestine protestors, including those at University of Virginia, who were arrested for public disorder and accused of antisemitism. This is in spite of the fact that the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful and many of the protestors are themselves Jews, begging the question of what precisely these crackdowns are about.

For his purported concern for the safety of Jews, Biden has had very little to say about the West’s history of antisemitism and its relationship to Zionism. And that’s because his understanding of antisemitism is skewed by his staunch commitment to Israel, no matter the cost. But by committing himself to Zionism as the only means of protecting Jews, even in the face of demands from many Jews who hold the opposite view, Biden is not only using Islamophobic tropes and weaponizing antisemitism to justify Israel’s occupation and assault on Palestinians. He is failing to do the one thing he claimed was a top priority on a day we should spend reflecting on the horrors of the Holocaust: keeping Jews safe.