Foreignness

One of the recurring themes driving antisemitic conspiracies throughout the centuries is the idea that Jews are perpetually “foreign” and “other.” 

Jews, in this worldview, can never really belong to a society, even as they live among it, and so can be accused of wishing to have power over it or to harm it, or both. 

This idea is so ingrained in Jewish history, it even shows up in two of Judaism’s biggest holidays: Passover, when we are each commanded to imagine ourselves as strangers and slaves who make it out of Egypt to wander and Purim, when we celebrate not being killed en masse on orders from an official who saw Jews as insufficiently subservient.

In this thinking, Jews — rootless and without real commitment to their neighbors — can be viewed with suspicion and even accused of unthinkable violence, which in turn justifies violence against them. Here, we’ll break down some of the tropes related to this line of antisemitic thinking, from blood libel to Judeo-Bolshevism.

TL;DR: BLOOD LIBEL / Expulsion of Spanish & Portuguese jews / pogroms / Jews as an alien race / Judeo-bolshevism / The Fifth Column / Dual Loyalty / Jews & Immigration / Replacement Theory

OK, so what does “blood libel” mean?

As anyone who’s attended a seder knows all too well, matzah is unleavened bread, eaten during Passover to commemorate the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. But in the Middle Ages, many Christians decided that the cracker-like food was made with the blood of Christian children, and this accusation is known as blood libel. As Passover is close to Easter, it was also linked to the myth that Jews were responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion. 

Though the earliest references to blood libel traces back to the 2nd century BCE, the idea really picked up after the First Crusade in the 12th century (Jews, it should be noted, were also physically attacked during the crusades). By the 15th century, it was common for non-Jews across Western and Central Europe to believe in blood libel. 

And what exactly is this trope trying to get at?

Behind this idea — like its medieval cousin, that Jews were poisoning wells — is the implication that Jewish neighbors could not be trusted, and that they were looking to hurt and kill the innocent local Christians. The concept continued on through the Holocaust. 

Do people still believe these blood libel claims? 

Unfortunately, yes, some still do, or at least use it to justify hatred and violence against Jews. For example, in 2019, a shooter attacked a synagogue in Poway, California. “You are not forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven,” the shooter had previously written in a manifesto, a reference to a two year old Christian boy found near a Jewish home on Easter Sunday in 1475. 

What are some other examples of antisemitism rooted in fear of foreignness throughout history?

Well, there’s the Spanish and Portuguese expulsion of Jews.

What was the Spanish and Portuguese expulsion of Jews?

In 1492, the monarchs of Spain expelled all practicing Jews from the country, and in 1496 the rulers of Portugal also expelled all practicing Jews, many of whom had originally fled from Spain. 

Why were Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal?

This is an example of what happens when those in power take as fact the idea that Jews are inherently foreign. Toward the end of the Reconquista — the reconquering of Muslim Iberia by Christian powers that dated from the 700s to 1492 — Christian authorities and masses alike became less tolerant of Jews. 

Murderous waves of mass violence rocked the Jews of Spain in 1391, in response to which thousands of Jews converted to Christianity, an attempt to stay safe and in Spain. In 1492, the monarchs of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, expelling practicing Jews, an attempt to keep Judaism’s influence away from the newly converted and their descendents. Over 200,000 converted; tens of thousands more were expelled (some fled to Portugal, from where they were expelled decades later). 

Some of the new “conversos” — the Jews who converted to Christianity in order to stay — continued secretly practicing Judaism. In any case, conversion still could not make them equal; in Spain, laws were passed to limit the opportunities for converts.  

So that’s Western Europe. But what about Eastern Europe?

Before and after the Holocaust, Jews in Eastern Europe were killed in pogroms, or organized massacres, which tended to coincide with people looking for someone to blame. Maybe the most famous was the Kishinev (today Chisinau) pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were killed and 1,500 homes destroyed after Jews were accused of murdering a Christian child to use its blood for a ritual. 

But pogroms were also carried out against Jews by both sides in, for example, the Russian civil war, as well as by Ukrainian and Polish civilians and soldiers, all believing Jews couldn’t possibly be on their side. 

And how does this fit into the Holocaust itself? 

What Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust is arguably the most famous example of the kind of violence and harm that can occur because of the belief of blood libel and the idea of a Jew as a foreigner.

The Nazis were successful in painting Jews as an “alien race,” a parasitic people feeding off the host nation, poisoning and exploiting it. 

I’m sorry, alien race?! Did the Nazis actually use that language?

Unfortunately, yes they quite literally did use that phrase. Key to this idea was that Jews were inherently other — that even if they were among a population, they could never really be of it, and in fact wanted to do harm to the very people with whom they lived and made up a society. 

The idea of Jews as perpetually and irreversibly separate from the true nation was key both to Hitler’s rise to power and to why such deep hatred was able to spread so far and wide within the German (and, more broadly, European) public.

I’ve heard that Jews were also blamed for the Russian Revolution, and for Communism? How did that happen? 

Yes, Jews were blamed for both those things, largely because of what was called Judeo-Bolshevism and the idea of the Fifth Column. 

What’s Judeo-Bolshevism?

Judeo-Bolshevism was another iteration of the antisemitic idea that Jews are inherently untrustworthy and have their own agenda. While some Jews absolutely were communists, this conspiracy took it a step beyond that and presented Jews as the driving and destabilizing force behind the Russian Revolution and Communism itself. 

Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s and even into World War II, nationalists across Europe blamed Jews for failed Communist takeovers in their own countries and stoked fears that the Jewish Communists would try again. 

And what’s the Fifth Column?

Literally, a fifth column is a group of agents working to undermine a country or nation from within. And if you’re an enemy within, the thinking went, the powers that be have the right to try to sniff you out and deal with you. 

So, for example, during the Communist period in Central and Eastern Europe, this distrust of Jews was used differently, with Jews presented as a “fifth column,” enemies in their Communist midst.

In 1953 in Soviet Russia, the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” — an allegation that Soviet medical specialists were planning to kill Soviet authorities — led to the arrest of nine doctors, six of whom were Jewish and accused of serving international Jewry. 

And in 1968 in Poland, authorities responded to student protests against the government by blaming and purging Jews. 

So the main idea seems to be that time and time again, people believed the Jews were lying or sneaking around, trying to cause harm. 

Unfortunately, yes. There’s even another version of this accusation: Dual loyalty.

Tell me more about dual loyalty. 

Dual loyalty is the idea that Jews are only really loyal to other Jews, and so cannot be trusted, and indeed should be considered suspect, by others in the nations where they live. One prominent example of this is the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish French army captain was accused of spying; his trial (and retrial) brought up questions over whether Jews could really be loyal to France.

Does Zionism and support for Israel fall under the umbrella of dual loyalty?

In the 19th and early 20th century, there was genuine concern on the part of many American Jews that Zionism would have them labeled as disloyal to the United States. In the early 20th century, however, some Jewish leaders began articulating that being good Americans and good Jews meant being good Zionists and, certainly in the latter half of the 20th century, many Jews felt that these three traits stacked neatly, one on top of the other. 

And as Israel enjoyed bipartisan support for much of the 20th century, Israel became less salient as an issue around which to “other” Jews.

How does the dual loyalty trope play out today?

Today, the question has been turned on its head. Politicians, particularly on the right, sometimes speak of American Jews as though they’re somehow falling short as Americans or as Jews if they do not take a certain position on Israel, or if they do not support them because of their support for Israel. 

For example, in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump, who had previously told a group of American Jews that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu was “your prime minister,” insisted that, given his support for Israel, Jews who didn’t vote for him would “need to have their heads examined.” Inverting the usual trope, this implied that status as sane American Jews was contingent on support for a foreign country, and that support was to be shown by voting for Trump. For what it’s worth, many Jewish supporters of Trump agreed with him.

Meanwhile, there are those, often on the political left, who argue or imply that Jews are responsible for putting the interests of Israel over those of the United States. For example, in 2017, Valerie Plame Wilson, a former CIA agent and author, promoted an article that put forth the idea that America’s Jews cause America’s wars out of animosity toward Iran and support for Israel (she at first defended the piece and then backtracked and apologized). 

For more recent examples, one could, if one were so inclined, do a quick search on social media to find examples of people who believe that ills carried out by America are actually the responsibility of Zionist Jews who make the United States behave badly.

How does this concept tie into antisemitic tropes about Jews and immigration?

In the United States and around the world today, Jews are accused of controlling all kinds of other minorities for nefarious ends: The person who carried out the 2022 shooting against mostly Black shoppers in a grocery store in Buffalo alleged in his manifesto that Jews, whom he loathed, were using non-white people to destroy the population. 

But the idea that Jews are smuggling in immigrants with the goal of corrupting and corroding the nation is, in a way, the Platonic ideal of the antisemitic myth of Jews and foreignness. In this, Jews are perpetually so far removed from belonging to the nation that they will bring in other outsiders to further degrade it. 

For example, when Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic organization started by Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist George Soros, fought to get immigrants’ benefits reinstated in the 1990s, an antisemitic conspiracy asserted that it was trying to degrade civilization. 

Likewise, HIAS, originally founded to help Jews fleeing Europe and today dedicated to helping refugees and asylum seekers more broadly, has been accused of trying to change the nation’s demographics.

I’ve heard bigots complain about replacement theory, and Jews participating in it. What does that mean?

Great question. Replacement theory is the idea that people — and “people” here is often meant to be “Jews” — are flooding the country with non-white immigrants so as to corrode the nation. 

The people who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 were referencing replacement theory, even if they wouldn’t have called it exactly that. 

That same logic (or lack thereof) was espoused by the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, who killed 11 Jews during a Shabbat morning service in Pittsburgh in 2018 and who was furious at the idea that Jews were bringing non-white immigrants in to the detriment of the white nation.

So it’s not only antisemitic, but pretty racist to boot?

Absolutely. A conspiracy that a Jewish person is flooding the country with migrants to ruin the country is not only antisemitic, but also xenophobic. Our oppressions are linked, and it’s a good reminder that antisemitism is bad for everyone — not just the Jews.