In a long read, Adam Slonim offers a comprehensive survey of antisemitism. Searching for ‘The Telos of a Hatred’, Slonim looks to identify Jew-hatred’s purpose, as seen by the antisemites. ‘What function explains its longevity, its mutations, its ability to reappear, hydra-like, each time a head is cut off? Why this hatred, uniquely protean, uniquely permanent? Why does it survive contradiction, thriving on incoherence – Jews hated as both rich and poor, revolutionary and reactionary, cosmopolitan and parochial, godless and too religious?’
‘I’m beginning to think they don’t like us’. 90 year old Meyer Harrari.
Aristotle in the Lyceum
In the gardens of the Lyceum, Aristotle taught his students to ask four questions of any phenomenon in order to understand its essence. What is it made of – the material cause of the phenomenon’s existence. What form does it take – the formal cause of the thing. What brings it into being – how it arose, or what is termed the efficient cause. And what is it for – what is this thing’s purpose, why does it exist? These, he said, are the aitiai, the causes of all phenomena. To explain the bronze statue of a god, one must know the bronze (the material cause), the shape into which it has been hammered (the formal cause), the sculptor’s chisel and hand (the efficient cause), and the purpose the statue serves – worship, remembrance, civic pride (the final cause). Without the final cause – why does it exist as it does – understanding falters.
This framework has been applied to science, art, engineering, biology – almost everything we observe, even metaphysics. Yet there is one phenomenon that has haunted history with such peculiar persistence that it demands an as yet unapplied Aristotelian accounting: antisemitism. Its material cause is obvious enough – texts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, accusations of blood rituals or conspiracies, memes mutating across centuries. Its formal cause we know as well: the ghettos, the inquisitions, the pogroms, the laws of Nuremberg, the swastikas scrawled on synagogues, the hashtags trending online. Its efficient causes are the rulers, mobs, and demagogues who wield it whenever expedient.
But what of the final cause? What purpose has antisemitism served? What function explains its longevity, its mutations, its ability to reappear, hydra-like, each time a head is cut off? Why this hatred, uniquely protean, uniquely permanent? Why does it survive contradiction, thriving on incoherence – Jews hated as both rich and poor, revolutionary and reactionary, cosmopolitan and parochial, godless and too religious?
Aristotle believed that the essence of a thing was revealed not only in its parts but in its purpose. The telos of the acorn is the oak. What, then, is the telos of a hatred that spans millennia? To answer this is not merely antiquarian; it is civic, even urgent. For if antisemitism persists because it is useful, then the only way to defeat it is to make it useless.
Part I: Witnesses Against the World
The ancient world was filled with hatreds. Rome despised the Carthaginians, Greeks mocked Persians, Egyptians derided Nubians. Yet those hatreds were territorial, vanishing once the enemy was defeated or absorbed. Antisemitism, in contrast, did not dissolve.
From the moment Jews entered the Roman imagination, they became something else: a permanent irritant, a witness against the empire’s self-understanding.
Take Tacitus, Rome’s great historian. Writing in the first century, he described Jews as a people ‘opposed to all others,’ stubbornly clinging to their own laws and customs. What shocked Romans was not Jewish violence or conquest – none existed – but Jewish difference. Jews refused to bow before Roman gods, refused to eat Roman food, refused to assimilate. Their Sabbath struck Romans as idleness, their dietary laws as barbaric, their insistence on circumcision as mutilation. For Rome, which prided itself on religious eclecticism and civic inclusivity, the Jew was intolerable precisely because he tolerated no compromise.
Already the outlines of purpose emerge. Jews, by their existence, bore witness to another sovereignty, another law. Where Rome declared Caesar lord, Jews declared otherwise. Where empire boasted universality, Jews clung to particularity. They were, as Jewish-Roman historian Josephus later called them when writing of the failed revolt against Rome, ‘a nation apart.’
The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the expulsion from Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt, the scattering of Jewish communities throughout the empire – none erased them. And in their persistence, Rome found a mirror of its own fragility. Other conquered peoples vanished into the imperial maw. The Jews remained, stubbornly, infuriatingly, reminding Rome that empires pass but covenant endures.
The early Christians absorbed and reframed this irritation. For them, the Jews were not just obstinate; they were theological rivals. Christianity proclaimed that the covenant had passed to the Church, that a New Testament had fulfilled and superseded the Torah – the ‘Old Testament’. Yet Jews refused to disappear on cue. Augustine called them ‘witnesses against us,’ a people condemned to wander so that their misery might testify to Christian truth. Their survival was not accidental; it served a function.
Here, perhaps, we see antisemitism’s first telos: the Jew as moral and theological witness, hated precisely because he cannot be erased. The hatred itself performs a purpose: by branding Jews obstinate, cursed, rejected, Christians reinforced their own identity as chosen. The Wandering Jew was the foil against which Christian triumph defined itself.
The irony is cruel. A people accused of deicide was kept alive, century after century, so that their survival might prove their guilt. Expulsions, ghettos, humiliations – each confirmed the narrative. To hate the Jew was not prejudice but pedagogy; it was how Christendom taught itself what it was.
This, of course, was not the first hatred of Jews. In Alexandria, as early as the third century BCE, Greeks accused Jews of misanthropy, of refusing to join in civic festivals, of plotting against the community. But in Rome and then in Christendom, the hatred found its enduring function. Jews were not merely disliked; they were needed. Needed as scapegoats, needed as witnesses, needed as the Other through which society defined itself.
Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, in their book ‘Why The Jews’, insist that antisemitism is rebellion against Sinai. The Jews brought into history the scandal of ethical monotheism: a God who commands justice, a law above rulers, a conscience that cannot be silenced. To tyrants and ideologues alike, this is unbearable.
Jews, they remind us, are not hated for what they do but for what they represent: a law that demands power be limited. Rome could tolerate any cult, provided it made room for Caesar. Jews refused. Christianity could tolerate any dissent, provided it acknowledged Christ. Jews would not. In every case, the Jew represented a counter-sovereignty, a stubborn witness to law above rulers. To hate Jews, then, was to attempt the annihilation of conscience.
The Roman Forum is long dust, the emperors’ names half-forgotten. Yet the hatred persists, its telos intact. The Jew remains, stubborn witness, inconvenient reminder that power is not all there is. Empires pass. Covenant endures. That endurance has always had its price.
Part II: Medieval Christendom
If the ancient world cast Jews as obstinate witnesses to a rival sovereignty, the medieval world transformed them into living pollutants – figures of contagion whose elimination promised purification. Here antisemitism revealed its second great telos: not just to explain or to witness, but to bind fractured societies through ritual expulsion.
The story begins in the small towns of Europe in the twelfth century, when the blood libel first emerged. In Norwich in 1144, the death of a boy named William was blamed on local Jews, accused of reenacting the crucifixion by murdering a Christian child at Passover. No evidence was produced, nor needed. The function was clear: the charge gave Christians a drama through which to define themselves. Jews were not only stubborn unbelievers; they were now pollutants, desecrators, conspirators against the very body of Christendom.
The libel spread with extraordinary speed. From England it travelled to France, then to Germany, Poland, Spain. Each time a child disappeared, each time plague or famine struck, the charge could be summoned. Jews were accused of poisoning wells during the Black Death, of desecrating the host, of conspiring with demons. These accusations were not meant to be proven; they were meant to be useful. They gave frightened communities a culprit, rulers a scapegoat, priests a sermon.
Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, once wrote that ‘dirt is matter out of place.’ Pollution, she argued, is not about hygiene but about boundaries. To accuse Jews of ritual murder or host desecration was to mark them as matter out of place, pollution within Christendom. Their removal became an act of purification. The pogroms that followed were not random violence but ritual cleansings. The telos of antisemitism here was boundary-maintenance, binding communities together by identifying the pollutant within.
Nowhere did this function reach its apotheosis more clearly than in Spain in 1492. For centuries, Spain had been a mosaic: Muslims, Christians, and Jews living under shifting sovereignties. Under Muslim rule, Jews often flourished, serving as translators, physicians, philosophers. Under Christian monarchs, they rose to prominence as financiers and advisers. But by the fifteenth century, Spain was in flux. The Reconquista had culminated in Christian victory; Ferdinand and Isabella sought to unify the realm under crown and cross. Diversity, once tolerated, was now a threat to national coherence.
Enter the Inquisition. It was not primarily concerned with Jews who openly practiced Judaism – they had long been marginalized – but with conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity, sometimes sincerely, often under duress. These New Christians were suspected of secretly practicing Jewish rites, of corrupting Christian society from within. In 1478, the Inquisition was established to root them out. Torture was sanctioned, confessions extracted, burnings staged in public squares.
Here antisemitism’s purpose was unmistakable. The Inquisition bound Spain together through fear, loyalty, and spectacle. To be a good Spaniard was to denounce the converso. To burn a Jew was to prove one’s orthodoxy. The hatred created cohesion in a fractured polity. Ferdinand and Isabella’s Inquisition was what Hannah Arendt called a form of ‘political technology’: the systematic, engineered use of ideology, organisation, and mass manipulation to manufacture political outcomes. In Spain, antisemitism was a tool to weld together a fragile polity by designating the Jew as the pollutant.
The expulsion decree of 1492 sealed this logic. All Jews who refused baptism were ordered to leave. Tens of thousands fled, many to the Ottoman Empire, others to North Africa or Italy. Those who stayed faced forced conversion or death. For Ferdinand and Isabella, the expulsion was a consummation. By purging Jews, Spain imagined itself purified, whole, unified under one faith and one crown.
Prager and Telushkin would here see their thesis confirmed: the Jews bore witness to Sinai, to law above rulers. Their presence was intolerable to monarchs who demanded absolute sovereignty. To expel them was to silence that witness, to rid the realm of the reminder that even kings are accountable. Antisemitism’s telos was rebellion against conscience.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks saw the same pattern through a different lens. He described antisemitism as a virus that mutates, adapting to survive. In antiquity, Jews were despised for their obstinacy. In medieval Christendom, they were vilified as pollutants, conspirators, corrupters of Christendom’s purity. In the Medieval period the charge donned the mantle of the age’s authority: theology. To accuse Jews of killing Christ’s children or desecrating Christ’s body was to claim the highest moral justification available. Hatred dressed itself as piety.
In later centuries, Sack’s mutating virus would become racial, then political. But the underlying purpose was the same: Jews functioned as the mirror against which societies defined themselves, the scapegoat onto whom they projected their contradictions.
And for the masses, the function was visceral. Pogroms were not simply outbursts of rage; they were rituals of cohesion. The burning of a Jew was a civic liturgy, a collective catharsis, a way for communities fractured by famine or plague to feel whole again.
What makes 1492 so emblematic is not only its cruelty but its consequences. Spain’s expulsion was meant to purify; in truth, it hollowed out the kingdom. Jewish financiers, doctors, translators, merchants – all were lost. Within a century, Spain’s empire began its long decline. The purpose antisemitism served in the moment – cohesion – was purchased at the cost of long-term decay. The telos of hatred was revealed not as redemption but as ruin.
Yet for centuries, the narrative held. The Jew as pollutant, the converso as hidden corrupter, the community purified by expulsion – these tropes endured, migrating into other lands, other forms. When Martin Luther, in the sixteenth century, turned against Jews after initially courting them, his pamphlets repeated the same logic: Jews as obstinate, Jews as pollutants, Jews as conspirators. Expel them, he wrote, burn their synagogues, drive them from the land. His fury was not just theological but functional: in a Germany riven by Reformation, the Jew again served as the unifying enemy.
This medieval telos did not die. It re-emerged in Nazi Germany, when Jews were branded pollutants to the Aryan body. It remerged in Soviet Russia, when ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were accused of corrupting socialism from within. It re-emerges today, when Israel is cast as the pollutant of global order, the obstacle to peace, the virus infecting the body of nations. Each time, the logic is the same: purge the Jew, purify the community.
The USA’s first Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, warns that this is more than prejudice; it is a conspiracy myth, a narrative that explains evil by projecting it onto Jews. And in times of stress – economic crises, pandemics, wars – it becomes especially useful. The medieval blood libel, the Spanish expulsion, the Nazi ‘Jew as bacillus,’ the social media meme of the Zionist cabal – all are mutations of the same purpose: to provide clarity through falsehood, to bind communities through exclusion, to offer redemption through expulsion.
Hadley Freeman’s brilliant essay in the Jewish Quarterly on the contemporary Left’s blindness after 7 October captures and echoes this history. Soviet propaganda recast Zionism as racism, Jews as pollutants in the body of socialism. Today, the Left repeats the trope: Israel as colonial contaminant, Zionists as corrupters of justice. Zionists must be cancelled everywhere – blotted out of society. The logic is medieval in structure, even if secular in language. It is the old story: we will be whole only if the Jews are gone.
The paradox, of course, is that the Jew never vanishes. Spain expelled its Jews, yet conversos remained, their very existence a permanent irritant to the myth of purity. Nazi Germany attempted extermination, yet Jews survived, and the state built on their ashes – Israel – emerged as witness against their enemies. The purpose of antisemitism is always annihilation; its outcome is always survival, and with it, the shame of those who sought to erase them.
And so the hatred persists, like a ritual that must be re-enacted precisely because it fails. The telos of medieval antisemitism was purification. Its result was contamination, not of Jews, but of the societies that embraced the lie.
Part III: Modern Europe
By the nineteenth century, Europe congratulated itself on having moved beyond the darkness of the Middle Ages. The Enlightenment had brought emancipation. Jews were granted citizenship in France after the Revolution, allowed to leave the ghettos of Italy, permitted to attend universities in Germany. The new age prided itself on reason and universal rights. The Jew, long confined to the margins, was now promised a place within the body politic.
And yet the old hatred did not die; it merely changed its clothes. The virus mutated, always borrowing the authority of the age, always finding a new home. In the modern world, it was race, science, and nation. And so where Jews were once pollutants to faith, they now became pollutants to blood and soil, to the nation itself.
The Dreyfus Affair in France crystallised this mutation. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was accused of treason – of passing secrets to the Germans. He was tried, convicted, and sent to Devil’s Island. The evidence was flimsy; the handwriting expert’s analysis was fraudulent; the real culprit went free. Yet the machinery of state and public opinion turned savagely against him. Crowds gathered in Paris shouting, ‘Death to the Jews!’ Newspapers published caricatures of Jews as hook-nosed conspirators, traitors within the nation.
The purpose of antisemitism in this drama was clear. France, still reeling from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, needed an explanation for its humiliation. National pride was wounded, the Third Republic fragile. Dreyfus became the scapegoat, his Jewishness a symbol onto which anxieties could be projected. The function was not truth but cohesion: to rally the fractured body of France around a common enemy.
Émile Zola’s famous open letter, J’Accuse!, exposed the injustice, but the scandal tore France apart for a decade. On one side, the Dreyfusards, who believed in justice and universal rights; on the other, the anti-Dreyfusards, who insisted that the honour of the army and the integrity of the nation mattered more than one Jew’s innocence. To defend Dreyfus was to betray France. To condemn him was to prove loyalty.
Here antisemitism revealed itself again as political technology. It provided a test of belonging, a way to weld the nation through exclusion. The Jew, no longer simply a religious outsider, became the symbol of treason, disloyalty, cosmopolitanism. The modern nation, anxious about its fragility, defined itself by casting out the Jew.
Dreyfus was hated not for his actions – he was innocent – but for his identity. He bore within him the symbol of Sinai, as Prager and Telushkin would interpret these events, the reminder that justice is not subordinate to the nation, that conscience is not a function of loyalty to flag or army. To hate him was to attempt to silence that reminder.
Lipstadt would call this the conspiracy myth at work. Dreyfus was not one man but the face of a vast imaginary cabal: Jews betraying the nation, Jews controlling finance, Jews pulling strings behind the scenes. Antisemitism functioned as a story that explained humiliation by inventing a traitor.
The Dreyfus Affair also revealed antisemitism’s identity-making power. For the anti-Dreyfusards, hating Jews was not just an opinion; it was a badge of belonging. It was how you proved you were French, Catholic, loyal. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing half a century later, would diagnose this: the antisemite, he said, is not mistaken about facts but committed to a worldview. Antisemitism gives him identity, coherence, passion.
A secular Jewish journalist from Vienna observed France, and more importantly, Austria descend yet again into Jew-baiting. Watching French mobs chant ‘Death to the Jews’ in the streets of Paris, and the Mayor of Vienna Karl Leuger frequently rallying against an alleged Jewish influence on academia and the press, Herzl drew a grim conclusion: assimilation would never save the Jews. If even in France, emancipation could be revoked by hysteria, then Jews would never be secure without a state of their own. Out of antisemitism’s purpose was born Zionism. The hatred intended to exclude Jews from the nation; it instead gave them the idea of a nation.
Elsewhere in Europe, antisemitism mutated in parallel forms. In Germany, Wilhelm Marr coined the term ‘antisemitism’ in the 1870s, explicitly framing Jew-hatred as a matter of race, not religion. Jews could no longer escape hatred by converting; their blood was indelible. In Russia, pogroms erupted after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, with Jews accused of complicity. The state encouraged the violence, using Jews as scapegoats to deflect anger from its own failures. Antisemitism again served as a pressure valve, a tool of governance.
By the late nineteenth century, antisemitism had acquired all the elements it needed for catastrophe. It had theological roots, racial rationales, political utility, economic myths. It could be activated by rulers, priests, scientists, or mobs. It could wear the robes of piety, the lab coat of science, the flag of nationalism. Always, it functioned: to explain, to unify, to distract, to mobilise.
Freeman’s point about the Left’s post-7 October blindness finds an antecedent here. In Dreyfus’s France, progressives and conservatives alike were tempted by antisemitism’s utility. For conservatives, it was loyalty to crown and church. For progressives, it was suspicion of finance and cosmopolitanism. The hatred was elastic, capable of binding enemies to one another against the Jew.
The Dreyfus Affair, then, was more than a miscarriage of justice. It was a revelation of purpose. Antisemitism was not about one man’s guilt or innocence. It was about the function of hatred in binding a nation, in providing clarity in chaos, in offering unity through exclusion. Its telos was not truth but utility.
The irony, as always, is that the purpose was purchased at terrible cost. France was divided for decades, its politics poisoned by suspicion. Antisemitism did not strengthen the nation; it corroded it. As in Spain, as in Rome, the hatred promised redemption and delivered decay.
Part IV: The Totalitarian Twentieth Century
The twentieth century was supposed to be the age of reason fulfilled. Science was triumphant, nations modernised, Parliaments proliferated, and Enlightenment values were declared universal. Instead, it became the age of genocidal politics. And nowhere was antisemitism more central to that rupture than in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Here the hatred achieved its most lethal purpose: not mere exclusion, not even expulsion, but annihilation as an act of redemption or ideological purity.
Saul Friedlander, the great historian of the Holocaust, coined a phrase that captures the Nazi variant: ‘redemptive antisemitism.’ This was not ordinary prejudice, nor the scapegoating of convenience. It was a worldview, a theology of politics. Hitler and his followers believed that Jews were the root of all corruption – cosmopolitanism, communism, capitalism, decadence, weakness. To eliminate them was not just to remove an enemy; it was to redeem the world.
The Nazis borrowed from centuries of myth. The Jew as Christ-killer became the Jew as corrupter of Aryan blood. The Jew as pollutant in medieval wells became the Jew as bacillus infecting the Volk. The Jew as stubborn witness to another law became the Jew as eternal conspirator against the racial destiny of mankind. The hatred was not a prejudice layered upon policy; it was the policy, openly stated by Hitler when, in a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, he called for “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
Why did this hatred serve? Because it gave totalitarianism its mission. Hitler told his followers that history was a biological struggle, Aryans against Jews. Defeat the Jew, and history itself would be purified. The Final Solution was not, in this worldview, a crime; it was a sacrament. Every train to Auschwitz, every bullet fired into a pit in Eastern Europe, was framed as liturgy.
Here antisemitism’s telos was not just scapegoating or distraction. It was utopian fuel. It gave the Nazi movement meaning, coherence, and purpose. The German people, humiliated by Versailles, impoverished by inflation, fractured by political strife, were offered redemption through annihilation. Destroy the Jew, and Germany would be reborn.
This was rebellion against Judaism writ large. The Nazis could not abide a God who commanded ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ who insisted on moral limits. Their creed was the will to power, unfettered by conscience. The Jew, as the eternal witness to law, had to be erased. Antisemitism’s purpose was to murder not only a people but the moral order they embodied.
Rabbi Sacks’s virus metaphor is apt here. In the modern age of pseudoscience and biology, antisemitism clothed itself in racial categories. The language of bacteriology, of breeding, of infection, was borrowed to sanctify hatred. Hatred disguised itself as science. The function was legitimacy.
Lipstadt’s insight, too, resonates; this was conspiracy myth elevated to state doctrine. Jews were accused simultaneously of being Bolsheviks and bankers, communists and capitalists, all-powerful yet subhuman. The contradictions did not matter. Their very incoherence was functional: no matter the problem, the Jew explained it. The myth provided clarity to a bewildered populace, coherence to a fractured society.
And, as always, the result was ruin. The Holocaust annihilated six million Jews, but it also corrupted Germany itself, leaving a nation shattered, disgraced, haunted. The telos promised redemption; it delivered destruction.
If Nazi antisemitism was redemptive, Soviet antisemitism was ideological. The Bolsheviks had initially proclaimed Jewish emancipation, outlawing pogroms, declaring Jews equal citizens. But as the Soviet Union consolidated power, Jews once again became suspect. In Stalin’s era, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were accused of undermining socialism, agents of Western imperialism disguised as intellectuals. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. The trials were rigged, the accusations grotesque. It was Stalin’s death in 1953 that prevented mass deportations of Jews to Siberia.
After the creation of Israel in 1948, Soviet antisemitism mutated again. Zionism was recast as racism, a tool of American imperialism. Soviet propaganda, at first supporting the creation of Israel, quickly turned ugly and incandescent. It depicted Israel as the outpost of colonial oppression, Jews as betrayers of socialist internationalism. The United Nations, under Soviet pressure, even passed Resolution 3379 in 1975 declaring ‘Zionism is racism.’ The old hatred had donned new ideological clothing.
Here antisemitism’s purpose was geopolitical. It allowed the Soviets to mobilise Third World allies by framing Jews as colonial oppressors. It allowed them to purge dissent at home by branding Jewish intellectuals as Zionist agents. It allowed them to present themselves as liberators even as they oppressed. Hatred served the state, welding ideology and propaganda into policy.
Hadley Freeman is right to locate the roots of today’s Leftist anti-Zionism in this Soviet inheritance. By redefining Jews as racists, Zionism as colonialism, the Soviets handed progressives a vocabulary of virtue through which to disguise an old hatred. After 7 October, when Hamas massacred Israeli civilians, parts of the Western Left responded not with horror but with slogans lifted from Soviet propaganda: Israel as colonial, Zionism as apartheid, Jews as global oppressors. The telos was the same as in Moscow: ideological clarity achieved by scapegoating Jews.
Rabbi Sacks would recognise the mutation. The moral authority of the age is not theology, nor science, but human rights. And so antisemitism today dresses itself in the language of human rights. Israel is not condemned for particular policies but delegitimised in toto. Criticism becomes demonisation, critique becomes denial of existence. The function is legitimacy. Hatred disguises itself as virtue.
History has shown that antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem; it corrodes democracy, destabilises global politics, threatens security. In the Soviet case, it provided a tool of authoritarianism, a weapon of propaganda, a way to unite people against an imaginary enemy. In today’s world, it functions similarly, weaponised on social media, spread by algorithms, amplified into movements.
From Nazis and Soviets alike, the lesson is the same. Antisemitism is not a relic of superstition. It is a tool of power, adaptable to any ideology, capable of serving any master. Its telos is always utility. In Nazi Germany, it provided redemption through annihilation. In Soviet Russia, it provided ideological clarity and geopolitical advantage.
The irony is that both failed. Germany, purified of Jews, collapsed in shame. The Soviet Union, purged of Zionists, imploded in corruption and decay. The societies that wield antisemitism as a tool end up poisoned by it. The purpose is achieved in the short term – unity, cohesion, distraction – but at the cost of long-term ruin.
Yet the hatred persists, precisely because the purposes persist. Societies will always need scapegoats, utopian fuels, political technologies, market alibis, identity machines. And Jews, stubbornly surviving, uniquely particular, eternally other, are always available.
Part V: Durban 2001 — The Licensing of Hatred
The Soviet Union had collapsed a decade earlier, but its anti-Zionist lexicon survived. ‘Zionism is racism,’ coined in the 1970s, had been discredited when the UN revoked Resolution 3379 in 1991. For a brief moment, it seemed that antisemitism, long the shadow of history, had been banished from respectable discourse. The 1990s, with the Oslo Accords and peace summits on the White House lawn, carried the illusion that Jews and their state would finally be accepted into the family of nations.
Then came Durban.
The United Nations World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa in September 2001, was meant to be a moral high-water mark. In a nation that had thrown off apartheid, activists from every continent gathered to condemn racism, bigotry, discrimination. It was supposed to be a festival of conscience. Instead, it became the most visible and consequential eruption of antisemitism in the post-Holocaust West.
The official conference halls were tense enough, with Arab and Muslim states pressing to single out Israel as uniquely racist. But it was in the NGO Forum, attended by thousands of activists, that antisemitism exploded without restraint. Leaflets distributed on the grounds showed caricatures of hook-nosed Jews with dollar signs dripping from their mouths. Posters declared ‘Hitler was right.’ Marchers waved placards equating Zionism with Nazism, the Star of David with the swastika. A banner proclaiming ‘Israel: The Greatest Racist State on Earth’ hung above the crowd. Jewish participants were surrounded, jeered, and physically intimidated. Israeli and Jewish NGOs were shouted down when they tried to speak. Human rights activists, who should have been allies, joined the chorus.
For those who came in hope, the betrayal was shattering. The very forum meant to condemn racism had licensed the oldest hatred of all. The mask was off: antisemitism was no longer a shameful prejudice whispered in corners. It was chanted in daylight, legitimised under the blue flag of the United Nations. The US and Israeli delegations walked out. Most others stayed. The NGO Forum’s final declaration, passed by acclamation, described Israel as a ‘racist apartheid state’ committing ‘crimes against humanity.’
In the days that followed, the world was consumed by another trauma: the 11 September attacks, which occurred just three days after Durban concluded. The spectacle of burning towers eclipsed the story of Durban. But for Jews, the wound lingered. Durban had done more than revive antisemitic rhetoric. It had sanctified it.
Deborah Lipstadt later called Durban a ‘watershed moment.’ What Soviet propaganda had seeded, Durban institutionalised. The Soviet Union had cast Zionism as imperialism to recruit allies in the developing world. Durban globalised that script, embedding it in the bloodstream of the human-rights community. Israel was no longer just a controversial state; it was the emblem of oppression itself. Denouncing it became the badge of progressive virtue.
Rabbi Sacks saw in Durban the virus mutating again. The reigning moral authority of the age was human rights, so antisemitism borrowed its robes. Hatred disguised itself as liberation. To call Israel an apartheid state was not presented as bigotry but as moral clarity. Antisemitism’s telos was not to exclude Jews from medieval guilds or modern nations but to expel them from the community of the righteous.
Durban also marked the turning point for NGOs and activists who would carry the rhetoric into campuses, unions, and international forums. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, founded a few years later, drew directly on Durban’s declaration. Its strategy was to isolate Israel culturally, economically, and academically, to render it a pariah. The old language of quarantine – Jews as pollutants to be expelled – was reborn as boycott.
Hadley Freeman’s analysis of post-7 October antisemitism on the Left cannot be understood without Durban. She shows how progressive movements, inheriting Soviet tropes, framed Jews as colonial oppressors. Durban was the moment that inheritance was baptised in global legitimacy. It gave activists permission to see anti-Zionism not as prejudice but as the purest form of anti-racism. That is why, after Hamas’s massacre, crowds in Western capitals could chant ‘From the river to the sea’ as if it were liberation theology. The slogans were not improvised; they had been rehearsed since Durban.
Durban also demonstrated antisemitism’s perennial utility. For activists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, attacking Israel offered solidarity with the Palestinian cause and a language of resistance to Western dominance. For NGOs, it offered moral capital: to be anti-Israel was to prove one’s credentials as an anti-racist. For the UN itself, it provided cohesion: a cause around which diverse blocs could unite. The Jew once again served as function, not fact.
The paradox is brutal. A conference designed to fight racism ended by legitimising the oldest form of it. A gathering meant to heal divisions ended by sanctifying division against one small people. The telos of antisemitism had mutated yet again: to provide global activism with a scapegoat, a symbol, a purpose.
From Durban onward, antisemitism no longer needed to apologise for itself. It could appear in campus resolutions, NGO reports, social-justice rallies, and international law conferences. It could circulate as virtue. The old hatred had found its most dangerous disguise.
By the early twenty-first century, antisemitism had revealed all its guises. Ancient Rome cast Jews as obstinate witnesses against empire; medieval Christendom branded them pollutants to be expelled; modern nationalism turned them into traitors within; Nazi Germany transformed them into bacilli whose extermination promised redemption; the Soviet Union declared them Zionist agents of imperialism; Durban licensed the oldest hatred under the language of human rights. After 7 October, it returned in Western capitals as a chant of liberation, as though the massacre of Jews were an act of justice.
The forms differ. The functions endure. The telos remains utility.
Rabbi Sacks also saw antisemitism as diagnostic. It signals the unravelling of civilisation. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ The telos is not only the utility it provides to haters but the warning it gives to others. When antisemitism rises, society itself is sick.
For Lipstadt, antisemitism as conspiracy myth thrives precisely because it explains everything. Its telos is explanatory power. In times of stress, it gives clarity; for politicians, it gives a tool; for movements, it gives cohesion. But Lipstadt too warns that its reach goes beyond Jews. Antisemitism corrodes democracy, destabilises security, poisons the civic trust on which pluralism depends. Its telos is systemic destabilisation.
For Freeman, the telos here is ideological utility: antisemitism supplies the story that binds fractured causes into a coalition.
Each of these accounts emphasises a different purpose. For Prager and Telushkin, the purpose is rebellion against God. For Sacks, it is mutation and warning. For Lipstadt, it is explanatory power that corrodes democracy. For Freeman, it is ideological clarity. None contradict the others. They are facets of the same truth: antisemitism persists because it serves too many purposes to die.
Epilogue: The Final Cause
Aristotle taught that the final cause of a thing is the ‘for the sake of which’ it exists. The telos of an acorn is the oak. The telos of a ship is to sail. What, then, is the root purpose – the telos of antisemitism?
The evidence of history is grim. Its purpose has been to bind communities through exclusion, to energise movements through hatred, to provide rulers with distraction, to give ideologies coherence, to offer individuals identity, to relieve societies of conscience. Its purpose has been to provide false clarity in times of chaos, false redemption in times of despair, false unity in times of fracture.
That is why antisemitism has survived contradiction. It has never been about truth but about function. Jews can be hated as capitalists and communists, clannish and cosmopolitan, religious and secular, because the content is irrelevant. What matters is the work the hatred does. As Sartre saw, the antisemite needs the Jew. Fantasies about Jews are not about Jews but about their accusers.
The telos of antisemitism is usefulness.
But there is another way to read Aristotle. The final cause is not only description but destiny. An acorn becomes an oak unless prevented. A human becomes what he was meant to be unless corrupted. If antisemitism’s telos has been utility for the haters, our task is to give it a different telos: to make it useless. To strip it of legitimacy, to deny it the functions it has so often served.
That requires more than refutation. Facts have never defeated antisemitism; it is immune to contradiction. It requires the creation of solidarities that do not depend on enemies, movements that do not need scapegoats, politics that do not thrive on poison. It requires, above all, insisting that the Jew is not the pollutant but the witness – witness to conscience, to covenant, to survival against annihilation.
History teaches that societies which wield antisemitism as a tool end up corroded by it. Spain, purified of its Jews, declined into obscurity. France, torn by Dreyfus, poisoned its politics for decades. Germany, redeemed by genocide, collapsed into shame. The Soviet Union, strengthened by its war on Zionism, rotted from within. And today, movements that chant for Israel’s destruction will find their own moral credibility hollowed out. The consequence of antisemitism is ruin.
The paradox of Jewish history is that the hatred always fails. The Pharaoh falls, the Temple is rebuilt, the ghetto walls crumble, the survivors emerge from Auschwitz to found a state. The Jew persists, stubborn witness against the world. That persistence is itself a rebuke to antisemitism’s purpose. The telos of hatred is annihilation; the telos of Jewish history is more than survival – it is endurance.
But to survive and endure is not enough; to witness is the more profound purpose. Prager and Telushkin are right: the world hates Jews because they remind it of Sinai. But that is also the reason the world needs Jews – to remind it of conscience.
In the end, the final cause of antisemitism is not only the utility it serves to its perpetrators but the warning it gives to us. It tells us where society is cracking, where democracy is corroding, where conscience is being silenced. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. To study the telos of antisemitism is to study the telos of civilisation itself.
And so the conclusion is clear. Antisemitism has always been history’s most seductive lie. It promises unity through exclusion, redemption through hatred, clarity through conspiracy. It has performed these functions with dreadful efficiency, century after century. But it has always delivered ruin. The meaning of antisemitism is destruction – not of Jews, who endure, but of the societies that embrace it.
Our task, then, is Aristotelian in the deepest sense: to name the purpose of a thing is to know how to resist it. If antisemitism survives because it is useful, then we must render it useless. We must deny it the roles it has always played. That is the civic project of our time. That is the moral imperative. That is the only answer to the telos of a hatred that has haunted history from Pharaoh to Hamas, from the cross to the campus.
For in the end, the acorn becomes an oak. The final cause unfolds into destiny. The telos of antisemitism is ruin. The telos of Jewish witness is moral conscience. And the fate of civilisation may depend on which of these destinies we choose to serve.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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