Jewish deaf college students recounted their experiences and Jewish deaf lecturers "spoke" in sign language about antisemitism recently at an evening sponsored by the Orthodox Union's (OU) division known as Our Way-YACHAD that helps the Jewish deaf community. I was asked to give a short talk about the Torah viewpoint on antisemitism that was simultaneously translated by an interpreter into sign language to the online audience of Jewish deaf participants:
I am the child of two Holocaust survivors so in a sense I am a product of real antisemitism.
To speak of the Torah point of view of something is really to speak of the truly authentic Jewish view, and it can be called the view of Torah Judaism.
The Torah point of view will obviously not be like a secular point of view because by definition the word Torah in Hebrew means the Bible in English.
Therefore references and proofs in this context will be from the Torah/Bible which is not the way an academic or sociological point of view would be expressed.
The word "antisemitism" is a modern word that was first used starting in the late 1800s starting in Germany. Before that there was just Jew hatred - hatred of Jews and of the Jewish People. In Hebrew and in Judaism this was known as "Sinat Yisrael" meaning "hate of Israel/Jews".
As far as Judaism is concerned, antisemitism, Jew-hatred, starts with the opposition to the first Jew Abraham who is known as Abraham the Hebrew (in Hebrew Avraham HaIvri) the word 'Ivri" means "the one who crossed or went over (to the other side)" meaning that it is as if Abraham "crossed over" to discover and believe in God while everyone else was "on the other side" as if being on opposite sides of a river. Abraham was persecuted for his beliefs in God and in particular for Monotheism which means belief in one God, unlike everyone else who were pagans and believed in many idols and "gods".
So for the believing Jew, antisemitism and Jew-hatred is nothing new. It is almost to be expected that a true Jew will face opposition from the outside world because of the differences between what a Jew is and believes in and what the outside world stands for and believes in. While the circumstances and the scenarios may change as history moves on, the core situation for the Jew is always the same: He or she is like an Abraham who is "on the other side of the river" or "going against the flow'" of where the rest of the world is headed and is therefore misunderstood and hated.
For the last two thousand years antisemitism or hatred of the Jewish People has come from two main directions:
1. From Christianity, starting about 2,000 years ago mainly based in Europe.
2. From Islam, starting about 1,500 years ago mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, in the Arabic-speaking world.
For the past 2,000 years the Jewish People have been divided into two main groups known as the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe and the Sefardi Jews, the Sefardi Jews also known as Mizrachi Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.
Ashkenaz is the Biblical name for Germany which was the heart of the European Jews for a long time, and Sefarad means Spain because over 1,000 years ago Spain was conquered and ruled by the Muslims and many Jews lived there. Some use the word Mizrachi Jews which means "Eastern" Jews for those Jews who lived in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Iran.
Let's first look at the fate of the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe under Christianity:
Christianity began 2,000 years ago with the intersection of the Roman Empire and the Jewish People in the land of Judea, today known as Israel. The Roman Empire eventually became the Christian Roman Catholic Church. First the Roman Empire conquered and persecuted the Jews of Judea and tried to force the Jews to worship the pagan Roman Gods. When the Roman Empire became the Roman Catholic Church, it wrote up the New Testament telling the story of Jesus and it accused the Jewish People of being guilty of killing Jesus.
This accusation, that the Jews had killed Jesus who the Christians believed was the "son of God" resulted in the ongoing persecution of the Jews exiled to live all over Europe and who suffered from Jew-hatred, prejudice that resulted in the persecution and death of millions of Jews from the times of the Romans becoming the Roman Catholic Church. Jews were forced to live in separate communities known as Ghettos. There were riots against Jews known as Pogroms. During the Crusades in the Middle Ages when armed Christians marched from Europe to "liberate" Jerusalem and the Holy Land that was under the Muslims, they destroyed many Jewish communities in Europe and killed tens of thousands of Jews.
Judaism was banned in many Christian countries and Jews were expelled from France and England in the Middle Ages. In Spain the Roman Catholic Church started the Spanish Inquisition against non-Christians. At that time there were hundreds of thousands of Jews that lived in Spain. In 1492 the Christian Roman Catholic King and Queen of Spain issued an edict that all Jews must convert to Christianity or be expelled. Many Jews became Marranos, also known as Conversos, practicing Judaism in secret but many others fled from Spain and then from Portugal.
Later in Christian Eastern Europe such as in the Russian Empire, the local Christians made Pogroms, or riots against the Jews destroying Jewish communities and murdering many Jews. The Russian government forced Jews to live in the Pale of Settlement, a small space of land where Jews were forced to live. That is why by the late 1800s millions of Jews escaped from Eastern Europe and ran away to the United States of America that offered them freedom!
The worst and biggest Pogrom against the Jews of Europe was the Holocaust during World War 2 when over six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their allies.
Now let's look at the fate of the Sefardi-Mizrachi Jews in the Middle East and North Africa:
Jews had lived in the Middle East for 2,500 years since the time they were exiled to Babylonia after the destruction of the First Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, in places such as Iraq and Iran. There were Jews who escaped to the areas of the Arabian Peninsula, where Saudi Arabia is today, after the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans 2,000 years ago. Jews lived in these lands before the start of Islam. There were large Jewish communities all over Arabia long before the onset of Islam which only begins with the arrival of Muhammad who lived between 570 and 632 of the Common Era, which was 500 years after the birth of Jesus.
Islam's most important book, the Koran, like Christianity's New Testament, is derived mainly from the Jews' Torah, with many modifications. Islam became very popular with the Arabs but the Jews of the Middle East rejected it as well as rejecting Muhammad as Islam's leader. This resulted in hatred of the Jews and Muhammad himself led wars against the Jews of Arabia killing many of them and forcing many of the Jews in lands that the Muslims conquered to convert to Islam. One of Muhammad's wives was a kidnapped Jewish girl.
Eventually the Muslims agreed to let the Jews live in their midst but only as second class citizens known as Dhimmis. For 1,500 years Sefardi and Mizrachi Jews lived as Dhimmis in the various Muslim empires and lands. With the rise of modern antisemitism in Europe and Arab nationalism, the Arabs and Muslims became more violent and started Pogroms and destruction against Jews and their properties with hundreds of Jews being murdered by Muslims all over the Middle East and North Africa.
After the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 it became dangerous to be a Jew in Muslim countries and about one million Sefardi and Mizrachi Jews were expelled and ran away from their homes in the Arab and Muslim countries where they had lived for thousands of years. This is known as the "Exodus of Jews from the Muslim world".
Sunce 1948 the Arabs have fought many wars against Israel trying to destroy and kill all of its Jews!
The Torah View:
According to Classical Judaism, Rome and the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity have their roots in the Biblical personality known as Esau (Esav) who was the oldest son of Isaac. This is all in the first part of the Book of Genesis. Isaac was the son of Abraham. Esau is the twin brother of Jacob who is also called Israel in the Bible. Esau and Jacob are rivals from the womb. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a scholar. Jacob manages to trick Esau to give up the privileges of being the first born son and for this Esau never forgives him because Jacob got a special blessing from their father Isaac. Nevertheless, Isaac also blesses Esau and tells him that when Jacob will stumble in his own devotion to God then Esau will be able to punish Jacob with the proverbial sword!
Judaism teaches that there is a kind of spiritual law that "Esau hates Jacob" and that what the Jews have experienced for the last 2,000 years, first under Rome and the Roman Empire that destroyed the Second Jewish Temple and sent the Jews into a 2,000 year long exile and then with the rise of the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity, persecuted the Jews during those years. This is all part of the "sword" of Esau coming down hard on the Jewish People up until modern times.
According to Classical Judaism, the Arabs and Islam have their roots in Ishmael who was a son of Abraham by his second wife Hagar. First it is Sarah, Abraham's first wife who tells Abraham to expel Hagar and Ishmael because they were tormenting Sarah's and Abraham's younger son Isaac. According to the Torah in the Book of Genesis, Abraham was reluctant to expel Hagar and Ishmael but God intervenes and instructs Abraham to do as Sarah says and expel Hagar and Ishmael which he does. God then promises Hagar that Ishmael will also become a great nation and according to Judaism that is the root of the Arabs and Islam.
The Arabs and Islam are obsessed with the Jews and Israel because they regard themselves as the true heirs of Abraham. It is also a struggle of birthright and who gets to inherit the legacy of Abraham.
So these are the main streams or pincers of antisemitism and Jew-hatred that have come from Europe and Christianity on the one hand and on the other hand from the Middle East and North Africa through Islam.
A famous rabbi, Rabbi Isaac Hutner who passed away in 1980, wrote an important essay a few years before his passing in which he stated that the two streams, of Christian and Islamic antisemitism came together during the Holocaust when a top leader of the Muslims, known as the Mufti of Jerusalem cooperated with the Nazis and encouraged Hitler to go ahead with the Final Solution murder of the European Jews because the Mufti did not want the Jews of Europe to come to the Middle East and build up the Jewish Homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine.
Even though six million European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, nevertheless, the remainder of the Jewish People were able to overcome all the odds and many survivors have helped rebuild the Jewish Homeland in Israel into a flourishing country that is today the country with the most Jews living in it.
Rabbi Yitschak Rudominwas born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College–Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach – Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988–1995, a Trustee of AJOP 1994–1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995–2015. From 2017–2024 he was a docent and tour guide at The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Downtown Manhattan, New York.
He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at [email protected]
...