Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, often called “America’s Rabbi," is the international bestselling author of 36 books and founder of the World Values Network.
The term “Muselman" was a term used by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz, to describe inmates who had been reduced by starvation, exhaustion, disease, and brutality to a state of extreme physical and psychological collapse.
Muselmann was effectively a term for the “living dead"-people who were still breathing but appeared to have lost nearly all strength, vitality, and ability to resist.
The spelling is:
German: Muselmann
Plural: Muselmänner
Pronunciation: MOO-zəl-mahn
English plural sometimes used: Muselmanns
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories thought Auschwitz’s “Muselmann" meant Muslims-and used that grotesque historical error to redefine Jew-hatred. She has apologized.
That’s not only dumb. That’s downright illiterate. It’s one thing to be a Jew hater. It’s another thing to be an imbecile.
You truly cannot make this stuff up.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Arab territories "occupied" since 1967, has become perhaps the world’s most notorious UN official dealing with Israel, repeatedly condemned by governments and major Jewish organizations over statements they have characterized as antisemitic-accusations Albanese herself rejects.
And now she has made an extraordinary discovery:
Antisemitism means hatred of Jews.
Welcome, Ms. Albanese.
It only took approximately 147 years since the word was coined-and more than eight decades since the Holocaust-to figure it out.
What makes this episode so astonishing is not merely that Albanese got a historical detail wrong. Everyone makes mistakes.
It is that a United Nations official whose mandate places her at the epicenter of the world’s most explosive debates about Israel, Jews and antisemitism apparently did not understand the basic historical meaning of antisemitism.
And then she attempted to use the Holocaust itself to prove her misunderstanding.
During a recent interview, Albanese declared that antisemitism was “not just discrimination against Jews." Rather, she argued, it meant discrimination against “Semitic peoples." She claimed that when the term arose in nineteenth-century Europe, it encompassed people originating in the Middle East.
Then came the truly breathtaking part.
Albanese invoked the Nazi concentration camps.
She claimed there were accounts in which Jews being taken to the gas chambers were called “the Muslims."
Think about what she was saying.
The Nazis constructed an industrial apparatus for the extermination of the Jewish people. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
Yet somehow, in Albanese’s telling, even the word describing hatred of Jews had to be expanded until Jews themselves became merely one subset of a larger category.
And her supposed historical evidence was Auschwitz.
Except it wasn’t true. The word Albanese had encountered was Muselmann.
In the concentration camps, Muselmann, as we defined above, was a term applied to prisoners who had been reduced by starvation, disease, exhaustion and abuse to a state of extreme physical and psychological collapse, often close to death.
It did not mean that the Nazis believed these prisoners were Muslims. Absolutely not.
Yet Albanese appears to have encountered this term and somehow transformed it into evidence for an extraordinary historical theory: that antisemitism did not specifically mean hatred of Jews, but hatred of “Semitic peoples" more broadly.
She has now acknowledged that she was wrong.
There is something almost unfathomable about this.
-Imagine a United Nations expert on racism misunderstanding the meaning of racism. -Imagine a UN expert on slavery misunderstanding whom the word “slave" referred to in the very history she was invoking.
Now imagine a UN official whose public work constantly touches upon antisemitism, Israel and Jewish history not knowing that the term antisemitism was coined specifically to describe hostility toward Jews.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance explains the history plainly. German journalist Wilhelm Marr popularized the term in 1879 in connection with anti-Jewish campaigns. Since its inception, antisemitism has referred to prejudice and hostility directed against Jews.
Yes, Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages.
No, that does not mean “antisemitism" historically meant hatred of everyone who speaks a Semitic language.
That etymological trick has been deployed for decades, often in the familiar formulation: Arabs are Semites too, so how can an Arab be antisemitic?
It is linguistic sophistry.
By that reasoning, a butterfly would have to be a dairy product capable of flight.
Words have histories. Words have meanings.
Antisemitism means hatred of Jews.
And Albanese has now admitted exactly that.
After criticism erupted, she publicly apologized, saying that she had misread the camp term Muselmann and had consequently drawn the erroneous conclusion that antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples. She acknowledged that the term was, in fact, coined specifically to denote hatred of Jews.
The apology is welcome. But it raises a question considerably more disturbing than the original mistake.
How did a UN Special Rapporteur whose mandate places her every day at the center of Israel, the Palestinians, accusations of antisemitism and the legacy of the Holocaust come to believe something so historically elementary-and so spectacularly wrong?
This was not confusing the date of a treaty.
This was not even Albanese citing an astonishing estimate of 680,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, a figure she told a UN press briefing had been advanced by “some scholars and scientists," while acknowledging that it was difficult to prove or disprove. (Even the UN claimed 70,000 although it did not mention that that number includes Hamas terrorists and people who died of natural causes during the war.)
This went directly to the definition of antisemitism itself.
The United Nations official who has repeatedly been at the center of international controversies over antisemitism apparently did not know what the word meant.
And the error matters because we are living through an age in which Jewish suffering is increasingly universalized until Jews themselves disappear from it.
The Holocaust becomes a metaphor for every political cause.
Antisemitism becomes generic prejudice.
October 7 becomes something to contextualize.
Jewish victims become controversial the moment acknowledging them interferes with someone’s preferred political narrative.
There were, of course, millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder. Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents and many others suffered horrifically under Nazi rule.
Acknowledging that historical truth takes absolutely nothing away from the central truth that the Nazis embarked upon the systematic annihilation of European Jewry and murdered six million Jews.
History is not a competition for victimhood. But neither may history be rewritten until Jews disappear from their own catastrophe.
That is why Albanese’s mistake was so disturbing.
The word Muselmann describes one of the most horrifying conditions human beings endured in the camps: prisoners starved and brutalized until their bodies were skeletal, their strength disappeared and death became imminent.
To take that horrifying terminology and somehow transform it into evidence that Nazi antisemitism was actually directed broadly against “Semitic peoples" is not merely bad etymology. It fundamentally confuses the history of the Holocaust.
And this matters enormously today.
Jews throughout the world are once again being assaulted, threatened and terrorized. Jewish schools and synagogues require extraordinary security. Jews have been harassed on campuses. Israelis abroad have been targeted because of their nationality. Ancient antisemitic imagery has returned to public discourse with terrifying speed.
At precisely this moment, the world does not need intellectual games explaining that antisemitism isn’t really specifically about Jews.
It needs moral clarity.
Francesca Albanese has now acknowledged the historical truth. Antisemitism was coined to describe hatred of Jews. Muselmann did not mean that the Nazis believed Jews were Muslims.
And six million Jews were murdered because they were Jews.
Her apology is welcome.
But perhaps the most important lesson from this extraordinary episode is much larger than Francesca Albanese.
Before the United Nations lectures the Jewish people about antisemitism, perhaps its experts should first know what antisemitism actually means.
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