The Complexity of antisemitism

Group judgmentalism — the tendency to ascribe collective guilt, stereotypes, or moral failings to an entire people based on the actions or perceived traits of some — is a persistent human failing. Few organizations have opposed this impulse more consistently than the Center for Human Equality in Oregon, founded by Rabbi Russell McAlmond, which has made the fight against all forms of collective blame a central mission.

Yet even among the many varieties of group judgmentalism, antisemitism stands apart in its protean complexity.

Unlike most forms of racism or ethnic prejudice, which tend to remain relatively stable in their justifications over time, antisemitism is uniquely shape-shifting: it can invert its own logic, adopt contradictory premises, and reappear in new ideological clothing while maintaining the same underlying impulse to judge all Jews as a group.

The Mutability of the Charge

Most forms of racism operate with a fairly fixed hierarchy of rationales. Anti-Black racism in the Western world, for example, has historically oscillated between two relatively stable poles: “inferiority” (biological or cultural incapacity) and “threatening superiority” (criminality, hyper-sexuality, or athletic dominance used as evidence of danger).

These justifications contradict each other, but they rarely coexist simultaneously in the same ideology. You are either deemed “inferior” or “dangerously hyper-competent,” but the racist framework usually picks one lane and stays there for generations.

Antisemitism, by contrast, has sustained both charges at the same time for centuries, often within the same text or speaker:Medieval Christian Europe: Jews were both subhuman Christ-killers and diabolically cunning moneylenders who secretly controlled kings. 

19th-century racial pseudoscience: Jews were a degenerate, parasitic race and simultaneously a hyper-intelligent conspiratorial elite. 

Nazi ideology: Jews were both Bolshevik commissars threatening to enslave the world through communism and capitalist financiers enslaving it through banking — two ideologies that supposedly hate each other, yet both were blamed on the same people. 

Contemporary discourse: Jews/“Zionists” are accused simultaneously of being rootless globalists with no national loyalty and ultra-nationalist ethnic supremacists who place their own nation above all others.

This ability to hold logically incompatible accusations in suspension is unique. The Jew becomes a Rorschach test onto which any societal anxiety can be projected, and the prejudice survives by changing its justification to match the spirit of the age.

The Trans-Ideological Character

Most group prejudices are tethered to a particular political or cultural constellation. Anti-Asian sentiment in the United States spikes during periods of economic competition or war with Asian powers. Islamophobia surges after terrorist attacks or during culture-war backlashes against immigration. These prejudices have a clear “address”: they are owned by specific demographics, parties, or historical moments.

Antisemitism is almost uniquely trans-ideological. It appears with equal ease on the far right (white supremacists who see Jews as non-white race-polluters) and the far left (anti-imperialist frameworks that cast “Zionists” as the ultimate symbol of settler-colonial evil). It flourished under religious theocracies (medieval Church, Islamic dhimmi regulations), under racial-biological regimes (Nazism), under communist universalism (Stalin’s “rootless cosmopolitans” campaign), and under contemporary progressive intersectional paradigms (where Jews are uniquely excluded from the circle of the oppressed because of Israel’s existence).

No other group judgmentalism can migrate so seamlessly across mutually hostile worldviews. The same week can produce a neo-Nazi chant of “Jews will not replace us” and a campus activist slogan that “Zionists” control American foreign policy — two worldviews that despise each other yet converge on the same target.

The Self-Sealing Conspiracy Structure

Ordinary racism generally does not need an elaborate conspiratorial explanation. It can rest on open contempt or pseudoscientific hierarchy.Antisemitism, however, almost always requires a theory of hidden Jewish power. Even when Jews are a tiny, persecuted minority, the prejudice insists that their influence is vastly greater than their numbers suggest.

This creates a self-sealing loop:If Jews are prominent in finance, media, or academia → proof of conspiracy. 

If Jews are underrepresented in those fields (as they were for centuries in Christian Europe) → proof they are manipulating things from the shadows. 

If a Jew criticizes Israel → proof of divided loyalty or a clever deception. 

If a Jew defends Israel → proof of tribal chauvinism.

Evidence against the conspiracy is simply interpreted as further proof of the conspiracy’s sophistication. This epistemological closed circuit makes antisemitic group judgmentalism extraordinarily resilient to factual rebuttal.

The Morphing Moral Valence

Perhaps the deepest difference is that most racisms operate with a consistent moral framing: the targeted group is either inferior (and therefore pitiable or contemptible) or dangerously superior (and therefore in need of suppression). The moral direction remains stable.

Antisemitism flips the moral valence of Jewish success itself. When Jews are excluded and impoverished, they are despised as weak, ugly, and parasitic. When some Jews achieve success after emancipation, that very success becomes evidence of malevolence (“How did they get all this power unless they cheated?”).

The same characteristic — striving for education, professional achievement, cultural contribution — is condemned when Jews do it, yet celebrated when other historically marginalized groups do it. Jewish success is uniquely transformed from a story of overcoming into a story of exploitation.

Antisemitism is not “just another racism.” It is the paradigmatic example of a prejudice that can justify judging all Jews as a group under almost any ideological regime, using almost any contradiction, and surviving refutation by incorporating the refutation into its own narrative.

Its complexity lies in its adaptability: it does not need consistency of logic, only consistency of target. That is why it has outlived empires, religions, and ideologies that once sponsored it, reappearing in new forms while the older forms of group judgmentalism — tied to more rigid hierarchies — often fade when their justifying conditions change.

Until we recognize this shape-shifting quality, efforts to combat group judgmentalism in general will continually be blindsided by the one form that refuses to stay in one shape. The work of places like Rabbi Russell McAlmond’s Center for Human Equality remains indispensable precisely because antisemitism keeps inventing new disguises for the oldest hatred.