On October 7th, 2023, so-called defenders of human rights minimized, excused, justified, and/or celebrated the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust under the guise of “decolonization.” They described the perpetrators as “freedom fighters.” They insisted the “Axis of Resistance” — Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their patron, the Islamic Republic — were pursuing the noble cause of “anti-imperialism.”
To the casual observer, these circumstances may appear worlds away from the traditional antisemitism of days past, when Jews were massacred for rejecting Jesus or alleged racial impurities.
But antisemitism as anti-imperialism is nothing new. In fact, the very first pogrom in Jewish history was carried out under the exact same premise.
THE FIRST POGROM
The first recorded pogrom in Jewish history is the Alexandria Pogrom or Alexandrian Riots of 38 CE, in Alexandria, Egypt.
What happened?
The Jewish king Herod Aggripa, who had a close relationship with the Roman emperor, visited Alexandria. Alexandria’s Greek and Hellenized residents resented this visit, viewing Alexandrian Jews as agents of Roman imperial rule (in reality, Jewish presence in Alexandria can be traced back to the conquests of the Macedonian Greek king Alexander the Great, when Jews were assigned a small quarter in the city by the Ptolemaic Greek rulers).
In response to the visit, Greek residents accused Jews of disloyalty to the Roman emperor. The Romans then sided with the Greeks, declaring Jews “foreigners.”
Furious mobs ravaged the city, murdering thousands of Jews. Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who was witness to the pogrom, described the city as “deluged with blood.”
JEWS AS AN IMPERIAL FIFTH COLUMN
Time and time again, when a new conqueror showed up in town, local Jews were treated as a fifth column or a Trojan horse, baselessly accused of secretly aiding the conquerors.
For example:
- When the Ottoman forces conquered Palestine in 1517, the previously-ruling Mamluks accused Jews of aiding the conquerors, even as both the Ottomans and Mamluks plundered Jewish households and murdered Jews by the hundreds or even thousands.
- During the Ottoman conquest of Yemen (1538-1635), local Zaydi imams incited the population against the Yemenite Jewish community, charging them as fifth columnists. When the Zaydi Qasimid dynasty expelled the Turkish forces from Yemen in 1635, this resentment resulted in backlash against Yemenite Jews, including harsh measures and periodic violence, finally culminating in the Mawza Exile of 1679, when Jews were entirely expelled from Yemen. As many as 60 to 70% of Yemenite Jews died of starvation and disease.
- During World War I, the Ottoman authorities expelled Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa — twice. In 1914, foreign-born Jews were declared “enemy subjects,” and a total of 6,000 to 11,000 Jewish residents were expelled from their homes, to be resettled in refugee camps under British domain in Egypt.
Then, in 1917, as the British forces closed in on Palestine, the Ottomans again expelled some 16,000 Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa, on suspicions that they could be colluding with the British. Approximately 1,500 Jews died of starvation, exposure, and disease, as well as brutal attacks and robberies along the roads.
NOT A PART OF OUR NATION
Time and time again, independence movements against imperial or foreign rule have marginalized Jewish communities that had lived in those countries for many generations. The list is too extensive to fit into a single post, but some examples come to mind:
- In the mid-17th century, the Cossacks revolted against the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in an event known as the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Instead of merely targeting Polish nobility and Polish-Lithuanian royal officials, the uprising ravaged the Jewish community, with an estimated 18,000-50,000 Jews slaughtered.
- Between 1834-1835, Syrian and Palestinian Arab peasantry revolted against the rule of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt. Palestine’s ancient Jewish community of Safed was targeted in a brutal 33-day-long pogrom.
- An estimated 100,000-250,000 Jews were massacred during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920). The violence came from all sides: from the Anti-Communist Ukrainian People's Army, the White Army, the Red Army, and various nationalist militias.
IMPERIAL PROJECTIONS
Some of the biggest, most brutal empires in human history have violently opposed Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, on the basis of anti-imperialism. The irony, of course, is that in our 3,000-year history, Jews have never had an empire.
For example:
- The Nazis, who conquered some 65% of Europe, repeatedly described Zionism as an imperial undertaking. In his early speeches and in Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that Jews wanted to establish a home base in Palestine to pursue their imperial goals of world domination. In a later conversation with the father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Hitler described his persecution of European Jews as a fight against the “Judeo-Communist empire.”
- The Soviet Union, also an enormous empire, persecuted its Jewish citizens under “anti-imperialist” grounds. Zionism was not the only national movement that the Soviets delegitimized in this manner; other minority nationalist movements within the Soviet sphere were accused of acting as agents of Western or American imperialism.
WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?
Antisemitism functions, above all, as a conspiratorial worldview that alleges Jewish “world domination.” It’s a conspiratorial worldview that has been used as a political galvanizing force time and time again in history. In other words, if you want to stir up the masses — say, to join a revolt against cruel rulers — the easiest, most effective thing you can do is drag Jews into your grievances.
Antisemites rely on antisemitism because it is the perfect projection. They use Jews to wash themselves clean of their sins, a historical tradition traceable to the earliest days of Christianity. This is how the biggest imperialists and colonizers, or the descendants of the biggest imperialists and colonizers, can so easily turn around and charge Jews with crimes Jews have never committed.
Because it bears repeating: Jews have never had an empire.
WORLD DOMINATION
Antisemitic conspiracies of so-called Jewish plans for world domination go hand-in-hand with accusations of Jews as an imperialistic force.
The conspiracy of purported Jewish world domination can be traced back to the antisemitic conspiracies about the Rothschild family. These conspiracies can in turn be traced back to French journalist Mathieu Georges Dairnvaell, who, in 1846, wrote an antisemitic pamphlet under the pen name “Satan” (really) in which he (falsely) claimed that Jewish banker Nathan Rothschild had witnessed France’s defeat in the Battle of Waterloo and had weaponized this knowledge before the news broke out to make a fortune in the stock exchange. From then on, Rothschild conspiracies evolved to charge the Rothschild family with instigating wars, calamities, and uprisings in the pursuit for Jewish world domination.
Later in the 19th century, Frederick van Millingen published the antisemitic essay “The Conquest of the World by the Jews.” By the early 20th century, conspiracies of Jewish world domination were cemented into the public consciousness thanks to the most infamous antisemitic hoax of all time, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT
It would be insincere to argue that the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is a perfect 1:1 replica of all of these events that came before it.
The most significant difference is that the State of Israel is now a sovereign Jewish state. None of the Jewish communities described in this post were sovereign. The vast majority of Israeli Jews are descended from refugees and immigrants from Diaspora Jewish communities (of course, the term “Diaspora” itself correctly implies that those communities traced their ancestry to Israel in the first place). By contrast, in many of the cases described in the prior slides, those Jewish communities had resided in those regions for many generations. The mainstream Palestinian narrative is that this sovereign Jewish state sits on land that Jews, as a collective, have no right to.
But this very idea — that Jews don’t belong — has ancient origins. More importantly, the idea that Jewish presence must be an extension of imperial interests isn’t rooted in the Balfour Declaration (after all, simultaneously, the British were making promises to the Arabs for a state in Greater Syria, which would’ve included Palestine); instead, it’s an idea that can be traced to the first recorded pogrom in Alexandria, Egypt, in 38 CE.
Above all, the idea that anti-Jewish violence is permissible in the name of anti-imperialism or resistance to foreign rule also has ancient origins. It would do commentators well to consider how ancient, deeply-engrained perceptions of Jews may color their understanding of today’s conflict.
"[The Führer] would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe."
Hitler’s scribe documenting his meeting with Haj Amin al-Husseini, 1941
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