THE WANDERING JEW TROPE
As early as the second century CE, over a hundred years before the Roman Empire officially adopted Christianity, some Christians argued that Jews would be cursed to be “fugitives and wanderers (upon) the earth” as punishment for “taunting Jesus on the cross.”
By the Middle Ages, the Wandering Jew legend, which alleges that Jews are cursed to wander the earth, homeless, until the Second Coming of Jesus, had been deeply cemented into Christian thought.
According to the myth, the Wandering Jew is an evil, mythical, immortal creature. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Europeans would report “sightings” of this mythological being, often as a pretext for Christians to go into Jewish quarters to massacre the local Jewish population.
While the Wandering Jew myth originated as a legend, over the centuries, it morphed into an antisemitic trope and a metaphor for the plight of the Jews in exile, as Jews were expelled from village after village as punishment for their rejection of Christendom.
THE FIRST ANTIZIONISTS
The Jewish community fiercely debated the merits of the modern political Zionist movement around the time of the First Zionist Congress, but save for some Christian Zionists, the conversation was, generally, of little interest to the outside world.
There was, however, one glaring exception: antisemites were very interested in the developments. Some, like Wilhelm Marr or the anonymous authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zionism, derided Zionism as part of a greater Jewish international conspiracy.
But others, like the Catholic Church, opposed Zionism not out of concern for the Arab population, but on the basis of the Wandering Jew antisemitic trope. They believed that Jewish statelessness was divine punishment.
"According to the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish people must always live dispersed and wandering among the other nations, so that they may render witness to Christ not only by the Scriptures...but by their very existence."
Civiltà Cattolica's response to the First Zionist Congress, 1897
"We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it... As the head of the Church I cannot tell you anything different. The Jews have not recognized our Lord; therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people."
Pope Pius X to Theodor Herzl, 1904
SCIENTIFIC RACISM
Though scientific racism is associated with the 19th century, its origins can be traced all the way back to the Middle Ages, especially where the treatment of Jews is concerned.
In the Middle Ages, Europeans believed that all Asiatic “races,” including Jews, descended from Shem, one of the sons of Noah. The term “Semite” comes from Shem. By the 19th century, the prevailing belief is that Jews were members of a distinct “Semitic race.”
Infamous and highly influential race theorist Arthur de Gobineau posited that three distinct races existed: white, black, and yellow. Among the “white” races was the “Aryan” race, which had remained “the purest” over time. Meanwhile, other “races,” such as the Jews, were a “dirty,” mixed race made up of white, black, and yellow ancestry.
This idea was later adopted by the Nazis and applied to the Nazi theory of blood and soil, which dictated that, as a “polluted” race, the Jews were incompatible with a homeland.
FROM THE WANDERING JEW TO THE JEWISH QUESTION
As all antisemitic tropes, the trope of the Wandering Jew, too, evolved over time to adapt to its new environment: Enlightened Europe, which now held science and intellect, rather than religion, as the pinnacle of human morality.
During the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte and other French revolutionaries argued in favor of emancipating French Jewry on the condition that they abandon their Jewish “national sentiments.”
As other European countries began discussing the emancipation of their Jewish populations, this gave rise to “the Jewish Question,” the question being “what should be the fate of the Jews?”
In 1843, German historian Bruno Bauer published a book titled “The Jewish Question,” which argued that, in order to qualify for emancipation, Jews should abandon their “Jewish consciousness” and “baseless” and “chimeric” ideas of Jewish nationalism, both of which Bauer denounced as a “primitive stage of development.”
BLUT UND BODEN
"[The Jew] has never had what we might call a state. It’s a mistake which is spreading widely today to say that Jerusalem was a capital of a Jewish state of a Jewish nation."
Adolf Hitler, in a 1920 speech titled "Why We Are Antisemites"
“Blut und boden,” meaning “blood and soil,” was a Nazi concept that dictated that a person’s blood, or racial makeup, dictated whether a person did or not belong to a particular territory. The Nazis promoted the ideology of blood and soil to depict Jews as a foreign, alien race, seeing so-called “Jewish blood” as biologically incompatible with Germany.
It’s interesting to see the resurgence of blood and soil nationalism in antizionist circles today, through the promotion of conspiracy theories like the (incorrect) conspiracy that Israeli Jews suffer from skin cancer at the highest rate in the world because their skin is biologically incompatible with the Levantine sun, or the (also incorrect) conspiracy that Israeli Jews or allergic to the natural flora in Israel.
AN IDEA ROOTED IN CENTURIES OF ANTISEMITISM
There is absolutely nothing progressive, new, or groundbreaking about the idea that Jews alone, as a collective, should be denied a national homeland. Instead, it is a concept rooted in centuries of antisemitic conspiracies, tropes, stereotypes, and religious intolerance.
Following the emancipation of Jews in Europe, some, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have argued that it’s not that Jews are meant to aimlessly wander; it’s that Jews, as individuals, are meant to make a home where they are. But this denial of Jews’ collective national aspirations, too, is rooted in old antisemitic sentiments.
"The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals."
French revolutionary Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, 1789
For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Patreon.