On September 3, 2023 – back in the “before times” – Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority that runs the West Bank, made a speech about why most European and American Jews are not Semites, and why therefore “antisemitism” is not anti-Judaism. While it may sound like in the grand scheme of things his point is merely a semantic one, in fact the speech in which this vitriolic lecture on the non-history of antisemitism was embedded was more about revisionist history and why the state of Israel is an illegitimate creation by European (non-semitic) Jews and Americans. And of course the British. But if you listen to his speech you’ll understand that the powerful conclusion toward which he was driving was “The U.S., who was not even a member of the League of Nations, forced the League of Nations to include the Balfour Declaration [the 1917 British promise for a Jewish state] in its covenant. I am saying this so that we know who we should accuse of being our enemy, who has harmed us and took our homeland away, and gave it to the Israelis or the Jews.” And now he’s shaking hands with Blinken, and while decrying the Israeli dismantling of Hamas, stating that he would be happy to take over Gaza – and East Jerusalem – as part of an extended Palestinian state once the dust settles.
While there’s a lot to unpack here, I want to focus first on this idea of Jews as Semites, the term “antisemitism,” and why the ways in which we categorize and classify people and ideas matter in the context of understanding both history and the present.
Let’s talk about Jews
The question of “who is a Jew” is fraught for all kinds of reasons, and always has been, but a quick look at the history of the term shows us what it has come to mean in a variety of contexts.
The Hebrew Bible doesn’t use the term “Jew.” The ancient ancestor Abraham is a “Hebrew,” and the descendants of his grandson Jacob (a.k.a. Israel) are the “children of Israel” or “Israelites” as this phrase is often translated in English. It won’t be until later texts, like Maccabees and Esther, that the Greek word Ioudaios appears. This is the ancient term that is usually translated as “Jew.”
There is some controversy though about translating this word into English as “Jew,” because it technically means “Judean,” as in, someone who either lives in Judea or traces their ancestry – or even just their language and customs – back to Judea. The English word “Jew,” on the other hand, reflects later ways of categorizing people by religion, rather than by ethnicity, geography, or lineage. In the ancient Greco-Roman worlds, people were categorized by a combination of language, custom, and place of geographical origin, so “Judean” makes sense in that context.
In the books of the Maccabees where Ioudaios is first used, a Judean is the opposite of a Greek in terms of belief, practice, lifestyle, and indigeneity to Judea. Note the blurry line between what we would call “religion” and what we would call “ethnicity” here – and that is because these are both later concepts. (Note: it’s actually a lot more complicated than this; if you’re interested in learning more about race, ethnicity, and methods of classifying people in the ancient world, this is a good place to start.)
But isn’t Judaism a “religion”?
The Latin word religio was used in Rome and from there in early Christianity to refer to obligations, rituals, and customs in both relationships among people and also relationships with the divine. Although nobis religio could be used to describe “ways of worship,” the concept doesn’t become narrowed down to the way we use “religion” today until the 16th century, when it is employed as a means of classifying Christianity vis-à-vis non-Christian groups in the era following the Protestant Reformation. Obviously it wasn’t that “religion” didn’t exist before then; it was rather that groups were categorized by combinations of ethnicity, custom, language, geography, rituals, beliefs, and practices. During and after the Reformation, “religion” became a tool for comparing and classifying the variety of cultures being encountered through imperial expansions into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
Way earlier though, both before and after the time of Jesus, there were many different ways of being Jewish all over the ancient world. While they had wildly different means of living, practicing, and understanding their Judaism, they were connected by the combination of law and history that is the Hebrew Bible. That is, the HB is a set of documents written over a 1000 year period (roughly 1200-200 BCE), the majority combined together in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, to define a people in terms of shared ancestry, connection to a particular piece of land, connection to a particular god, shared cultural traditions, and a shared set of instructions on how their god wanted them to live. So while interpretations and local customs varied a lot, Jews were a cross-national ‘people’ with a common history and a common place of origin who lived, practiced, and believed in accordance with a common set of texts. Within a century or two after the time of Jesus, as Christianity gained followers from among Jews and non-Jews and began to define itself as a separate nobis religio, Judaism consolidated its various sects (for the most part) and began to define itself in terms of its ethical and practical principles, broadly construed, that were based on a series of interpretations of their biblical texts, in what became known as the Mishnah, elaborated in the Gemarah, and codified in the Talmud. Jews lived all over the known world, and remained connected by belief in a shared ancestral heritage of peoplehood and indigeneity to the land of Israel, as well as by the ability to adapt their beliefs and practices wherever they lived via interpretations of Talmudic passages in a constant dynamic interactive redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish in a particular place and time. In other words, for a Jew, what it meant to be Jewish was a combination of connection to texts, to each other through a shared history, and to the land of Israel where they once had thrived and longed to return.
But for Christians, Judaism was defined more narrowly. If Christianity was a “way of worship” – a defining set of rituals, beliefs, and practices that were laid out in a set of texts that superseded the Jewish ones, then Judaism must also be a “way of worship.” Not an ethnicity, not a shared historical community, and not a claim to indigeneity in any particular place. One of the problems with the study of religion as an academic discipline to this day, is that because the disciplinary fields of study originate within Christian academic settings in the Enlightenment period, Christian ideas of what constitutes a “religion” – i.e. faith and practice – determine what gets counted as a religion for the purposes of classroom study and faculty research. This has in turn affected how various “religious” groups understand and define themselves… but this is a can of worms we don’t need to open for our purposes here.
The point is, unless you’re a fundamentalist Jew (in which case you have more in common with fundamentalist Christians and Muslims than you do with mainstream Jews in terms of how you understand religious identity), at some level you have a sense of your Jewish identity as something beyond the narrow term religion as construed by the history of Christianity. (So writes the Jewish atheist.)
Let’s talk about race
The basic idea of classifying people by skin color alongside other physical attributes and character traits is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is really difficult for us to imagine a time when people were categorized any other way. Skin color is such an obvious feature that it seems “natural” that we would use it as a way of dividing up groups of people into “us” and “them,” especially as it maps so neatly onto ethnic and geographically-based divisions in terms of places of origin. But in the ancient world, in Hellenistic or Roman times, skin color was only one factor, combined with where you came from, and the language you spoke, that determined social or economic hierarchies. For Jews then, their peculiar beliefs and practices were understood to stem from the fact that they came from Judea. Their “religion” was a product of their indigeneity to Judea, and their foreign “otherness” a result of that indigeneity as well.
This may also seem like a game of semantics – what does it matter if their difference from Greek or Roman society stemmed from their place of origin, or from their religious beliefs? Well, as Hitler would have told you, it matters a lot. Because if you’re born a Jew by race, then there is nothing you can do to throw off that yoke of Otherness. Conversion to Christianity, assimilation to German culture, even membership in the Nazi party, would not save you. One Jewish grandparent meant you had enough Jewish blood in you to require your extermination from the earth. Back in Greece or Rome though, if a Jew embraced cultural and religious assimilation and was fortunate enough to be born in a part of the empire that warranted citizenship, that Jew was considered to be Greek or Roman. Period.
So the invention of “race” as a category of Otherness makes a big difference.
The idea of race came into play in the Middle Ages. Drawing on the story of the flood in the book of Genesis, medieval Christians divided the world into three groups of people according to the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japeth. According to Genesis 10, after the flood the descendants of these men populated the earth; this genealogy was on the one hand the biblical author’s way of understanding the different ethno-linguistic groups that existed in his own day, and on the other hand, a polemic against enemies of the Israelites. He counted himself among the descendants of Eber, son of Shem (Noah’s oldest son); Shem’s other offspring included the progenitors of the Assyrians, the Arameans, and the Elamites. He singled out the Canaanites as the descendants of Ham, who was cursed by Noah himself for violating Noah’s dignity. Arguably by getting drunk and passing out naked in his tent, Noah violated his own dignity, but the text blames Ham for publicizing Noah’s shame instead of covering it up; this leads to Noah cursing Ham’s son Canaan’s descendants to become slaves to the descendants of his older two sons, Shem and Japheth. It’s all very convoluted. But the thrust is that the author was using genealogy to make political and historical points relevant in his own day – much as Abbas is doing in the quote above. (Side note for context: the author believed that his ancestors had conquered the Canaanites and in the ancient world, conquest meant enslavement. He also believed that the Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites for 400 years. So the myth in Genesis 10 is doubly justifying the enslavement of the Canaanites by the Israelites; Ham, the father of Egypt and of Canaan, had brought a curse upon himself and his son Canaan by disrespecting his father Noah. This makes all descendants of Ham look bad -- including the Egyptians -- and legitimates the Israelite takeover of Canaan that the author believed to have happened. Further side note though: Hebrew is a dialect of Canaanite. So while the author gets a lot of the other ethno-cultural-linguistic groupings right -- e.g. Japhethites are all what we would call Indo-Europeans -- Canaanite and Hebrew are very closely related Northwest Semitic languages. So this myth is definitely intended as polemic, not accurate history.) And for our purposes here, the larger point is that medieval Christians understood the descendants of Shem to be “S(h)emites" (which is where we get "Semites" and "Semitic languages from). Like the biblical author, these medieval Christians also played fast and loose with the genealogies and peoples involved to form racial hierarchies, which led in turn to the idea that the Hamites were Africans, destined to become slaves to Europeans… but that’s also another story.
Ok, so what’s the point of all of this. Abbas states that European Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites and therefore (a) antisemitism isn’t anti-Judaism, and (b) they don’t belong in Israel. He further claims that Jews from Arab and Muslim lands (Mizrachi – “Eastern” -- Jews; they come from North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Caucasus) were forced to emigrate from their homes to Israel by Ashkenazi (European) Jews trying to forge a majority at the founding of the state, and likewise don’t belong in Israel. We don’t need to get into the basic facts here, that Zionist hopes amidst the Nazification of much of the Arab world and concomitant persecution of Jews in those lands, in addition to the eventual founding of the state of Israel in 1948 which caused a huge backlash throughout the Arab world of mass slaughter of local Jewish populations that had lived there for years, resulting in an exodus of almost 900,000 Mizrachi Jews to Israel from the 1940s to the 1960s. What Abbas is promoting is the idea that the people we call “Jews” today comprise two separate ethnicities. And one of those two are not Semites, and therefore does not belong in Israel, while the other belongs in their MENA countries of origin.
The term antisemitism first appears about 150 years ago in Europe to refer to hatred of Jews. Some historians use this word today to refer to the kind of racialized hatred specifically of European Jews that developed in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, between 1500-1700, and developed out of the religious “anti-Judaism” that preceded it. That is, people used to hate Jews for religious reasons, but came to hate them as a race instead. This would lead to the most dire consequences for Jews under the Nazis, when conviction that Jews were a race came to mean that the only way to be rid of Jews was to exterminate us all. (In other periods of history, when Judaism was considered to be a religion, renouncing the religion and converting to Christianity was an option for Jews seeking to avoid torture and death by the Inquisition, for example.)
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many of us began to argue that Judaism – according to our own self-definition -- is neither a race nor even primarily a religion. This is reflected in the most recent definition of antisemitism, put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. According to the IHRA, antisemitism refers to the hatred of Jews. Who are Jews? IHRA implies a shared religion but tends to refer to Jews as a collective, or a people. Jews are not defined as a racial or ethnic group.
Again, why does all this matter? Well, if you watch Abbas’ speech, he too is trying to change the definition of who is a Jew. It’s not just that antisemitism doesn’t apply to Jews of European descent because they’re not Semites. It’s rather that he wants to claim that European Jews, in fact, were not persecuted because of their race at all. Rather, the Nazis sought to eradicate them because of “their social role, which had to do with usury, money, and so on.”
So to sum up: Abbas wants to argue that Ashkenazi Jews – those of European descent, who comprise about half of the population of Israel and most of the Jews of Europe and North America today, have no roots in the Middle East at all. Where did they come from? Abbas will explain that we are descendants of a nomadic tribe called the Khazars who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages; a dubious faddish theory that was promoted particularly in the Soviet Union. Here, Abbas is in a long line of Arab and Muslim intellectuals who have elaborated on this idea for the purpose of delegitimating any claim of Ashkenazi Jews to a pre-medieval heritage and of course to the land of Israel. But it actually goes deeper than that.
Abbas did his doctoral work (yes, he has a Ph.D.) in Moscow in the early 1970s. As you may know, the Soviets were no fans of Jews either. And in totalitarian regimes where history is written to suit a reigning ideology, Soviet historians discussed the conversion of the Khazars as a means by which native/Russian values had been corrupted by this domination of Jews in the large area between the Caspian and the Black Seas. And thus the official historical record came to reflect the politics of the day. The need to keep a close eye on the Jews because of the ever-present threat of their nationalistic ambitions to take over and displace good Russians, was now rooted in historical precedent. The fact of the matter is that we don’t know the actual Khazar history very well, nor do we know how many of them actually converted to Judaism. That’s because under the Soviets, all attempts at excavating Khazar sites were quashed, as sites were destroyed and investigation into artifacts forbidden. (You can read more about this here.)
Abbas’ doctoral dissertation is entitled The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945. Rather than bore you with all the Soviet jargon that fills the abstract (but you can read about it here), I’ll jump to the conclusion: Zionism and Nazism are the same. They are racist, colonialist, capitalist, and “antisemitic” (!) imperialist movements. Although Abbas’ dissertation itself is inaccessible, the party line (literally) upon which it expounds and expands is that in the 1930s, the Zionist movement reached out to Nazi Germany in order to obtain German Jewish money toward their colonialist objectives in Palestine. The Nazis, who also wanted to take over Palestine, agreed. And, the argument continues, this alliance was quite natural because both Nazis and Zionists believed in racial superiority. Thus, the Zionists collaborated with the slaughter of Jews in Europe because it would foster sympathy for their cause, and would also eliminate those who were too weak to help further their colonial enterprise in Palestine. (So maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised when Abbas jumps on promoting the idea that the October 7 slaughter was actually perpetrated by Israel.)
The ideas that Abbas spouts in the speech I quoted at the beginning of this piece, that Israel is illegitimate and Jews are Nazis -- ideas now echoed in social media and legacy media around the world regularly -- constitute the longstanding platforms of Palestinian politics (particularly as sponsored and supported first by the USSR and now Russia). Abbas and the PA regularly engage in such rhetoric (you can use Google translate if you want to read this linked page). This incitement toward hatred and violence not only accounts for the popularity of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad among the Palestinian population, but the accusations that Israel is guilty of “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing” that have spread like wildfire through the governments – including the Canadian one -- now voting for Israel to lay down its arms and allow Hamas some breathing room.
I have a lot more to say about Abbas and the idea of the PA running Gaza when the war ends, but this is long enough for today. Stay tuned.