To understand antisemitism, look at Jerusalem.

For millennia, the ancient city has been the stage on which civilizations act out their prejudices against Jewish sovereignty and identity.

photo: Katalin Salles/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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There is an old joke that the best thing about Jerusalem’s nightlife is the road to Tel Aviv.

Yet, for all its cosmopolitan glitter, Tel Aviv has never had Jerusalem’s gravitational pull. No city on earth is so loved, hated, mythologized, and misdiagnosed. Jerusalem is less a place than a mirror into which the world compulsively peers — and recoils from what it sees.

This is why most foreign ministries refuse to accept Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It is not because the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as its capital, but for more fundamental reasons to do with what the city represents.

Every empire that conquered Jerusalem claimed to sanctify it. Every faith that lost it re-imagined it. Every ideology since the Enlightenment has projected its moral neuroses upon it. This obsession, this Jerusalem Fever, is not about topography, but about meaning. Jerusalem is a defiant embodiment of faith, history, and particularism in a civilization and era that worship universality.

For three millennia, Jerusalem has been the moral axis around which empires, religions, and ideas have revolved — and resented. It is where humanity’s hunger for transcendence collides with its resentment of the divine, where theology hardens into geopolitics and geopolitics disguises itself as moral theology.

By every rational measure, Jerusalem should have been irrelevant. It has no river, no port, and no natural resources, yet it has outlasted every civilization that presumed to own it. The ancient world found it vexing: a small, obstinate hilltop that refused to genuflect before visible gods, insisting instead on the invisible. The modern world finds it an intolerable reminder that history is not linear, and that the sacred refuses to let reason domesticate it.

Every empire that sought to erase Jerusalem was itself erased. Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Caliphates, the Crusaders, the Ottomans — all tried to annex its sanctity, all disappeared into its dust. Jerusalem endures because it refuses to follow anyone’s story but its own.

Beneath the politics lies a deep theological resentment: a chronic envy of election, divine intimacy, and of meaning bestowed rather than self-created. Christianity claimed to inherit Jerusalem’s covenant, yet lost the city twice — once to the Romans in antiquity, and again to the Jews in 1967. Pilgrims still swoon in ecstatic delirium at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but the Jewish return to the city poses an enduring scandal to Christian supersessionism: If the Jews are home, then God’s promise was never revoked.

Islam, arriving centuries later, declared Jerusalem sacred as both reverence and rivalry — an act of emulative transcendence. The Dome of the Rock was built not merely as worship, but as assertion: Islam would now stand where Judaism and Christianity had once stood.

Secularism, too, has its theology. For the modern liberal West, Jerusalem is an embarrassment — a stubborn remnant of metaphysics in an age that canonizes reason. The Enlightenment’s faith in universality finds Jerusalem’s Jewish particularism offensive. It prefers a world without chosen peoples or places.

From crusaders to diplomats, from popes to peace envoys, every age has tried to neutralize Jerusalem by reframing it as a “shared city,” a “holy basin,” or a “spiritual capital of humanity.” Beneath every euphemism lies the same impulse: to dilute Jewish particularity until holiness becomes a zoning category. The world tolerated Jewish yearning for Jerusalem, but cannot abide Jewish possession of it.

For two millennia, Jewish longing for Zion¹ was poetic: an exile’s prayer, safely sentimental. The nations found it moving precisely because it was futile. But when longing became sovereignty, sentiment curdled into scandal. The rebirth of Jewish rule in 1967, after Israel captured East Jerusalem and the Old City of Jerusalem from Jordan during the Six-Day War, shattered not only geopolitical dogma, but the entrenched theological hierarchy.

The Jews, whom history had cast as perpetual witnesses to others’ faiths, had re-entered their own narrative. For Christianity, that was unsettling; for Islam, intolerable; for secular world, incomprehensible.

It is one thing for the Jews to survive, but quite another for them to govern, and above all in the sacred epicenter of Jerusalem. Every United Nations resolution that denies Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, every embassy that refuses to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, every editorial that warns Israel against “provoking” others by existing there — all are symptoms of the refusal to accept that the Jews are not merely alive, but home. The world’s quarrel is not with occupation; it is with resurrection.

Jerusalem has never truly belonged to those who claimed it; it has always unmasked them. The Romans renamed it Aelia Capitolina and vanished. The Crusaders drenched it in blood and called that piety. The Ottomans neglected it and called that “peace.” The British “protected” it and called that order. The UN tried to internationalize it and failed.

Nowadays, bureaucrats and diplomats arrive with PowerPoints instead of swords, preaching “shared sovereignty” and “neutral administration.” These are euphemisms for Jews to not be in charge. The medieval crusader marched with a cross; his modern descendant arrives with a press badge and a European Union grant. The weapons have changed; the impulse of moral control has not.

Jerusalem exposes every age’s neuroses. To secular modernists, it is the past that will not die. To totalitarian ideologies, it is transcendence that outlives tyranny. To antisemitic politics, it is the ultimate insult: a Jewish people resurrected, sovereign, unextinguished.

Each ideology projects its private pathology onto Jerusalem. The UN projects its fetish for antisemitism, flattening truth into narrative. Much of the Western Left projects its colonial guilt, transforming indigenous Jews into “settlers” in their own capital. The Islamic world projects its wounded pride, unable to reconcile centuries of dominance with Jewish autonomy and military might. The Christian world projects its theological ambivalence, loving the Jewish Bible yet resenting living Jews who prove its story incomplete.

Every creed uses Jerusalem as stagecraft for its psychodramas. That is why, whenever conflict flares, the world scrambles to issue declarations about “Jerusalem’s status,” as though holiness were negotiable and moral clarity could be subcontracted to committees.

But Jerusalem is serenely indifferent to their proclamations. Its stones have endured sieges more devastating than the statements of any bureaucrat or diplomat. Denying Jerusalem’s Jewish essence has become an existential requirement for the modern moral order, because acknowledging it would mean admitting that history is not random but redemptive, that promises can be kept and that exile is not destiny.

The unbearable revelation is that the Jew’s natural state is not exile after all. Hence the compulsive demand that Jerusalem be “shared.” Shared, of course, means diluted — holy, but not too holy; Jewish, but not too Jewish. The world craves a Jerusalem that belongs to everyone, which is to say to no one. It prefers a symbol to a sovereign. Yet a Jerusalem without sovereignty is a museum exhibit; a Jerusalem without Jews is a relic or tombstone.

Ancient and modern crusaders have sought to domesticate it, first with swords and crosses, now with resolutions and roadmaps. The Western diplomat who urges “internationalization” is the bureaucratic heir of the knight who once sought to “liberate” it. Each imagines that holiness can be managed and transcendence administered. They all misunderstand the city in the same way.

Jerusalem cannot be managed. It can only be lived, suffered, and revered. Its holiness is inseparable from its history. Its story is inseparable from the Jews.

The truth the world cannot abide is that Jerusalem is Jewish not because Israel declares it so, but because history does. It is where King David built his capital, where King Solomon raised his temple, where prophets thundered, and where exiles turned their faces in prayer. It appears more than 600 times in the Hebrew Bible and not once in the Qur’an. The claim that Jerusalem is “disputed” is nonsense. Disputed by whom? By empires long dissolved, by faiths that borrowed its sanctity, and by diplomats who believe peace can be drafted like a treaty clause.

Jewish Jerusalem’s endurance is history’s great refutation of cynicism. It is proof that the covenant survived exile, pogrom, and genocide. That is the vindication that the world cannot forgive.

Jerusalem stands as evidence that the Jewish story was true all along: a living rebuttal to every theology of replacement and every ideology of erasure. It is the city that will not let humanity forget its argument with God. That is why every empire has coveted it, every religion has claimed it, every ideology has universalized it.

And that is why, in the end, only the Jews have kept it — not as conquerors, but as custodians of memory and conscience.

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1. A hill in Jerusalem, located just outside the southern walls of the Old City; in biblical times, the name “Zion” initially referred to the City of David and later expanded to mean the entire city.