More than a billion people hate Jews. Here’s what that does to us.

The West loves dead Jews, fears religious Jews, and hates Zionist Jews. No other minority is treated this way.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay written by Liah Greenfeld, an Israeli-American Russian-Jewish interdisciplinary scholar.

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

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A prominent French-Tunisian filmmaker, an Arab and a Muslim, Said Ben-Said (who insists that “the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic” and is ostracized for this in his, Arab and Muslim, community), estimates that for every Jew in the world, there are at least 100 antisemites.

In other words, 16 million Jews versus at least a billion-and-a-half antisemites; Jews representing 0.2 percent (one-fifth of 1 percent) of world population, antisemites at least 22 percent of world population. More than one-fifth of world population are antisemites.

But Said Ben-Said’s estimate of 100 antisemites per every Jew is likely an underestimate. According to Anti-Defamation League numbers, antisemites represent 30 percent of the world population on average, in some areas more in some areas less. In numbers: 2.4 billion people, or over 150 antisemites for every Jewish man, woman, and child!

Given that the Chinese and Indian civilizations (about half of humanity) never developed indigenous antisemitic traditions and hardly understand what antisemitism is, these 2.4 billion are concentrated within the monotheistic (Western) civilization and represent 60 percent of its population.

This means that the majority of the people in Western civilization, which is based on Judaism, hate the Jews. No other group in humanity is surrounded by so much hate. Can you imagine the psychological toll it exacts on every single one of us, who live among you, every day?

This is so, despite the fact that most of the lands covered by this civilization are now Judenrein¹, that in the 20th century Jews have been eliminated from millennia-old centers of their habitation.

In the 1940s, Jew-hatred physically destroyed a full one-third of the Jews in the world, before death inflicting on them indescribable suffering, 1.5 million of them young children, toddlers, and infants. This happened in Europe. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, another million Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries.

Today, about 8.5 million Jews live in the Diaspora (about 7.5 million in the United States), and another 7.5 million in Israel. Israelis are only now becoming aware of the Jew-hatred surrounding us.

Before the October 7th massacre, they were under the illusion that antisemitism was a problem in the Diaspora only, and that in their own sovereign state where Jews represented the majority of the population, they would not be the subject of constant targeted hatred. We do not yet know how their disillusionment in this respect would affect Israeli Jews.

This is the effect of ubiquitous antisemitism on us — Jews who live among you — constant fear, insecurity, discomfort, feelings of being rejected.

In an attempt to escape these emotions, we develop defense mechanisms. Some of us willfully blind themselves to them, pretend antisemitism around us does not exist, try every possible way not to attract attention to ourselves as Jews and thus to Jewish problems.

This is the reason for Jews being so active in the fight for everyone else’s causes — immigrants from Syria and Latin America, LGBTQAI+, and so on — and so fervent against every form of discrimination (homophobia and racism), except the oldest racism and phobia, antisemitism.

Is there any other group in the world so consistently acting for the benefit of others and to the exclusion of its own particular interests?

No.

This is also the reason for the extraordinary Jewish philanthropy, the financial support of every worthy general cause, generous donations to universities, and so forth. In this, wealthy Jews behave like beggars; they are willing to give their all to be accepted, liked, and treated as if they were not Jewish.

Many Jews go further, justify and excuse antisemitism, internalize it, turn into antisemites, hate the Jew in themselves, make every effort to rid themselves of this hateful to them identity, and form and participate in plainly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel organizations.

Again, how many groups of African-Americans do you know, who dedicate their lives to the discreditation of African states, or to the slavish service of racists who demand their eradication?

None.

How many Poles, Italians, Germans, whose goal in life is to undermine Poland, Italy, and Germany?

None.

But there are many such Jews and Jewish groups. The ubiquitous presence of self-hating Jews, apparently indifferent to the plight of their own people, trying to separate themselves from it, and actively working against it, is an eloquent proof of the systemic, institutionalized, inescapable nature of antisemitism in our society.

Perhaps worst of all is that, under the constant pressure of the surrounding hatred, many Jews actually go insane; that is, they develop psychotic disorders, such as manic depression and schizophrenia. The rates of these mental diseases among Jews are above those of other groups, particularly in the United States.

Indeed, an American journal Psychological Medicine asked in 1983 in the title of one of its articles, “Is manic depressive illness a typically Jewish disorder?”

The explanation suggested was genetic (presuming that Jews were not a religious group, as Westerners like to think, but a racial one, after all). But the comparison with Israel, where the rates of mental illness are significantly lower, contradicted that explanation. The evident reason is that, in the Diaspora, including the United States, Jews live surrounded (and overwhelmed) by hate; in Israel, though also hated by the surrounding states and their populations collectively more than a hundred of times its size, as individuals in their daily lives Israelis do not face this hate.

Psychologically, in the Diaspora, the majority of Jews live in hiding, in a state of crippling fear, and fear often combined with even more crippling sense of self-disgust, comparable to the condition of gay men in the now-forgotten but still recent times, when being gay was a criminal offense and a medical condition requiring brutal intervention.

Today, as a society, we are proud that we have let gay men out of their closets, finally allowing them to enjoy life as they are, without denying a part of themselves, but we do not recognize that we still confine to closets our Jewish citizens, men and women, adults and children.

Even before the glorification of Hamas butchery on Western campuses and near-ubiquitous support of openly antisemitic demonstrations with their calls (addressed to the general public) to “gas the Jews” and (addressed to the Jews) to “go back to Poland,” in the media, Jews felt unsafe.

On campuses of liberal democratic societies, Jews have been routinely denied the right to defend Jewish causes and (while constantly and tirelessly defending causes of other larger, more accepted minorities) have been denied the right to do this as Jews. As a society, we (you!) consistently made Jews uncomfortable with our identity, forcing us to deny it. I am not even mentioning the antisemitic Bacchanalia² of today!

The only group of Jews who in the past could truly escape the psychological toll that this exacted were Orthodox believers, whose lives are regulated by the relations between them and God — and who, in effect, withdraw from the concerns of the mundane society. Today, I am not sure that even they can escape it.

Other Jewish denominations, Conservative and Reform, could not escape it. These denominations largely represent attempts on the part of the Jewish community in the modern, secular age to adjust to Western societies, which until now were willing to officially recognize Jews only as a religion, though they have systemically discriminated against Jews as a race.

And what about truly secular Jews, who cannot seek the protection of organized religion at all? While considered Jews by everyone in their environment, they were never been allowed any identity at all. Can you imagine what it is to live without an identity?

So, many of these secular people convert — become Catholics, Lutherans, or Orthodox Christians — but are never fully accepted by the religious communities within which they attempt to find refuge, seek to replace their impossible Jewish identity with sexual minority identities, and commit themselves body and soul to non-Jewish and explicitly anti-Jewish causes.

These are psychologically broken, suffering people. A huge number of them require psychiatric help. It is you, as a society, who cause their distress. And today they discover that all their self-destroying efforts have been in vain.

Add to this the pathetic experience of half-Jews, especially children of Jewish fathers married to gentile women, who cannot bequeath their offspring a confident Jewish identity, but necessarily bequeath to them their uncomfortable sense of self, social maladjustment, lack of confidence, and confusion.

Are Western societies ready to confront and face up to the greatest hatred among them? If not, there is no hope for their societies or for their civilizations.

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1. German, meaning “from which Jewish people are excluded” (originally with reference to organizations in Nazi Germany)

2. Orgiastic festivals and rituals dedicated to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, freedom, and ecstasy, and a parallel to the Greek Dionysus