The Jewish Thing About Anti-Jewish Things

Behind every antisemitic idea is an ironic truth.

photo: Benny Rotlevy/Unsplash

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There is something deeply Jewish about anti-Jewish ideas — not because they are true, but because they are strangely consistent, historically durable, and revealing.

Antisemitism doesn’t just tell you what people think about Jews; it tells you what societies are anxious about, what they envy, what they can’t explain, and who they need to blame when systems feel out of control.

Jews are a uniquely useful target. We are everywhere people look, and yet few enough to be blamed. That paradox sits at the heart of almost every anti-Jewish narrative.

We are said to dominate Hollywood, medicine, finance, academia, journalism, technology, law. To the conspiratorial mind, this makes us omnipotent. But in reality, Jews make up roughly 0.2 percent of the world’s population. In the United States, about two percent. We are visible, but not numerous. Familiar, but not majoritarian. Integrated, but still distinct.

That combination is volatile.

It makes Jews seem bigger and more influential than we actually are, while being small enough to scapegoat. If we were truly dominant, blaming us would be dangerous. If we were truly marginal, blaming us would be pointless. Jews exist in the uncomfortable middle: successful enough to resent, different enough to suspect, and few enough to target without consequence.

History shows what happens when that resentment is unleashed.

In six years, one-third of the Jewish People were murdered. Not in a distant, primitive era, but in modern, bureaucratic, educated Europe. The Holocaust was not chaos; it was systems, paperwork, ideology, and professional classes doing their jobs. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and civil servants participated.

And yet, less than a generation later, the Jewish People — traumatized, displaced, reduced in numbers beyond comprehension — founded a state. Not just any state, but one that absorbed refugees from dozens of countries, revived an ancient language, built a modern economy, defended itself against repeated wars, and became a hub of science, medicine, and technology.

At the same time, Jews in the diaspora played disproportionate roles in building Western institutions: universities, legal frameworks, cultural industries, financial systems, civil movements, and intellectual life. Not because of secret coordination or collective strategy, but because survival trained Jews to build portable value (education, argument, skills, networks) things that could not be confiscated as easily as land.

This success does not comfort much of the world; it destabilizes it, because it breaks the moral math people rely on. Victims are supposed to remain victims. Trauma is supposed to break you. Industrial-grade genocide is supposed to finish you off. Jews violate that script. We were nearly annihilated — and instead of disappearing, we reappeared with vigor.

That unsettles people. And when moral categories fail, resentment fills the gap.

Modern moral frameworks prefer clean binaries: oppressed or powerful, victim or oppressor, innocent or guilty. Jews refuse to stay in a single box. We are victims with memory, survivors with agency, a people who carry trauma and still insist on responsibility. Jewish suffering is endlessly invoked, but Jewish self-defense is endlessly interrogated. Sympathy is permitted only as long as Jews remain weak.

The moment Jews exercise power, draw borders, or say no, the moral permission slips away and the story gets inverted. Jewish success becomes proof of guilt. Jewish resilience becomes evidence of manipulation. Jewish visibility becomes confirmation of control.

Take, for example, money.

Yes, Jews are often “good with money,” but not because of greed or mysticism or cultural worship of wealth. In much of medieval Christian Europe, Christians were prohibited by Church law from charging interest to other Christians. At the same time, kingdoms and city-states desperately needed credit, liquidity, and reliable tax collection to function: to develop large armies, wage wars, build infrastructure, and govern.

Jews were barred from owning land, joining most guilds, and entering many professions, so they were pushed into moneylending and tax farming — roles that were economically essential but socially despised. Rulers relied on Jewish financiers to keep the state solvent, advance funds, and collect revenue efficiently. Without them, governments would have struggled to operate.

But the very work that made Jews indispensable also made them hated. When taxes were high or debts painful (as they always are), anger flowed downward. Kings and nobles could deflect blame by pointing to Jewish collectors. Pogroms often followed fiscal crises. Debts to Jews were conveniently erased when Jewish communities were expelled or murdered. The state kept the benefits of the system while discarding the people who made it run.

The same pattern repeats everywhere. Jews do the work others avoid, succeed at it, and are then accused of corruption. We become essential and resented at the same time. Useful, but never forgiven for being useful.

In the early 20th century, the film industry was widely considered disreputable, risky, and morally suspect. Land-based elites, established financiers, and traditional cultural institutions avoided it, leaving room for newcomers with fewer entrenched opportunities.

Many Jews, often excluded from established industries and professions, saw an opening. They built studios, developed creative talent, and established distribution networks, turning the fledgling film business into a global cultural force. The very skills that allowed them to succeed — vision, risk-taking, and organization — made their influence highly visible.

Once the industry became mainstream and powerful, that visibility was misinterpreted: Their central role was framed not as innovation or entrepreneurship, but as undue control or cultural corruption. The story mirrors a recurring pattern in Jewish history: stepping into spaces others avoid, achieving success, and then having that success recast as a threat rather than recognized as contribution.

When medieval and early modern cities declined (after wars, plagues, expulsions, or the collapse of trade routes), many Christian and Muslim merchants followed land, titles, or guild protections elsewhere. Jews often had no such options. Barred from owning land, excluded from guilds, and periodically expelled from stable regions, Jewish communities learned how to survive in places others considered economically dead.

They reopened markets in half-abandoned cities. They rebuilt long-distance trade routes connecting ports, fairs, and inland towns. They reintroduced credit, inventory management, contracts, and cross-border trust in places where capital had dried up.

Because Jewish merchants were diasporic (family and communal networks stretching across regions), they could move goods, information, and money faster than local actors. They spoke multiple languages, understood multiple legal systems, and relied on reputation rather than state protection. This made them unusually effective at restarting commerce where others saw only risk.

For city rulers, this was invaluable. A struggling town with Jewish merchants could suddenly collect taxes again. Markets returned. Trade fairs revived. Urban life restarted. Jews were invited, sometimes explicitly, to settle because their presence correlated with economic recovery.

But this usefulness came with a catch. When markets later failed during crop shortages, inflation, war, or political upheaval, the same visibility that made Jewish success noticeable made Jewish blame convenient. Complex economic forces were hard to explain. It was far easier to point to the merchants, moneylenders, or traders who had become symbols of economic life itself.

If prices rose, Jews were accused of hoarding. If credit tightened, Jews were accused of strangling the economy. If trade slowed, Jews were accused of manipulation.

This is tied to another anxiety Jews provoke: We are a portable people. Judaism does not dissolve neatly into empires, religions, or ideologies. It does not seek to absorb everyone. It carries its covenants with God, holidays, laws, memories, history, language, and arguments across borders and centuries. Empires prefer subjects who disappear into them. Jews don’t. We adapt without vanishing, integrate without evaporating.

That makes power uncomfortable, which is why antisemitism appears everywhere: Christian Europe, Muslim lands, communist regimes, fascist states, and even “progressive” movements that believe themselves immune. Different ideologies, same unease.

This is also why Jewish security is so often misunderstood. When people point to the Mossad as evidence of Jewish omnipresence or control, they miss the point entirely. The Mossad does not keep its eyes on the world because Jews run the world; it does so because Jews are scattered across it, and history has taught us what happens when no one is watching.

Today, the Mossad has become somewhat of a global police force tasked with protecting Jewish communities. Synagogues, schools, community centers, and cultural institutions have been threatened in country after country, often with little warning and less accountability. Jewish memory does not allow for the luxury of assuming goodwill. Vigilance is not dominance; it is survival learned the hard way.

“If you knew how many terror attacks the Mossad has prevented,” an Israeli official recently said, “you would drop your jaw.”

That statement is not a boast of control; it is a quiet admission of burden. The work is largely invisible precisely because success looks like nothing happening at all. No headlines. No funerals. No investigations after the fact. Just absence and prevention.

The same vigilance that protects Jewish lives becomes, in the conspiratorial imagination, evidence of manipulation. Watching becomes “spying.” Prevention becomes “interference.” Responsibility becomes “control.” Peaceful becomes “genocidal.”

Jews are, by default, a peaceful people. Long before October 7th, kibbutzniks living near the Israel–Gaza border provided aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Communities built on cooperation and generosity quietly offered jobs, food, medicine, education, infrastructure, and rides to Israeli medical services.

And yet, when survival demanded defense — when Palestinians came to massacre, rape, pillage, and kidnap on October 7th — the same people who had helped were suddenly recast as aggressors. Self-defense became “genocide” in the eyes of distant observers. The pattern is painfully familiar: The generosity that saves lives is ignored, but the defense that preserves them is vilified.

And nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in media.

The idea that Jews “control the media” is wrong, but revealing. Jews do not dominate media because we control it. Media types obsess over Jews because Jews generate attention. Conflict, symbolism, morality, power, victimhood, history — these are the currencies of media, and Jews sit at the intersection of all of them: Israel, the Holocaust, antisemitism, religion, secularism, East and West, old world and new. The longstanding saying “No Jews, No News” doesn’t exist for no reason.

Obsession then gets mistaken for ownership. Coverage becomes proof of conspiracy. Visibility becomes evidence of orchestration. But obsession is not control.

Conspiracy theories about Jews are, in a strange way, a form of flattery. They exaggerate the qualities societies wish they had: long memory, internal debate, intergenerational learning, adaptability, resilience under pressure. Instead of asking why their own institutions are brittle or corrupt, it is easier to believe someone else rigged the system.

Antisemitism simplifies a complex world, turning structural failures into personal villains and converting envy into righteousness and confusion into certainty. Jews — small, visible, resilient, historically inconvenient — become the perfect mirror.

That is the Jewish thing about anti-Jewish things.

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