The Myth of Jewish Race (A History Written by Antisemites)

The most enduring lies about Jews come from those most determined to define us.

An exhibit at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial institution for the Holocaust (photo: Snowscat/Unsplash)

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This is an excerpt from the book, “Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press, October 2025) by David Harris, the long-serving former CEO of the American Jewish Committee.

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

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With the development of technological and scientific innovations in the late 19th century, including notions of human biology and genetics, “race” became an increasing focus of attention.

More or less in tandem, the dominant form of antisemitism shifted from religious to racial and to notions of the “purity” of the nation. Jews were no longer primarily perceived as a religious group, but rather a fixed “race.”

As a consequence, the conversion of an individual Jew to Christianity could not change their racial “Jewishness,” which would never be “pure.” This racialized ideology of the Jew poisoning the “superior” White, Aryan race and nation ultimately led to the genocidal ideology framing the Holocaust.

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Antisemitism can be largely broken down into three phases. First, there was a religious phase, followed by a racialized phase, and, in the contemporary context, Jews are attacked as a state, often with racialized overtones.

In the Christian phase of antisemitism, Jews were perceived largely as being “blinded by evil” for not accepting the Christian notion of the Messiah. By not accepting it, Jews were cutting themselves off from personal redemption and, collectively, hindering the advent of world redemption. Thus the solution must be to convert them forcefully, drive them out, or, in some cases, destroy them.

When societies began shifting methods of classification in the 19th and 20th centuries, from religion to science or from the supernatural to the natural, pseudo-scientific notions of race and ethnicity emerged. Jews were now to be perceived in some places as foreign, corrupting elements.

As a consequence, the purity of the race and nation had to be saved from Jewish impurity. Unlike the Christian phase, where Jews had an “out” — they could convert — the race-based ideology allowed no escape from innate and immutable racial characteristics and qualities. The Jews had to be either removed or eliminated.

Following the Holocaust, racist and Christian notions of antisemitism started to become taboo in mainstream Western societies. But, like a shape-shifting virus, antisemitism began to focus instead on the one and only Jewish-majority state, Israel, which was reborn in 1948, including accusations of “racism” and “apartheid.”

In the United States, the notion of race is primarily judged by the color of one’s skin. However, as previously noted, the Jewish People are comprised of different “racial” groups.

The notion of race was used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to classify the Jews as “subhuman.” Nazi ideology additionally utilized social Darwinist theories of the 19th century, which postulated that distinctive characteristics were passed on genetically, to formulate notions of race.

Also intrinsic to social Darwinism was the concept of the “survival of the fittest.” The Nazi interpretation included notions of expanding the “fittest” (i.e., Aryan) race both genetically and geographically (through a policy of Lebensraum, “living space”). The Nazis believed they had an obligation to target the “inferior” races, including Jews, as well as Slavs, so-called Asiatics (peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the Muslim populations of the Caucasus region), Roma, people with disabilities, and Africans.

Apropos Africans, a number of whom served in the French army at the time, Joel Kotek, professor of political science at the Free University of Brussels, has collected cartoons from Nazi magazines that depict Jews and Black people scheming together to control the West. Black people are portrayed as subhuman, degenerate, predatory and a threat, through miscegenation, to the purity of the European bloodline. Of course, these were quite similar tropes to Nazi characterizations of Jews.

Despite Nazi belief, there existed no scientific methodology to classify Jews as a racial group. Indeed, in 1934 the Nazis widely featured, including on a magazine cover, the photo of a baby girl to highlight “the perfect example of the Aryan race to further Nazi philosophy.” It turns out the girl was Hessy Levinsons, born to Jewish parents!

In a similar vein, the Berliner Tageblatt¹ published a wartime photo of Werner Goldberg, who was described as “the ideal German soldier” (“der ideale deutsche Soldat”). His photograph was used in Nazi recruitment propaganda in 1939. Goldberg’s father, Albert Goldberg, was born Jewish in the German city of Königsberg.

Since many German Jews had assimilated into the cultural and social fabric of Germany, the Nazis relied on citizenship laws, which were passed in September 1935 and known as the Nuremberg Race Laws. A Jew was defined as someone with three or more grandparents who were born into the Jewish religious community. Under the law, Jews in Germany were no longer citizens, but instead “subjects” of the state. These laws defined people as Jewish who did not even regard themselves as Jews, due to their conversion to Christianity or to their secular beliefs.

The laws also classified those who were considered “mixed-race” (Mischlinge) as those with only one or two grandparents born into the Jewish religious community. Despite initially being identified as “racial” Germans, as Nazi legislation expanded, the classification of Mischlinge Jews as such shrank accordingly.

In the contemporary era, ideas of racial classification may differ between the Jewish community and other groups, including the African American population. A person who is white-skinned, as some Jews are, may, ipso facto, be seen as a beneficiary of “White privilege.”

Perhaps that is why Whoopi Goldberg, a popular African American actress and television personality, classified Jewish victims of the Holocaust as White. On a television show in 2022, Goldberg argued that the genocide was “not about race” but was instead about “man’s inhumanity to man.” She insisted that it involved “two White groups of people.”

To clarify her argument, Goldberg explained that, in her experience, race is something “I can see”: “If the [Ku Klux] Klan is coming down the street with a Jewish friend… I’m gonna run. But if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times, because you can’t tell who’s Jewish.” (However, to her credit, Goldberg eventually retracted her claim, saying that the Holocaust “is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.”)

What she had also earlier failed to take into account is that often, yes, one can indeed tell who is Jewish, and very easily. Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish men are recognizable by their head covering and, in many cases, distinctive clothing. Jewish homes and shops are often identified by a mezuzah prominently affixed to the outside doorway. Many surnames are also frequently associated with Jewish identity.

And Jews can also easily be found congregating at or near synagogues, Jewish community centers, and Jewish day schools. In other words, those antisemites looking for Jews or Jewish targets have a much easier time of it than Goldberg’s remarks might have suggested.

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“Scientific” notions of Jews constituting an inferior race led to the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Indeed, to this day, the extreme right does not consider Jews “pure” or “White.”

However, with the eruption in the 21st century of extreme-Left antisemitism, Jews, as explained below, have become the epitome of “Whiteness” for some.

The fixation of the extreme Left on overthrowing “unequal power structures,” including colonialism and capitalism, would not be applicable to Jews if they were considered non-White. Thus the antisemitism on the extreme Left and extreme Right splinters, even if in both cases it leads to singling out the Jews for special attention, if not obsession.

So, is racial antisemitism consistent in different societies?

No. The contrasting views toward Jews as a “socially inferior” race may be exemplified in the case study of Denmark during the Holocaust. It is estimated that 90 percent of Danish Jews were rescued by fellow Danes during World War II. Following the war, when questioned on their rescue efforts, the Danes’ most common answer was simply that the Jews were fellow Danes. Needless to say, this approach was the polar opposite to that of Denmark’s neighbor Germany, which categorically refused to see Jews as fellow Germans.

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The use of racial antisemitism by both the extreme Right and the extreme Left is testament to the irrationality of antisemitism. Indeed, two seemingly opposite viewpoints unite in their “logic” to single out and demonize Jews. Jews are depicted at once as both poisoning the purity of the White race and exemplifying Whiteness.

The Far-Right views Jews as an ominous threat to the White race. This can most demonstrably be seen in Nazi and neo-Nazi narratives, in addition to those of the Ku Klux Klan, White Aryan Resistance, Christian Identity Movement, and others. On the other hand, racial antisemitism is used by the Far-Left to designate Jews as the embodiment of all sins of White privilege (e.g., colonialism).

Racialized antisemitism on the Far-Left can perhaps best be exemplified in extreme anti-Israel narratives, whereby Jews are presented as White, European, settler colonialists, even as the majority of Jewish citizens of Israel today are of direct Middle Eastern origin themselves. Still more important, Jews are indigenous to the land, dating back approximately four millennia.

So, are Jews a race, ethnicity, religion, or nation?

It depends on who is answering the question. To the Nazis and to the Far-Left, Jews are a race, though, again, seen through very different lenses. Ask Jews, however, and they would likely define themselves as an ethnicity, religion, nation, tribe, or people, or some combination thereof.

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1. The Berliner Tageblatt or BT was a German language newspaper published in Berlin from 1872 to 1939. Along with the Frankfurter Zeitung, it became one of the most important liberal German newspapers of its time.