The Real Reason Antisemitism Survives
What if antisemitism survives not because it makes sense, but because it protects people from confronting themselves?
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This is a guest essay by Melissa Brodsky, a writer focused on media literacy, modern antisemitism, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Why Jews?
Why always Jews?
Why across every century, every continent, every political system, every religion?
I dug into religious theory, racial theory, economics, media, power structures. I’m sniffing out every trail I find. None of it fully closed the loop.
Then I was lying in bed, deep into Edward Kritzler’s book, “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom — and Revenge,” and something in me shifted.
First, I want to be honest about who I am. I’m not a historian. I’m not a scholar. I’m not a subject-matter expert by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a writer who worked in marketing for almost two decades. Everything I know about this subject I learned the way most people learn things they care about: I kept asking questions, I kept reading, and I didn’t stop until something started to feel true.
What started feeling true last night was this: I think we’ve been overcomplicating it.
Because when you strip away the religious theory and the racial pseudoscience and the centuries of academic scaffolding built around this question, what you’re left with is something almost embarrassingly simple — something every person alive recognizes from their own life, their own worst moments, their own darkest impulses.
When things fall apart, people don’t want to ask what they did to help break them.
That’s it. That’s the whole of it. Everything else is just the same sh*t, different century.
Kritzler’s book traces Jewish history in Spain back to around 1000 BCE. He walks through the Inquisition, the expulsions, the conversos (Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted to Roman Catholicism, particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries, often under duress) who fled across the Atlantic and ended up running trade networks from Jamaica to Amsterdam — Jewish pirates.
It sounds like the setup to a joke until you understand what drove them there. They weren’t sailing for adventure; they were sailing because every place they built something eventually decided they were the problem.
Spain in 1492 is almost too perfect an example to be real. The same year Christopher Columbus set sail, a voyage financed in large part by conversos, the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, signed the Alhambra Decree in Granada, Spain, and expelled every Jew who wouldn’t convert. They had just purged one of the most educated, commercially sophisticated, financially capable populations in Europe from their own country. Spain never recovered its footing. The golden age cracked before the ink dried. But the Jews were gone, so Spain found other explanations. It always does.
Port Royal, Jamaica? Same story from the other direction. The city welcomed Jewish merchants fleeing the Inquisition and became the wealthiest port in the Western Hemisphere. Amsterdam extended legal protections to its Jewish population and became the financial capital of the world. Both cities grew in almost direct proportion to how well they treated the people everyone else kept expelling. That’s not a coincidence; it’s a controlled experiment running across centuries with results that aren’t complicated.
The places that did the expelling didn’t get richer. They didn’t get more stable. They got more desperate, more fractured, and they found new Jews to blame for the fractures kept fracturing.
Here’s the pattern, and I feel like that’s the only word to describe it. I’m not talking about the pattern in one country or one century, but the pattern across all of them, in every form it has ever taken, without a single exception in recorded history that I can figure out: A society starts to crack.
It doesn’t matter why, whether it’s economic collapse, political failure, military defeat, plague, famine, corruption that finally becomes too heavy to carry. The cause is almost beside the point because the response is always the same. Instead of the people inside that society stopping and looking honestly at what they built and what they did or didn’t do to contribute to the breaking of it, they look outward. They find a name to put on the problem and then assign a people to carry it.
For most of recorded history, that people has been the Jews.
A village gets taken over; blame the Jews. A child dies; blame the Jews. A government collapses; blame the Jews. A man loses his job, his money, his standing, his sense of himself; blame the Jews. Not the decisions. Not the habits. Not the years of choices that compounded into the life now lived. The Jewish boss who fired him. The Jewish banker who won’t lend to him. The Jewish media that won’t give him a fair shake. The Jewish X who didn’t Y. Always an external cause. Always someone else holding the instrument of his failure.
This didn’t stop happening. It never stopped happening.
The pull underneath all of it isn’t complicated. Every human being alive has felt it. The pull away from the mirror. That instinct to find a story about your circumstances that keeps your self-image intact. The desperate need, when your world is falling apart, to find something to blame somewhere outside yourself.
Many people resist that pull, at least some of the time. But, antisemitism is what happens when an entire society stops resisting it altogether.
Scholars have written libraries on this — religious jealousy, racial pseudoscience, economic resentment, political utility. The list goes on and on. I’ve read a lot about it, and all of it has merit. But after all of it, every single time, I come back to three words: envy, accountability, scapegoat.
They are not three separate things, but one thing with three moving parts, running in the same sequence every time — like the Ouroboros1, constantly eating its own tail, forever and all eternity.
It starts with envy. Jewish communities across wildly different countries and centuries were built. They educated their children when education wasn’t universally valued. They mastered finance and law and medicine and trade, often because those were the only fields that weren’t closed to them. And the people around them looked at what they built and, instead of asking what could be learned from it, felt something darker. The success got reframed as proof of conspiracy because conspiracy is easier to live with than envy.
Then comes the accountability failure. The resentment turns inward for one uncomfortable moment and then immediately doesn’t. It gets pushed out. A man losing his job doesn’t sit with the fact that he was late every day and produced nothing of value. A government doesn’t sit with the corruption it chose and the institutions it gutted. A civilization doesn’t sit with the decades of decisions that hollowed it out from the inside. They all find the same exit. The same door that has been standing open for 3,000 years.
The Jews were always available for that role — visible enough to point at and, for most of history, small enough to point at without much risk. That’s the scapegoat. The oldest accountability bypass in human history.
We don’t have to look far to see that exact same reflex alive and well and flexing right now. We’ve built an entire culture around it.
We give children participation trophies so nobody has to feel the pain of losing. We tell them effort is the same as achievement and then wonder why they’re unprepared for a world that disagrees. But the kids aren’t even the most telling part. Watch the parents.
A child fails a class; the teacher is incompetent. A child racks up unexcused absences; the school’s policy is unreasonable. A child can’t keep up, can’t focus, can’t follow basic instructions — certainly not because of anything happening or not happening at home, certainly not because the parent hasn’t shown up in any meaningful way. It’s the teacher, the administration, the system. Anyone and anything except the person raising that child and the choices being made inside that house every single day.
The teacher becomes the scapegoat. The school becomes the scapegoat. And the parent walks away with their self-image perfectly intact and their child completely unprepared for what’s coming.
Then we medicate the discomfort away. Difficulties become a diagnosis. Uncomfortable emotions become a disorder with a prescription attached to it. That’s not to dismiss genuine mental illness, which is real and deserves real treatment. It’s an observation about what happens when a culture becomes so allergic to sitting with hard feelings that it has industrialized the avoidance of them.
When accountability becomes optional, when self-reflection becomes something you can just medicate your way out of, when every struggle demands an external explanation, you don’t build resilience. You build a population that has never once had to ask what role they played in their own circumstances.
This is the culture that antisemitism grows in — not because bad parenting or over-medication creates antisemites. Because a society that has made the outsourcing of personal responsibility into a virtue has no defense against the oldest scapegoat in history. The machine is already running. It just needs a target.
And it always finds one.
Maybe this is a “duh” moment for some people. Maybe there are historians and lifelong students of this subject who arrived here decades before I did and are reading this thinking, welcome, we’ve been waiting. That’s fine. I’m not embarrassed to be late to a theory if the theory is honest.
Because I kept looking for something deeper. Something that justified the centuries of study and the libraries full of analysis devoted to explaining this. Surely it couldn’t be this simple. Surely there had to be more underneath it.
But the more I read, the more I write, the deeper into rabbit holes I go, the simpler it gets: a failure, deep-rooted, long-cultivated, deliberately passed down through generations of indoctrination until it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like inherited truth.
And at the center of that failure, feelings — hurt feelings, wounded pride, bruised ego, the unbearable human experience of coming up short and needing somewhere to put it. Whether it’s a peasant in medieval Spain or a man typing in a comment section in 2025, the raw material is the same. And when enough people are feeling it at the same time, it stops being personal. It goes collective, the blame pools and organizes and dresses itself up in ideology and religion and political theory and calls itself something legitimate.
That’s what cognitive dissonance does: It protects the self-image at any cost, even at the cost of truth.
What we are living through right now is not some ancient irrational hatred nobody can explain. It is a massive moral failure — a catastrophic, collective, generational failure of accountability playing out in real time at a scale that should make every thinking person stop and take a cold, hard look in the mirror. It isn’t complicated, it’s just ugly. And ugly things are hard to look at directly, which is exactly how they survive.
Even when the evidence shows up anyway, when it’s undeniable and documented and stacked in plain sight without room for interpretation, people still don’t change their minds. They dig in harder and double down.
The avoidance of the mirror is so total that truth becomes impervious to itself. Facts don’t land. Evidence doesn’t move anyone. The story just closes around the lie and seals it shut.
Because being wrong isn’t just an inconvenience it’s a threat to everything. To admit the Jews weren’t responsible for the plague, the financial collapse, the lost job, the fallen civilization, means admitting that one destroyed innocent people for a story they made up to protect their ego. That’s not something people absorb and move on from; that’s a mirror nobody wants to stand in front of.
So they don’t. They find new information that confirms what they already believe. They find louder voices saying the same thing. They build entire communities around a shared wrongness because wrongness with enough company becomes truth. The propaganda doesn’t survive because it’s convincing; it survives because abandoning it costs too much. It would mean taking everything they put on the Jews and putting it back where it belongs: on themselves, on their leaders, on their choices, on the society they actually built.
Almost nobody in history has been willing to pay that price. So the lie gets passed down generation to generation, repackaged for the new era. Each new generation inherits not just the prejudice but the thinking that makes it necessary — the inability to be wrong, the terror of the mirror, the comfort of a story where someone else is always to blame.
Three-thousand years of that, and counting.
The Jews have been paying for humanity’s inability to look in the mirror since before recorded history. Until the mirror stops being the scariest thing in the room, the oldest excuse in the world will remain the reflection.
An ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, representing eternity, cyclicality, and the unity of opposites
That´s exactly what I told a f*ckpiece at a Berlin Underground Station who attacked and insulted me "because" I was wearing an Israel Flag.
I shouted at him very loudly (in German):"Jew Hate is only for pitiful b*tches like you who don´t get along with themselves".
The audience applauded.
But I think it was only for the show. Which ends at latest when they have to look in the mirror themselves.
My fellow jews: if nothing else , say Never Again to traveling to Spain. Between the Inquisition and their butchery in the new world and now their choosing to side with hamas and Iran, not seeing or spending time in Spain is a sacrifice all proud jews can make.