The Strange Connection Between Antisemitism and Argentina

To radical ideologues, Jews and Argentines commit the same unforgivable sin.

image: provided by author

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This is a guest essay by Andres Spokoiny, President and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.

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

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Jewish communities have often persuaded themselves that there was a peculiar affinity between Judaism and the countries in which we have had made our home.

German Jews built an entire philosophy around that conviction. In 1915, German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen wrote an essay entitled “Deutschtum und Judentum” (“Germanness and Jewishness”), arguing that the ethical aspirations of Germany and Judaism were not merely compatible but profoundly consonant.

French Jews found a similar harmony between Judaism and the universal ideals of the Republic.

American Jews went further still; they saw the American experiment as the materialization of traits that were eminently Jewish, like freedom of conscience, pluralism, and the immigrant experience.

I always regarded these exercises with the affectionate skepticism one reserves for other people’s provincial vanities. Every Jewish community, it seemed, eventually convinced itself that its adopted country was uniquely attuned to the Jewish experience.

Then, Argentina became the villain of the World Cup, and I caught myself doing exactly the same thing — not because the hostility directed at a successful football team is remotely comparable to antisemitism (it isn’t), but because I suddenly recognized the same intellectual mechanism at work.

It appears that Argentines and Jews are guilty of the same thing: the refusal of reality to fit into neat ideological categories.

That realization came gradually. At first, the accusations against Argentina were almost funny. Figures whose rhetoric about Israel and Jews has long relied on antisemitic tropes suddenly discovered an intense interest in FIFA refereeing. Disputed Video Assistant Referee decisions became evidence that Argentina was “protected.” Lionel Messi ceased to be merely the greatest footballer of his generation and became the beneficiary of a vast political conspiracy.

Somewhere between Argentina’s victory over Egypt and its defeat of Switzerland, the defending world champion stopped being a football team and became a theory of history. Argentina’s victories became evidence of colonial privilege, white supremacy, Zionism, FIFA corruption, and American hegemony.

In one especially imaginative if predictable version, a conspiracy has linked Lionel Messi, President of Argentina Javier Milei, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Mossad. Football has always inspired paranoia, but this was something different. Ninety minutes of sport had become a complete explanation of the world.

That was the moment I stopped laughing.

One grows accustomed to conspiracy theories about Jews. They are as old as the diaspora itself. But why should Argentina provoke the same style of thinking? Why were commentators steeped in post-colonial theory openly rooting for England — a nation that built the largest colonial empire in history — against Argentina in the name of anti-colonialism? Why has Argentina suddenly become the embodiment of whiteness, colonialism, and privilege?

The answer, I think, lies deeper than football and concerns the essence of totalitarianism.

Extremist ideologies require clean moral categories: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and brown, victim and victimizer, virtuous and guilty. Their power depends upon the assumption that every individual and every nation can be assigned, once and for all, to one side of these binaries. The categories are not merely descriptive; they become moral descriptors.

If the totalitarian worldview is based on immutable categories, its true enemy is not the dissenter, but the exception.

Argentina is one such exception. It belongs unmistakably to the Global South. Economically, politically, and historically it has experienced many of the challenges associated with the developing world. Yet culturally, it bears the unmistakable imprint of Europe.

It is a nation built largely by immigrants (Italians, Spaniards, Jews, Poles, Russians, Irish and many others) whose descendants today are often perceived as “white.” It was shaped by colonialism, yet contemporary Argentines do not resemble the archetypal colonized people imagined by post-colonial theory. They are too European to fit comfortably into the progressive imagination of Latin America, yet too Latin American ever to be regarded as fully European, as countless Argentines dismissed as sudacas in Spain have discovered.

Nor does Argentina fit comfortably into contemporary narratives of victimhood. It welcomed millions of immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution. Its Constitution famously extends “the benefits of liberty ... to all the people of the world who wish to inhabit Argentine soil.” Yet, because so many of those refugees happened to be the aforementioned Europeans, their suffering has become strangely invisible within today’s racialized moral vocabulary.

Argentina irritates because it cannot be placed in a neat box on the ideological map, and thus proves that the map itself is inadequate.

This becomes especially apparent in the language of identity politics. We are constantly asked to declare “where we are speaking from,” whether our experience is one of privilege or oppression, whether we occupy the position of colonizer or colonized. To an Argentine, these dichotomies are almost impossible to answer. The categories overlap. They contradict one another. They refuse to produce a single moral identity, thus committing the cardinal sin against extremism: the refusal to be neatly categorized.

And that, I suspect, is the point of contact with anti-Jewish hatred.

Jews are glitches in the matrix. We are too white for the radical Left and too non-white for the radical Right. We are undeniably victims of one of history’s longest and most persistent hatreds, yet we also possess agency and power, which means we no longer fit comfortably into modern narratives in which the victim is always powerless. We are a religion, but not merely a religion; a nation, but not merely a nation; an ethnicity, a civilization, a culture, and a people, none of which adequately defines us on its own.

Like Argentina, the Jews are an exception, and exceptions expose bad theories, like the anomalies in planetary orbits that ended up showing that the geocentric paradigm was wrong and the Sun didn’t revolve around the Earth.

That is why extremists hate anomalies more than they hate their enemies. The existence of a people who escapes their conceptual boxes threatens something far more important than a political argument. It threatens the categories themselves, and thus their entire conceptual edifice.

Totalitarian thinking does not merely classify the world; after all, every system classifies reality. The distinctive feature of totalitarianism is that it moralizes and essentializes those classifications. It transforms descriptive categories into immutable moral identities. Once a person has been assigned to the right box, every action becomes evidence of a predetermined essence.

If the world is divided neatly between “oppressors” and “oppressed,” what does one do with a people who have been victims of relentless persecution, yet have also rebuilt their national life? If history is simply a struggle between “colonizers” and “colonized,” what does one do with a nation like Argentina, born from European immigration, shaped by mestizaje (people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry), scarred by colonialism, and yet unmistakably part of the Global South?

Every exception weakens the explanatory power of the ideology. Every ambiguity exposes the inadequacy of the theory itself. And that is why totalitarians consider complexity itself subversive.

American Jewish historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarianism “strives ... to transform human nature itself.” That ambition begins by denying the most obvious fact about human beings: that they are irreducibly plural. But the totalitarian mind cannot tolerate this. It demands that one identity eclipse all the others. Everything else becomes secondary, if not illegitimate.

History provides many examples. The Nazi regime reduced millions of people to racial categories from which there could be no escape. Conversion, patriotism, military service, cultural achievement — none of it mattered. Jewishness was transformed from one aspect of a person’s identity into his entire essence.

Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union committed a similar reduction, though in the language of class rather than race. Entire populations were labeled “kulaks,” “bourgeois elements,” or “reactionaries,” rendering individual biographies irrelevant. Once the category had been assigned, the person disappeared.

British Jewish philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin captured the danger with characteristic precision: “To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.” Uniforms erase distinctions. They replace individual lives with collective identities. They promise clarity at the cost of truth, and in many cases, at the cost of life itself.

Reality, however, is stubbornly untidy. People belong to many communities at once. They have conflicting loyalties, evolve over time, inherit contradictory traditions, and often refuse to fit neatly into the categories devised by political ideologies. Nations are no different. They are mixtures of conquest and refuge, triumph and tragedy, memory and reinvention. They cannot be reduced to a single moral essence any more than individuals can.

This is, ultimately, what distinguishes liberal democracy from totalitarianism.

Liberal democracy does not deny the existence of categories, but it denies their finality. It recognizes that human beings are more than their race, class, religion, nationality, or any other single attribute. It assumes that political institutions must accommodate this ambiguity rather than abolish it.

Totalitarianism works in the opposite way. It seeks certainty through simplification. It divides the world into mutually exclusive camps and insists that reality conforms to the scheme. When reality refuses, it is reality (not the ideology) that must be suppressed.

That is why totalitarian movements invariably become coercive. If people refuse to inhabit the identities assigned to them, they must be pressured, shamed, reeducated, excluded or, in the darkest chapters of history, physically eliminated. The progression is all but inevitable. A worldview built on rigid identities cannot tolerate those who escape them.

Jews and Argentines, each in their own very different way, have become reminders that reality is more complicated than ideology allows. Neither can be adequately described by the moral binaries that increasingly dominate our political discourse. Neither fits comfortably into the role assigned by those who insist on viewing history as a struggle between immutable categories. Their very existence challenges the idea that identity can be reduced to a single defining characteristic.

For that reason, neither Jews nor Argentines should surrender the definition of who we are to those determined to flatten them into ideological caricatures. We should resist the temptation to simplify ourselves in order to satisfy the expectations of others, whether those expectations come wrapped in admiration or hostility. We should not apologize for our complexity, but affirm it.

Our strength lies precisely in what totalitarian minds find intolerable: our layered histories, our multiple loyalties, and our capacity to belong to more than one world at once.

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