Judaism is Not About Antisemitism

After a wave of pogroms shook Russia in the early 1880s, the Zionist thinker and physician Leon Pinsker wrote that the Jew appeared in the eyes of the world as “a ghostlike apparition of a living corpse.” It was a fitting metaphor. The Jew of his day was neither fully alive nor fully dead — suspended between assimilation and distinctiveness, homeland and exile, purpose and passivity. The world, Pinsker argued, could not reconcile the presence of a people so long divorced from their land, so long removed from their mission, and so visibly unable to explain their own role among the nations.

Pinsker’s diagnosis of antisemitism was that it is a chronic, multisystem disease. Its symptoms — the charges that Jews were beggars, exploiters, vagrants, or conspirators — were beside the point. To treat those accusations individually would be as futile as treating a fever without addressing the infection. The real illness, Pinsker argued, was fear — fear of the stateless, landless Jew who lived among the nations but belonged fully to none. His prescription was not to plead for tolerance, but to demand dignity. The Jews, he argued, must “auto-emancipate” and take responsibility for themselves, their identity, their future.

More than a century later, antisemitism — what Pinsker called Judeophobia — persists across cultures, ideologies, and continents. As Pinsker rightly understood, antisemitism is not a glitch. It’s a feature — a condition — of Jewish existence.

Contending with this condition means confronting the very nature of the thing many modern Jews have resisted: chosenness.

A recent Voice of the People survey asked more than 10,000 Jews what most concerns them. The top response by far was rising antisemitism. That has now become the dominant frame of Jewish discourse. Billions are poured into Holocaust education and “fighting antisemitism.”

But if antisemitism is a chronic condition, as Pinsker argued, the best that can be hoped for is remission, not a cure. Like the return of a dormant cancer, antisemitism is not a problem to be solved once and for all, but an alarm to be heeded.

What I want to propose is that antisemitism is simply one expression of chosenness — the reality that Jews are perpetually marked as different, whether they choose that difference or not. When Jews experience this form of chosenness, they can treat it as either something that is happening to them, which leads them to fight it, or something happening for them: as an alarm reminding them of their chosenness.

If antisemitism functions as an alarm, an inherent aspect of the condition of chosenness, then Jews must respond to this wakeup call in the most effective way: not by silencing the alarm or attempting to reason with it, but by rising to meet the challenge of the day. The current rise in antisemitism summons us to fulfill the active calling of chosenness, to be “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).

This biblical notion of chosenness is far less about who the Jewish people are and more about who they are called to be. As the 19th-century scholar Samuel David Luzzatto explained, “God did not choose Abraham for Abraham’s sake alone, but so that he would be the father of a holy nation. And the choosing of the nation, too, was not for their own sake, but for the sake of all humanity.”

The choice facing the Jews is therefore not whether to assimilate, which they can never fully do. It is whether to shape an identity based on passive otherness or to engage in active chosenness. The former is an act of falling victim to the discourse of antisemitism while the latter is the impulse to take up the sacred mission of the Jewish people — living with covenantal purpose, modeling a distinctive moral life, and serving as an example to all of humanity. Passive otherness, by contrast, is when Jews are made to feel different, regardless of whether they choose to model distinctiveness or run toward assimilation.

Antisemitism reminds us that we are different. But only Judaism can tell us why.

The history of the Jews can be seen as a dialectic between these two forms of separateness. What history and memory both seem to show is that when Jews actively embrace their calling as a chosen people, the condition of chosenness tends to manifest less as antisemitism and more as philosemitism. But when Jews retreat from that calling, or worse, define their identity primarily in opposition to antisemitism, the condition of chosenness manifests more intensely as antisemitism.

If antisemitism is meant as an alarm for Jews, it should be treated as an air-raid siren for everyone else. Periods of violent antisemitism often coincide with moments of heightened tension within a society. That tension usually has to do with the competing forces of progress and tradition. The historian Jeffrey Herf described the rise of Nazi Germany as “reactionary modernism” — a fusion of industrial technology with a rejection of liberal Enlightenment values. Fascist movements could embrace modern tools while longing for tribal purity. The Jew became the target of a society at war with its own identity.

But the core elements of this phenomenon predate and extend far beyond 20th-century fascism. Across history, periods of rapid technological and social change have consistently produced what we might call reactionary modernist responses — societies that struggle with a world that is rapidly changing around them and spiral into a crisis of identity. In such moments, Jews have repeatedly found themselves singled out for persecution. And it is easy to understand why. The Jews are a multi-millennia embodiment of that struggle.

While there is no justification for the scourge of antisemitism, there may be an explanation. The Jewish people have long been exemplars of what may be termed “conservative progress.” They occupy this position in the stories of several civilizations. In his commentary on Deuteronomy 32:7, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch rendered the verse as “Remember the days of yore, contemplate the changes of generations.” He explained that the Jewish mission is to remain rooted in ancient wisdom while fully engaging with new generational challenges. Jews, at their best, model how to embrace beneficial change without losing essential identity — the very challenge that reactionary modernists such as the Nazis struggle to overcome. When Jewish communities fail to model this type of synthesis — when they fail to live as an ancient people in a modern world — they undermine their very purpose of acting “for the sake of all humanity.”

In 1492, Spain, like the rest of Europe, was on the brink of transformative change. Printing presses were circulating early humanist texts, and Columbus was poised to sail west. Yet amid this promise, anxieties lurked. Venetian editor Hieronimo Squarciafico had recently warned that “printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men, who corrupted almost everything,” expressing a fear that newfound means of discovery might undermine cultural cohesion. Spain’s decision to convert or expel its Jews revealed a society convinced that new horizons could be reached only by silencing any echo of its formerly diverse soul. And while, according to some estimates, 100,000 Jews chose exile in August 1492, more than double that number chose to convert to Catholicism.

By the late 19th century, the center of Jewish life had shifted eastward. More than 5 million Jews lived in the Russian Empire. At that time, Russia was struggling to industrialize and catch up to the rest of Europe. Railroads, financial institutions, and cities expanded. New ideologies flooded in, and Jews were caught in a crosscurrent. The Orthodox rejected modernity; the maskilim (secularists) abandoned tradition. Neither approach modelled for Russia how to evolve without coming apart. Pogroms and restrictive laws followed, leading to an exodus of more than 2 million Jews between 1881 and 1914. (This was the world in which Pinsker called for auto-emancipation.)

Germany, for a time, did offer a model of Jewish balance. But as Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk warned at the beginning of the 20th century: “He [the modern Jew] will think that Berlin is Jerusalem . . . and then a storm will come.” And it did. Germany’s fusion of modern technology with ancient resentments became the most pure and terrifying reactionary modernism in history.

The age of AI that is upon us is teeming with that volatile tension, with the potential to explode into reactionary modernism. As Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit recently wrote, “We stand at the threshold of perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced.” Outlining the stakes, they continued: “This technology can usher in an age of human flourishing . . . [but also] a crisis about what it is to be human at all.”

This may well explain why antisemitism is on the rise. The AI revolution is creating the same anxieties about progress and identity that historically produced antisemitic responses. One form of reaction to identity crises of our day has been identity politics — characterized by an obsession with immutable characteristics. But the framework that casts some as innately virtuous and others as oppressive cannot hope to reclaim the essential identity of humanity. It echoes the “purity of blood” doctrine from 15th-century Spain.

With the steady decline in prominence of identity-politics frameworks, the Jewish people may, counterintuitively, be well positioned to heed the calling of Jewish chosenness by modeling a conservative progress that can help humanity navigate its identity crisis in an age of change. Jewish action is not protest or viral slogans. It is keeping Shabbat — carving out sacred time from the algorithm. It is giving tzedakah — not as charity, but justice. It is honoring parents — not as sentiment, but as a societal institution. These are practices that root us in a life of meaning and remind us what it means to be human.

People are nervous of a future in which humans are no longer the most intelligent beings. They wonder: What makes us human? What is the grounding principle of human distinctiveness, of human identity?

The reactionary modernists are ready to turn this crisis toward a familiar outcome: antisemitism. To lean into a reactive Jewish identity as the core Jewish identity, to define Jewish priorities by antisemitism, is to treat the alarm as the problem. Antisemitism is not a reminder to fight Jew-hatred. It is a wake-up call to practice and propagate Judaism.

Jewish identity and tradition have a lot to say about the latest crisis of humanity: the challenge of living and transmitting a sense of meaning in a time of vast social and economic upheaval. Taking up the mantle of chosenness now means to be proactive in offering up Jewish ideas and rituals as a toolbox. For instance, the Jewish practice of a weekly digital detox helps to facilitate uniquely human experiences that AI cannot replicate. It brings about the kind of communal bonding imperiled by the dissolution of boundaries between human and machine. Other fruits of Jewish civilization may prove deeply valuable in a transformed human landscape. By building off the wisdom of Jewish legal texts, we can forge new frameworks and ways of thinking about AI and ethics, allowing us to maintain our sense of agency in shaping technological development. Jewish law has already brought its insights and ethical principles to bear on questions presented by the advent of electricity and organ transplantation. That body of precedent and methodology expands as we continue to look to Jewish learning as a source of enduring wisdom.

When Jews secularize and wait for antisemitism to remind them of their Judaism, and then seek to “fight” it, they do nothing to solve the core problem that lies at the heart of that antisemitism — the disillusionment that society is feeling with its own identity. Only by showing how we can balance the old and the new, maintaining authentic human identity without shunning technological progress, can Jews reduce society’s anxiety and transform the condition of chosenness from antisemitism into philosemitism. This is not a time to protest our difference. It is a time to live it — on purpose, with purpose.