I have been arguing for nearly a year now that the common denominator of antisemitism - left, right, Arab, Christian or whatever - comes from Jews not fitting inside the paradigms of each group's philosophies. Jews, or Judaism, or Israel are particularistic when philosophies demand universalism, victims who became victors which makes binary frameworks break, or simply a people who survived when other philosophies predicted they cannot last. Philosophers prize cohesiveness in their theories, and Jews often prove the thinking is incoherent. Rather than update their frameworks to explain Jews, philosophies would rather get rid of the Jews to keep their frameworks intact.
But there is another response that can be made in response to those pesky Jews: create a cohesive philosophy whose entire purpose is to demonize Jews.
This is what Abdul Wahab al-Messiri has done.
The brilliant
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour traces the ideology of al-Messiri as described in his eight volume
Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, and what emerges is not crude prejudice but a fully systematized metaphysical indictment. Messiri did not stumble into antisemitism. He built it.
Critical Theory provides a particularly fertile environment for this dynamic, not because it is inherently antisemitic but because of its structure. Its central move is unmasking. It claims surface appearances conceal hidden domination and institutions encode power. The moral hero exposes the concealed logic beneath the visible order. Once this becomes the default intellectual posture, anomalies do not falsify the framework; they intensify the search for deeper concealment.
If applied to Jews, this sounds a lot like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, doesn't it?
Messiri takes the crude antisemitism of 19th century Eastern Europe and makes it compatible with the most trendy philosophical theories. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason, and Heideggerian and existential critiques of modernity, he relocates the source of Western domination from abstract rationality to Judaism itself. The hidden structure that Critical Theory sought to expose becomes Jewish metaphysics. Zionism becomes the distilled expression of modernity’s will to dominate. The Jewish narrative of chosenness is recast as the original civilizational pathology from which Western imperialism, capitalism, liberalism and even Nazism supposedly flow.
This is not medieval demonology in religious language. It is medieval demonology translated into the vocabulary of twentieth-century critical philosophy.
The result is a philosophy in which antisemitism is not an emotional reflex but the organizing principle. Jews do not merely fail to fit the paradigm. They explain why the paradigm is necessary. They occupy the structural position of hidden power more elegantly than any other candidate, precisely because antisemitic tradition has prepared that slot for a thousand years. Critical Theory’s emphasis on concealed domination and antisemitism’s emphasis on clandestine Jewish influence converge with remarkable ease.
Before reading this article, I had thought that this encyclopedia was just an encyclopedia. It is often reviewed and referenced in Arabic news media and op-eds. I didn't realize there was an entire philosophical framework behind it.
Messiri’s influence matters. His encyclopedia is widely cited in Arab intellectual circles and has shaped this generation of educated discourse. He provides a coherent architecture in which hostility to Israel and Judaism is not simply political but metaphysical. In his system, opposing Zionism is an act of universal emancipation. Violence becomes resistance against the Logos of domination. The Palestinian cause becomes a transcendent symbol around which history itself is morally organized.
So far, I see little evidence that Messiri's philosophy has been accepted in Western universities. It is still relatively new. When he is studied it is usually in Middle Eastern Studied departments. But the fact that it is coherent means there is little in the way of "progressive" scholars to start adopting it - it is a socially acceptable philosophy to justify Jew hatred, and something like that will not remain isolated for long.
When that happens, the antisemitic Right might be in the forefront of its mainstreaming, since it is already close to their conspiracy theories about Jews.
I began my philosophical project in order to dismantle antisemitism by identifying the broken assumptions that generate it. What Mansour’s essay reveals is a different challenge. There exists an intellectual tradition in which antisemitism is not a byproduct of philosophical incoherence but its deliberate center. Instead of eliminating Jews to preserve a theory, Messiri reconstructed theory to eliminate Jews conceptually. He did not defend a fragile paradigm against anomaly. He designed a paradigm in which the anomaly becomes the ultimate explanation.
If antisemitism can arise from philosophical systems that cannot tolerate Jewish particularity, it can also arise from systems that define Jewish particularity as the concealed engine of evil. The first problem is rigidity. The second is design. Both demand response, but they are not the same adversary.
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