Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Elder of ZiyonIn Sunday's Telegraph, columnist Zoe Strimpel discusses a fascinating new theory of antisemitism from physicist and philosopher David Deutsch.
Deutsch argues that antisemitism isn't fundamentally hatred, prejudice or fear. It is something much stranger: a persistent impulse to legitimize hurting Jews, with the moral justifications invented afterward. He calls it The Pattern: “a contagious, irrational pattern of thinking about morality that has persisted for millennia, characterised by a compulsive need to legitimise hurting Jews, for being Jews.”
This explains why Jews have been accused of being capitalists and communists, warmongers and cowards, insular and dangerously influential. The accusations contradict each other because they aren't the real reason for the hostility. They are rationalizations for something that already exists.
Strimpel enthusiastically endorses Deutsch's theory, saying it explains why otherwise intelligent people adopt bizarre moral double standards when Jews are involved.
I think they're both onto something important. But there is a major missing piece.
Deutsch explicitly admits that he cannot explain two things: why Jews are the target, and why this phenomenon has survived for thousands of years across radically different societies.
Strimpel similarly observes, "Why it works like this, only in relation to Jews, is not yet explained."
I believe I have an answer.
Over the past 18 months I have been trying to answer the question of antisemitism from a different angle: why are most forms of antisemitism eliminationist? They don't just want to discriminate against Jews; they want to eliminate them altogether, whether the Jewish religion, or the Jewish people, or the Jewish nation more recently represented by Israel.
Last December, I proposed a structural definition of antisemitism based on my observation: Jews keep breaking philosophical systems.
Jews, simply by continuing to exist as Jews, demonstrate that fundamental assumptions of supposedly comprehensive worldviews are wrong.
Consider Christianity. The Church claimed to have superseded Israel and inherited its covenant. Yet the Jewish people stubbornly continued to exist, maintaining their covenant and refusing to disappear into Christianity. Jewish survival was a theological problem that demanded an explanation. Jews had to be portrayed as blind, cursed or condemned to degradation.
Consider racial Social Darwinism. If history was a struggle in which superior races survived and inferior races disappeared, how could Jews have survived thousands of years of persecution without territory or political power? The answer was to invent a special category: the Jew as parasite, surviving by exploiting supposedly superior peoples. And parasites, unlike ordinary competitors, must be eliminated.
Consider Marxism. Jewish identity and history refused to fit neatly into economic class categories. Jews could be workers or capitalists, wealthy or poor, yet remained Jews. Reducing Jewishness to an expression of bourgeois capitalism was one way to force this inconvenient reality back into the theory.
Today, consider certain versions of decolonial theory. The world is divided into indigenous peoples and foreign colonizers. But Jews are an indigenous people who returned to their ancestral homeland and rebuilt their nation. That doesn't fit the simplified framework. So Jewish indigeneity must be denied. Jews must be redefined as Europeans, foreign settlers or merely adherents of a religion with no legitimate national identity.
Universalist philosophies have a similar problem with Jewish particularism. Jews maintain obligations to their own people without denying obligations to humanity. Systems that insist on universal morality simply cannot handle a people who insist that they are a particular people, with a particular purpose. Denying Jewish particularism entails denying what makes Jews Jews.
In every case, the same thing happens. A philosophy claims to explain the world. Jews demonstrate that some of its load bearing assumptions are false. Rather than revise the philosophy to account for the evidence, its adherents redefine Jews so the philosophy can remain intact.
Or they try to get rid of them.
The problem isn't that Jews violate the rules. It's that Jews demonstrate that the rules were never correct to begin with.
This also helps explain something Deutsch does not address. He explains how ubiquitous hate for Jews is, but it really isn't. Historically, there has been practically no eliminationist antisemitism in the Far East.
He cannot explain it. My theory can. Because there is nothing about Jews that contradicts the basic tenets of Eastern thought. Jewish existence did not fundamentally threaten their explanatory systems. There was no equivalent of Christian supersessionism, no theological need to explain why Jews survived, and no inherent requirement that Jews disappear for those systems to make sense.
Modern antisemitism certainly reached East Asia, but largely through imported Western ideologies and conspiracy theories. There is nothing I am aware of that insists Jews or Judaism or Israel are an existential threat to Eastern philosophies.
Deutsch argues that the impulse to legitimize hurting Jews comes first, and the ideologies provide excuses afterward. I think the relationship often works the other way around. An ideology encounters something it cannot explain. Its adherents are unwilling to concede that the ideology is flawed. Jews become the exception that must be discredited, redefined or eliminated.
Once that happens, Deutsch's Pattern takes over. Hurting Jews becomes not merely permissible but virtuous, because Jews have been defined as an obstacle to truth, justice, salvation or progress.
This is why antisemitism is so virulent. It is a threat to people's worldview. The people who cannot tolerate Jews (or Judaism or Israel) think that they are defending their entire self-conception. Questioning their own core philosophies is inconceivable. They must rid themselves of the source of the threat.
An ideology is structurally antisemitic if it requires the negation, erasure, or redefinition of Jewishness, as a people, a nation, a covenant, or a moral tradition, in order to remain internally coherent.
That definition provides a way to identify antisemitism before it produces overt hatred or violence. We can examine an ideology and ask whether it can accommodate Jews as they actually are, rather than as the ideology requires them to be.
Deutsch is right that conventional definitions of antisemitism are inadequate. But I think his Pattern describes what happens after a more fundamental philosophical failure.
Perhaps the real mystery is not why so many different societies have found reasons to hate Jews. It is why so many supposedly universal explanations of humanity cannot accommodate the Jewish people without breaking.
And that may be the real litmus test for any philosophy: if it must deny the reality of Jews in order to preserve its own coherence, then it is not just a wrong philosophy: it is potentially a dangerous philosophy, no matter how moral it claims to be.
