We've discussed how antisemitism is a result of Jews not fitting into the simplistic binaries of many philosophies and how that makes Jews a threat that must be eliminated. But it still does not explain why ordinary people - people who do not think in ideological terms at all - are so drawn to antisemitism. Why do hundreds of thousands of people eagerly attend anti-Israel demonstrations while showing little interest in almost any other cause? What emotional need does modern antisemitism fill?
Modern Western societies have become extraordinarily good at explaining how the world works. They are far less capable of explaining why anything should matter. This has been the primary goal of traditional religions: they provide moral structure, a sense of purpose, shared rituals, communal belonging, and a path toward moral elevation.
As religious belief declined, those psychological and social functions did not disappear. The human need for meaning remained.
A strictly secular, materialist worldview struggles to offer meaning. If science can explain why we act how we do to so many people, then what good is acting morally? If we are deterministic machines and life has no inherent meaning, then what difference does it make how we act? We might as well be selfish and optimize the world for our personal pleasure. Some philosophies try to replace meaning with reason - "if everyone acted selfishly then everyone would suffer" - but reason alone rarely provides the meaning that spirituality does.
There is a deep need inside us to feel morally oriented in the universe, to participate in something larger than ourselves, and to know where we stand in relation to good and evil. When that need is unmet, it does not vanish. It looks elsewhere.
Modern ideological movements often recreate the form of religion without acknowledging it. They offer a sacred story (oppression vs. liberation), a cosmic struggle (good vs. evil), moral status, a teleology (history itself arcing towards the good.) And activists extend this into sacrament: marches as ritual, slogans as prayer, chanting as gospel music. Chanting together with hundreds of others produces the felt experience of moral elevation, even when no moral action follows.
The modern secularists fill a need that people have for a life beyond themselves But they do not demand what traditional religions do: obligation. No repentance is required, no inward change is demanded. One becomes “good” by simply showing up, standing on the right side, repeating the right phrases, chanting the right slogans. Being a part of a larger movement, marching together with hundreds of others, feels meaningful even when it has no underlying meaning. It feels like moral elevation without demanding moral actions.
This feeling of being morally right - or even morally superior - without obligation is immensely attractive. This is spirituality stripped of introspection.
For such systems to work at scale, they require moral clarity. Complexity does not mobilize passion. Binary frameworks - oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and indigenous, righteous and evil - provide instant moral legibility. They reduce the world to a story that can be inhabited emotionally without the burden of doubt.
Reality, however, resists binaries. And when it does, something must be forced into the role of the villain to preserve the story. And the story - in modern parlance, the narrative - is central. To understand why, it helps to look at a seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the modern use of the term “Turtle Island.”
“Turtle Island” appears today as a capitalized proper name for North America, frequently taught in universities and invoked in activist and academic settings as an ancient indigenous term that predates colonial naming. It is a modern myth.
Certain Indigenous creation stories, primarily among Algonquian and Haudenosaunee peoples, describe the entire world emerging on the back of a turtle after a primordial flood. The application of “Turtle Island” specifically to North America as a proper noun is new, popularized in the 1970s by non-indigenous writers and activists seeking a decolonized vocabulary. It has since been embraced by some First Peoples activists and institutionalized within academia, often presented as a recovered ancestral name rather than a contemporary symbolic adaptation.
The irony is striking. A modern, activist-driven myth, shaped by contemporary political needs, is treated as historical fact by institutions that pride themselves on empiricism, skepticism, and resistance to religious mythmaking. Questioning its provenance is often treated not as historical inquiry but as moral transgression.
A myth was needed to support an ideology. So one was created. Modernity needs myths as much as the ancients did.
Antisemitism operates in precisely the same way, but with far greater historical depth and emotional power.
Jews have occupied a unique role in Western moral imagination for nearly two thousand years. In Christian societies, Jews were not merely another minority. They were cast as the theological counterpoint to Christianity itself: the people who rejected salvation, clung to law instead of grace, and embodied resistance to redemption. The Jew became not just a social outsider, but a metaphysical problem.
Over centuries, this produced a durable archetype: the Jew as the obstinate resistor to moral resolution, the hidden corrupter, the eternal outsider whose continued existence threatened the coherence of the dominant worldview. Even as explicit Christian belief declined, this archetype did not disappear. Western culture, literature, and moral storytelling remained saturated with it.
Modern secular ideologies emerged from societies deeply shaped by Christian categories, even as they rejected Christian theology. The old antagonist was stripped of religious language and recast in political and ideological terms. Zionists replaced Christ-killers. Israel replaced the synagogue. Power replaced heresy. But the role remained intact. The myth of the Jew as the evil Other never went away; it just morphed because it was still needed by modern ideologies.
This helps explain why Western antisemitism differs fundamentally from traditional Muslim attitudes toward Jews. In classical Islamic societies, Jews were subordinate and restricted, but they were not cosmic enemies. They were despised second-class citizens, not metaphysical villains. The idea of Jews as a uniquely malevolent force entered much of the Muslim world through European Christian influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, importing blood libels and conspiracy myths wholesale.
In the West, by contrast, the Jew had already been trained into the role of the villain. When modern secular movements needed an enemy capable of embodying illegitimacy, corruption, and moral obstruction all at once, the figure was already available. And this makes recruitment that much easier since the Jew already was associated with the role in the myth.
Jews are particularly useful for this role because they resist simplification. They are indigenous and diasporic, particularist and universalist, ancient and modern, religious and national. They persist across time in ways that disrupt linear stories of progress and redemption. In mythic frameworks that depend on clean binaries, this complexity is intolerable.
Flattening Jews into a single dimension solves the problem. Once Jews, Israelis, or “Zionists” are cast into familiar villain archetypes - the shadowy power, the colonial usurper, the hidden manipulator - the moral story becomes legible again. Popular culture has trained audiences for decades to recognize these figures instantly, rewarding recognition with emotional certainty. The narrative resumes, complete with righteous heroes and sanctioned hostility.
Antisemitism thus functions as a complete secular religion. It offers a sacred narrative, a cosmic struggle, communal belonging, ritual participation, and a promise of redemption. What it does not require is self-examination, restraint, or moral accountability. Redemption comes through opposition, not transformation.
This is why antisemitism escalates. The Jew as unparalleled evil is the myth that keeps these ideologies alive. The "apartheid" slander, the "genocide" libel, are not based on fact - they are modern myths that are too attractive to be defeated by simple facts, just like the Turtle Island myth. It is social engineering disguised as science, religion without introspection. Jewish complexity must be denied and Jewish existence itself becomes intolerable, because it threatens the coherence of the story. And coherence is more important than truth.
Antisemitism remains attractive not because people are uniquely hateful, but because modern societies have failed to provide meaning without illusion. In the absence of demanding spiritual frameworks, people gravitate toward substitutes that feel moral without being costly. Antisemitism checks every emotional box that religion once did while shedding truth, humility, and responsibility.
That is why it keeps returning, even among those most convinced they have transcended myth.
Friday, December 19, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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