This is the second in a series on Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country (Penguin Random House, 2026). The first post examined four specific factual errors in the Palestine chapters. This post examines the sourcing structure that enables those errors.

The book has 1,914 endnotes. Several reviews have cited the number as evidence of research depth. It appears in the book’s write-ups as a signal of scholarly seriousness.

The number is real. What it answers is another matter.

Chapter 17, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country,” has more footnotes per thousand words than any other chapter in the book, including the Holocaust chapters, running at approximately 111 per thousand words. The Palestine chapters, as a block (Chapters 16 through 18), average 92 footnotes per thousand words, compared with 35 for the early Bund history chapters and 67 for the Holocaust chapters. By any measure, the Palestine material is the most heavily cited in the book.

Seventy-seven percent of the footnotes in Chapters 16 through 18 cite Bundist and Polish sources: Bernard Goldstein’s memoirs, the papers of Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, Bernard Johnpoll’s political history of the Bund, the Yiddish press, JTA wire reports on events in Warsaw, and Jack Jacobs on Bundist counterculture. These are citations for the Warsaw content in those chapters, and that content is well-sourced. When Crabapple writes about what the Bund did in Poland in the 1930s, she has the documentation.

The Palestine-specific claims in those same chapters, Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, the Histadrut, the Haganah, and Musa Kazim, rest on approximately ten citations in total. This is the 5 percent doing the contested work, while the 77 percent supplies the appearance of rigor.

The first post in this series examined four of those ten citations in detail. Each one misrepresented its source. Here, the focus is on the citation that best illustrates the structural problem: Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (University of California Press, 1996).

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Comrades and Enemies, misread

Chapter 17 describes the Histadrut as “a Jewish-only labor union that locked Palestinians out of the Zionist economy.” The endnote cites Lockman.

Comrades and Enemies is the most sustained scholarly treatment of Arab-Jewish labor relations in Mandatory Palestine, drawing on Hebrew, Arabic, and English archives across four decades of labor history. His thesis statement, page 83, reads:

“The result was a complex series of interactions, a pattern of cooperation and conflict deeply enmeshed within, but always seeking to transcend, its larger political context, the Zionist-Palestinian struggle for control of the country.”

This is not a description of a simple lockout. Lockman spends four hundred pages documenting the Palestine Labor League, the Histadrut’s vehicle for organizing Arab workers, and the ways in which Jewish labor organizers genuinely believed in Arab-Jewish worker solidarity while simultaneously serving a Zionist project that structurally undermined that solidarity. His conclusion is that the labor-Zionist movement “consistently declared its adherence to the principle of friendship, solidarity, and unity between Jewish and Arab workers in Palestine,” stated not as an endorsement but as an accurate description of what the movement said, set against the complicated reality of what it did.

Crabapple has cited the scholar most sympathetic to Jewish-Arab labor cooperation in the available literature to support a claim of total exclusion.

The irony goes further. Deborah Bernstein’s Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (SUNY Press, 2000), which covers the same ground from a more critical angle, explicitly criticizes Lockman for focusing too heavily on cases of cooperation. Bernstein’s central conclusion is that “the most salient outcome was the drive of Jewish labor for organization and separation, for closure, and for the construction of boundaries.” She writes that Lockman, “by confining himself to those cases of direct interaction and cooperation between Jews and Arabs, he seems, much of the time, to ignore the separation between them, so pervasive in the lives of both.”

The scholarly position is this: Lockman is criticized by peers for potentially underplaying the importance of separation by focusing on cases of cooperation. Crabapple uses Lockman to support a claim of total exclusion. The source she chose to support the simple lockout is the source her peers say may be too optimistic about cooperation.

The citation is from the wrong decade

The Histadrut claim also cites Jonathan Frankel’s Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1981) at pages 385-86.

Chapter 8 of Prophecy and Politics covers Russian-Jewish youth in Palestine between 1904 and 1914. The Histadrut was founded in December 1920. Pages 385-86 fall in a chapter that predates the institution by six years. Whatever Frankel says on those pages cannot describe the Histadrut’s exclusionary policies, because the Histadrut did not exist when those pages were written.

This is a different kind of error from the Lockman inversion. The Lockman error requires checking what the source argues. The Frankel error requires only checking when the chapter ends.

Of the ten Palestine-specific citations in Chapters 16 through 18, here is the status of each:

Citation Problems:

• Segev, A State at Any Cost, p.49 — appears accurate

• Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929, p.209 — individual policemen become institutional Haganah policy

• Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, pp.385-86 — predates the Histadrut by six years

• Lockman, Comrades and Enemies — source argues the opposite

• Kijek, “Violence as Political Experience,” p.257 — cited for a militia that didn’t exist until 1940

• Warsaw Institute web article (2018) — non-scholarly partisan source; contradicts the claim

• Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine — PLO political pamphlet, not scholarship

• Lundsten, “Wall Politics” (1978) — appears accurate

• CJPME advocacy fact sheet (2022) — advocacy NGO used for empirical claim

• Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall” (1923) — primary source mischaracterized by omission

Eight of ten Palestine-specific citations have confirmed or significant problems. Two appear to be correctly used.

What the architecture does

A reader moving through Chapter 17 encounters a densely footnoted text. The footnotes are real. The sources are real. The Warsaw material, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of what those footnotes source, is carefully documented. The reader who glances at the endnotes sees Goldstein, Erlich, Johnpoll, Jacobs, the Yiddish press, JTA archives. The page looks like serious historical work.

What the architecture conceals is the switch. When the chapter moves from Warsaw to Palestine, from the Bund’s activities to claims about Zionism, the Histadrut, and the Iron Wall, the quality of the sourcing changes dramatically. The footnotes continue. They remain dense. But they are now citing a source that argues the opposite of the claim, a chapter from a book that predates the institution being described, a web article from a Polish nationalist foundation, and a primary source from which the conclusion has been removed.

The density is uniform. The quality is not. Because the reader has no way of knowing from the page that 77 percent of the footnotes source the Warsaw content and 5 percent source the contested Palestine claims, the impression is one of consistent scholarly rigor across the entire chapter.

The credibility earned in Warsaw is spent in Haifa. The reader cannot see the transaction.

A note on the scholars she chose

The Lockman inversion is not a case of reaching for an obscure or marginal source. Lockman is a respected scholar; Comrades and Enemies is a serious contribution to the historiography of Palestine. The same is true of Hillel Cohen, whose Year Zero is a genuinely critical account of Jewish conduct in 1929, and of Jabotinsky’s essay, which she cites from the primary text.

The sourcing problem cannot be explained by careless selection. Even choosing the most sympathetic available scholars, and Lockman is the most sympathetic on Arab-Jewish labor relations, she still had to distort what they said to make the specific claims she needed. The claim exceeded the source. In each case, the reader has no way of knowing this without going back to the source itself.

Next in the series: The Iron Wall, read in full — what Jabotinsky actually argued and why the omission matters.

At the end of the last post, we left the Nazi physicist Johannes Stark writing in the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps that even a victory over racial antisemitism would be only a “partial victory” — “we also have to eradicate the Jewish spirit, whose blood can flow just as undisturbed today as before, if its carriers hold beautiful Aryan passes.” The Jew who had converted, whose grandparents had been baptized, whose family had been German for generations: still requiring extermination, because Jewish identity was a permanent, heritable essence that no individual act of assimilation could dissolve.

This was 1936. Here is Bernard of Clairvaux in 1134, writing to oppose the election of Anacletus II as Pope: “It is an insult to Christ that the offspring of a Jew has occupied the chair of Peter.”

Anacletus’s great-grandfather had been a Jew. Four generations of Christian practice, and Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of the twelfth century, co-author of the Second Crusade, the theological voice of his age, still considered the man’s Jewish ancestry disqualifying. The logic was identical to Stark’s: Jewish identity was an ineradicable, heritable essence that baptism could not erase, conversion could not dissolve, and generational distance could not extinguish. The vocabulary in 1134 was theological. In 1936, it was biological. The structure was the same.

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Hitler did not invent the cosmic enemy framing. It was waiting for him, constructed across fifteen centuries of Christian theological anti-Judaism, codified into legal-administrative infrastructure by the Spanish Inquisition, and transmitted through the Enlightenment’s secular reformulations into the racial science vocabulary the Nazis finally adopted. What changed in the twentieth century was the organizational capacity and state power available to act on a structure that had been in place for centuries.

I. The Theological Foundation

Christianity’s relationship to Judaism is structurally unlike any other religious antagonism in history. Christianity was born from Judaism, defined itself against Judaism, and required Judaism to persist, as defeated, as dispersed, as witness to Christian truth, in order to confirm its own claims. This produced a theological position of extraordinary systemic complexity: Jews were simultaneously necessary and accursed, preserved and persecuted, inside and outside civilization.

The deicide charge is the foundation. The accusation that Jews were collectively responsible for killing Christ, that they bore this guilt across all generations, is the specific mechanism by which Jews were assigned a position of cosmic rather than ordinary guilt. Not simply wrong about theology. Not exclusively obstinate in refusing the Messiah. But killers of God. The charge does something no other religious accusation in Western Christianity does: it assigns an entire people a unique ontological crime with no parallel in the moral universe. It places them categorically outside the normal human community defined by the possibility of redemption.

The Church Fathers systematized this into a comprehensive portrait. Wistrich summarizes the result in The Longest Hatred: “No other religion has so consistently attributed to them a universal, cosmic quality of evil, depicting them as children of the Devil, followers of Antichrist or as the ‘synagogue of Satan’.” Jews were not exclusively non-Christians. They were the anti-Christians, allied with Satan against the divine order, as John’s Gospel had explicitly framed them.

Augustine’s theology added the crucial structural paradox that would govern Christian treatment of Jews for a millennium. Jews must be preserved, as living witnesses to Old Testament prophecy, as necessary participants in the eschatological conversion required at the end of days. But their preservation required their degradation: their suffering and dispersion were divine punishment confirming Christian truth. Jews occupied a position that was simultaneously necessary and cursed, theologically required and cosmically condemned. They were what Wistrich calls “living letters” of Scripture; their continued miserable existence was itself a kind of proof.

This Augustinian paradox contained an embedded brake on violence: Jews could not be killed because their eventual conversion was required for salvation history to complete. That brake would matter enormously, until it was removed.

II. The Medieval Elaboration: When the Mythical Jew Replaced the Real One

By the high medieval period, the theological foundation had been elaborated into a comprehensive demonic portrait through a specific accumulation of charges: ritual murder, host desecration, well-poisoning, sorcery, and in league with Satan. Each charge was its own expression of the cosmic enemy structure, Jews attacking the Christian body politic through supernatural evil.

Joshua Trachtenberg’s The Devil and the Jews (1943) remains the most exhaustive documentation of this elaboration, and his central finding remains startling: “the mythical Jew, outlined by early Christian theology and ultimately puffed out to impossible proportions, supplanted the real Jew in the medieval mind, until that real Jew to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. The only Jew whom the medieval Christian recognized was a figment of the imagination.”

By the high medieval period, the actual behavior, beliefs, and practices of real Jews had become irrelevant to the social function of the Jewish figure. The demonic portrait had acquired a cultural dynamic of its own. Trachtenberg makes a further structural observation that is critical for the series argument: the magic and evil attributed to Jews “had very little relation to the magic current in Jewish circles; it constituted a reflection of customs and traditions current among Christians.” The demonic portrait was a projection, not a description. Medieval Christians were projecting their own anxieties, about sorcery, about contamination, concerning the fragility of the sacred, onto a mythical figure, whose actual content had nothing to do with real Jews.

This is Nirenberg’s argument at the specific level: the Jewish figure functions as the negative principle of Western civilization, the receptacle for everything threatening and dark in Christian culture. By the thirteenth century, this function was so well established that Trachtenberg identifies a structural identity between the composite portrait of the demonic Jew and the portrait of the heretic-sorcerer-witch: “creatures of the devil, with whom they conclude secret pacts and whom they worship with obscene rites; they offer sacrifices to demons; they conduct secret meetings where they plot foul deeds against Christian society.” The Jew occupied the same categorical position as the embodiment of anti-Christian cosmic evil. The accusations were generated to fill a position that had been constructed in advance.

Wistrich documents the endpoint of this process in The Longest Hatred: antisemitism without Jews, the phenomenon observable in medieval England after the expulsion of 1290, in Spain after 1492, in Poland today, where almost no Jews remain. “Nothing could make clearer the fallacy that antisemitism can be simplistically viewed as a ‘natural’ or even a ‘pathological’ response to a concrete Jewish presence.” The structure had become self-sustaining. It no longer required actual Jews to operate.

III. The Immutable Essence: From Bernard of Clairvaux to the Nuremberg Laws

The Anacletus case introduced at the opening of this post is not an isolated curiosity. It is a load-bearing example of a pattern that Geraldine Heng documents systematically in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages: by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ecclesiastical authorities had developed what she calls “strategic essentialism”, converts and their descendants “were really Jews all along, because having once been Jews, or having descended from people who had formerly been Jews, carried an essence that tainted a person forever, and relegated them back to membership in their great-grandfather’s category of origin.”

Heng accurately identifies the structural mechanism: conversion was Christianity’s central technology, the foundation of its entire mission. But conversion of Jews created a category crisis; the converted Jew was neither Jew nor completely Christian, a hybrid whose interior state could not be verified and whose apparent Christianity might be strategic. The church’s response to this crisis was what Heng calls “not yet forever”: conversion was acknowledged in principle but perpetually suspended in practice. The Jew who converted was a convert for now, whose descendants might in four generations still be assigned back to their great-grandfather’s category. As the English historian Robert Stacey observed of the 12th-century case of Henry of Winchester, a knight who had converted and been knighted by the king himself: “By the middle of the thirteenth century in England, there was clearly an irreducible element to Jewish identity in the eyes of many Christians, which no amount of baptismal water could entirely eradicate.”

The Nuremberg Laws’ threshold of a quarter-Jewish ancestry, one Jewish grandparent as a legally significant category, is Bernard of Clairvaux’s logic about great-grandchildren rendered in bureaucratic form. The structure was identical. The vocabulary was biological rather than theological. But the claim — that Jewish identity is an inerasable, heritable essence impervious to individual choice, religious practice, or generational distance, had been constructed in the twelfth century.

The Spanish limpieza de sangre statutes represent the administrative formalization of this theological essentialism. Originating in fifteenth-century Castile, initially as restrictions on conversos, Jewish converts to Christianity, they were codified into law and administered through the Spanish Inquisition’s genealogical investigation apparatus. María Elena Martínez’s Genealogical Fictions documents their development in detail: initially requiring investigation of parents and grandparents, the definition kept expanding, the generational reach becoming effectively unlimited, the standard shifting toward requiring “equally unsullied paternal and maternal bloodlines.” By the mid-sixteenth century, the Inquisition had standardized genealogical investigation procedures across Spain and its empire.

Martínez’s most important analytical observation is about what the statutes actually measured: “whether someone had Jewish or Muslim ancestry mattered less than whether anyone remembered they did.” The statutes generated a market in false genealogies, shaped collective historical memory, and produced what she calls a society “obsessed with genealogy and in particular with the idea that having only Christian ancestors, and thus a ‘pure lineage,’ was the critical sign of a person’s loyalty to the faith.” The infrastructure for investigating, documenting, and assigning ancestry, for making the Jewish category heritable and indelible in legal practice, was fully operational by 1550. Three and a half centuries before the Nuremberg Laws.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 did not build new infrastructure. They inherited a seven-century tradition of theological essentialism, took the Inquisition’s genealogical investigation apparatus, applied modern state bureaucracy to it, and added the vocabulary of racial biology. The quarter-Jewish threshold, the ancestry record-keeping requirements, and the classification of people who had never practiced Judaism as legally Jewish all had medieval theological and early modern administrative precedents. The Nazis were the terminus of a process, not its origin.

And Stark’s quote from the last post, eradicate the Jewish spirit even in those carrying beautiful Aryan passes, is simply Bernard of Clairvaux’s argument that baptism cannot remove what the Anacletus case demonstrated: Jewish identity, once in the bloodline, was permanent.

IV. The Secular Transmission: Survival Without the Salvation Schema

The Enlightenment appeared to offer an escape from this structure. Universal principles of human rights, emancipation of Jews as individual citizens, and the rational critique of religious superstition all seemed to promise the dissolution of the theological architecture that had supported the Jewish demonic portrait.

Wistrich’s analysis in The Longest Hatred is sobering on this point: the dissolution was only partial, and the most dangerous element survived. “Even wholly secularized antisemites like Voltaire, Bruno Bauer, Richard Wagner, and Eugen Dühring always assumed that Christianity was a superior religion to Judaism and did not hesitate to draw on Christian doctrines to reinforce their own cultural or racist perspectives. They inherited the pervasiveness of the Christian antagonism to Jewry while no longer believing in its scheme of salvation.”

This is the critical distinction: the salvation schema was discarded, but the Manichean structure was retained. Jews remained the negative principle, now against Enlightenment rationalism, or German culture, or the national body, rather than against Christ. The cosmic enemy position was preserved; the theological vocabulary was replaced via cultural and, eventually, racial vocabulary.

But discarding the salvation schema had a consequence Wistrich identifies as decisive: it removed the theological brake on violence. Christianity had retained one limiting commitment: Jews must eventually be converted, and until then preserved as witnesses. Once that eschatological requirement was abandoned, the only remaining logic was the cosmic-enemy framing, without the reason to keep cosmic enemies alive. Secular antisemitism inherited the framework without the brake.

The nineteenth century’s racial science provided the final transformation in vocabulary. What had been a theological category, children of the Devil, cosmic spiritual enemy, indelible Jewish essence, became a biological category: a race whose threatening qualities were innate, heritable, and incurable by conversion or assimilation. Shulamit Volkov’s analysis in Interpreting Antisemitism shows how this worked in Imperial Germany specifically: antisemitism functioned as a cultural code, a marker of belonging to the anti-modern, anti-liberal political camp. The Jewish figure wasn’t merely hated; it was functional, serving a structural role in German political culture, a way of identifying which wider ideological package you subscribed to.

Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies of 1543 is the Reformation’s contribution to this transmission, all the medieval accusations systematized and delivered, in Wistrich’s phrase, “with apocalyptic fury and vehemence all his own.” Luther did not diminish the medieval picture; he intensified it. The Nazis explicitly cited him. His manuscript is one of the clearer documentary examples of how the medieval demonic portrait survived the Reformation’s religious revolution intact and remained available for secularization and biologization in subsequent centuries.

V. What the Nazis Inherited

The Nazis stripped out Christianity; they were explicitly anti-Christian, holding Judeo-Christianity responsible for poisoning the natural order, but kept the structure. Jews are the active cosmic enemy of all genuine civilization. The extermination of Jews is the precondition for humanity’s redemption. The permanent heritable essence that no individual act could dissolve. Wistrich documents the direct inheritance in Demonizing the Other: “Despite their underlying Christophobia, the Nazi leaders made thorough and systematic use of Christian anti-Jewish stereotypes. They could and did build on a rich bimillennial tradition that went back to the Gospels, especially John, and their depiction of the Jews as a pariah people, as the murderers of Christ and of their own prophets, in league with Satan himself.”

The specific content of the Nazi accusations, Jews as conspirators controlling international finance, manipulating Allied governments, subverting German culture from within, had direct medieval precedents in the conspiracy charges Trachtenberg documents. The image of the powerful Jew secretly orchestrating the destruction of Christian society was old. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Nazis treated as documentary evidence, was a Russian forgery from 1903 assembling Christian conspiracy mythology into a pseudo-document. It contained nothing that medieval theologians had not already claimed.

What the Nazis added was organizational capacity, state power, modern bureaucratic infrastructure, and the specific historical circumstances of Weimar Germany’s crisis. They were not innovating ideologically. They were operationalizing a structure that had been under construction for fifteen centuries and had already generated all the administrative infrastructure they needed, from the Inquisition’s genealogical apparatus to the medieval badge laws to the expulsion technologies Rowan Dorin documented in Part I of this series.

VI. Holocaust Universalism and the Problem of Erasure

Dan Stone’s The Holocaust: An Unfinished History traces what he calls the “progressive” narrative of Holocaust consciousness: from near-silence in the immediate postwar period, through the Eichmann trial in 1961, the NBC Holocaust television series in 1978 (seen by 120 million American viewers), Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1993, to the worldwide institutionalization of Holocaust memory through the IHRA and national memorials across the globe. By the 1990s, this appeared to be moving in a clear direction: Holocaust consciousness was expanding into a universal framework for human rights and cosmopolitan values.

The universalizing impulse had genuine moral weight. The figure of the Holocaust survivor as, in Stone’s phrase, “the universal witness, standing metonymically for victims of oppressive regimes everywhere,” gave Holocaust memory a reach and moral authority that served multiple humanitarian purposes. If the specific history of the genocide of the Jews could generate general lessons about the dangers of dehumanization, racism, and state violence, then the more universal its reach, the better.

But Stone’s analysis of the contemporary situation is not reassuring. The confident universalist narrative has been, in his words, “derailed.” And something more analytically interesting has happened: the left-right political positions on Holocaust uniqueness have inverted since the 1980s.

In the 1980s, Historikerstreit, the West German historians’ debate, defending the uniqueness of the Holocaust, was the progressive position. Jürgen Habermas argued against Ernst Nolte’s relativizing comparisons with Stalinist crimes because he feared that any diminution of uniqueness would license renewed German nationalism and dissolve the grounds for the democratic “constitutional patriotism” he advocated. Minimizing uniqueness was the conservative and nationalist position.

Today, this has reversed. Stone: “In scholarly debates concerning the place of the Holocaust in world history, comparison is now advocated by, broadly speaking, progressive thinkers, while a defense of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, now implying also firm support for Israel, is the preserve largely of the conservative right.” The progressive position now advocates comparison with colonial crimes, particularly Germany’s genocide in Namibia, along with the broader history of racial violence. The conservative position defends uniqueness — but, as Stone notes with appropriate skepticism, often as a way of “avoiding additional forms of ethical and political implication” from colonial crimes.

This inversion is not grounds for abandoning the uniqueness argument. It is a reason to ground it more carefully in historical specificity rather than political allegiance.

The problem with universalizing Holocaust memory for the argument this series is making is precise: it erases the specific mechanism. The Holocaust was not the product of generic prejudice, of hatred that whirled out of control, of ordinary human tribalism taken to an extreme. It was the product of a specific ideological structure, the cosmic enemy framing, the Manichean logic, the assignment of Jews to a position outside the normal human community as the active negative principle of civilization, that had been constructed across fifteen centuries and is distinguishable from other forms of racism and group hatred by definite structural features.

Generic anti-prejudice frameworks cannot capture this structure because they are meant to address more general cases. Stone says it directly: “In contemporary debates over racism, antisemitism sometimes gets inadvertently left out. It would be ironic if Holocaust memory were to be siloed as somehow ‘Eurocentric’, when in fact it provides one of the clearest examples of where race thinking or ‘security paranoia’ can lead under conditions of crisis.”

The secondary problem Stone documents is competitive martyrdom, the deployment of Holocaust analogies by different national and ethnic groups to claim victim status or authorize violence. His Yugoslavia example is instructive: Croatian nationalists claimed to be the “new Jews” facing Serbian genocide during the Yugoslav wars, a claim made by a country that had committed genocide against Jews and Serbs during the Second World War, governed at the time by a Holocaust denier. The Holocaust framework, deployed by perpetrators as victim-framing, was used to incite exactly the kind of violence it was supposed to prevent.

VII. Why Specificity Is the Precondition for Recognition

The resolution to both the universalist erasure and the competitive martyrdom problem is the same: historical specificity.

The cosmic enemy framing, Jews assigned to a position outside the normal human community as the active negative principle of civilization, is specific enough to be recognized when it reappears. “Never again for everyone” is too generic to do this work. It describes a moral commitment lacking a diagnostic mechanism. The diagnostic mechanism requires knowing what pattern you are looking for.

That pattern has specific features. Does the phenomenon assign Jews to a unique ontological position, not simply disliked or discriminated against, but understood as a metaphysical force threatening civilization itself? Does it display the evidence-immunity that characterizes structural antisemitism, the persistence and intensity disproportionate to any actual Jewish behavior or power? Does it recycle the fixed accusation complexes Trachtenberg documented, conspiracy, secret manipulation, contamination, the destruction of the host society, in a new vocabulary? Does it generate the self-destructive obsession earlier posts identified as the behavioral signature, giving priority to the elimination of Jews over rational self-interest, accelerating persecution as conditions deteriorate?

This is not particularism. It is pattern recognition. And the Christian genealogy traced in this post is not background context; it is the specification of the pattern. The fifteen centuries of theological construction, medieval elaboration, Enlightenment reformulation, racial-science biologization, and Nazi operationalization constitute the genealogy of a recognizable structure that did not end in 1945.

It was adapted, transmitted, and institutionalized through new channels, channels the Colonial series traced through Soviet propaganda, Islamist organizing, and academic inheritance. The vocabulary changed again, as it always has. The structure beneath the vocabulary is the same one Bernard of Clairvaux was already deploying in 1134.

From deicide to genocide.

The next post traces how antisemitism accumulated across the medieval and early modern period, not the recurrence of the same hatreds, but each generation building on the last, until the Nazis did not inherit just an ideology but a fully equipped infrastructure.

Molly Crabapple’s book about the Jewish Labour Bund is at its best when it stays in Warsaw. The chapters tracing the Bund’s origins in the Pale of Settlement, its years of street battles and general strikes, the generation that chose to stay in Poland and face what was coming, these are vivid and genuinely moving. Crabapple has spent serious time in the Bundist archives, and it shows. The book earns its emotional authority in Vilna and Warsaw. The book is also strikingly illustrated, Crabapple's own art giving the Bundist world a visual weight that prose alone couldn't achieve.

The problem is that the book uses the Bund’s story as a platform for a parallel argument about Zionism and Palestine, and the sourcing for that argument does not hold up. The errors appear at the center of the book’s political claims, in the chapters where its argument is most contested, and they are the kind of errors that compound: each one misrepresents a source, and several misrepresent the source cited in the footnote immediately attached to the claim.

What follows is a precise account of four of those errors. The sources used to correct each one are the same scholarly sources any careful reader of the period would reach for, and in one case, the source used to make the correction is the same source Crabapple herself cites.

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Error 1: Lehi Did Not Exist in the 1930s

In Chapter 18, Crabapple writes that the Polish government provided “machine guns, Mauser rifles, and military training to three Zionist militias in Palestine — the Haganah, which secretly answered to David Ben-Gurion; Jabotinsky’s Irgun; and the fascist Lehi militia — even though all three groups had already murdered countless Palestinians.”

This sentence has a problem that no amount of sourcing can fix. Lehi did not exist in the 1930s. The organization was founded in 1940, when Avraham Stern broke from the Irgun after disagreeing with its decision to suspend attacks on the British following the outbreak of war with Germany. The chronology is established in every standard reference on the period.

Anita Shapira’s Israel: A History (Stanford, 2014) is explicit: Lehi was “led by Avraham Stern and founded in 1940 by an extremist Etzel splinter group.” Eugene Rogan’s The Arabs: A History (Basic Books, 2017) describes how “one faction in the Irgun dissented and continued its attacks on the British. The splinter group... are better known in the West as the Stern Gang, after the leader of the faction, Abraham Stern” — a split that Rogan dates to the decision to suspend hostilities in 1940.

The endnote for “three Zionist militias in Palestine” cites a 2018 web article from the Warsaw Institute, a Polish nationalist foundation established under the PiS government. The article does not support the claim. It explicitly states that “the main beneficiaries of the organized training were Irgun fighters,” describes the 1938 conference as attended by representatives of “Haganah and Irgun,” and correctly identifies Lehi as a 1940 creation.

The specific footnote anchor she links to is a postwar letter of personal thanks from one Lehi member. Not documentation of training.

Her cited source describes one militia receiving Polish military training, not three, and places Lehi’s founding after the period the claim describes.

The chronology is not contested. Every standard account of the period places the Stern Gang’s split from the Irgun in 1940 at the earliest.

Error 2: The Iron Wall Ends With Equal Rights

In Chapter 17, Crabapple summarizes Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” as follows: it “shattered the genteel doublespeak of the Zionist Congress. In it, he said that, like all colonies, Israel could only be built by subjugating the native people. Palestinians would resist, as all native people do, and one had to either accept this or give up on Zionism and remain powerless and doomed in the diaspora.”

This is not wrong about what Jabotinsky argues in the essay’s first half. The Iron Wall does begin with the case that Palestinian Arab resistance to Jewish immigration is rational and will not be overcome by diplomacy or goodwill. That part of the argument she has right.

What she omits is the essay’s explicit conclusion. Jabotinsky writes that once Palestinians accept that the Jewish presence in Palestine is permanent and further resistance is futile, negotiation becomes possible, and his vision of that negotiated outcome is not subjugation but equality. The essay ends: “but if and when they find that further attempts at converting us [to accepting an Arab majority] are useless, then they will drop this stand, and both peoples will live together in the land as good neighbors, and mutual respect will grow.”

Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (California, 1996) summarizes the essay’s logic precisely: once Palestinian Arabs lost hope of ridding themselves of Jews, the moderates among them “would seek a platform of mutual concessions guaranteeing against removal, equal rights, or national self-determination; and I believe and hope that then we will be able to give them such guarantees.” Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State (Princeton, 2023) notes that Jabotinsky “urged an uncompromising militance in the face of Arab opposition to Zionism, but he saw that opposition as rational and commanding of respect”, and that in his 1940 book The Jewish War Front, Jabotinsky envisioned complete equality for Arabs in a Jewish state, including a provision that “in every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice versa.”

Crabapple cites the primary source directly. Her mischaracterization is entirely her own reading, not inherited from a secondary source.

Dropping the explicit conclusion of an argument you are summarizing is not a minor omission.

Error 3: Individual Policemen Become Institutional Policy

In Chapter 17, Crabapple writes: “The new Labor Zionist paramilitary, the Haganah, sometimes kidnapped and sexually tortured Jewish women who dated Palestinian men.”

The footnote for this claim cites page 209 of Hillel Cohen’s Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Brandeis, 2015).

Cohen’s book is a serious and unflinching account of that year’s violence, deeply critical of Jewish conduct. What page 209 actually documents is a different and more specific thing: individual Hebrew policemen in Tel Aviv in 1924-25 who took enforcement action against Jewish women they accused of consorting with Arab men from Jaffa. Cohen describes one specific method used, which is genuinely harrowing. He does not attribute this to the Haganah as an institution, and the timeline, 1924-25, predates the period Crabapple is writing about in this chapter.

Cohen is in fact careful about attribution. He writes that “the Hebrew police seem to have stretched the concept of prostitution beyond its original meaning” — a formulation that captures the ambiguity of the situation, where some cases involved consensual relationships that the policemen chose to treat as prostitution. The transformation from individual Tel Aviv policemen in 1924-25 acting outside any institutional mandate, to Crabapple’s characterization of the Haganah as an organization with a policy of kidnapping and sexually torturing women, is not supported by the source cited.

The incident is real; the torture as policy is not.

Error 4: Two Errors Against Her Own Source

In Chapter 18, Crabapple writes: “British police beat Musa Kazim Pasha to death in 1933 at a protest in Jerusalem.”

The endnote cites page 212 of Michael Provence’s The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge, 2017).

What the passage actually says (pp.240-242 in my copy) is this: Musa Kazim did not die at the protest. He died five months later, in March 1934, not 1933. And Provence’s characterization is not “beaten to death” but that “many believed injuries received from British police hastened his death” — a meaningfully different claim about causation.

A contemporary JTA wire report from March 28, 1934, corroborates the date and further undermines the manner of death claim: it describes him as having “been in ill health for some time,” with no mention of a police beating as the cause of death. This was findable in a basic search. The claim in the book is wrong on two specific points, year and manner of death, and both corrections come from the source attached to the endnote.

A reader who pulled the book from a library shelf, or conducted basic fact checking would find the sources do not say what Crabapple claims.

The Pattern

These four errors are not independent. They share a structure: each one makes a Palestine-related claim more stark, more dramatic, or more attributable to organized Jewish institutional action than the cited source supports. Lehi is added to a list of militias where it cannot historically belong. The Iron Wall is presented as a permanent ideology of subjugation rather than a tactical argument with an explicit equal-rights endpoint. Individual policemen become institutional Haganah policy. A death from deteriorating health in 1934 becomes a beating to death in 1933.

The chapters where these errors appear, 17 and 18, have more footnotes per thousand words than any other section of the book, including the Holocaust chapters. That density creates an impression of rigorous sourcing. But as we will examine in the next post in this series, the footnotes in those chapters overwhelmingly cite Bundist sources about Warsaw. The Palestine-specific claims rest on approximately ten citations in total, and the majority of those citations either predate the institutions they describe, argue the opposite of what they are cited for, or, as in the case of Musa Kazim, simply do not say what Crabapple claims they say.

The Bund’s history deserves better than to be the scaffolding for claims this imprecise. The people the book memorializes — the Bundists who chose to stay and were murdered — are not well served by historical arguments about their antagonists that cannot survive contact with the sources used to support them.

Next in the series: The Footnote Architecture: How 77% of the citations in the Palestine chapters source events in Warsaw, and what the remaining 23% actually say.

The objection is common, usually well-intentioned, and historically confused.

“Catholics were killed too.” “Jews act like the Holocaust was only about them.” “What about the Roma? The disabled? The gay community?” All of these responses to Holocaust education rest on a genuine misunderstanding, not about numbers, but about the logic of different persecutions.

The Nazis persecuted many groups. They persecuted them for different reasons, operating under different ideological frameworks and aiming at different intended endpoints. Collapsing those differences does not honor the other victims. It erases what made each persecution distinct.

Dan Stone, introducing his recent book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, states: using the term Holocaust to encompass all targeted groups, “with the aim of being inclusive and not prioritizing one group’s suffering, actually does a disservice to groups other than Jews. For the Nazis persecuted these groups for different reasons, reasons we fail to appreciate if we collapse them all together.”

This post is an attempt to clearly show those distinctions.

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The Hierarchy — and What It Misses

Nazi racial ideology was more nuanced than a simple Aryan-versus-subhuman binary. It was a tiered system, with different groups occupying different positions and carrying different policy implications.

At the apex stood Nordic Germans. Below them sat other non-Nordic Germans and northern European peoples. Slavs were classified as Untermenschen, racially inferior peoples earmarked for subjugation and eventual demographic elimination to make room for Lebensraum in the east. Black Africans were placed near the bottom in Nazi pseudoscientific literature. Arabs, South Asians, and other non-European peoples occupied a genuinely ambiguous middle position, to which we will return.

The crucial point is this: however reviled, all of these groups were located within the hierarchy as lesser or inferior races. Each had a policy attached to them that was ultimately instrumental, subjugate, exploit, clear territory, control, and eliminate where inconvenient.

Jews were not at the bottom of this hierarchy. They were placed entirely outside it, as its negation. In Nazi ideology, Jews were not a weak or primitive race that had failed to develop. They were an active, parasitic counter-force whose specific civilizational function was to corrupt, dissolve, and destroy the racial order that produced all genuine culture. Not the bottom rung, the thing gnawing at the ladder.

Five Distinct Persecution Logics

Running alongside the Jewish case were at least four other distinct persecution frameworks, each with its own ideological rationale.

The eugenics targets. The disabled, psychiatric patients, and those with heritable conditions were persecuted under a framework of Volksgemeinschaft purification, removing biological weakness from within the German racial body. These were German citizens. The theoretical basis was pseudo-scientific eugenics, a framework that had significant support across the Western scientific establishment at the time. The T4 euthanasia program, which the previous post examined, was the administrative expression of this logic. Its intended endpoint was a healthier racial body politic, not the extermination of an external enemy. It was an internal purification program, not a war of annihilation.

The racial inferiors: Slavic peoples, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians, were classified as Untermenschen whose territory was needed for German settlement. They were expendable in vast numbers, and died in staggering numbers through violence, forced labor, deliberate starvation, and exposure. But they were not scheduled for total extermination as a category. Generalplan Ost envisioned massive depopulation of Eastern Europe but was never fully implemented, and its logic was territorial and demographic; the land was wanted, not the complete annihilation of Slavic existence everywhere in the world. A Pole in Argentina was not a target.

The behavioral deviants: Gay men were persecuted under Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, a persecution specifically targeting gay men, not homosexuality as a general category. Lesbians were largely not systematically targeted, and the reason is itself revealing: Nazi ideology understood female sexuality primarily in relation to reproduction and male authority. A woman’s sexual orientation was seen as correctable through the right circumstances, or as simply irrelevant to the masculine martial project the regime was building. Male homosexuality, by contrast, threatened both the birth rate and the homosocial bonds the military state depended on. The differential treatment was not inconsistent — it was the logic of a patriarchal racial state applied consistently across its own categories. Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned because they refused Nazi oaths and military service, a behavioral and political category, not a racial one. In principle, a Jehovah’s Witness could renounce their faith and exit the targeted category. The Nazis did not pursue their descendants or hunt them across occupied Europe.

One clarification worth making explicitly: the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering research institute on sexuality, was raided and burned in 1933. This was an act of ideological destruction of a research institution and the knowledge it housed, not the implementation of a systematic policy targeting trans people. The Nazis had no operative administrative category for trans people, because their ideological framework contained no concept to attach a policy to. The raid was a destruction of Weimar-era sexual liberalism, not persecution of an identified group.

The political opponents: Communists, Social Democrats, and clergy who actively and publicly resisted were imprisoned for their politics. Catholics as a population were not targeted; thirty-five million German Catholics served as Wehrmacht soldiers, civil servants, and Nazi party members. The Concordat of 1933 gave the Catholic Church formal legal status in Germany. The regime was scrupulously careful not to alienate the Catholic institutional structure it needed. Individual clergy were imprisoned for political resistance. This is political suppression of opponents, not racial persecution of a group. The objection “but Catholics were killed too” conflates political prisoners with racial victims. By the same logic, everyone the regime killed is equivalent, which makes historical analysis impossible.

The Siniti/Roma: The Porrajmos, the Roma genocide, is a genuinely complex case, and it deserves a category of its own rather than being subordinated to any other history. Roma were eventually targeted for systematic murder, particularly after 1942. Roma were classified primarily under an “asocial criminal” hereditary category rather than as a cosmic enemy. The Nazi legal apparatus treated Roma differently throughout — there was no equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws for Roma until 1942, and the internal administrative logic shifted and changed in ways that the anti-Jewish policy never did. This did not make the murder less real. It means the ideological structure was distinct, and collapsing it with the Jewish case does both groups a disservice.

The Jewish Category: Outside the Hierarchy

The distinction between Jews and all other persecuted groups was not primarily about the severity of persecution but about ideological logic. For every other group, persecution served a comprehensible instrumental purpose, however monstrous. For Jews, the framework was what Saul Friedländer calls “redemptive antisemitism”, a salvific worldview in which the destruction of Jews was the precondition for the redemption of humanity.

In Nazi ideology, Jews were not merely inferior. They were the active cosmic enemy of all humanity, the source of every evil afflicting the modern world. Hitler’s worldview was Manichean in structure: a struggle between two world principles with no possible reconciliation, no negotiated settlement, no coexistence.

Jews had, in this framework, introduced Christianity and thereby poisoned the natural order of the ancient world. Jews had invented liberal democracy. Jews had created Marxism. Jews controlled international finance. Jews puppeteered the Allied powers. Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, “Behind England stands Israel, and behind France, and behind the United States. Even when we have driven the Jew out of Germany, he remains our world enemy.” Not a domestic problem to be solved, but a metaphysical war to be won.

An SS indoctrination leaflet of 1936 states the ideology with useful clarity: “It is the Jew and Judaized Europe with its incurable diseases such as weakening Christianity, corrupt Marxism, that are the contradiction per se; therefore the Jew is the main obstacle for the fulfillment of our global and historical mission.” The scholar Otto Kulka, summarizing decades of research in the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, puts the scholarly consensus plainly: Jews were not merely a race that “polluted the Aryan racial pool or, like the Slavs, were an inferior population that could be terrorized and decimated at will; they also presented a mortal danger for the Aryan race, as they strove to achieve the control of Germany and, ultimately, world domination. The struggle against the Jews was a matter of life and death; victory meant salvation, defeat, the perdition of Germany and of Aryan humanity.”

No other targeted group occupied this position in the Nazi ideological universe. The Poles were in the way. The Jews were the enemy of all.

The Ambiguous Middle: Arabs, South Asians, and Tactical Flexibility

Arabs, South Asians, and other non-European peoples occupied a genuinely ambiguous position in Nazi racial thought, and the inconsistency was not an oversight. It was a structural feature allowing tactical flexibility when strategic circumstances required it.

Two factors drove this suspension of the racial logic. First, these populations were not inside the geographic and demographic landscape that drove the most violent elimination logic. The drive to clear the east was tied to Lebensraum; German settlers needed that specific territory. Arabs and South Asians posed no equivalent territorial threat and were not in the way of anything the Nazi state immediately wanted. Second, they could be used against Britain and France, the colonial powers that ruled them. David Motadel’s Islam and Nazi Germany’s War is the key text here: Nazi outreach to Muslim and Arab populations was largely instrumental, a wartime political tool aimed at destabilizing enemy empires, not evidence of genuine ideological respect.

Hitler’s private views expressed admiration for Islam as a political and martial religion, and reportedly mused that had Charles Martel lost at Tours in 732, and Islam spread into Europe, the Germanic peoples would have converted and built a far more powerful Islamic civilization, because he saw Islam as suited to a conquering people in ways Christianity was not. But he concluded that the Arabs, “because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate,” so “not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.” The admiration was for the religion; the contempt for the Arabs remained fully intact.

The Subhas Chandra Bose case makes the instrumental nature of Nazi “anti-colonialism” unmistakable. Bose met Hitler in 1942 seeking support for Indian independence from Britain. Hitler offered nothing essentially and was dismissive. This was entirely consistent with his stated position in Mein Kampf that the British Empire was a civilizational achievement worth preserving precisely because it kept racially inferior peoples, including Indians, under European control. Anti-colonial nationalism was a weapon of convenience against Britain, never a genuine ideological commitment.

But he did not categorically reject all Muslims. Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met Hitler in November 1941, broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic across the Middle East, and helped recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS. The Nazis found him useful against British interests in the region. His racial status in Nazi ideology was entirely unchanged, the cooperation was tactical, not ideological, and it coexisted without contradiction alongside Hitler's private contempt for Arabs as racially inferior. The pattern is consistent: non-European peoples were instruments when convenient, obstacles or inferiors otherwise. The Jews alone occupied the position of active cosmic enemy, the force the entire racial hierarchy existed to destroy.

Behavior Under Pressure: The Real Proof

Abstract ideology is easier to dismiss than behavior under constraint. The clearest evidence of the categorical difference between Nazi persecution of Jews and persecution of every other group is what the regime actually did when resources were scarce and the war was being lost.

In 1944, as the Wehrmacht retreated on all fronts, the deportation of Hungarian Jews, the last large remaining Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Europe, was prioritized. Trains to Auschwitz competed with Eastern Front logistics at precisely the moment those logistics were most desperately needed.

Half a million Hungarian Jews were deported between May and July 1944. Under any instrumental logic, this is irrational; military defeat loomed, and rail capacity was a finite resource. Under the logic of redemptive antisemitism, it is perfectly rational: the cosmic enemy of humanity must be destroyed even at the cost of military defeat, because destroying the enemy is the mission.

There was also no exit route for Jews of the kind that existed, however imperfectly, for every other targeted group. A Polish Christian could pass as German with sufficient language and papers. A gay man could live discreetly. A Jehovah’s Witness could formally renounce. A disabled person could be hidden. There was no equivalent path for Jews, because in Nazi ideology, the category was ontological, not behavioral or political. No conversion, no assimilation, no performance of loyalty was available. The Nazi physicist Johannes Stark wrote in Das Schwarze Korps that even a victory against racial antisemitism would be only a “partial victory”, “we also have to eradicate the Jewish spirit, whose blood can flow just as undisturbed today as before, if its carriers hold beautiful Aryan passes.” The Jew who did not look Jewish, who had converted, whose grandparents had been baptized, all still required elimination. The category pursued you.

This is not to say that hiding was impossible, thousands of Jews survived in Germany and across occupied Europe through concealment, passing, and extraordinary acts of rescue. But those paths required individual heroism from rescuers who faced the death penalty, and a state apparatus actively hunting across every occupied territory. No comparable machinery pursued Jehovah's Witnesses into hiding across Europe. The difference is not between possible and impossible, it is between a bureaucratically recognized exit and a fugitive existence dependent on others' willingness to die for you.

Why This Distinction Matters Beyond 1945

The claim that Jews are claiming the Holocaust as exclusive property, or weaponizing Holocaust memory to deflect from contemporary Israeli policy, rests on the same historical confusion.

If the Holocaust were one genocide among many, committed for ordinary instrumental reasons, analogical comparisons would be more defensible. But the Holocaust was the product of a specific and unique ideological structure, redemptive antisemitism, the belief that Jews are the active cosmic enemy of humanity, that has no parallel in the modern record of mass violence.

This does not make Jewish suffering more important than that of others. It makes it different, and that difference is historically real, documented in the primary sources of the regime itself, and consequential for understanding both the Holocaust and the antisemitism that preceded and followed it.

The structure of antisemitism, the assignment of Jews to a unique and uniquely threatening ontological category, outside the normal hierarchy of human groups, did not disappear in 1945. It was adapted, transmitted, and institutionalized through new channels, as this series has traced. Recognizing its distinctive structure in the Nazi period is not special pleading. It is the precondition for recognizing its distinctive structure today.

The next post asks where that logic came from, through fifteen centuries of Christian theological anti-Judaism, the Spanish Inquisition’s genealogical apparatus, and a secular transmission that preserved the structure while discarding the theology. It also examines what happens when Holocaust memory is universalized into a generic lesson about prejudice, and why that erasure makes the pattern harder to recognize today.

Further Reading

On the taxonomy of Nazi persecution:

Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023) — the essential starting point for this post’s central argument. Stone’s opening chapter establishes precisely why collapsing the different categories of Nazi persecution does a disservice to all victims, and his analysis of the distinction between racial science and racial mysticism is the scholarly foundation for the argument that Jewish persecution operated under a categorically different ideological logic.

George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978) — traces the intellectual genealogy of European racial thinking from the Enlightenment through its Nazi endpoint. Mosse shows how scientific racism and völkisch mysticism converged in ways that made Jews specifically the active negation of the racial hierarchy rather than simply its lowest rung. Essential background for understanding why the ideological logic produced genocide rather than permanent subjugation.

George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1966) — the foundational study of the völkisch movement that fed into Nazi ideology. Documents how the specific combination of romantic nationalism, antisemitism, and pseudo-scientific race theory developed in German intellectual culture across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

On popular opinion and the mechanics of persecution:

Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (1983) — the definitive study of how ordinary Germans related to Nazi policies, including antisemitic persecution. Kershaw’s evidence that Germans could and did dissent from other Nazi policies, T4 being the clearest example, while remaining largely indifferent to Jewish persecution is the empirical foundation for the structural antisemitism argument running through this series.

Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (2008), a collection of Kershaw’s key essays on the decision-making process behind the Holocaust and the relationship between Hitler’s ideology and institutional radicalization. The essays on the evolution of the Final Solution are particularly relevant to the argument about the ontological character of Nazi antisemitism.

On Nazi collaboration with Arab and Muslim allies:

Matthias Küntzel, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 War and its Aftermath (2023) — documents the Nazi-Arab collaboration in detail, including the Mufti’s role and the Radio Zeesen broadcasts. Küntzel’s analysis of how the Nazi regime used Arab and Muslim partners instrumentally while maintaining its racial contempt for Arabs is directly relevant to the Husseini and Bose arguments in this post.

Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (2007) — the earlier and broader study tracing how Nazi antisemitic ideology traveled into Islamist movements through the 1940s partnership. The collaboration was tactical on both sides, but the ideological transmission was real and lasting.

One of the comments from Reddit about the prior post asked a question that historians have spent decades trying to answer properly: to what degree was local support for the deportation of Jews influenced by the prospect of prime real estate coming on the market at must-sell prices?

The neighbor who moved into a Jewish apartment within hours of a massacre, the municipal mayor who forced a fire-sale deed at 2am under threat of Dachau, the Reich finance minister redistributing confiscated Jewish furniture to German bombing victims as social welfare, these were not separate phenomena. The Holocaust was, among other things, a transfer of wealth, and that transfer implicated ordinary people at every level of German and occupied European society in ways that go well beyond ideology.

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I. The cost structure of betrayal

The most precise framing of the economic logic at the individual level comes not from the German case but from occupied Poland.

Jan Gross’s reconstruction of the aftermath of the Jedwabne massacre in July 1941 documents that Polish neighbors moved into Jewish homes within hours of the killing. This was not looting in the sense of taking portable valuables from abandoned buildings. It was an occupation, the immediate physical inheritance of the space left by the dead. The transfer required no paperwork, no authorization, no waiting period. The bodies were still in the barn when the redistribution began.

Denouncing a Jew in hiding to German authorities yielded a direct reward: cash, vodka, or sugar, depending on what the local German administration had on hand. Failing to warn a Jewish neighbor costs nothing and might eventually result in their apartment and other goods being seized. Hiding a Jew, by contrast, carried the death penalty for the entire household, a cost the German occupation made explicit and enforced without exception.

Rescue was an existential risk for your family. Betrayal was an immediate material reward. Passivity was free and might be profitable. Gross made this argument explicitly in Golden Harvest (2012), which documented Poles digging up the mass graves at Treblinka after the war to sift for gold and valuables. The book provoked furious denial in Poland, for the same reason Neighbors had a decade earlier: it described a population with material interests intertwined with the genocide, not merely bystanders to it.

The szmalcownicy, the Polish blackmailers who extorted money from Jews hiding on the “Aryan side” and denounced them when payment stopped, operated as a systematic association rather than a collection of individual criminals. They were not ideological antisemites in any coherent sense. They were entrepreneurs operating in a market that the occupation had created.

II. The municipal level: mayors as instruments

Stefanie Fischer’s research on Jewish cattle traders in rural Franconia reconstructs the mechanics of Aryanization at the local level in Germany. The process was not spontaneous; it was administered dispossession, carried out by local officials using the threat of concentration camp imprisonment as the instrument of transfer.

In the town of Altenmuhr in July 1938, the mayor and local party officials pushed Karola Thormann, the daughter of a cattle trader, to sell her family property at a price 80 percent below what she had paid her brother for it just months earlier. That price was already below market value. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Nazi party functionaries arrived at the Mann brothers’ house after midnight, informed Josef Mann that he would be sent to Dachau unless he signed over his property to an Aryan cattle distributor named Assel, and had the transfer certified by a notary before morning. The brothers fled to Munich. Too old to emigrate, they were deported to Theresienstadt in June 1942 and transported to Treblinka that September.

What is notable about these cases is not that they happened but that they happened through civic infrastructure. The mayor of Altenmuhr. A notary in Rothenburg. Local party functionaries whose names are in the records. The transfer of Jewish property was not a lawless act; it was a legal act executed by local officials using the threat of extrajudicial violence. The semblance of legality was, as David Sorkin notes in his synthesis of the period, a consistent feature of Nazi expropriation policy: “characteristically, the Nazis maintained a semblance of legality, enacting legal measures that recapitulated the process of expropriation.”

The synagogues of Ellingen and Leutershausen were sold during the High Holy Days in autumn 1938 for a few marks, with Jewish residents compelled to participate in the transaction. By late 1938, ten of Central Franconia’s twenty-two village synagogues had already been sold, damaged, or formally desacralized before Kristallnacht.

III. The Reich level: genocide as welfare policy

Götz Aly shows in Hitler’s Beneficiaries that the Nazi regime functioned, in his phrase, as a “racist-totalitarian welfare state,” and that the looting of Jewish property was one of its primary funding mechanisms.

Aly’s research draws on secret Nazi financial files and examines who actually benefited from the dispossession of Jews, not only at the level of individuals taking furniture from deported neighbors, but at the level of the Reich’s macroeconomic management. His core finding is that confiscated Jewish assets were systematically used to fund social programs, tax relief, and material distributions to ordinary Germans, buying their consent for a regime conducting a war of continental conquest.

The Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, reported that after heavy RAF raids in September 1941, he “personally approached the Führer requesting to have the Jews evacuated so that at least some of those who had been hit by the bombs could be given new apartments.” Hitler, Kaufmann recalled, “reacted immediately to my suggestion, and issued the relevant orders to have the Jews transported away.” At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich explicitly cited “the question of apartments and other social-political necessities” as a factor in the decision to accelerate deportations. The connection was not incidental; it was stated policy.

Immediately after the first deportation wave in late 1941, the head of the Cologne Finance Department ordered that apartments, household effects, textiles, and furnishings from deported Jews be placed in “the deserving hands of victims of bombing raids, newly married couples, widows of fallen soldiers.” The Westphalian Finance Department issued the same instructions. In Berlin, at Goebbels’s personal direction, the belongings of deportees were hoarded as “a reserve supply for possible future damage” from air raids.

Alfred Rosenberg formalized this into what became known as the furniture operation (Möbelaktion). Beginning in late 1941, the operation stripped Jewish households across occupied France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. By November 1943, Rosenberg reported to Hitler that goods from 250,000 Jewish households had been confiscated and 47,000 loads delivered to the Reich. The Cologne city orphanage purchased furniture from the Jewish Children’s Home for 1,850 Reichsmarks. The public library acquired books. Private citizens, depending on their means, obtained volumes of Rilke’s poetry, Mozart sheet music, or simply a pair of shoes and a school knapsack.

The macroeconomic scale is documented in Hilberg’s parallel accounting. The Reich Flight Tax, imposed on Jews emigrating from Germany, yielded approximately 900 million Reichsmarks between 1933 and 1940. The “Atonement Payment” imposed on German Jews after Kristallnacht, framed as collective punishment for the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, was set at exactly one billion Reichsmarks, a figure Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels fixed in advance and then worked backward to impose as a “tax.” The Finance Ministry had recently required Jews to register all their property precisely because, as Hilberg notes, it knew “that sooner or later all Jewish property would be German.”

The regime’s initial preference was forced emigration combined with maximum asset extraction through the Reich Flight Tax, a position that became untenable after 1941 when occupation had closed the exits.

Aly’s broader argument is that the pace of Nazi conquest was partly driven by financial necessity: each annexation and occupation provided fresh assets to extract, which funded the social programs and tax relief that kept the German population materially comfortable during a war of extraordinary destruction. The Holocaust, in this framing, was not separable from the welfare state that sustained popular support for the regime. They were the same program.

IV. The long template

The Nazi machinery was not invented in 1933. It industrialized a template that European states had been refining for eight centuries.

The post in this series on the 109 Countries myth traced the mechanics of medieval Jewish expulsion in England: the Exchequer of the Jews, which tracked Jewish assets for the Crown; the archae system, which required all Jewish loans to be registered in royal chests; the tallage system, by which Henry III extracted over £70,000 from English Jews between 1240 and 1255. When Aaron of Lincoln, the wealthiest Jew in twelfth-century England, died, the Crown seized his entire estate, approximately £15,000, roughly equivalent to the annual revenue of the whole kingdom. The 1290 expulsion of English Jews was a political transaction: Edward I received parliamentary approval for the largest single tax of the medieval period in exchange for expelling the Jews. Parliament got the expulsion. Edward got the revenue. The Jews got sixty days to leave, after which the Crown claimed their real property and their outstanding debts.

Spain in 1492 followed the same logic on a larger scale. The wealth of converso communities, accumulated over generations of commercial activity in Castile and Aragon, was a direct incentive for Inquisition prosecutions, since convicted heretics forfeited their property to the Crown. The expulsion decree stripped the departing Jewish community of real property and prohibited them from taking gold or silver out of the country.

What Nazi Germany added was bureaucratic thoroughness, industrial scale, and the technology of the modern state: property registries, railway timetables, census data, and centralized financial administration. The Trustee Offices (Treuhandstellen) that administered Polish Jewish property after the 1939 invasion were a modernized version of Edward I’s archae: a centralized system for tracking, freezing, and transferring Jewish assets to the state. The principle was identical. Only the paperwork had improved.

V. The silence that followed

Polish families living in formerly Jewish homes after 1945 had a material interest in not asking how those homes became available. Acknowledging the economic transfer required acknowledging that Polish society had reasons, reasons that predated the German occupation and that the occupation merely made feasible, to want Jews gone. The postwar insistence on Polish victimhood served not only national pride but material interest.

Aly documents the same dynamic for Germany itself. The postwar German families who had received packages of French shoes, Parisian quilts, Dutch linens, and Jewish household furniture during the war years had every incentive to frame their wartime prosperity as the product of organizational competence and personal thrift. The goods had simply appeared, sent by husbands from the front or distributed by municipal authorities as emergency relief. The chain of custody between a Jewish family in Amsterdam and a German housewife in Cologne receiving their furniture as bombing compensation was long enough to make each step seem unremarkable.

Mary Fulbrook, drawing on the postwar testimonies in Reckonings, documents the near-universal pattern: those who had benefited most directly from Jewish dispossession were the least willing to examine the origins of their benefit. Those who had been most immediately involved in the transfers, the local officials, the notaries, the mayors, continued in their jobs after the war, in most cases without consequence. The French police officers who carried out the Vel d’Hiv roundup in July 1942, as noted in the comments on the previous post, returned to their positions after liberation. Not one was prosecuted.

The previous post argued that the Holocaust and the T4 protest represent a natural experiment: the same population activated its moral machinery for one killing program and not the other, revealing that centuries of embedded antisemitism had made Jewish murder feel categorically different from the murder of German citizens.

The difference was not only ideological; it was material. Germans who were not fanatical antisemites, who might even have felt a residual unease about what was happening, had been made into beneficiaries. The furniture was in the apartment. The house was on the street. The business had a new name on the sign. The transfer of Jewish wealth into German homes and German public finances created a population with a stake in not looking too closely at what had been done.

Kershaw called it lethal indifference. Aly’s contribution is to explain why indifference was not simply a moral failure but a structurally produced condition. You do not scrutinize the provenance of goods you need. You do not ask questions when asking questions might cost you the apartment.

The infrastructure of antisemitism, which this series has traced from medieval expulsion law through to the Nuremberg statutes, not only normalized the idea that Jews were legitimate targets. It built, over centuries, a system in which their persecution was repeatedly made profitable for those who carried it out. The Holocaust was that system’s fullest expression. But it was not its invention.

The next post will examine how that infrastructure was built theologically: the mechanism by which the Jewish responses to persecution were consumed and transformed into new justifications for violence, what Israel Yuval calls the parasitic structure of European antisemitism.

Primary sources and further reading:

Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2005) — the essential starting point for the economic argument

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (2003) — on the property tax mechanism and Reich Flight Tax

Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001); Golden Harvest (2012)

Stefanie Fischer, Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919–1939 (2024) — on the micro-level mechanics of Aryanization

Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (2018)

David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (2022) — on Nazi expropriation in occupied Poland

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (1992)

That is not an accident. It is the point.

The campaign to free Adeena Kohn has done something impressive: it has made Raphi Stein’s get (a Jewish bill of divorce) refusal visible to hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of him. The tactic worked. But the discourse it generated has largely devolved into arguments about tzniut, about whether the women posting those stories are dressed appropriately, about what kind of campaign is acceptable for a Jewish cause. In the meantime, Adeena is still an agunah.

So let’s talk about what the halacha actually says.

But first, the scale of the problem, because Adeena is not an anomaly. An agunah is a woman legally chained to a marriage after it has functionally ended, unable to remarry under Jewish law because she lacks either proof of her husband’s death or a get. The modern version of this, Adeena’s situation, is technically called mesorevet get: a woman who is refused a get. Though in common use, the term agunah covers both.

Reliable numbers are almost impossible to pin down. In Israel, estimates range from 180 (the figure Agudath Israel offered) to 10,000 (reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post), a gap that tells you more about institutional incentives to minimize the problem than about the actual count. Advocacy organizations, including Chochmat Nashim, have documented that the official rabbinate numbers exclude women who gave up custody, money, or child support to escape, women whose cases were dropped because they couldn’t sustain years of litigation, and women who simply stopped fighting.

The Boston Agunah Taskforce puts it plainly: the manipulation of Jewish law in the divorce process is a form of domestic abuse, and its primary victims are women and their children. In the United States, the RCA prenuptial agreement has substantially reduced new cases in the Modern Orthodox community, but it is not universally used, and it cannot help women already in Adeena’s position. Every one of those cases is a woman waiting.

What a Beit Din is supposed to do

The Beit Din of America issued a seruv against Raphi Stein in 2023. Rabbi Perlman’s beit din issued one as well. A seruv is a formal finding of rabbinic contempt, issued after multiple ignored summonses. It is not preliminary. It is the main coercive tool available to a diaspora beit din, and it has been in place for roughly three years. In that time, Raphi Stein appeared on a podcast, introduced himself under a pseudonym as a divorced man, and continued on with his life.

The seruv is on paper, but has not gotten results.

To understand why, it helps to know what the civil record actually looks like, because this case has now been litigated across five courts over five years and the paper trail is substantial.

The family came to Monsey in August 2020 under circumstances that are not in dispute. Adeena had experienced a postpartum mental health emergency requiring hospitalization, and her psychiatrist prescribed ongoing treatment in New York. Both parties signed a joint stipulation of facts confirming this. By March 2021, her doctor had written a prescription stating she needed to remain in New York until completion of treatment. That treatment was ongoing until the time of trial.

In March 2021, Stein told Kohn he wanted the family to return to Montreal. She told him she was not returning. In October 2021, she filed for divorce in Rockland County, index number 35657/2021, seeking custody of the children. That state proceeding has been running since then and remains active today: a Rockland County Supreme Court order dated March 17, 2025 is currently on appeal to the Appellate Division, Second Department, with assigned counsel having confirmed in late April 2025 that Stein intends to proceed.

In December 2022, Stein filed a separate federal petition under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, seeking the return of the three children to Montreal. Following a three-and-a-half-day bench trial in the Southern District of New York, the petition was denied. The district court found that wrongful retention had occurred no later than October 2021, more than a year before the petition was filed, which made the children’s “now settled” defense available. On the merits of that defense, the court found that the children, then seven, five, and three years old, had lived in Monsey for at least half their lives, with the youngest having lived there nearly her entire life. They had attended the same schools consistently, lived in the same apartment complex throughout, and were surrounded by maternal grandparents, a great-grandmother, aunts, and cousins. The court found the now-settled defense established by a preponderance of the evidence and denied the petition.

Stein appealed to the Second Circuit. In November 2024, a three-judge panel affirmed in a summary order, finding no clear error in any of the district court’s factual findings. The court was given every reasonable inference in Stein’s favor, as it is required to give pro se appellants, and still affirmed. Rehearing and rehearing en banc were denied in January 2025. In April 2025, Stein filed a pro se petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court, docket 24-7482, arguing a circuit split on when the one-year clock begins under the Convention. That petition is pending.

The full sequence is: a state divorce proceeding open since October 2021, a federal Hague petition filed December 2022, a bench trial lost, a Second Circuit affirmance, a rehearing denial, a cert petition, and a state appellate proceeding currently being perfected. That is not a man who has run out of options. It is a man who has pursued every available legal avenue while the beit din’s rulings sit unenforced.

New York Domestic Relations Law §253 exists specifically for this situation. It prevents a party from receiving the full benefits of a civil divorce until they have taken steps to remove religious barriers to remarriage. With civil proceedings still active, this is a direct lever that requires nothing further from the beit din.

This is the gap the campaign is trying to close. The litigation is the mechanism that keeps the get profitable, and the record of that litigation now spans half a decade and five separate courts.

The Talmud is not ambiguous on the underlying obligation. Amoraim in both Babylonia and Palestine were actively compelling gittin, and doing so frequently. Gittin 34a records R. Judah forcing a man to write a get three times, because the man canceled it twice the moment the immediate pressure was removed. The Yerushalmi contains an exchange between R. Jeremiah and R. Abahu that is blunt to the point of being uncomfortable: if we force a man to divorce his wife because she can’t tolerate his odor, R. Abahu asks, would we not force divorce when her very life depends on it? R. Yohanan’s ruling follows: if a man refuses to support his wife, we tell him, either support her or divorce her.

The Talmudic rabbis of Babylonia claimed authority to compel gittin and regularly exercised it. What has happened in the intervening centuries is not that the principle disappeared. It is the enforcement infrastructure that did. In the diaspora, a beit din has no bailiff, no state mechanism, and no power of physical compulsion. Its authority rests entirely on the community choosing to honor it.

When the community doesn’t, when Raphi Stein can walk into a shul and get an aliyah while holding a seruv, the system fails the woman it was designed to protect.

The cherem, full communal excommunication, is the escalation that has not yet been formally deployed in this case. Under Jewish law, a man under cherem cannot be counted in a minyan, cannot receive synagogue honors, and no community member in good standing may do business with him. In Flatbush and Monsey, this is not a symbolic punishment. The reason it is deployed rarely and carefully is the same reason the entire question of compulsion is complicated.

The Talmud requires that the get be given of the husband’s own free will. Pressure that tips into coercion risks producing a get me’useh, a forced get that is retroactively invalid, which is arguably worse for Adeena than no get at all, because she would believe herself free, remarry, and her children from that marriage would carry a status that follows them for generations.

The Seidenfeld Beit Din in Monsey appears to have recognized this vulnerability and deliberately exploited it. They issued a bittul seruv, annulling the BDA’s seruv, and then turned seruvim against Adeena herself and against Rabbi Willig. The documents were allegedly signed by the beit din’s secretary, not by the dayanim, raising serious questions about their validity. But in a community without a central enforcing authority, a questionable document can still function as cover. It gives people permission to look away.

This is not halacha. This is halacha being used as a tool against the woman it was supposed to protect.

Ona’at isha and the system being gamed

Ona’at isha is not a single prohibition. It is a cluster of them, running through Ketubot and into the responsa literature, based on the principle that a husband bears active obligations toward his wife’s wellbeing, not simply negative duties to refrain from harm. The Talmud in Bava Metzia 59a is specific about the magnitude of these obligations: a man must be careful never to cause his wife distress, because her tears come easily and her sense of wrong runs deep, and the gates of heaven that closed at the destruction of the Temple remained open for tears. That is not a sentiment. It is a legal principle with enforcement attached.

The ketubah itself was designed partly as a deterrent against arbitrary get refusal: the husband owes the ketubah sum the moment the marriage ends, so withholding the get preserves leverage over that payment. Extended litigation, child support obligations structured for minimal financial traceability, demands that shift each time a settlement is close, these are not separate issues from the get. They are the get. What the campaign describes, five years of documented refusal combined with a full settlement offer rejected, is a textbook application of this pattern.

The mental health dimension of this has become increasingly legible in contemporary responsa, consequently strengthening the ona’at isha case considerably. Contemporary poskim, including R. Rosensweig, have applied the pikuach nefesh framework directly to psychological suffering, mapping the categories of holeh she-yesh bo sakana and holeh she-ein bo sakana onto mental health conditions.

The reasoning is that nefesh encompasses mental and spiritual life, not only physical survival, and that severe depression or trauma constitutes a medical emergency under halacha in the same way a physical illness does. The research on prolonged get refusal consistently documents outcomes including severe depression, anxiety disorders, and PTSD in agunot. If a posek would rule that a man suffering equivalent psychological harm has a claim under pikuach nefesh, the same standard applies to the woman he is deliberately and systematically causing that harm to. Ona’at isha is not a soft ethical preference. It is a legal category, and what is being described in this case meets its criteria over five years and counting.

The campaign document describes a “divorce coach” named Simcha Kornbluth who allegedly trains men in get-refusal tactics through a company called “The Smartest Divorce.” He is unlicensed. When approached, he falsely claimed that Rabbi Schabes had endorsed the get refusal. Manufacturing halachic cover for a get refuser compounds the original offense because it forecloses the communal mechanisms the tradition built to address it. The Geonim were explicit: the court’s power to coerce a violent husband derived precisely from the deterrent effect of that power. Coaching men to neutralize the deterrent while denying they are doing so is enabling ongoing harm, and doing so under false rabbinic authority is a separate violation layered on top.

What tzniut is actually about

In November 2006, thousands of ultra-Orthodox men convened in Jerusalem to address a religious crisis: spandex. Only men attended. The symposium focused entirely on women’s attire. One rabbi summarized the stakes: “each and every one of us must stand guard and make sure his wife and daughters’ clothing are modest.” The men present did not discuss their own clothing.

Rabbi Falk’s 600-page compendium on female etiquette states it plainly: “It is essential that women and girls realize that it is their responsibility to ensure that men do not transgress, even inadvertently.” The Talmud in Berachot 24a declares that a man who glances at a woman’s little finger acts as if he gazes at her private parts, and the rabbinic solution is not to teach men to govern their gaze. It is to regulate what women show. A partially revealed shoulder, Falk writes, “presents a stumbling block to a man who happens to see the woman or girl.” Men’s failings are women’s problem. The solution to male desire is female concealment, and the obligation to implement that solution falls entirely on women, extending to elastic bands sewn into necklines and clasps fixed between blouse buttons to prevent accidental exposure.

The prudishness presented as authentic Torah-rooted tradition does not flow cleanly from Sinai. Frymer-Kensky traces the sexual phobia underlying modesty regulations not primarily to Jewish sources at all but to Hellenistic Judaism, specifically Ben Sira and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, both written in conscious reaction to Greek culture and saturated with its fear of erotic attraction. Ben Sira is explicit: looking at beauty is a great danger, women deploy their beauty as a weapon, and the natural conclusion is separation. The yihud laws, the talmudic assumption that the mere presence of a woman tempts men into immorality, the entire architecture of treating female bodies as an uncontrollable hazard to male spiritual life, these draw from Greek popular and intellectual traditions that Israel absorbed from a culture it identified, with considerable ambivalence, as superior.

The Ashkenazic authorities of medieval Germany and France did not resist that environment. Baumgarten documents a shared mentality between Hasidei Ashkenaz and their Christian neighbors, a parallel asceticism she and Fishman connect to direct cultural contact with the theologians of Paris, Bologna, and Köln. The increasingly negative view of marital sexuality, the encouragement to avoid women as much as possible, and the tightening of rules around female public presence cemented into Ashkenazic communal norm during precisely the centuries when Ivo of Chartres, Gratian, and Aquinas were making similar arguments fifty miles away.

What Henkin’s critique of the post-Holocaust standardization project reveals is the final stage of this process. Historically contingent, culturally borrowed anxieties, Greek in origin, reinforced by Christian asceticism, varying by community and era for centuries, were flattened into a single maximalist code and retroactively presented as an eternal obligation. Henkin is clear about this: books like Oz ve-Hadar Levushah perpetuate the standardization of halacha at the expense of local custom, and tzniut is particularly ill-suited for that standardization.

Under the ideology these books promote, a woman’s ultimate distinction is to be considered a tzenu’ah. Her equivalent of Torah study is modesty. Displaying knowledge or excellence in any other domain risks becoming a tzniut violation because it attracts attention. Women in Flatbush in 2026 are being policed by dress standards whose intellectual genealogy runs through Aristotle and Aquinas as much as through anything at Sinai. Calling that halacha is not a description. It is a claim to an authority that history does not support.

This is where the conversation about the Instagram campaign gets dishonest. The women posting those stories deliberately deployed the logic of the male gaze, using it as a tool rather than suffering under it. The halachic objection to their method assumes that the problem tzniut is solving is men’s inability to control themselves around women’s bodies, and that women therefore bear the obligation to prevent male transgression. But that framing, taken seriously, requires us to explain why Raphi Stein, a man who has ignored two batei din for three years and has allegedly been coached in tactics intended to trap his wife in a dead marriage, is not discussed in terms of tzniut at all.

Tzniut, properly understood, is a value about restraint, dignity, and not using power to overwhelm others. It applies to him. A man who has weaponized a legal system against his wife for five years, who appeared on a podcast under a false name, presenting himself as divorced, who has allegedly manufactured a halachic cover to sustain his refusal, is not a modest person in any sense the tradition would recognize. The Yerushalmi is plain: if we coerce a man to divorce his wife because she cannot tolerate his presence, certainly we coerce him when her life depends on it. The conversation about what the women in those Instagram stories were wearing is not a halachic objection. It is a distraction from the one who actually has a tzniut problem here.

What the campaign is actually doing, halachically

The social media pressure is applying exactly the kind of communal force that a cherem is designed to produce, without the formal instrument. It is making the social cost of his behavior real in a community where the Beit Din’s paper ruling has not been enforced. The hostage negotiator’s language in the campaign is precise: shifting demands are a leverage tactic, not a negotiating posture. A full settlement was offered in exchange for the get and was refused. That refusal establishes bad faith on the record.

The bittul seruv from Seidenfeld needs to be contested. If it was signed only by a secretary and not by dayanim, it is not a valid beit din ruling. The original seruvim from the BDA and Rabbi Perlman’s beit din stand unless overturned by a properly constituted court. Getting that clarity into public discourse matters because the confusion it creates is not accidental.

The campaign’s goal is to make him give the get of his own will, which is precisely what the halacha requires, by making the alternative intolerable enough that his will changes. That is, as a matter of Jewish legal theory, exactly how the system is supposed to work.

It has worked before. Flatbush Girl has helped free 44 agunot. Forty-four women who can remarry, whose children will not carry a compromised status, because sustained community pressure did what the beit din system required but could not enforce on its own. That is the answer to every objection about the method. The proof is 44 women who are free.

The problem is not the campaign. The problem is that the community let it get to this point.

Free Adeena Kohn. If you would like to contribute to the campaign the link is here, and follow flatbushgirl on insta.

This post analyzes the differential public response to two Nazi killing programs, the T4 euthanasia program and the Holocaust. It uses the difference as evidence that antisemitism was structurally embedded in German society rather than situationally produced. Please note that this post discusses mass killing and genocide by the Nazi regime.

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Between 1939 and 1941, Nazi Germany murdered between 70,000 and 90,000 disabled and psychiatric patients in a network of gas chambers operating inside Germany. Buses arrived at the asylums and left empty. Smoke rose from the crematoria. Death notices arrived in bulk, listing identical improbable causes, “appendicitis,” “heart failure”, for patients who had been healthy weeks before.

The German populace protested, Catholic and Protestant clergy issued statements, and families demanded information. The Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, delivered a sermon on August 3, 1941, publicly denouncing the murders as violations of divine and German law. Goebbels told Hitler that if anything were done against Galen, “the population of Münster could be regarded as lost to the war effort, and the same could confidently be said of the whole of Westphalia.” Hitler ordered the program halted. Public protest stopped the Nazi killing machine.

Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews. This, too, was visible, in some respects more so, since it was larger and longer. Locals worked in and around the camps. Towns near extermination facilities in occupied Poland smelled burning flesh and saw ash fall on nearby fields. Inside Germany, by 1944, nearly every major industry used concentration camps or forced labor; the camps were next to the factories. Death marches in the war’s final months elapsed through German towns, the starving prisoners visible to anyone who looked. Germans largely did not protest.

The question then is, why did the same population that was outraged by one killing program fail to mobilize against the other?

I. T4: A Protest With Limits

Ian Kershaw’s exacting documentation of popular opinion in the Third Reich reveals that the T4 protest, while genuine and ultimately effective, was more complicated than a straightforward assertion of humanitarian principle. Kershaw notes that the unrest “did not emanate alone or even chiefly from humanitarian concern, but arose in good measure from doubt, reaching into Nazi circles, about the lack of explicit legal guidelines and sanctions for the taking of ‘useless life.’”

What disturbed many Germans was not only the killing itself but the killing’s legal formlessness, the absence of a statute, a procedure, an official framework. Some protesters were not objecting that people were being killed; they were objecting that people were being killed without proper authorization. In one documented case, a woman who had protested the transfer of patients from a nearby asylum said she had wanted only to hear from authorities “that it was not a matter of a case which dispensed with every form of legal foundation.”

Yet even this limited, partially legalistic protest achieved what nothing comparable achieved for the Holocaust. The killing centers were inside Germany, the victims were German citizens with German families, and the deaths were traceable and demonstrably false in their official explanations. The protest had institutional support from the churches, the only time during the Third Reich, Kershaw observes, that church leaders channeled public opinion on “a matter not simply of denominational concern but in a matter of the most basic human right — the right to life.”

Kershaw’s Popular Opinion and Political Dissent speaks about the Absberg incident, which captures the nature of this protest. In late February 1941, several hundred mentally disabled patients were loaded onto buses in the market square of a small Bavarian town, not behind the asylum’s closed gates but in public view. “The entire population of Absberg, strongly Catholic, had gathered and watched the scene in tears.” Among the weeping spectators were Party members. The local priest had brought all the patients into the church for communion before their removal. The Nazi Gau Staff Office was alarmed enough to write to the Führer Chancellery requesting permission to warn Local Group Leaders in advance, so that future transfers could be arranged without causing public unrest. Permission was refused.

This response, villagers out, tears, clergy, collective solidarity, bureaucratic alarm, is the baseline of what German moral mobilization looked like when it was activated.

II. The Holocaust: What Germans Saw

The visibility of the Holocaust inside Germany was extensive. Kershaw’s reconstruction of the evidence draws on SD reports, private diaries, field letters, and postwar surveys to establish what ordinary Germans encountered.

The deportations beginning in 1941 were, in many cities, conducted in public. Jewish neighbors were collected from apartment buildings. Their furniture appeared for sale or simply disappeared into neighbors’ homes. SD reports from December 1941 and April 1942 document ordinary Germans commenting on the deportations without apparent distress, noting that Jews had been sent east, speculating about their fate, expressing a range of responses from indifference to approval.

By mid-war, soldiers on the Eastern Front wrote home. Workers employed at facilities adjacent to camps described what they saw. The sheer industrial scale of forced labor, 13 to 14 million people across the Nazi system by some estimates, meant that concentration camp laborers were visible features of the German landscape in the middle of the country. Not in some remote area, working alongside roads, clearing rubble, harvesting crops. Their condition was observable. The beatings, the starvation, the summary executions, often by hanging along the roads, were conducted openly and were available to any witness.

Yet what Kershaw finds in the opinion reports is not protest but what he calls “lethal indifference”, a phrase that has anchored Holocaust historiography since he introduced it. The “Jewish Question,” he argues, “did not rank prominently on the scale of priorities of the German population during the Nazi era.” Most Germans had, in the fullest sense, other things on their minds.

III. Why the Difference

The T4 program was new; it violated existing norms in ways immediately legible to the German public. German citizens, with German families, were killed by German bureaucrats without legal authority. The church could oppose it on the grounds of existing ethical codes, including the Fifth Commandment, the sanctity of German family life, and the rule of law, because the program violated them.

The Holocaust was not new. It was, in Kershaw’s formulation, the activation of something already present: “latent antisemitism and apathy sufficed to allow the increasingly criminal ‘dynamic’ hatred of the Nazi regime the autonomy it needed to set in motion the Holocaust.” The distinction between latent and dynamic antisemitism is important here. Dynamic antisemitism, the fanatical, eliminationist hatred of the Nazi leadership, was not required to be widely shared for the Holocaust to proceed. What was required was that latent antisemitism make the murder of Jews feel, to most Germans, less like a violation of norms than T4 did. And it did, because that latent antisemitism had been taught at school, preached from pulpits, written into legal codes, and embedded in the basic categories of economic and social life for centuries — the infrastructure this series has traced in Part I.

“The road to Auschwitz,” Kershaw writes, “was built by hate, but paved with indifference.”

What produced that indifference was not ignorance and not terror alone, though both played roles. It was the cumulative effect of a civilization’s infrastructure. Jews had been positioned as permanent outsiders, racial threats, conceptual opposites, and economic scapegoats. The killing of Jews could draw on centuries of normalized hostility in a way that the killing of disabled Germans simply could not.

IV. Ordinary Men

Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men provides the micro-level evidence that fills in Kershaw’s macro-level analysis. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was composed of middle-aged men from Hamburg, not SS ideologues, not fanatical antisemites selected for their hatred, but policemen drawn from the general population. They were given, at Józefów in July 1942, an explicit choice: those who could not bring themselves to participate in the shooting of Jews could step forward and be assigned other duties. A small number did so. The rest did not.

Browning’s evidence shows that at least 80 percent of those assigned to firing squads continued until 1,500 Jews had been killed. The reasons were various: peer pressure, careerism, conformity, a desire not to appear weak before colleagues, but the point is that the structural conditions that would have made refusal normal, expected, or institutionally supported were absent. When Bishop Galen preached against T4, he was giving voice to a widely shared moral intuition backed by institutional church authority. When Lieutenant Buchmann of Reserve Police Battalion 101 refused to participate in Jewish actions and wrote to Hamburg requesting transfer, he was acting as an isolated individual, “somewhat older,” as he put it, with a Hamburg business and no ambition for police advancement, with no comparable institutional support for his position.

The difference is not individual moral character. It is the presence or absence of institutional systems that makes moral resistance normal rather than exceptional. Those frameworks existed for T4 because T4 violated norms that were institutionally defended. They did not exist for the Holocaust because the Holocaust fulfilled norms that had been institutionally constructed for centuries.

Browning’s conclusion extends the point beyond Germany: “I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts because of their inability to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”

V. The Structural Conclusion

Kershaw’s final verdict on the German failure is not about individual moral weakness or peculiar national character. It is about institutional architecture: “the failure of the pluralist society of the pre-Nazi era to anchor the defense of Jewish interests in its organizational and institutional structures. For, it seems to me, only the incorporation of minority interest into the organized defense of majority interest against authoritarian inroads provides the structural framework where the processes which can culminate in genocide are blocked from the outset.”

This is the structural argument applied to its own evidence. T4 could be protested because the institutions of German society, the churches, family networks, local communities, and legal tradition still recognized the victims as members of those institutions. Disabled Germans had families in German communities who went to German churches. Their deaths activated the machinery of existing moral and institutional defense.

Jews were systematically excluded from those same institutions for centuries. They had been expelled, ghettoized, and legally defined as racial aliens, making the conceptual opposite of everything those institutions were meant to protect. When the machinery of extermination was turned on them, there was no comparable institutional framework to defend them, because the infrastructure of antisemitism had devoted centuries to making sure there would not be.

The T4 protest was not a measure of German humanity that makes the Holocaust inexplicable. It was, rather, a measure of exactly how far the structural embedding of antisemitism had proceeded, a natural experiment that reveals, through differential response, what centuries of embedded hatred had normalized.

The next post will trace how that infrastructure accumulated, and reveal the mechanism by which European antisemitism became, in Israel Yuval’s phrase, parasitic: not only adding new legends with each generation but consuming Jewish responses to persecution and transforming them into new justifications for violence.

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On October 1, 1993, the FBI was recording a meeting at a Marriott hotel near Philadelphia airport. The gathering was not announced publicly. Approximately twenty attendees were senior figures of the Palestine Committee, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas support network in the United States, who met to discuss strategy in the wake of the Oslo Accords, which they viewed as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.

The FBI had placed wiretaps in the conference room. The transcripts were later introduced as evidence in United States v. Holy Land Foundation, the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in American history. A federal jury convicted the defendants. The transcripts are public record.

Among the approaches discussed was explicit institutional penetration. Nihad Awad, then director of public relations for the Islamic Association for Palestine and later co-founder of CAIR, articulated the approach: the goal could be achieved by “infiltrating the American media outlets, universities and research centers.” The framing, Awad and others agreed, needed to be carefully managed, not Islamic resistance, but civil rights, human rights, and academic freedom. “War is deception,” said another attendee. “Deceive, camouflage, pretend that you’re leaving while you’re walking that way.”

The story of the Philadelphia meeting is a matter of public record, presented as evidence in the landmark United States v. Holy Land Foundation case, the largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history. The Soviet propaganda infrastructure explored in Part Six; those conclusions aren’t speculation; they’re grounded in peer-reviewed studies, recently opened state archives, public UN General Assembly votes, and financial records that line up with FBI investigations.

I. The Campus Before the Network

To understand how the Philadelphia meeting’s strategy could work, you need to understand what the campus already was by 1993.

The West German campuses of the late 1960s offer the clearest early documentation of what an anti-Zionist university environment looks like in formation, and why it develops faster on campuses than anywhere else. Jeffrey Herf’s archival research traces the shift precisely. From 1949 to 1967, the predominant stance of non-Communist left and left-liberal opinion in West Germany was emphatically pro-Israel. The tacit moral consensus of postwar West German public life, do no more harm to the Jews, was embedded across the political spectrum, including the student left.

That changed between June and September 1967. The Six-Day War gave the West German New Left an opportunity to reframe Israel through the vocabulary of anti-imperialism, a vocabulary that, as Part Six established, the Soviet-East German propaganda apparatus had been developing and distributing for years. Approximately 16,000 Arab students were studying at West German universities in those years, of whom 3,000 were Palestinians. The General Union of Palestinian Students, an arm of Al Fatah and the Arab League, organized politically among them, explicitly targeting West German campuses as a front in the PLO’s war against Israel.

The result was rapid. On June 9, 1969, at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, members of SDS, together with supporters of Al Fatah in the General Union of Palestinian Students, interrupted Israeli Ambassador Asher Ben-Natan’s lecture with chants including “Nazi Kiesinger and Ben Natan, a clique with Dayan” and “Zionists out of Palestine.” Ben-Natan left after two hours, unable to be heard over the tumult. He called the leftist anti-Zionism at the event “hidden antisemitism.”

Theodor Adorno, co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the leading figure of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, wrote to Herbert Marcuse ten days later. He reported that left-wing students had interrupted his own lectures twice that semester and that he had been forced to call the police to evict students occupying the Institute. He told Marcuse, “The danger that the students will turn toward fascism is one I take more seriously than you do. After people here in Frankfurt screamed at the Israeli Ambassador, I’m no longer convinced of the assurance that this has nothing to do with antisemitism. You must once look into the manic, cold eyes of those who, even when appealing to us, turn their rage against us.” Seven weeks later, on August 6, 1969, Adorno died of a heart attack. His warning proved prescient.

That summer, approximately fifty members of West German SDS accepted invitations from Al Fatah to spend time at a military camp in Jordan. They returned and published an open letter adopting the full PLO vocabulary: Israel was “a colonial state,” “racialist and imperialist,” “fiercely opposed to the liberation struggle of the Palestinian and Arab people.” They described themselves and the PLO as fighting “the same enemy.”

On November 9, 1969, the thirty-first anniversary of Kristallnacht, a bomb was placed at the Jewish Community Center in West Berlin. It failed to detonate. The group that claimed responsibility, the “Black Rats, Tupamaros West Berlin,” published a manifesto in the leftist magazine Agit 883 entitled “Shalom and Napalm.” It declared that German guilt about the Holocaust was a neurosis to be overcome, that “true anti-fascism is the clear and unambiguous expression of solidarity with the fighting fedayeen,” and that “the Jews who were expelled by fascism have themselves become fascists.” Jews who publicly supported Israel in West Germany were, the document stated, legitimate targets.

After the SDS dissolved in 1970, a wave of Marxist-Leninist student groups, known as the K-Gruppen, sprang up and left a lasting mark on West German universities. Historian Gerd Koenen even dubbed it “the red decade.” These groups were more than just a political blip; they shaped campus culture through 1977. Their language was clear and pointed: Israel was painted as a racist, colonialist, imperialist state; Zionism was equated with racism; Palestinian armed struggle, they argued, was legitimate resistance. Strikingly, these were the same arguments once broadcast in Arabic by Radio Zeesen during World War II, later repackaged by Soviet propaganda after 1967, and now echoing through lecture halls across West Germany.

What happened in West Germany happened across the Western left. By 1971, as Seymour Martin Lipset observed in the New York Times, anti-Zionism had become the predominant form of antisemitism in left intellectual culture. The vocabulary was embedded in the institutions the left controlled: the press, the unions, the parties that received Soviet subsidies, and, increasingly, the universities.

II. Channel One: The Academic Inheritance

When the New Left imploded in the early 1970s in the United States, dispersed by the end of the Vietnam War, the collapse of SDS, the Weather Underground’s implosion, a significant cohort of its activists entered graduate school. The liberal academy of the 1970s was tolerant enough to hire them. It did not anticipate that, once tenured, they would be considerably less tolerant of dissenting views themselves.

Harvey Klehr’s analysis of this institutional trajectory shows the organizational line from CPUSA through Students for a Democratic Society, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee under Michael Harrington, and eventually to DSA. At each institutional transition, the anti-Zionist vocabulary traveled with the organizational lineage. When Harrington merged his organization with the New American Movement, composed largely of New Left survivors, to form the modern DSA, he wanted their energy and organizing capacity. What he also acquired was the ideological vocabulary his new partners had inherited from the Soviet-aligned international left of the 1960s and 1970s. By the time this vocabulary had traveled through three organizational generations, its Soviet origins were invisible. It presented itself as the natural politics of the progressive left.

Graduate students learn the vocabulary of their field. They learn which questions are asked, which frameworks are employed, and which citations mark a scholar as serious. The postcolonial theoretical turn of the 1980s and 1990s, along with Said’s Orientalism, Spivak, Bhabha, and the more extensive apparatus of postcolonial studies, provided the academic framework. The settler-colonial theory that emerged in the 2000s, through Wolfe and Veracini, applied that framework precisely to Israel.

But neither Said nor Wolfe invented this vocabulary; the characterizations of Israel as racist, colonialist, and imperialist, of Zionism as a global force of oppression, had been constructed by the Soviet propaganda apparatus, institutionalized through UN Resolution 3379 and subsequent UN bodies, and distributed into universities, libraries, churches, and NGOs throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Wistrich documents that the UN apparatus distributed anti-Zionist materials “into many universities, schools, libraries, textbooks, and churches” as a direct result of the institutional cascade following Resolution 3379. The academic left did not develop this vocabulary independently. It inherited it from institutions it treated as authoritative, institutions that had been seeded by state-level Soviet propaganda thirty years earlier.

By the time the term “settler colonial theory” arrived in university seminars, the change was complete. The seams were invisible. It felt like valid scholarship because it had passed through scholarly channels. The genealogy had been laundered by institutional passage.

III. Channel Two: The Islamist Campus Strategy

Returning to Philadelphia in October 1993: the meeting that the FBI recorded was not primarily about ideas. It was about strategy. The participants were discussing a practical problem: how to continue supporting Hamas during the peace process period without legal exposure, and the answer they developed was institutional penetration under a neutral framing.

What made this strategy viable was not anything the Palestine Committee invented. It was the pre-existing vocabulary. By 1993, twenty-six years of Soviet propaganda, eighteen years of UN Resolution 3379, and a decade of academic postcolonial theory had already embedded Zionism-as-racism, Israel-as-apartheid, and settler-colonialism into the institutional culture of universities, NGOs, and left-wing organizations. The Palestine Committee did not need to present new ideas on campus. It needed to be organized within an existing discursive environment that had already been prepared.

Students for Justice in Palestine was founded at UC Berkeley in 1993. The GWU Program on Extremism, in research based on the Holy Land Foundation trial records and other federal court documents, traces the organizational genealogy from the Palestine Committee network through the Islamic Association for Palestine to the campus organizing infrastructure. Whether the direct link between the 1993 Philadelphia meeting and SJP’s Berkeley founding is causal or coincidental, the organizational environment from which SJP emerged was formed by the same network.

SJP’s vocabulary is entirely Soviet-derived: Zionism as racism, settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide. SJP did not originate this vocabulary; it deployed vocabulary that two decades of Soviet propaganda had embedded in international institutions and that the academic left had incorporated into postcolonial theory. The Islamist organizing network and the academic left were running on identical vocabulary for entirely different reasons. One had inherited it through institutional socialization; the other adopted it deliberately as cover because it had already been legitimized internationally.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Zionist vocabulary was itself not invented in 1993. Küntzel’s archival research documents its earlier genealogy: Radio Zeesen had transmitted genocidal antisemitism to the Arab world between 1939 and 1945; the Muslim Brotherhood had absorbed and radicalized that lexicon in the 1940s; Hassan al-Banna was calling in 1944 for Jews to be destroyed “like sick dogs.” The contemporary campus organizing infrastructure of the Palestinian solidarity movement draws from both streams, Soviet-constructed progressive vocabulary and Muslim Brotherhood-derived Islamist vocabulary, which had been convergent since the Soviet-PLO partnership of the 1970s.

After the Holy Land Foundation prosecutions created legal pressure on the direct Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States, a new funding channel emerged: Qatari state investment in American universities. According to US Department of Education disclosures, Qatar is the largest foreign funder of American universities, having provided over $7.7 billion over four decades, a figure that only came fully into view after a 2019 federal investigation uncovered billions in previously unreported funds. Qatar simultaneously hosts Hamas's political leadership in Doha. The relationship between that funding and the specific content circulating in Middle East studies programs is debated, but the structural incentive, a state that bankrolls Hamas politically and bankrolls American academic infrastructure simultaneously, is documented rather than inferred.

IV. The Convergence

The UN World Conference Against Racism at Durban in 2001 is the most visible documented case of both channels operating in the same space simultaneously.

Durban was organized through the UN infrastructure that Soviet anti-Zionism had built, the same apparatus that had distributed Resolution 3379 material into universities, NGOs, and churches since 1975. International NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, attended. Academic departments that had absorbed the Soviet-derived vocabulary through thirty years of institutional passage sent representatives and treated the conference as a credible human rights forum.

What happened there documented the convergence. Booths displayed posters equating Zionism with Nazism. Flyers bore Hitler’s photo captioned “What if I had won?” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed. Jewish participants were harassed and physically threatened. The conference that opened as a human rights gathering ended with human rights activists unable to show Jewish colleagues basic respect because, in Tabarovsky’s documentation of the event, their “very Jewishness shamed the antiracist cause.”

The Soviet anti-Zionist vocabulary, transmitted through UN institutions into NGO and academic culture, had been fully absorbed by the progressive human rights infrastructure that university seminars treated as authoritative. The two channels had merged into a single discourse. By 2001, it was no longer possible to distinguish where Soviet propaganda ended and independent left analysis began because the vocabulary had been shared for thirty years.

That is precisely the point. When vocabulary becomes invisible as vocabulary, when it presents itself as the conclusions of analysis rather than the products of institutional history, it achieves its maximum effect. The seams have healed. The genealogy has been forgotten. What remains is the framework, feeling like common sense.

V. Why the Campus Specifically

The university campus became the primary site of this discussion, not because academics are uniquely susceptible to bad ideas, but because it has definite structural features that both channels identified and exploited.

Academic freedom protects the deployment of any sufficiently credentialed analytical method from institutional challenge. Once settler colonial theory achieved critical mass in peer-reviewed journals, through normal academic processes of citation, hiring, and publication, it became impossible to challenge without appearing to threaten the academic freedom that protects genuine scholarly inquiry. The ideological capture of the apparatus preceded any individual challenge to it.

Campuses train the next generation of institutional actors. The vocabulary learned in a graduate seminar in 2005 circulates in 2025 through journalism, NGO work, policy analysis, and electoral politics. Both channels understood this: the Soviet apparatus specifically targeted universities, libraries, and textbooks as distribution channels for its materials after 1975. Nihad Awad’s formulation at the 1993 Philadelphia meeting explicitly listed universities alongside media outlets and research centers as targets for penetration.

Student populations turn over every four years, which means each incoming cohort can be socialized into the vocabulary anew without institutional memory of how the previous cohort was socialized. The organizing model of both channels, academic left socialization and SJP chapter organizing, depends on this renewable population.

VI. What This Means for Diagnosis

The campus anti-Zionism visible in 2023 and 2024 is not a spontaneous response to events in Gaza. If it were, it would track Israeli policy. It does not. It predates October 7. It predates 2014. It predates 2008. The vocabulary has been present on Western campuses, in essentially the same formulation, since UN Resolution 3379 seeded it into academic and NGO culture in 1975.

The students who chanted Soviet propaganda slogans at Columbia in April 2024 did not know they were chanting Soviet propaganda slogans. They knew them as the vocabulary of their discipline, their student organizations, their NGO networks, their social media feeds. The translation documented in Part Six, medieval European figures of Judaism rendered into progressive vocabulary by the Soviet propaganda machine, had been so thoroughly institutionalized through two parallel channels over fifty years that the seams were invisible.

This matters because it determines what kind of problem it is. A spontaneous response to Israeli policy is addressed by changing Israeli policy. An inherited institutional vocabulary, embedded through two independent channels over five decades, is a different kind of problem, one that cannot be addressed without first recognizing what it is.

The diagnostic test the series has applied throughout applies here: does the phenomenon track the evidence, or does it precede the evidence and survive its refutation? The campus anti-Zionism that was present before October 7 intensified after October 7, without reference to what actually happened on October 7, and deployed vocabulary constructed for geopolitical purposes by a state propaganda apparatus decades before October 7, is evidence-immune in precisely the way Nirenberg’s analysis predicts.

The vocabulary is doing work that the evidence cannot disturb. That is not analysis. That is a mechanism. And identifying the mechanism is the first step toward anything else.

Further Reading

On the West German campus precedent:

Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), is the definitive archival study of the East German channel and the West German radical left’s turn against Israel after 1967. Herf documents the Adorno-Marcuse letter, the Al Fatah summer camp, the “Shalom and Napalm” manifesto, and the K-Gruppen network from primary sources, including West German state security archives, the papers of Jewish community organizations, and SDS documents. The West German campus radicalization of 1967-1977 is the historical model for what we see today.

Jeffrey Herf, Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (Routledge, 2023), Herf’s most recent synthesis, brings together the three contemporary strands. The chapter on the West German radical left covers the same period as Undeclared Wars in accessible form, including the full text of the “Shalom and Napalm” manifesto. The most useful single volume for readers who want the West German precedent without the full archival apparatus.

On the Islamist campus organizing network:

Lorenzo Vidino, The Hamas Networks in America: A Short History (GWU Program on Extremism, 2023), freely available online from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, which is an academic institution. Documents the organizational genealogy from the 1993 Philadelphia meeting through IAP, Holy Land Foundation, and CAIR to the contemporary campus infrastructure, based on FBI wiretap transcripts and federal trial records from United States v. Holy Land Foundation. The Philadelphia meeting transcripts quoted here come from this work.

On the pre-history of Muslim Brotherhood antisemitism:

Matthias Küntzel, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 War and its Aftermath (Routledge, 2023), the most recent and focused study of how Nazi Arabic-language radio propaganda between 1939 and 1945 planted genocidal antisemitism in Arab public discourse, and how the Brotherhood absorbed and radicalized that lexicon. Radio Zeesen’s broadcasts, their reception in the Arab world, and the transmission of Muslim Brotherhood ideology are documented from German military archives, British intelligence reports, and Jewish Agency records.

Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, 2007/2013), the earlier and broader study covering the same genealogy with more attention to the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational development and the specific relationship between Amin el-Husseini and the Nazi leadership. Read alongside the 2023 book, these two volumes provide the most complete account available of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological formation.

On the Durban convergence:

Anne Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, American Society of International Law (2002), freely available. A contemporaneous legal analysis from a scholar who attended Durban. Documents the distribution of the Protocols, the harassment of Jewish participants, the anti-Zionist NGO coalition, and the institutional mechanisms by which the conference normalized Soviet anti-Zionist vocabulary as the international human rights consensus.

On the Soviet campaign (Part Six sources, recommended for follow-up):

Izabella Tabarovsky, “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism,” Fathom Journal (May 2019), freely available online. The essential starting point: how a Soviet citizen recognized the vocabulary of her childhood circulating in American progressive spaces after 2018, and what archival investigation revealed about how it got there. Read this before the longer academic studies.

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On April 24, 1973, a Paris court indicted a Soviet embassy employee for racial defamation. The article in question had appeared in a French-language bulletin circulated by Soviet diplomatic networks. It accused Israeli soldiers of learning from Jewish holy books that the only way to treat an Arab was to kill him. It equated Zionism with Nazism. It invented blood libel-like claims about the religious foundations of Israeli military conduct.

When the plaintiffs subpoenaed the article’s origins, a Soviet writer named Grigory Svirsky testified to what he had found. The article had been copied, typos included, from a 1906 pamphlet by a member of the Black Hundreds, the ultranationalist Russian movement that organized pogroms in the last years of the Tsarist empire. The pamphlet’s author had himself borrowed his supposed “Jewish religious quotes” from a Tsarist antisemite who had fabricated translations of the Talmud as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy against Christendom.

The only editorial intervention between the 1906 pogromist pamphlet and the 1972 Soviet diplomatic bulletin was systematic: every instance of the word “Jew” had been replaced with the word “Zionist.”

This was not an oversight or an aberration. It was the operating method of a propaganda campaign that ran from 1967 to approximately 1988, and that systematically repackaged medieval European antisemitism in the vocabulary of progressive anti-colonialism. The vocabulary it produced, Zionism as racism, Israel as apartheid state, Zionist as settler-colonialist, Israel-Nazi equation, circulates today in Western progressive discourse largely without attribution, presented as the conclusions of political analysis instead of the products of a documented institutional history.

Understanding that history is not a way of dismissing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a precondition for thinking clearly about it.

I. The People Who Built the Vocabulary

The men who produced Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda were not Marxist scholars analyzing colonialism. They were members of what Tabarovsky’s archival research recognizes as the Russian Party, a loose far-right nationalist movement that arose in the late 1950s inside the Soviet apparatus, whose members read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulating among Komsomol elites, and some of whom read Mein Kampf. Their “knowledge” about Jews became institutionally sought-after after 1967, when Israel’s unexpected victory over the Soviet Union’s Arab allies threw the socialist bloc into crisis, and the Kremlin needed an ideological weapon.

The most consequential of these figures was Yuri Ivanov, who worked under a senior CPSU Central Committee functionary named Ivan Milovanov. On Milovanov’s urging, Ivanov wrote in 1969 what became the core text of Soviet anti-Zionism: Beware: Zionism!, published in 800,000 copies in the Soviet Union and translated into at least sixteen languages, including English, Arabic, French, Ukrainian, and Polish. As a colleague later recalled, Ivanov’s singular achievement was to fit classic antisemitic conspiracy theory into the only philosophical framework permitted in the USSR, the Marxist-Leninist one, so that “no one could argue against it.” His colleagues at the Central Committee called him, with no apparent irony, “the Soviet Union’s main kikologist.”

Another important figure, Yevgeny Yevseyev, had personal notes that called for solving “the Soviet Jewish question” through discriminatory measures, emigration of those who objected, and prohibition of any remaining Jews from communicating with Jews abroad. His published work equated Zionism with fascism, with racism, with Nazi Germany. He borrowed material not only from the 1906 Black Hundreds pamphlet, as the Paris trial revealed, but also from antisemitic propaganda produced in Cairo in 1957 by Johannes van Leers, a Nazi fugitive appointed by Nasser to head Egypt’s Institute for the Study of Zionism. The chain of transmission was explicit: medieval European blood libel, through Nazi propaganda, through Soviet anti-Zionism.

In the early 1980s, a Soviet historian called Ruth Okuneva wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev expressing concern. She attached pages of what she called “strange analogies”, 200 quotes from Soviet anti-Zionist bestsellers placed alongside nearly identical quotes from Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Black Hundreds propagandists. The general secretary did not respond.

II. Three Channels

The campaign reached its global audiences through three parallel, complementary channels.

The Novosti channel. The Novosti press agency was active in 110 countries, maintained connections with 140 major international agencies, and had intelligence officers comprising a significant portion of its editorial staff. Between 1967 and the mid-1980s, it published no fewer than fourteen documented English-language pamphlets on Zionism, each translated into multiple additional languages, with titles including Zionism: An Instrument of Imperialist Reaction, Anti-Sovietism — Profession of Zionists, Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism, and Enemy of Peace and Progress: On the Criminal Policy of Israel’s Zionist Regime.

Soviet embassies circulated this material through diplomatic routes and, as the Paris trial demonstrated, through front publications in the host country they were in. When the Soviet embassy’s direct legal immunity protected the distribution apparatus, sympathetic local employees were left to face the consequences.

The most striking single achievement of this channel: on January 23, 1971, Novosti placed an article in the New York Times. The paper’s editors retitled it from the bombastic Soviet original towards the anodyne “A Soviet View on Jews” and ran it flanked by two columns by leaders of the American Soviet Jewry movement, but they ran it. The article’s ostensible subject was Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League. Its actual purpose was to introduce the “Zionism is Nazism” equation to the Times’ readership. Ambassador Dobrynin’s embassy had simultaneously established what internal documents describe as a “special propaganda council” tasked with driving wedges between American Jews and non-Jews, prompting doubts about Jewish loyalty to America, and working with “progressive” American Jewish publications to “expose hostile Zionist activities.”

The financial channel. Between 1958 and 1980, Soviet couriers, later revealed to be FBI informants reporting the entire operation, delivered more than $28 million in subsidies to the Communist Party of the United States. These figures derive from Soviet state financial records opened after 1991 and from FBI documentation of the courier operation, not from inference or testimony. By 1988, the annual subsidy had reached $3 million. The French Communist Party received $50 million between 1950 and 1990; Moscow also supplied free newsprint for its newspaper L’Humanité and paid the salary of its Moscow correspondent. The Communist Party of Great Britain’s newspaper, the Morning Star, was kept financially viable by Moscow’s daily bulk orders of 6,000 copies. When Moscow abruptly terminated those purchases in 1989, it caused, in the paper’s own words, “huge financial disruption.”

The financial dependency came with ideological conditions. When CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall criticized Gorbachev’s reforms, Moscow cut subsidies from $3 million to zero in a single year. The parties that accepted Moscow’s money adopted Moscow’s positions, including Moscow’s positions on Israel and Zionism. The mechanism was not covert ideological infiltration. It was contractual.

The practical result: Hyman Lumer, a member of the CPUSA Political Committee and editor of its theoretical journal, flew to Moscow to “collect materials for unmasking the Zionist anti-Soviet campaign.” He met with Soviet handlers who explained the correct position. He returned to the United States and published a series of articles and a 1973 book, Zionism: Its Role in World Politics, written in Soviet anti-Zionist idiom but calibrated for an American audience, less overtly vitriolic, more suitable for mainstream left consumption. Moscow republished Lumer’s output in Russian-language collected volumes as evidence that “progressive world opinion” agreed with Soviet positions. In November 2023, the website People’s World began publishing Lumer’s 1973 book. They did so without reference to its origins, Lumer’s ideological background, or acknowledgment that the source material constituted a Soviet propaganda exercise.

The East German channel. The East German state pursued its own parallel anti-Israel campaign that reached the West German and wider European left through a distinct pathway. Jeffrey Herf’s archival research documents how the East German Foreign Ministry coordinated with the PLO, co-sponsored UN Resolution 3379 (”Zionism is a form of racism”), and actively cultivated the West German radical left’s turn against Israel after 1967. The West German student, already predisposed against the Federal Republic, against American imperialism, and against any politics associated with the conservative establishment, encountered East German and Arab Palestinian students in universities who brought the Soviet-developed vocabulary with them. By 1969, the West Berlin Tupamaros were placing bombs at Jewish community centers and issuing manifestos declaring that “Palestine is here, we are fedayeen.” “Shalom and Napalm,” their founding document, declared that support for Israel was a form of fascism and that German guilt about the Holocaust was a neurosis to be overcome. The Jews who had been expelled by fascism had, the document claimed, become fascists themselves.

As Herf observes, the PLO Charter of 1968 contained in explicit form all the themes that would circulate through this network: Zionism as racism, colonialism, fascism, and imperialism; the denial of any Jewish historical tie to the land; the assertion that “Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality.” These positions, which amounted to the denial of Jewish peoplehood in its entirety, were adopted by the global left as the common language of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, presented as the conclusions of anti-imperialist analysis instead than what they were: the assertions of one party to a conflict, systematically amplified by a state propaganda apparatus.

III. What the Vocabulary Does

Steve Cohen, a committed British socialist who had no sympathy for Zionism, sat down in 1982 to write a condemnation of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. He went to the left press for source material and, he wrote, “became horrified by what I was reading.” In 1984, he published That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic, in which he identified what he called “transcendental” antizionism — an antizionism that “transcends anything done by the Israeli state” and “could easily exist without Israel, without Zion and even without Zionism.” This form of anti-Zionism, Cohen argued, “has the same transcendental qualities as anti-Semitism without Jews; it has no necessary relationship to anything a real Zionist, or real Jew, is doing. It exists in the air quite apart from material reality.”

What Cohen described was the Soviet campaign’s most important and lasting contribution: the redefinition of Zionism from a specific national movement with an identifiable historical background into a global force of universal evil. Soviet encyclopedias document this transformation precisely. In the 1920s, Soviet definitions of Zionism noted that it arose in response to antisemitism and represented the view, mistaken from a Marxist perspective, that Jews were a nation.

By the mid-1960s, these definitions had been revised: references to antisemitism as the context for Zionism’s emergence disappeared entirely. Zionism was now described as a “far-flung system of organizations” connected to “imperialist states” and “monopolistic circles”; the “shock detachment of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism”; an ideology employing “terrorist methods” and allying itself with “a whole assortment of reactionary forces, including Nazi Germany.” By the time UN Resolution 3379 passed in November 1975, on the thirty-seventh anniversary of Kristallnacht, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” this vocabulary had been prepared across a decade of institutional effort and was ready for global institutionalization.

The resolution’s passage was not only a diplomatic achievement. It created infrastructure. UN departments and specialized agencies distributed resolutions and protocols in millions of copies to universities, schools, libraries, churches, and NGOs worldwide. Within a decade, as Wistrich documents, what had been explicitly identified in the Western press as Soviet propaganda had become, in his phrase, “part of today’s conventional wisdom.”

IV. The Living Inheritance

Two figures make the transmission concrete rather than abstract.

Angela Davis joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1969 and remained a member until 1991. By CIA estimates, in 1971 Moscow devoted approximately five percent of all its propaganda efforts to her, a measure of how valuable her status as a Black American Communist intellectual was to the Soviet campaign’s American operation. She refused to speak on behalf of jailed Soviet Jewish dissidents on the grounds that they were “Zionist fascists.” She continues advocating the positions Cohen identified as transcendental antizionism, linking Zionism to policing in Ferguson and Baltimore as part of a unified structure of global oppression.

Andrew Murray spent thirty-five years in the Communist Party of Great Britain, beginning in 1976. Between 1986 and 1987, he worked directly for Novosti, the Soviet propaganda agency, as a staff member. He subsequently became Jeremy Corbyn’s Special Political Advisor during the years when Corbyn’s Labour Party was investigated by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission and found guilty of antisemitism and “political interference in antisemitism complaints.” Murray’s Soviet-style conspiratorial anti-Zionist views are documented throughout his public writing.

V. The Prepared Ground

The preceding five posts in this series established that the settler colonial framework does not fit the historical record of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not the Ottoman legal context, not the economic structure of the Yishuv, not the formation of Palestinian identity, not the mechanism of fellahin dispossession. The posts asked, on the framework’s own structural terms, whether the evidence supports the classification. It does not.

This post asks a different question: how does a framework that doesn’t fit the evidence come to dominate the discourse about the evidence?

Part of the answer is internal to academic theory; Wolfe’s settler-colonial framework was developed in the 1990s and 2000s in Western universities, drawing on Foucault, Gramsci, and the postcolonial tradition, and spread through the normal mechanisms of scholarly citation and intellectual influence. The Fanonian anti-colonial wave of the 1960s created the conceptual infrastructure into which settler colonial theory arrived.

But the settler colonial framework did not arrive in a neutral environment. It arrived in one that had been systematically prepared by twenty years of Soviet institutional propaganda, propaganda that had already embedded Zionism as racism, Israel as apartheid, Palestinian struggle as national liberation equivalent to the ANC and the Viet Cong, into universities, NGOs, left-wing publications, and church groups worldwide. The vocabulary the framework uses was already present and already felt like scrutiny rather than ideology. The framework did not create the discourse. It formalized a discourse that already existed.

When the language produced by the Zionologists, by men who read Mein Kampf and borrowed from Black Hundreds pogromist pamphlets and fabricated blood libel-like stories about what Israeli soldiers learned from the Talmud, circulates in Western progressive spaces as the common vocabulary of solidarity with the oppressed, it is doing exactly what Nirenberg identified as the fundamental operation of antisemitism across two millennia of Western history: translating medieval European figures of Judaism into the conceptual vocabulary available in the current moment, so that the figure feels like observation rather than projection.

The Soviet campaign succeeded not because it invented new content. It succeeded because it translated old content with extraordinary institutional thoroughness into the language the global left already spoke. The translation was so complete that the seams became invisible.

Further Reading

On the Soviet campaign itself:

Izabella Tabarovsky, “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism,” Fathom Journal, May 2019 — freely available online. The most accessible overview of the 1967-1988 campaign and its transmission to the Western left. Tabarovsky grew up in the Soviet Union and recognized the vocabulary of her childhood circulating in American progressive spaces around 2018; this essay is the result of her archival investigation into how it got there. The starting point for anyone new to this material.

Izabella Tabarovsky, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2022 — the peer-reviewed version. Deeper on the Zionologists — the far-right Russian nationalists who produced the propaganda — and the distinct mechanisms of transmission, including Soviet embassy networks, Novosti, and the echo chamber built through Western Communist party subsidies.

Baruch Hazan, Soviet Propaganda: A Case Study of the Middle East Conflict (1976) — a dedicated academic study of the Soviet propaganda apparatus targeting the Middle East conflict. Hazan documents the full range of themes, methods, and distribution channels at the campaign’s peak. Somewhat dry but irreplaceable as primary documentation.

On the institutional cascade:

Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010) — comprehensive and sprawling but the chapters on UN Resolution 3379 and its aftermath are the best single account of how the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign achieved international institutional legitimacy. Wistrich documents the cascade from the 1975 vote into UN bodies, specialized agencies, NGOs, universities, and churches with unusual precision.

Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The Soviet World of American Communism (Yale University Press, 1998) — based on Soviet archives opened after 1991 and FBI records. Documents the financial subsidies from Moscow to CPUSA and other Western Communist parties — $28 million to CPUSA between 1958 and 1980 — with primary source documentation. The financial figures are not inferences; they come from Soviet state records and FBI informant reports. Fundamental for understanding why Western Communist parties adopted and defended Moscow’s positions on Israel.

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005) — Andrew is a Cambridge historian; Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist who smuggled documents out when he defected. This volume covers Soviet active measures in the Third World including the anti-Zionist campaign’s African and Arab dimensions. Primary KGB documentation.

On the Western left absorption:

Robert Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) — the comprehensive treatment of how the Western left moved from the ambivalent socialism of the early twentieth century to the anti-Zionist consensus of the postwar period. Wistrich is systematic and thorough; this is the reference work on the subject.

Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) — documents the East German channel specifically — how the GDR’s anti-Zionist foreign policy shaped the West German radical left in the critical “red decade” from 1967 to 1977. Important because it shows a distinct European transmission pathway operating in parallel with the Soviet subsidies to Western Communist parties.

There is a family in the Galilee whose great-grandparents farmed land they had never formally owned. The title belonged to an effendi in Beirut who had registered it under the 1858 Ottoman Land Law, a law that converted their customary tenure into legal invisibility before a single Zionist buyer had arrived. In 1910, the effendi sold. They were evicted.

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Their dispossession was real. It was unjust. They deserved better than what happened to them.

What produced it?

The answer to that question is not academic. It determines what remedies would address the actual harm. And the settler colonial framework, whatever its other uses, gives the wrong answer, not because it exaggerates the suffering, but because it misidentifies the mechanism. That misidentification has consequences for the people it claims to represent.

I. The Mechanism of Dispossession

The fellahin of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine lost their land through a specific, historically traceable mechanism: three forces intersecting in ways none of them controlled.

The first was the 1858 Ottoman Land Law. Before it, Palestinian agriculture operated under the musha’ system, communal rotating tenure in which cultivation rights, effective occupation, and formal legal ownership were distinct overlapping categories. The 1858 Law’s mandatory registration requirement treated customary cultivation rights as legally inferior to registered title. Fellahin, unfamiliar with Ottoman bureaucracy, frequently failed to register. The result was a class of large landowners who held formal legal title to land their tenants had farmed for generations, often absentee owners in Beirut, Damascus, or Constantinople who had never seen the fields.

The second was the absentee landlord structure that this created. Over 52 percent of Jewish land purchases were made from non-Palestinian landowners based outside the country. Twenty-five percent came from Palestinian large landowners. Direct purchases from fellahin represented less than 10 percent of the total. The people who sold were overwhelmingly those with legal title and no stake in what happened to the cultivators.

The third was the Zionist land-purchasing policy, which operated downstream of the first two, legally, through registered transactions with recognized title holders, and with consequences for tenant farmers that were foreseeable and foreseen. The agronomist Yitzhak Epstein wrote in 1907, from inside the Zionist movement, that the fellah “in anguish from the burden of heavy taxes, may decide in a moment of despair to sell the field; but the sale leaves him with a festering wound.” He predicted, accurately, that dispossessed Arabs would “return to us in blows what we have looted from them with our gold.”

This is not a defense of the outcome. It is a description of the mechanism. And the mechanism matters because it points to specific remedies: tenant farmer compensation, recognition of customary cultivation rights, and land reform responsive to the actual legal wrong done. Those remedies address what actually happened to the people who actually suffered.

The settler colonial framework, which requires elimination as the structural logic of the enterprise, metropolitan sponsorship, and an arriving population without prior historical connection, addresses a different wrong done to different people in a different place. Applied to the fellahin’s dispossession, it conscripts their specific suffering into a theoretical apparatus that prescribes a solution to a problem they didn’t have.

They deserved an accurate account of what harmed them. They still do.

II. The Classification Forecloses the Remedy

Patrick Wolfe is explicit about this. Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Structures are not resolved through negotiation, reparation, compensation, or power-sharing, those are responses to events. The logical conclusion of the framework is decolonization in the full demographic sense, because that is what the structure requires.

This is not a radical misreading of Wolfe. It is his stated position.

What this means practically: before the political conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begins, the framework has already eliminated partition, confederation, rights-based frameworks, refugee compensation schemes, and any arrangement that preserves a Jewish state. Not as empirical conclusions about what is achievable, but as structural logical requirements. The label does that work invisibly, in advance, before anyone has argued for it.

Adam Kirsch documents how this functions in public discourse. The framework doesn’t stay analytical when it leaves the seminar. “Settler colonial state” carries Wolfe’s structure-not-event logic, the decolonization endpoint, and the moral verdict simultaneously. If the lighter version is what’s intended, a modest descriptive claim about patterns of dispossession, then the colonial label is not meaningfully different from “systematic dispossession” or “asymmetric ethno-national conflict” without the prescriptive endpoint attached.

The people with the most at stake in getting this right are Palestinians. A framework that forecloses every negotiated outcome before negotiations begin is not obviously serving their interests.

III. Questions That Are Only Asked Here

Set aside the mechanism question for a moment. There is a prior puzzle that the preceding four posts in this series have been circling without naming directly.

Israel is a state based on a national-religious identity, with laws favoring that identity’s majority, a founding displacement of part of its prior population, a diaspora with political involvement in state affairs, and a rapid rise to regional power. These features generate serious scholarly and political debate.

They also describe Greece, Ireland, Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Slovakia, Kosovo, and most of the post-Wilsonian international order. The post-WWI settlement was built almost entirely on national self-determination: states organized around a dominant national group, with minorities. This is not a marginal or exotic feature of the modern state system. It is the dominant model.

The questions routinely directed at Israel, Is a state based on religious-national identity legitimate? Can a founding displacement be justified? Is diaspora political involvement appropriate?, are not asked of these other cases with equivalent force. Greece’s founding involved the expulsion of Anatolian Greeks and Turks in one of the largest forced population transfers in history. Ireland’s constitution gave the Catholic Church a “special position” until 1972. The Baltic states reconstituted themselves on ethnic national identity. Kosovo’s independence was recognized on the basis of Albanian national self-determination over Serbian objections.

None of these states faces a prolonged international movement questioning their right to exist as states. None has a UN body that devotes more sessions to their conduct than to Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Russia combined. None generates, in Western universities, a theoretical apparatus designed specifically to classify their founding as a structure requiring demographic reversal.

The anomaly is not Israel’s structure. It is the framework applied to Israel that is not applied elsewhere.

A reader of this series raised a sharper version of this point in the comments on Part Four. The structural elements the settler colonial framework deploys to classify Zionism, nationalist movement seeking demographic control of a territory, prior population in the way, mass displacement as outcome, describe the Armenian genocide almost exactly. A nationalist movement (the Young Turks) reorganizing a collapsing empire along ethnic lines, needing demographic control of a specific territory, encountering a prior population in the way, using the confusion of war to effect mass displacement and worse. Yet the Armenian case is universally classified as nationalist ethnic cleansing, not settler colonialism. The asymmetry in classification choices requires an explanation that the framework itself cannot provide.

The same reader, in a follow-up, pressed on the internal consistency argument made in Part Four and made a fair correction. Wolfe’s “prior and independent constitution” requirement, he noted, refers to the social group’s presence on the land, not to its national or political consciousness. Aboriginal Australians didn’t have nationalism either. The framework needs Palestinians to have been there, not to have been a nation, and on presence, there is no serious dispute. The co-formation argument in Part Four shows that Palestinian national identity as a mass political movement was substantially constituted through the encounter with Zionism, which is historically interesting and accurate, but it doesn’t touch the framework where it lives, which is the structural claim that Zionism needed the land and the people on it were in the way.

This is a genuine correction to the way the argument was stated in Part Four, and it deserves a direct response.

The first problem with the stripped-down formula is Mahmoud Mamdani’s argument, which the reader invoked in its defense. Mamdani’s claim is that colonialism creates the native as a political category, the native is native because the settler arrived, not prior to the settler’s arrival. This is a coherent position. But it cuts symmetrically. If the colonial encounter creates the native as a political category, it equally creates the settler by the same logic. Applied symmetrically, the framework dissolves the binary it needs rather than stabilizing it. More concretely: the Old Yishuv, the Sephardi, Mizrahi, and other Jewish communities present in Palestine for centuries before 1882, were also on the land before the Zionist arrivals. Mamdani’s logic makes them “native” by his own definition, which the framework cannot accommodate without abandoning the binary entirely.

The second problem is that the stripped-down formula, Zionism needed the land, and the people on it were in the way, is structurally too thin to produce the classificatory distinctions the framework claims. This formula describes the Armenian case with equal precision. It describes Greek-Turkish population transfers, the Baltic German expulsions, the postwar Polish-German border settlement, and numerous other nationalist territorial conflicts that nobody classifies as settler colonialism. If the formula can’t generate the distinction between settler colonialism and nationalist ethnic cleansing, it hasn’t identified a structural type. It has identified a generic feature of territorial conflict, which is precisely why it can’t explain the asymmetry in classification choices.

There is one genuine structural distinction between Zionism and the Armenian case: the CUP was established with state power, eliminating a minority within its own territory, while Zionism involved an arriving population without initial state power. But that distinction points directly back to what this series has argued is the contested element in the framework’s application, the arriving-population problem, the refugee character of that population, the historical connection, rather than resolving it. And it does nothing to explain why the classification asymmetry runs so consistently in one direction.

The argument in Section II of this post is the one neither the framework nor Truboff’s reformulation of it has addressed: Wolfe explicitly states that structures cannot be resolved through negotiation, reparation, or power-sharing. That foreclosure operates regardless of how the native category was constituted, when Palestinian national consciousness emerged, or which version of the framework’s structural requirements one accepts. The label does prescriptive work before the political conversation begins. That work is not incidental to the framework, it is the framework’s purpose.

The anomaly is not the conflict. The anomaly is the dialogic framework applied to the conflict but not to structurally comparable cases.

IV. The Antisemitism That Confirms the Diagnosis

There is a specific form of evidence for Jewish nationhood that its opponents inadvertently provide: the history of European antisemitism itself.

The “Jewish Question”, a staple of European political discourse from the 1840s through its Nazi endpoint, presupposed that Jews were a foreign national element in the societies where they lived. The terminology encodes the premise. You do not have a “question” about your own people.

“Jews, go back to Palestine”, the expulsion demand that functioned as an insult across the 19th and 20th centuries, inadvertently affirmed the Zionist claim. The antisemites and the Zionists agreed on the diagnosis: Jews were a people with a national origin, not purely a religious congregation. They drew opposite conclusions from it.

Heinrich von Treitschke’s 1879 attack, which gave German antisemitism its most respectable intellectual formulation, was directed specifically at assimilated Jews, not recent immigrants from the east but Germans who had integrated into German cultural and professional life with conspicuous success. The more successfully Jews assimilated, the more virulent the antisemitic response. Achievement was reframed as infiltration. Integration was reframed as displacement.

This confirms that the category being invoked was ethnic and national, not cultural or religious. Jews could not assimilate out of the Jewish Question because the answer to the Jewish Question was never about assimilation. It involved the presence of a people that European nationalism experienced as foreign, regardless of what that people actually did.

If European antisemitism consistently classified Jews as a foreign national element, and it did, throughout centuries and contexts documented in the previous posts in this series, then it was responding to something real about Jewish collective identity, however grotesquely it distorted that reality and however criminally it acted on its conclusions. The Zionist movement did not invent Jewish nationhood. It drew political conclusions from a national identity that Europe had been recognizing, and persecuting, for centuries.

Herzl understood this. His argument was not that Jews should become a nation. It was that they already were one, that Europe had demonstrated this through its own treatment of them, and that the only remaining question was whether Jews would organize that fact politically or continue to suffer its consequences passively.

V. What the Questions Reveal

Return to the anomaly identified in Section III: Israel faces queries about its legitimacy as a state that comparably structured states do not face, at a level that comparably structured conflicts do not generate.

The four posts preceding this one established what the historical record shows: the framework doesn’t fit. The Ottoman context, the economic structure, the identity co-formation, the classification problem, each examined on its own terms, each finding the same mismatch.

But the mismatch itself requires explanation. Scholars and activists are not stupid. They can read the same Ottoman archives and reach different conclusions. Something is driving the application of a framework used for a case that, on the evidence, the framework was not built to describe.

That something is not the conflict. The conflict is real and generates real political engagement. But the conflict doesn’t explain the disproportionality. It doesn’t explain why a theoretical apparatus exists specifically to classify this state’s founding as a structure requiring demographic reversal, while no comparable apparatus exists for Greece, Kosovo, or Ireland. It doesn’t explain why the Star of David, a symbol of Jewish religious and ethnic identity that predates the modern state by two thousand years, appears in a 2024 peer-reviewed geography journal as a visual marker for colonialism, with no one in the editorial chain flagging the conflation.

The conflict triggers the engagement. Something else explains why the engagement takes this specific form, at this specific scale, with this specific immunity to contrary evidence.

That something else has been the subject of this series from the beginning. The companion series, The Scapegoat, traces how Western civilization has always used “the Jew” as a conceptual instrument, how each era has distinguished its central anxieties, named them “Jewish,” and used the figure to do cognitive work that had nothing intrinsically to do with actual Jews or actual Jewish practice. Medieval materialism. Enlightenment superstition. Nationalist cosmopolitanism. The figure precedes the facts in each case and survives their refutation because it does something different from what the facts alone can address.

The current domain is post-colonial guilt. The West is processing its imperial history, and it is doing so, as it has always done its hardest moral processing, through figures of Judaism. Israel has been made available as the condensed symbol of Western colonialism, not because the historical record supports that classification, but because the structural position Jews have occupied in Western thought for a millennium made it available. The cognitive slot was already there. The conflict filled it.

Recognizing this is not the same as saying the conflict doesn’t matter or that Palestinian suffering isn’t real. It is saying that the disproportionate, evidence-immune, structurally singular role Israel plays in Western moral discourse is explained by a mechanism that is at least as old as the blood libel, and that confusing the mechanism with the conflict serves no one’s interests except the mechanism’s.

The fellahin deserved a precise account of what harmed them. Their descendants deserve one too. That account is harder to construct than the colonial verdict, less satisfying than a clear moral framework that names a villain and prescribes a solution. But it is the only account that might actually be useful.

Further Reading

On the fellahin dispossession mechanism:

Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882 (1993) — the essential archival study of the pre-aliyah period, important for understanding how the 1858 Ottoman Land Law transformed the legal landscape of land tenure before Zionist buyers arrived. Schölch’s analysis of the musha’ system and the consequences of mandatory registration for cultivators without formal title is the scholarly basis for the dispossession mechanism described here.

Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine (2008) — documents the land purchase data in detail, including the 52 percent absentee landlord figure. Dowty’s analysis of where land actually came from and who actually sold it is indispensable to understand why the colonial framing misidentifies the mechanism of harm.

Ruth Kark, “Consequences of the Ottoman Land Law: Agrarian and Privatization Processes in Palestine, 1858–1918,” in Chand, Nel, and Pelc (eds.), Societies, Social Inequalities and Marginalization, Springer, 2017 — independent corroboration from historical geography, working from Ottoman cadastral records rather than archival social history. Kark documents the scale of pre-Zionist land reconstitution: by the end of Ottoman rule, private estates already covered over one million dunams, more than a quarter of all arable land, not counting the Sultan’s additional 800,000 dunams. She also documents the explicit effendi-to-Zionist pipeline: absentee landlords initially developed estates for their own cash-crop agriculture, then sold to Zionist buyers, meaning over 52 effendi estate buildings became the literal physical cores of new Jewish agricultural settlements. The private investor pool included Arabs from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, North Africa and Turkey alongside European Christian churches, German Templars, and individual Jews, establishing that the landscape Zionist buyers encountered had been reconstituted by multiple actors operating under the same Ottoman legal framework. Available freely on Academia.edu.

On Patrick Wolfe and the framework’s prescriptive logic:

Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006) — the key text. Read it directly to see both what the framework actually claims and how explicitly Wolfe states that structures require structural solutions. The “structure not event” formulation and its consequences for what remedies are conceivable are Wolfe’s own argument, not a misreading.

Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) — documents how the framework’s prescriptive logic functions in public discourse rather than academic seminar. Kirsch is not a historian and this is not load-bearing scholarship, but as a contemporaneous account of how the colonial label travels with its full endpoint attached regardless of individual user intent, it is directly useful.

On the Zionist movement as a national rather than colonial enterprise:

Derek Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State (2023) — the most rigorous recent rethinking of Zionism as a historical phenomenon from a leading historian. Penslar’s argument that Zionism had “certain colonial characteristics” while also being “shaped by the forces of anti-colonialism” — and that the colonial framing “leaves unexplained many of its key aspects” — is the scholarly standard the series works from throughout.

On Jewish nationhood and the antisemitic record:

David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013) — the essential text for the series as a whole, and particularly for the argument in Section V that what is anomalous is not the conflict but the communicative framework applied to it. Nirenberg’s two millennia of documentation of how Western thought uses Jewish figures to do conceptual work that has nothing intrinsically to do with actual Jews is the analytical spine of this conclusion.

Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia (2014) — documents how multiple Jewish political movements — the Bund, diaspora nationalists, autonomists — accepted Jewish nationhood as their operating premise and debated only what followed from it. Zionism was one nationalist response, not an outlier. The breadth of Jewish national political thought before and alongside Zionism is essential context for the argument that Jewish nationhood is not a Zionist invention.

“Is it true that Passover traditions come from the Barley Harvest Festival? Did the unleavened bread, the dipping of parsley in salt water, and the other Seder rituals originate from the Exodus story, or from something much older?”

It is a genuinely good question, and it is genuinely confused. The confusion is not the questioner’s fault. It comes from treating “Passover” as a single, continuous thing that has always meant what it means today. It has not. What we call Passover is actually three or four historically distinct things that were combined, reformulated, and argued over across more than a thousand years.

So let us go through the evidence period by period, and see what we actually know.

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There Was No Single “Passover” Festival

The first thing to establish is that the festival we call Passover was originally two separate rituals that had nothing to do with each other.

The first was Pesach proper, a nighttime sacrifice of a lamb, with its blood applied to the doorposts. Scholars such as Samuel Balentine (The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible) and the Jewish Study Bible commentary both argue that this ritual most likely began as an apotropaic rite among pastoral-nomads, possibly connected to the movement of flocks to summer pasture. The blood functioned as magical protection against harm, probably demonic. The meaning of the Hebrew name pesach is contested, the Jewish Study Bible argues the verb means "to protect" rather than "to pass over," while Robert Alter holds the primary meaning is "to skip" or "step over", and many scholars argue that the ritual predated its association with the Exodus, the name for an older spring pastoral sacrifice later attached to the liberation narrative through what Alter calls "folk etymology."

The second was Chag HaMatzot, the Festival of Unleavened Bread was a seven-day agricultural pilgrimage festival requiring attendance at the Temple. The temple environment was itself a leaven-free zone, Leviticus explicitly prohibits leaven from all sacrificial offerings (Lev 2:11), which made unleavened bread the natural idiom of sanctuary worship. As Balentine documents, the festival 'seems to have its origins in a seasonal ritual, most likely an agricultural festival coinciding with the barley harvest’.

These two were originally independent, and the Hebrew Bible itself preserves evidence of it. The clearest trace is structural; Chag HaMatzot was one of the three pilgrimage festivals (ḥaggîm) requiring attendance at the Temple, while Pesach was a domestic celebration held at home, a family ritual with no requirement to travel. These are the signatures of two different kinds of religion entirely, one communal and civic, one household and local. When Deuteronomy later centralized the Passover sacrifice at the Temple, it effectively swapped their roles. Pesach moved to the sanctuary and Unleavened Bread retreated to the household. That reversal would make no sense if the two had always been a single festival. As James VanderKam (An Introduction to Early Judaism, 2022) summarizes, the two were fused at some point in Israelite history, but “most agree that Unleavened Bread was originally celebrated independent of Passover.”

The Barley Harvest Connection Is Real, But It Belongs to the Wrong Festival

So there is a barley harvest connection. But it belongs to Chag HaMatzot, not to Pesach.

To understand the connection, it helps to think about what was happening agriculturally in the Land of Israel in early spring. The winter grain stores were running low, the old crop was spent, and the first new barley of the season was just beginning to appear in the fields. The festival of Unleavened Bread sat at exactly this threshold moment: the end of the old agricultural year and the anxious beginning of the new one. Israel Jacob Yuval (Two Nations in Your Womb) captures the symbolic logic: in the ancient world, leavened bread represented human mastery over nature, the fermented, processed, stored product of the previous year’s work, while matzah was “the symbol of simplicity and primitivism, the bread of the unsettled nomad,” food that had not been worked on by civilization. Removing leaven from the household was, in agricultural terms, clearing out the old crop to make way for the new. The Mishnah makes the stakes of that renewal explicit: “At Passover the world is judged regarding grain” (m. Rosh Hashana 1:2).

The formal ceremony marking this transition was the omer offering. On the second day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, 16 Nisan, the first sheaf of the new barley was brought to the Temple as a firstfruits offering. This single sheaf then initiated the fifty-day count toward Shavuot, the wheat harvest festival, so that the entire agricultural season from spring barley to summer wheat was framed as a single liturgical arc. The connection between Passover and grain was so fundamental that the rabbis explained the omer in explicitly petitionary terms: as Milgrom (Leviticus 23–27, 2021) cites from the Tosefta, Rabbi Akiva taught that the Torah required bringing the barley omer at Passover “so that the wheat harvest would be blessed on its account.” The firstfruit offering was not just a thanksgiving for what had come in. It was a prayer for what had not yet arrived.

Critically, the barley being offered was not yet fully ripe. Across most of the Land of Israel, barley does not ripen until mid-April at the earliest, and Milgrom documents that in many years the omer was not ripe grain at all but what the sources call “the color of ripe barley,” a milky, still-forming ear. What was being presented at the Temple was the very first appearance of the new grain, a symbolic pledge of the harvest to come rather than the harvest itself. Yet the reaping of this first sheaf was a dramatic public event. The Mishnah (Menachot 10:2–3) records the ceremony as it was performed at the end of Second Temple times: court messengers would go out the evening before, tie the standing grain in bunches while still unreaped, and assemble the nearby towns to watch. When darkness fell, the reaper called out to the crowd, “Is the sun set?” and they answered, “Yea!” He repeated the question three times, then called, “Shall I reap?” and the crowd answered, “Reap!” three times over.

The public call-and-response was itself a polemic, a pointed demonstration against sectarian groups who disputed the correct date for the offering. Even the reaping of a single sheaf of unripe barley could become a theological controversy.

One thing this clarifies is a common misconception worth addressing directly. The matzah eaten at the Passover meal was made from old stored grain, not from the new barley crop just appearing in the fields. The matzah and the omer were therefore distinct: the omer was the new firstfruit, while the matzah that accompanied the paschal sacrifice came from the previous year’s stores. The barley’s ceremonial presence in the spring festival cycle was real and significant, but it ran alongside Passover rather than inside it. This is why readers who sense an agricultural layer beneath the modern Seder are picking up on something genuine, while also finding it slippery to locate precisely. The agriculture is there, but it belongs to Chag HaMatzot and the omer ritual, not to the Passover meal itself.

The Book of Ruth illustrates the point well. Its narrative is set at the barley harvest, it is read liturgically at Shavuot, and it tracks the same agricultural arc, beginning with barley, ending with wheat, that the omer count traces. “She arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest,” the text says (Ruth 1:22), and “she gleaned until the barley harvest and wheat harvest were finished” (Ruth 2:23). The whole spring festival cycle, from Passover through Shavuot, is saturated with grain. The agricultural calendar is always just beneath the surface.

The Seder Is Not Ancient. It Is a Rabbinic Construction

Here is where many people’s assumptions collapse.

The Seder as we know it, with the Haggadah liturgy, the four cups of wine, the karpas dipped in salt water, the reclining, the structured question-and-answer format, is not the ancient Passover. It is a post-Temple rabbinic invention, formalized in the Mishnah around 200 CE.

The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE forced a radical transformation. With the Temple gone, the paschal lamb could no longer be sacrificed, which was the entire center of the original Pesach. The rabbis had to rebuild the festival from scratch. As the commentary in Early Rabbinic Writings (MacCoby) explains:

“In post-Temple times, the paschal lamb could not be eaten, except symbolically, so the centre of the service shifted to the ‘telling’ (haggadah) of the story of the Exodus.”

The rabbis did not rebuild the festival in a vacuum. They built it in a Greco-Roman world, and they borrowed the structure of the Greco-Roman ceremonial meal, the symposium in Greek, the convivium in Latin. The reclining, the multiple cups of wine, the formal progression from appetizers to meal to after-dinner discourse, these were all standard features of elite Greco-Roman dining culture.

Seth Schwartz (Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine) notes that scholars have long identified the Passover Seder as a deliberate adaptation of the convivium or symposium by the rabbis. Ben Sira, writing in the early second century BCE, already shows that well-to-do Jews had absorbed sympotic etiquette. The rabbis who formalized the Seder were working in a Greco-Roman cultural world they knew intimately, even as they formally rejected it.

The Karpas Dipping Is from the Symposium

This brings us to the parsley in salt water.

The Talmud finds the first dipping, karpas into salt water, puzzling, because it has no obvious connection to the Exodus story. A strained explanation was eventually produced: the salt water represents the tears of the Israelites in Egypt. But MacCoby’s commentary on the Mishnah cuts to the real explanation:

“Recent scholarly research into Graeco-Roman menus at the ceremonial meal, or symposium, has shown that the eating of parsley or celery at the commencement of the meal was quite standard, corresponding to the modern eating of crudités.”

The karpas dipping is a Greco-Roman dinner custom that the Seder absorbed and then retrofitted with a Jewish meaning. This is not unusual, it is exactly how the Seder was constructed: take a cultural form (the symposium), fill it with Jewish content (the Exodus narrative), and retroactively explain the borrowed elements as if they had always been there.

Afikomen: Greek Word, Contested Meaning

The Greek origin of the word afikomen is well established. The question is which Greek word it comes from, and the answer matters considerably.

The conventional etymology derives it from epikomon, referring to the Greco-Roman custom of moving from dinner party to dinner party after eating. The Mishnah’s prohibition, “one does not conclude with an afikoman following the Passover sacrifice,” on this reading, simply forbids Jews from drifting off to other parties in the Greco-Roman fashion after the meal.

But scholars Robert Eisler and David Daube, as documented by Yuval, proposed a second derivation: from aphikomenos, “the one who comes.” Under this reading, the eating of the final piece of matzah expresses anticipation of the Messiah’s arrival. The prohibition would then be not about Greco-Roman party etiquette at all, but about anti-Christian polemic from the second century CE, aimed at severing a parallel with Jesus’s actions at the Last Supper.

The question of which etymology is correct remains live in the scholarship.

Matzah, Messiah, and the Last Supper

This brings us to the deepest layer of the question.

Why matzah? Why Passover? Why is unleavened bread the vehicle for all of this?

Yuval’s analysis in Two Nations in Your Womb identifies the full symbolic weight matzah was already carrying before Christianity arrived. In the Temple period, leavened bread was explicitly prohibited from sacrificial offerings. Only unleavened bread was fit to be eaten in the Temple. The shewbread on the golden table in the Sanctuary had to be matzah. Matzah was the bread of sacred encounter; leaven was categorically excluded from the divine presence.

The reason for this goes back to the ritual purity system that governed the ancient Israelite cult. In the priestly worldview, fermentation is a process of organic transformation, something closer to decomposition than to creation. The same symbolic logic that made corpse impurity, certain skin conditions, and bodily decay ritually defiling also made leaven unfit for the altar. Leavening introduces an agent of ongoing change into the bread, a process the ancient world associated with corruption rather than cultivation. Balentine, summarizing the scholarly consensus, notes that the prohibition of leaven from sacrificial offerings (Exodus 23:18; Leviticus 2:11; 6:9–10) likely reflects exactly this concern with fermentation as a form of impurity. Matzah, precisely because it undergoes no such transformation, is inert, stable, and pure in the technical sense the priesthood required. It is bread that has not been touched by the processes of decomposition. This is why it was the only bread permitted inside the sacred precincts, and why it carried the weight of holiness long before the Exodus story attached a narrative to it.

On top of that, matzah already held two simultaneous and opposing meanings in the Exodus narrative itself. As a symbol of the haste of redemption, it is the bread of freedom. But Deuteronomy calls it “the bread of affliction,” making it simultaneously a symbol of slavery. Redemption and suffering are encoded into the same object. There is even a proposed etymology of the word matzah itself from the Hebrew root meaning “to quarrel,” symbolizing the quarrel between God and death, between the condemned firstborn and the one who is redeemed.

And there is a pre-Christian Jewish text, the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Rule of the Congregation, that describes an eschatological banquet at which the Messiah eats bread and wine in the presence of the leaders of Israel. As John Efron (The Jews: A History) notes, this connects Passover, bread, and the messianic age in a way that predates the Gospels entirely. When Jesus broke bread at Passover and said what he said, he was stepping into a symbolic field that already existed in Jewish thought.

Whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal at all is itself contested. The Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, identify it as such, eaten on 14 Nisan. John’s Gospel places the crucifixion on the day of preparation for Passover, meaning Jesus died as the Temple lambs were being slaughtered, before any Passover meal had been eaten. The dominant scholarly view is that John’s chronology is theological rather than historical: casting Jesus as the Paschal lamb at the precise moment of the Temple sacrifice is too clean a parallel to be accidental. But the debate has never fully closed, and some scholars have attempted a calendrical reconciliation, noting that the Qumran community used a solar calendar while the Temple used a lunar one, which could theoretically allow both accounts to be accurate on different reckonings.

A Dialogue Written in Bread

After the Temple’s destruction, Yuval argues, both Judaism and Christianity inherited the same symbolic vocabulary: matzah as the bread of redemption, Passover as the festival of deliverance, bread as the vehicle of messianic hope. They then used that shared vocabulary to say opposite things.

Christianity took the matzah-as-redemption complex and placed it at the absolute center of its daily ritual as the Eucharistic Host, which is always unleavened. The Host is eaten every day, not just once a year. It is the body of the redeemer, present in every community, at every Mass.

Judaism, by contrast, kept the burning of leaven as its central Passover gesture. Removing leaven is the active ritual work of the holiday. The matzah is eaten, but it is the absence of leaven, the purging of the old and corrupted, that structures the Jewish home in the days before Passover. Yuval reads this as a deliberate counter-gesture: leaven is the evil impulse that delays Redemption, and in burning it one is burning “the other,” the rival.

The two religions then spent centuries in what Yuval calls “a dialogue of ceremonial language,” each reinforcing, inverting, and responding to the other’s use of the same symbols, often without acknowledging that is what was happening. And nowhere is this clearer than in the specific ritual history of the afikoman in medieval Ashkenaz.

In Talmudic times, the afikoman was not a ceremony at all. It was a prohibition: do not go to another party after the Passover meal. By the twelfth century, its meaning had been reversed entirely. The piece of matzah broken at the start of the Seder, wrapped in a cloth, and hidden until the end of the meal, had become the most sacred object on the table: a substitute for the Paschal sacrifice, a symbol of the hidden Messiah, and in Yuval’s reading, a Jewish counterpart to the Eucharistic Host.

The evidence for this is striking. Two converts from Judaism writing in the early sixteenth century, Victor von Karben and Antonius Margarita, both described the afikoman ceremony in terms that leave little ambiguity. Von Karben wrote that the father takes the broken middle matzah, which is considered the most holy, hides it in a clean cloth napkin, and at the end of the Seder breaks it and distributes a piece to all present, adding explicitly: “in the same way we Christians accept the Sacrament.” Margarita wrote that the Jews “consider it most holy” and are careful not to let a crumb fall, adding that they say “this matzah is instead of the Paschal Lamb, and therefore they hide it, like their Messiah, the time of whose coming is hidden away.”

This is confirmed from within Jewish sources. The Ashkenazic Haggadah names this section of the Seder tzafun, meaning “hidden,” which in apocalyptic literature is precisely the term used for the Messiah before his revelation. The seventeenth-century Kabbalist Hayyim ben Abraham ha-Cohen wrote that eating the afikoman “alludes to the meal that the Holy One blessed be He is to make in the future for the righteous,” and that covering it at the start of the feast symbolizes the Redemption that is as yet hidden. One Tosafist source goes further, saying that the Seder as a whole “alludes to the feast we anticipate eating in the future,” with the afikoman corresponding to the Leviathan, the great messianic banquet of the end of days.

Where did the specific ritual form, the cloth wrapping, the concealment, the solemn revelation and distribution, come from? Yuval traces a striking parallel to the Christian Holy Week ceremony. On Maundy Thursday, two Hosts were consecrated: one distributed at Mass, the other carried in procession to a closed vessel. On Good Friday, no new Host was consecrated. The reserved Host from the day before was taken out, buried in a sepulchrum, and covered with a cloth called a sudarium. It was kept there until Easter Sunday, when it was taken out and placed on the altar in a ceremony of resurrection called the elevatio. The earliest reports of this practice in the Western Church date from the tenth century, which is also roughly when the afikoman begins acquiring its distinct sacred character in Ashkenazic sources.

Yuval is not arguing that Jewish Seder leaders were consciously imitating the Good Friday liturgy. He is arguing something more subtle: that Jews and Christians were living in close proximity, hearing each other’s prayers through shared walls, sharing the same ceremonial grammar of bread, concealment, and redemption, and that this shared grammar produced parallel forms that then fed back into each other. The language of ceremony, as he puts it, is closed and coherent, and does not declare its contents openly.

The evidence that this symbolic proximity generated real danger is concrete. In 1510, Jews in Brandenburg were imprisoned for alleged Host desecration after a piece of matzah was found hanging on a synagogue wall, where it had been placed as part of an eruv boundary marker, a purely halakhic practice with no anti-Christian intent. A Christian court saw unleavened bread nailed to a wall and reached its own conclusion. Some Ashkenazic rabbis began prohibiting the practice precisely because they understood how it would read to the surrounding culture.

So What Is the Seder?

The Seder is not a single ancient ritual. It is a layered construction assembled from at least four distinct historical moments:

An apotropaic pastoral rite (the original Pesach), probably pre-Israelite in origin, which involved a lamb sacrifice and blood on the doorposts, and was later attached to the Exodus narrative.

An agricultural barley harvest festival, originally independent, which required the elimination of leaven and was the actual springtime pilgrimage festival.

A Greco-Roman symposium, whose structural features, reclining, multiple cups, vegetable dipping, formal pedagogy, were deliberately adopted by the rabbis after 70 CE as the vessel for the new narrative-centered Passover.

A polemical dialogue with early Christianity, which shaped the specific meanings attached to matzah, to the afikoman, and to the structure of the meal across the first several centuries of the Common Era.

The initial question that started this reconstruction was not wrong to sense an agricultural layer beneath the Passover. It was right. It just underestimated how many other layers were sitting on top of it.

Further Reading

Samuel E. Balentine — The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible (2020) The most thorough scholarly account of the biblical festivals and their likely pre-Israelite origins, with detailed analysis of Pesach and Chag HaMatzot as originally separate rites.

James C. VanderKam — An Introduction to Early Judaism (2022) A clear and authoritative overview of Second Temple Jewish practice, covering the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the barley omer, and the pilgrimage cycle in detail.

Jacob Milgrom — Leviticus 23–27: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (2001) The definitive technical commentary on the biblical festival calendar, essential for understanding the grain offerings and their relationship to Passover.

Israel Jacob Yuval — Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians (2008) The most important work on the Jewish-Christian ceremonial dialogue, tracing how matzah, the afikoman, and the Seder’s structure developed in response to Christianity, and vice versa.

Hyam MacCoby — Early Rabbinic Writings (Cambridge Commentaries series) Contains the essential Mishnaic passages on the Seder with commentary, including the discussion of karpas, the symposium parallels, and the structure of the four cups.

John M. Efron — The Jews: A History (2018) Accessible and scholarly, with a strong section on the Last Supper debate and the connection between early Jewish eschatology and the Passover meal.

Shaye J. D. Cohen — From the Maccabees to the Mishnah The best single volume on the transformation of Judaism from a Temple religion to a text-centered diaspora religion, essential context for understanding why the Seder took the form it did.

Seth Schwartz — Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine Contains the key analysis of how rabbinic culture absorbed and transformed Greco-Roman symposium practices while officially rejecting Roman culture.

The debate about Palestinian national identity has settled into two positions that are mirror images of each other, and equally wrong.

The first: Palestinian identity is ancient and continuous, rooted in the land for millennia, and Zionism arrived to suppress a fully formed national project that predated it. The second: Palestinian identity was invented in the 1960s as a political weapon, conjured after the fact to contest Israeli legitimacy, with no authentic roots before the Arab nationalist movements of the mid-20th century.

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Both positions project backward onto a historical process a fixed, stable category that the historical record does not support. Both treat identity as something that either exists fully-formed or doesn’t exist at all, a binary that nationalism scholars have spent the better part of a century dismantling. And both, crucially, make the same methodological error: they use the outcome of the encounter between Jews and Palestinians to determine what existed before the encounter began, which is precisely the circular reasoning this series has been tracking throughout.

What the historical record actually shows is more interesting than either position allows, and more respectful of Palestinians as historical agents.

I. Nationalism as Political Technology

Before asking when Palestinian national identity emerged, it helps to ask what national identity is, and the answer is considerably more specific than common usage suggests.

Nationalism as a political ideology, the claim that a people defined by shared ethnicity, language, or culture constitutes a natural unit deserving sovereign self-determination, is a specifically modern development. It emerged from the intellectual ferment of 18th and 19th century Europe: German Romanticism’s organicist vision of the Volk, French Revolutionary popular sovereignty, the pressures on the multi-ethnic Ottoman and Habsburg empires as European state models spread eastward. It was not a universal feature of human political organization.

Before the 19th century, most people in most places organized their communal lives through religion, dynasty, locality, and guild, not through ethnic nationhood.

Nationalism was, in this sense, a political technology. Like other technologies, it spread from its origin point, arrived in new contexts through specific transmission channels, and was adopted and adapted by people who found it useful for problems they faced. The channels through which it arrived in the Arab world were identifiable: European missionary schools, the Alliance Israélite Universelle educational network, the Beirut and Cairo Arabic press, and direct encounter with European administrative power. The Ottoman state itself, attempting to modernize and survive, imported European political frameworks that reorganized its subjects’ relationship to state and territory.

The Ottoman millet system that had organized communal life in the empire organized it through religion, not ethnicity or territory. A Muslim was a Muslim; a Christian was a Christian; a Jew was a Jew, and the rights, duties, and social organization of each community flowed from that religious identity, not from a national one. This is not to romanticize the millet system, which had its own hierarchies and inequities, but to note that it was a genuinely different way of organizing human difference than European nationalism offered. When European nationalist models arrived, they did not simply describe existing social realities, they reorganized them, creating new categories and new stakes that had not existed before.

This context matters for understanding what happened in Ottoman Palestine after 1882.

II. What Fishman Documents

Louis Fishman’s Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914, drawing on Ottoman archives and the Palestinian Arabic press, offers the most granular account of Palestinian identity formation in the pre-Mandate period.

His central argument: during the Young Turk constitutional period (1908-14), “a unique local Palestinian sense of being emerged”, not separatist nationalism aspiring toward statehood, but what he calls “Palestinianism”: a local patriotism that “coexisted with their religious (Islam and Christianity), ethnic (Arab) and national (Ottoman) identities.” This identity formed through multiple simultaneous pressures: Zionist settlement and land purchases, British imperial encroachment, the influx of Western culture, Ottoman administrative failure and indifference to Palestinian petitions, and the growing landlessness of the peasant class.

Crucially, Fishman documents both communities moving simultaneously. “Both Arabs and Jews in Palestine were on the brink of transforming a local identity into a national one.” The Jewish community, whether Ashkenazi or Sephardic, “never included Palestinians within the conceptual boundaries of their envisioned homeland”, but the Palestinians were simultaneously developing new bonds across social and religious lines, with the urban elite adopting the cause of the peasant class, “a crucial factor in the creation of a Palestinian identity that would cross social and religious boundaries.”

What Fishman is describing is a political community forming in real time, not a pre-existing national project being suppressed, but an identity crystallizing under pressure, through specific institutional encounters, in a specific historical window. His evidence, drawn from the newspapers Filastin and al-Karmil alongside Ottoman petitions and parliamentary records, shows Palestinians articulating a sense of collective fate and territorial belonging as early as 1908-1914, before World War I, before the Balfour Declaration, before the British Mandate.

That early dating is important. It refutes the maximalist “invented in the 1960s” position definitively. But the character of what Fishman documents is equally important: this Palestinianism was not a fully-formed mass nationalism. It was a local patriotism that coexisted with other identities, that “was not a separatist nationalism that aspired towards statehood,” and that developed substantially through the encounter with Zionism and imperial encroachment rather than independently of them.

III. What Khalidi Concedes

Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness makes the strongest mainstream scholarly case for earlier and more robust Palestinian identity formation. Khalidi argues against purely reactive accounts, tracing how specific people, editors at Filastin and al-Karmil, Jerusalem’s municipal politicians, religious scholars, peasant organizers, actively constructed a political identity through deliberate choices. He pushes the roots further back, finding a sense of Palestine as sacred and bounded territory in Islamic devotional literature, in early-19th-century petitions, in the local awareness of Palestine as a distinct place.

His evidence for this is real and his argument is compelling on its own terms. But notice the language he uses to frame it: “the construction of modern national consciousness.” The word “construction” in his title is not accidental. Khalidi is making a sophisticated historical argument about how specific agents, at specific moments, actively built a political identity from available cultural materials. He traces how “much of the population of Palestine came, in Benedict Anderson’s term, to ‘imagine’ themselves as a political community, with clear boundaries and rights to sovereignty, early in the twentieth century.”

This is the language of modern nationalism scholarship, Anderson’s imagined communities, the bureaucratic and print technologies through which people come to conceive of themselves as a nation. It is a rich and important argument. But it concedes the very thing the settler colonial framework needs to be independently true: that Palestinian national identity as a mass political movement was substantially “constructed” through “specific institutional and political encounters,” developing in the modern period through processes that included the encounter with Zionism and the British Mandate administrative apparatus.

Even the strongest mainstream scholarly voice for deep Palestinian identity frames it as construction developing through encounter. The maximalist position, that Palestinian identity was fully formed prior to and independently of Zionism, requires Ilan Pappe’s more contested methodology, which reaches for early 19th century national consciousness through sources that the mainstream of the field regards skeptically.

IV. The Symmetry Point

The same analysis applies to Zionism.

Zionism was not the recovery of an unbroken ancient nationalism. It was a 19th-century political invention, constructed in response to the failure of European Jewish emancipation and the persistence of European antisemitism despite it. Its founders, Herzl, Pinsker, Nordau, were largely secular men who had attempted integration into European national life and concluded that it was structurally impossible. Pinsker’s 1882 Auto-Emancipation diagnosed Jews as a “people without a homeland” whose national existence without a national state made them uniquely vulnerable, a psychic aberration in their neighbors’ imaginations, provoking fear that no amount of assimilation could dissolve. Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896) translated this diagnosis into a political program.

The particular form Zionism took, Hebrew language revival, agricultural labor ideology, territorial statism in Palestine specifically, was shaped by European nationalist models it was adapting, the specific Arab agricultural environment it encountered, and Ottoman and British legal frameworks it had to navigate. The Hebrew language itself was a reconstruction: spoken Hebrew had been liturgical for centuries and was revived as a vernacular for an explicitly nationalist purpose, borrowing the logic of European linguistic nationalism (Welsh, Czech, Finnish) and applying it to a language with very different historical circumstances.

Treating Palestinian identity as historically constructed and Zionism as primordial, or vice versa, is equally wrong in both directions. The symmetrical account is the correct one: both nationalisms were 19th and 20th century political technologies, adopted and adapted under specific local conditions, shaped substantially by each other and by the European imperial frameworks that surrounded them both.

As Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal put it in Palestinians: The Making of a People: “A Palestinian national identity, like those of other modern nations, has been created, invented and elaborated over the course of the last two centuries. In some ways, the Jewish national movement has shaped the Palestinian people almost as much as it did the Jews themselves.”

V. The Internal Consistency Problem

This matters for the settler colonial framework because Wolfe is explicit about its structural requirements. The logic of elimination applies to “social groups who were constituted prior to and independently of the normative basis on which settler society is established.” That prior and independent constitution is not an incidental qualifier, it is load-bearing. The framework was built to describe cases where it is unambiguously satisfied.

For Australian Aboriginal communities, the paradigm case around which Wolfe developed the framework, there is no serious historical argument that Aboriginal identity was substantially constituted through encounter with European settlers. The prior and independent constitution is unambiguous.

For Palestinian national identity as a mass political movement, Fishman and Porath document, and even Khalidi’s language concedes, that the prior and independent constitution is precisely what is historically contested. Palestinian presence in the land predates Zionism by centuries. Palestinian attachment to the land predates Zionism. But Palestinian national identity as a modern mass political movement, the thing the framework needs to have been suppressed, was substantially constituted through the very encounter the framework is classifying as settler colonial.

The framework cannot simultaneously argue that the colonial encounter produced Palestinian national consciousness AND claim that pre-colonial Palestinian national identity is what the settler colonial framework is describing as suppressed. Those are mutually exclusive positions. The Native American comparison, which is sometimes invoked to deflect this problem, actually highlights it: pointing to a paradigm case where the prior and independent constitution is unambiguous draws attention to exactly where the Palestinian case diverges from it.

VI. Why This Is More Respectful

It is worth being explicit about what the co-formation thesis is not claiming.

It is not claiming that Palestinian suffering was not real. Not only that, but it is not claiming that displacement did not occur. It is not claiming that Palestinians had no legitimate relationship to the land. It is not dismissing Palestinian identity as invented or inauthentic.

What it is claiming is that Palestinians are historical subjects, people who made choices, built institutions, organized politically, responded to pressures, and forged identities through active agency, rather than timeless natives whose role in the story is to be the passive object of colonial logic. Khalidi’s insistence on tracing how specific editors, politicians, and organizers actively constructed a political identity is precisely this: the restoration of Palestinian agency against accounts that flatten Palestinians into theoretical placeholders.

The co-formation thesis treats both communities with the same analytical lens. Neither gets to claim a primordial identity immune to historical analysis. Both were shaped by the encounter. Both were shaped by broader imperial forces neither controlled. Both made choices, some admirable and some not, within the constraints of a situation neither had fully created.

That symmetry is what the settler colonial framework resists, because it requires one side to be the structural aggressor whose logic determines the shape of the conflict from the beginning. The historical record is messier, more tragic, and more interesting than that. It is a collision of two modern nationalisms, both substantially constituted in the same historical period, both making claims on the same territory, both shaped by forces larger than themselves, inside Ottoman and British legal frameworks that served neither of them, and inside a European imperial order that produced the conditions that drove Jewish refugees to Palestine in the first place.

The next post examines what follows from getting the classification right, and why it matters for what solutions are actually conceivable.

The shoe does not fit. The economic structures are not analogous, they are precisely inverted.

How South African Job Reservation Actually Worked

The “civilised labour policy” introduced in the 1920s, and the subsequent Job Reservation Acts that extended it, were designed to maintain racial hierarchy within an integrated and shared labor market. This is the key word: integrated. The entire South African colonial economy depended on Black African labor at its base. The Rand goldfields ran on it. The farms ran on it. The mines, the construction sector, the domestic economy, all of it depended on non-white labor as the essential substrate of the colonial enterprise.

White job reservation was about stratifying who received which roles and wages within a system that required the native labor base to function. Remove Black miners from the Witwatersrand and the economy collapses. The system of white supremacy in South Africa did not aim to eliminate its dependency on indigenous labor. It aimed to manage and exploit that dependency while reserving its most lucrative positions for whites.

This is precisely what Wolfe’s settler colonial model describes as the economic logic of colonialism, stratification within an integrated market, native labor at the foundation, settler labor at the apex. The native population is not eliminated, it is permanently subordinated and economically essential.

Wolfe himself draws this distinction explicitly. In his contribution to Dirk Moses's edited volume Empire, Colony, Genocide, he distinguishes settler colonialism from "franchise colonialism on the British-India model" precisely on this axis: the latter depends on native labor, while settler colonialism is "first and foremost a territorial project, whose priority is replacing natives on their land rather than extracting an economic surplus from mixing their labor with it." South African job reservation is Wolfe's franchise colonial model, stratification within a labor-dependent economy. Kibush ha-avoda is something else entirely.

What Kibush Ha-Avoda Actually Was

The Hebrew labor ideology of the Second Aliyah was not like the South African system. It was structurally the opposite.

The pioneers who arrived from Russia, Romania, and the Austro-Hungarian periphery in the decade before World War I did not come to manage indigenous labor. They came, in the words of A.D. Gordon, the philosopher of the movement, to redeem the Jewish people through direct physical labor, “We were defeated through lack of labor... Work will heal us.” The ideology of avodah (labor) as secular redemption was not about overseeing Arab workers. It was about replacing them entirely.

Anita Shapira’s Land and Power, the foundational scholarly study of this period, documents what these immigrants encountered when they arrived in the First Aliyah colonies. Ben Gurion described it in terms that reveal everything about the structural logic at work. He spoke of the “honeymoon” in the homeland, enchanting at first, but soon he detected “an old, familiar picture.” The first settlers had “introduced the idol of exile to the temple of national rebirth, and the creation of the homeland was desecrated by avodah zara [employment of Arab workers, lit. ‘alien work’].”

Avodah zara is a term with enormous weight in Jewish legal and religious culture. It literally means idol worship, one of the three cardinal sins in halakhic thought, the prohibitions so severe that a Jew was traditionally expected to accept death rather than transgress them. The application of this term to the employment of Arab labor was not rhetorical excess. It encoded the entire ideological program: Jewish economic self-sufficiency, physical labor as national redemption, and the rejection of any structural dependency on Arab workers.

Shapira captures the resulting paradox with precision: “the socialists, who carried aloft the banner of changing the world, fraternity among peoples, and other virtues of peace and non-aggression, found themselves in actual fact on a national collision course with the Arabs.” Not because displacement was their goal, but because the goal, building a self-sufficient Jewish economy entirely from Jewish labor, structurally produced separation from Arab economic life regardless of intent.

The program had a name: kibush ha-avoda, the conquest of labor. Its concrete demand was that all jobs created by Jewish capital be reserved for Jewish workers. As Shapira documents, the practical ambition was “the creation of two separate economies, Jewish and Arab. Eventually, this meant the creation of two societies as well.”

The Failure in Practice

Here is the detail that should be dispositive for the colonial analogy: kibush ha-avoda largely failed.

Shapira is unambiguous. “Kibbush ha-avoda... proved a failure: Arab workers stayed on to work in the Jewish-owned fields.” The ideological campaign to eliminate dependency on Arab labor did not succeed during the Second Aliyah period. Jewish workers were few and found themselves in serious conflict with the First Aliyah colonists, who had practical reasons to continue employing Arab workers, lower wages, experience, and availability. The aspiration toward two separate economies remained an aspiration. The reality was continued Arab employment in Jewish-owned fields despite the ideological push.

This failure is analytically important, not incidental. In the South African model, the colonial enterprise could not have functioned without native labor, that dependency was structural and permanent. In the Yishuv, the governing ideology was actively attempting to eliminate precisely that dependency, and failing. A colonial enterprise genuinely operating on the South African logic would have had no interest in eliminating its dependency on native labor. It would have institutionalized that dependency, as South Africa did. The attempt at autarky, and the significant extent of its failure, is evidence against the colonial model, not evidence for it.

The Security Dimension

The picture is not complete without acknowledging what was driving the push toward Jewish labor beyond socialist ideology. The First Aliyah moshavot had employed Arab labor extensively, and this integration had generated rather than prevented violence.

Alan Dowty’s Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine documents incidents at Petach Tikvah in 1886, Gedera in 1888, Yesud Ha’ma’ala in 1890, and multiple incidents at Rehovot in the 1890s. The attacks were not uniform in origin or character, and their causes were various, land disputes, labor competition, general intercommunal tension. But they established a pattern: economic integration between the two communities did not produce harmonious coexistence. It produced friction at points of contact that could escalate into violence.

Ha-Shomer, the Jewish self-defense organization founded in 1909, emerged from the same Second Aliyah milieu as kibush ha-avoda. Gordon’s philosophical labor redemption and the practical need for armed watchmen were two responses to the same underlying situation. The ideology of Hebrew labor and the institutions of self-defense developed together, because both were responses to the discovery that integration created vulnerabilities and interdependencies.

This context does not make the push toward separation admirable or free of consequences for Arab workers. It does establish that the causal sequence matters analytically. The separation was not the originating logic of the enterprise. It was an adaptation, to ideological commitment, to the failure of First Aliyah integration, and to security pressures generated by that integration. Those are different causal structures, with different implications for what the enterprise was structurally designed to accomplish.

The Causal Chain Reversal

This is where the colonial analogy breaks down most fundamentally.

In the classic settler colonial model, displacement is the originating logic. The enterprise begins with the intent to possess the land and remove or subordinate the indigenous population. Economic integration may or may not occur, but it is always instrumental to the colonial enterprise, native labor extracted, native land seized, native culture erased. The “logic of elimination” is not an outcome that arrives by accident. It is baked into the structure from the start.

What the historical record of the Yishuv shows is a different sequence. Early economic integration, First Aliyah moshavot employing Arab workers, creating markets for Arab produce, providing medical services to neighboring villages, generated Arab resistance, which generated security-driven and ideologically-driven pressure toward separation, which generated displacement as a structural byproduct.

That is a meaningfully different causal structure. Displacement was not the goal of the enterprise. It was the outcome of a defensive and ideological adaptation to conditions that themselves grew out of integration. Wolfe’s “logic of elimination” requires elimination as the structural logic from the outset. The actual historical sequence does not fit that requirement.

A clarification is necessary here. Acknowledging that displacement was a structural byproduct rather than an originating goal does not make it benign or less real. Families lost land they had cultivated for generations. That harm is documented and serious. The point is that what produced the harm was a specific historical mechanism, Ottoman property law’s treatment of customary cultivation rights, absentee landlord structures that concentrated formal legal title in absent hands, Zionist land purchasing policy operating downstream of both, and a British Mandate framework that was making incompatible promises to everyone. Understanding that specific mechanism is not a defense of the outcomes. It is the prerequisite for identifying remedies that would actually address the actual harm.

Note also that Jewish National Fund exclusivity policies and Jewish Agency land consolidation strategies were real institutional choices made alongside these structural forces. An honest account requires holding both: the structural context that produced displacement as a byproduct, and the institutional agency that made deliberate choices within that context. The colonial framing, by collapsing everything into a single structural logic, obscures the first. A purely legal-purchase defense, by treating each transaction as an isolated voluntary exchange, obscures the second. Both are incomplete.

What the Comparison Requires You to Ignore

The South Africa comparison requires ignoring the structural inversion at its heart: South African apartheid built an economy that could not function without the native labor base it was simultaneously subordinating. Hebrew labor ideology attempted to build an economy with no dependency on native labor at all. These are not variations on the same theme. They are opposite structural logics.

South African job reservation said: you will work here, but at the bottom and for our benefit. Hebrew labor ideology said: we will not employ you at all. The first required permanent integration. The second aspired to permanent separation. The first was a mechanism of extraction. The second was an attempt at autarky that, as Shapira documents, substantially failed.

Derek Penslar’s formulation, developed in the context of the broader colonial analogy rather than South Africa specifically, remains the right standard: Zionism had “certain colonial characteristics” while also being “shaped by the forces of anti-colonialism.” Both are true simultaneously. The colonial framework, which requires a single clean structural logic, cannot hold both truths at once. The historical record can.

The next post examines the co-formation of two nationalisms, neither ancient nor invented, both emerging through the same nineteenth-century European political technology, both substantially shaped by their encounter with each other.

Further Reading

On the labor ideology of the Second Aliyah:

Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (1992) — the essential study of the relationship between Zionist ideology and the practical realities of settlement. Shapira’s account of kibush ha-avoda, its ideological roots in the galut critique, and its failure in practice is the scholarly foundation for this argument.

Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (1989) — the major structural-economic account of the Yishuv’s formation. Shafir focuses specifically on the labor question and the mechanisms by which the push toward Jewish labor generated Arab displacement as a structural byproduct. More structurally oriented than Shapira; the two books are complementary.

On the ideological context:

Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (2012) — broader narrative history that contextualizes the labor ideology within the longer arc of Zionist development. Useful for the Dayan period and for understanding how Second Aliyah ideological formations shaped Israeli political culture well into the state period.

On the early encounter and its violence:

Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine (2008) — documents the incidents of intercommunal violence during the First Aliyah period that generated the security logic behind the shift toward Jewish labor. Dowty is careful to distinguish the causes and characters of different incidents rather than treating the violence as a uniform phenomenon.

On the South African comparison specifically:

Gershon Shafir’s comparative analysis in Land, Labor and the Origins explicitly engages the South African analogy and distinguishes the structural logic of the Yishuv from that of apartheid. His argument that the Yishuv operated on a logic of separation rather than stratification is the scholarly basis for this post’s central claim.

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David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition shows that the most consequential deployments of “Judaism” in Western intellectual history had little to do with actual Jews. “Judaism” was a cognitive instrument, a set of figures and associations through which theologians organized questions about carnality and spirit, through which philosophers organized questions about the letter and its meaning, through which economists organized questions about property and exchange, through which political theorists organized questions about power and corruption.

Marx grasped this with unusual clarity. In “On the Jewish Question” (1844), he recognized that “Judaism” named not the religion of a specific people but a conceptual category, one that non-Jews used to think about money, property, and the corrupting logic of capital. The implication, which Nirenberg develops across the full sweep of Western thought, is recursive and uncomfortable; figures of Judaism “are re-formed by the work to which they are put in understanding the changing world, but both the world and the real Jews in it are also re-formed by being thought through figures of Judaism.” Real Jews, living in real communities with real economic and religious practices, were secondary inputs into a system that had already decided what Jews and “Judaism” meant.

This is why so many myths around Jews like the moneylending myth, documented and refuted in the previous post, is immune to evidence. The myth was never an empirical claim about Jewish lending practices. It is usage of the figure of the Jewish usurer to organize thinking about credit, materiality, and moral corruption. The Jew in western thought was “not simply an attitude toward Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging the world.”

Quantitative research on 118 expulsions across 814 medieval German cities confirms what the conceptual history suggests: the drivers of anti-Jewish violence were overwhelmingly disputes between Christian power brokers, with Jews peripheral to the conflicts that destroyed them.

This post will investigate how that cognitive instrument was built, what institutional, theological, and legal mechanisms made “Judaism” available as a stable, portable, apparently explanatory category across more than a millennium of Western thought.

Three frameworks illuminate the construction; Geraldine Heng’s analysis of how medieval Christianity resolved the conversion crisis through strategic essentialism, making Jewishness an unerasable category; María Elena Martínez’s documentation of how that was codified into law through limpieza de sangre and then exported as the template for colonial racism; and Hannah Arendt’s account of how race-thinking became ideology, a system claiming to possess the “key to history”, before becoming the intellectual infrastructure of European imperialism.

Together, they show how medieval Europe didn’t merely persecute Jews. It built antisemitism into the foundational categories through which it understood the world, and then exported that framework as the scaffolding of modernity.

I. The Conversion Conundrum: Strategic Essentialism and the Indelible Jew

Christianity is, at its doctrinal core, a religion of conversion. The Damascus Road, the apostolic mission, the eschatological ingathering, all presuppose that identity is transformable, that the interior person can be genuinely remade. This foundational premise created an acute problem when applied to Jews.

The problem was not theological resistance to Jewish conversion; the Church actively sought it. The problem was that successful conversion produced a genuinely unresolvable category crisis. The convert occupied, as Geraldine Heng observes in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, “a new identity somewhere between Christianity and Judaism”, a position that unsettled the clean binaries on which Christian social order depended. Baptism marked a public, sacramental transformation, but interior conversion was, by definition, “obscure and incommunicable.” No ceremony could make it transparent. And temporal priority pressed uncomfortably: which identity had ontological ground? Was the convert “really” a Jew who had adopted Christian practice, or a Christian whose Jewish past was genuinely superseded?

“The converts, and even their descendants, were really Jews all along, because having once been Jews, or having descended from people who had once been Jews, carried an essence that tainted a person forever.” - Geraldine Heng

Ecclesiastical and civil authorities resolved this crisis through what Heng calls strategic essentialism. Having once been Jewish, or having descended from people who had been Jewish, carried an essence that tainted a person forever. Conversion did not and could not erase this essence; it merely overlaid it. The convert’s Jewish origin remained operative beneath the Christian exterior, and this remained true across generations. Descendants of converts, even those with no personal experience of Judaism, bore the taint of ancestral Jewish identity.

This was racialization in a pre-biological framework. The mechanism was genealogical rather than genetic, but the logic was structurally identical: an essence transmitted through lineage, resistant to individual transformation, marking its carriers as permanently other. What made it specifically racial rather than merely theological was the insistence on hereditary transmission and the denial of redemptive trajectory. Converts could not achieve Christian status fully; their descendants could not achieve it either. Heng describes this as the “not yet forever” structure of progressivist colonial logic: an improvement narrative whose terminus is indefinitely deferred, not promised but withheld, functioning as perpetual exclusion in the guise of conditional acceptance.

The mechanism required that Jewishness remain detectable. Strategic essentialism creates an identification problem: if essence is invisible and conversion overlays it, how is the tainted person to be recognized? Medieval culture solved this through a proliferating sensory apparatus, the foetor judaicus (Jewish stench), the facies judaica (Jewish face), circumcision as both visual and tactile marker, the “continuous caterwauling” attributed to synagogue prayer. These were not merely insults. They were technologies of detection, necessary correlates of a system that required Jewishness to be legible on bodies. The body became the archive of an ancestry that conversion could not expunge.

The social consequences were systematic. In England, the Statute of Jewry (1275) mandated the yellow badge precisely because it was understood that Jewish bodies might otherwise pass unmarked. In Iberia, the anxiety about passing, the marrano as hidden Jew, drove the establishment of the Inquisition. The detection apparatus and the enforcement apparatus were two sides of the same essentialist logic.

II. Figures of Judaism: The Conceptual Work of Anti-Judaism

David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition makes a claim that initially sounds counterintuitive: the most important uses of “Judaism” in Western intellectual history have had little to do with actual Jews. “Judaism,” in the framework Nirenberg develops, is a conceptual category, a set of attributes and associations through which non-Jewish thinkers have organized their understanding of the world.

The career of Augustine illustrates this with almost uncomfortable precision. Augustine produced hundreds of works engaging with Judaism, its law, its letter, its relationship to Christian salvation, across his entire adult life. As Nirenberg documents, the only living Jew he is known to have ever encountered appeared in his court as a plaintiff, complaining that another bishop had illegally seized his lands. His entire theological construction of Judaism was the product, as Nirenberg puts it, "entirely of the theological exigencies of his debate with the Manichaeans", an internal Christian dispute in which "Judaism" served as the accusation each side leveled at the other. Jerome accused Augustine of Judaizing for defending the literal truth of Hebrew scripture. Augustine accused Jerome of Judaizing for consulting the Hebrew original rather than the Greek translation. Neither had meaningful contact with Jews. Both shaped Christian thinking about Judaism for a millennium.

The insight is not new with Nirenberg; he credits Marx with its clearest early formulation. In “On the Jewish Question” (1844), Marx observed that “Judaism” functioned as a name for the corrupting logic of money and property, a category through which the social relations of capitalism could be criticized. The significance of this, for Nirenberg, is that it reveals the structural position “Judaism” occupied in Western thought: not an empirical description of Jewish practice but a figure, a cognitive instrument with which thinkers engaged problems that had nothing intrinsically to do with Jews.

These figures, Nirenberg argues, were “reformed by the work they do in understanding the changing world, but both the world and the real Jews in it are also re-formed by being thought through figures of Judaism.” The relationship is recursive: figures of Judaism shape how thinkers understand property, power, carnality, materialism, and legalism; those understandings, in turn, shape how actual Jews are perceived and treated. The gap between the conceptual figure and the empirical reality is not a problem awaiting correction, it is constitutive of how the figure functions.

“’Judaism,’ then, is not only the religion of specific people with specific beliefs, but also a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world. Nor is ‘anti-Judaism’ simply an attitude toward Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging the world.” - David Nirenberg

This explains why the moneylending myth was immune to evidence. The myth was never primarily about what Jews did in credit markets. It was about what “Judaism” meant as a conceptual category: materialism, carnality, attachment to the letter over the spirit, exploitation of temporal advantage. Real Jewish lending practices were irrelevant to this deployment. The figure of the Jewish usurer organized the world conceptually regardless of if Jews were actually dominant in usury, and in medieval Europe, as Robin Mundill and others have documented, they were not. The figures preceded the facts and survived their refutation because they were doing different cognitive work than the facts could address.

Anti-Judaism, in Nirenberg’s formulation, is thus “not simply an attitude toward Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging the world.” It was used to think about politics (the “Judaizing” of Catholic practice in Protestant polemic), philosophy (the “carnal” reading of scripture versus the “spiritual”), economics (usury as Jewish contamination of Christian exchange), and empire (the colonial subject as “Jewish” in the sense of obstinate, material, resistant to spiritual transformation). Each of these uses reformed the figure slightly, adapting it to new contexts, and each use reinforced the broader structure in which “Judaism” signified corruption, materiality, and threat.

III. The Ideology of Race: Arendt and the Key to History

Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism situates race-thinking within a broader analysis of ideological thought. For Arendt, an ideology is distinguished from ordinary opinion not by its content but by its formal claim: it asserts possession of “the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.” This formal claim exempts the ideology from ordinary empirical testing, it cannot be falsified by evidence because it explains why the evidence appears as it does.

By the nineteenth century, two ideologies had come to dominate Western political thought: the struggle of classes as the engine of history (Marxism) and the struggle of races as the law of nature and civilization (racism). Race-thinking did not emerge suddenly. Arendt traces its roots to the eighteenth century, where it appeared first not as a theory of natural species but as a tool of aristocratic class conflict. In France, Boulainvilliers and later Gobineau deployed the distinction between Germanic conquerors and Celtic peasants to argue for the natural supremacy of the nobility, “race” as a legitimating vocabulary for aristocratic privilege rather than a biological science. In Germany, the trauma of 1806 (Napoleonic defeat, dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire) produced nationalist ideologies organized around “blood relationship” and “unmixed origin”, the Volk as an organic racial community whose integrity was threatened by admixture with foreign elements.

What made race-thinking ideologically powerful, and politically catastrophic, was precisely its explanatory completeness. It claimed to reveal hidden laws operating beneath the visible surface of events, laws that, once grasped, made the whole of history intelligible. Arendt’s most devastating formulation: “Race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.” The ideology that claimed to illuminate human origins was, in her analysis, an ideology of decomposition, it dissolved the political into the biological, the person into the species, the citizen into the carrier of hereditary substance.

The connection to medieval anti-Judaism is structural rather than simply genealogical. Heng’s strategic essentialism established the logic of indelible hereditary taint. Nirenberg’s figures of Judaism established “Judaism” as an instrument for making sense of the world. Arendt’s race-thinking added the final element: an ideology capable of systematizing these structures into a comprehensive account of history, one that could function as the intellectual foundation of imperial policy.

IV. The Bridge to Modernity: Limpieza de Sangre and the Colonial Template

The connection between medieval racialization and modern racism is not merely analogical. There is a documented transmission, a mechanism by which the anti-Jewish essentialist framework became the template for European colonial racism.

That mechanism is limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, the statutory system that emerged in Castile in the fifteenth century and achieved systematic codification in the sixteenth. María Elena Martínez’s analysis demonstrates that the limpieza statutes “transformed purity of blood from a naturalist to an essentialist principle”, they closed off the possibility that “natural” traits might change across generations, constructing conversos and moriscos as “a particular type of convert, never fully able to rid themselves of their ancestral beliefs.” This was Heng’s medieval strategic essentialism written into administrative law.

The word raza, the direct ancestor of the English word “race”, is itself evidence of the transmission. Martínez traces how the term shifted in Castilian usage from a vocabulary of horse-breeding, designating bloodline in livestock, to a vocabulary of human genealogy, where it came to refer to descent from Jews, Muslims, and eventually other religious categories. By 1611, Covarrubias’s dictionary defined racial reference in lineages as understood negatively: having “some race of Moor or Jew.” The word that English speakers have used for four centuries to organize human difference was constituted, from its very first uses, by reference to Jewish and Muslim ancestry as pollution.

The colonial extension followed with a logic that, in retrospect, was almost inevitable. When Castilians arrived in the Americas and Africa, they carried with them a developed administrative apparatus for marking hereditary religious-racial taint, statutes, procedures, evidentiary standards, genealogical investigations. Martínez documents that “the association of blackness with infidelity facilitated the extension of Castilian concepts of limpieza de sangre to persons of African descent.” The anti-Jewish framework became the template for racializing people who had no connection to Judaism, and would shape the reproductive imagination of the Iberian Peninsula and the New World for the next five hundred years. Medieval antisemitism was not merely the origin of modern antisemitism. It was, in a documentable institutional and lexical sense, the origin of modern race-thinking itself.

Conclusion: The Structure Persists

Medieval antisemitism was not a series of independent prejudices that accumulated accidentally. It was a nested system of reinforcing mechanisms, each requiring and supporting the others. Blood libel and ritual murder (Post 1) made Jews ontologically threatening to Christian social order. The archae system (Post 2) made Jewish economic activity hypervisible through bureaucratic infrastructure. The moneylending myth (Post 3) generated economic scapegoating that persisted despite documentary refutation, because economic scapegoating required racialization to explain why descendants of converts bore Jewish guilt, racialization required the conceptual figures Nirenberg documents to remain stable across generations, and those figures required legal codification in the yellow badge, the ghetto, and the limpieza statute to become enforceable. Each layer depended on the others. None could function alone.

The structure persists because it was never about what Jews actually did. When modern antisemites invoke Jewish financial control, they are deploying a conceptual category formed in the thirteenth century and codified in the sixteenth, a category constituted by figures of Judaism that were never constrained by empirical Jewish practice. The persistence is not irrational; it is the normal functioning of a system that claims explanatory completeness. Evidence that contradicts the figure does not refute it. The figure explains why the evidence appears as it does.

The next part will examine how this structure culminated in the twentieth century. The path from medieval strategic essentialism to industrial genocide was neither inevitable nor accidental. It ran through specific institutions, texts, and decisions. But the destination was, in some sense, latent in the structure from the beginning: if Jewishness is indelible, hereditary, and resistant to transformation, the logic of elimination is always available as a solution, waiting for the political conditions that would make it seem not merely thinkable but necessary.

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The Framework and the Function

The settler colonial framework was developed primarily to describe European overseas empire: populations with no prior connection to the territory they occupied, arriving as agents of expansion from a position of metropolitan security and power, with the active backing of colonizing states. Before asking whether Zionism fits this description, it is worth asking whether the historical record it is being applied to accurately reflects what the framework was built to describe.

It doesn’t. And the mismatch is not incidental, it runs across every structural requirement the framework specifies.

What the Framework Requires

Patrick Wolfe, whose 2006 formulation of settler colonial theory remains the field’s foundational text, specifies that the logic of elimination applies to social groups “constituted prior to and independently of the normative basis on which settler society is established.” The arriving population must be an extension of a metropolitan power, operating with its sponsorship, displacing a native population whose prior constitution is not substantially shaped by the colonial encounter itself.

These are not incidental qualifiers. They are structural requirements. The framework’s entire analytical apparatus, the logic of elimination, the structure rather than event formulation, the decolonization endpoint, depends on them being satisfied. When they are not satisfied, the framework is not describing the case. It is being applied to it regardless.

The Ottoman and pre-Mandate historical record fails to provide these requirements. The failure is worth examining in detail, because each point of failure tells you something specific about what the historical record actually shows.

The 1858 Ottoman Land Law and the Pre-Aliyah Disruption

The most rigorous archival study of the pre-aliyah period in Palestine is Alexander Schölch’s Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882 (1993), which draws on Ottoman administrative records, consular reports, and European commercial archives to document what was happening to Palestinian land and labor before the first significant wave of Jewish immigration began in 1882.

What Schölch establishes is that Palestine was already being substantially transformed by European economic penetration and Ottoman centralization a generation before Zionist buyers arrived. The central mechanism was the 1858 Ottoman Land Law.

Before 1858, Palestinian agriculture operated substantially under the musha’ system, a form of communal rotating tenure in which cultivation rights, effective occupation, and formal ownership were distinct, overlapping categories that did not map onto each other cleanly. A family might cultivate a particular plot for generations without holding formal legal title to it, because under musha’, cultivation rights were communally allocated and periodically redistributed. The system worked within an Ottoman legal culture that recognized multiple overlapping forms of claim on the same land.

The 1858 Law formalized Ottoman land categories through a mandatory registration requirement that, in practice, treated customary cultivation rights as legally inferior to registered title. Schölch is careful to note that the law did not create fundamentally new land-ownership norms but comprehensively codified existing Ottoman law, the goal was fiscal reform, specifically the extension of individual registration to all land holdings. It was part of the broader Tanzimat reform program, and it had a specific consequence for Palestinian cultivators. Formal legal title now required registration with Ottoman authorities. This process required navigating Ottoman bureaucracy, paying registration fees, and demonstrating claims through documentary evidence that most fellahin did not possess and could not easily produce.

The result was systematic. Fellahin who had cultivated land for generations under musha’ frequently did not register their cultivation rights as formal title. Many were unaware of the requirement, unable to navigate the process, or unwilling to pay the fees or risk the tax implications of formal registration. Large landowners, wealthy merchants, and urban effendis, in many cases absentee owners in Beirut, Damascus, or Constantinople, registered formal legal title to land their tenants had farmed for generations without the tenants’ knowledge or consent.

By the time Zionist land purchasers arrived in any significant numbers in the 1880s and 1890s, they encountered a landscape whose formal legal ownership had already been substantially reconstituted by this Ottoman-European interaction. When Jewish buyers purchased land from registered legal title-holders, they were operating downstream of a transformation they had not initiated. The legal mechanism that made the purchases possible, formal individual title in Ottoman land law, had been created by the 1858 reform. The absentee ownership structures that made large sales feasible had been created by the same reform, as effendis registered title to land they had no direct connection to and then were willing to sell when the price was sufficient.

Schölch’s framing of the larger dynamic is worth noting precisely: the British occupation of Egypt and the beginning of Jewish settlement in Palestine were “the starting points for two lines of development, British imperialism on the one hand and Zionism on the other, which gravitated toward each other and finally converged during World War I.” This framing matters analytically. The relationship between British power and Jewish settlement was a convergence of originally separate trajectories, not a coordinated colonial scheme with metropolitan sponsorship from the outset. The framework requires the latter. The historical record shows the former.

The Pre-Zionist Jewish Community Was Ottoman, Not European

Any analysis of the Zionist settlement period that does not begin by distinguishing the pre-existing Jewish population from the arriving immigrants is working with a distorted picture. The settler colonial framework, which requires a unified colonizing bloc arriving from outside, dissolves on contact with the internal heterogeneity of the actual Jewish population in late Ottoman Palestine.

Julia Phillips Cohen’s Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (2014) documents how Sephardi Jews had been building a form of imperial citizenship from below across the Tanzimat era, actively integrating into Ottoman civic life in ways that made them, by the late nineteenth century, recognizable to both Ottoman Muslims and the broader imperial public as a “model millet”, a religious community that had successfully navigated the transition to the new Ottoman civic framework.

These were not European arrivals. They were Ottoman subjects with deep roots in the region, communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron that predated Zionist immigration by centuries, in some cases by millennia. Hillel Cohen’s Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict documents the Old Yishuv in detail: communities deeply embedded in Ottoman Palestinian life, with legal and cultural commonalities with their Arab neighbors that vastly exceeded anything they shared with the Eastern European arrivals of the First and Second Aliyot.

The new Zionist immigrants, predominantly from Russia, Romania, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were experienced by the Old Yishuv not as the first bearers of modernity. The Old Yishuv had its own exposure to modernizing currents: Alliance Israélite Universelle schools had operated in Jerusalem since 1870, missionary and European educational institutions were part of the broader Ottoman Palestinian environment, and the Tanzimat reform era had reshaped civic life across the empire. What made the Zionist arrivals alien was not modernity per se but a specific ideological program, secular nationalism combined with socialist labor organization, that was foreign to the existing community’s religious identity and Ottoman civic formation. As Anita Shapira documents, the Old Yishuv had “undergone slow processes of change” and included elements seeking modernization; it was the secular nationalist framing of the new immigrants, not modernization as such, that constituted the fracture line. Cohen documents the tensions between what the Old Yishuv called the “Moscovites” and the established population. The framing was not trivial disagreement. The secular Zionist immigrants rejected the religious culture of the Old Yishuv, operated on different economic principles, and brought an entirely different relationship to Ottoman authority. The colonial framing, which requires a unified colonizing group with shared interests and metropolitan backing, collapses on contact with this fracture line.

The Refugee Population and the Colonial Model

The colonial model requires colonizers to arrive from a position of security and power, as agents of expansion, extending metropolitan reach into new territory. This requirement is categorical, not scalar. The Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the First and Second Aliyot fail to meet it.

They were stateless or quasi-stateless refugees from the primary victims class of European civilization. The Russian May Laws of 1882 restricted where Jews could live within the Pale of Settlement, barred them from rural areas, and excluded them from most professions. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 killed dozens and prompted mass flight. The wave of pogroms during the 1905 Russian Revolution killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands more. In Romania and throughout the Habsburg periphery, systematic legal exclusion from economic life was the baseline condition of Jewish existence, not an exceptional circumstance.

These immigrants were not agents of Russian or Austro-Hungarian imperial expansion. Russia and Austro-Hungary had no interest in Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine, in many cases they actively discouraged it. The immigrants came because they had nowhere else to go. Western countries had erected or were erecting barriers to Jewish immigration. The United States, the primary destination for most Eastern European Jewish emigrants, passed increasingly restrictive immigration legislation culminating in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which used national origin quotas specifically calibrated to exclude Jews and Southern Europeans. The Zionist leadership chose Palestine as the destination for an ideological program of national reconstitution in the ancestral homeland. The immigrants chose it because the alternatives were limited and closing.

Arriving as a refugee from persecution is not the same thing as arriving as a colonizer extending metropolitan power. The framework requires the latter. The historical record shows the former.

The Historical Connection and What It Means

Jewish absence from majority status in Palestine was not a choice. It was the product of Roman imperial violence, the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, the subsequent dispersal of the Jewish population from Judea, and the Roman renaming of the province as Syria Palaestina as a deliberate act of cultural erasure. What Zionism describes as “return” is not analogous to British settlers in Kenya or French settlers in Algeria, who had no historical presence to return to. It is something for which the settler colonial framework has no analytical category, because the framework was not built to describe it.

This does not resolve the claims of the people who were living in Palestine when Jewish immigrants arrived. Those claims are real, documented, and deserve serious analysis, which the remaining posts in this series provide. But it does mean that the specific framework being deployed to analyze those claims, built to describe overseas colonization by populations with no prior connection to the territory they occupied, is missing one of its central structural requirements from the outset. Derek Penslar’s formulation remains the right standard: “Placing Zionism within the broad sweep of Western colonialism leaves unexplained many of its key aspects, such as the nature of Zionism’s connection with historic Palestine.”

The Non-Static Demographic Picture

One further complication for the framework’s native/settler binary: the population of Palestine in the late Ottoman period was not static, and “native” cannot be resolved by pointing to whoever occupied the most recent layer before the one being contested.

Palestine under the Ottomans had seen significant population movements throughout the nineteenth century. Egyptian migrants arrived during and after Muhammad Ali’s occupation in the 1830s. Algerians displaced by French colonization found refuge in the Levant. Circassians were relocated from the Caucasus to the Levant after the Russo-Turkish wars of the 1870s as part of explicit Ottoman population policy, what Albert Hourani’s Minorities in the Arab World documents as settlement “for political purposes,” meaning the Ottoman state was using population transfer as an instrument of imperial administration in exactly this region at exactly this time.

The conceptual problem this creates for the framework is not that it invalidates Arab Palestinian claims, it does not. It is that the framework requires a clean native/settler binary that the actual demographic and administrative history of the region does not provide. Multiple populations with mixed origins and layered claims were present in the region, all of them shaped in various ways by Ottoman and European imperial processes they had not chosen and could not fully control. Reducing this complexity to a binary in which one population occupies the “native” slot and another occupies the “settler” slot requires imposing a theoretical template on a historical situation that resists it.

What the Decolonization Movement Itself Decided

There is a further dimension to the framework’s structural mismatch that is rarely acknowledged in contemporary applications: the international legal architecture of decolonization, constructed by the postcolonial nations most invested in dismantling European empire, explicitly excluded cases like this one from the definition of colony.

In the years following the UN’s founding, as former colonies gained membership and began using the General Assembly as a platform for promoting decolonization, the question of how to define “colony” for purposes of self-determination became politically urgent. The answer the decolonization movement itself arrived at is known among scholars as the Blue Water or Saltwater Thesis. The distinction it encodes was not a postwar invention. The conceptual separation between overseas colonial empire and contiguous land empire had been a recurring analytical judgment across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made by imperial powers themselves: Russian historians and officials consistently distinguished Russian continental expansion from European overseas colonialism, and American debate over the Philippines after 1898 drew a sharp line between westward territorial integration under manifest destiny and the overseas possession of non-contiguous territories never expected to achieve statehood. What Resolution 1541 did was codify a distinction that already existed in the conceptual vocabulary of empire, giving it formal legal force within the international framework of self-determination. UN General Assembly Resolution 1541 (XV), adopted in December 1960, specified that non-self-governing territories are those that are “geographically separate and distinct ethnically and/or culturally from the country administering it”, meaning separated by open sea from the metropolitan power.

This definition was not a Western imposition designed to protect European interests. It was advanced by African and Asian nations, including leaders of the newly independent Congo, precisely because they needed a definition of colonialism that would protect their own newly independent states from internal separatism. If contiguous territories with distinct ethnic or cultural populations qualified as colonies entitled to self-determination, the same logic that could be used to demand Palestinian self-determination from an Israeli state could be used to demand Katangese self-determination from a Congolese state, and Belgium, which had just relinquished the Congo, was actively making exactly that argument. The Blue Water Thesis was the decolonization movement’s answer to that problem.

The practical consequence is significant. The settler colonial framework, as developed by Wolfe and Veracini in Western universities in the 1990s and 2000s, applies to Israel a category of analysis that the architects of formal international decolonization explicitly declined to apply to contiguous territories. The nations that built the legal infrastructure of decolonization drew the structural distinction that contemporary academic settler colonial theory collapses. That gap between the formal international framework produced by the decolonization movement itself and the contemporary academic framework is not incidental. It is evidence that the academic framework is doing different conceptual work than the legal framework, which returns us to Nirenberg’s question: what work is it doing, and why does Israel specifically require it?

The Modification Problem

Applying the settler colonial framework to a case where the arriving population has continuous historical ties to the land, arrived substantially as refugees from imperial persecution, encountered a co-ethnic community that was Ottoman rather than European in character, operated within a prior European imperial legal infrastructure it did not create, and was itself being manipulated by British imperial interests for purposes of its own, requires substantial modification and explicit argument, not assumption.

Aziz Rana’s recent piece in Dissent, the most careful contemporary defense of the framework’s application to Israel, acknowledges this by treating settler colonialism as a spectrum rather than a binary. This is an intellectually honest response to the historical complexity, but it is also a concession that the framework is being adapted rather than applied, that the case does not fit the framework as constructed, and that what is being argued is that a modified version of the framework still illuminates something useful. That is a different and weaker claim than the one usually made in public and political discourse, where the colonial label travels with its full prescriptive weight regardless of what modifications any individual careful user intends.

What the Ottoman and pre-Mandate historical record actually shows, when examined without the framework’s structural requirements imposed on it in advance, is something more complex than either the colonial indictment or the legal-purchase defense can accommodate: the collision of multiple partially displaced populations, each with legitimate grievances, layered historical claims, and deep internal divisions, inside a European imperial legal infrastructure that had been disrupting the region before either party arrived in significant numbers, and a British Mandate framework that was using all groups for its own ends while making incompatible promises to each.

That is not a comfortable picture. It is, however, an accurate one. And it is the picture the remaining essays in this series examine in detail.

The next post will examine the economic structure of the Yishuv and why the South Africa comparison, the most sophisticated version of the colonial analogy, fails on its own terms. The logic turns out to be precisely inverted.

Further Reading

On the Ottoman legal and demographic context:

Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882 (1993) — the foundational archival study of the pre-aliyah period. Schölch works from Ottoman administrative records, consular archives, and European commercial documents to reconstruct the land law, the musha’ system, and the economic transformation of Palestine before 1882. Indispensable for anyone engaging seriously with the land question.

Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine (2008) — a careful documentary history of the early encounter period, including detailed analysis of land purchase patterns, absentee landlord structures, and the first generation of Arab-Jewish relations. Dowty’s data on the provenance of land sales is essential for understanding the fellahin dispossession mechanism.

On the Ottoman Jewish community:

Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (2014) — the best study of how Sephardi Jews navigated the Tanzimat reforms and constructed a form of imperial citizenship from below. Essential for understanding why the pre-existing Jewish community was Ottoman in character rather than European.

Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929 (2015) — focuses on 1929 as a pivotal moment but provides rich background on the Old Yishuv and its distinct relationship to Palestinian Arab neighbors, documenting the cultural and civic life of communities that predated and were structurally distinct from the Zionist settler project.

On Jewish-Arab relations in the late Ottoman period:

Louis Fishman, Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914 (2019) — Fishman draws on Ottoman archives and the Arabic and Hebrew press of the constitutional period to document how both communities were simultaneously constructing identities in relation to each other and to the Ottoman state. The most rigorous recent scholarship on the pre-Mandate encounter.

Neville Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism Before World War I (1976) — older but still valuable study of early Arab responses to Zionist settlement, based on Ottoman archival sources. Documents opposition emerging substantially from specific local concerns about land and labor rather than from a pre-formed nationalist ideology

On Zionism in its Ottoman context:

Derek Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State (2023) — the most rigorous recent reassessment of Zionism as a historical phenomenon, attentive to what the colonial framing illuminates and what it distorts. Penslar’s formulation that the colonial framework “leaves unexplained many of its key aspects” is the scholarly standard the series works from.

The historical literature on medieval Jewish economic activity has long accepted a basic premise: that Jews concentrated in moneylending because Christians were prohibited from the practice, and that this concentration made Jews indispensable to medieval credit markets. The premise appears in works from Heinrich Graetz through Cecil Roth to more recent scholarship. Even historians who challenge aspects of the “Jewish moneylender” stereotype often accept its core claim about Jewish dominance in credit provision.

Julie Mell’s exhaustive analysis of English loan chest records challenges this consensus at its foundation. Her examination of scrutinies from Lincoln (1240) and twelve towns (1275) reveals that the majority of the Jewish population held no loans whatsoever in the archae, and that among those who did lend, most held only a single bond, lending as occasional investment, not profession. Professional moneylending was the occupation of a tiny elite, not the Jewish community. The distribution of wealth among Anglo-Jewry, Mell demonstrates, “roughly paralleled that in the urban Christian population,” with three-quarters of Jews living “at the lower end of the urban scale.”

Jonathan Ray’s analysis of the market town of Santa Coloma de Queralt in fourteenth-century Catalonia (drawing on notarial registers from 1276 to 1313) produces similar findings. When all forms of credit are counted, not merely direct monetary loans, Christians constituted 70.5% of creditors. The appearance of Jewish dominance in direct lending (70.3%) dissolves when credit-sales and commodity-denominated loans are included in the analysis.

The gap between these findings and the received narrative raises a historical question: if Christians dominated medieval credit markets, why did the rhetorical and legal apparatus of medieval Europe assign responsibility for usury almost exclusively to Jews?

The English Evidence

The richest archival evidence comes from England, where the Exchequer of the Jews maintained detailed records. Mell’s analysis of loan chest scrutinies provides quantitative data that challenges the traditional narrative.

The Lincoln scrutiny of 1240 (E 101/249/4) lists 115 adults; adjusted for married women absent from the record, Mell estimates the total adult population at roughly 160. Over 70% of Lincoln’s Jewish population had no recorded loans in records that are “very full for the preceding 5–10 years, and stretch back as far as 20 years.” The distribution of wealth among those residents mirrored that of the wider urban population. This was not a community of professional moneylenders. Three-quarters of Lincoln’s Jews “eked out a living” far from the credit markets.

Among the 28% who did have loans in the chest, the pattern is equally revealing. A majority held only one or two bonds, which Mell reads as a form of occasional investment, a small nest egg put to use, rather than a livelihood. Only a small minority made loans at the volume and frequency that marks professional lending; Mell calculates that only 15% of Lincoln’s adult population made more than ten loans, and a handful of elite lenders dominated the chest’s volume entirely. A few well-known figures, such as Aaron of York, held loans across multiple regional chests; 56% of the lenders appearing in Lincoln’s archa were not even Lincoln residents.

The 1275 scrutiny of twelve towns shows a consistent pattern. Of the 352 Jewish taxpayers whose records were examined, specifically those who appeared in arrears on the Great Tallage, a limitation Mell acknowledges makes the sample partial, only 42% had any loans at all in the local chests. The combined figure across towns, Mell argues, is “roughly representative”: something in the range of 60–70% of England’s Jews had no loans in the archae at all.

Edward I’s primary creditors were not Jews. They were Italian merchant-bankers. The Riccardi of Lucca advanced over £200,000 to the crown in Edward’s first seven years alone. By 1290, when Edward expelled England’s Jews, Jewish lending had already declined to overwhelmingly small-scale, rural, and short-term operations focused on peasants and craftsmen. The Riccardi, along with other Italian firms including the Frescobaldi, Bardi, and Peruzzi, provided the systematic credit infrastructure that powered the English state. These were Christian banking families operating at scales that dwarfed Jewish lending, and they did so throughout the period when usury prohibitions theoretically applied to Christians.

Robin Mundill notes that “there had always been Christian moneylenders in England operating alongside Jewish ones.” English Christian lenders, often high-ranking royal servants, used their administrative positions to have debts enrolled on official records and payment enforced. The credit market was not a Jewish monopoly waiting to collapse after expulsion. It was a Christian-dominated system in which Jews participated at the margins.

Corroborating Evidence from Iberia

Ray’s analysis of Santa Coloma de Queralt, a market town in the county of Queralt in Catalonia, drawing on five notarial registers covering the period 1276 to 1313, provides corroborating quantitative evidence. His findings challenge the traditional narrative at its methodological foundation.

When all credit transactions are counted, not merely direct monetary loans, Christians constituted 70.5% of all creditors. Jews were 29.5%.

The traditional narrative persists because historians have counted only one category of credit: direct loans. By that measure, Jews constituted 70.3% of direct loan creditors, which appears to confirm Jewish lending dominance. However, this represents only part of the credit market.

Credit-sales, selling goods on deferred payment, made up a roughly equal share of all debt transactions, and Christians dominated this market at 98.8%. Interest could be hidden in the sale price. A Christian merchant selling cloth on credit didn’t record “principal plus interest” the way Jewish lenders were required to. They charged more for the cloth and called the markup a sales price, not usury.

Wheat-measures functioned similarly. Christians made 88% of loans denominated in wheat rather than currency. Interest was embedded in the commodity itself: repayment terms referenced the market price of wheat in ways that could incorporate what functioned as a return on the loan without identifying it as interest.

Hidden partnerships completed the picture. Ray documents Christian nobles providing capital to Jewish lending partnerships. In one case from 1304 to 1305, two local Christian nobles, Galcerandus de Tous and Bernat Zanou, provided 1,200 solidi and fifteen measures of wheat to the Jewish partnership of Jucer Franc, Mosse de Carcasona, and their families. The Christian investment supplied over 70% of all the capital those Jewish partners lent during the period. The Jews’ names appeared on the contracts. The Christians collected profits in the background.

Ray’s conclusion merits direct quotation: “The religious and political rhetoric of medieval Iberia which focused attention on the threat of Jewish lending did not have a basis in economic reality. Rather, this rhetoric reflected concerns about power relations, religious antagonism, and the social consequence of economic development.”

Mark Meyerson's work on Valencia corroborates this dynamic. The occasional accusations of oppressive lending against Jews coincided precisely with anti-Jewish sermons by bishops who then attempted to take control of judicial inquiry, a jurisdictional challenge to the crown, not a spontaneous economic complaint. As Ray synthesizes it, the crown's response was to lean into the rhetoric rather than resist it: using the existence of anti-usury attacks as a rationale to investigate lenders (especially Jews) and enforce debt collection (primarily from Christians), extracting fines, fees, and exemption payments in the process. The religious rhetoric didn't just mask Christian lending, it actively generated revenue for the same secular authorities who were ostensibly policing it. Regulation, instigated by religious rhetoric, became a rewarding industry precisely because it was never intended to eliminate credit. It was intended to control who was visible within it.

Even Barcelona, where some evidence suggested Jews made 70% of direct loans, turns out to be a documentation artifact. Stephen Bensch, as Ray discusses, demonstrates that the late thirteenth-century legal climate demanded written documentation of Jewish loans more often than Christian. The surviving parchment over-represents Jewish lending because Christian lending often went unrecorded. When credit-sales are included, Christians were far more active.

The Structural Production of Visibility

The answer to the opening question begins with infrastructure. Rowan Dorin's analysis of the spread of mass expulsion and the archae system reveals how administrative apparatus produced differential visibility. When Richard I established the archae in England in 1194, he created a bureaucratic apparatus requiring every Jewish loan over a certain threshold to be registered in locked chests with duplicate copies held by Christian and Jewish chirographers. The system made Jewish credit transactions a matter of public record.

Christian lending had no such requirement.

The result was a structural visibility gap. When debtors failed to repay, Jewish loans were documented, traceable, and visible to royal officials, ecclesiastical authorities, and the public. Christian loans floated beneath the surface of official record-keeping. Credit-sales didn’t look like loans. Wheat-denominated loans didn’t look like usury. Partnerships with Jewish fronts hid Christian capital. The archae created a documentation bias that historians still struggle to overcome.

Mell’s methodological insight is critical here: theologians and canonists developed concepts like interesse (interest) to distinguish legitimate Christian credit mechanisms from illegitimate usury. Damnum emergens (compensation for damages suffered) and lucrum cessans (compensation for profit foregone) provided technical categories that exempted Christian lending from usury prohibitions. Penalties for late payment weren’t usury, they were poena. Purchasing land usufruct wasn’t usury, it was venditio fructus. These distinctions mattered, they were the escape hatches through which Christian lending passed into legal respectability.

Jews had no such conceptual escape hatches. Philip Augustus’s 1206 ordinance for France is instructive. It set a maximum rate for Jewish lending (two pennies per pound per week), but it used the term lucrum (profit) rather than usura (usury). By the time Philip issued his mandate to bailiffs around 1210–1213, the language had shifted: now the charge was explicitly usura, even though the rate and structure were identical. The intent was assumed. “Jewish lending emerges here as always already usurious,” Mell writes. “By virtue of being a Jew, the lender is already designated a usurer.”

Christian lenders charged comparable or often higher rates, used the same mechanisms, and served the same clients. In England, Jewish lending rates were set by the Crown, while Christian lenders operated with less regulatory constraint. Yet their transactions were interesse, not usura. Technical, not theological. Legitimate, not sinful.

Post-Expulsion Evidence

The most direct test of the Jewish moneylending thesis comes from examining credit markets after expulsion. If Jewish lending had been structurally essential, its elimination should have produced market disruption.

It did not. England expelled its Jews in 1290. Credit continued without observable disruption. Italian merchant-bankers expanded operations. English Christian lenders increased their market presence. Mundill’s research demonstrates that “there had always been Christian moneylenders in England operating alongside Jewish ones,” and that Christians were much more active in commercial finance than traditional historiography acknowledged. By 1290, the Riccardi alone had provided more credit to the crown than Jewish lenders had supplied in the previous generation combined.

France expelled Jews in 1306, recalled them in 1315, expelled them again in 1394. Each time, credit markets adapted seamlessly. The Lombards and Cahorsins, Christian lenders from northern Italy and southern France, filled any gaps.

The 1289 expulsion decree issued by Charles II of Anjou and Maine is revealing in its structure. Charles expelled the Jews from his territories of Anjou and Maine on grounds that were primarily theological and political: the decree opens with extended language about Jewish enmity toward Christians, religious subversion, despoiling through usury, and cohabitation with Christian women. Usury is present, but as one element in a cluster of charges derived directly from the ecclesiastical anti-Judaism program, not as a standalone economic grievance. Notably, the same decree expelled “all Lombards, Cahorsins, and other foreigners who engage in public usury” as a secondary measure, invoked explicitly to demonstrate the sincerity of the prince’s motives. Christian usurers were swept up alongside Jewish ones. The rhetorical difference was that Jewish expulsion was framed as permanent purification, while Christian lenders returned, restructured, and continued operations under new legal umbrellas.

Spain expelled Jews in 1492. Credit continued.

The expulsions revealed what the archival evidence had already demonstrated: Jews were participants in Christian-dominated credit markets, not monopolists whose removal would cause systemic collapse. The infrastructure was Christian-built and Christian-maintained. Blaming Jews served political and theological functions, but it did not reflect economic structure.

From Medieval Scapegoating to Modern Antisemitism

The mechanisms documented in medieval credit markets have historiographic implications beyond the Middle Ages. When modern antisemitic discourse invokes Jewish financial control, it replicates the structural pattern Mell and Ray document: assigning disproportionate causal weight to a visible minority while the activities of the unmarked majority escape analytical scrutiny.

The Rothschild conspiracy theory, for instance, survives not because the Rothschild banking house maintains the position it held in the nineteenth century (it does not), but because a named Jewish banking family provides a comprehensible target for economic anxieties that resist systematic analysis.

The mechanism is the same one that produced the archae: a documentation asymmetry creates the appearance of Jewish dominance, and that appearance acquires its own political life independent of the underlying reality. George Soros's Open Society Foundations operate through disclosed tax filings and transparent grant-making; comparable political donors on all sides of the political spectrum utilize donor-advised funds, 501(c)(4) organizations, and limited liability companies that shield beneficial ownership from public scrutiny. The visible actor absorbs blame proportionate not to actual influence but to visibility. What the archae did through institutional design, modern legal structures accomplish through differential disclosure requirements. The gap is structural, and it is exploited in structurally similar ways.

Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism theorizes this pattern across centuries. “The Jew” functions in Western thought as a conceptual instrument rather than an observation of actual Jewish behavior. The medieval moneylending myth required infrastructure (archae), theological categories (usury versus interesse), and political commitment (expulsion decrees). But it never required Jews to dominate credit markets. The fabrication served Christian theological and political needs regardless of economic reality.

The archae system built visibility bias into institutional infrastructure. Theological doctrine built it into conceptual categories. Expulsion rhetoric built it into political justification. Understanding this transforms how we read both medieval sources and modern antisemitic discourse. The question was never “Did Jews control finance?” The question is: “Who benefits when that myth is maintained?”

Christians dominated medieval credit. That is not interpretation but arithmetic. When historians count all forms of credit rather than only the legally documented forms that infrastructure made visible, Christians constituted 70% of creditors. When we examine who financed royal operations, Italian merchant-bankers dwarfed Jewish lenders. When we trace credit after expulsion, it continued because the infrastructure was never Jewish-dependent.

Yet the myth of Jewish moneylending dominance served too many functions to yield to evidence. It justified expulsion politically. It resolved theological contradictions about usury. Not only that, but it assigned blame for debt burdens without challenging the credit infrastructure that powerful Christian interests controlled. The gap between reality and blame was not an error requiring correction. It was the mechanism, operating as designed.

The next post in the series will examine how race, thought, and empire combined in high medieval Europe (Heng, Nirenberg, Arendt), showing how the economic scapegoating mechanism nested within broader structures of racialization and conceptual antisemitism that laid groundwork for what Nirenberg calls “Anti-Judaism” as a permanent feature of Western thought.

First post here: 1492: One Empire, Two Minorities, Two Logics of Power

Second Post Here: How Medieval Europe Learned to Govern by Governing Jews

Further Reading

Mell, Julie L. The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender. 2 vols. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017–2018.

• Volume I provides the conceptual framework for understanding how theological categories (usury vs. interesse) created differential treatment of Jewish and Christian lending.

• Volume II analyzes the English evidence in detail, including the Lincoln and twelve-town scrutinies, and documents how the archae system and ecclesiastical legislation together produced the visibility bias that shaped the historical record.

Mundill, Robin R. England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

• Definitive study of the Jewish expulsion from England, showing how credit markets continued seamlessly after 1290 because Christian lenders, especially Italian merchant-bankers, had always dominated royal finance.

Ray, Jonathan. “Jews and Finance in Medieval Iberia.” In The Jew in Medieval Iberia: 1100–1500, ed. Jonathan Ray. Academic Studies Press, 2013.

• The chapter on credit markets provides the Santa Coloma de Queralt quantitative evidence showing Christians constituted 70.5% of all creditors when credit-sales and commodity-denominated loans are included alongside direct monetary loans, drawing on notarial registers from 1276 to 1313.

Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. W.W. Norton, 2013.

• Theorizes “the Jew” as conceptual instrument in Western thought rather than observation of actual Jewish behavior, explaining why the moneylending myth persists despite contrary evidence.

Dorin, Rowan. No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe. Princeton University Press, 2023.

• Traces the wave of expulsions from the 1280s through the fourteenth century, documenting how Jewish and Christian usurers were expelled together in several decrees (including Charles II’s 1289 order), and how the expulsion of Christian lenders was consistently reversible while that of Jews was not.

This is worth pausing on. Not because student political statements are historically significant, but because the speed and certainty of the verdict, and the breadth of the coalition delivering it, tells you something that the content of the statement doesn’t. Organizations with no particular expertise in Middle Eastern history, no institutional stake in the conflict, and no evidentiary basis for the claim nonetheless found it urgent and appropriate to issue a definitive moral verdict about Israel within hours of a mass casualty event. The verdict was not tentative. It did not call for investigation. It assigned total responsibility with complete confidence.

What explains that confidence? Not the historical record, which as we will see is considerably more complex than any confident verdict can accommodate. Not institutional expertise, which most of the signing organizations didn’t have. Not evidentiary review, which hadn’t happened.

What explains it is that Israel was available as a symbol. Not a state with a specific history, specific legal claims, specific internal political divisions, and a specific relationship to a population it has displaced and occupied. A symbol. The condensed embodiment of everything these organizations were already primed to indict: colonialism, settler violence, Western imperial power, racial hierarchy. The verdict wasn’t reached by examining Israel. It was reached by reading Israel as a symbol and applying the verdict the symbol demands.

If this were an isolated phenomenon, a specific political moment producing a specific political overreaction, it would be unremarkable. Political movements overreach. Coalitions issue badly timed statements. What makes this worth analyzing is that the pattern it reflects is not new. It is not even modern. It is, as the historian David Nirenberg has documented across two thousand years of primary sources, one of the most durable structural features of Western intellectual history.

The Mechanism

In 2013, Nirenberg published Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, a work that took twenty years to research and immediately changed how seriously engaged scholars think about the persistence of antisemitism in Western thought. The book is not a survey of what people have believed about Jews and why. It is something more structurally interesting: a close reading of primary texts, Paul’s letters, Augustine’s theology, Aquinas’s philosophy, Spinoza’s political theory, Marx’s economics, Wagner’s cultural criticism, asking a different question. Not what did these thinkers believe about Jews, but what work was “the Jew” doing in their arguments? What conceptual problem was the Jewish figure being deployed to solve?

The answer Nirenberg finds, across texts separated by centuries and produced in radically different intellectual contexts, is remarkably consistent. When Western thinkers grapple with what they find most threatening about their own societies, the corrupting power of money, the persistence of superstition, the fragmentation of national identity, the alienation of modern labor, they reach for Jewish figures as the conceptual vehicle. Not because Jews are causing the problem being analyzed. Not because Jewish history or Jewish thought is directly relevant to the question being asked. But because “the Jew” is available in Western conceptual architecture as the opposite of whatever the thinker is trying to defend.

Medieval Christians worried about materialism and the corrupting power of money? The anxiety gets projected onto Jewish moneylenders, even though, as the historian Julie Mell’s exhaustive archival work demonstrates, Christians dominated medieval credit markets and lent at higher rates than Jews. Enlightenment philosophers building a case for universal reason feared the persistence of superstition and tribal particularity? The fear gets located in Jewish religious practice, even as those same philosophers drew on Jewish textual traditions for their own frameworks. Modern nationalists anxious about cosmopolitanism and rootless internationalism? Jewish internationalism becomes the threat, even as Jews were being systematically excluded from the national projects those same nationalists were building.

The content of the accusation changes across these contexts. The structural function stays identical. In each case, "the Jew" is not being observed, Jews are being used. The figure serves as a vehicle for expressing anxieties the thinker cannot or will not articulate directly, and for defining the thinker's own values by contrast with their Jewish opposite. Nirenberg's formulation is precise: anti-Judaism is not primarily an attitude about actual Jews. It is a mode of thought. A way of organizing moral categories. An infrastructure of the Western imagination.

This matters for a reason Nirenberg is careful to establish: the mechanism does not require anyone to be consciously antisemitic. It does not require hatred, or even hostility. It requires only that "the Jew" remain available as a conceptual placeholder, a figure onto which anxieties can be projected, against which values can be defined, through which moral verdicts can be delivered. Individual good faith does not disable the mechanism. It operates at the structural level, beneath the level of individual intention. Thinkers from Paul to Marx to Wagner were not all antisemites in the crude sense. But they all reached for Jewish figures when they needed a conceptual opposite, and that reaching, repeated across two thousand years of Western thought, is what built the infrastructure Nirenberg is documenting.

The Framework and Its Function

With Nirenberg’s mechanism in view, return to the student coalition statement and ask a different question. Not: were these organizations acting in bad faith? But: what conceptual work was Israel doing for them?

The settler colonial framework, as it has been applied to Israel and Zionism in contemporary academic and activist discourse, positions Israel as the condensed symbol of Western colonial guilt. Everything the framework wants to indict about modernity, power, racial hierarchy, and imperial violence gets located in the Jewish state. This is not incidental to the framework’s application to Israel, it is the application’s primary function. Israel is not being analyzed as a state with a specific history. It is being made to do conceptual work. And the intensity of the verdict the framework demands, not criticism of specific policies, not acknowledgment of specific harms, but a structural verdict of eliminationist colonial guilt requiring demographic reversal, is not proportionate to what the historical record shows. It is proportionate to what the symbol requires.

The evidence for this is not primarily in the framework’s conclusions but in its mechanics. Phillip Salzman and Donna Robinson Divine, in Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict (2008), identify what they call the self-immunizing structure of the framework as applied to this case. It establishes preordained conclusions that preclude discovery, replaces evidentiary analysis with moral verdicts, and refutes disagreement not on evidential grounds but by labeling alternatives as orientalist or apologetic. A historical argument that cannot be refuted by evidence is not making a historical claim. It is issuing a verdict.

The self-immunizing structure is visible in a specific and revealing way when you examine the framework’s handling of Palestinian identity. The settler colonial model requires, as Patrick Wolfe specifies in his own formulation, social groups “constituted prior to and independently of the normative basis on which settler society is established.” That prior and independent constitution is a structural requirement of the framework, not an optional qualifier. The framework needs a coherent pre-colonial native subject whose identity was suppressed by the colonial encounter.

But the historical scholarship on Palestinian identity, including the scholarship most committed to Palestinian agency and historical depth, tells a different story. Louis Fishman’s Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era (2019), drawing on Ottoman archives and the Palestinian press, documents Palestinian political consciousness emerging substantially through the encounter with Zionist immigration and British administrative structures in the 1908-1914 period. Rashid Khalidi, the most rigorous scholarly defender of deep Palestinian historical identity, nonetheless frames it explicitly as the “construction of modern national consciousness” developing through “specific institutional and political encounters.” Khalidi’s language concedes the modernity and constructed character of the phenomenon even while arguing for its depth and legitimacy.

This creates an internal consistency problem the framework cannot resolve. It cannot simultaneously argue that the colonial encounter produced Palestinian national consciousness and claim that pre-colonial Palestinian national identity is what the settler colonial framework is describing as being suppressed. Those are mutually exclusive positions. The framework needs one to be true. The historical record, including the record produced by scholars most sympathetic to Palestinian claims, supports the other.

This is what Salzman and Divine mean by preordained conclusions precluding discovery. The framework doesn’t engage this evidence. It can’t, engaging it would require acknowledging that its starting condition is partly a product of the process it’s describing. Instead, challenges to the framework get filtered out as false consciousness or bad faith. The framework immunizes itself against the evidence by delegitimizing the tools needed to evaluate it.

There is a specific irony here worth naming directly. The settler colonial framework claims to decenter Western epistemology and recover suppressed indigenous knowledge. It was produced entirely within Western academia, by Western-credentialed scholars, using theoretical vocabularies derived from Foucault, Gramsci, and postcolonial theory. It is now applied to a region with its own rich, documented, sophisticated intellectual traditions, the Nahda, Ottoman legal culture, medieval Islamic jurisprudence, centuries of Jewish responsa literature, and the application requires treating the people of that region as pre-political natives rather than as the historically active, intellectually engaged agents the actual record shows them to be. There is a name for imposing theoretical categories on a region without engaging its own intellectual traditions on their own terms. The framework would usually call it epistemic violence. The fact that it does not recognize itself in that description is precisely what makes it ideological rather than analytical.

What the Historical Record Shows

None of this is an argument that displacement did not occur, that Palestinian suffering was not real, or that the structural outcomes of Zionist settlement were benign. They were not. The historical record is unambiguous on these points and this series will not pretend otherwise.

What this series argues is something more specific: that the historical record is more complex than the colonial verdict can accommodate, and that the complexity matters practically rather than rhetorically. Derek Penslar, in Zionism: An Emotional State (2023), provides the methodological standard the remaining essays will try to meet: “A critique of Zionist attitudes and Israeli practices can be factually correct while mistakenly conflating attitudes such as condescension or disregard, as well as actions such as expropriation, exploitation, and expulsion with the particular, time-specific practice of modern Western colonialism.” The framework is a tool of analysis, not a discovered property of events. When it was built to describe a different structure, applying it to this case requires argument rather than assumption.

The remaining essays work through what the primary scholarship actually shows when that argument is made honestly rather than assumed. What they find, across the Ottoman legal context, the economic structure of the Yishuv, the formation of Palestinian and Zionist identities, and the specific mechanism of fellahin dispossession, is a collision of multiple partially displaced populations, each with legitimate grievances, layered historical claims, and deep internal divisions, operating inside a European imperial legal infrastructure that had been disrupting the region before either party arrived in significant numbers, inside a British Mandate framework designed to serve neither of them.

That record is more complex than either available verdict. It is also more useful, because the people most harmed by the historical process deserve an accurate account of what harmed them, not a framework that conscripts their suffering into a different political argument and prescribes solutions unresponsive to the actual harm.

The historical record has mostly received a verdict. This series is an attempt at the analysis.

The Colonial Question is a companion series to European Antisemitism as Structural Infrastructure.

The main series traces how the mechanism Nirenberg identifies was historically constructed and transmitted, embedded in European state bureaucracy, economic scapegoating, racial categories, and conceptual frameworks over centuries before being exported to the Middle East through documented channels. This series shows the same mechanism operating in present-day analysis of the conflict most likely to activate it. The two series are the same argument at different scales. Readers of the main series will find in these essays the contemporary demonstration of what they have been reading historically. Readers who arrived here first will find in the main series the explanation for why the mechanism Nirenberg identifies is not a modern phenomenon but a two-thousand-year inheritance, and why that inheritance makes it so difficult to see clearly.

The Four-Month Deadline

The March 1492 expulsion decree gave Spanish Jews until July 31 to leave the kingdom. Four months to liquidate assets, settle debts, arrange transportation, and depart forever.

This was not merely cruelty. It was administrative capacity.

Ferdinand and Isabella knew where Jews lived. They knew what Jews owned. They knew which debts were owed and which properties could be seized. That knowledge didn’t appear spontaneously. It was built over centuries through administrative systems invented specifically to govern Jewish populations, though not the comprehensive, totalizing surveillance medieval England had pioneered.

To understand how expulsion became administratively routine in some contexts but not others requires examining these bureaucratic technologies. England provides the clearest evidence of systematic infrastructure. Spain reveals a different pattern, less comprehensive monitoring, but sufficient state capacity when combined with political will.

England’s Bureaucratic Laboratory

In 1194, after anti-Jewish riots destroyed records of debts owed to Jews, the English Crown installed a network of chirograph chests (archae) in every major center of Jewish settlement across England: Bedford, Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Colchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Lincoln, London, Norwich, Oxford, York, and at least a dozen more towns. Each chest functioned as a registry of Jewish assets and all transactions involving Jewish credit.

The system worked through enforced documentation. Every loan had to be recorded in triplicate. One copy went to the Christian debtor. One to the Jewish creditor. One remained locked in the chest, which could only be opened in the presence of official chirographers and Christian witnesses. All transactions had to be entered into the registry. Any transaction not recorded in the archae was legally invalid and unenforceable in royal courts.

This created what historian Geraldine Heng calls an “economic panopticon”, bureaucratic surveillance indispensable to governmental knowledge of Jewish resources for calculating taxes, fines, and estate duties. The archae “constituted an important means by which the state successfully exerted force over, and rechanneled, the free circulation of economic flows.”

The surveillance was total and continuous. Royal officials periodically ordered scrutiny of an archa, literally “scrutinium”, sending its contents or transcripts to Westminster for examination. This typically preceded new extractions. Government orders to close the archae, preventing withdrawal of chirographs before levying new taxes on the Jewish community, became ritualized actions preceding the harvest of state profit.

The archae were not merely about monitoring loans. They transformed Jewish economic activity from sprawling, diffuse flows into something with “scrutable form” and “documentary durability.” By fixing Jewish activity at nodal points where it could be registered and monitored, the state created quotidian instruments of micropower.

Only at archa towns could business legally be transacted with Jews. Financiers who wished to remain within the law had to confine economic activity to centers where chirograph chests were situated. The network imposed a grid where free economic activity could be arrested and scrutinized at key focal points.

The Jewish Exchequer

After confiscating Aaron of Lincoln’s estate in 1186 revealed the profitability of systematic monitoring, the Crown created the Exchequer of the Jews in the 1190s, a dedicated government bureau with responsibility for “the oversight and control of England’s Jewish community.”

The Exchequer’s functions were comprehensive. It acted as court for litigation involving Jewish parties. It prosecuted debts when they passed into royal hands. It took charge of property escheating to the Crown. It conducted inquisitions and enforced estate duties. It supervised the chirograph chests. It controlled the system of permissions and licenses deciding where Jews could live. It punished breaches of all laws and statutes relating to Jews.

The agency’s powers intersected at collection, enforcement, administration, and adjudication. Initially headed by one Jewish and three Christian “Justices of the Jews,” this apparatus exercised oversight over Jewish lives at a level of detail unmatched for any other population in medieval England.

This was bureaucratic technology invented specifically for governing Jews.

Controlling Movement

As the state gained control over Jewish economic behavior, control over physical movement intensified.

In 1190, Richard I’s royal charter stipulated that Jews “with all their possessions, were allowed to go wherever they wished.” In 1201, King John’s charter confirmed this right.

By 1239, legislation ordered Jews “to remain for a year in their existing place of residence, from which they were not to remove without the king’s licence.”

In 1253, Henry III’s ordinance mandated that Jews were not to be received into any town without special royal license, except where they had already been accustomed to dwell.

By the mid-1260s, the Exchequer of the Jews administered the system controlling Jewish residence. No Jew could change location without official permission. Unlicensed residence could lead to seizure of body and movable possessions and forfeiture of property.

The 1275 Statute of Jewry mandated that “all Jews shall dwell in the King’s own cities and boroughs, where the Chests of Chirographs of Jewry are wont to be.” Orders from 1277 onward authorized arrest of Jews not residing in archa towns.

England’s administrative evolution demonstrates what Heng calls “a logic of escalation in monitoring and control.” Mechanisms organized to make Jews economically visible became the basis to compel Jews to bend fundamental aspects of existence to state authority. Residential herding followed economic surveillance.

Visual Surveillance: The Badge

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 demanded that Jews wear distinctive clothing. On March 30, 1218, England specified a badge: white rectangular patches of cloth worn on the front of outer garments.

In 1222, this was written into Canon 40 of the Council of Oxford. In 1253, into statutory law by Henry III. The 1275 Statute of Jewry specified the most conspicuous badge yet: six inches by three inches, yellow felt, worn by every Jew including children aged seven and above.

The badge functioned to separate populations through visual inspection. It made Jews identifiable at a glance. Combined with residential segregation, it accomplished spatially and visually what economic surveillance accomplished documentarily.

Jews resisted. From at least 1221, receipt rolls record fines paid to avoid wearing the badge. The highest recorded payment was £4 by Moses son of Abraham of Norwich, roughly equivalent to several months’ wages for a skilled craftsman. For thirty years, fines testified to persistent refusal.

This resistance reveals that administrative systems required enforcement. The infrastructure was not self-executing. It had to be maintained, refined, and repeatedly imposed. Yet by the 1270s, the badge, the archae, and residential controls functioned as integrated surveillance mechanisms.

Racialization Through Administration

These administrative practices constituted what Heng identifies as racial governance. The archae, the Exchequer, the badges, the residential controls, these were “ethnoracial practices of herding” that marked Jews as a corporate entity requiring special state management.

Economic monitoring extended incrementally through quotidian micropowers to domains beyond economics. Residential confinement began within fiscal logic but disclosed “an arc of power severed from mere fiscal necessity.” The 1275 Statute’s prohibition against Christians living among Jews, ”no Christian shall go to bed nor rise up among them”, revealed desire to organize urban space preventing intimate contact between groups.

This was segregation operating through administrative mechanism.

Medieval church and medieval state both practiced nascent theories of race and theorized the racial practices they instituted. When churchmen served as bureaucrats, and at higher government echelons, “abbots, bishops, and even archbishops were conspicuous among the barons and higher functionaries of the Great Exchequer”, coordination between ecclesiastical and state authorities in racial governance became systematic.

Administrative infrastructure and racialization were not separate. They were the same process viewed from different angles.

Resistance, Evasion, and Enforcement Gaps

England’s system was sophisticated but never totalizing. Jews evaded archae registration where possible. Wealthier Jews paid fines for badge exemptions rather than comply. Unlicensed residence persisted despite penalties. The very persistence of repeat legislation, 1239, 1253, 1275, 1277, reveals ongoing resistance.

The state responded by refining enforcement. Fines for evasion became revenue streams. Special licenses became privileges granted and revoked strategically. The Jewish Exchequer developed increasingly detailed procedures for tracking compliance.

Yet gaps remained. Not every transaction was registered. Not every Jew wore the badge. Not every residential restriction was enforced uniformly. The infrastructure created capacity for surveillance and control, but implementation depended on local officials, political priorities, and the resources devoted to enforcement at any given moment.

What made England’s system powerful was not perfect compliance. It was the creation of institutional mechanisms that made comprehensive surveillance possible when political will demanded it. By 1290, when Edward I expelled England’s Jews, the infrastructure existed to identify, track, and dispossess them efficiently. The expulsion took months to execute because the bureaucratic groundwork had been laid over a century.

After 1290, the Jewish Exchequer was dissolved and the archae dismantled. The infrastructure had been too specialized to Jewish populations to transfer easily to other uses. This reveals limits to bureaucratic generalization: while surveillance techniques could inspire similar systems for other groups, purpose-built Jewish institutions didn’t automatically become general state capacity.

Spain: A Different Pattern

Spain did not replicate England’s model, though it had its own forms of dress regulation.

Badge Enforcement: Systematically Ignored

Over more than 270 years, Spanish authorities repeatedly attempted and repeatedly failed to enforce badge requirements.

In 1217, Honorius III ordered enforcement in Castile. Two years later he suspended it on the remonstrance of Fernando III, who argued that Jews would abandon his kingdom rather than wear badges and he needed their revenues to fight the Reconquista.

Then nothing until 1233, when Gregory IX ordered enforcement. Fernando “quietly disregarded the injunction.” Another gap until 1250, when Innocent IV repeated the demand. Again ignored. Alfonso X included badge requirements in the Siete Partidas, but as the code was not confirmed by the Cortes for nearly a century, the regulation remained inoperative.

Not until 1313 did the Council of Zamora and the Cortes of Plasencia order the badge worn. The Infante Juan replied he would “do what was for the advantage of the land”, meaning he declined to enforce it. In Aragon, councils of Tarragona in 1238 and 1282 “vainly ordered the canon to be obeyed.”

Decades later, in 1371, Henry II finally ordered badges (a red circle on the left shoulder), but “the injunction had to be frequently repeated and was slenderly obeyed.” Even in the late fifteenth century, more than 120 years after Henry II’s decree, Tomás de Torquemada petitioned Isabella to enforce the badge requirement, evidence that it “was not diligently enforced” even on the eve of expulsion. Wealthy Jews like the Abraham Senior family secured exemptions. Tax collectors were permitted to travel without badges to protect them from highway robbers.

Sumptuary Laws: Class Control, Not Visual Identification

Spanish monarchs’ refusal to enforce badges didn’t mean they ignored Jewish appearance entirely. But the regulations they DID enforce revealed different priorities.

At the 1258 Cortes of Valladolid, Alfonso X prohibited Jews from wearing expensive fabrics and furs, certain colors like crimson, and luxury items like gold or silver-trimmed saddles. The 1268 Cortes of Jerez specified: no white fur, low-cut shoes, gilt saddles or bridles, dark leggings, or reddish cloth except dark brown. Jewish women could not wear scarlet, orange, martin fur, ermine, golden cords, golden veils, golden shoes, or sleeve linings with gold or silk.

A modern reader might see these restrictions as comprehensive. But Alfonso imposed similar legislation on Christians. He entrusted enforcement to a Jewish administrator, Çag de la Maleha, who was empowered to grant exemptions as he saw fit. And wealthy Jews continued wearing clothing “similar to the robes of royalty” despite the laws. The purpose was “to limit the growing power of the great magnates of Castile and to establish closer ties with the towns”, not to segregate Jews specifically. These were CLASS-based sumptuary laws controlling luxury consumption across all groups.

In documented cases, like Morvedre in 1456 and likely in other communities, Jewish aljamas passed their OWN sumptuary laws specifically “to prevent ostentatious display that might lead to an increase in taxes.” This reveals that the Crown’s restrictions weren’t stopping wealthy Jews from dressing lavishly, and that Jewish communal leaders worried this visibility would trigger fiscal targeting.

Spanish dress regulations were “merely the opening salvos in what would prove to be a long and drawn-out battle to enforce social difference throughout Iberia, a struggle that would last well into the early modern period.” They were aspirational more than operational. Monarchs valued Jewish fiscal contributions and tolerated noncompliance when convenient.

The result was patchwork enforcement driven by shifting priorities rather than systematic surveillance.

Administrative Capacity Without Totalizing Surveillance

Spain’s infrastructure for governing Jews functioned differently than England’s.

Jewish aljamas served as corporate fiscal units. They collected taxes internally, maintained communal courts, and regulated Jewish life under royal protection. The Crown relied on aljama leadership to deliver revenue and manage the community. This created bureaucratic convenience, the state could tax and regulate Jews collectively without building dedicated surveillance apparatus.

The aljama system provided sufficient capacity for fiscal extraction and corporate management. Royal officials knew which aljamas existed, their approximate population and wealth, and how much revenue they could yield. Aljama tax records tracked collective obligations. When Ferdinand and Isabella needed to identify Jewish assets in 1492, aljama records and debt registries provided the data.

What Spain lacked was England’s comprehensive individual-level surveillance. No network of chirograph chests tracking every transaction. No dedicated Jewish Exchequer monitoring residence changes. No systematic enforcement of visual identification through badges.

The Inquisition, established in 1478, created new institutional mechanisms, but focused on conversos, not professing Jews. Its procedures for identifying suspects, taking testimony, and confiscating property developed administrative expertise that authorities could draw upon when enforcing the 1492 expulsion. Inquisition tribunals had experience with property seizures and conducting investigations under tight timelines. Whether this expertise was systematically deployed during the expulsion or remained largely separate remains unclear from surviving records, but the institutional capacity existed alongside aljama structures.

Why Different Systems Produced Similar Outcomes

England built comprehensive, individualized surveillance over a century and used it to execute expulsion in 1290. Spain built less systematic infrastructure but combined aljama records, Inquisition expertise, and royal authority to execute expulsion in 1492 within four months.

Both expelled Jews efficiently. But they did so through different bureaucratic logics.

England’s system was proactive surveillance, continuous monitoring enabling rapid state action when political will demanded it. Spain’s system was reactive extraction, sufficient state knowledge to act decisively when royal policy shifted, without requiring continuous comprehensive surveillance.

This difference exposes a fundamental insight about state power: you do not need totalizing surveillance infrastructure to execute expulsion. You need sufficient bureaucratic knowledge combined with political will. England had built the former over 150 years. Spain had developed enough of the latter through aljamas and Inquisition while tolerating widespread noncompliance with segregation requirements when Jews remained economically useful.

Export and Generalization

Administrative techniques refined on Jewish populations appeared in other contexts, though whether through conscious emulation or parallel development remains debated.

In France, Philip Augustus established registries of Jewish debts following the 1182 expulsion and readmission. Ordinances of 1206, 1219, and 1230 increasingly restricted Jewish lending and required transaction registration. When Louis IX criminalized Jewish lending, he relied on existing registries to identify and confiscate assets. The 1306 expulsion by Philip IV was executable because this infrastructure existed, following administrative patterns similar to England’s, though the mechanisms of transfer between kingdoms remain unclear.

Italian merchant-bankers faced registration requirements in France and England. Lombard moneylenders were subjected to residential controls and special taxation. The expulsions of foreign moneylenders in the late thirteenth century followed administrative patterns developed for Jewish populations, suggesting that once states learned to monitor one minority population, those techniques could be adapted to others.

Rowan Dorin’s insight: expulsion became administratively routine because infrastructure to execute it already existed. States learned techniques of surveillance, registration, and fiscal extraction by governing Jews. Once learned, these techniques spread, whether through institutional borrowing, administrative personnel moving between courts, or independent innovation inspired by shared challenges.

Medieval Europe learned to govern by governing Jews.

Why This Matters for 1492

Ferdinand and Isabella’s four-month deadline was possible not because Spain replicated England’s comprehensive surveillance, but because Spain had developed sufficient state capacity through different mechanisms.

Aljama records identified Jewish communities and their collective resources. Debt registries tracked lending relationships. Inquisition tribunals had developed procedures for investigation and property seizure. Royal officials knew where major Jewish populations concentrated. The decree could specify prohibited export of gold and forced asset sales precisely because bureaucratic knowledge existed to monitor compliance, even if that monitoring was less systematic than England’s archae.

The decree itself shows this. It forbids taking gold or silver. It requires property sales within the deadline. It voids outstanding debts. These are not abstract prohibitions. They are enforceable because the state knows what Jews own, whom they lent to, and how to verify compliance through existing records and officials.

This was not England’s proactive panopticon. It was reactive state capacity, sufficient infrastructure activated by political decision.

What both systems demonstrate is that medieval states built capacity to govern by building capacity to govern Jews first. Whether through comprehensive surveillance or corporate fiscal management, states invented bureaucratic technologies around Jewish populations and then generalized those technologies.

By 1492, expulsion was imaginable and executable because the administrative groundwork existed. The infrastructure had been built over centuries, refined through practice, and embedded in state operations.

Expulsion was bureaucracy functioning as designed.

Next in Series: Post 3 - The Economic Scapegoat: How Christians Dominated Moneylending While Jews Absorbed the Blame

I want to take a few hundred words to tell you what you’ve subscribed to, because the colonialism analysis that brought you here is connected to a larger project, and understanding that connection will make both more useful.

What this Substack is

I write about Jewish history, with a focus on misunderstandings and antisemitism for a general audience, using primary scholarship, structural analysis, and a commitment to following the evidence rather than confirming available verdicts.

The main series running here is European Antisemitism as Structural Infrastructure, a 12-part argument that antisemitism was not just prejudice but civilizational infrastructure, embedded in European state bureaucracy, economic systems, legal categories, and conceptual frameworks over centuries, culminating in the Holocaust, and transmitted to the Middle East through documented channels. The first post is already up. With the second in the series coming Sunday.

Why the colonialism analysis belongs here

The Reddit thread stress-tested an argument I’ve been developing for a while: that the settler colonial framework’s application to Zionism is not primarily a historical claim, it’s a conceptual operation. And that operation has a specific name and a specific history.

David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013) documents a pattern across two thousand years of Western thought. When Western thinkers grapple with what they find most threatening about their own societies, capitalism, power, modernity, moral corruption, they reach for Jewish figures as the conceptual vehicle. Not because Jews are present or relevant. Because “the Jew” is available in Western conceptual architecture as the opposite of whatever the thinker is trying to defend. The mechanism operates at a structural level. It doesn’t require anyone to be consciously antisemitic.

The settler colonial framework, when applied to Israel, makes the Jewish state do conceptual work as the condensed symbol of everything the framework wants to critique about Western modernity and power. The disproportionate focus, and the intensity of the verdict it demands, is not explained by the historical facts on the ground. It is explained by the function Jews and the Jewish state continue to serve in Western moral imagination.

That is not a dismissal of Palestinian suffering or dispossession, both were real, documented, and serious. It is an argument that the historical record is more complex than the framework can accommodate, and that misclassifying what happened has real consequences for what remedies are conceivable.

What’s coming

The main series continues on its planned schedule.

Running alongside it, I’ll be publishing The Colonial Question, a five-part series that develops the Reddit analysis into a full argument: the Ottoman legal context, the economic structure of the Yishuv, Palestinian identity formation, and why the classification of fellahin dispossession matters for what solutions are actually conceivable. The first post introduces the Nirenberg framework as the analytical spine.

The two series are related. The main series explains how the mechanism was built. The colonialism series shows it operating in real time in contemporary intellectual discourse. If you came here for the colonialism analysis, the main series will show you where that analysis comes from. If you’ve been here for the main series, the colonialism posts are the applied demonstration of what you’ve been reading.

And again, thank you for being here.

Antisemitism is usually treated as prejudice. Attitudes, stereotypes, hatred passed between generations. Something that rises and falls, appears and retreats, cycles through history without fundamental change.

This series will argue something different.

Antisemitism in Europe was not merely an adopted attitude. It became structural, embedded in religious institutions, state administration, fiscal policy, legal categorization, economic systems, and conceptual frameworks over centuries. It was not a prejudice that produced persecution. It was infrastructure that made persecution theologically justified, administratively routine, and legally imaginable.

The distinction matters. Prejudice can be challenged through education and moral argument. Infrastructure requires understanding how it was built, how it accumulated, and how it was transmitted before it can be dismantled.

This series traces that infrastructure across three movements.

Part I examines how antisemitism became structurally embedded in European civilization through state bureaucracy, economic scapegoating, legal racial categories, and conceptual frameworks that made “the Jew” the permanent opposite against which Christian Europe defined itself.

Part II examines how that accumulated infrastructure culminated in the Holocaust, and how Europeans revealed they understood it was structural through their own differential responses to state violence.

Part III examines how European structural antisemitism was transmitted to the Middle East through documented channels over more than a century, destroying cultural integration that had existed for generations.

A note on what this series does not argue.

This is not a claim of inevitability. History could have gone differently at multiple points. This is not a moral ranking of suffering. Multiple communities have faced persecution, and comparison is used here as analytical method, not hierarchy. This is not an argument about civilizational essence, neither European nor Islamic. It is an argument about specific historical mechanisms, specific institutions, and specific transmission channels.

Structural analysis explains how systems of persecution were built. It does not excuse participation in them.

The argument begins in 1492, with a paradox.

The Puzzle

In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella confronted two non-Christian populations.

The Muslims of Granada had just been conquered after centuries of warfare. They received negotiated treaty terms. The November 1491 capitulation promised religious freedom, protection of property, and preservation of legal customs. As the historian Henry Charles Lea observed, “Nothing could be more liberal than the terms conceded to the Moors of Granada.”

Four months later, the Jews of Spain received an expulsion decree.

The March 1492 edict ordered them to “depart and never to return… on penalty of death.” They were given four months. They were forbidden to take gold. They were forced into rapid liquidation of property and compelled to abandon uncollected debts. Scholarly estimates of those who fled range from 40,000 to over 150,000, the sources disagree, but the scale was catastrophic by any accounting. Tens of thousands more converted under duress.

The mechanics of departure stripped communities to nothing. Property sold under a four-month deadline sold at whatever price buyers chose to offer. Outstanding loans had to be abandoned. Ship captains at Mediterranean ports understood the situation and charged accordingly. Those who reached Portugal found temporary refuge. In 1497 the Portuguese Crown ordered the forced baptism of the entire Jewish population rather than permit departure. The refugees from Spain became New Christians overnight, without even the pretense of choice.

The same monarchy. The same rulers. The same year.

Why two completely different logics of power?

Muslims: Conquered Enemies

The fall of Granada in January 1492 ended Muslim political sovereignty in Iberia. The capitulation treaty recognized Muslims as a defeated political community whose status required formal regulation. It guaranteed the continued practice of Islam, the protection of property, the preservation of local legal systems, and the right of Muslim officials to remain in office. It also granted a three-year window for emigration, during which the Crown would provide passage to North Africa.

Ferdinand and Isabella subsequently violated these guarantees. By 1502 they ordered the forced conversion of all Muslims remaining in Castile. By the 1520s Muslims across Aragon and Valencia faced the same ultimatum. The eventual outcome for Muslims was persecution, forced conversion, and expulsion, though the final Morisco expulsion did not come until 1609.

This matters for the argument. Muslims were ultimately subjected to coercion and displacement on a massive scale. The differential treatment of 1492 was not a permanent condition. What it reveals is the structural category each group occupied at that moment, and why the same monarchy used entirely different legal and administrative mechanisms to address them. Muslims were external enemies whose submission could be formalized through treaty. That category had a logic, and a timeline, that differed fundamentally from the logic applied to Jews.

Jews: Immediate Expulsion

The Jews of Spain were not recently conquered enemies. They were long-standing internal minorities embedded within Christian kingdoms for centuries.

The 1492 decree offered no negotiation and no staged transition. Jews were ordered to leave or accept baptism. Those who refused forfeited security and property. Departure meant economic ruin.

Conversion did not resolve their vulnerability. By the mid-fifteenth century, statutes of limpieza de sangre defined Jewish ancestry as a permanent mark. Having a Jewish grandparent could disqualify an individual from university study, entry into religious orders, or public office. Christianity had acquired a genealogical dimension. Baptism no longer erased suspicion.

The Toledo statute of 1449 was the first formal codification. What began as a fiscal revolt against a converso tax farmer produced legislation excluding descendants of Jewish converts from public office. Nicholas V condemned it as contrary to Christian doctrine on the universality of baptism. The statute spread anyway. By the late fifteenth century, purity of blood requirements appeared in universities, military orders, and religious institutions across both kingdoms. The legal architecture was in place before the expulsion decree was issued. The monarchy did not construct new mechanisms in 1492. It activated existing ones.

Conversion became a trap rather than an exit.

Conversion and the Corporate Crisis

The expulsion decree’s logic only becomes clear when you understand what mass conversion had already done to Spanish society.

Medieval Iberia was organized corporately. Legal identity operated through membership in recognized bodies, municipal councils, guilds, noble lineages, and religious communities. Jews belonged to legally recognized aljamas that exercised jurisdiction over marriage, inheritance, and communal discipline. These communities functioned as fiscal and administrative units under royal authority.

Conversion did not merely alter belief. It transferred jurisdiction.

A baptized Jew passed from the authority of Jewish communal courts into that of ecclesiastical courts. At small scale, this transfer was manageable. But the pogroms of 1391 triggered mass forced conversions. Haim Beinart estimates roughly one-third of Spanish Jewry was killed in 1391 and another third baptized. Tens of thousands transferred jurisdiction within a short period. Entire kin networks split across confessional lines. Families became jurisdictionally divided.

Jewish law did not automatically dissolve marriages contracted before baptism. Church courts now claimed authority over the same individuals. Inheritance disputes multiplied. Questions of lineage, legitimacy, and communal affiliation destabilized legal coherence. As historian Paola Tartakoff demonstrates, conversion disputes predated 1391, but after the mass baptisms they became systemic.

Corporate society depended on stable communal boundaries. Mass conversion fractured those boundaries.

Theological anti-Judaism had long existed. The jurisdictional crisis did not create hostility. But it intensified and institutionalized it. Ancestry emerged as a stabilizing substitute. If blood, rather than belief, defined identity, then corporate boundaries could be secured against the instability that mass conversion had created.

Limpieza de sangre did not replace theology. It hardened it into heredity.

The Expulsion Decree Made This Explicit

The 1492 edict did not primarily present Jews as political rebels or religious dissidents.

It argued that the continued presence of practicing Jews endangered conversos. Proximity, the decree claimed, encouraged baptized Christians to “return to Mosaic law.” Jewish existence was framed not as a theological problem requiring conversion but as a structural obstacle to the stability of Christian society.

Muslims had been external rulers subdued by force. Jews had become internal structural contradictions, their presence destabilizing converso Christianity, their conversion destabilizing corporate jurisdiction. Ferdinand and Isabella were not solving a religious problem in 1492. They were attempting to resolve a century of accumulated structural strain

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The Analytical Problem

Standard explanations do not account for the differential treatment.

Religious difference cannot explain the divergence. Both Muslims and Jews were non-Christian minorities. Both faced Inquisitorial suspicion at various points. If religious difference alone drove persecution, the treatment should have been parallel. It was not.

Political threat does not explain it either. Muslims had recently governed territory, maintained military organization, and represented a genuine security concern to the new unified monarchy. Jews had no military capacity, no territorial base, and no armed force. If threat drove expulsion, Jews should have been the safer population to accommodate. They were not.

Economic competition does not resolve the puzzle. Both communities participated in commerce. Christian merchants and Italian banking houses dominated the most lucrative credit operations. The economic argument predicts neither expulsion nor differential treatment.

Timing eliminates remaining explanations. The same rulers addressed both populations in the same year, in the same territory, with full awareness of each other’s situations. This was not two separate policy decisions made in ignorance. It was one monarchy operating with two entirely different logics simultaneously.

The puzzle of 1492 is not that Jews were expelled. The puzzle is that expulsion had already become administratively, legally, and conceptually imaginable, while negotiated capitulation remained the mechanism for Muslims.

It is worth noting here that both Christian and Muslim civilizations persecuted Jews historically. That comparison, and what it reveals about the structural differences between them, will be examined in detail in Part III.

The Structural Explanation

By the late fifteenth century, antisemitism in Europe was no longer episodic hostility. It had become embedded in administrative practice, fiscal extraction, legal categorization, and increasingly racialized notions of ancestry. “The Jew” functioned not merely as a religious dissenter but as a structural category within Christian society, one that had been built, refined, and institutionalized over centuries before 1492.

The expulsion decree did not invent this structure. It activated it.

Muslims could be negotiated with because they fit the political logic of conquest and incorporation, a logic European monarchies understood and had mechanisms to execute. Jews were expelled because their continued presence was perceived as destabilizing a Christian corporate order already strained by a century of mass conversion, jurisdictional crisis, and racialized suspicion.

That structural difference explains the two logics of 1492.

Why This Matters

This comparison is not about ranking suffering. Muslim communities faced increasing coercion, and the Morisco expulsions of 1609 displaced hundreds of thousands. The issue is not who suffered more.

The issue is structural position.

Muslims were external enemies incorporated into sovereignty through recognizable mechanisms of conquest. Jews were permanent internal minorities around whom administrative, legal, and conceptual systems had already been constructed over centuries.

Understanding how that infrastructure was built requires four scholars whose frameworks define this series.

Rowan Dorin documents how medieval states constructed administrative systems specifically to monitor, tax, and eventually expel Jewish populations, dedicated royal departments, mandatory asset registries, badge requirements, movement licensing. These made the four-month expulsion deadline of 1492 executable: the Crown already knew where Jews lived, what they owned, and how to compel their departure. Medieval Europe learned to govern by governing Jews.

Julie Mell demonstrates that Jews were structurally positioned as scapegoats for economic processes Christians were driving. Italian merchants dominated high finance and lent at higher rates, yet Jews absorbed the moral blame for usury. This positioning made Jews economically visible during social stress, which is precisely why the 1492 decree included asset confiscation alongside expulsion.

Geraldine Heng traces how medieval Europe invented racial categorization, and invented it for Jews first. The limpieza statutes that made 1492’s conversion-as-trap possible were proto-racial law, operating four centuries before modern racial science. When racial thinking later expanded to colonized peoples across the globe, Europeans applied a framework already developed on Jewish populations.

David Nirenberg argues that anti-Judaism was not primarily an attitude about actual Jews. It was a mode of reasoning embedded in Western thought itself, each era defining its central anxieties as Jewish and defining itself against them. The Jew functioned as civilizational opposite, a conceptual category whose persistence required no actual Jewish presence to sustain it. This explains why conversion offered no escape: the category was structural, not personal.

These four dimensions, administrative, economic, legal, conceptual, reinforced each other over centuries. By 1492 they had accumulated into something that did not require active hatred to activate. It required only a fiscal crisis, a political calculation, and a decree.

The next posts trace how each dimension was built.

Next in Series: Post 1.2 — How Medieval Europe Learned to Govern by Governing Jews