Joe Hildebrand: The most sinister thing about anti-Semitism is how incredibly specific it is

Anti-Semitism is a painstakingly unique kind of hatred, with no other race or religion having had such a long and lethal construction of lies deliberately applied to it, writes Joe Hildebrand.

The scariest thing about the ugly and escalating outbreak of anti-Semitism in this country is how little people understand it.

This is most commonly seen in often well-intentioned but misguided attempts to equate it with other forms of prejudice, such as racism and Islamophobia, as though they are all the same thing.

They are not.

Yes, they are all bad and, at their worst, downright evil. But the most sinister thing about anti-Semitism is how incredibly specific it is, how deeply and carefully crafted.

People might be scared and hateful of other races and religions out of ignorance or xenophobia, or even simple misanthropic malice.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visits the Adass Israel Synagogue after the recent firebombing in Melbourne. Picture: The Office of the PM

But no other race or religion has had such a long and lethal construction of lies deliberately applied to it for centuries verging on millennia.

Anti-Semitism is a painstakingly unique kind of hatred.

A car damaged by anti-Israel graffiti in Woollahra. Picture: Tim Hunter

A forensics police officer takes photographs of the wall where anti-Israel graffiti has been removed in Woollahra on Wednesday. The two suspects also torched a car. Picture: David Gray/AFP

This is in part because Jewishness is itself unique. Unlike the other two great Abrahamic religions – Islam and Christianity – Jewishness is an ethno-religious identity.

It can be either a race or a religion or both – and any of those three identities can prove equally fatal to those who hold it.

It also is because for two millennia, between the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD70 and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Jews had no safe haven. No national or state polity to protect their religion.

As Martha Reeves and the Vandellas once sang, they had nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

This meant that for almost 2000 years their very existence depended entirely on the forbearance of other religions and dominions.

At best they were tolerated. Mostly they were restricted or persecuted, expelled or extinguished.

For the first 18½ centuries of these years, the worst persecutors were Christians, although Muslims also gave it a fair shake.

Here are just two examples.

When Muhammad took control of the city of Medina in 622, he sought to convince the Jewish population that he was their prophet. When they refused to accept this, he changed the Muslim direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca – a seminal moment in Islamic history.

Despite the Medina Jews aiding Muhammad in his subsequent war with the Meccans, they were accused of treachery. The men were killed and the women and children taken into slavery.

Four centuries later, when the first Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, Jews were slaughtered both in their homes and in Christian places of refuge, just as the Crusaders massacred Muslims in their thousands. The streets of the Holy City ran deep with blood.

If anything, these supposedly righteous men of God put Muhammad’s death count to shame.

Jews also were expelled from England by Edward I in 1290 and expelled from Spain in 1492 – the same year Spain’s famous Italian emissary Christopher Columbus “discovered” America.

This was because Christian Spain had captured the neighbouring Islamic state of Al-Andalus, under which Jews had enjoyed a so-called “golden age” of 800 years of protection under Muslim rule.

If only both Muslims and Jews would reflect on that friendship now.

Yet, in all these horrific wars of religion, Jewish people had a faint hope of survival if they converted.

That was often an unthinkable price to pay in an era when faith was the difference between eternal life and eternal damnation, but at least it was an option.

The entrance to the infamous Auschwitz camp after liberation in 1945. For Hitler, being Jewish wasn’t a crime of religion, it was a crime of the blood.

Then the Nazis came along.

For Hitler, being Jewish wasn’t a crime of religion, it was a crime of the blood. There was nothing that the most patriotic German Jew could do – even those who had fought for the Kaiser in World War I – to receive an ounce of mercy if they had a trace of Jewish ancestry.

The result was the greatest genocide ever committed in the course of a human history already littered with genocides.

And the greatest number of those slaughtered came not from Germany itself but from the lands it conquered and supplanted. Those who were literally stateless and had no homeland.

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

Former prisoners of the ‘little camp’ in Buchenwald stare out from the wooden bunks in which they slept three to a ‘bed’.

The justification for this was not simple racism or xenophobia. It was a deliberate and absurdly elaborate fabrication that constructed Jews as being somehow secretly in control of the world while at the same time likening them to beastly vermin.

And so, yes, all hatred is ugly, but anti-Semitism is a deeply specific hatred whose ugliness has been honed and harnessed throughout the ages.

And what we are seeing in our suburbs today is not a political contest between Muslim and Jew or left and right. It is the culmination of centuries of malevolent lies and conspiracy theories directed towards just one particular people.

This is the arrow of history aimed squarely at our heart. We must raise our shield or die.

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