A Short History of Jewish Self-Hatred

By Alex Gordon

HAIFA, Israel — In the second half of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, a new kind of anti-Semitism simultaneously emerged from the right and left of the political spectrum and radical Islam. It is in opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel.

The author of the term “new antisemitism” is the American historian and publicist Daniel Pipes. The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation, but oppressors: imperialists, colonizers, white exploiters. Antisemitism does not disappear, but only changes forms. Auto-antisemitism, that is, Jew-hatred of Jews, is a much older phenomenon than the new antisemitism described, but it doesn’t disappear either, it just changes forms.

In the Middle Ages, Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (Ramban, or Nachmanides) had to engage in difficult and life-threatening debates with Jewish apostates whose hatred of Jews and Judaism was more fanatical than the hatred of Jewry by Christians. Jewish self-hatred as a phenomenon became prominent with the flowering of Jewish emancipation. Karl Marx’s article “To the Jewish Question” is one of the most vivid manifestations of the Jew’s identification with Judeophobes.

The author writes: “What is the world basis of Jewry? Self-interest. What is the world cult of the Jew? Bargaining. Who is its true god? Money… Money is the jealous god of Israel… The banknote is the true god of the Jew!” Marx believed that the main result of the emancipation of the Jews should be the emancipation of humanity from the Jews. Like some other famous baptized Jews, Marx erased the Jews from history. He needed to do away with the Jewish question and sever all ties with the Jewish people.

In 1840 a blood libel was brought against a group of local Jews in Damascus. As usual in such cases, the Damascus affair was accompanied by anti-Jewish demonstrations. At this critical moment for the Jews, Ferdinand Lassalle, one of the founders of German Social Democracy, lashed out at his people: “You despicable people, you deserve your fate. A worm trampled underfoot tries to twist itself away, but you only grovel even more. You don’t know how to die, to destroy, you don’t know what just revenge means, you can’t die with your enemy, strike him dead. You are born for slavery.” Marxists of Jewish origin did not like their origins.

In The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl criticized opponents of the plan to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, calling them “disguised antisemites of Jewish origin.” He was the first to speak not only about the creation of a Jewish state, but also about the phenomenon of Jewish antisemitism. Self-hatred began with the hatred and envy of the Christian population toward the Jews. The phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred was analyzed by Theodor Lessing, a professor at the Hannover Higher Technical School, a German philosopher and publicist of Jewish origin. In 1930, he published a book entitled Jewish Self-Hatred. Lessing argued that the “tragedy of Jewish exile in the diaspora had undermined national pride, dignity, and self-respect.” In his view, antisemitism and slavish submission to the ideal of “Germanness” created a psychology of self-hatred.

Lessing studied self-hatred on himself. As a student, he, a typical German Jew who had not received a Jewish upbringing, had been influenced by antisemitism, imbued with hatred for his people, and embraced Lutheranism. Feeling that the antisemitic attacks against him did not become weaker, he returned to Judaism, exhibiting sympathies for Zionism. Under the pressure of antisemitism, many Jews developed self-hatred, which Lessing considered an “acute psychosis.”

The term “Jewish self-hatred,” coined by Lessing, became especially popular after the publication in 1986 of a book of the same name by American historian Sander Gilman. Gilman writes, “Jews see the way the dominant nation perceives them, and through cleavage project their concerns onto other Jews for self-soothing.” This projection creates a dichotomy: “self-hating” Jews seek to make themselves the “good” Jews, the exceptions, different from the stereotypical “bad” Jews. The self-hating Jew is copying the attitudes of antisemites toward his people. The self-hating Jew is convinced of the inferiority of his nation and seeks to borrow other people’s language, other people’s art, other people’s traditions. According to Gilman, the “self-hating Jew” is formed from the fusion of the images of the “mad Jew” and the “self-critical Jew.”

The American psychologist Kurt Lewin, a German Jew who fled to the United States as a result of the Nazis’ rise to power, wrote in his article Self-Hatred in the Jewish Environment (1941): “The sense of inferiority inherent in the Jew is nothing but evidence that he looks at everything Jewish through the eyes of an unfriendly majority.” The consciousness of the Jews was split into two parts. One was the desire to get rid of unfreedom and inequality, the other was the result of alienation from their nation and the desire to win the sympathy of non-Jews by renouncing the Jews. Jewish self-hatred was the pathological result of the search for “normality.”

Jewish self-hatred was provoked by the hatred of the dominant population of the host countries in which the Jews lived, where they were considered a lower-ranking minority – the “other,” the “born strangers.” It arose as a response to the pushing of the dominant nation of Jews to the margins of society. Antisemitic Jews radiated restlessness and anxiety, pushing away from belonging to their own people and artificially elevating themselves above their countrymen. Jewish self-hatred was a neurotic reaction to the growing power of antisemitism and an expression of the fear of fighting it for spiritual national self-assertion.

A people who had no homeland for hundreds of years sometimes find it difficult to digest the possession of a homeland they received 76 years ago. The burden of not having a homeland has been replaced by the burden of acquiring it. The Frankfurt School’s teachings against national and religious ideas, against tradition and conservatism, have proved a seductive acquisition for Israeli left-wing extremists. Jews born in Israel began to feel alienated from the values of their fathers and grandfathers and felt themselves to be indigenous outsiders in their own country.

Gilman writes: “One of the most recent forms of Jewish self-hatred is a fierce resistance to the existence of the state of Israel.” That “fierce resistance” takes place both in the Jewish Diaspora and in Israel. Israel wants to preserve its existence and therefore defends patriotism and loyalty to historical traditions. The native-born post-Zionists criticize not only Israeli policies, but also the Zionist project and the legitimacy of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Post-Zionism is essentially pre-Zionism, not a move forward but a turning back decades, a turning away from the Jewish state to dispersion, a retreat into the historical impasse in which Jews were before the creation of Israel.

In the essay The Moral Failure of American Jewish Intellectuals in the book Jews Against Themselves (2015), American scholar Edward Alexander writes about the silence of “American Jewish intellectuals” and notes their “deafness” to the danger of the Holocaust and the significance of the revival of the Jewish state. The author explores the contribution  to antisemitism of medieval Jewish renegades, such as Pablo Christiani, who played a major role in the anti-Jewish disputation with Nachmanides in Barcelona in 1263.

He draws an analogy between them and contemporary Jewish apostates, such as American intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish state for the sake of “justice” and, in fact, to make these apostates look good in the eyes of gentiles. Alexander uses the term “Jewish suicidalism.” However, this term refers to the behavior of Jewish apostates who are willing to sacrifice the “wrong” Israeli Jews.

In the essay Why Jews Should Behave Better Than Others Alexander explores the “false moral symmetry and double standards” that are usually applied to Israel but “not to other nations, at least not to all Arab states.” He writes of “new forms of Jewish apostasy, with Jewish existence facing the most dire and immediate threat since the Nazi war against the Jews.” He extends his definition of “Jews against themselves” to Israel: “Israelis against themselves.” In his view, some Israeli Jews “join the agenda of the Jews going back to the Middle Ages, those Jews ‘who slandered, abandoned and harmed their own people.’”

The core of the new auto-antisemitism is that its spokesmen fear to identify with the accused Israelis, the “oppressors,” “imperialists,” “colonizers,” and “white exploiters.” They apparently see themselves as a new people, purged of national “prejudices.” The tragedy of October 7, 2023 reminded Israelis of the existence of the Jewish people, of its sad history of pogroms. The violent antisemitic reaction in much of the world to the massacre in southern Israel and the Jewish state’s response to it showed that the new antisemitism mentioned by Daniel Pipes had replaced the outdated religious and racial antisemitism. Frightened by the new storm of the new antisemitism, some Israelis responded to the outbreak of the new antisemitism with a new auto-antisemitism.

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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.