The falsehoods that underpin antisemitism

OPINION:

My father grew up in a small town in northeastern Poland. The town had a substantial Jewish population, but the Jews were regularly subjected to antisemitic attacks from their non-Jewish neighbors. Defamatory accusations and even violent attacks made life in the town unpleasant for Jewish residents.

Having been subjected from his youngest age to this antisemitic venom, my father began to wonder whether his attackers might be right. As he recalled, he began to think that all the terrible things said about Jews must be true because they were so widespread and frequent. After all, he thought, how could all these people say so many bad things about Jews unless they were true?

Then, as my father related to me, he suddenly remembered that one of the most oft-repeated accusations against Jews was that they used Christian blood to make matzah, the unleavened bread that Jews eat during Passover. In the small town, everyone could watch as the communal baker prepared matzah. As my father well knew, matzah is made exclusively from flour and water. The myth of Jewish use of Christian blood was patently false.

Once my father discovered that this most virulent accusation against Jews was so evidently false, he quickly concluded that all the other accusations leveled by antisemites had to be just as false. His childhood analysis of that most ancient hatred made it clear that antisemitism is a pack of lies.

Of course, he was not schooled in theology. Had he been, he would have known that the blood libel against Jews was an echo of a distortion of a Christian concept that focused on blood. The Catholic Holy Communion, with its emphasis on the transubstantiation of wine into the blood of the Jewish Jesus, provided a platform upon which the obsession with the role of blood could be transmogrified into an anti-Jewish libel. Ignorance and prejudice joined together in a vile alliance.

The blood libel did not end with the Enlightenment. It continued well into the 20th century. Yet again, my father recounted that his mother had explained to him that a Russian Jew named Mendel Beilis had been tried in Kyiv by czarist authorities on a blood libel charge during the year of my father’s birth in 1912. Thus, there is still official sanction for this false blood libel in modern times.

Now, and especially since Oct. 7, 2023, we are yet again witnessing surging antisemitism. It is not the same as the distorted blood libel of my father’s childhood. It has taken on a new focus, hatred of Israel, and is constituted of new allegations that could not have been expressed in my father’s Polish hometown. Still, there are powerful echoes of the anti-Jewish expressions of the past.

Today, Jews are being made to live in fear because of their emotional and religious attachment to Israel. The world reverberates to the sound of chants calling the Jewish state of Israel “genocidal.” Murders are committed in the name of a “free” Palestine. Jews are accused, as they were so often in the past, of being child killers, with the resonance of medieval libels quivering in the accusations.

Once again, the terrible assertions launched against Jews stand out as a flagrant distortion of the truth. Just as the blood libel of the past grew out of an inversion of a religious rite of Christians, so today is the new antisemitism born of a reversal of geopolitical reality by its exponents.

When the raging antisemites parading through our streets and campuses call for a “free” Palestine, what they really mean is they want a Middle East free of Jews. When they accuse Israel of genocide, they are actually evoking their own desire to eliminate the Jewish people by any means, as was so amply demonstrated by the massacres of Oct. 7. When the International Criminal Court charges Israel and its leaders with war crimes as that nation seeks to defend itself against those who have repeatedly attempted to destroy it, an official body sanctions the hatred disseminated by the antisemites.

I have been to Israel multiple times, and I can attest that it is anything but genocidal. There is a value placed on life and freedom in that nation that is rare in our current world. Israeli society is a multiracial, multicultural and inclusive place. Jew and non-Jew can live there in peace and security.

Just like my father, I can sometimes wonder whether vociferous antisemites have a point. Still, when I think of what they say about Israel, a nation I have come to know and whose life-asserting ethos is embedded in me, I know their allegations are false.

Perhaps it is my French-Jewish mother’s ancestors who would best know how to characterize today’s venomous and growing antisemitism. They would, alas, evoke that most French of adages: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.