In the twenty-first century, debates about the formation of an anti-Semitic category of Jews intensified following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and debates about colonialism, indigeneity, and ethnic identity. If one thinks of Jews as a diasporic category, the notions of “rooted” and “rootless” or bound and unmoored also come into play. We can recall how George Bernard Shaw, as early as 1907, criticized Broadbent, the ultimate Englishman, who condemned everything and everyone who did not know enough English:
You’re thinking of the modern hybrids that now dominate England. Hypocrites, hypocrites, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, park laners, cosmopolitan riffraff. Don’t call them English. They are not of the dear old island, but of the new empire they have founded; And by George! They deserve it; And I wish them happiness in it.
In fact, anti-Semitism proves that a society can simultaneously hold contradictory images, such as the fact that Jews are anarchists out to destroy capitalism and at the same time capitalists out to exploit the working class. Real self-identified Jews in early twentieth-century London – think of the Jewish labor reformer Samuel Gompers – had to deal with the social reality of both change and continuity in their world of early twentieth-century capitalism.
If one thinks of Jews as a diasporic category, the notions of “rooted” and “rootless” or bound and unmoored also come into play.
And this is not unique to the image of the Jews: think of the “Irish” in the British imagination (and again, the colonial idea – from India and Kipling to Australia and the myths of the first settlers there). But it is also a label for a religious identity in this world, that of Roman Catholicism in its post-Enlightenment (and not Celtic) version. In complex ways, modern Irish national identity traces back to the indifferent British response to the famine of the 1840s and the devastation it caused, even when Oliver Cromwell and the confiscation of land in the mid-seventeenth century were cited as the source of Irish political identity.
Remember that even after the Famine, the face of Irish nationalism in the 1880s and the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party was the Anglican Charles Stewart Parnell. The Famine defined Irish Catholic identity and thus Irish national politics, at least retrospectively, in opposition to Anglican Britain. Claire Mitchell states that “the construction of Catholic Irishness was strengthened by the disaster of the Famine from 1845 to 1849…Religious affiliation, as an effective agent of communal solidarity, increasingly became a surrogate for national identity.” It could be said that due to the famine in the late seventeenth century the “British” were often Scots Presbyterians who had been banished to Ireland and looked down upon as “better” people by their Anglicans (Church of Ireland) counterparts.
In fact, being Irish and being Catholic became interchangeable, so much so that when a Jew, Robert Briscoe, the only Jewish member of the Irish Parliament, was elected mayor of Dublin in 1956 and then marched in the annual New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade the following year, it made the front pages of all the New York City newspapers, as a pleasant but strange event. Yet “being Irish” is also non-sectarian, as in Chicago the Chicago River is dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day, because “everybody is Irish” that day. Yet while an Irish identity does not demand any religious subtext, it is also the case that other religious identities have played and continue to play a role in both Irish identity and Irish politics (in the Republic as well as in Northern Ireland). Such contradictions and changes are no different from “being Jewish” and its contemporary version “being Jewish-ish”.
Modern Jewish historians, such as Jacob Neusner Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of JudaismHas argued for a material understanding of the diaspora. For Neusner, this is the model of wilderness and land, the dialectics between tent and home, nomadism and agriculture, wilderness and Canaan, wandering and settlement, diaspora and state, echoing Max Weber’s relationship of nomads caught between market and market. oikosThe tribe that developed into the modern state. Welsh Congregationalist WD Davies argued Territorial dimension in JudaismThis duality is well balanced in the Bible, that for every quote praising the wilderness as a decisive factor in Judaism, a counterpart can be found in praise of the land of Zion.
And yet modern Israel was created to dismantle the notion of Diaspora Judaism (and secondarily, Diaspora Judaism): Shlilat Haglut. But it was created as a state composed of migrant communities organized along caste lines, some along geographical, some along religious lines. This was the call of the second generation of Zionists, such as the German Jew Theodore Lessing, whom we will meet in our final case on the “non-Jew.” In 1930 he wrote:
What if in 1750 – when yellow staining, persecution, anti-Jewish laws, and Kammerknechtshaft With the relaxation of oppression and the implementation of complete bourgeois emancipation, gradually began to be removed – they would have replied: “For the last 2,000 years, we have been living for the coming of the Messiah, who has promised to take us back home. Now your generosity and friendship offer us beautiful Europe and great America as the Fatherland. But, as payment, we must break with our historical traditions in order to adapt and develop in the great Christian West. We cannot do this…You are free to despise us, but in return we refuse to accept your benefits: your offices and schools, your methods and means. We do not want to participate in your arts and sciences galut And the ghetto is waiting for our Messiah to appear from Bethlehem.”
The notion that diaspora was still a form of self-alienation is, as we have already seen, alleged by many on the left, such a situation being untenable in the modern nation-state.
These inequalities are normal because identities vary over time and space, even if they do not change; Because their references always do.
Galut Thus it is often understood as the experienced reality of being in exile, albeit structured by the internalization of the textual notion of diaspora and influenced by the daily experience (good or bad) of life in the world. The Jew experiences the daily life of exile through the mirror of the Biblical model of exile, whether it is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden or liberation from slavery in Egypt. Galut has constituted the Jewish self-understanding of exile, at least for religious Jews. Yet for some thinkers today the involuntary dispersion of the Jews (galut Or Circle) is described as inherently distinct from the voluntary deportation of Jews (migrant Or tfutsot). These two models exist simultaneously in Jewish history in the image of the uprooted and powerless Jews on the one hand and the rooted and empowered Jews on the other.
It’s Possible to Have an Assertive, Meaningful Cultural Experience as a Jew galut or feeling alone and abandoned in diaspora (as well as vice versa) – two people can live in the same place and time and experience that place and time in opposite ways. Indeed, the same individual may find his existence conceptually bounded by both models at different times and in different contexts. Zionism abandons it as essential to its self-understanding. In 1984 the Israeli philosopher Eliezer Schweid wrote that the rejection of Jewish life in the Diaspora—Shlilat Ha-Golah-A central notion in all streams of Zionist ideology is… in its most extreme formulation, the idea of Shlilat Ha-Golah The implication is that the state of exile will ultimately destroy the Jewish people, first of all in the moral and spiritual sense, and later also in the material sense, whether by discrimination and persecution, or by complete assimilation.
still there today galuts Inside galuts; Diaspora within the diaspora. The children of Israeli Jews in Berlin become German Jews in New York; Soviet Jews in New York suddenly see themselves as Americans when they visit Putin’s Russia. In the post-Soviet world, whether in the global North or in Israel, secular identity in the USSR transformed into ultra-religious identity; Religious identity in the global North, tied to the idea of the completion of Zionism in the Israeli state, suddenly becomes fundamentally secular once that bond is called into question. What are opposites at one moment are realized as complementary situations. These inequalities are normal because identities vary over time and space, even if they do not change; Because their references always do.
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Reprinted with permission Antisemitism: History of Jew Hatred By Sander L. Gilman. Published by Reaction Books Ltd. Copyright © 2026 Sander L. By Gilman. All rights reserved.
