EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Jew-Hatred: The Latest Edition (Simon Schama)
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Automatically transcribed from the episode audio. Some words and names may be inaccurate.
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Picture this. It's early spring, 2026. You're in New York City taking a walk through Riverside Park. OK, I can picture that. It's one of those beautiful, crisped days where the city just feels alive. You're strolling down the bike trail near 109th Street, maybe holding a coffee, just taking in the day. Sounds perfect, honestly. Right. But then you glance over at this large rock outcropping by the path and painted there in stark thick black creosote. It's a message. Oh, boy. Yeah.
And it doesn't use coded language. It doesn't hide behind academic jargon or political theory. It just says, very simply, kill a Jew, go to heaven. God. That just, it stops you dead in your tracks. Exactly. Just the visual of that, the sheer unvarnished violence of it interrupting a completely normal spring day. It's completely jarring. And the The text we're exploring today actually starts with that exact image. But what's truly unsettling is the observation our author makes about that graffiti. Right. As horrifying as it is, he points out that it possesses a kind of refreshing straightforwardness. Which is a terrifying phrase to use, I mean, when you really think about it. It is. But when you compare that blatant threat on the rock to the incredibly complex, heavily veiled modern rhetoric that we see today, you know, rhetoric that disguises ancient prejudice as mere political critique, you start to understand his point. Right, because the Riverside Park graffiti doesn't hide what it is. Exactly. And that mechanism, the way hate hides, mutates, and disguises itself in the modern era, is exactly what we're unpacking today. We are. We're looking at a truly monumental piece of historical and cultural analysis. It's an extensive, highly acclaimed essay by the renowned historian Sir Simon Schama. Yeah. Published in the October 2026 issue of the Jewish Quarterly.
Right. It's titled Jew Hatred, The Latest Edition. And I have to say it is an incredibly dense, rigorous and frankly painful text to work through. It really is. So our mission for this deep dive is to methodically unpack Schama's historical cultural and psychological analysis of the recent global surge in antisemitism We want to go chapter by chapter Exactly concept by concept really getting into the mechanics of how ancient prejudices have adapted to survive in modern political movements We aren't just looking at the what we're gonna look really deeply at the how and the why but before we take one more step I want to speak directly to you the listener for a second because we are wading into incredibly deep, politically explosive waters here today. Oh, absolutely.
The source material touches on the Gaza War, the Israeli -Palestinian conflict, and the rhetoric of both left -wing and right -wing political figures. And we need to be crystal clear about our role here. Yes. Our goal today is not to take a geopolitical stance. We are not here to validate a specific political side, nor are we endorsing the viewpoints of the author or the actions of any political groups mentioned. Right. We're essentially acting as historical detectives today. Exactly. Our sole mission is to neutrally report, deconstruct, and analyze the arguments exactly as they're presented in this original text. We want to give you the tools to understand the historical thesis being laid out so you can see the architecture of the argument yourself.
Okay, so with that framework firmly in place, let's jump in. The analysis begins with a phenomenon that's really defining our current cultural moment. The modern litmus test. Right. Schama's argument is that in today's society, anti -Zionism has become virtually indistinguishable from anti -Semitism. But it's not just a theoretical overlap, right? It's actively functioning as a societal purity test. Yeah, and to understand the mechanics of this, Schama brings in the German philologist Hans Mayer. Oh right, going back a bit. Yeah, way back in 1984, Mayer wrote that anyone who attacks Zionism but claims they mean nothing against the Jews is just fooling themselves or others. Wow, 1984. Right. And Schama's thesis builds on that, suggesting that society is currently forcing Jewish people into a corner. They're being demanded to publicly denounce Israel. And specifically to denounce it as the unique singular source of world evil, just to be exempted from total social ostracism. It's like a reverse loyal to oath. I mean, you know how historically minority groups were forced to swear allegiance to their host country to prove they belonged. Right. Like during the McCarthy era or the Inquisition. Well, here the dynamic is completely flipped. Jewish people are being asked to publicly renounce their ancestral homeland to actively disavow it. Just to participate in normal civic life. Just to exist, basically. Exactly. Just to buy groceries or go to class safely. The psychology of a purity test is fascinating and terrifying because it's not about debate. It's about social death. Yeah.
If you don't pass the test, you are cast out of the tribe. And Schama brings receipts to show exactly how this reverse loyalty oath operates in practice. Like, look at the example he gives of California State Senator Scott Weiner. Oh, this is a crazy story. It is. Here is a distinctly progressive politician, right? Initially, he declined to classify Israeli military action in Gaza as a genocide. Right. Because of that hesitation, he was completely demonized by the progressive left. But here's where the purity test becomes impossible to pass. Even after he changed his mind and aligned with their view, no gesture of penitence was enough. He was still ostracized. Wiener was literally banned from a pride parade in his own San Francisco constituency.
He was even forced to chant free Palestine, just at the price of admission, to sit in a local pub and watch a World Cup match. Let's just pause on that pub example for a second because it perfectly illustrates the mechanism. A pub is a public accommodation. Right. Watching the World Cup is a universal communal human activity. By creating a literal password, a political slogan that a Jewish person has to say just to enter that space, you are completely conditionalizing their existence in society. It's a mechanism of collective incrimination.
Exactly. And it doesn't even spare people who are from Israel but are fiercely critical of their own government. Schama brings up two prominent figures here, the filmmaker Nadav Lapid and the writer Edgar Caret. Both of whom we should definitely note have been incredibly harsh vocal critics of Benjamin Netanyahu and the right -wing policies of the Israeli government. They are the furthest thing from government mouthpieces. Right. Yet, Lapid faced demands to be removed as a judge at the Marseille Film Festival and Caret has been boycotted at international literary festivals.
And why? Not because of their political stances but simply because they exist as Israelis. This is where we see geopolitical conflict being weaponized to hold diaspora Jews hostage. Schama quotes the influential leftist livestreamer Hassan Piker here. Oh, right. In August 2026, Piker issued this warning to American Jews. He essentially said that if American Jews keep putting out the idea that they're invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to take action, quote, not against Israel, but against American Jews. just literal mafia logic. It really is. It's like nice community you've got here. It would be a shame if something happened to it because of what a government 6 ,000 miles away is doing. That's exactly that logic. It tells Jewish people drop your connection to your history and the state or whatever violence happens to you here in America or Europe is your own fault. It's blaming the victim entirely.
It shifts the blame for antisemitic violence onto the victims themselves, making their safety entirely conditional and passing this modern politically cloaked litmus test. But, you know, if we pull back, this politically cloaked hostility didn't just spawn out of nowhere. No, absolutely not. It isn't a uniquely 21st century invention. Schama's historical analysis argues that this modern rhetoric is actually dragging incredibly old. dark medieval tropes right back into the daylight. This is where the historical mapping gets truly fascinating because hate doesn't usually invent new materials, you know, it just recycles the old ones. Right. Schama traces the genealogy of current rhetoric directly back to the 19th century in the Middle Ages. For instance, he notes the shocking return of the swastika. He mentions an incident where 57 swastikas were found drawn in a single children's playground in Brooklyn. Fifty seven. Right. In one playground.
Right. Just completely casual hate. But it goes way deeper than Nazi imagery. He points to the revival of 19th century zoological framing. Like framing people as animals? Exactly. Think of people like the French socialist Alphonse Toussaint in the 1800s. During the Industrial Revolution, society was changing rapidly and there was massive anxiety about capitalism and modernism. To channel that anxiety, anti -Semitic thinkers began characterizing Jews not just as religious enemies, but as biological threats. Like pests. Yes. Insect. Parasites.
Vermin. Plague -carrying rodents who were somehow clogging or corrupting the machine of society. Now that specific mechanism, dehumanizing a group into vermin, is so crucial to understand because it fundamentally changes the psychological threshold for violence. Right, because you fight an enemy, but you exterminate vermin. Exactly. And that exact zoological framing is back. Schama mentions this chilling scene in rural Ireland on roads in County Loth and County Meath. painted in giant white letters on the road, alongside a star of David and a swastika, were the words, Jew Rat.
And Schama, drawing on his deep literary history, connects this immediately to James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. Oh, the pub scene. Yes. He reminds us of the famous scene set in 1904, where the nationalist character known as The Citizen is in Barney Kiernan's pub. He attacks the Jewish protagonist, Leopold Bloom, using the exact same rhetoric, calling him quote, as a shithouse rat. So what we're seeing in 2026 is an echo of 1904, which itself was an echo of 19th century pseudoscience. But the timeline goes back much, much further than the 19th century. We need to spend some time with this because Schama dives deeply into the blood libel. Let's unpack the mechanics of this.
Where does this actually start? Well, the formal blood libel, as we understand it, really takes root in 12th century England. Schama brings up two foundational cases, William of Norwich in 1144 and Little Hugh of Lincoln about a century later. Okay. Let's look at William of Norwich. He was a young apprentice, right? And he was found dead in the woods? Yes. A tragic, unsolved local murder. But instead of an investigation, a local monk concocted a story that the Jewish community had kidnapped William and crucified him in a mockery of the death of Jesus. Just totally made up out of thin air. Completely.
And this was the birth of the myth that Jews required the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, often specifically tied to making Passover matzah. Which, if you know anything at all about Jewish dietary laws, is absurdly ironic, considering kosher law strictly forbids the consumption of any blood whatsoever. Exactly. The lie is the diametric opposite of the truth, which is a really common feature of effective propaganda. Right. But this lie that Jews are a demonic predatory force harvesting children spread like wildfire across Europe. But Schama doesn't even stop in the Middle Ages. He traces this conspiratorial archetype all the way back to antiquity. To the Romans and Egyptians. Yes.
He cites the Roman historian Tacitus, who claimed Jews confront the rest of the world with, quote, a hatred reserved for enemies. Wow. And going back even further to the third century BCE, the Egyptian priest Manetho claimed that the biblical Exodus wasn't a story of liberation from slavery, but rather that the Egyptians had rightfully expelled a diseased people, specifically lepers who were a public health threat. So the framing of the Jewish people as a biological contagion goes back literally thousands of years. Yes.
And later, the Greek grammarian Appian popularized this diabolical archetype of Jews as a conspiratorial cabal. Appian claimed that Jews would kidnap Greeks, fatten them up in the Jerusalem temple, and sacrifice them. It's like a horror movie script. It is. These are the ancient Greco -Waroman roots of the idea that Jews are a predatory child -sacrificing cabal. Okay, but let me step in here as the skeptical listener. I understand the history, but Schama points out that these ancient tropes of child sacrifice and cannibalism are reappearing today. Yes. How exactly does an ancient Roman or Egyptian conspiracy connect to, say, a modern art gallery in 2026? I mean, how does that leap actually happen? That is the core of Schama's argument here. It happens through rebranding. He shows the seamless transition of the medieval blood libel into modern, supposedly anti -colonial art. specifically details an exhibit by the artist Matthew Collings at a gallery in Margate called Drawings Against Genocide. Tell me about this specific painting. So in this exhibit, there is a painting depicting a Jewish art dealer.
And it's not ambiguous. It is specifically modeled after the French Israeli owner of Sotheby's, Patrick Drahi. In the painting, this Jewish figure has sharpened demonic fangs and he is eating a baby alive while blood cascades from his mouth. Oh my God. That is a literal visual recreation of the medieval blood libel. It's like Goya's Saturn devouring his son, but explicitly racialized. Exactly. But here is the mechanism of modern disguise. When the artist was confronted about this horrifying imagery, he insisted it wasn't anti -Semitic. How could he possibly claim that?
Because he claimed it was about Zionists, not Jews. He used a geopolitical term to shield ancient racialized hate. And the local police actually investigated and judged that the show didn't insult Jewish people as a group. Wow. So the legal and cultural defenses of society just short circuit because the magic word Zionist was used. Precisely. Schama uses this to illustrate how perfectly the ancient demonic archetype of the blood drinking Jew has been preserved. It has just been placed in a modern frame. And these ancient libels aren't just staying on canvas, you know. They aren't just academic curiosities.
Schama makes the forceful case that this rhetoric is leading to a terrifying contraction of physical safety for Jews in the present day. It's bleeding off the canvas and onto the streets. The phrase he uses is a drastic contraction of citizenship. That's a powerful phrase. It is. We are talking about the loss of basic civic freedoms that most people take completely for granted. The assumed right to wear ethnic clothing like a kippah or a star of David necklace without fear. Right. The right to gather for a wedding or a school play or bar mitzvah without needing a perimeter of armed guards and metal detectors. That baseline level of citizenship is disappearing. Schama grounds this in a very poignant personal reflection that I think really anchors the emotion of this text.
He recalls a phone call with his mother. back in the summer of 1990. Yeah. She was deeply distressed. She was. It was about the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. There was one in Edmonton in the UK and another in Carpentras in France. And let's talk about Carpentras because it wasn't just knocking over headstones. No, it was much, much worse. A recently buried 81 year old man was exhumed from his grave and his body was brutally mutilated. I mean, why do that? What is the psychology of digging up an 81 -year -old man? It is the ultimate act of erasure and disrespect. It sends a message that you are not just unwanted in life.
You are not even permitted peace and death. The earth of this country rejects you. It's psychological terrorism against the living community. And Schama's mother saw this in 1990, and she told him on the phone, quote, It's over. The good times, the safe times for Jews here. And at the time, Schama admits he brushed off his mother's fears. He believed that in places like England or America, the post -war consensus was solid. Jews were ultimately safe. Right. But looking at the landscape today, he realizes she was a prophet. Because the examples today are just relentless. Schama lists these heartbreaking everyday incidents.
A 13 -year -old boy in Paris, held at knife point, beaten, and called a dirty Jew, simply for walking down the street wearing a kippah. Horrific. A property inspector in Slough going about his daily job, accosted by a stranger and called a baby killer. And the incident with the Jewish Free School football team? That one is just so disturbing. These are kids. Under -15 boys playing a local football match near Norwich. Right. And they were met by crowds making gas chamber hissing noises, shouting Nazi slogans and using racial slurs. Try to imagine being a 14 -year -old kid just trying to play a game. An adult are making the sound of the gas chambers at you. It's completely depraved. It's a total loss of the freedom to just exist in public spaces. What is deeply troubling is how Schama ties this cultural shift to a generational divide. He specifically analyzes Generation Z here. Yeah, let's explore this generational amnesia.
For many young people, Schama observes the actual historical genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust is increasingly viewed as ancient history. Right. It's seen as a distant bore, or more maliciously, it's viewed as a gait trip that is cynically exploited to smother criticism of Israel. The historical weight of the Holocaust has just evaporated for a huge swath of the younger generation. He notes how Nazi salutes and Hitler -loving jibes have somehow become normalized. Edgy humor in schools. And we must state clearly here, again, that we are impartially reporting Schama's analysis. which takes aim at figures across the political spectrum who are influencing this younger generation. Right. He doesn't just blame one side. No. For instance, he points to the right wing. He mentions the podcaster Nick Puentes, who has a massive following among young men and who openly, gleefully mocks the Holocaust.
Yeah. He also highlights Tucker Carlson's guest, the podcaster Darrell Cooper, who went on a massive platform and essentially... claimed that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II, completely downplaying the reality of the concentration camps. It's a phenomenon of Holocaust trivialization, inversion, and outright denial. But if we connect this to the bigger picture of the text, Schama isn't just pointing at the right wing. Right, because earlier we were talking about left -wing college students chanting for global intifada.
And now we're looking at right -wing podcasters praising Hitler. How does Schama interrelate those two extremes? Because politically, they hate each other. They do. But they are united by what Schama calls a refusal of gravity. A refusal of gravity. I like that. Yeah, it's the horseshoe theory in perfect action. If you think of a horseshoe, the two furthest extremes bend back around to almost touch each other. Whether it's the far -left campus activists tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish toddlers or the far -right podcaster mocking Auschwitz, both extremes share a fundamental psychological desire. Which is? They want to disqualify Jewish grief. Oh. Because acknowledging that grief, acknowledging the reality of Jewish vulnerability and historical suffering, it complicates their respective ideological narratives. Exactly.
For the far right, acknowledging the Holocaust disrupts their fascist white nationalist nostalgia. And for the far left, acknowledging Jewish vulnerability disrupts their rigid oppressor versus oppressed binary, where Israel must be the ultimate colonial evil. Spot on. The gravity of Jewish history is inconvenient for both extremes, so they both just refuse it. And this shared refusal of gravity is hyper accelerated by the digital age, where reality and language are so easily distorted. Which brings us to what is undoubtedly the most controversial, heavy, and rigorous chapter of the steep dive. The digital disinformation age and the weaponization of the word genocide. And before we unpack this, it is crucial once again to reiterate to you, the listener, that we are neutrally unpacking Schama's arguments regarding the Gaza war, the legal definitions of genocide, and the International Court of Justice. Yes, absolutely. We are not validating these claims or taking a stance on the geopolitical conflict itself. We are simply examining how Schama constructs his historical and legal defense. Exactly. So Schama addresses head on the most consequential heavy accusation leveled at Israel today. The charge that the Israel Defense Forces set out to commit a deliberate planned genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Right. And Schama mounts a deeply rigorous historical defense against this specific charge. That's his main argument.
His argument is that while the civilian suffering in Gaza is horrific and while he readily concedes that war crimes may indeed have been committed by individuals or units, the structural intent of the war differs fundamentally from the legal and historical definition of genocide. He actually demands that the reader hold multiple contradictory truths at the same time. He calls them the truths of Gaza. And it's a demanding list for anyone entrenched in dogma. It is. He says first we must grieve Palestinian suffering. We must acknowledge the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
The destruction of homes and lives is a profound tragedy. Yes. Second, we must acknowledge the tactical reality that Hamas purposefully embeds its military infrastructure within civilian areas, hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, specifically to maximize that civilian suffering for strategic gain. And third, notably, he insists we must recognize the existence of what he explicitly calls Jewish supremacist fascists serving within the Israeli government who are enabling murderous violence and land grabs in the West Bank. So he refuses to paint a simplistic one -sided picture where one side is pure good and the other is pure evil. Exactly. But his core argument regarding the word genocide rests on legal and historical rigor. Let's look at his dissection of the International Court of Justice. the ICJ. Right. This is a vital point of clarification in the text. Because a ubiquitous talking point on social media and in protests is that the ICJ definitively ruled that Israel committed genocide. Which Schama points out is legally and factually incorrect. Completely.
The ICJ ruled that Palestinians have a quote plausible right to be protected from genocide. Okay, let's break down that legalese for a second. What is the difference between finding that a genocide occurred and finding a plausible right to be protected. It's the difference between a restraining order and a murder conviction. The ICJ was essentially saying the situation is so dire that the protected group has a right to demand the court ensure their safety. And Schama agrees with that. He fully agrees they have that right. But the court did not rule that the crime of genocide had materialized. Schama highlights the descent of Judge Julia Sabutinde, who pointedly stated that South Africa had not produced evidence of genocidal intent. And intent is the linchpin. The word genocide wasn't just invented casually. No, it was coined in 1944 by a Polish -Jewish lawyer named Rafael Lemkin, specifically to describe the systematic, intentional, industrialized destruction of a people. Right.
To drive this home, Schama compares the tragic casualties of urban warfare in Gaza with the systematic kill rates of the Holocaust. He brings up Operation Reinhardt in 1942. This was the deadliest phase of the Holocaust. Yeah. In just 100 days, utilizing death camps like Treblinka and Sobibor, approximately 1 .5 million Jews were murdered. It was an industrialized extermination machine. But I have to stop you here because... I think a listener might hear this comparison and push back. OK, lay it on me. Shema literally writes that numbers numb, acknowledging that statistics can obscure humanity. But then he insists historians must quantify to find the truth. By comparing the death tolls of Gaza and Operation Reinhard, does any risk sounding incredibly callous. That's a very fair question. Isn't he falling into a trap of minimizing one tragedy by holding it up against another? Well, Schama actually anticipates that exact criticism. He makes a painful, explicit concession in the text.
He writes that every single child's death in an urban theater of war is an irreparable catastrophe. Right. He is not minimizing the horror, the grief, or the devastation in Gaza. So why make the comparison at all? Because of language. He argues that for the sake of historical truth, the specific legal and historical definition of genocide, which implies a onesie -style organized systematic intent to exterminate an entire population, cannot be casually swapped for the tragic albeit horrific realities of high -casualty urban warfare. Right, because if every tragic war is a genocide, the word loses all meaning. Exactly. And he argues that this swapping of definitions is not an accident.
It is an intentional distortion of language. And that leads directly to the next major concept in the essay. He argues that the reason the word genocide is used so aggressively and ubiquitously against Israel isn't just about criticizing the war. No. It is specifically designed to strip Jewish people of their own historical memory. It brings us to the erasure of memory and the disqualification of grief. He introduces a concept here called secondary death. Oh, this is profound. If the primary death is the physical murder of the victim, the secondary death is the energetic, deliberate urge to inflict pain on the survivors by erasing the memory of the victims from the public record. You kill the person and then you kill their ghost. Precisely. And the examples he provides of this secondary death are incredibly vivid and honestly upsetting. He describes the vandalism of the Stolper Steining. For listeners who might not have traveled to Europe or haven't seen these, let's explain what these Stolpersteine are because they carry immense emotional weight.
Stolperstein translates to stumbling blocks. They are small brass cobblestone -sized plates set directly into the pavement across various European cities. Right. Each one marks the exact doorstep of a house where a victim of the Holocaust lived before they were dragged away and deported. They are brilliant in their design because they are integrated into the mundane, everyday street. You're just walking to get coffee, and suddenly you have to physically bow your head to look down and read the name, the birthdate, and the date of murder of the person who lived right there. It's a physical intervention. Yeah. It returns the victim from the anonymity of a mass grave back to the actuality of a lived life, a specific address. They are a profound act of memorialization. But Schama notes that these stones are currently being targeted. They are being dug out of the pavement, defaced with swastikas, or painted over with the word Gaza. Which is an act of attempt to overwrite the memory of a Holocaust victim. Exactly. And Schama connects this exact same impulse to the tearing down of hostage posters in cities worldwide after October 7th. Right. Often these vandals were filmed tearing down faces of kidnapped civilians with unrepentant gleeful laughter. He highlights a specific incident at the University of Toronto. What happened there?
The names of the Bebus family, which includes a mother and her two small children, one a baby, held hostage, were carved in chalk into the granite paving stones of the campus. And they were intentionally scrubbed out and defaced. It's the literal eradication of empathy. But this erasure isn't just physical, right? It's happening in the literary and intellectual spheres as well. Yes, Schama dedicates a significant portion of this chapter to a rigorous intellectual takedown of an essay by Pankaj Mishra titled The Shoah After Gaza. Let's get into the weeds of this because it's a real battle over historical narrative. Schama takes deep issue with how Mishra manipulates the writings of Jean Omari. Jean Omari was an Austrian -born essayist and a survivor of Auschwitz -Muchenwald. His writings on torture and survival are completely seminal. And Mishra uses Amri's legacy to essentially condemn modern Israel. The argument Mishra makes is that Zionists only care about the Holocaust to exploit ally guilt to justify their own actions. Correct.
Mishra attempts to use the moral authority of a Holocaust survivor to validate anti -Zionism. To me, reading that, it feels like a profound violation. It's like someone breaking into your house, stealing your family's tragic diary. and then using the words in that diary to justify kicking you out onto the street. That analogy hits the nail on the head. And Schama methodically proves that Mishra cherry -picked and distorted Ahmari's work. He really brings the receipts. He does. While Ahmari was indeed critical of military occupation, he was actually a lifelong impassioned Zionist. Schama points out that way back in 1976, Jean Ahmari explicitly warned that anti -Zionism was simply the new respectable mask for anti -Semitism. Wow. Schama is deeply offended by the assertion that Zionists view the Shoah merely as a cynical political tool.
So to counter this narrative of exploitation, this popular modern idea that Israel was just a cynical colonial project built on exploiting European guilt, Schama takes the reader back to the actual gritty historical conditions of the postwar era. He wants to show the mechanics of why the state of Israel was viewed not as a colonial land grab, but as an absolute desperate existential necessity for Jewish survival. And the history he presents here is stark and largely forgotten.
It is. The core concept is that history has empirically proven that Jewish people simply cannot rely on the goodwill or the laws of host nations for their survival. When we look at the immediate post -World War II landscape, the common narrative is one of liberation. The camps were opened, the war was won, and the survivors were saved. But the reality was that the world did not open its arms. Not at all. The historical evidence Schama brings is shocking. Like when the Canadian government was asked how many Jewish refugees they would be willing to take in, a senior immigration official famously replied, none is too many.
None is too many. That was the official stance of a liberal democracy after the Holocaust. Yes. Australia enforced strict quotas specifically to keep Jewish numbers down. And the U .K., under a labor government, maintained draconian blockades on Palestine and actually forced ships full of Jewish refugees to turn around and return to the blood -soaked soil of Europe. They put Holocaust survivors behind barbed wire in internment camps in Cyprus. It's unbelievable. And perhaps the most harrowing example of why returning to Europe was physically impossible is the Kielce program.
Let's spend a moment on this because the timeline is crucial this happened in Poland in July 1946 1946 a full year after Hitler is dead and the camps are liberated right a group of about 200 Jewish survivors had managed to return to this town of Kielce They were living in a local building. Just trying to put the pieces of their shattered lives back together Okay, and then a nine -year -old non -jewish boy in the town went missing for two days To avoid getting in trouble with his parents, he made up a story. He claimed he had been kidnapped by Jews and hidden in the basement of the building where the survivors were living. It is a direct, immediate echo of the medieval blood libel we talked about earlier, the lie of William of Norwich mutating in 1946 Poland. Exactly. And what happened? Did the town investigate? No. A violent f— frenzied crowd, which included local police and steel workers, besieged the building housing the survivors.
42 Holocaust survivors were murdered, beaten to death, shot, bayoneted by their own neighbors based on a child's lie. It proved with devastating clarity that the ancient hatred had survived the Holocaust completely intact. The Nazi regime was destroyed, but the ideological rot remained. And Schama is careful to point out that this danger wasn't just isolated to a post -war Europe poisoned by Nazi propaganda. He addresses the Middle Eastern context, too, because the narrative often claims Jews were perfectly safe in the Arab world until Israel was created. Right. He cites the Farhad pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, where hundreds of Jews were murdered, raped, and their homes looted.
And he also details the collaboration between the Nazi regime and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al -Husseini, who actively discussed extending the Final Solutions extermination camps into Palestine. So the inescapable conclusion for the Jewish people at that historical juncture was that statelessness equaled death. A sovereign state with the ability to self -defend wasn't a luxury or a colonial ambition. It was the only guarantee of life. Exactly. So, Schama is essentially saying to the modern critics, you ask why we need a state. You think it's a cynical ploy.
Look at what happened in Kielce the literal second the Holocaust ended. Right. But I want to ask how Schama addresses the modern left's primary argument today. You go to a college campus right now. The most common critique is not about 1946. The critique is that Israel is a European settler colonial project. How does Schama dismantle that specific label? This pushes us into one of the most intellectually rigorous sections of the essay, the deconstruction of the settler colonial narrative. He argues that applying this label to Israel doesn't just fail politically, it fails on historical, genetic, and linguistic grounds.
Let's walk through his methodology. He starts by defining what true imperialism actually is. Right. Think of the British East India Company in India, or the French in North Africa, or the Belgians in the Congo. True settler colonialism has three main features. Okay, what's the first one? First, colonists have a metropolitan home to return to if things go wrong. If the British fail in India, they get on a boat and go back to London. Makes sense. Second? Second, the entire purpose of the colony is to extract resources and native labor from the colonized land and send the wealth back to that metropolis. Right.
And third, the colonists have absolutely no linguistic, cultural, or historical ties to the land they're colonizing. Okay, so let's contrast that point by point with Zionism as Shema does. First, the metropolis. Jewish refugees had no metropolis to return to. They were fleeing pogroms in Russia or the ashes of Europe or later expulsion from Arab nations. There was no motherland funding them. Second, the extraction of wealth and labor. He looks at early labor Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement was based on the kibbutz model, agricultural self -help, draining malaria -infested swamps, and Jewish physical labor. It wasn't about subjugating native labor to extract gold or rubber to send back to Europe. It was about working the land themselves to survive. But the most fascinating part of his deconstruction, where you can really feel his passion as a historian, is how he tackles the concept of indigeneity. Because the common refrain is that Ashkenazi Jews are simply white Europeans who colonized the Middle East. He dives into the actual science here. Yes, he cites genome -wide DNA research by prominent geneticists like Harry Ostrer and Carl Skarecki. This research conclusively shows that Ashkenazi Jews share much closer genetic ties with Middle Eastern populations, including Palestinians, Druze, and Bedouins than they do with their European host societies. Wow. Despite a thousand years of exile in Europe, their genetic markers remain deeply Levantine. So the genetics prove the Levantine origin. But Schama's real love shines through when he talks about the cultural continuity, specifically the Hebrew language, because another myth is that Hebrew was a dead language like Latin, that these European colonizers artificially resurrected in a lab to legitimize their land grab. He completely debunks that. Right. He traces the continuous unbroken use of Hebrew across millennia. It wasn't just confined to ancient biblical text. Right. He points to its continuous presence. It's in the Mishnah. It's in the mosaic floors of synagogues built hundreds of years after the Romans destroyed the temple. It was used by medieval poets in Islamic Spain. And he brings up the Cairo Geniza, which we have to talk about. Yes. Let's pause and marvel at the Cairo Geniza for a second, because it is one of the greatest historical treasure troves ever discovered. In the late 19th century, a scholar named Solomon Schechter went to the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. In Judaism, you cannot throw away a piece of paper that has the name of God written on it. You have to store it in a repository called a Geniza. Right. Well, this synagogue in Cairo have been storing documents in its attic for a thousand years. Schechter discovered nearly 300 ,000 fragments of Jewish life. And it wasn't just Torah scrolls, right?
It was everyday life. Exactly. It was marriage contracts, business ledgers, letters between merchants, poetry, legal disputes. And it was all written in Hebrew or Judeo -Arabic using Hebrew script. It proves that Hebrew was the living, breathing, connective tissue of the global Jewish diaspora for millennia. It never died. So to synthesize all of this, Schama is effectively saying that calling Jewish people colonizers in the Levant is historically and scientifically illiterate. Completely. It forces Jewish history onto what he calls the Procrustian bed of settler colonial theory. It requires you to ignore the genetics, ignore the archaeology, ignore the continuous use of the language, and ignore the refugee status of the people. It requires an act of suppression of facts to make the theory work. So the obvious glaring question is why?
If the history doesn't fit, If the label is historically illiterate, why does the world, especially the highly educated progressive Western world, cling to this colonizer label so tightly? Why the obsessive focus? This brings us to the culmination of the essay, which is Schama's psychological diagnosis of the modern world. He asks the ultimate question, why the Jews? Why this specific relentless obsession? And what's his answer? His conclusion is profound.
He argues that anti -Zionism and modern antisemitism are ultimately a psychological displacement of the West's own colonial guilt. Let's break that down. He's saying the global paroxysm of rage we see on college campuses and city streets isn't actually about Palestine or Israelis. It's about the haters themselves. Exactly. Schama observes a fascinating, undeniable geographical correlation. Where does the fiercest, most vitriolic anti -Zionism flourish? It flourishes in countries that have actual unrectified colonial pasts.
He lists the U .S., Canada, Australia, France, the U .K. These are nations quite literally built on the actual dispossession and often genocide of indigenous peoples. Right. And rather than grapple with that immense, unassuagable historical guilt, which is terrifying and destabilizing to a nation's identity, these societies need a scapegoat. They need what Schama calls the paradigmatic opposite. The Jews are the available scapegoat. We talked about how they were scapegoated for the plague in the Middle Ages or for capitalism in the 19th century. Now they are the scapegoat for colonialism. Exactly. By casting Jews as the ultimate hyper -imperialist oppressors, white progressives and the descendants of actual colonizers can effectively displace their own historical guilt. It is a massive psychological defense mechanism. It's transference. It is so much easier to put the Jewish state in the dock, to point at Israel and scream colonizer, than it is to examine the bloody freebooting of one's own ancestors.
If Israel is the worst colonizer in the world, then the American, or the Australian, is absolved. It's a tragic irony, and Chama points it out brilliantly. The world largely ignores massive, ongoing, undeniable atrocities. Think about the slaughter and starvation in Sudan right now. Think about the cultural annihilation and concentration camps for the Uyghurs in China. Think about the imperialist bombing of Ukraine. The world basically shrugs. But it fixates obsessively, singularly on Israel. And why? Because as Schama puts it so starkly, the Jews are not white enough for the right and not brown enough for the left.
They are the perfect equal opportunity culprit for everyone's anxieties. It is a profound failure of self -recognition by the West. It's like Western society is looking in a mirror, seeing its own horrific colonial past and pointing the finger at the reflection. The hatred is a mirror reflecting the guilt of the accuser. We have been on an incredible heavy journey through this text today. We started with that terrifyingly straightforward graffiti in Riverside Park, kill a Jew, go to heaven. and we unpack the mechanics of how the modern world has veiled that exact same ancient hatred in the weaponization of the word genocide.
We covered a lot of ground. We traced the blood libel from ancient Rome to a modern art gallery in Margate. We explored the deep legal and historical context of the ICJ rulings and the definition of genocide. We marveled at the Cairo Geniza and the unbroken history of the Hebrew language. And finally, we arrived at this profound psychological realization that the current obsession is a projection of Western guilt. And despite the darkness of this subject, Schama ends his essay not with anger, but with a plea. What's his plea? He makes a desperate plea that people simply take the trouble to read a little history. Read a book. Literally.
He warns that relying on slogans, TikTok algorithms, and historical amnesia will doom everyone to a tournament of lethal aversion. His final thought is a warning. A failure to listen to our shared history will ultimately make victims of us all. The hatred never stops with the Jews. They are just the canary in the coal mine. What's a sobering warning. But as we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave you, the listener, with a final thought to mull over. It's something that builds directly on the psychological thesis we just discussed. Listening? If this text is right, if it is true that society uses the Jewish people as a blank screen to project its deepest anxieties and guilts, whether that's medieval plagues, capitalist greed, or modern colonial guilt, what happens to a society when it successfully purges its scapegoat? That's a dark thought. History suggests that the hatred doesn't just disappear once the scapegoat is gone. It simply turns inward Devouring the very culture that fostered it as you look at the fracturing of our modern Institutions today the incredible rage tearing apart our politics in our universities. You have to ask yourself a terrifying question What's that is the current global obsession with the Jewish state? Actually a symptom of a much deeper terminal illness within Western democracy itself A question that demands our attention long after the shouting stops.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning, keep reading, and keep diving deeper.