Antisemitism and the Devil

by David Solway (April 2026)

 

The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted. —Psalm 22

 

What historian Robert Wistrich in A Lethal Obsession has called the world’s longest hatred is also the world’s oldest sickness. Jew-hatred is best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of a decimating plague. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. It strikes me that the catalogue of such reprobates would fill the devil’s Rolodex. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.

In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that antisemitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. Sartre’s thesis is that the Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human—an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution and a convenient repository of all the unpleasant things we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. Sartre concludes that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”

In an important book with the plain title Anti-Semitism, former president of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis Theodore Isaac Rubin regards antisemitism as an authentic disease of the mind, characterized by what he calls “symbol sickness” which transfers a sense of inner failure and conflict to its projected object—the Jew. The isolation of the symbol from both the real object and the central self that posits it makes the application of logic difficult, if not impossible. Symbol sickness is predicated on an irrational reversal of semantic designation. Unfortunately, the malediction of Isaiah has been forgotten or dismissed: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness… ” Israel and its people, whom Isaiah called “a light unto the nations,” are now threatened by an encroaching darkness, the collective hatred of the so-called civilized world verging on affective psychosis, a universal pathology.

The cadastral address of the Empire of Antisemitism is located in the recorded past and the indefinite future, but it squats in the here and now so that it remains substantial, fully formed, repressive and immutable, and refuses to be abolished. It merely creates tenement states of mind—anti-Zionism, scholarly distaste, personal animosity, feckless alliances—until the day history is annulled and the devil’s pleasure palace is erected in perpetuum. It is an evil that migrates from the meandering insincerity of our lives to the radical decline of moral sensitivity into the ninth circle of Hell where the social order turns feral and what Wistrich calls the “Judeophobic virus” once again infects the human race. We see this happening now in the wake of the Gaza embroilment as majorities side with a monstrous Islamic entity while reviling and abusing the only democratic nation in the Middle East constantly fighting for its always-threatened survival. We see it in the increasingly frequent and toxic anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement playing out on the streets, ministries, websites, and university campuses of our liberal world. We see it in the streets rife with Palestinian flags.

It is an evil that spares neither its victim nor its perpetrator. For antisemitism ultimately casts its stygian murk over Jew and non-Jew alike, harming the one, debasing the other. As Satan tormented Job in the Fiend’s wager with God, so the antisemite afflicts the Jew in an act of what we might call motivated malignity—not as a wager but as a form of criminal envy and resentment. What is the offense? What do untold millions begrudge? The imposition of a demanding moral code like the Ten Commandments, which underwrite all our values? The extravagant dreams, as Thomas Cahill affirms in The Gifts of the Jews, that the Hebrew prophets articulated of universal justice and the God that sustains it? A scientific and medical benefactor whose many inventions and contributions to human welfare put much of an ungrateful world to shame? The fact that approximately 0.2 percent of the world’s population garners 20 percent of Nobel Prizes? A people capable of gratification-deferment waiting endlessly for the Messiah is accustomed to patient training in study, work, struggle and development, unlike the majority of its haters.

The various blood libels are merely the standard calumnies intended to avoid confronting the genuine reasons for such groundless and arbitrary hatred. Antisemites are still doing the devil’s work. They are still “going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it.” (Job 1:7.)

“The devil, after a period of relative quiescence,” writes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism, “has reappeared, flexes his muscles again, and stalks the world, with ever more confidence, power, and followers.” Goldhagen explains that he is speaking “not only metaphorically but conceptually.” Yet, the devil and his cohorts may be something more than a metaphor or a concept; one may imagine that we are now really living in the time of demons, as John of Patmos prophesied and as Rabbi Jonathan Cahn has warned in The Paradigm and other volumes.

Similarly, poet Ted Hughes avers in an essay titled “Myth and Education” reprinted in the edited volume The Symbolic Order, “The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines. The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine.” That is the faculty that is missing in the antisemite.

Indeed, what is a demon but a creature without scruples, a creature who despises beauty, is impervious to truth, is oblivious to moral reciprocity, and is devoid of humor? Demons have desires, fears and ambitions, but they are strangers to introspection. The voice within is silent. To put it bluntly, they don’t have souls. Their souls have died under a barrage of lies—the lies they have told and the lies they have uncritically received or welcomed. And such creatures proliferate among the mass of humankind.

One is tempted to think of these demons as “fallen angels,” which do all they can to mock the proper sacred order of the cosmos and of human life. The celestial hierarchy or holarchy has three functions: to express sacred adoration of God, to keep the universe “going” (science), and to encourage and defend morality. Reverence, Harmony and Moral Goodness are the three qualities trashed by the enemy who promotes scorn, chaos and deceit. The demons are also capable of infecting “normal” people, who then become demons themselves.

Entire populations, Goldhagen writes, are being “redemonized in the new social, cultural circumstances and opportunities of the new global age,” and Jews are the primary victims of those who are carrying out the unholy work of “the demonic ecumenical church of antisemitism.” Goldhagen, of course, is still speaking conceptually, as a world-class scholar must, but one may wonder, however fancifully, whether demons do literally exist, circulating among the mass of humankind. Perhaps they went underground for a spell and have now re-emerged. Shakespeare’s words from The Tempest continue to resonate: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

One recalls St. Paul’s warning in Ephesians 6, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” People are merely “mules,” or carriers of harmfully stimulating products that warp the personality.There is a sense in which antisemitic individuals lose distinctions of personal selfhood and begin to replicate one another almost like robots. “A malignant symbol sickness,” Rubin emphasizes, “can infect a population and there are never any real differences between individuals.”

As Dinesh D’Souza pointed out in his documentary The Dragon’s Prophesy, antisemitism is the infection that the Devil transmits into the soul of man, the infusion of evil into the world. The evil we are confronting is so flagrant, irrational and diabolical that the literal hypothesis, if not demonstrably empirical, still remains persuasive. Antisemitism is the subtle form of demonic possession against which no rite or formula has been discovered.

I sometimes think that the concept or practice of possession has taken on a new form. The devil does not necessarily dispatch his minions like shape-shifting phantoms or Gadarine shadows that enter the human being, hurling insults and blasphemies in modulator voices, distorting the “human face divine,” dashing objects against the wall and splintering mirrors. They are known among sundry cultures as dybbuks, jinns, asuras, unclean spirits, and the like. Far more efficiently and effectively, the devil merely changes the brain chemistry of individuals, even intelligent people who should know better. The devil works at the level of the cerebral molecule. These fallen beings otherwise appear quite normal. Once admirable people become despicable.

As a Jew, I am provoked to believe that the devil has once more unleashed his hordes, that whole populations are corrupted, that demons actually do exist, that antisemitism is their calling card, and that they and their corollaries are really here again.

 

Table of Contents

 

David Solway’s latest books are Profoundly Superficial: Observations on a Net-Zero Culture and Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam, and the West. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast