Amichai Chikli
Jerusalem Post, Mar. 23, 2025
“Whoever turns their back on our people in our fight against evil will soon find that evil at their own doorstep.”
Warsaw, 1882 – 36 years before the Petliura pogroms, in which more than 100,000 Ukrainian Jews were massacred in over 1,500 attacks; 57 years before the Holocaust; 138 years before these words were written – a concerned Jewish journalist, Nahum Sokolow, published an essay titled Eternal Hatred for the Eternal People.
It opened with these lines:
“Thousands of years ago, one family – the family of Abraham the Hebrew – set itself apart from the nations. It believed in God and walked in His ways, and ever since, this nation has not known peace… Jew-hatred is like a tree: in autumn its leaves fall, but its trunk and roots remain… The nations have attributed every crime in the world to the Jews. They accused us of qualities stamped with the seal of falsehood. Not once were we blamed for two opposite things at once – unified only by a hatred both ancient and born of profound ignorance… Today, that old hatred has a new name: antisemitism.”
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Indeed, just a few years before Sokolow penned those words, the term “antisemitism” was coined by German thinker Wilhelm Marr in his 1879 pamphlet The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism.
The virus of Jew hatred had mutated — from religious xenophobia into racial hatred. The theological rationales gave way to pseudo-scientific ones.
The new twist was that this hatred offered no escape — not through conversion, not even through assimilation.
Fifteen years after publishing his seminal essay, Sokolow was present at the First Zionist Congress in August 1897. He met Theodor Herzl, translated his utopian novel Altneuland into Hebrew, and eventually became president of the World Zionist Organization.
Herzl believed that Zionism would end antisemitism: …SOURCE