It’s Not About the Dirt: The Lineage of Antisemitism and the Rebbe’s Answer

What “shocks” American Jews shouldn’t

The most common American Jewish reaction to the post-October 7 antisemitism wave is genuine bewilderment. Why? What did we do? How can normative people fall for this? It’s the question of someone who assumed that emancipation, Holocaust memory, and the moral architecture of the post-war West had foreclosed the possibility.

But the bewilderment is itself the clue. Americans of every persuasion have been raised inside one of the very few moments in history when systemic Jew-hatred was politically deactivated. It looks like the default. It isn’t. It’s the exception.

Antisemitism is not a generic prejudice that occasionally takes Jews as its target. It has a specific shape, a specific origin, and an unbroken lineage from antiquity to the present day. Once you see the lineage, the question of “why” stops being mysterious. So does the question of what to do about it.

The religious origin nobody wants to name

Modern antisemitism didn’t emerge from medieval prejudice and economic envy alone. Its first and deepest root is theological, and Christian.

Early Christianity had a structural problem: a Messiah came, claiming to fulfill the Jewish redemptive narrative — and the people whose narrative it was declined to accept the claim. That is not a small dissonance. It is a gaping hole at the center of the faith’s foundational story. Either the Jews were wrong about their own scripture, or the new claim was wrong.

Augustine of Hippo — the towering philosophical mind of the early church, writing from what is today Tunisia — proposed a solution that became the operating system of Western Christendom for over a thousand years: the Witness Doctrine. The Jews must be preserved, but they must suffer. Their humiliation would serve as living evidence — proof to Christians of the truth of their faith, and of the displacement of the synagogue by the Church. As historian David Reagan summarized Augustine’s position: the Jews “deserved death but were destined to wander the earth to witness the victory of the Church over the synagogue.” All of this rested on the developing idea of collective punishment for the Jewish rejection — and supposed murder — of the Messiah.

That is the architecture. Jews are not to be killed; they are to be degraded. Forever. As proof.

When the Crusaders marched east in 1096, they implemented the doctrine well past its official limits. As they sought control and territory, the Crusaders massacred Jewish communities throughout France and Germany — what became known as the Rhineland Massacres — fueling widespread antisemitism, including the durable conspiracies of blood libel and host desecration. During the Crusades, traditional Catholic hostility toward Jews became radicalized, with the Jews coming more and more to represent an alien enemy residing in the heart of Christendom. The Rhineland atrocities weren’t a deviation from doctrine. They were the inevitable consequence of a theology in which the Jew was a permanent ontological enemy of Christ.

This is the foundation. Every later layer was built on top of it.

Islam’s parallel arc

A similar arc plays out in Islamic history, though the geometry is different. In Mecca and the early Medina period, Muhammad viewed Jews as natural allies — sharing core principles of his teachings, adopting Jewish customs, praying toward Jerusalem, fasting on Yom Kippur, adopting kashrut-like dietary rules and the ritual of circumcision. He anticipated their acceptance and support.

When that acceptance didn’t come, the relationship inverted. In the years following the Hijra, two of Medina’s three Jewish tribes — Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir — were expelled, and the third, Banu Qurayza, was wiped out: the men killed, the women and children taken as captives. The hadith literature records the eschatological tradition in which, at the end of days, “the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say: ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” That hadith is cited verbatim, as Article Seven, in the founding charter of Hamas.

Both Christianity and Islam are universal monotheisms that emerged from Judaism while requiring Judaism’s partial erasure to validate themselves. The Jew, in both traditions, is the inconvenient witness who knows the source material — and who declined to confirm the new claim.

The 19th and 20th centuries: the same hatred, secularized

When religion lost its grip on European public life, the hatred didn’t dissipate. It changed register.

Marx — born to a converted Jewish family — articulated in On the Jewish Question (1843) what would become the template for left-wing antisemitism. “Money is the jealous god of Israel… The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew… The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.” Bernard Lewis described the essay as “one of the classics of antisemitic propaganda.” When Enlightenment intellectuals undermined Christianity in the 18th century, they produced the first secular layer of antisemitism: Voltaire engaged in some of the era’s most virulent attacks on Judaism, in part as an indirect way of attacking the more dangerous target of Christianity. The intellectual scaffolding of the modern world was warped by antisemitism before “antisemitism” was even a word.

The mechanism is worth naming clearly. Universalist progressivism — communist or otherwise — promises a final dissolution of difference. One humanity, one class, one global subject. The Jews refuse to dissolve. They want to remain Jews. That refusal is read as a moral crime against the universal project. Not stubbornness to be tolerated. A betrayal to be corrected.

Nationalism, in the same period, generated the inverse problem. As the great empires fell and nation-states crystallized, every people needed an authentic ethnic core. Jews were never the core anywhere. They had relationships across borders — kinship in Vilna and Frankfurt and Salonika and Aleppo — that placed them outside the new “us.” In the Nazi reading, Hitler viewed world history as a racial struggle for survival of the fittest and saw Jews as the source of all evil: disease, social injustice, cultural decline, capitalism, and every form of Marxism, especially Communism.

A minority blamed simultaneously for capitalism and communism, for cosmopolitan rootlessness and tribal exclusivism, is not being analyzed. It is being assigned a role.

Today: the cost-free deflection

The structure of contemporary antisemitism is simpler than its historical antecedents and uglier in its honesty. The Jews are an available minority onto which any social, economic, or political grievance can be displaced — at very low cost to the displacer. The mechanism the speaker in the original transcript names — fight back, why the hell not, there’s no cost to it — captures it.

The lineage is intact. The vocabulary changes; the move does not.

The Rebbe’s diagnosis: it’s not about the dirt

Here is where most contemporary analysis stops, with a sober description of the lineage and a recommendation to “fight” it. The Lubavitcher Rebbe — Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — refused to stop there. His diagnosis is sharper, and it cuts in a direction most of the institutional Jewish world still hasn’t internalized.

The Rebbe based his analysis on a parable from the Talmud (Megillah 14a). When Haman offers Ahasuerus ten thousand silver pieces to destroy the Jews, the king refuses payment and gives the Jews to Haman for free. The Talmud asks: who hated the Jews more, Haman or Ahasuerus? It answers with a parable of two farmers — one with a mound of dirt he wants to get rid of, one with a pit he needs to fill. The man with the mound says: “Take my dirt. I’ll pay you.” The man with the pit says: “Give me your dirt. No payment needed.”

Most readers take this as a story about transactions. The Rebbe read it as a typology of antisemitism itself.

There are exactly two structural complaints any antisemite ever makes, and they are mirror images. The Jews are a mound — too elevated, too rich, too powerful, too in control of media, capital, governments. Or the Jews are a pit — too parasitic, too low, too dependent on welfare, too cloistered, too unproductive. Mound or pit. Capitalist or communist. Cosmopolitan or tribal. Rootless or stubbornly rooted.

In the Rebbe’s words, as transmitted through his student Rabbi Yehoshua Gordon: “The problem is not that the Jews are a mound, and the problem is not that the Jews are a pit. The problem is that they hate the Jews. And antisemitism cannot be fixed by trying to solve the supposed problem.”

This is the diagnostic move that breaks the cycle. Every Jewish strategic response to antisemitism — for two thousand years — has implicitly accepted the antisemite’s framing. If they hate us for being too visible, we’ll lower our profile. If they hate us for being too cloistered, we’ll assimilate harder. If they hate us for being too foreign, we’ll prove our patriotism. If they hate us for being too powerful, we’ll sand the edges off our success. Every move concedes the premise that the hatred has a referent — that it is about something the Jews are or do — and every move fails.

The Rebbe’s claim is that there is no referent. The hatred is the thing itself. Trying to defuse it by adjusting Jewish behavior is a category error.

The Rebbe’s prescription: walk tall, and add light

If antisemitism is a constant — a feature of exile, not a misunderstanding to be cleared up — then the Jewish response cannot be primarily defensive. It has to be generative.

This is the pivot the Rebbe made, and it explains why Chabad looks the way it does today.

Be unapologetically Jewish. “The only proper response to antisemitism is to be who you are, walk with your head held high, and be proud of your Judaism.” Not Jewish-when-convenient. Not Jewish-but-don’t-worry-about-it. Visibly, recognizably, publicly Jewish. The Rebbe pushed for menorahs in public squares, tefillin on busy streets, Shabbat candles in unfamiliar homes — not as provocation, but as ordinary practice made visible. The visibility is the point.

Add light, don’t fight darkness directly. The Rebbe taught endlessly from the principle m’at min ha-or docheh harbeh min ha-choshech — a little light pushes away a lot of darkness. He never urged his followers to hit the streets to confront evil. He urged them to hit the streets to spread goodness and kindness. The strategic logic is precise: darkness is not a substance to be removed; it is the absence of light. You don’t shovel out a dark room. You turn on a lamp. The ultimate accomplishment of light, in the Rebbe’s framing, is not just that it dispels darkness but that it has the power to transform darkness itself into light.

Ahavat Yisrael as infrastructure. Before any campaign aimed outward, the Rebbe demanded a campaign aimed inward — Jews loving and reaching other Jews, regardless of denominational alignment, observance level, or politics. The Rebbe’s emissary network is, in operational terms, the largest sustained Ahavat Yisrael deployment in modern Jewish history: thousands of shluchim dispatched, often as young couples, to every corner of the diaspora with the charge to make Jewish life accessible to any Jew who walked through the door. Its existence pre-supposes the diagnosis: if the hatred is constant, then the cohesion of the targeted people is not optional.

The Mivtzoyim — ten campaigns of practical mitzvos. The Rebbe didn’t theologize from the chair. He launched ten specific, concrete, actionable campaigns: tefillin, mezuzah, Torah study, Jewish education, charity, Shabbat candles, kashrut, family purity, having Jewish books in the home, and Ahavat Yisrael itself. Each one a small visible act. Each one a candle.

The Noahide framework. And here the Rebbe did something nearly unprecedented in Jewish history. Where most Jewish leaders in the 20th century asked Jews to be quieter to win toleration, the Rebbe asked the non-Jewish world to engage. He campaigned publicly for the Sheva Mitzvos B’nei Noach — the Seven Noahide Laws — universal moral commitments addressed to all humanity, not requiring conversion. The strategic frame is striking. The Rebbe didn’t ask Christians and Muslims to like Jews. He asked them to commit to a shared moral floor that, if taken seriously, would make antisemitism structurally untenable. In 1991, the U.S. Congress formally declared the Seven Noahide Laws “the foundation of modern social morality.” Pro-semitism, not anti-anti-semitism.

Build, don’t explain. When terrorists massacred children at the Kfar Chabad agricultural school in 1956, the Rebbe didn’t issue a statement of outrage. He didn’t attempt to explain the tragedy. He sent more students. He told the survivors to expand. Healing through growth — and in this way, conquering death and evil itself. The model: every act of destruction is to be answered with a disproportionate act of construction.

What going forward looks like

If the Rebbe’s diagnosis is right — and the lineage in the transcript is the strongest evidence that it is — then the dominant institutional Jewish playbook of the last sixty years is incomplete at best. Defensive PR, ADL counts, condemnation cycles, and interfaith dialogue all operate inside the antisemite’s framing. They work to lower the mound or fill in the pit. The Rebbe’s claim is that none of it touches the underlying problem because there is no underlying problem to touch.

Going forward, the move is something like:

Stop trying to be liked into safety. Hatred for which you are not the cause cannot be appeased by changing what you are. Every concession buys nothing and signals weakness, which buys less than nothing.

Be more Jewish, not less. Visibly. Publicly. With pride that is calm rather than defensive. Mezuzah on the doorpost where it can be seen. Kippah in the boardroom. Shabbat candles in the window. The chanukiyah lit, on time, where the world walks by.

Build infrastructure that produces Jews and produces light. Schools, batei midrash, families, public observance, acts of chesed at scale. The Chabad emissary network is one model; it is not the only one. The principle is generative, not the specific organizational form.

Take the Noahide frame seriously. Make the moral case to the non-Jewish world directly — not “tolerate us” but “here is the moral architecture without which none of this works.” Some will respond. Most won’t. The point is to make the offer.

Answer destruction with disproportionate construction. Every attack on a Jewish school is answered with two new schools. Every defaced menorah is answered with five new public lightings. Every pulled-down hostage poster is replaced by ten more, larger and brighter. The proportion is the message.

The lineage of antisemitism is real and old and unbroken. The Rebbe’s contribution is to insist that it is also not the operative variable in Jewish strategy. The operative variable is what Jews do — not in response to the haters, but as a positive expression of being Jewish in the world.

Mound or pit, the world will choose its complaint. The Jewish answer is the same either way: Hineni — here I am, walking with my head held high, lighting another candle.

Sources & further reading

• The Real Answer to Antisemitism — Rabbi Yehoshua B. Gordon, on the Rebbe’s reading of Megillah 14a (citing Sichot Kodesh, 5725, p. 444). Chabad.org.
• The Rebbe on How (Not) to Combat Antisemitism — Chabad.org.
• The Rebbe Fought Anti-Semitism By Spreading Pro-Semitism — David Suissa, Jewish Journal, 2019.
• On the Jewish Question — Karl Marx (1843).
• Augustine, Tractatus Adversus Judaeos; the Witness Doctrine (developed across multiple works).
• Murder on a Moonless Night: How the Rebbe Responded to Terror in Israel — Chabad.org.
• The Obligation to Illuminate the World — Letter of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Chanukah 5741 (1980).
• Talmud, Megillah 14a (the Haman/Ahasuerus parable of the mound and the pit).
• Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 11:10–12 (the framing of Christianity and Islam as preparing the world for the messianic era).