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The corpse in the grave

Paul Barber describes the visitor who would arrive at your door on Halloween if he were drawn from the traditional sources: a plump, ruddy, swollen man in a linen shroud, with long fingernails and a stubbly beard, his mouth and one eye open, looking like a disheveled villager. The tall gentleman in the black cloak belongs to fiction, a figure “derived from the vampires of folklore but now bearing precious little resemblance to them.” Count Dracula himself was a Transylvanian aristocrat modeled loosely on Vlad Tepes, who was a prince of Wallachia and was never regarded by the people around him as a vampire.[1]

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Note: this next paragraph describes a corpse to show where the images came from, but can be safely skipped if needed.

Eighteenth-century exhumations show where the folklore body came from. When investigators opened the grave of the Serbian Arnod Paole, they reported fresh blood at the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, nails and skin that had fallen away with new ones beneath, and a corpse that groaned and bled when a stake was driven through its chest.[2] Barber reads each detail as ordinary decomposition. Internal pressure forces blood out of the nose and mouth, the nails drop away to expose the nail bed, the outer skin slips to reveal a redder layer, and air pushed past the glottis by a stake sounds like a groan.[3] The villagers could not know this.

A body with blood on its lips had to have got the blood from somewhere, and Peter Plogojowitz’s chronicler reports that he saw fresh blood in the mouth, which “according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him.”[4] On Barber’s account, vampire lore is “an elaborate folk-hypothesis” for unexplained deaths and for what happens to a body after burial.[5]

The blood-sucking is the feature that we want to discuss here, and it is the least reported part of the folklore. Many folkloric vampires do not drink blood at all. Bulgarian vampires feed in an invisible form while the body stays in the grave, and Vukanovic’s detailed study of Roma vampire beliefs in Serbia never mentions blood-sucking. Barber treats the habit as a folk explanation for two unrelated phenomena, unexplained deaths and blood at the mouth of a corpse.[6] Nothing in his account connects that corpse to Jews.

Where the blood came from

The medieval charge started as an accusation of crucifixion. In 1144 a boy named William disappeared at Norwich near Easter, his family blamed the Jews, and five years later the monk Thomas of Monmouth arrived and began the book that argued for William’s sainthood.[7] Thomas’s account says William was seized “to be mocked and put to death by the Jews in scorn of the Lord’s passion.”[8] His informant, a convert named Theobald, claimed that the Jews had to sacrifice a Christian every year in contempt of Christ.[9] That is a ritual murder charge. It does not yet say that Jews need blood. Gavin Langmuir separates ritual murder from the blood libel proper, and Israel Yuval notes that on that distinction the accusation at Fulda in 1235 is the first to claim that Jews needed Christian blood, though ritual murder charges were already widespread in Germany in the twelfth century.[10] Jewish law forbids the consumption of blood, which makes the charge absurd on its face, as Robinson notes, but absurdity did not slow it.[11]

Hillel Kieval, as David Biale summarizes him, counts well over one hundred ritual murder accusations against Jews between the early 1880s and the Beilis trial of 1911 to 1913, where the whole period from the twelfth to the eighteenth century produced at most scores.[12] Sara Libby Robinson dates the new wave to 1763 and its real spike to the accusation at Tiszaeszlár, Hungary, in 1882.[13] Dracula appeared in 1897, in the middle of that spike. Robinson adds in a note that Eastern Europe was the main site of modern vampire folklore and also the place most Jewish immigrants of the period came from, so “it was easy for the discourses to become intertwined.”[13] That is her inference and not a documented link.

Two features of the literary vampire are now in place. One is the blood, which folklore explained as a corpse’s decay and which the nineteenth century had learned to associate with an accusation against Jews. The other is a habit that connects them, the use of the vampire as a political figure.

The vampire goes to Parliament

Between about 1870 and 1914 the vampire was a figure of political speech in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, and not only a character in horror stories. Sara Libby Robinson shows that capitalists were called vampires, and so were the anarchists who attacked capitalism, the immigrants who changed the economy and the meaning of citizenship, and the women who sought emancipation.[14] The metaphor gravitated to each country’s internal Others, the groups people met in daily life and feared most.[14] Members of Parliament used it in debate, judges in their summations, ministers in sermons, and editors in lead articles.[15]

Jews, a constant Other, were also a target of this accusation. In the late 1870s a German rabbi warned the banker Gershon Bleichröder to stay very modest in public, because non-Jews so often talked about “Israelite bloodsuckers and usurers.”[16]

Novels turned the insult into a monster. In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), the crooked financier Augustus Melmotte is said to have been “fed with the blood of widows and children.” Robinson reads him as both a vampire and a Jew who practices ritual murder, though he points out that Trollope never says outright that Melmotte is Jewish.[17] In Guy de Charnacé’s Le Baron Vampire (1885), a peddler from Bohemia named Rebb Schmoul rises to become a Paris financier. He is “attracted by the smell of corpses” that financial panics give off, and the book ends with him selling supplies to both sides in a war.[17][18] Zola’s L’Argent is more complicated. A character named Saccard, who hates Jews, accuses the banker Gundermann (Zola’s version of the head of the French Rothschilds) of sucking the blood of nations. But Saccard turns out to be the novel’s real bloodsucker.[19]

None of this is Dracula, but they inform how a reader at that time would have understood Dracula. Robinson points out that the Count’s first action in the book is to mark the sites of buried treasure so that he can dig it up at his leisure, and she treats him as a character who evokes these economic debates.[20]

Dracula and the Jewish body

Literary critics have read the novel against that background since 1991, The first to do so was Jules Zanger, in his essay “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews” (1991) is the earliest of the readings below. Robinson summarizes it as showing that Dracula embodies Britain’s anti-Semitic anxieties.[21] Zanger also argues that before Stoker, vampire lore was a diffuse, heterogeneous mix, and that Stoker recast it within a clear Christian framework.[21]

Judith Halberstam, who writes from literary and cultural theory and not from the history of antisemitism, calls the result “Gothic anti-Semitism.” She lists the ways Dracula resembles the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse: his appearance, his relation to money and gold, his parasitism, his degeneracy, his lack of allegiance to a fatherland, and his femininity.[22] She compares the vampire’s anatomy to anti-Semitic studies of Jewish physiognomy, with its peculiar nose, pointed ears, sharp teeth, and claw-like hands.[23] Matthew Biberman adds the blood libel. When Jonathan Harker hears “a low wail, as of a half-smothered child” after Dracula throws a bag to the female vampires, Biberman reads a direct echo of the blood libel as it circulated in Victorian England in ballads such as “The Jew’s Daughter.” He notes that Lucy, once transformed, stalks small children, a choice at odds with Dracula’s pattern of hunting adult women.[24] Biberman concludes that Dracula is “a fully modern version of the Jew-Devil.”[25]

The novel also contains one explicitly Jewish character. Hildesheim is a German Jew “of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep,” and he is the one identified person Dracula enlists to help him escape Britain. The heroes have to bribe him to get his aid. Robinson reads the episode as Stoker tapping the theme of Jewish dual loyalty.[26]

The Limits of the Stereotype

Halberstam says that if the vampire is related to the antisemite’s picture of the Jew, “it tells us nothing about Jews but everything about anti-Semitic discourse.” She does not claim Stoker deliberately turned a monster into a Jew. Her point is that hatred of outsiders borrows its images from many places.[27]

Biale sees “a family resemblance, if not more” between vampire stories and the blood libel. He says it may be a coincidence that Dracula appeared just as ritual murder accusations were at their peak. But both rest on the idea that people who threaten the nation do it by sucking its blood.[28]

Robinson argues that Dracula “was woven within an existing political tapestry, commenting on rather than shaping it,” and that the vampire stood in for capitalists, anarchists, immigrants, and women as well as Jews.[29] Maurice Hindle, in his Penguin introduction, admits the antisemitic elements but stresses that the Count stands for many outsiders.[30]

Part of the reason these images stuck to Jews so easily is that Jews had long been Christian Europe’s model outsider. Ivan Marcus says Jews and Christians “invented each other” in late antiquity, and that even after Jews were expelled from parts of Europe, the imagined Jew kept serving Christians as their “self-defining other.”[31] Sander Gilman argues that the Gospel’s negative image of the Jew became “the central referent for all definitions of difference in the West.”[32]

Not every historian accepts a single, permanent Other. Jonathan Elukin warns that making Jews “the Other” of medieval Europe “creates arbitrary categories that do not reflect medieval realities,” and he points to Paul Freedman’s observation that the Middle Ages despised many groups, among them Muslims, lepers, and heretics.[33] A chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies says that from the twelfth century the Jew “ceased to function as a unique ‘other’” because Jews now shared negative traits with those groups.[34] The better-supported claim is that Jews were the first and longest-lasting model of the outsider, and that other groups were later described with the same images.

That brings the post’s three lines together. In Barber’s account, the folkloric vampire has no connection to Jews. The accusation that Jews drained Christian blood was flaring up in Central and Eastern Europe as Stoker wrote. And by the 1880s, talk of bloodsucking was already a familiar way to attack Jewish financiers. None of this proves that Stoker meant the Count to be a Jew. It does explain why readers in 1897 had these images ready, and why critics still disagree about how deliberately Stoker used them.

The vampire in Jewish folklore

Joshua Trachtenberg observes that the Franco-German names of so many spirits were taken into Jewish folklore, among them the estrie, the broxa, the mare, and the werwolf, whose non-Jewish prototypes are easy to recognize. Some Jewish writers explained them as demons whose souls were created on the eve of Shababt and left without bodies when the hour ran out. Trachtenberg says the French, German, and Latin names become especially notable in the thirteenth century.[35]

Jewish demon lore goes back in time, The Talmud already talks about shedim, mazikim and Lilith, and Babylonian incantation bowls name them too. Elisheva Baumgarten notes that Jews in Germany and northern France also believed in demons and witches in the same manner as their Christian neighbors did, and Sefer Hasidim, the book of the German pietists, discusses werewolves and streyas, or witches, who are often associated with women.[36] Its stories give these figures German names, such as the female demon Striga and the werewolf, so the old Jewish category took in local European creatures.[37] One story attributed to Judah he-Hasid describes a sick woman, a stria, who lets down her hair, flies, and sucks the blood of a sleeping woman. If she could kill her she would live, and since she cannot she dies, “for she needs that which can be found in blood.”[38] Rachel Elior and Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel conclude that the pietists wrote, under Germanic influence, about werewolves, witches, and many creatures absent from ancient Jewish literature.[38]

The creatures were shared property in the Middle Ages. What changed in the nineteenth century is who was said to be one.

Notes

1. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 16.

2. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, pp. 174 to 175, quoting the Visum et Repertum on Arnod Paole.

3. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, p. 175.

4. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, pp. 134 to 135.

5. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, p. 17.

6. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, p. 114.

7. Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 192 to 193.

8. Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), p. 158 [chapter author to confirm].

9. Rebecca Rist, Popes and Jews, 1095 to 1291 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 111.

10. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, p. 193 n. 71, discussing Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 268.

11. Sara Libby Robinson, Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors before World War I (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), p. 50.

12. David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 143 to 144, citing Hillel Kieval.

13. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, p. 57 and n. 58.

14. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, pp. 15, 22 to 23.

15. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, pp. 218 to 219.

16. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, pp. 113 to 114.

17. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, pp. 123 to 124 and n. 74.

18. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, p. 175.

19. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, pp. 124 to 125.

20. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, p. 125.

21. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, p. 24; Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), ch. 6, n. 60, citing Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” English Literature in Transition 34, no. 1 (1991): 33 to 44, at 36 to 37.

22. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 92, as quoted in Biberman, ch. 6.

23. Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 28.

24. Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature, ch. 6, quoting Bram Stoker, Dracula, p. 55.

25. Biberman, ch. 6.

26. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, pp. 179 to 180, quoting Stoker, Dracula, p. 413.

27. Halberstam, Skin Shows, pp. 105 to 106.

28. Biale, Blood and Belief, pp. 188 to 189.

29. Robinson, Blood Will Tell, pp. 15, 24 to 25.

30. Biberman, ch. 6, discussing Maurice Hindle’s introduction to the 1993 Penguin edition of Dracula, p. xi.

31. Ivan G. Marcus, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800 to 1500 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), ch. 8.

32. Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 34 to 35.

33. Jonathan M. Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), introduction, quoting Paul Freedman.

34. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 179 [chapter author to confirm].

35. Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (1939; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 60 to 61, 69 to 70.

36. Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 3.

37. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 980 [chapter author to confirm].

38. Rachel Elior and Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel, Unknown History of Jewish Women through the Ages (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), pp. 333 to 334, quoting Judah he-Hasid, Sefer Hasidim, no. 464 (Margaliot ed.).

A heresy with a Jewish name

Martin Le Franc wrote Le Champion des dames around 1440, while serving at the Council of Basel, and his text uses la synagogue for the sorcerers’ assembly.[2] He was not inventing the word. From the late fourteenth century, especially in the western Alps, Waldensians, the followers of Peter Waldo, were described as a sect that flew through the air to assemblies called synagogues, where they worshiped the devil in the form of a cat or another animal.[3] A Latin treatise on the Waldensians of Lyon, composed by the city’s Dominican inquisition in the late 1430s, says that in everyday speech the assembly was most commonly called la synagogue.[4] A copy made at Trier around 1470 adds that it was also called the Sabbath.[5]

Long before Le Franc, R. I. Moore has shown, heretics, Jews, and lepers had been treated as interchangeable in the Christian imagination, all of them tied to filth, sexual menace, and the devil’s work against Christian order.[6]

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A cat named Ketzer

The same association shows in a German folk etymology. Heretics were charged with worshiping Satan as a cat or a goat, and Germans traced Ketzer, “heretic,” to Kater, “tomcat.” Joshua Trachtenberg adds that the Middle High German ketzerie meant sorcery as well as heresy, and that vauderie, a word derived from the Waldensians, became a name for the witches’ Sabbath.[7]

Whose Sabbath?

Whether the witches’ sabbat takes its name from the Jewish Sabbath is an ongoing debate. Carlo Ginzburg calls the word’s etymology obscure, though he does not reject the link. Julio Caro Baroja and Norman Cohn commit to it, and Moshe Idel proposes a Jewish bridge, the tradition tying the Sabbath to the planet Saturn, to magic, and to the extra soul a Jew was believed to receive on that day.[8]

The Jew as witch

Christian artists had long marked Jews with a pointed hat, and Jews in the German lands wore it too. It first appeared on painted Jews in the eleventh century, and by about 1150 it was the sign by which a Jew was recognized.[9] According to Sara Lipton, it came to stand for a bundle of associations that included opposition to Christianity, fraud, unbelief, and diabolical connections.[10] In 1267 the Council of Vienna ordered Jews to wear a horned hat, the pileum cornutum.[11] Trachtenberg treats the next step as the completion of a transfer from heretics and witches to Jews, and describes pictures of Jews as sorcerers and witches, identified by the Jew badge and the tools of the trade, riding the animal that embodies their satanic master.[12]

A borrowed fear

Ginzburg’s account of how the fear was assembled runs through the lepers. In 1321 lepers in France were accused of poisoning wells, and the story soon shifted to the Jews as the entrepreneurs behind the plot. Trachtenberg records a Hebrew letter, “translated” by a convert, said to reveal a scheme by Jews, lepers, and the Saracens of Spain to destroy Christian Europe.[13] Ginzburg proposes that the fear passed from lepers to Jews, and then to the larger and vaguer category of witches.[14] Trachtenberg draws a related conclusion about sorcery. The accusations against Jews derived less from anything Jews did than from the general picture of the sorcerer that the Church’s campaign against sorcery and the later witch cults had painted.[15] The reputation itself was older. Jews were accused of magic in the Roman world, and from Origen on the Jew as sorcerer was a learned and popular motif, as Edward Peters notes.[16]

The cauldron

In 1510 Hans Baldung Grien cut a woodcut of three naked women around a cauldron, and the cauldron carries an inscription in pseudo-Hebraic script.[17] The cauldron had first become prominent in earlier Molitor woodcuts, which Baldung adapted, and a group of women around a cauldron became one of the dominant visual codes of witchcraft in the sixteenth century.[18] Baldung’s composition reached its widest audience in a woodcut for Johann Geiler’s Die Emeis, and a woodcut modeled on that one appeared on title pages in 1571, 1575, and 1583.[19]

What the picture shows

The women of 1451 are Waldensians, and the cauldron scene is Baldung’s version of an older image. Charles Zika doubts that the fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Waldensian witch were critical to the later printed iconography, since they circulated only in manuscript, though the figure of the witch riding an animal or implement through the sky survives from them.[20]

What passed between hated groups was a shared vocabulary: the synagogue, the Sabbath, the cat and the goat, the poison. The witch took her signs of belonging to a hated sect from the Jews: her gathering was named for their house of worship, and in 1421 the Buda code sent a convicted sorcerer through the streets in a peaked Jew’s hat.[21] On Trachtenberg’s reading, the Jew received being associated with the devil in return, the horns, the tail, and the goat that the heretic and the witch had worn first.

Notes

1. Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 77 to 79 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12476, fol. 105v).

2. Zika, Appearance of Witchcraft, pp. 77, 78 to 79.

3. Zika, Appearance of Witchcraft, pp. 73 to 74.

4. Zika, Appearance of Witchcraft, pp. 78 to 79, who dates the treatise to 1460. Martine Ostorero, in The Routledge History of Witchcraft, ed. Johannes Dillinger (London: Routledge, 2020), p. 77, dates its composition to the late 1430s and attributes it to the Dominican inquisition at Lyon, with the case at Arras around 1460 giving the treatise its name.

5. Ostorero, in Routledge History of Witchcraft, p. 77 (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 613).

6. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950 to 1250, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 73 to 75.

7. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (1943; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), ch. 14.

8. Moshe Idel, Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 55 to 56.

9. Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), ch. 1.

10. Flora Cassen, Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 58, citing Lipton.

11. Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, ch. 3.

12. Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, ch. 15.

13. Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, ch. 7.

14. Idel, Saturn’s Jews, p. 56, summarizing the argument of Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath.

15. Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (1939; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 41.

16. Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), p. 33.

17. Zika, Appearance of Witchcraft, pp. 25 to 26.

18. Zika, Appearance of Witchcraft, pp. 31, 88.

19. Zika, Appearance of Witchcraft, pp. 85 to 87.

20. Zika, Appearance of Witchcraft, pp. 81 to 82.

21. Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, ch. 4 (Buda code of 1421), and ch. 15 on the transfer of horns, tail, and goat.

In 1545, a boy in the Galilean village of Safed began collapsing and uttering strange prophecies. Many rabbis were summoned to examine him, among them a man named Judah Hallewa, who wrote that he saw it with his own eyes.[2] The spirit inside the boy had a grievance. In its previous life it had lived inside a dog, and the boy’s father had killed the dog. It meant to kill his only son in exchange.[2]

The sage who took charge was Joseph Karo. He forced the spirit to speak by threatening it with excommunication, and it answered. It said it had been a dog, and before that an African, and before that a Christian, and before that a Jew. Karo asked whether it had ever put on tefillin. It said never. Karo told it there was no fixing it, recited the opening of the Aleinu prayer seven times forward and backward, and banned it from the Galilee. The boy recovered.[2]

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Karo and his contemporaries wrote of an evil spirit. The word dybbuk, a short form of a phrase meaning “cleaving of an evil spirit,” from a Hebrew root meaning “adhere,” came into common use only in late seventeenth-century Ashkenazic circles.[3]

Before Safed

Possession was not new to Jewish writers. David’s lyre relieved Saul of the evil spirit that terrified him.[4] Josephus says he watched a countryman named Eleazar draw a demon out of possessed men in front of Vespasian and his soldiers, using a ring with a root under the seal that Solomon had prescribed.[5] Josephus even defines demons as the spirits of wicked men.[5]

Then the stories nearly stop. The historian Jeffrey Chajes calls the accounts written by Safed’s rabbis the first narratives of spirit possession in Jewish literature in more than a thousand years.[6]

A town of exiles and graves

Safed was a small town in the Galilee that filled with refugees. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, Spanish Jews and their children settled across the Ottoman Empire, and the kabbalists among them reached Safed between the mid-1530s and the mid-1580s. Rachel Elior describes a town where Jews from the Muslim East and the Christian West were thrown together, a source of social tension and mystical excitement.[7]

Some of the people in the street had lived two lives. Safed held a significant number of conversos, Spanish Jews who had converted to Christianity under the threat of the Inquisition and kept living as Jews in secret. Lawrence Fine says they reminded the town how vulnerable Jews still were, and that they wanted to put their past behind them and live openly as Jews again.[8] He suggests that one reason for reviving rabbinic ordination in Safed was to let courts impose the punishments that would allow former conversos to atone fully for their past.[8]

The exiles also carried their dead. Elior argues that the bodies of many who died in the expulsion and the wanderings that followed were lost, and that survivors were left asking where those souls had gone. Belief in souls returning in new bodies was revived as consolation. In that scheme the souls of the wicked, left disembodied by their sins, could cling to a living person and speak through that person’s mouth as a dybbuk. Elior reads the exorcism as the community settling accounts with those who had offended against its sense of justice.[9]

And Safed lived beside its graves. Chajes calls it a city that lives with its dead. Its hills today hold some 20,000 graves, which begin a few steps beyond the houses of the living. In the sixteenth century Isaac Luria was said to see the souls of the dead hovering over graves like these.[10]

A town that watched

A spirit entered a poor widow of Safed, and she became a public attraction. Visitors came to put questions to it, and it told them their private troubles and wishes. The three surviving versions of her story disagree about what this meant. In two of them the spirit is a learned rabbinic student, and her gift is treated as normal. In the version the chronicler Joseph Sambari preserved, the visitors keep begging the spirit to leave her in peace so she can support herself and her children.[11]

In February 1571, a Safed scholar named Elijah Falcon, a student of Luria’s who had come from Turkey, wrote up a possession that began on the sixteenth of the month. Three other prominent rabbis of Safed, all eyewitnesses, signed his account, and “The Great Event in Safed” went out to the Diaspora as a broadsheet.[12]

The cases travel

By 1575 the phenomenon had reached Italy. Gedalia ibn Yahya, an Italian loan-banker, historian, and talmudist, described a possessed woman in Ferrara in his Chain of Tradition, printed in Venice in 1586, and mentioned a case of multiple possession in Ancona. He called possession by a disembodied soul one of the wonders of the age, and a strange one.[13] Cases followed in Pesaro, Venice, Damascus, Prague, Cairo, Tetuan, and Turin.[14]

Eliezer Ashkenazi (1513 to 1586) wrote in 1583, in his Ma’asei ha-Shem, that he had first learned of such cases only in 1579 or 1580, when a broadsheet from Safed reached him, perhaps by way of Venice.[15]

Whether Safed was the true starting point is unsettled. Joshua Trachtenberg points to an Ashkenazic tale in the Sefer Ma’aseh, first printed in 1602, in which a sinner’s spirit flees a cow about to be slaughtered and enters a young man. He thinks this story is older than the spread of Luria’s teachings, though he does not date it.[16] Chajes notes that Sambari’s version of the Ma’aseh Book narrative is set in Safed.[16] Chajes treats Karo’s 1545 case as the first known possession narrative.[1]

Jews were not alone. The nuns of Wertet in Brabant were possessed in large numbers in 1550.[14] Possession was not a crime, so there are no court records to count, but historians see a marked rise from the mid-sixteenth century.[17] They tie it to a growing demonization of the world and, in Catholic lands, to the use of exorcism as public theater against Protestants.[17] Chajes argues that Jews, even as they answered their own crisis, shared those broad currents, and that no single cause explains the dybbuk.[18]

Who was possessed

Women, mostly. Of seventy-five cases in the dybbuk narratives and exorcism reports, forty-nine involved women, in a count Elior takes from Gedalyah Nigal. Many of the women were young and recently married, and the usual pattern was a male spirit in a female body.[19]

Elior calls the dybbuk an escape from marriages imposed against a woman’s will, a resistance expressed through loss of control over the mind and body.[20] We don’t have accounts from history of women saying that explicitly but Elior sees this as the motivation based on social structures that limited women.

The spirits tell their own story. In the stories, nearly all had rejected the community’s authority in life or committed its gravest offenses: bloodshed, incest, adultery, idolatry.[21] They also talked about the Christian world, with attraction and repulsion, and about forbidden desires. Elior says those confessions may echo real events, real fears, or the suppressed impulses of the victim, the spirit, or the exorcist.[21]

Not every possession ended in an exorcism. Chajes identifies a circle of clairvoyant women in Safed, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Among them was a possessed girl who, once exorcised, mastered her spirits and served her community as an oracle.[22]

Possession without a hunt

Safed’s rabbis took some of these women seriously. The girl who became an oracle lived in Damascus in 1609, and Hayyim Vital gave her possession and later career seven pages of his diary in the early . He also noted that a pious woman named Francesca Sarah saw visions and that most of her pronouncements came true.[23] In Christian Europe, women with similar manifestations were often condemned as witches, according to a recent history of Jewish women.[24] Chajes adds that historians link the rise of the malevolent witch in the late Middle Ages to a retreat from valuing women’s embodied spirituality, so that women who might once have been praised as prophets and healers were accused of witchcraft or diagnosed as possessed.[25] Church law, citing Exodus 22:17, made witchcraft a crime punishable by torture and burning, and manuals like the Malleus Maleficarum treated possession as Satan’s work.[26]

Jewish communities did believe in witches. The Scroll of Ahimaaz, from eleventh-century southern Italy, tells of witches who preyed on children, and pietistic sources from medieval Ashkenaz describe cannibalistic witches and report vigilante-style executions of them.[27] But Chajes says there could be no witch-hunt within Jewish society, because Jews lacked the judicial autonomy to run one.[25] Elior adds that Satan is a marginal figure in the dybbuk stories, and that the dybbuk was no concern of criminal law.[28]

Notes

1. Jeffrey H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 28 to 29, 36 to 37. Chajes calls the Karo exorcism the first known possession narrative in early modern Jewish sources, a finding he credits to Moshe Idel.

2. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 36 to 37 and 141 to 142 (Hallewa’s account in translation, dated 5305, or 1545). Chajes dates the case to the early 1540s on p. 1; Hallewa’s own dating and Rachel Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore, trans. Joel Linsider (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2008), p. 100, both give 1545. The words Karo recites in Chajes’s translation, “It is incumbent upon us to praise,” open the Aleinu prayer.

3. Chajes, Between Worlds, p. 13 (Vital on the ghost, ruah ra’ah) and p. 181 n. 2 (the term dybbuk, citing Gershom Scholem, “’Golem’ and ‘Dibbuk’ in the Hebrew Lexicon,” Leshonenu 6 (1934)); Fine, Physician of the Soul, notes to pp. 166 to 172, n. 34; Martin Goodman, A History of Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), ch. 15.

4. 1 Samuel 16:14 to 23, in Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

5. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 8.44 to 49, quoted in Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007), ch. 6; Josephus, Jewish War 7.185.

6. Chajes, Between Worlds, p. 35.

7. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, p. 47.

8. Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), in the section on pre-Lurianic Safed.

9. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, pp. 76 and 95.

10. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 32 to 33.

11. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 47 to 48.

12. Chajes, Between Worlds, p. 37 and pp. 198 to 199 n. 28.

13. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 2 to 3, 35 to 36, 181 to 182 n. 9. Chajes refers to “the 1575 Ferrara case” (pp. 2 to 3) and says ibn Yahya’s book recounts his own experience with a possessed woman in Ferrara (pp. 35 to 36); he does not say outright that these are the same case. Ibn Yahya’s dates, 1515 to 1587, and his occupations are in n. 9.

14. Chajes, Between Worlds, p. 1.

15. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 3 and 37.

16. Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (1939; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), ch. 3. On Sambari’s version of the story as a Safed case, see Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 35 to 36, and p. 150 for the text in translation.

17. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 5 to 6, citing H. C. Erik Midelfort and D. P. Walker.

18. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 30 to 31.

19. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, p. 73 n. 27, citing Gedalyah Nigal, Sippurei dibbuk be-sifrut Yisrael, p. 35.

20. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, p. 57.

21. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, pp. 86 to 89.

22. Chajes, Between Worlds, p. 10.

23. Chajes, Between Worlds, pp. 102 to 104.

24. Rebecca Lynn Winer, Federica Francesconi, and Rachel Adelman, Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021), chapter on Jewish women and gender in Iberia (Sepharad) and beyond.

25. Chajes, Between Worlds, p. 5.

26. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, pp. 82 to 85.

27. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, p. 85; Chajes, Between Worlds, p. 5.

28. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women, pp. 84 to 85.

The book is scheduled for release on October 6, 2026. Its thesis is that a single female monster, born as the Mesopotamian demoness Lamashtu, has survived for four thousand years under different names, and that Western patriarchy created and sustained her as a tool for the oppression of women.¹ The argument goes through Greek Lamia, Jewish Lilith, the early modern witch, the Romantic vampiress, the psychoanalytic patient, and finally the heroines of modern horror movies.

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I have read only the introduction, so this post stops there since Princeton has released it as a preview. However, this still gives us enough to see what the author claims she will prove and how, and it is fair to test those claims against the specialist literature before the chapters are available. Where the chapters may resolve a problem the introduction raises, I say so.

The reason for the post here is the book’s reach into Jewish material. Lilith is one of the three named avatars on which the whole genealogy depends, and the introduction makes explicit claims about the Hebrew Bible, the Babylonian Talmud, and Kabbalah. Those claims can be checked, and several of them do not hold. More broadly, the book is a clear case of a problem this publication keeps returning to: a confident, sweeping claim whose sourcing does not support its confidence.

Johnson is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia. Her previous books concern Middle English literature and theology and, most recently, American horror film and feminism.² The film chapters are her home ground, and nothing here should be read as a judgment on them. The questions below concern the ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and rabbinic material where the book lays its foundation.

The argument as Johnson states it

Johnson defines the Monstrous Bitch by three primary traits and one secondary one (pp. 3-4). She is sexually predatory. She tampers with reproduction, with a special taste for killing and consuming infants. She opposes the patriarchal order through her utterance, whether by spell, curse, or invective. She also has bestial aspects, above all doglike ones, which Johnson traces to Mesopotamian depictions of female monsters with canine heads and offers as the reason the English word “bitch” carries its force (p. 2).

Three further commitments shape the argument.

First, the figure is singular. The names change, but they are “often lexical variations on one single original name” (p. 3), and the introduction’s closing formulation names “one archetypal Monstrous Bitch” across four millennia (p. 9).

Second, the history follows a model of biological evolution. Culture evolves slowly, Johnson argues, until a “point mutation” forces rapid change (p. 1). Her mutations are the coalescence of Mesopotamian and Greek patriarchy, the rise of Rome, Christianity, the Scientific Revolution, psychoanalysis, and feminism (p. 2). Through all of them, the figure is said never to change “its most basic genetic makeup” (p. 9).

Third, the cause is Patriarchy, capitalized throughout the book “to highlight that Patriarchy functions as an agential being” (p. 3). The Monstrous Bitch is Patriarchy’s embodiment of what it most fears in women: their sexuality, their reproductive power, and their voice (p. 5).

The introduction clearly states its present-day stakes. It opens with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (p. 1), names Jordan Peterson’s account of female “chaos” as its foil (p. 5). It describes the present as “these Waning Days of Women’s Liberation” (p. 10). Political motivation does not by itself invalidate a historical argument. It does raise the burden on the evidence, because the introduction announces the conclusion for four thousand years before presenting any of the cases.

What holds: Lamashtu’s traits in the Aramaic bowls

The strongest part of Johnson’s genealogy is also its most important link for Jewish history, and it deserves credit before the problems. Lamashtu’s characteristics clearly carry over into the Jewish Lilith, and the specialist literature says so plainly.

James Nathan Ford’s study of wordplay in the Lamashtu incantations offers a precise example. An Old Assyrian incantation describes Lamashtu with disordered hair and her hip covering torn off. Ford shows the same image surviving, more than two thousand years later, in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls addressed to liliths, who are stripped naked with hair cast behind their backs. He calls Lilith Lamashtu’s “descendant.”³ Marc Brettler, surveying women’s ritual in the ancient Near East, states the same conclusion in a sentence: Lamashtu reappears in post-biblical Jewish tradition as Lilith.⁴ Carole Fontaine’s entry in Women in Scripture holds that Lilith had absorbed Lamashtu’s traits by the biblical period.⁵

The transmission is material, not only literary. Lamashtu amulets, about seventy of them, mostly from the first millennium BCE, are found from Syria-Palestine to Susa, including one from Bet Guvrin in the Judean Shephelah.⁶ The bowls themselves were produced in Sasanian Mesopotamia in the same region where Lamashtu incantations had been circulated for millennia.

So Johnson’s central continuity is not invented. The question is what kind of continuity it is, and whether it can carry the weight the introduction places on it.

One name or many

Johnson’s claim that the monster’s names are “lexical variations on one single original name” is where the argument first does not align with the evidence. The three central names have separate origins.

Lamashtu is Akkadian. Her Sumerian name, Dimme, originally referred to a class of demons, and Karel van der Toorn notes that Mesopotamian scholars later reworked popular traditions into the doctrine of a single figure with a distinct personality.⁷ The unified Lamashtu is itself a scholarly construction within Mesopotamian religion.

Lilith derives from Akkadian lilītu, a class of female demons, and ultimately from Sumerian lil, “wind.” The older derivation from Hebrew laylah, “night,” is now regarded as a folk etymology.⁸ The lilû and lilītu demons are a different family from Lamashtu, and a possible third-millennium reference places a lilītu figure in the Sumerian poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld. Lilith did not grow out of Lamashtu’s name. She was a distinct demon who absorbed Lamashtu’s functions.

Lamia is Greek. Scholars such as Walter Burkert have argued seriously for Near Eastern influence on Greek child-killing demons, and the resemblance between Lamia and Lamashtu is part of that discussion. It is still a hypothesis of influence, not an established derivation.

The distinction matters because it separates two historical models. Johnson’s model is descent: one being, renaming herself as she migrates. The evidence supports convergence: several demon traditions, originally separate, borrowing traits from one another throughout centuries of contact. Convergence fits the bowls and amulets. It is not compatible with a single entity whose “basic genetic makeup” never changes, because under convergence there is no original organism to preserve.

The dog

Johnson is right that Lamashtu could be dog-headed. Van der Toorn cites an Old Babylonian incantation which gives her the head of a dog and the teeth of a donkey, and notes that Bronze Age amulets show her with the head of a dog, a bird of prey, or a lion. In the first-millennium series, a black dog accompanies her.⁹ Iron Age plaques more often show her lion-headed, suckling a dog and a pig.¹⁰

The introduction omits that animal features, including dogs, generally belonged to Mesopotamian demons, and most of those demons were not female. A third-millennium spell calls the demon Samana “the savage dog of Enlil” and a “divine dog with gaping maw.” Van der Toorn stresses that most demons in the standard lists were male or explicitly genderless, and that Lamashtu is the exception.¹¹ Pazuzu, the male demon whose image was hung on amulets to drive Lamashtu away, is himself called a “running dog” in his own inscriptions.¹² In Mesopotamia the dog marked the demonic, not the feminine. The link to the English word “bitch” is a modern coincidence of vocabulary, not a four-thousand-year inheritance.

The Jewish material

The introduction compresses Lilith’s Jewish history into one sentence (pp. 4-5). Lamashtu, it says, appears in the Jewish tradition as far back as “the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible,” most notably Isaiah, then reappears “in supercharged form in the Babylonian Talmud and Kabbalistic traditions of Late Antiquity,” continuing into the Middle Ages. Almost every element of that sentence needs correction.

Start with the Hebrew Bible. Lilith appears once in the entire Hebrew Bible, at Isaiah 34:14. The verse is part of an oracle against Edom, which will become a desolate waste inhabited by wild animals and demons, and the lilīt is one creature among them.¹³ Nothing in the verse concerns infants, sexuality, or speech. Isaiah is not the most notable among a plurality of prophetic books. Van der Toorn’s point about Lamashtu is apt here: like Lilith in Isaiah, she keeps company with undomesticated animals.¹⁴ The shared trait in the biblical text is the wilderness, not the triad Johnson builds her argument on.

The Babylonian Talmud mentions Lilith in a handful of passages: Eruvin 100b, Niddah 24b, Shabbat 151b, and Bava Batra 73a.¹⁵ They describe a demon with long hair and wings, warn a man against sleeping alone in a house, and discuss a miscarried fetus with Lilith’s form. These are brief, scattered references in legal and aggadic discussion. “Supercharged” is not a fair description.

The richest late antique evidence is not the Talmud, but the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic bowls of the late Sasanian and early Islamic periods, roughly the fifth to eighth centuries CE. Here the bowls do support Johnson on at least one trait. One Schøyen bowl, a writ of divorce against a lilith named Zanay, calls her a “fornicating singing-girl” who kills her own children and those of her companions.¹⁶ That is close to her profile, and the chapters should use it. But the introduction files the bowls under “the earliest periods in Mesopotamia” (p. 11), alongside the Lamashtu amulets, conflating evidence separated by more than two thousand years.

The tale that makes Lilith Adam’s first wife, who refuses to lie beneath him, flees, and becomes a killer of newborns, is not late antique. It first appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a Babylonian work variously dated between the eighth and early tenth centuries: Rebecca Lesses calls it eighth-century, and Shalom Sabar places it in the late ninth or early tenth.¹⁷ Mika Ahuvia places it among later medieval midrashim.¹⁸ Sabar also observes that the story appears designed to justify childbirth amulets, which bears on the question of function discussed below.

Finally, there are no “Kabbalistic traditions of Late Antiquity.” Kabbalah emerges in Provence and Catalonia in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the Zohar dates to the late thirteenth. Lilith’s development as Samael’s consort in Castilian Kabbalah belongs to that period. The late antique Jewish material is rabbinic and magical, not kabbalistic.

The introduction’s sequence (biblical, then Talmudic and kabbalistic in late antiquity, then medieval) suggests that Lilith’s full profile existed early and then persisted. The evidence shows the reverse. The profile assembles gradually: a wilderness demon in one verse, a winged and long-haired figure in a few Talmudic asides, a child-killer in the bowls, and a rebellious first wife only between the eighth and tenth centuries. That is exactly the kind of buildup an evolutionary model should see, and a single-archetype model misses.

Tiamat and the first mutation

The introduction’s first “point mutation” is a Mesopotamian patriarchal consolidation. Johnson places it “toward the end of the Old Period,” which she dates from about 2300 to 1800 BCE, and marks it by “a new religious tradition” centered on the slaying of Tiamat (p. 4). That is Marduk’s killing of the primordial salt-water goddess in the Enuma Elish.

“Old Period” is not a standard term in Assyriology, and 2300 to 1800 BCE runs across the Akkad, Ur III, Isin-Larsa, and early Old Babylonian periods without separating them.

Early twentieth-century scholars, excited by the rediscovery of Hammurabi’s Babylon, dated Enuma Elish to the Old Babylonian period. Scholars have since generally rejected that dating, although no single alternative has won agreement. W. G. Lambert, whose edition is now standard, found that Marduk was an unimportant god under the First Dynasty of Babylon, and that his kingship over the gods is first asserted in official documents under Nebuchadnezzar I, who reigned from 1125 to 1104 BCE. The only earlier hint is a personal name from about 1250 BCE, “Marduk-is-king-of-the-gods.” Lambert therefore placed the epic in Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, while W. Sommerfeld argued for a somewhat earlier, late Kassite date.¹⁹ Tzvi Abusch is not yet persuaded by Lambert, but notes that the proposals now cluster in the second half of the second millennium. A minority view, going back to J. van Dijk in the 1960s, adduced evidence for Marduk’s exaltation in the late Old Babylonian period, as Jeffrey Tigay reports.²⁰ Johnson’s date is therefore not impossible, but it rests on a position the field has largely abandoned, and the introduction does not signal that the dating is disputed.

The standard reading of Enuma Elish is political theology: Marduk’s elevation tracks the rise of Babylon, and the myth was recited at the Akitu festival to proclaim his kingship. Tiamat is a cosmic mother whose defeat makes creation possible. One can argue that the myth also encodes gender hierarchy, and Tiamat threatens her own divine descendants and takes Qingu as consort, so she is not a poor fit for Johnson’s traits. But the reading of Tiamat’s death as the moment patriarchy “snaps into focus” (p. 4) descends from Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) and the goddess-centered historiography of the 1970s and 1980s. Assyriologists and historians of religion have heavily criticized that framework, and the introduction adopts it without acknowledging the debate.

The chapter on Mesopotamia may handle this better than the introduction does. As stated, though, the first mutation rests on an outdated date and a contested interpretation.

Where the Jewish evidence helps Johnson

On one point, the Jewish sources give Johnson better evidence than her introduction uses, and she should lay it out before going further.

Rabbinic literature genders sorcery as female, and does so repeatedly. Tal Ilan collects the material. The Babylonian Talmud says that most women are given to sorcery (b. Eruvin 64b, with parallels at y. Sanhedrin 7:19 and b. Sanhedrin 67a). Old women are suspected as a class (b. Sanhedrin 100b). Two women sitting on either side of a road are “certainly” engaged in magic (b. Pesahim 111a). The witches of Babylonia even have a chief with whom the rabbis negotiate (b. Pesahim 110a). The Mishnah’s maxim, attributed to Hillel, is blunt: the more women, the more witchcraft (m. Avot 2:7). And there is a Jewish witch hunt. The Mishnah reports that Shimon ben Shetah hanged eighty women in Ashkelon (m. Sanhedrin 6:4), and the Jerusalem Talmud identifies them as witches. Ilan probably dates the episode to the reign of Shelamzion Alexandra, 76 to 67 BCE, and argues for a historical kernel.²¹ The introduction’s account of the witch moves from Greece and Rome to the Christian late Middle Ages, when witches “really come into focus” (p. 6). A rabbinic tradition of executing women as witches, some seventeen centuries before the European trials, is evidence that it does not mention and could use.

But the scholars who have studied this material do not read it as she reads her sources. Ilan argues that the rabbinic accusations should be neither accepted as true nor dismissed as false. They are better understood as a male, unsympathetic interpretation of women’s religious practice and skilled labor, much of it midwifery and healing. She also notes that of the forty-two Jewish amulets she reviewed, twenty-six were written for women, and that amulets identify clients by their mothers’ names.²² The rabbinic anxiety is real, and so is the women’s practice it misdescribes.

Kimberly Stratton's Naming the Witch shares Johnson's premise that the female witch is an ideological construct rather than a report on real women, and Stratton says plainly that these stereotypes still serve to demonize assertive women. But she distinguishes a stereotype, which persists for centuries as a loose and often contradictory aggregate of images, from a representation, the local deployment of selected parts of that stereotype for local purposes. The distinction explains what a single archetype cannot, such as why Roman literature makes its sorceresses old women while Greek literature makes them young. Stratton also points to a gap in Johnson’s trait list. Literature overwhelmingly made the witch a woman, but the material evidence of curse tablets shows that about 86 percent of erotic binding spells were performed by or on behalf of men.²³

Applied to the rabbis, Stratton’s approach produces a conclusion that fits neither Johnson’s model nor its simple negation. Palestinian sources tend to denounce women categorically for magic, while the Babylonian Talmud is more ambivalent, and even depicts some rabbis excelling at magic as a mark of authority. If there is a single rabbinic ideology of magic, Stratton suggests, it may be the association of women, food, and harmful magic, which she connects to rabbinic efforts to control women’s sexuality and reproduction, the very theme Johnson emphasizes. Yet she concludes that no single conception of magic obtains in rabbinic literature.²⁴ Rebecca Lesses, reading the Babylonian Talmud against the incantation bowls, finds the rabbinic texts more divided than their slogan suggests. The bowls show women as clients and, in first-person texts such as the one spoken by Komiš daughter of Mahlapta, possibly as practitioners, and they treat the lilith as the antitype of the proper wife and mother.²⁵

The sources contain a great deal of misogyny, much of it concerned with exactly the sexuality and reproduction Johnson describes. But the specialists who know them best find a durable stereotype deployed differently in each setting, alongside women who practiced and commissioned the rituals themselves. That is a different history from one archetype that never changes.

Who used the amulets?

The most serious gap in the introduction is not a date or an etymology. It is the absence of the explanation that specialists routinely give for these demons, which starts from the objects themselves.

Johnson says she will read the Mesopotamian material through “talismanic devices, such as bowls or amulets that regular people kept in their homes to ward off evil” (p. 11). That is the right evidence. Still it raises a question the introduction never asks: who commissioned these objects, and against what?

For the objects aimed at Lamashtu and Lilith, the answer is very often women, protecting pregnancies and infants.

• Carol Meyers places lamps and apotropaic jewelry against Lamashtu and Lilith within women’s household ritual culture, and notes that the Lamashtu charms from Ugarit protected women through pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation.²⁶

• Brettler suggests that the Lamashtu plaque from Bet Guvrin may have belonged as plausibly to a Judean woman as to an Assyrian soldier.²⁷

• The bowl against the lilith Zanay was written for a woman, Immi daughter of Qaqay, who commissioned several related bowls, probably from the same scribe.²⁸

• A Cairo Genizah amulet protects “Habibah bint Zuhra” against demons and liliths, male and female spirits, and the spirits that deform offspring in the womb. It threatens the demons with the rods of the four matriarchs, Bilhah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Leah.²⁹

• Peter Schäfer’s survey of medieval Jewish magical books found pregnancy the dominant theme: barrenness, the danger of losing the child, difficult labor, and death in the womb.³⁰

As a corpus, the incantation bowls served women and men for largely the same purposes. Lesses observes that bowls written for specifically female concerns, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and erotic desire, are a minority, and at Nippur Mika Ahuvia finds that about 60 percent of beneficiaries were male, a figure she reads as questioning the assumption that women were more prone to magic. Gideon Bohak adds that rabbinic literature itself shows magic practiced by men and women alike, and that accusations of magic commonly served, as anthropologists since Evans-Pritchard have shown, to explain misfortune that otherwise had no explanation.³¹

In a world of high perinatal mortality, Lamashtu and Lilith explained miscarriage, stillbirth, and the sudden deaths of infants, and gave women ritual means to act against them. On this reading, the child-killing demon is not primarily an expression of male fear of women’s reproductive agency. She is an etiology of reproductive catastrophe, and women were central actors in the protective ritual.

The gender of the demonic world also resists the introduction’s framing. The Genizah amulet addresses “lilis and liliths” and harmful spirits “male and female.” The bowls do the same. Pazuzu, Lamashtu’s chief adversary on the amulets, is a male demon of disease-bearing wind.³² Van der Toorn notes that most Mesopotamian demons were male or genderless.³³ A theory in which the monstrous female is the singular projection of patriarchal fear has to account for a demonology in which she is one threat among many, most of them not female.

None of this rules out gendered anxiety in these traditions. The Zanay bowl’s “fornicating singing-girl” is plainly gendered invective. The point is that a history of these figures must evaluate the apotropaic, medical, and household functions the objects themselves attest.

The metaphor that cannot fail

Johnson presents evolution as “a generally gradual and linear process” punctuated by “point mutations,” which she defines as spontaneous glitches that turn out to be adaptive (p. 1). A point mutation changes a single position in the genetic sequence. Most are neutral or harmful. They are the raw material of variation, not jumps in the tempo of change. What Johnson describes, long stability interrupted by rapid change, resembles Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium, which concerns the pattern of speciation. Evolution is also not linear in any sense biologists would accept.

The error would be cosmetic if the metaphor were decoration. It is not. By definition, the metaphor supplies the book’s continuity. Johnson calls her framework evolutionary, but a figure whose “basic genetic makeup” never changes (p. 9) is a fixed type, not an evolving lineage. Any change in the evidence then counts as a mutation of the same organism rather than as a sign of a different one. A Lilith who does not carry Lamashtu’s name, a lilit in Isaiah with none of the three defining traits, a vampire tradition built on dead men: each can be read as a variation on the same lineage rather than as evidence of a different one.

The capitalized, agential Patriarchy closes the remaining gap. When demonized women appear, Patriarchy produced them out of fear. When the figure becomes a heroine in modern horror, that is “the glitch of glitches” in which she escapes patriarchal control (p. 8). No observation is described that would count against the thesis. A historical claim that no evidence could disconfirm is not a finding. It is a lens, and a lens should be argued for as one, with its costs acknowledged.

The problem is not that ancient societies lacked male dominance; by most accounts they were patriarchal in the ordinary sense of male-headed households and male control of marriage. It is that Johnson treats Patriarchy as a single, universal agent. Carol Meyers has argued that this universal model is a legacy of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, which imagined societies passing from primitive matriarchy to civilized patriarchy, and that it obscures the real authority women held in household and ritual life. Not every specialist agrees, and Leo Perdue, for one, defends the term for ancient Israel, but the debate itself is something the introduction never acknowledges.

The alternative is not to deny continuity. It is to specify it. Which traits passed between which traditions, by what route, at what date, and with what documented change of function? The Ford parallel between the Old Assyrian Lamashtu and the Aramaic liliths answers those questions for one motif. That is the standard the rest of the genealogy should meet.

Smaller overreaches

Several further claims in the introduction are stated more strongly than the evidence allows. None is decisive on its own, but they share the pattern already described.

Johnson lists the Whore of Babylon among the medieval names of the Monstrous Bitch, “appropriately enough, considering Lamashtu’s original Mesopotamian origins” (p. 6). The figure in Revelation 17 is a political allegory, conventionally read as Rome, and it draws on the prophetic habit of personifying cities as women, as in Isaiah 47’s “Mistress Babylon.”³⁴ The connection to Lamashtu runs through the word “Babylon,” not through any documented transmission.

The introduction also claims that the vampire tradition is “traditionally female dominated” and “actually originated” with Lamia, Lilith, and Lamashtu (p. 7). Greek lamiai, empousai, and striges are recognized precursors of later blood-drinking monsters. But the modern vampire takes its name and shape from Balkan and Slavic revenant belief, and the eighteenth-century cases that made it famous in Western Europe, Peter Plogojowitz in 1725 and Arnold Paole in the 1720s and 1730s, concerned dead men. Johnson acknowledges that the most familiar vampires are male and answers by pushing the tradition back to Mesopotamia, but the introduction never shows how Lamia or Lilith reached an eighteenth-century Serbian village.

Finally, the introduction presents the witch hunts as the moment the Monstrous Bitch engulfed "untold tens of thousands of real, historical women" (p. 6). The figure is sound: of perhaps 50,000 people executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe, about four in five were women. But the proportions varied, and the accusations reached further than the executions. Raisa Maria Toivo summarizes current figures for the accused: women were usually 60 to 80 percent in Europe, while men were about 90 percent in Iceland, 70 percent in Normandy, 60 percent in Estonia, and about half in Finland. Many accusers and witnesses were women. A history of the witch as Patriarchy's instrument has to account for both. Whether chapter 5 does cannot be judged from the introduction.

Proportion

The table of contents shows where the book’s weight falls. The three chapters on antiquity cover roughly 2,500 years in 78 pages. The three chapters running from early Christianity to the Enlightenment cover about 1,700 years in 68 pages. The four film chapters, on roughly the last eighty years, get 94 pages, and a 24-page final chapter returns to Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia from Lamashtu to Tiamat gets a single 25-page chapter. No chapter is devoted to Lilith, whose Jewish history presumably falls within chapter 4 alongside early Christianity. The four-thousand-year claim rests on the book’s thinnest treatment.

Conclusion

The introduction to Monstrous Bitch promises a four-thousand-year history and delivers, at least in its opening pages, a four-thousand-year thesis. Its one well-supported link, the passage of Lamashtu’s traits into the Jewish Lilith, is real and important. Around it, the introduction builds a single archetype that the evidence does not show: names with separate origins treated as variants of one, a Jewish chronology that places medieval developments in late antiquity, a founding myth placed in a period most specialists have rejected, and a demonology whose household and medical functions go unmentioned.

The book may prove valuable as cultural criticism. As a history of Lamashtu, Lilith, and Lamia, the introduction warrants caution.

When the book is released, three things will show whether the chapters repair the introduction or compound it:

1. Does chapter 1 distinguish documented transmission (Lamashtu to Lilith in the bowls) from typological resemblance (Lamashtu and Lamia)?

2. Does chapter 4 correct the chronology of Lilith, placing the first-wife story in the Alphabet of Ben Sira and Lilith’s kabbalistic career in the thirteenth century?

3. Does the book engage the apotropaic function of the amulets and bowls, and the women who commissioned them?

Readers who want the Mesopotamian and Jewish material itself should start with the specialists: Walter Farber’s edition of the Lamashtu incantations, F. A. M. Wiggermann’s “Lamaštu, Daughter of Anu,” Shaked, Ford, and Bhayro’s Aramaic Bowl Spells, and Mika Ahuvia’s On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel. On the witch, Kimberly Stratton’s Naming the Witch and Tal Ilan’s work on women in rabbinic literature are the place to begin. A follow-up post will assess the full book after publication.

Notes

1. Eleanor Johnson, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026), 1–12, cited from the publisher’s preview. Page references in the text are to this introduction.

2. Princeton University Press author page for Monstrous Bitch.

3. James Nathan Ford, “Wordplay in the Lamaštu Incantations,” in Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul, ed. Chaim Cohen et al. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 588–89 n. 14, citing BIN 4 126 and Shaked’s edition of the bowl text.

4. Marc Zvi Brettler, “Women and Psalms,” in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 53 n. 110.

5. Carole R. Fontaine, “Lilith,” in Women in Scripture, ed. Carol Meyers, Toni Craven, and Ross Shepard Kraemer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).

6. Brettler, “Women and Psalms,” 53–54, citing Mordechai Cogan, “A Lamashtu Plaque from the Judaean Shephelah,” IEJ 45 (1995): 155–61.

7. Karel van der Toorn, “The Theology of Demons,” in God in Context: Selected Essays on Society and Religion in the Early Middle East (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 256–57, citing F. A. M. Wiggermann, “Lamaštu, Daughter of Anu.”

8. Eric Orlin, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions (New York: Routledge, 2015), s.v. “Lilith,” 542; Fontaine, “Lilith.”

9. Van der Toorn, “Theology of Demons,” 255–56, citing Walter Farber, Lamaštu: An Edition of the Canonical Series of Lamaštu Incantations and Rituals (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), 147, 283.

10. Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 79–80.

11. Van der Toorn, “Theology of Demons,” 255–57, citing Irving L. Finkel, “A Study in Scarlet: Incantations against Samana” (1998).

12. Keel, Symbolism, 79.

13. Isa 34:14; Fontaine, “Lilith”; Routledge Encyclopedia, s.v. “Lilith.”

14. Van der Toorn, “Theology of Demons,” 256.

15. Mika Ahuvia, On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), ch. 3 n. 97, citing b. Erub. 100b, b. Nid. 24b, b. Shabb. 151b, b. B. Bat. 73a; Manfred Hutter, “Lilith,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 520–21.

16. Shaul Shaked, James Nathan Ford, and Siam Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), JBA 50, 225–28.

17. Shalom Sabar, “Childbirth and Magic: Jewish Folklore and Material Culture,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002); Rebecca Lesses, “Exe(o)rcising Power: Women as Sorceresses, Exorcists, and Demonesses in Babylonian Jewish Society of Late Antiquity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 2 (2001): 357.

18. Ahuvia, On My Right Michael, ch. 3 n. 97, citing Eli Yassif, The Tales of Ben Sira in the Middle Ages.

19. W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 249, 442–43, citing W. Sommerfeld, Der Aufstieg Marduks (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982), 174–81.

20. Tzvi Abusch, in The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible, ed. Samuel E. Balentine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 2; Jeffrey H. Tigay, Literary-Critical Studies in the Gilgamesh Epic (PhD diss., Yale University, 1971), notes to ch. 3, citing J. van Dijk, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung 12 (1966–67): 57–74; Routledge Encyclopedia, s.v. “Enuma Elish,” 299.

21. Tal Ilan, “Gender and Women’s History in Rabbinic Literature,” in Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Federica Francesconi and Rebecca Lynn Winer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021), section on magic and witchcraft; m. Sanhedrin 6:4; y. Sanhedrin 6:9, 23c.

22. Ilan, “Gender and Women’s History,” same section.

23. Kimberly B. Stratton, Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 23–25.

24. Stratton, Naming the Witch, chapter “Caution in the Kosher Kitchen,” 146, 169.

25. Rebecca Lesses, “Exe(o)rcising Power: Women as Sorceresses, Exorcists, and Demonesses in Babylonian Jewish Society of Late Antiquity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 2 (2001): 343–75, esp. 346, 361–62, 369.

26. Carol Meyers, Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), ch. 5.

27. Brettler, “Women and Psalms,” 54.

28. Shaked, Ford, and Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells, 225–28.

29. Lawrence H. Schiffman and Michael D. Swartz, Hebrew and Aramaic Incantations from the Cairo Genizah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), 69–82, as quoted in Brettler, “Women and Psalms,” 52.

30. Peter Schäfer, “Jewish Magic Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages,” JJS 41 (1990): 88, as quoted in Brettler, “Women and Psalms,” 51–52.

31. Lesses, “Exe(o)rcising Power,” 346; Ahuvia, On My Right Michael, ch. 1; Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 392–93.

32. Keel, Symbolism, 79.

33. Van der Toorn, “Theology of Demons,” 257.

34. Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, “Mistress Babylon,” in Women in Scripture.

35. Raisa Maria Toivo, “Witchcraft and Gender,” in The Routledge History of Witchcraft, ed. Johannes Dillinger (London: Routledge, 2020), 219–21.

Further reading

• Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

• Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology, ed. T. J. M. Schopf (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1972).

• Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

• F. A. M. Wiggermann, “Lamaštu, Daughter of Anu: A Profile,” in Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, by M. Stol (Groningen: Styx, 2000).

In February 1912, the Palestine Office sent eight Yemenite Jewish families to the Kinneret training farm in the Galilee, part of the same recruitment effort Shmuel Yavne'eli, a World Zionist Organization emissary, had opened in Yemen the previous year to bring Jewish laborers into the moshavot. The plan had a gendered design from the outset: men were expected to provide cheap agricultural labor, women inexpensive domestic service.

By April the agricultural season had ended, and the farm’s agronomist-manager, Joel Golde, told the families they had to leave. What happened between that announcement and their departure in May is contested in the two surviving accounts. The farm’s nurse, Shoshana Blubstein, remembered the Ashkenazi workers as largely passive bystanders while the Yemenite families were removed. Moshe Smilansky, a planter who wrote his memoir after turning against the labor movement he had previously supported, described active maltreatment, with two mediators eventually pulling the families out for fear the hostility would turn to bloodshed.Gershon Shafir, working with both accounts alongside the contemporary press, concludes Smilansky's harsher version holds up better, pointing to the same pattern of exclusion recurring at other sites in the months around Kinneret. Smilansky's own attentiveness to Yemeni communities predates the Kinneret dispute: a census he conducted among Jaffa's Jews in 1905 documented Yemeni women already working as domestic servants there, years before any organized recruitment effort began.

A later group of Yemenite wage laborers lived at a separate moshava that also carried the Kinneret name, run by the Jewish Colonization Association rather than the Palestine Office, and it was this second group that was eventually resettled at Kfar Marmorek in 1930. Ben-Zion Israeli, a Second Aliya worker who tried to correct Smilansky's account in a 1953 essay, was not present for the original 1912 episode and conflated the two groups into one continuous story. The training farm expulsion and the 1930 resettlement are two different events, two different sets of families, eighteen years and a different sponsoring institution apart.

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Ein Hai and Degania

There were other instances of this besides the Kinneret episode. At Ein Hai, a private smallholding colony, Ashkenazi workers raised the same objections to a mixed settlement and then, according to Shafir, shifted the blame for the failure onto the World Zionist Organization. In April 1912, amid the Kinneret dispute, the Third Congress of the Federation of Agricultural Workers of the Galilee met at Sedjra. It resolved to set up a committee that would help Yemenite Jews improve their living conditions while working toward their “concentration mostly in the moshavot,” a resolution that reads as help offered in one hand and removal from the Galilee arranged with the other. When the Palestine Office tried again in 1914 to build Yemenite housing at Kinneret and Degania, the Committee for Yemenite Affairs, whose members besides the Palestine Office’s own representative were entirely drawn from the Ashkenazi workers’ parties, redirected the building program to Judea instead. The same argument surfaced a third time at Degania during the First World War, when a small minority of kibbutz members pushed to let Yemenite wageworkers take part in the kibbutz’s decision-making. They lost, and none of them stayed in the kibbutz movement afterward.

Once cheap Yemenite labor filled the moshavot’s demand for workers, the Second Aliya generation was freed to pursue the cooperative kibbutz model instead of remaining wage laborers themselves for life. Yemenite Jews, like the Arab laborers they were brought in to displace, became what Shafir calls an invisible link in the kibbutz’s own genealogy, structurally necessary to its emergence while excluded from the institution itself. The Yemenite workers’ own demands, recorded from their communities in Petach Tikva and elsewhere, were narrower than membership in that cooperative project: equal pay and a plot of land.

Wage discrimination in the moshavot

David Ben Gurion wrote in 1912 that the entry of Yemenite workers into the moshavot, then three years underway, held “the key for a radical solution of the question of Jewish labor.” The wage gap that recruitment produced shows up in the record. In 1920 a strike broke out at the Rishon Le-Zion winery, and Ahdut Ha’avoda, the Labor Party, led the negotiations with the winery’s management on behalf of the workforce. The settlement the negotiators reached gave Ashkenazi workers a larger pay increase than Yemeni and Sephardi workers at the same winery.

The Yemeni Union, 1923 to 1926

Yemenite immigrants had substantial numbers within the Yishuv by 1920, enough that political parties actively courted their votes ahead of that year’s elections for the first National Assembly. Avraham Tabib, writing a public appeal titled “Awaken Yemen” before the vote, described the competing pulls from secular Zionists, religious Zionists, and Yemenite lists of their own. Three Yemenite lists ran that year, from Jerusalem and Jaffa, and together won twenty of the assembly’s 314 seats. Many Yemenite immigrants voted directly for the Labor Parties instead, 136 of them in Rishon Le-Zion alone casting ballots for Ahdut Ha’avoda while asking that their votes be recorded as belonging to “the Yemeni Ahdut Ha’avoda,” a distinct bloc within the party rather than an undifferentiated part of it.

By 1923, after three years in the Histadrut, founded in 1920, Yemenite leaders concluded that working inside the existing Labor Parties was not enough. The Histadrut had not included them in decisions affecting their own interests, had not represented them adequately, and had in places actively marginalized them. The Yemeni Union’s founding convention met in Tel Aviv on February 7 and 8, 1923, at the Talmud Torah la-Temanim, led by Zecharia Glusqa, Avraham Tabib, and Shalom Cohen Haramati, who brought in Avraham Zarom, chairman of Jerusalem’s community committee and an active figure in the religious-Zionist ha-Mizrahi movement, to widen the coalition. The elected central committee took the name Merkaz Hit’ahdut Ha-Temanim, the Central Committee of the Yemeni Union.

In the 1925 elections for the second National Assembly, the Yemeni Union won 8.8% of the vote, a result strong enough to let it push into labor, housing, and education, territory the Histadrut had treated as its own exclusive domain. The Histadrut’s response, in 1926, was to found a competing body, the Yemeni Workers’ Club, later renamed in 1934 the Center for Yemeni Workers in Palestine, built specifically to hold the same constituency the Yemeni Union was drawing away.

Building a usable past

Having learned the mechanics of Zionist institutional politics from the inside, Yemeni Union leaders and other public figures of Yemeni origin worked to identify a Zionist background in their own community’s past, selecting and shaping elements of their history that would read as already aligned with the movement’s own story. They argued they needed no new ideology to replace “exilic” patterns of life with Zionist ones, because Yemeni Jews had always possessed these qualities on their own. Part of this effort required embracing, rather than merely enduring, the “natural laborers” framing which brought them to Palestine in the first place, turning which had begun as an outside characterization into a claimed qualification.

Two competing versions of Yemeni-Zionist history emerged from this effort. One held that Yemeni Jews had already lived lives of freedom, creativity, and labor before any Zionist pioneer arrived, needing no rescue or reform. The other adopted the standard Zionist narrative of exile and suffering and applied it directly to the Yemen experience, positioning the move to Palestine as redemption from hardship. Neither framing addressed the messianic and labor-driven causation actually documented for the 1881 and 1906 to 1914 waves. Both versions served the same purpose, giving Yemeni Jews a more central place in the movement’s own map of national feeling, even where they contradicted each other on the basic character of life in Yemen itself.

The “natural laborers” claim itself did not hold up especially well against the community’s actual background. Most Jews in Yemen lived in villages among agricultural tribes, and some were landowners, but Klorman notes they typically leased their land to Muslim tenants and shared the crop rather than farming it themselves, an occupational pattern closer to that of Eastern European Jews, roughly forty percent of whom worked in commerce with most of the rest in craft trades, than to the image of the supposed “instinctive agricultural laborer” the Zionist labor movement had established around them.

Conquest of labor, admitted failure

By 1924, fifteen years after the labor movement first began recruiting Yemenite workers into the moshavot specifically to conquer Jewish labor from the Arab workers who had been doing it, activists inside the Labor Parties acknowledged the project had not worked.

One internal assessment from that year states that the idea contained “no basis in reality.” Yemenite neighborhoods had grown up alongside several of the larger moshavot, but their effect on the actual arrangement of work inside them was, in the assessment’s own words, nearly undetectable. The entry of Yemenite Jews into the moshavot had not significantly changed how the work there was carried out, and the general impression, fifteen years into the project meant to solve exactly this problem, was that the labor was still, in large part, being performed by others.

Sources

• Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), for the Kinneret, Ein Hai, and Degania material, drawing on contemporary accounts in Haachdut and Hapoel Hatzair, the Central Zionist Archives, and the memoirs of Shoshana Blubstein and Moshe Smilansky

• Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman, Traditional Society in Transition: The Yemeni Jewish Experience (Brill, 2014), chapter 5, “Challenging the Zionist Enterprise and Ethos,” for the Rishon Le-Zion strike, the Yemeni Union’s founding and electoral results, the Histadrut’s response, and the community’s own historiographic self-fashioning

• Deborah Bernstein, The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Pre-State Israel (Praeger, 1987), for the gendered design of the 1911 recruitment plan and Smilansky's 1905 Jaffa census documenting Yemeni women's employment as domestic servants

Yemen did not experience the nineteenth-century transformations that remodeled Jewish life elsewhere in the Ottoman world. France had no capitulatory or colonial foothold in Yemen as it did in Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco, and without that leverage the Alliance Israélite Universelle could not simply install schools there as it had elsewhere. It was not for lack of interest. The Alliance corresponded with Sana’a’s community as early as 1872 and again from 1899, and in 1910 sent an actual representative, Yomtov Sémach, who reached Sana’a and won over its communal leaders. Each attempt ran aground on the region’s contested rule. The Ottomans held Sana’a and the towns from 1872, but Zaydi imams never fully accepted that, and Imam Yahya spent much of the 1900s in open revolt against Turkish authority. Each attempt also met resistance from Orthodox rabbis wary of secular education, the same suspicion the Alliance ran into in other communities. What Yemen got instead, briefly, was a Turkish government school under Ottoman sponsorship, run by the same Rabbi Yahya Qafih discussed below, which closed within a few years over an internal religious dispute rather than any failure on the Alliance’s part. The Jewish community that started leaving for Palestine in 1881 was still fully embedded in a traditional legal and social order.

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That order was set by the Zaydi dhimma pact, which in Yemen imposed distinguishing dress, side-locks, a ban on riding horses or building houses taller than a Muslim neighbor’s, and confinement to designated quarters, terms one scholar of Yemeni Islamic law summarizes as designed to abase and distinguish non-Muslims rather than merely tax them. Enforcement varied enormously by geography. In Sana’a and areas under direct imamic rule, enforcement was relatively consistent. In the tribal highlands, where most of the community actually lived, dhimma restrictions were something Jews and their Muslim neighbors both treated as negotiable against older tribal custom, and a Jew who settled within a tribe’s territory came under that tribe’s protection as a client, a relationship summarized in the tribal saying that whoever harmed a tribe’s Jew would answer for it in blood. Jews in these northern and eastern regions carried weapons alongside their Muslim neighbors and were valued for it.

The Zaydi statute, which Jewish sources call the Orphans Decree, obligated the state to raise as a Muslim any dhimmi child whose parents had both died while he was a minor. The decree lapsed under Ottoman administration from 1872 to 1918 and was revived under Imam Yahya after 1918. Families evaded it by marrying off children as young as seven or eight to establish they were no longer legally minors, or by smuggling orphans to relatives elsewhere in Yemen or across the border into British-administered Aden. Even the decree’s modern dating and issuing authority are not well established in the secondary literature, a gap that shows how much of this history still rests on informant testimony rather than documented legal record.

The 1679 Mawza expulsion

The community’s best-known catastrophe before the modern period was the 1679 to 1680 expulsion of Sana’a’s Jews to Mawza, a hot and unhealthy district on the Red Sea coast, under Imam al-Mahdi Ahmad. Shlomo Dov Goitein treats the expulsion as an unprovoked act of religious fanaticism, later reversed because the state discovered it could not function without Jewish artisans. The historian Ahmad Dallal has challenged that account, arguing that modern histories of Yemeni Jewry lean almost entirely on Jewish sources, chiefly the Sana’a coppersmith Hayyim Habshush, and largely overlook the Muslim legal and historical literature on the community’s status. Dallal reads the Muslim jurist al-Maqbali, who was defending the legal basis for expelling non-Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula, as reporting in passing that Yemen’s Jews had grown certain they were about to “establish a state,” language he glosses as a reference to the appearance of a false messiah among them. If Maqbali’s account is accurate, the Mawza expulsion was not simply an arbitrary act of persecution but a state responding, however brutally, to a Jewish messianic movement it read as a political threat. This would place Yemen’s community squarely inside the wider Sabbatean upheaval of the 1660s and 1670s, whose aftershocks reached Jewish communities from Poland to Yemen well after Shabbetai Tzvi’s own conversion to Islam in 1666.

Steven Wasserstrom’s work, cited by Dallal, argues for the long survival in Yemen of doctrines descended from the eighth-century Isawiyya movement founded around Abu Isa al-Isfahani, sometimes described as the first Jewish claimant to a Mahdi-like role, whose adherents held that Jesus and Muhammad were each true prophets to their own peoples. Whether or not a direct line runs from the Isawiyya to the nineteenth-century pretenders discussed below, religious heterodoxy and messianic expectation were not a late aberration in Yemeni Jewish life. They recur across the record from at least the seventeenth century onward.

The nineteenth-century messianic claimants

Messianic expectation in Yemen entered an unusually active phase in the mid-nineteenth century, and it did not begin with Jews. Two Muslim messianic pretenders, Faqih Sa’id in 1840 and Sharif Isma’il in 1846, raised general apocalyptic expectation across the country before any Jewish claimant appeared. Jewish and Muslim communities in Yemen watched each other’s movements closely, and each side’s excitement seems to have fed the other’s.

The first Jewish claimant, known as Shukr Kuhayl, announced himself in Sana’a in 1861. He spent two years preaching repentance in the countryside, citing Quranic material to Muslim audiences as well as Jewish sources to his own community, before establishing a base on Mount Tiyal and declaring himself a full messianic figure. News of him reached Yemenite communities already settled in Alexandria, and Sana’a’s rabbis, notably, never repudiated him outright. Enough Muslims treated him as an apocalyptic figure that the ulama had him killed in 1865, which did not end the movement so much as convert it into an expectation of return.

That expectation was answered in 1868, when a man named Judah Bar Shalom announced himself as Shukr Kuhayl returned from the dead. To support the claim, he wore a scarf wrapped around his neck, as if to hide where his severed head had been reattached. Kuhayl II, as he is known, was a considerably more sophisticated operator than his predecessor. He built an actual fundraising apparatus around the claim, an organized network of messengers carrying epistles and collecting a tithe, the ma’aser, from adherents not only across Yemen but in Aden, Alexandria, Bombay, Calcutta, Jerusalem, and Safed, and he drew followers as far as Egypt, India, Palestine, and Russia. He also married his predecessor’s divorced wife, who by one account recognized he was not actually her former husband but accepted the marriage anyway, apparently for the economic security it offered. The tithe funded his court, charity to poor Jews and Muslims alike, and payments to tribal shaykhs for permission to operate on their land. The network’s reach made it exploitable as well as effective: in the southern districts of Hubaysh, Bani ‘Ud, and Bilad al-’Adin, a man named Sa’id Qarayti declared himself Kuhayl’s emissary and collected donations in his name without any actual authorization, until a local leader’s agent exposed him as an impostor and Qarayti pleaded not to be tried publicly for it. Sana’a’s rabbinic leadership again failed to move decisively against Kuhayl II himself, and it took an external intervention, a widely circulated 1869 epistle from Jacob Saphir in Jerusalem refuting the claim outright, combined with the loss of political cover after the Ottoman reconquest of central Yemen in 1872, to bring the movement down. The Ottomans arrested Kuhayl II in 1875 and exiled him to Istanbul; he died in poverty in Sana’a in 1877 or 1878.

A third figure, Yosef Abdallah, appeared in Sana’a in 1888 as the messiah’s herald rather than the messiah himself, calling for repentance in advance of the end of days. His following was substantial enough among both Jews and some Muslims that it took organized pressure from within the Jewish community itself, specifically from the rationalist Dor De’a faction described below, to get the Ottoman authorities to expel him from the capital in 1893. He settled in Shibam and faded from relevance.

Rabbi Yahya Qafih and Dor De’a

Rabbi Yahya Qafih, together with Sa’id al-Arusi and Hayyim Habshush, came into contact with the French orientalist Joseph Halevy during his 1869 visit to Yemen and later with the Austrian traveler Edward Glaser, and absorbed enough of the Haskalah’s rationalist temper through them to found the Dor De’a movement. Its target was Kabbalah, which it treated as an irrational foreign import inconsistent with what its adherents considered the true, Maimonides-derived character of Yemenite Judaism, and it built on an older internal dispute, predating Halevy’s arrival, over whether communal prayer ought to follow Maimonides’ rite or a Sephardic rite formed by Kabbalistic tradition. Klorman describes a group that had, by this point, “witnessed three messianic eruptions” since 1861 and was for that reason generally primed for change. However, Dor De’a’s own program was aimed at Kabbalah rather than at messianism as such. The two movements collided directly only once, in 1893, when Dor De’a, by then established enough to carry political weight, lobbied the Ottoman authorities to expel Yosef Abdallah from Sana’a. By 1905, Qafih had opened a school in Sana’a teaching arithmetic, Hebrew, Arabic, and eventually a full modern curriculum under Ottoman sponsorship. The school fell apart within a decade in a dispute with the opposing Kabbalistic faction, the Iqshim, that split Sana’a’s Jewish community into rival institutions until the late 1940s.

The 1881 emigration

The first sustained wave of Yemenite emigration to Palestine began in Sana’a in 1881 and continued with few interruptions until 1914, eventually drawing off roughly ten percent of Yemen’s Jewish population. No Zionist organization had any presence in Yemen at this point. Two purely practical developments made the movement possible: Ottoman citizenship after 1872, which gave Jews freedom of internal movement within the Empire they had not previously had, and the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, which dramatically cut travel time to Palestine. According to both Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman and the broader country survey by Reeva Spector Simon and her collaborators, these practical openings mattered because they arrived in a community still primed by three consecutive messianic movements to see political change as a prophetic sign. Klorman is explicit that the 1881 wave and the waves that followed it carried messianic motifs as part of how the emigrants explained their own decision to themselves and to those staying behind, and that settling the land was understood by at least some of them as an act that could itself hasten the messianic era rather than merely as flight from one place to another.

The 1906 to 1914 emigration

The character of the migration changed after 1906, when a second wave began in northern Yemen among Jews whose material circumstances were, by the World Zionist Organization emissary Shmuel Yavne’eli’s own later account, generally secure and prosperous. This wave was driven not by distress but by news filtering back from relatives already in Jerusalem and the new agricultural moshavot. The Zionist labor movement in Palestine, meanwhile, had by 1908 formulated the doctrine of the “conquest of labor,” the position that Jewish claims to the land depended on Jewish hands working it rather than merely Jewish capital purchasing it. When Eastern European settlers proved unable to compete with Arab agricultural labor on wages or working conditions, the Palestine office of the World Zionist Organization sent Yavne’eli to Yemen in 1911 specifically to recruit Jews it had already decided, on essentially racialized grounds, would make suitable “natural workers,” people the movement’s own language described as accustomed to hard labor and modest living conditions in a way European Jews reportedly were not. Yavne’eli’s year in Yemen brought roughly a thousand more immigrants, mostly from central and southern Yemen, into the moshavot as agricultural laborers, work Yemenite immigrants kept doing for decades afterward.

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Sources

• Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman, Traditional Society in Transition: The Yemeni Jewish Experience (Brill, 2014), especially the introduction’s account of the nineteenth-century messianic claimants and the Mawza expulsion’s messianic backdrop

• Aharon Gaimani, “The Messianism of Shukr Kuhayl II: Two New Letters,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92, nos. 3-4 (2002): 347-358, for the scarf, the divorcee marriage, the Sa’id Qarayti fraud case, and the Ghulah letter

• Ahmad Dallal, “On Muslim Curiosity and the Historiography of the Jews of Yemen,” in Joseph V. Montville, ed., History as Prelude: Muslims and Jews in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East (Lexington Books, 2011)

• Hayyim Habshush, A Vision of Yemen: The Travels of a European Orientalist (ed. and trans., 2019), for the dhimma pact terms and Bernard Haykel’s summary of their intent

• Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer, eds., The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, chapters on Yemen and on Eretz Israel/Palestine 1800 to 1948, for the Orphans Decree, the 1881 and 1906 to 1914 emigration waves, and the Yavne’eli mission

• Gordon D. Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia (background on pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabian Jewish communities, for comparative context)

• Reuben Ahroni, Jewish Emigration from the Yemen, 1951-98: Carpet Without Magic (Routledge, 2013), reserved for the next installment’s treatment of the interwar and Magic Carpet period

The el-Baida café on Abu Nuwas street was attacked, the Mas’uda Shemtov synagogue was bombed, and a US government building and two Jewish-owned businesses were hit as well. Five incidents in all, five separate targets, between 1950 and 1951.

The claim, made most prominently by historian Avi Shlaim, is that Israeli agents planted the bombs to accelerate the departure of Iraq’s Jews. The record shows Iraq’s Jews were already being stripped of citizenship, having their property frozen, and living under a running campaign of professional exclusion, on top of a pogrom nine years earlier.

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Frozen property, restrictive laws, and leaving

On March 10, 1950, Iraq’s parliament passed the Denaturalization Law, letting Jews renounce citizenship and leave within a year. By April 4, only 220 people had registered. On April 8, a bomb went off outside the el-Baida café on Abu Nuwas street, injuring four people, one of them fatally. Registration climbed to 25,000 within three weeks. Over the next year it crept upward in fits and starts, reaching 70,000 by September, 84,000 by December, and stalling out around 86,000 in mid-January, until a second bomb hit the Mas’uda Shemtov synagogue on January 14, 1951, killing five and wounding more than twenty. Registration surged again. By the time the law expired on March 9, 1951, roughly 105,000 Jews had signed up, and by the end of the migration Iraq had lost about 130,000 of its ancient Jewish community, one of the oldest in the world, tracing itself to the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE.

On March 10, 1951, the day after the law expired, Iraq passed a second law freezing the assets of everyone who had left. Historian Orit Bashkin puts the value of frozen property at 150 to 200 million dollars, roughly 1.8 to 2.4 billion dollars today. A government does not need to coerce people who are leaving of their own free will, and it does not confiscate the property of people it considers free agents. Additionally, there was the 1941 Farhud, in which mobs killed and injured hundreds of Baghdadi Jews over two days while the police stood down; the criminalization of Zionism as a capital offense in 1948; and, as Bashkin documents in Basra, Jewish teachers transferred out of their posts, Jewish doctors denied license renewals, merchants forbidden to sell to non-Jews, and state railway employees quietly dismissed without pension. None of this required a single bomb. The Iraqi state built the conditions for departure well before anyone argued about who threw what.

Because the claim that Israel bombed its own people gets cited to shift responsibility for the Mizrahi expulsions off Arab governments and onto Israel itself. That claim needs to be aired out and checked against the actual record.

The trial and convictions for the bombings

Shalom Salah, a nineteen-year-old cobbler, and Yosef Basri, a lawyer, were tried and hanged in 1952 for three of the five bombings: the attack on the US Information Service building (Gat dates it March 19, 1951, Bashkin gives March 14), the May 10, 1951, attack on the Lawee company building, an American car importer, and the June 5-6, 1951 attack on Stanley Shaashua’s car dealership.

Their conviction rested on a confession from Salah, extracted, according to his own testimony in court, after torture. The American ambassador, Edward Crocker, wrote at the time that confessions obtained under those conditions are inherently suspect. No prosecution witness testified to seeing either man throw a bomb or plant a device. The rest of the case was circumstantial: caches of weapons in synagogues and homes, tied to the confession rather than to any independent proof. The British Foreign Office, no friend of the Zionist movement, reported that the trial had been conducted properly but stopped short of saying the two men were guilty of the bombings. Gat notes this as a contrast: the same Foreign Office was willing to say, of a separate espionage trial that same year, that the evidence pointed to actual guilt.

The prosecution also added in a fourth bombing, the January 14 synagogue attack, that contradicted its own theory of the case. The indictment held that the underground intended only to injure, but the synagogue bombing killed four people, and two witnesses who saw the culprit flee gave a description that did not match either convicted man. The prosecutor included the charge anyway.

Avi Shlaim and an unreliable witness

The most credentialed source for this claim, that Israeli agents did it, is Avi Shlaim, whose 2023 memoir Three Worlds rests the case on an aging witness named Yaacov Karkoukli. Shlaim tells the story at length and in his own words, and his summary conclusion, that Karkoukli is a reliable source, doesn’t match what his own transcribed account shows.

At their first meeting, Karkoukli told Shlaim that the January 14 synagogue bombing was carried out by Salih al-Haidari, a Syrian con man acting alone out of personal revenge against Jews who had reported him to police. At a later meeting, Karkoukli changed the story. Haidari had been paid to do it, by a corrupt Iraqi police officer who had himself been bribed by the Zionist underground. Shlaim pointed out this made no sense, since an Iraqi police officer had no obvious reason to serve the interests of the group he was supposed to be investigating. Karkoukli didn’t add clarity to the story but added even larger claims. Karkoukli stated that this officer was later arrested, tried, and convicted of collaboration with the enemy, a detail sourced to nothing but Karkoukli himself.

Shlaim also spent years trying to obtain a supporting document Karkoukli described as a Baghdad police report. What eventually arrived, years later, through Shlaim’s mother, was a single unsigned page with no letterhead, no date, and no clear provenance beyond Karkoukli’s account of a friend of a friend inside the Iraqi police archive. Shlaim himself calls it something short of a smoking gun. An anonymous, undated page obtained decades after the fact through an unverifiable chain of personal favors is not evidence in any sense a historian should accept as dispositive, and Shlaim’s own text says as much even while he leans on it anyway.

There was a police officer involved, which often gets confused here. Gat documents a different Iraqi officer, Major Jamil Mamo, arrested on suspicion of planting the synagogue bomb himself, rumored at the time to be an Istiqlal Party member hostile to Jews, not a paid collaborator with the Zionist underground.

Karkoukli’s testimony on the bombings contradicts itself, before you even get to Shlaim’s separate reputation for selective sourcing on other Zionist-Arab historiography. Naming Shlaim here isn’t a dismissal of his archival work generally, and he’s not hiding where he’s coming from. The opening chapters of Three Worlds lay out his family’s own displacement from Iraq and his political trajectory, including a self-described right-wing phase in his youth that gave way, he says, to a more detached view after he moved to England. Disclosing a personal stake isn’t the same as establishing a specific factual claim, though. This one rests on one elderly man’s shifting and internally contradictory recollections, corroborated by a document even its own collector cannot authenticate.

Orit Bashkin, in New Babylonians, notes that an Israeli investigation committee concluded the Zionist underground could not have carried out the bombings, but that many witnesses brought before that committee said at the time that they believed Jews were responsible. She also cites a separate incident, Zionist activists threatening the Iraqi Jewish community leader Ezra Menahem Daniel with violence to accelerate emigration, as circumstantial evidence. Bashkin calls Zionist involvement “plausible,” not proven, and concludes that historians “cannot provide a decisive answer at this point.” Even so, she holds that the bombings, whoever set them, were the final chapter of a process the Iraqi state had already made irreversible: without the 1948–49 crackdowns, the Denaturalization Law, and the collapse of Jewish institutional life in Baghdad, the bombings alone would not have triggered mass emigration, the way the far bloodier 1941 Farhud hadn’t.

Why the Lavon Affair keeps coming up

The Lavon Affair belongs in this discussion too, because it comes up whenever the Baghdad question surfaces. In 1954, Israeli military intelligence ran a sabotage operation in Egypt, targeting American and British sites to disrupt Anglo-Egyptian relations. Two of the network’s Egyptian Jewish operatives were executed, others imprisoned, and the domestic Israeli fallout eventually ended David Ben-Gurion’s tenure as prime minister.

That operation was confirmed by surviving operatives once they were free to speak, decades later. It has no factual connection to Iraq. Different country, different personnel, different year. But its exposure in 1960 is precisely what gave the Baghdad theory new life: Uri Avnery’s 1966 article linking the two, and the books that followed it, explicitly leaned on the Lavon disclosure to make the Baghdad claim more plausible than it had been. Moshe Gat, drawing on Elie Kedourie, traces this chain directly. The Lavon Affair explains why the Baghdad theory found an audience after 1960. It is not itself evidence about Baghdad.

Sources:

• Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (London: Oneworld, 2023)

• Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012)

• Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951 (London: Frank Cass, 1997

• Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970)

• Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

• David Ben-Gurion, Israel: A Personal History (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1971)

A family that already believed it

Herzl’s father, Jakob, was from Zemun, a town on the Ottoman-Habsburg border near Belgrade. The hakham of Zemun in the 1820s and 30s was Yehuda Alkalai, a Sarajevo-born Sephardic rabbi who had already spent years arguing that Jews needed to organize, fund, and physically carry out a return to Palestine. Herzl’s own grandfather was one of Alkalai’s followers.

So the man installed as Zionism’s point of origin had a grandfather who prayed under a rabbi already running an organized political program for Jewish return to the land, sixty years before Herzl wrote a word of Der Judenstaat. The idea didn’t start with Herzl, it was even in his own family before he was born.

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Long before anyone called it Zionism

Even farther back, Jewish movements built around explicit, organized calls to return to the land go back nearly two thousand years before Herzl, not as vague religious longing but as actual political and military action.

Bar Kokhba’s revolt in 132-135 CE was a war fought to hold Jewish sovereignty over the land, backed messianically by Rabbi Akiva, one of the leading rabbinic authorities of his generation, who thought Bar Kokhba was the Messiah. The revolt failed catastrophically, and the rabbinic establishment’s response to that failure shaped Jewish political theology for the next thousand years, producing the Talmudic tradition of the Three Oaths in Ketubot 111a, an aggadic passage, not a legal ruling. It counseled against forcing a mass return or rebelling against the nations. The twentieth-century Satmar Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum built an explicit halakhic argument against Zionism on it in Va-Yoel Moshe, treating narrative material (aggadah) as though it carried the force of law, which other Orthodox authorities rejected. Religious Zionists going back to Alkalai himself read the same tradition and reached the opposite conclusion, drawing instead on a third-century rabbinic dictum that restored Jewish sovereignty required no miracle at all, only the end of foreign rule.

In twelfth-century Kurdistan, a messianic claimant named David Alroy raised an armed following and wrote to Jews everywhere that “the time has come in which the Almighty will gather together his people Israel from every country to Jerusalem the holy city.” That’s an explicit, organized call for literal return, seven hundred years before Alkalai.

In 1665-66, Shabbetai Tzvi’s movement produced a real wave of Jews across three continents selling property and preparing to leave for Israel. The movement’s own core theology, as Gershom Scholem and later Yehuda Liebes have shown, was more concerned with cosmic and spiritual redemption than with territorial politics, but the political dimension was also present. Nathan of Gaza, Sabbetai Tzvi’s prophet, developed an actual plan for him to depose the Ottoman sultan and use his army to gather the exiles, a plan close enough to Herzl’s later Charter strategy as Liebes notes. The plan collapsed when Sabbetai Tzvi converted to Islam under threat of execution. That story is well known. Less often told is what happened after: through the early eighteenth century, a string of kabbalist figures, Judah he-Hasid, Abraham Rovigo, Hayyim ben Atar, Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto among them, read older kabbalistic teachings on the mystical virtue of dwelling in the land and concluded that relocating there was the correct course of action.

Christian restorationism, dated correctly

One of the reasons that this comes up is to “prove” Christian Zionism influenced Judaism, generally arguing that it started with the Earl of Shaftesbury in the 1830s. It’s wrong by about two hundred years. Calvinism and Puritan England took up biblical literalism during the Reformation, and Jewish restoration began to be debated. Cromwell called the Whitehall Conference in 1655 specifically to weigh readmitting Jews to England, partly on the theological premise that the promised Christian regathering required the dispersion to reach even there. This train of thought ran through Newton, Hartley, and Priestley in the following century before its nineteenth-century revival under Shaftesbury and later Blackstone. It’s older than the standard narrative, and even then Sephardic political Zionism still predates it by a wide margin.

A religious migration that already looked like resettlement, 1530s

Solomon Alkabets left Salonica for Safed around 1535 or 1536. Lawrence Fine notes that a sermon Alkabets delivered in Salonica in 1534 shows he was motivated by hopes of rebuilding the Temple, something he understood as tied directly to Israel’s messianic redemption. He wrote back to the kabbalistic circle in Salonica describing how Joseph Karo’s mystical mentor had urged Karo, in Alkabets’s presence, to make the same move: “Go up to the land of Israel, for not all times are opportune... Make haste, therefore, to go up to the land, for I sustain you here and shall sustain you there.” Karo followed within a year or two, and Safed grew into the kabbalistic center that would later produce Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria. This is a rabbi’s own textual and mystical reasoning concluding that relocation to the land was the correct religious action, then actively recruiting colleagues to do the same, nearly three centuries before Alkalai.

An actual state-building project, 1560s

In the 1560s, Dona Gracia Nasi, a Portuguese converso widow who had reclaimed her Jewish identity in Constantinople, secured a permit from Suleiman the Magnificent and financed an economically self-sufficient Jewish settlement at Tiberias. Her nephew Joseph Nasi, whom Suleiman made Duke of Naxos, continued the project after her death. This was an organized, funded, state-permitted resettlement project, roughly two hundred seventy years before English Protestant restorationism became a political force and well over three centuries before Herzl.

The rabbis who actually wrote Herzl’s program

The two men whose ideas Herzl’s political Zionism most directly reproduces were both Sephardic, and both were active decades before he was.

Yehuda Bibas, born in Gibraltar and serving as rabbi of Corfu, watched the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule and argued in 1821 that Jews should do the same, take up arms, physically reclaim Palestine, and build settlements that could support themselves rather than depend on charity from abroad. His student and colleague Yehuda Alkalai, hakham of Sarajevo and then Semlin, laid out in his 1834 book Shma Yisrael a plan for organized settlement as preparation for national redemption, reading the concept of teshuvah as literal return rather than only spiritual repentance, and pleaded with wealthy diaspora Jews to fund land purchase, effectively proposing a Jewish National Fund sixty years before one existed. Jane Gerber points out that Alkalai fused nationalist activism with traditional religious observance instead of requiring Jews to abandon it, unlike the secular socialist Zionism that would later dominate the European movement, which is part of why it took root in Sephardic communities rather than fracturing into competing factions.

Benny Morris notes that the actual content of Herzl’s program, the national fund, philanthropically financed but state-held land, a charter secured through alliance with a Great Power, traces to “the largely ignored forerunners, Kalischer, Alkalai, and Hess, rather than the praxis of Hovevei Zion.” Even that sentence still centers Kalischer, an Ashkenazi rabbi, ahead of Alkalai, who came first and whose ideas were more fully developed.

A different kind of Sephardi argument, from Amsterdam

Everything so far, Bibas, Alkalai, the Safed emigrants, Nasi, comes from the Ottoman Sephardi world. The Western Sephardim, the Portuguese and Spanish converso diaspora that resettled in Amsterdam and London, made a different kind of contribution.

Menasseh ben Israel, an Amsterdam rabbi of Marrano parentage, spent years arguing for the readmission of Jews to England, and his 1650 book Hope of Israel laid out the theological reasoning behind it. The promised messianic ingathering required the Jewish dispersion to reach every corner of the earth first, England included, before the return to Zion itself could follow. He carried that argument to London in person, petitioning Cromwell directly in 1655. This wasn’t a call to settle Palestine. It was a Western Sephardi rabbi treating the completion of Jewish exile as a necessary precondition for eventual return, and working to bring that precondition about.

Baruch Spinoza, born in Amsterdam to a Portuguese converso family and later excommunicated from that same Sephardi congregation, wrote in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that if the foundations of Jewish religion hadn’t weakened their political capacity, the Jews could, given the ordinary reversals of historical fortune, “raise up their empire afresh.” Shlomo Pines has shown this wasn’t original to Spinoza either. He was restating an argument made four centuries earlier by Joseph ibn Caspi, a Provençal Jewish philosopher who pointed to the rise and fall of empires as, in his words, “a true testimony for our return to the Land of Israel being possible.”

None of this is the same kind of thing as Bibas organizing settlement or Alkalai fundraising for land purchase. Ibn Caspi and Spinoza weren’t proposing programs, they were making an argument that the door hadn’t been closed, working from historical reasoning rather than activism. However, it shows the idea of Jewish return being treated as live and defensible across an even wider range of Jewish intellectual life than the activist strand alone would suggest, including from a Western Sephardi philosopher whose own community had cast him out.

A parallel case, not a precedent: Bulgaria

Bulgaria doesn’t predate Herzl the way Alkalai does, but it developed its own independent pre-Zionist current right alongside him, for reasons specific to the country. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue identify Bulgaria as the single most active center of pre-Zionism in the Sephardi world, with local activists, Barukh ben Yizhak Mitrani, Reuven Isaac Perahia, and the militant Marco Barukh (1872-99), reaching what they call a “crucial turning point” in 1895, a year before Herzl’s Der Judenstaat.

What made Bulgaria different was the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s own failure there. In most Ottoman Sephardi communities the AIU’s French-language schools stayed dominant for decades, and the state never managed to impose its own linguistic authority on non-Muslim education. In Bulgaria the AIU schools disappeared early, and Bulgarian state schooling filled the vacuum instead. Jewish illiteracy in Bulgarian fell sharply between 1898 and 1910, and Jewish children were educated inside the same national curriculum shaping their Bulgarian neighbors. That put them in direct view of a nationalist movement that actually succeeded, full independence from Ottoman rule, while persistent local antisemitism kept them from assimilation. Benbassa and Rodrigue’s conclusion: this combination produced “an expansion of Zionism unknown elsewhere in Sephardi lands.” Local Jews, in their words, “unquestionably projected this example onto Palestine.”

A movement already running in Russia

Leon Pinsker’s 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation and the Hovevei Zion societies forming across the Russian Pale in the aftermath of the 1881-82 pogroms both predate Herzl by fifteen years. The Bilu settlers were founding Rishon LeZion that same year. Ahad Ha’am was developing cultural Zionism as an independent intellectual project through the 1880s and 90s. By the time Herzl arrived in 1896, this was a movement already fifteen years into building actual settlements on actual land, not a vacuum waiting for a Viennese journalist to fill it.

A migration nobody organized from Europe

Then there is the wave nobody planned from Vienna, Odessa, or anywhere else in the movement’s usual geography. Beginning in 1881, roughly three thousand Yemenite Jews immigrated to Palestine, driven, in Norman Stillman’s words, by “a wave of messianic fervor as well as the harsh and unstable conditions of Jewish life in Yemen.” Fifteen years before Herzl. The timing was triggered partly by news of the Ashkenazi First Aliyah, but the Yemenite Jews who came were, as Hasia Diner puts it, “likewise inspired by religious beliefs and the hope for redemption in the Land of Israel,” running on their own religious logic in parallel with the Russian wave rather than copying it. By 1914 Yemenite Jews made up something like six to ten percent of Palestine’s Jewish population, a community that had built itself before Herzl’s own organization ever sent recruiters to Yemen during the Second Aliyah.

What Herzl actually did

Herzl built the apparatus: the World Zionist Organization, founded at Basel in 1897 as a standing international body with a president, a regularly convened congress, and a financial system, the shekel membership scheme and the Jewish Colonial Trust, that could mobilize an international Jewish public rather than depend on the patronage of individual philanthropists who had already turned him down.

Herzl pursued sustained diplomacy with the Ottoman sultan, the German Kaiser, the King of Italy, the Pope, and the British government. He secured none of it. He died in 1904 without the charter he had spent his final years chasing. What survived him was the institutional shell, and Hasia Diner notes her specific contribution: he converted Zionism from elite-directed philanthropy into mass participatory politics. The specific and traceable shift that let ordinary Jews across class lines organize and fund the movement directly, rather than waiting for wealthy patrons to act on their behalf.

That’s a real achievement, and a separate one from inventing the idea that Jews should return to their land and govern themselves there. Bibas said it in 1821. Alkalai wrote the operating manual in 1834. Nasi built an actual settlement in the 1560s. Alroy raised an army for it in the twelfth century. Bar Kokhba fought a war over it in 132. Herzl’s own grandfather believed it before Herzl was born.

Why the erasure is not random

Herzl didn’t invent Zionism. He organized a version of it that Ashkenazi historiography then wrote its own origin story around, and the rabbi his own family had already been listening to sixty years earlier got left out of it. Notice what that does to the other claim that usually travels alongside “Herzl started it,” that Zionism is basically a secular European import with no real roots in Judaism. That claim only works if Alkalai and Bibas, and others who built their program entirely out of halakhic and aggadic reasoning, get left out too.

Sources

• David Vital, The Origins of Zionism

• Benny Morris, Righteous Victims

• Anita Shapira, Israel: A History

• Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience

• Ira M. Lapidus, Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century

• Hasia R. Diner, in The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora

• Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times

• Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840

• John M. Efron, The Jews: A History

• Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism

• David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History

• Yaacob Dweck, Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas

• David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology

• Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship

• Morris Faierstein, Jewish Customs of Kabbalistic Origin: Their Origin and Development
  

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Who actually approached Germany

The first thing the claim gets wrong is who founded the group. Shamir did not. Avraham Stern did, in 1940, when he broke from the Irgun over whether to keep fighting the British during the war. What Stern founded was not yet called Lehi. It operated as the “IZL in Israel” faction; the name Lehi, an acronym for Lohamei Herut Yisrael, only came into use in the summer of 1943, after Stern was dead and Shamir was already involved in rebuilding what was left of the organization. Stern’s position in 1940 was that Britain, not Germany, was the immediate obstacle to a Jewish state, and that the underground should exploit any opening that weakened British control of Palestine.

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That position produced two attempts to approach Nazi Germany. Neither went through a formal decision by the organization. Stern initiated both, and at least two of his own high command, Kalay and Zeroni, knew and went along without objection when the first was proposed. The wider membership was not told. The first came at the end of 1940, when Stern sent an envoy, Naftali Lubenchik, to Beirut to meet Werner Otto von Hentig of the German Foreign Office. The resulting memorandum, drafted in January 1941, proposed a convergence of interests between the “New Order” in Europe and a restored Jewish state allied with Germany, and offered active Jewish participation in the war against Britain in exchange. Stern hoped to recruit forty thousand men for a campaign to seize Palestine. Germany did not respond.

January 1941 was months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the Einsatzgruppen began the mass shootings that marked the shift toward systematic extermination of Jews. It was a full year before the Wannsee Conference formalized that into Nazi policy in January 1942. Nazi policy toward Jews at the time of the Lubenchik memorandum was still centered on forced emigration and expulsion, the same policy idea that had kept the Haavara Transfer Agreement running since 1933. Stern was not, in January 1941, proposing an alliance with a government he knew to be running an extermination program, because that program did not yet exist.

The second attempt came in December 1941, when Nathan Friedman-Yellin traveled toward German-held territory with a similar proposal focused on the Jews of the Balkans and central Europe. By then the Einsatzgruppen had already been killing Jews by the hundreds of thousands across the occupied Soviet Union for six months. Whatever Stern knew or did not know in January, the December mission cannot claim the same excuse. Friedman-Yellin was arrested near Aleppo before making contact, a few days before Stern himself was killed by British police in February 1942.

He revealed the German connection to his own ideological mentor, Abba Achimeir, only in the summer of 1941, long after the first mission had already failed. Achimeir’s reaction was blunt: a German connection in 1941 meant becoming, in his words, a fifth column for the Angel of Death. Stern’s answer was that the movement would manage with the Germans once they had conquered Palestine, the way the Russians had managed with them when necessary. The broader Revisionist movement went further than private disagreement. In March 1941 the Irgun publicly accused Stern of “selling his followers to our sworn enemy” and called the outreach “this madness.”

Whether knowledge extended beyond that inner circle is contested. Later interviews with surviving Lehi figures, some obtained under conditions of duress that should temper how much validity they have, have been used to suggest broader awareness within the organization. Stern’s son, a longtime journalist and specialist on his father’s archives, disputes any involvement beyond his father specifically.

Where Shamir actually was

Shamir joined Stern’s faction in late 1940 or early 1941, close to when Stern’s outreach was underway, but he was arrested shortly afterward and spent most of the relevant period in British custody. He did not escape until September 1942, seven months after Stern’s death. He was a member of the organization during the outreach, but not part of the small circle that planned or executed it, and he was imprisoned for nearly the entire span in which it occurred.

When he escaped he helped rebuild the shattered remnant of Stern’s organization into what would formally become Lehi, alongside Israel Eldad and Friedman-Yellin. The group that emerged in late 1942 broke from Stern’s 1940 position. It named both Britain and Germany as enemies, describing England as “the judge” and Germany as “the executioner,” and it looked toward the Soviet Union as a counterweight to British power. By the time Shamir was involved, the group had no interest in Nazi Germany at all.

The response from the rest of the Yishuv

The claim that “Israel was founded by Nazi collaborators” also erases how the mainstream Zionist leadership treated Lehi. After Lehi assassinated Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, in November 1944, the Jewish Agency under Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann moved to suppress both Lehi and the Irgun in an operation the Yishuv called the Saison, the hunting season.

Eliyahu Golomb, the Haganah commander, described the choice facing the Yishuv as one between Zionist democracy and what he called Jewish Nazism. Weizmann personally told Churchill on 7 December 1944 that the names of five hundred suspected members of the underground movements had been passed to the British police, and that half of them had already been arrested. The organized Zionist leadership handed British authorities the names of Jewish underground fighters, over the objection of a minority within its own ranks, because it judged the underground’s actions a threat to the movement’s political future.

None of this makes Shamir a marginal or innocent figure in Lehi’s history. He commanded Lehi’s operations section during the Moyne assassination described above, and he separately ordered the assassination of the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in September 1948, an operation he did not publicly acknowledge for decades. Ben-Gurion’s government responded to the Bernadotte killing by arresting Lehi activists and effectively dissolving the organization. Those are the documented actions. The Nazi outreach is not one of them, because Shamir was not there for it.

The claim in circulation gets the history wrong on three counts. It hands Stern’s personal, secretive initiative to Shamir, who spent nearly the entire episode in a British cell. It treats one failed, unanswered approach as though it defined the organization Shamir went on to lead, when Stern’s own political circle condemned it at the time. And in doing so it trades a real, documented charge, two assassinations Shamir actually ordered, for one that never touched him.Key sources:

• Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics, and Terror, 1940-1949

• Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History

• Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany

• Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution

• Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History

• Anita Shapira, Israel: A History

• Jeffrey Herf, Israel’s Moment

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Amin al-Husayni came from a well-known family that was one of the two main political families in Jerusalem. His father was the Mufti of Jerusalem, known as Mufti Tahir, who died in 1908. Amin was 11 at the time, so his much older half-brother Kamil was installed as Mufti in his place. Under British rule, which began roughly a decade later, Kamil would become the first to hold the title “Grand Mufti,” a designation the British introduced to Palestine that hadn’t existed under the Ottomans. Kamil’s tenure proved conciliatory toward the British administration and the Zionist movement; he took part in the ceremony laying the foundation stone of the Hebrew University.

Amin’s education was conventional for a family preparing a son for religious office: the Quran memorized by age ten, then a Turkish government school, French at a local Frères school, then al-Azhar University in Cairo from 1912, the center of mainstream Sunni orthodoxy, where he studied Islamic law, theology, philosophy, and Arabic.

Rashid Rida and the limits of inheritance

While in Cairo, al-Husayni also studied at the Dar al-Da’wa wa al-Irshad, the school run by Rashid Rida. Rida was a family friend who stayed with the Husaynis on his visits to Jerusalem and took a personal interest in Amin, and Rida was himself a direct student of Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the two founding figures of the Salafiyya reform movement, a modernist current that argued Muslims could selectively adopt European science and civil administration while reviving what its adherents saw as the uncorrupted practice of the Prophet’s own generation.

The reformist Salafiyya of Abduh and Rida, as Henri Lauzière argues, aimed to reconcile Islam with the modern world, and it is epistemologically distinct from the more literalist, doctrinally conservative movement that later acquired the same label in the twentieth century. Collapsing the two is a common and misleading anachronism.

Mattar notes that al-Husayni “did not accept everything Rida taught, or, if he did, he did not act upon it.” Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood later adopted Rida’s emphasis on religious conservatism, al-Husayni instead focused on political mobilization and independence. What he got from Rida was the idea, in Mattar’s phrase, that political education translated into a “spirit of revolt,” and that mosques, schools, and the press were the tools for spreading it.

Amin’s older half-brother Kamil had no connection to Rida or to the Salafi reformist movement. Kupferschmidt’s history describes Kamil as “cooperative to the British,” and the historian Yehoshua Porath’s assessment, cited by Mattar, calls him “apolitical, amiable, and cooperative,” a man who “went out of his way to aid the British occupation authorities” and whose friendliness toward the Zionist movement extended to taking part in the ceremony laying the foundation stone of the Hebrew University. Rida’s mentoring was directed specifically at Amin, the younger relative sent to Cairo for education.

Cairo, 1913: the first anti-Zionist organizing, and what it wasn’t yet

Al-Husayni’s first political activity against Zionism was in Cairo in 1913. While he was still a student, he helped organize what Mattar calls “a Palestinian society to oppose Zionism.” The founding meeting was hosted by a Christian Palestinian and drew both Muslim and Christian Arab students. Mattar’s assessment is that al-Husayni was ahead of most of his contemporaries in treating Zionist claims and Jewish immigration, rather than Ottoman rule, as the primary threat to Palestinian Arab interests, in a period when Palestine’s Jewish population had grown from roughly 25,000 in 1882 to 85,000 by 1914.

Khalidi dates the formation of Palestinian national identity to 1917-1923, tied to the Balfour Declaration, the Ottoman collapse, and the failure of the Damascus experiment in 1920. What existed before that, Najib Azuri’s 1908 proposal, Amin’s own “Palestinian society to oppose Zionism,” the 1911 newspaper Filastin, is what Khalidi himself calls only an “incipient” sense of Palestine as a bounded community, rooted mostly in older sacred geography rather than modern nationalism.

What matters is that this earliest documented anti-Zionism was political and demographic, land purchases, immigration numbers, framed in terms both Muslim and Christian Arabs could share. It is not yet religious or theological in content.

Damascus, 1918-1920: the toolkit, not the target

Al-Husayni spent 1918-1920 in Damascus, active in Faisal’s short-lived Arab government and specifically leading the Jerusalem branch of the Arab Club, a Damascus-directed pan-Arabist organization with chapters across Syria and Palestine. His fellow leaders of the Jerusalem branch included Hilmi, Ibrahim, and Jamil al-Husayni, and Shaykh Hasan Abu Sa’ud, the same cleric who a decade later would lead the crowd burning Jewish devotional notes at the Western Wall in 1929.

James Gelvin did research into the content of Damascus nationalist propaganda across this period. Comparing leaflets distributed before and after the King-Crane Commission’s departure in mid-1919, he found that appeals to interfaith equality and minority rights dropped from 32 percent of the sample to 7 percent, although explicitly Islamic mobilization language, jihad calls, address to “Defenders of Islam,” direct Quranic quotation jumped from near zero to over 20 percent. This was a shift in the larger nationalist movement’s rhetorical strategy, driven by the collapsing political situation, the sense of British and French betrayal, the looming French occupation, and not by any single figure’s antisemitism. And critically, the target of this religious mobilization was Britain and France, not Jews.

Damascus gave al-Husayni’s political generation a working religious framing as mass-mobilization technology. It did not supply anti-Jewish content.

The 1921 appointment: the al-Aqsa claim’s first use

Kamil died on March 21, 1921. The British initially separated the mufti-ship from the other office he’d held, and pressure built within the Husayni family and the wider Muslim community to install Amin in his place. Amin had been officially pardoned for his role in the 1920 Nabi Musa riots, but per historian Bernard Wasserstein’s research, he was never actually removed from the British political blacklist. A British official, E.T. Richmond, advocated for him internally, and Amin himself promised loyal cooperation with the Mandate if appointed.

The actual election, following the Ottoman procedure among Muslim electors, happened on April 12, 1921. Amin did not place among the top three candidates. His family immediately contested the result, and proclamations went up around Jerusalem claiming that if the man who had genuinely won, Husam al-Din Jarallah, were appointed, he would be a “Jewish Zionist Mufti” who would hand the Haram al-Sharif to the Jews to rebuild their Temple. Jarallah withdrew under the pressure. [FLAGGED, not resolved: exactly how a candidate who hadn’t placed in the top three then became eligible for appointment isn’t fully spelled out in the source, worth deciding how confidently to state the causal link.] Amin’s appointment was communicated to him on May 8, 1921, and, notably, never confirmed in writing.

It is notable that this libel’s first use, in 1921, wasn’t against Zionists at all, but against a fellow Palestinian Muslim cleric, destroying a legitimately elected rival and securing the office for Amin himself. It was only later, in 1928 and 1929, redirected outward at Jews and Zionists.

The riots of 1929

Al-Husayni’s political career through the 1920s was affected by the Western Wall dispute that preceded the 1929 riots. Tom Segev’s reconstruction in One Palestine, Complete shows a mutual escalation: Jewish worshippers erected a partition at the Wall in 1928, British police removed it by force, and both communities spent a year building parallel campaigns of protest and provocation before violence broke out. Hillel Cohen’s Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 documents Sheikh Hasan Abu Sa’ud, an Islamic cleric tied to al-Husayni through the old Arab Club network, stoking visits to the al-Buraq site and burning Jewish devotional notes, while Jewish activists staged their own escalating demonstrations at the Wall.

The Shaw Commission, the British inquiry that followed the riots, formally cleared al-Husayni of directly instigating the violence. The Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath’s later work argued the Commission got it wrong, that the mufti’s Supreme Muslim Council deliberately worked the Wall dispute into a religious mobilization aimed at forcing British intervention against Zionist gains, and subsequent historiography has largely followed Porath.

Al-Husayni worked throughout the mandate period to push the idea that Zionists intended to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount and rebuild the Jewish Temple in their place, piece of a broader plan to seize the country and expel the Arabs. This let him position himself as the defender of the holy places against those forces, which is what built his standing as a national leader.

What the fear wasn’t entirely wrong about

The claim was still a fabrication. No credible evidence exists of any organized Zionist plan, in 1921 or 1929, to destroy the mosques and rebuild the Temple.

Historian Hillel Cohen preserves a piece of testimony from Aryeh Botrimovitch, a member of a Haganah “liquidation team” in Jerusalem, describing an operation from around the early 1930s. A group in the city was plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock. Botrimovitch infiltrated the group posing as a recruit, extracted its plans, then helped lure the ringleader into a car at night, where two other Haganah operatives took him away. Cohen is candid that the episode is thinly corroborated, he calls it an event he can find no other mention of, and notes that Botrimovitch’s account doesn’t fully match a separate surviving report. Cohen places it alongside an earlier, better-documented case: the Haganah’s 1924 killing of Rabbi Ya’akov Yisrael de Haan, an anti-Zionist Haredi opponent of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Both, in Cohen’s reading, were the same mainstream Zionist leadership using lethal force to suppress its own ideological extremes.

That pattern recurred decades later in a much better documented case. In the early 1980s, a cell within the religious-nationalist settlement movement, the Jewish Underground, spent years planning to destroy the Dome of the Rock in order to, in the words of one of its leaders, Yehuda Etzion, clear the ground for rebuilding the Temple. The plot was stopped only for logistical reasons and still unresolved rabbinic authorization. Etzion was convicted and imprisoned in 1984.

Messianic longing for a rebuilt Temple was a real and recurring current in some parts of the Yishuv and, later, the Israeli religious right, serious enough that people actually tried to act on it, once possibly in the early 1930s, definitively in 1984. But in both documented cases, the people acting on it were a fringe the mainstream Zionist movement moved violently to suppress or, later, successfully prosecuted, not an official plan as al-Husayni described. He was warning about it as an organized plot years before any such plot existed, and mischaracterizing it as Zionism itself.

1936 to 1939: from cooperation to exile

Since 1921, al-Husayni had managed a dual strategy, loyalty pledges and cooperation toward the British, and religious and political statements toward the Palestinians. In April 1936, violence and a general strike spread across Palestine, and after resisting public pressure for ten days, al-Husayni took the leadership of the newly formed Arab Higher Committee, uniting all five Palestinian political parties under him. Mattar notes this was “the beginning of the end of his policy of cooperation,” and of British confidence in him.

The strike dragged on for months, cost roughly a thousand Palestinian lives alongside eighty Jewish and thirty-seven British deaths, and ended only through Arab-ruler mediation. Britain responded with the Peel Commission, which recommended partition in July 1937, an outcome al-Husayni rejected, since he had spent his career working first for Syrian-Palestinian unity under Faisal and then for a unified Arab Palestine, and partition meant abandoning both.

The British moved to arrest him on July 17, 1937, at a committee meeting. Warned in advance, he escaped through a back door into the Haram al-Sharif, and British authorities held off arresting him there for fear of the reaction across the Muslim world. He spent the following weeks issuing statements against partition from inside the sanctuary and organized a four-hundred-delegate Pan-Arab congress at Bludan, Syria that September, which rejected partition outright. He eventually escaped Palestine for Lebanon and continued directing the revolt from Beirut and Damascus as it entered its final, bloodiest phase. By the time British forces crushed it in 1939, conservative British estimates put Palestinian deaths at over three thousand, with a hundred and ten hanged and six thousand more imprisoned that year alone, out of a Palestinian population of under a million. Al-Husayni was, per a contemporary report by the French High Commissioner in Beirut, depressed enough afterward to consider suicide.

Al-Husayni rejected the 1939 White Paper despite terms genuinely favorable to Palestinian demands, restricted Jewish immigration, limited land sales, a path to independence under an Arab majority, and by October 1939, under close French surveillance in Lebanon and with a Zionist representative having already lobbied London to have him assassinated, he escaped to Iraq.

Baghdad and Berlin

Al-Husayni had spent 1939 to 1941 in Baghdad working with pro-German Iraqi officers to push the country toward the Axis and unseat its pro-British government. This succeeded briefly under Rashid Ali al-Gaylani before British forces crushed it that spring. He and Rashid Ali fled Baghdad in late May, days before the city’s mayor was left to negotiate the armistice.

Both men were already out of the country when the Farhud broke out in Baghdad on June 1 and 2, the pogrom that killed, injured, and raped scores of the city’s Jews and destroyed homes and shops as the regime fell behind them. The Iraqi government’s own postwar investigation named al-Husayni specifically, faulting him for distributing much of the antisemitic propaganda that had been spread in the preceding months and for rerouting funds meant for the Palestinian cause into that campaign.

He made his way through Iran, Turkey, and Italy, and arrived in Berlin in November. To understand what he was walking into, it helps to know what Germany actually thought of the Arabs he claimed to speak for. A December 1940 memorandum from Manfred Melchers, the Foreign Office official then responsible for Arab affairs and later West Germany’s postwar ambassador to Amman, Baghdad, and New Delhi, put it plainly: Germans had no reason to sympathize with the Arabs, who he considered fundamentally hostile to Europe, and the Reich should support their demands only insofar as doing so served German purposes. Historian Łukasz Hirszowicz’s research into Nazi racial thinking shows that, in the Nazi worldview, Arabs, like the rest of Asia and Africa, sat near the bottom of Hitler’s racial ordering, with almost no exceptions. Al-Husayni was one of the very few exceptions, since the German bureaucracy considered him of partial Aryan descent.

The “New Order” Berlin drafted for a Nazi victory carved Africa and the Arab world into spheres of influence, formally assigning the Arab east to Italy while Germany intended to reserve its own political and economic interests there. Where the Nazis actually held territory and could have made good on promises of Arab self-government, Tunisia and Vichy Syria, Hirszowicz notes they did nothing. Whatever al-Husayni believed he was gaining for the Arab world by allying with Berlin, the Reich’s own internal planning treated Arab independence as a promise never intended to be kept.

His meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941, the single most cited event in his biography, is documented in German Foreign Office records reproduced by historians Klaus Gensicke and Zvi Elpeleg, both drawing on al-Husayni’s own later account of the meeting alongside the German transcripts. What al-Husayni wanted from it, a public Axis declaration recognizing Arab independence and endorsing the elimination of the Jewish national home in Palestine, something he had already raised in Rome days earlier with Mussolini and his foreign minister Ciano, was not granted. Mussolini told him directly, of Italy’s own Jews, that they were “our enemies” with “no place” left in Europe. Hitler refused him the declaration in the November 28 meeting, citing the risk of upsetting Vichy France and Germany’s other allies.

What Hitler told al-Husayni was that Germany was engaged in an uncompromising struggle against the Jews, framing the Jewish presence in Palestine as one theater of that struggle. He spoke of extending that fight to the Jews of the Arab world once German forces reached the region, telling al-Husayni it would be his duty to “unleash his secretly prepared Arab action.” The mass murder of Jews was already six months into implementation by the time of this meeting. Historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers document an SS Einsatzkommando under Walter Rauff, staged in Athens and intended to follow Rommel’s Afrika Korps into Palestine to carry out the same mass murder there that other Einsatzgruppen were already carrying out in the Soviet Union. What the meeting shows is convergence, not origin: two men recognizing in each other’s project a shared enemy, with Hitler treating al-Husayni as a potential instrument for expanding an extermination campaign that was already in progress.

The relationship didn’t cease with that one meeting and its failed declaration. Al-Husayni maintained a documented personal correspondence with Himmler through 1943 and 1944, sending him a birthday gift that October with a note hoping for “even closer collaboration” toward their “common goals,” and receiving back Himmler’s thanks “in genuine solidarity and in the fellowship of our common struggle.” A transactional alliance doesn’t produce this kind of correspondence a year after the transaction has already failed. This was a sustained personal relationship with the head of the SS, built well after al-Husayni had gotten nothing of substance from Berlin.

The register was ideological, not diplomatic

The clearest evidence against the “purely tactical” reading comes not from the Hitler meeting but from what al-Husayni said on Arabic-language radio to an audience of ordinary listeners, where there was no foreign minister to flatter and no independence declaration to extract. Historian Jeffrey Herf’s study of Nazi Arabic propaganda reconstructs these broadcasts, and the December 1942 speech al-Husayni gave at the opening of Berlin’s Islamic Central Institute grounded his antisemitism explicitly in Quranic text, arguing that Jewish hostility to Muslims dated to the Prophet’s own lifetime, and fused this with the European conspiratorial tradition: that Jews were dictating the war, dominating Britain and America, and driving “atheist communism.” Herf reads the speech as al-Husayni synthesizing two distinct antisemitic traditions, the European conspiratorial one and a selectively read Islamic one, into something neither tradition had produced on its own, doing so independently rather than merely repeating a German script. An opportunist managing a wartime alliance has no reason to reach for Quranic exegesis in front of an audience he isn’t performing for. Al-Husayni believed what he was saying, and had believed some version of it before he ever needed German money or a radio platform.

In his own postwar account, written decades later and reproduced by Elpeleg, al-Husayni insisted he had never believed in Nazism, that Germany was simply an enemy of his enemies, and that he “did not cooperate with Germany for the sake of Germany.” However, a purely transactional actor doesn’t need to ground his radio addresses in Quranic exegesis for a domestic Arab audience, and doesn’t keep writing to Himmler in 1944 about their common struggle once the transaction has already failed to deliver anything.

What he actually did about Jewish emigration

There is a claim that al-Husayni blocked the rescue of children who would otherwise have survived the Holocaust. That claim isn’t true, and the truth isn’t much better.

The claim’s primary source is SS Colonel Dieter Wisliceny, testifying at Nuremberg in early 1946. Two affidavits, gathered from Zionist rescue workers Rudolf Kastner and Andre Steiner and both later signed by Wisliceny, quote him describing al-Husayni as an “initiator of the systematic extermination of European Jewry” and “permanent collaborator and adviser” to Eichmann and Himmler in planning it, including a claim that al-Husayni personally inspected Auschwitz. A third Wisliceny statement, produced later that year, adds a scene of Eichmann personally briefing al-Husayni on extermination plans in a “map room” in Berlin.

Historian Michael Sells traced these documents through the Central Zionist Archives to their actual origin, and the record he found doesn’t support treating them as reliable testimony. The affidavits were solicited by Gideon Ruffer, a Jewish Agency operative building a war-crimes case, who visited Wisliceny repeatedly in his Nuremberg prison cell, personally obtained his signature confirming Steiner’s affidavit, and worked to keep him in custody specifically to extract more material before his trial and execution. The most dramatic claim, the map room scene, surfaced only after ten weeks of this cultivation. No other witness ever corroborated any part of it. Kastner never mentioned it again in his own extensive later testimony. Andre Steiner spent decades afterward publicly discussing his wartime rescue work and never once mentioned it. The 1990 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust gave al-Husayni an unusually long entry and still declined to validate the claim. Sells’ conclusion, working from Bartov’s own standards for distinguishing responsible historical revision from denial, is that the instigator narrative fails on sourcing, corroboration, and context, the three things a claim this significant would need.

What does hold up, because it’s independently documented in the German Foreign Office’s own internal records rather than in postwar testimony solicited by an interested party, is something narrower: that German policy toward Jewish emigration to Palestine specifically took al-Husayni’s objections into account.

In December 1942, when Romania’s Marshal Antonescu agreed to let 75,000 to 80,000 Jews emigrate to Palestine for a fee, the German Foreign Office objected on the grounds that it would strain trust with Middle Eastern allies, and Mallmann and Cüppers document al-Husayni pressing the same position at the time. By February 1943, when Britain offered to take 5,000 Jewish children from Bulgaria, a German undersecretary argued against it on similar grounds. Then in May 1943, small streams of Jewish refugees, mostly from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, were reaching Palestine through Turkey, some through exchange arrangements the German Foreign Office and RSHA were negotiating with Britain via the Red Cross.

Al-Husayni intervened directly and repeatedly to stop this. He wrote to the Bulgarian foreign minister demanding a halt, framing Jewish emigration to Arab lands as a conspiratorial-sounding threat requiring “self-protective measures,” and to Ribbentrop making the same demand. In the Bulgarian letter he asked that Jews be sent instead to somewhere “under tighter control, for example, to Poland,” telling the minister this would “avert the danger and perform a good, rewarding deed for the Arab people.” By May 1943, more than a year into mass deportations to the death camps, there is no plausible reading of “send them to Poland” as anything other than a death sentence.

The German Foreign Office in June 1943 dismissed his objections as exaggerated and continued facilitating exchanges. Von Thadden’s internal notes from spring 1944 record that al-Husayni’s opposition would be “considered” but would not change German policy on including Jews in a British exchange. Historian Dalia Ofer’s tallies put the number of Jewish refugees who reached Palestine via these Balkan and Turkish routes during the war above thirteen thousand.

Al-Husayni pushed for these transfers to stop. He did not have unlimited power to make this happen: the Bulgarian and Antonescu channels weren’t shut down outright, and thousands of refugees reached Palestine regardless, but he wasn’t merely posturing either. Gensicke’s account of the German Foreign Office notes his complaints arrived often enough, at enough different offices, minister’s staff, press, radio, the SS, that officials came to expect them as routine whenever a Balkan Jewish emigration question came up, and found the persistence unwelcome. That’s the actual shape of his influence: not the instigator of a genocide he had no power to instigate, and not a man ignored either, but a persistent, well-connected lobbyist whose objections German officials weighed and sometimes overrode. The instigator myth doesn’t just overstate what he did. It replaces this more specific, better-documented picture with a dramatic story built by people with an obvious interest in seeing him hanged for it.

The Handschar division

The second overstated claim concerns the Bosnian Muslim Waffen-SS division, the Handschar. Popular treatments often describe al-Husayni as having raised or founded the unit. David Motadel’s institutional history of Islam in the Nazi war effort shows the SS conceived, organized, and commanded the division; Himmler and Gottlob Berger drove recruitment through Bosnian Islamic clergy already sympathetic to the project. Al-Husayni’s role was a spring 1943 recruitment tour through the Balkans, intended, in Motadel’s account, to lend religious legitimacy to an enlistment drive already underway, alongside an effort to rebuild trust with the Muslim civilian population there. He gave speeches, was photographed reviewing troops, and by his own later boast helped move enlistment numbers. Motadel’s own assessment is that it remains unclear how much religious appeal, as opposed to material incentive and local self-defense against Chetnik and partisan violence, actually motivated most recruits. Al-Husayni lent his name and his religious authority to an SS project. He did not build it.

A second claim about Handschar circulates alongside the founding myth, and it doesn’t survive a chronology check either: that the division was responsible for killing ninety percent of Bosnia’s Jews. Michael Sells traced this figure to an April 2000 newsletter article by two authors, Paul Longgrear and Raymond McNemar, with no identifiable historical credentials and no cited sources, published on the “Media Digest” page of a Christian Zionist advocacy organization. From there it was picked up and repeated, in one case elaborated into a specific death toll of 12,500, by several more recent popular books without anyone apparently checking where it came from.

The actual chronology makes the figure impossible. At the war’s outset roughly forty thousand Jews lived in the Independent State of Croatia, the fascist puppet state that included Bosnia. Croatian dictator Ante Pavelić’s own Ustashe militia began rounding up and detaining Jews across the territory starting in June 1941, had finished Sarajevo by November, and had two-thirds of the NDH’s Jewish population in concentration camps by the end of that year. Nazi officials began transferring the survivors to Auschwitz in early 1942, and after the last large deportation in May 1943, only a small remnant remained, mostly in Zagreb. Handschar wasn’t combat-ready until months after that: recruitment began in spring 1943, training took place in France, where German officers were killed in a mutiny that further delayed the unit, and the division didn’t return to Bosnia for actual deployment until late February 1944. By the time it existed as a fighting force, there were very few Jews left in the region for it to kill. Sells doesn’t dismiss the division’s record entirely, he notes one credible report of Handschar soldiers murdering Jewish civilians in the Bosnian town of Zvornik in April 1944, after locals betrayed their identity, but that’s a documented isolated atrocity, not the ninety percent of a forty-thousand-person community the popular figure claims. The actual killing of Bosnian Jewry was substantially complete before Handschar ever fired a shot, carried out by the Ustashe and the German deportation apparatus, not the division al-Husayni helped recruit for.

The whitewashing argument, and why the record defeats it

A third argument states that al-Husayni’s alliance with the Axis was simply anti-colonial pragmatism, his antisemitic rhetoric borrowed for a German audience and shed once German patronage disappeared. The 1921 and 1929 material already rules this out, a specific antisemitic conspiracy claim, not generic anti-colonial politics, predating any German contact by two decades. Also left open is why the pattern continued past the point of any German patron actually delivering anything.

The December 1942 Institute speech was to an Arabic-speaking public with no diplomatic audience, grounded in Quranic exegesis rather than any argument about British colonialism. 1943, with the war already turning against Germany and his own influence collapsing, he was still writing personally to Balkan governments to keep Jewish children from reaching Palestine, using the same conspiratorial register he’d used since the 1920s. A wartime marriage of convenience doesn’t require lobbying against child refugees after North Africa is already lost, and the alliance has stopped paying dividends.

Hirszowicz’s research into the Arab exile community in Europe after the Tunisia defeat in 1943 shows a mixed response. Adel Arslan refused a German invitation that year specifically because he opposed al-Husayni’s and Rashid Ali’s continued activities, was reportedly meeting with Allied officials in Istanbul, and other formerly pro-Axis figures like Shekib Arslan grew openly pessimistic about the alliance. Al-Husayni and Rashid Ali did not. Per Hirszowicz, they had “committed themselves too heavily to Nazi Germany to be able to alter their standpoint,” and there’s no evidence either man wanted to. Al-Husayni kept submitting declaration drafts to the Axis as late as April 1943, well after any rational calculation of German victory had collapsed. A purely tactical operator, watching allies around him quietly distance themselves as the war turned, has every reason to do the same. He didn’t.

After the war

Al-Husayni escaped French internment in 1946 and was given refuge in Egypt, never facing an Allied tribunal. Klaus Gensicke, records that Yugoslavia pursued a war crimes case against him specifically over his role in the Bosnian recruitment campaign, though the case never reached him in exile. The Handschar itself, deployed for anti-partisan operations in northeastern Bosnia, acquired what David Motadel’s research describes as a grim reputation for brutality, with a British liaison officer attached to Tito’s partisans reporting that it “massacres all civil population without mercy or regard for age or sex” in Serb-populated areas. Within the Arab world itself, his standing didn’t survive the 1950s and 60s intact. Nasser’s Egypt, consolidating leadership of a newly assertive Arab nationalism, came to treat his Nazi-era past as a liability, and he spent his final years politically marginal even among former allies. A man whose wartime record was widely read at the time, including by his own former patrons, as a discrediting association rather than an incidental footnote is a harder man to recast retroactively as merely a nationalist making tactical use of an opportunity.

Like many things in discussions of Israel/Palestine, both get treated as absolute facts by people who have never fact-checked either one.

What the actual ancestry shows

Many people think of “The Canaanites” as a distinct group that appeared ex nihilo — but ancient DNA from Bronze Age sites across the Southern Levant shows the Canaanite population in the region was already mixed in the Bronze Age. Lily Agranat-Tamir and colleagues, sequencing genomes from nine Bronze Age sites, found the Canaanite population was a combination of an earlier local Neolithic substrate with people related to the Chalcolithic Zagros (modern Iran/Iraq) or Bronze Age Caucasus. The Chalcolitichic Zagros or Bronze Age Caucasus component is a not local and is already detectable by roughly 2400 BCE and it increases through the Iron Age.

Marc Haber’s team, working from five Bronze Age genomes excavated at Sidon, a documented Canaanite city, found the same admixture: Sidon’s population works out to roughly 48 percent local Neolithic Levantine ancestry and 52 percent Chalcolithic Iran-related ancestry, arriving to the region around 5,000 years ago, plausibly tied to population movements out of Mesopotamia during the Akkadian period. Israel’s first appearance in the historical record, the Merneptah Stele of 1209 BCE, sits near the end of this window and lists Israel as already present in Canaan, consistent with Israelite identity forming inside this already-mixed population.

Studies show that the people who identify today as Palestinians, Jews, Samaritans, and Druze all descend from the same Bronze Age population, before Judaism, Christianity, or Islam existed as categories to join or convert into or out of. Nebel and colleagues found Kurdish and Sephardic Jews genetically indistinguishable from one another, and Jews overall more closely related to Kurds, Turks, and Armenians in the northern Fertile Crescent than to their Arab neighbors to the south. Iraqi, Kurdish, Yemenite, and Sephardic Jewish communities carry this shared regional ancestry as directly as Ashkenazi Jews do, arguably more so, since they never left the region long enough to pick up the later European admixture Ashkenazi Jews acquired. On the scale of the whole shared pool, Nebel’s team found that 70 percent of Jewish Y-chromosomes and 82 percent of Palestinian Muslim Arab Y-chromosomes belong to the same regional chromosome pool, a degree of overlap the authors themselves called remarkable given the long separation and wide geographic dispersal involved.

The “Palestinians are the real Canaanites and Jews are foreign” claim fails on the genetics, then. There’s one shared regional population both trace back to.

How the Jewish population changed under Rome and Byzantium

The Arab conquest wasn’t the first event to reshape who lived in the land, and it wasn’t the most demographically violent one either. M. Avi-Yonah’s demographic analysis of Roman Palestine estimates the Jewish population before the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 CE at roughly 1.3 million, falling to somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 in the revolt’s aftermath, with 300,000 to 400,000 of the survivors concentrated in Galilee. Judaea itself, the revolt’s epicenter, effectively stopped being a Jewish-majority district afterward. Galilee became, in Avi-Yonah’s own words, “the main bastion of Judaism in the Holy Land,” with Jews forming roughly three-quarters of its population against about a quarter in the coastal plain and the lands east of the Jordan.

What happened over the following five centuries is genuinely contested among historians, though the disagreement is narrower than it sounds. Seth Schwartz’s influential model divides the period into two phases: a shattering of communal Jewish life from 70 to 350 CE, when rabbinic authority held only marginal sway, followed by an actual revival under Byzantine Christian rule from 350 to 640, the period during which Jodi Magness’s archaeological surveys document a boom in synagogue construction even in small settlements. Lee Levine and other historians push back not on the revival, both sides agree that happened, but on how bad the earlier period actually was, pointing to continuous institutional strength, the Patriarchate, the compilation of the Mishnah, third-century prosperity in cities like Tiberias and Sepphoris, as evidence that Schwartz’s “shattering” understates Jewish continuity even before 350. By the sixth century, growing legal and social pressure from Byzantine Christian authorities was squeezing Jewish communal life, pressure serious enough that when the Persians invaded in 614 and the Arabs in 634, some Jews are recorded as having actively joined the invading forces against Byzantine rule.

The Arab Conquest and Genetics

The same studies that show the first claim false also falsify the second, that Palestinians are simply displaced Arabian settlers. Within that 82 percent shared pool, Nebel’s team found that about a third of the Palestinian chromosomes form a haplotype cluster rarely found in Jews. A related paper by Nebel, Landau-Tasseron, and colleagues finds a haplotype present at 18.5 percent frequency among Galilee Muslim Arabs, absent from Jews and Muslim Kurds, and matching a haplotype found at roughly 41 percent in the Yemeni town of Sena and 10 percent in the Yemeni Hadramaut sample. The authors read this as evidence of Arabian tribal expansion into the region, most plausibly reaching its high point at the seventh-century conquest. The genetic data shows traces of the Arab migration into the Levant. It also shows what we already know from history: that force was small.

Hugh Kennedy draws his numbers from the Muslim sources themselves and calls them rough but broadly consistent. Syria fell to roughly 30,000 Arab invaders, who rarely operated as one force and fought most of the campaign split into smaller units. This follows the pattern across the region: Iraq took between 6,000 and 12,000. Egypt’s initial force was smaller still, 3,500 to 4,000 men, with 12,000 reinforcements arriving later. Kennedy calls these armies of fighting men, not settlers. Families and livestock mostly stayed behind in Arabia until the fighting was done, arriving later.

What happened after the fighting diverged sharply by region, and Syria, the province that included Palestine, shows only moderate settlement. Kennedy is direct about this: “There is no evidence of great tribal migrations of the sort that are well attested in Iraq.” The Muslim elite wanted to keep Syria’s existing towns and resources intact rather than share them with a mass of Bedouin, who were redirected toward Iraq instead, in Kennedy’s own line, “Syria was for the officers, Iraq for the other ranks.” Muslims mostly took over vacated Byzantine properties and existing towns rather than founding new settlements. The one specific exception Kennedy names is villages around Tiberias, where Muslims were settled and given deserted agricultural land to cultivate, which happens to sit in the same Galilee region where Nebel’s team found that Yemen-matching haplotype at 18.5 percent. Ira Lapidus’s account of the wider settlement shows why even this limited process left the underlying society intact: the Byzantine and Sasanian administrative structure survived, with local landowners and village headmen keeping their authority underneath the new rulers.

A conquering force in the low tens of thousands, replacing the people at the top while leaving the existing population and its administration in place, plus a small and localized wave of Arabian settlement concentrated in places like the Galilee rather than spread evenly across the country. That’s what the history and the genetics independently show, and together they explain the shape of the genetic signal itself: real, traceable, and geographically specific, not the broad population replacement either side of the argument wants it to be.

How the rest of the population became Arabic-speaking and Muslim

Conversion, not replacement, is also how the majority of the population became Muslim, and it took roughly six or seven centuries, not one. The documentary record traces the shape of that curve with unusual precision. Richard Bulliet’s quantitative work on conversion timelines, built from biographical dictionaries, shows Syria’s Islamization following an S-curve that only starts accelerating after 791 CE, well over a century after the conquest, under the early Abbasids. Ronnie Ellenblum’s documentary and archaeological work shows large parts of rural Palestine remaining Christian straight through the Crusader period, pushing the decisive Islamization of the Palestinian countryside into the Ayyubid and especially Mamluk period, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Gudrun Krämer notes that Christians still formed the majority of the population in the Fatimid period, in the countryside and in Jerusalem itself, four centuries after the conquest. Donald Little’s work on Coptic conversion in Mamluk Egypt shows the actual mechanism at work everywhere in the region: legal discrimination, tax burden, and generational fiscal pressure eventually pushed communities toward conversion, no single post-conquest event.

Whatever Islamization means for the Palestinian countryside, it happened to a population that was already there, gradually, under sustained fiscal and legal pressure, over thirteen or fourteen generations.

The Samaritan exception, where you can actually watch this happen

Moshe Gil’s history of Palestine under Islamic rule gives the one population in the region whose absorption is directly documented rather than inferred: the Samaritans, who survived as a distinct, persecuted group long enough to leave a named, dated paper trail, unlike individual converting families, whose transition left no comparable record at the family level. Gil documents Justinian’s forced-conversion campaign and the revolt it triggered in the sixth century, then a second wave of persecution under the Abbasids, synagogues burned at Zayta and Kafr Salam, a revolt crushed under al-Ma’mun, and heavy taxation running through al-Mutawakkil’s reign in the 840s and 850s. Those episodes are named and dated because Samaritans remained visible as a distinct community while it was happening to them. The same synagogue-construction boom Magness documents for the fourth through sixth centuries shows up specifically in the Galilee and Golan, exactly when Byzantine Christianization was accelerating elsewhere, real Jewish demographic continuity in those areas through the same period that was hollowing out the Samaritans.

A population too unstable for precise head counts

The population base itself complicates any claim to precision on either side, because it was never fixed long enough to count with confidence. The Black Death cut Syria and Palestine’s population by roughly a third in 1347 to 1348, and Eliyahu Ashtor documents fifteen further epidemic waves through the early sixteenth century, compounded by Bedouin tribal warfare that depopulated hundreds of villages.

The Ottoman-era numbers compound the problem rather than resolving it. Wolf-Dieter Hutteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, analyzing the Ottoman census of 1596 against nineteenth-century Palestine Exploration Fund surveys, estimated the population had fallen to around 206,290 by the 1870s. Krämer cites Haim Gerber’s competing estimate of 213,660 for 1548 to 1549 alone, close enough to Hutteroth and Abdulfattah’s own 1870s number to undercut the decline story, and Justin McCarthy’s corrected Ottoman data putting the 1850 population at 340,000 Ottoman subjects, 300,000 of them Muslim and Druze, 27,000 Christian, and 13,000 Jewish. Kimmerling and Migdal, working the same general period, put the 1870s figure closer to 350,000 to 400,000. Krämer adds a reason not to trust any of these numbers too much, Ottoman surveys were built around taxation and conscription, giving every household counted an incentive to undercount, and updating the data across years was harder than the original survey, so that, in her words, “data from different years were combined to produce aggregate data in the statistical totals” rather than freshly gathered each time. Whichever figure in that cluster is closest to right, the population rebuilt sharply after 1850 as epidemics receded, and public health improved, nearly doubling by 1882, with abandoned villages being resettled starting in the 1840s.

A population that goes through demographic collapse and rebuild from plague and war, absorbs a partial wave of Arabian migration at the conquest, shifts language and religion over six or seven centuries afterward, and does all this without any surviving institution that had a reason to record which families carried which prior identity, cannot honestly be reduced to a single origin story.

What this settles, and what it doesn’t

What the evidence settles is the two confident indigeneity claims that get thrown around as established fact using DNA as a basis are wrong. Palestinians are not simply displaced Arabian settlers with no local roots. Jews are not a foreign population standing outside a genetically distinct Canaanite lineage. Both trace substantially to the same Bronze Age population.

Sources

Lily Agranat-Tamir, Shamam Waldman, Mario A.S. Martin, David Gokhman, Nadav Mishol, et al., “The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant,” Cell 181 (2020): 1146–1157

Marc Haber, Claude Doumet-Serhal, Christiana Scheib, et al., “Continuity and Admixture in the Last Five Millennia of Levantine History from Ancient Canaanite and Present-Day Lebanese Genome Sequences,” American Journal of Human Genetics 101 (2017): 274–282

Michal Feldman, Daniel M. Master, Raffaela A. Bianco, et al., “Ancient DNA Sheds Light on the Genetic Origins of Early Iron Age Philistines,” Science Advances 5 (2019): eaax0061

Almut Nebel, Dvora Filon, Deborah A. Weiss, et al., “High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs Reveal Geographic Substructure and Substantial Overlap with Haplotypes of Jews,” Human Genetics 107 (2000): 630–641

Almut Nebel, Dvora Filon, Bernd Brinkmann, et al., “The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East,” American Journal of Human Genetics 69 (2001): 1095–1112

Almut Nebel, Ella Landau-Tasseron, Dvora Filon, Ariella Oppenheim, and Marina Faerman, “Genetic Evidence for the Expansion of Arabian Tribes into the Southern Levant and North Africa,” American Journal of Human Genetics 70 (2002): 1594–1596

M. Avi-Yonah, The Jews under Roman and Byzantine Rule: A Political History of Palestine from the Bar Kokhba War to the Arab Conquest

Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.

Lee I. Levine, “Jews and Judaism in Palestine (70–640 CE): A New Historical Paradigm,” in The Faces of Torah, ed. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal et al.

Seth Schwartz, “Historiography on the Jews in the ‘Talmudic Period’ (70–640 CE),” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts

Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History

Ronnie Ellenblum, “Settlement and Society Formation in Crusader Palestine,” in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, ed. Thomas Evan Levy

Donald P. Little, “Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Bahri Mamluks, 692–755/1293–1354,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 39 (1976)

Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel

Wolf-Dieter Hutteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the Late 16th Century

Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate

Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099

Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In

Ira M. Lapidus, Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History

Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest

Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People

Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine: Two Worlds Collide

You have probably encountered this argument. It shows up in discussions of Soviet antisemitism, in debates about Soviet anti-Zionism, in comment sections under any article that criticizes the USSR’s record on Jewish life: the Soviet Union liberated Jews from Tsarist persecution, abolished discriminatory laws, opened universities, defeated Nazi Germany. Whatever happened later, the USSR was better for Jews than that which preceded it. Soviet anti-Zionism was a legitimate political position, not antisemitism in disguise, and Jewish complaints about Soviet treatment are exaggerated or politically motivated.

The baseline

The time period for comparison in the claim is always the Tsarist system. This is often chosen because it is the worst period for Jewish life in the region.

Nicholas I’s 1827 conscription decree imposed 25-year military service on Jewish men and authorized the effective abduction of Jewish boys, some as young as eight, into military preparatory academies called cantonist schools. The explicit purpose was conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. Between 40,000 and 50,000 Jewish boys were conscripted before the system was abolished in 1859. Families lit mourning candles when their sons were taken.

Saying the Soviet Union improved on this is true. It is also not a high bar.

What the claim gets right

The Pale of Settlement was abolished by the February Revolution of 1917 and confirmed by the Bolsheviks. University quotas came down. Restrictions on Jewish residence and occupation were lifted. These changes affected millions of people who had spent their lives managing a system specifically designed to exclude them.

By the mid-1920s Jews constituted roughly 6 percent of the Soviet ruling elite and 10 percent of the leadership of Soviet economic agencies, despite being under 2 percent of the population. Elissa Bemporad’s study of Minsk shows Jews at 67 percent of the first intake at Belorussian State University in 1921. By 1939, Moscow and Leningrad Jews made up around 70 percent of all dentists, nearly 60 percent of pharmacists, 40 percent of physicians, and 31 percent of writers, journalists, and editors.

The Red Army from 1918 offered Jewish men promotion possibilities unavailable under the Tsars. Jewish officers exceeded their population share at every rank: 4.6 percent of senior officers in 1926, rising to 10.3 percent by 1929. Oleg Budnitskii documents that Red Army commanders actively suppressed anti-Jewish violence in their ranks, in some cases through public executions of soldiers who carried out pogroms. Apolitical Jews who had no interest in Bolshevism concluded that supporting the revolution was a matter of survival when the alternative was Petliura’s forces, which were responsible for the majority of the more than 1,500 civil war pogroms and the bulk of the 150,000 to 200,000 Jews killed between 1914 and 1921.

What the numbers actually show

Being a doctor in Soviet Russia was not a glamorous profession. Soviet medicine was nationalized and salaried from the beginning. A physician in a Minsk state clinic in the 1930s was a state employee on a fixed wage with no independent income, no private practice, no professional autonomy of any kind.

Jewish concentration in medicine and dentistry did not reflect prestige or privilege. These were simply the options accessible under the Tsarist quota system. The exclusion that produced concentration in whatever niches were open to Jews changed jobs available, but the system did not change.

Working-class Jews and Jews who joined the party apparatus gained the most from Soviet emancipation. Jews who were classified as having commercial or merchant backgrounds did not fare as well. The Soviet category of lishentsy, citizens deprived of civic rights due to bourgeois class origin, directly affected Jewish families who had run small businesses or worked in trade.

It is worth noting here that Bourgeois in this context did not mean wealthy. It meant anyone whose pre-revolutionary occupation fell outside labor or peasant categories, which swept in petty shopkeepers and small traders alongside genuine merchants. Their children faced university restrictions, employment barriers, and political exclusion.

That so many Jewish families fell into this category was itself a legacy of Tsarist policy rather than Jewish preference. Restrictions on land purchase and guild access, dating to the partition era, pushed Jewish economic life toward trade and commerce in the first place. The 1804 statute offered land and loans for Jewish agricultural colonization, but the provision was vague from the outset and, like most of the statute, went largely unenforced. Historians differ on how much weight to give legal exclusion against other factors, inherited settlement patterns from the Polish-Lithuanian period, regional economic conditions, and enforcement that varied sharply by province. What is not in dispute is that Jews were denied the option of landholding and faced serious barriers to guild trades, and that the resulting concentration in commerce is what Soviet law then classified as bourgeois and penalized.

A 1923 social stratification survey of Lithuanian Jewry, whose occupational structure carried over directly from the Tsarist-era Pale, found that 85 percent of Jews working in trade were either the owner of the business or an unpaid family member working alongside him. Only 10 percent were hired employees. Among non-Jews in the same trade sector, owners and family members combined made up less than half. The Jewish “merchant” the Soviet class system flagged as bourgeois was, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a shopkeeper whose wife kept the books and whose children stocked the shelves, not a man employing a workforce. Jacob Lestschinsky’s description holds: the Jewish economic mass was petit-bourgeois, small shopkeepers, peddlers, and independent craftsmen, with only a narrow stratum of genuine wealth above them.

Jews were classified as one of the Soviet Union’s “foreign” nationalities, grouped administratively with Poles and Baltic peoples who also lacked a national territory of their own within the USSR. This classification excluded Jews from the indigenization preferences the Soviet state extended to supposed nationalities within their own regions, which is why Belorussians received preferential university admissions over Jews from the mid-1920s despite Jewish families having lived in Belorussia for generations.

The classification became permanent in December 1932, when the Soviet government introduced internal passports carrying a mandatory nationality line, paragraph 5. Officially, the 1936 constitution held that nationality classification carried no legal significance. In practice, it became the primary mechanism through which the state tracked and restricted people by ethnicity for the rest of Soviet history. Once assigned, nationality could not be changed. A Jew who spoke no Yiddish, kept no religious practice, and identified entirely with Russian culture was still marked Jewish on the document required for every job application, university admission, and residence registration. The marker tracked ancestry, and it followed a person regardless of how thoroughly they had assimilated.

As Pinkus puts it, Soviet policy fixed the Jews’ constitutional and political status as a “negative nationality,” a status that conferred no rights but only restrictions. Jews were denied recognition as a genuine nation under Marxist-Leninist theory, which required territorial concentration Jews did not have, while simultaneously being tracked, flagged, and restricted as a nationality on the one document that governed access to Soviet institutional life. The same passport line that justified the 1920s preference for Belorussian applicants over Jewish ones was still in use, unchanged in function, when Moscow University’s admissions committees restricted Jewish enrollment in the 1970s. The Jewish share of university enrollment declined in the 1920s even as absolute numbers rose.

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The price of admission

The claim most consistently omits the following fact: formal emancipation and the destruction of Jewish cultural autonomy were linked.

In July 1919, the Evsektsia, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, submitted a memorandum calling for the immediate suspension of all Zionist party activities. Hebrew schools were forbidden in Greater Russia by 1921. Synagogue buildings were confiscated. Yeshivot and longstanding educational institutions were closed. The kehilot, the self-governing Jewish communal organizations that had structured Jewish life for centuries, were dismantled.

By 1928 Zionism was absolutely banned throughout the Soviet Union, but this was the culmination of a decade of inconsistent and factionally driven suppression rather than the application of settled policy. The government’s own Central Committee had ruled in July 1919 that the Zionist party was not counter-revolutionary, only to see Hebrew instruction banned a month later. The Evsektsia, the Communist Party’s Jewish sections, are generally credited with pushing the anti-Zionist campaign harder and faster than the central leadership’s own priorities would have produced, since the party had larger adversaries to contend with in the early 1920s.

Two groups, the agricultural Hehalutz movement and the Poalei-Zion Marxist-Zionist party, were permitted to operate legally into the late 1920s. Both were dissolved in 1928, the same year Stalin ended the New Economic Policy and began the broader consolidation of state control that swept up every remaining form of independent association, Jewish, Zionist or otherwise.

The Soviet state did not give Jews true emancipation. It gave conditional citizenship and access, the oldest bargain in the history of Jewish emancipation. Dating to the French Revolutionary debates that first granted Jews civic equality: everything to the Jew as an individual, nothing to the Jew as a nation. The Soviet version compressed decades of that trade into a handful of years and enforced it far more aggressively.

Zionism as a domestic loyalty problem

The usual claim treats Soviet anti-Zionism as a post-1967 development, a response to the Six-Day War and the deepening alignment between the United States and Israel. Benjamin Pinkus’s archivally documented study of Soviet Jews shows this is not right.

Trials were running against Jews in the Soviet Union from the first year of Soviet power. Pinkus identifies four types: anti-Zionist, directed at members and sympathizers of Zionist movements and those active in Hebrew culture; anti-religious, directed at rabbis, scholars, and synagogue officials; anti-bourgeois, directed at those classified as Jewish bourgeoisie under the lishentsy system; and anti-nationalist, directed at Evsektsia functionaries and Yiddish culture figures once the Evsektsia itself was disbanded. Pinkus is careful to note that not all of these functioned as antisemitic persecution in intent, particularly in the 1920s. But the anti-Zionist category is the one that ran without interruption throughout the entire period, from the earliest Soviet years through the post-1967 escalation. Zionists were kept under constant surveillance from the first Soviet weeks.

The single brief relaxation came from mid-1947 to October 1948, coinciding precisely with Soviet support for Israeli partition at the United Nations. It ended abruptly in November 1948.

Between 1970 and 1974 the Soviet propaganda apparatus published 134 anti-Zionist books. At the 1970 peak, 96 Soviet publications characterized Zionism as barely distinguishable from Nazism. But this was an escalation of a posture running continuously since 1917, not a new policy introduced by Cold War calculations.

The civil war and the Red Army

The comparative claim about the Red Army is true as far as it goes. White Army forces, Ukrainian nationalist units, and peasant bands carried out the overwhelming majority of the civil war pogroms. The Red Army was less systematically pogromist than its opponents.

The Red Army carried out pogroms as well, typically framed in ideological vocabulary as anti-bourgeois or anti-speculator action rather than explicitly antisemitic, but the effect on Jewish communities was the same. The Avrutin and Bemporad documentary history of pogroms shows that Jews were caught between all the armed forces in the civil war, not protected by one of them. The 150,000 to 200,000 killed and 300,000 children orphaned between 1914 and 1921 died at the hands of multiple perpetrators.

Stalinist antisemitism, 1948 to 1953

Solomon Mikhoels, head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the most important figure in Soviet Jewish cultural life, was murdered by state security agents in January 1948. The killing was staged to look like a car accident.

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had spent the war years fundraising for the Soviet war effort among Jews in the United States and Britain, was liquidated. In spring and summer 1952, a secret trial was held of its surviving members: writers, poets, scientists, and the director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre. Thirteen defendants, among them the Yiddish poets Peretz Markish, Itzik Feffer, Leib Kvitko, and David Bergelson, were executed on August 12, 1952, in what became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. The Doctors’ Plot followed in early 1953, with leading Soviet physicians, mostly Jews, accused of conspiring to assassinate Soviet leadership on behalf of Zionist and American intelligence.

At a Presidium meeting on December 1, 1952, Stalin declared that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence.”

Stalin simultaneously supported Israeli partition at the UN in 1947, authorized Czech arms deliveries to Israel in 1948, in order to harm Britain’s interests. It also ran a domestic terror campaign against Jewish cultural figures in the same years. Soviet policy toward Jews was never about Jewish welfare. It followed Soviet state interests. Those interests could simultaneously require supporting a Jewish state abroad and liquidating Jewish cultural life at home.

Rubenstein and Naumov’s edition of the JAC trial transcripts, drawn from Soviet archives opened after 1991, establishes what the confessions were worth: they were obtained through torture, and after Stalin’s death investigators found “irrefutable evidence of the complete innocence of all the defendants.”

After Stalin

The claim sometimes concedes the Stalinist terror and relocates the argument in the post-Stalin period. This does not hold either.

Khrushchev told foreign delegations concerned about Soviet Jews that the USSR required “new cadres” and that when a Jew received an important post “he surrounds himself with Jewish collaborators,” provoking antisemitic hostility. In a 1958 interview with Le Figaro, he attributed the failure of Birobidzhan to Jewish “incapacity for collective work” and agricultural labor. He told Bertrand Russell in 1963 that antisemitism had never existed in the Soviet Union.

University restrictions returned and intensified. From the 1960s onward, the most distinguished institutions began restricting Jewish admissions to specific faculties. By the 1970s Jews found it difficult to gain admission to entire departments at Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, and Kharkiv. Jewish students at Moscow University fell from 19,508 in 1970 to 9,911 in 1980. Jewish scientific workers declined from 15.5 percent of all Soviet scientists in 1950 to 5.7 percent by 1975. Certain institutions had been effectively closed to Jews since the early 1950s: the security services, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the senior ranks of the military.

The economic trials of 1961 to 1964 were openly used as antisemitic propaganda. Defendants were identified in the national press by Hebrew names even when they used Russified ones. Their religion and alleged Zionist connections were made central to coverage. In 1963, Trofim Kichko published a text through the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences depicting Judaism as a religion promoting greed, bribery, and usury, linking it to Zionism and American capitalism. The book was briefly withdrawn under international pressure and reissued after 1968.

The refuseniks

The claim’s account of Soviet-Jewish relations effectively ends with Brezhnev, but the same conditional logic ran through the final two decades of Soviet power.

Immediately after the Six-Day War, Moscow banned all emigration to Israel outright. It reopened in 1969, not from any change of heart but for calculated propaganda reasons. Andropov and Gromyko proposed the resumption to the Politburo explicitly to “contain the slanderous assertions of Western propaganda concerning discrimination against the Jews in the Soviet Union.” The KGB, they noted, would keep using the emigration channel “for operational goals,” meaning to insert agents into Israel.

Every applicant for a visa was branded, in the KGB’s own internal language, an enemy of the Soviet Union. Technical workers and even clerks were dismissed from their jobs the moment they applied, whether or not the visa was granted. Students whose families applied were expelled from university and conscripted for three years of military service, after which they faced a mandatory five-year wait before they could reapply themselves. In August 1972, a “diploma tax” required anyone who had received higher education to repay its cost before leaving.

Those who were refused permission, the refuseniks, organized protests and hunger strikes through the 1970s and 1980s. The KGB’s internal reporting characterized it as evidence of an international Zionist conspiracy rather than a human response to being trapped. Brezhnev’s own recorded remarks to the Politburo in 1973 complaining about international criticism of the education tax, he mused: “Why not give the Jews some little theatre with 500 seats for a Jewish variety show that will work under our censorship with a repertoire under our supervision? Let Auntie Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there.” Controlled, minor, revocable cultural expression, offered grudgingly and calibrated for its effect on foreign opinion: that is the entire pattern of this piece compressed into one Politburo transcript.

The persecution of refuseniks continued past Brezhnev, through Andropov and Chernenko, and initially under Gorbachev as well. Even as Gorbachev worked to resolve the case of Andrei Sakharov, the resistance within the KGB and the Politburo’s old guard to releasing Jewish refuseniks was, by the archival record, stronger than the resistance to freeing non-Jewish dissidents. Natan Sharansky’s release in 1986 marked the turning point. The floodgates did not fully open until 1989, when 71,000 Jews left in a single year.

The audit

The claim covers roughly 1917 to the mid-1930s: the peak mobility years, when formal legal equality was new, and the worst had not yet arrived. Left out: the simultaneous destruction of Jewish cultural and religious autonomy from 1917 onward; the class-based lishentsy restrictions that fell on Jewish commercial families from the beginning; the anti-Zionist surveillance running without interruption from the first weeks of Soviet power; the Stalinist terror of 1948 to 1953, which was antisemitism, not anti-Zionism; the Khrushchev-era economic trial propaganda and informal exclusions; the explicit numerical restrictions and institutional closures of the 1970s.

The Soviet state used Jewish literacy, organizational capacity, and military motivation when those qualities served its purposes. When Jewish national particularity, Zionism, religious practice, Hebrew culture, connections to Jews abroad, appeared to conflict with Soviet state interests, it was suppressed. The mobility of the 1920s and the terror of the early 1950s follow the same logic applied to different circumstances. They are not contradictions.

What the USSR offered Jews was conditional access, contingent on surrendering everything that distinguished Jewish life from Soviet life, and retractable whenever state interests required it.

Sources:

Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948-1967

Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority;

Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews

Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence

Zvi Gitelman, “The Evolution of Soviet Anti-Zionism,” in Robert S. Wistrich, ed., Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World

Oleg Budnitskii, Jews in the Soviet Union: War, Conquest, and Crisis

Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

Robert Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel

Eugene Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad, eds., Pogroms: A Documentary History

Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World

John Efron, The Jews: A History

Yosef Govrin, Israeli-Soviet Relations, 1953-1967: From Confrontation to Disruption

ChaeRan Freeze, Sarunas Liekis, and Antony Polonsky, eds., Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 25, Jews in the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian Empire.

The chronology problem

The claim that Jews “always” rejected Zionism doesn’t match the actual history of Zionism. Organized Jewish anti-Zionism tracks the emergence of organized Zionism itself. It dates to the 1880s at the earliest and consolidates institutionally in the 1890s.

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Yehuda Hai Alkalai published Minhat Yehuda in 1843. He was the rabbi of Semlin, Serbia, born in Sarajevo, raised in Jerusalem. His argument for the Jewish return to the Land of Israel was halakhic and kabbalistic, grounded in the proposition that collective teshuvah required physical return as a precondition. Zvi Hirsch Kalischer published Drishat Tsion in 1862, advancing a comparable argument on independent grounds from the Polish territories of Prussia. Both drew on the rising nationalist currents among the peoples around them. Both were arguing within a traditional Jewish legal framework about the mechanism of redemption, not importing a foreign ideology into Jewish life. Alkalai’s promotional efforts reached Moses Montefiore and Adolph Crémieux. They reached Herzl’s grandfather, Simon Loeb Herzl, whose grandson would publish Der Judenstaat in 1896.

When opponents of Zionism formulated their objections in the 1880s and 1890s, they were responding to a movement that had itself only recently consolidated. The fight was between two positions in simultaneous development, not between a foreign ideology and an established Jewish consensus.

The gedolim claim

The strongest version of the anti-Zionist majority argument runs through rabbinic authority: the gedolim, the great halakhic decisors of the pre-war period, opposed Zionism. Hirsch, Breuer, Teitelbaum. The Agudath Israel movement institutionalized this opposition. The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 renounced Jewish nationhood in the name of Reform universalism.

Reform opposition rejected Jewish particularity in the name of civic integration. They proposed that Jews were Germans or Americans of the Mosaic faith, not a people awaiting restoration. Haredi opposition defended Jewish particularity, insisting that restoration could only come through divine action, not secular nationalist organizing. Treating them as co-evidence of a unified anti-Zionist tradition ignores what each group was actually protesting.

What both were arguing within was Ashkenazi institutional politics. David Biale and his collaborators in Hasidism: A New History put it directly: when Zionism emerged in the late nineteenth century, “the fight over Zionism within Orthodoxy at that time was over ideology and politics, not faith and lifestyles, so that it was a dispute between two parties within the same world. Orthodox Zionists and Orthodox non-Zionists followed the same religious lifestyle, lived in the same neighborhoods, and married each other”. The sharp communal separation between haredi anti-Zionists and religious Zionists came after 1948, not before. Projecting the current split back into the pre-war period misreads what the conflict was.

The Pittsburgh Platform’s statement against Jewish nationhood was contested within Reform from the moment of its adoption. The Columbus Platform of 1937 reversed it on Jewish peoplehood within two generations. That is not a stable anti-Zionist consensus. It is a movement that changed its position as conditions changed.

The Bund

The Bund is commonly cited as evidence of broad working-class Jewish opposition to Zionism. This overstates both its reach and its representativeness.

The Bund was a significant force in the industrial regions of Congress Poland and Lithuania. It was essentially nonexistent in Galicia before the First World War. Its influence was concentrated in a specific geographic and demographic slice of Eastern European Jewry, primarily urban, primarily Yiddish-speaking, primarily in the former Russian Pale. Its doikayt doctrine, the proposition that Jews belonged where they were and should build their future there, was a reasonable bet given what was known in 1900. It was not a position held by Jews in Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt, the Balkans, or most of the Ottoman world.

The Bund’s actual electoral performance also tells a different story from its modern ideological visibility. In the 1919 Polish Constituent Sejm elections, Bundist candidates in Congress Poland received 16,366 votes. The Zionist-dominated Temporary Jewish National Council received approximately 180,000. The Orthodox list received approximately 97,000. The Folkists received approximately 59,000. The Jewish socialist parties combined were, as Ezra Mendelsohn summarized, “revealed as extremely weak, thus demonstrating that the radicalization of the Jewish population evident to some extent in socialist Russia was not present in nationalist Poland”. The 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly elections told the same story: at least 622,797 people voted for Jewish parties, and 80 percent of those votes went to Jewish national coalitions. The Bund, Poalei Zion, and the Fareynikte combined received less than 15 percent of the total Jewish party vote.

The Bund reached an estimated 35,000 members during the revolutionary surge of 1905. By October 1910, it had 609, across nine organizations, of which only six were considered secure. A movement that reaches 35,000 and falls to 609 in five years does not have deep roots. It has a revolutionary moment. Even at its 1938 peak, the strongest showing in the party's history, Bundist support remained concentrated in Warsaw, Lodz, and the Litvak cities of eastern Poland. The Bund did not compete in Lvov, the third-largest city in Poland, and won only 15 percent in Krakow.

When Eastern European Jews voted, they did not vote for the Bund.

The Ashkenazi Centralism problem

The debate as usually conducted- Feld’s The Threshold of Dissent, Geoffrey Levin’s Our Palestine Question, the arguments about the American Council for Judaism, the Agudath Israel position, the Pittsburgh Platform, the Bund’s doikayt- takes as its universe of reference European and American Ashkenazi institutional politics. The question “did Jews support Zionism?” is asked, in these texts, by examining a sample that excludes the majority of the world’s Jewish population.

Jane Gerber makes it clear: “One myth of modern Zionism that is still widely believed is the alleged absence of Sephardic participation in the Zionist revolution. In fact, Sephardim were always Zionists in the sense that many of them have lived in Palestine for centuries while others continued to migrate there over the past 1,000 years. Moreover, since the country formed an integral part of the successive empires in which they lived, they could hardly regard it with idealistic religious sentiment as some remote, almost mythical land to be redeemed in God’s own time”. The first calls for Jewish return, Gerber notes, came from Sephardic leaders, Alkalai and Rabbi Yehuda Bibas of Corfu, not from Herzl.

Sephardic rabbis “tended to be supportive of Zionism from the outset, for the movement was a natural form of expression of Sephardic Judaism.” Communities that had long understood themselves as a separate ethnoreligious nation within Muslim polities did not find Jewish nationalist claims strange. In North Africa, Zionism “was tinged with a strongly messianic fervor” that ran back through traditions of longing for Eretz Yisrael predating the Spanish exile, as noted by Gerber.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of gainfully employed Jewish settlers in Palestine were Sephardic. Sephardic Jews comprised one-sixth of the pre-1949 Jewish population of Palestine, though they were less than one-tenth of world Jewry at the time. None of this appears in the historiography that purports to establish Jewish attitudes toward Zionism.

The Yemenite case

The 1881 Yemenite aliyah preceded the Bilu pioneers. From 1881 to 1914, somewhere between three and five thousand Yemenite Jews made their way to Palestine, motivated primarily by messianic fervor and deteriorating conditions at home. By 1914 they constituted roughly six percent of the Jewish population of Palestine.

These were not Herzlian Zionists. They were not responding to the Basel Program or to Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation. Their relationship to Eretz Yisrael was both halakhic and messianic, rooted in a tradition unrelated to the European political categories generally relied upon.

The claim that Zionism was a “foreign nationalist ideology” imported into Jewish life requires, as its first premise, that Jewish life had some pre-political default from which Zionism deviated. Yemenite Jews walking to Aden to board ships for Palestine in 1881 are not evidence for that premise. The longing was not produced by Herzl. The movement was.

The Iraqi Jewish case

Iraqi Jewry before 1948 was not straightforwardly Zionist in any organized institutional sense. The community was integrated into Iraqi professional and commercial life to an unusual degree for the region. The Farhud of 1941 and the legal disabilities of the late 1940s had not yet fully materialized as a perceived existential crisis. Orit Bashkin’s characterization of a Jewish effendi class with real investment in Iraqi nationalism describes something real, though it describes an elite more than a mass.

What Iraqi Jews were not was anti-Zionist in the sense the historiography implies. Institutional identification with the Iraqi national project was not ideological opposition to Jewish restoration. The mass emigration of 1950-51, in which roughly 120,000 of Iraq’s 130,000 Jews left for Israel within a two-year window, was not the behavior of a community that had organized itself around principled rejection of Zionism. It was the behavior of a community that, when the choice was clarified by events, chose differently than their previous accommodation suggested they might.

The Iraqi case is evidence of how circumstances shaped the options available, not of what Jews believed Zionism to be.

What Levin’s book actually shows

Geoffrey Levin’s Our Palestine Question (Yale, 2024) is cited regularly as evidence of a substantial and continuous American Jewish tradition of opposition to Zionism. It is the most recent serious attempt to document American Jewish engagement with the Palestinian question.

Levin’s own text does not support this use. Organized American Jewry never adopted an independent stance on the Palestinian refugee question except through what he describes as “a few small, outlying groups.” Independent discussion of the refugee question became “even more negligible” in the 1960s. The organizations he documents, the American Council for Judaism foremost among them, are described in his own analysis as marginal. The book is a careful history of those margins. It cannot be made to say something about the center.

Feld’s The Threshold of Dissent is framed around recovering what she calls a “usable past” of American Jewish anti-Zionism. The framing is honest about what it is recovering: a minority tradition, always marginal to the institutional mainstream, that required considerable archival effort to surface. Romano’s Moment review of Feld identified the methodological problem directly: framing a minority tradition as evidence of suppressed consensus is circular. The recovery project proves only that the tradition existed, not that it was representative.

Western Sephardic proto-Zionism

Rabbi David Meldola de Sola, minister of Shearith Israel, the Spanish-Portuguese congregation of New York, was publicly advocating for Jewish restoration to the Holy Land in the 1840s, before the Bilu movement, before the Pittsburgh Platform, before Herzl. Henry Pereira Mendes, his successor at Shearith Israel, was a co-founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1886 and an early participant in American Zionist organizing. Emma Lazarus, from the same Western Sephardic milieu, was writing proto-Zionist essays in The American Hebrew as early as 1882, the same year the Bilu founded their movement. The poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty is hers. Her advocacy for Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine is less often mentioned alongside it.

The claim that Zionism was an Ashkenazi nationalist import requires ignoring that Sephardic rabbis and lay leaders were making the same arguments, from within a halakhic and messianic framework entirely their own, decades before.

What the sources show

The sources cited in support of the anti-Zionist majority claim describe, when read carefully: a genuine dispute within Ashkenazi institutional Orthodoxy that was conducted between two parties in the same world and only sharpened into communal separation after 1948; a minority tradition in American Reform Judaism that its own most recent historian describes as marginal and outlying; a Bund whose electoral performance, when Eastern European Jews actually voted, was decisively weaker than Zionist and nationalist alternatives; and a Sephardic and Mizrahi majority of world Jewry whose relationship to Israel was shaped by traditions and experiences the European institutional debate simply did not address.

The anti-Zionist majority claim is not supported by its own sources. It is a reading of a selected sample, drawn from Ashkenazi institutional politics, presented as though it covered Jewish opinion broadly. The selection omits most Jews.

Jewish political life in this period was genuinely plural. Anti-Zionist voices were real and, in some communities, significant. They were also a regionally concentrated minority and unrepresentative of a world that the historiography mostly does not look at.

Sources:

Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History (Princeton, 2018);

Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine (Stanford, 2019);

Gerber, The Jews of Spain (Free Press, 1994);

Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (Indiana, 2009);

Levin, Our Palestine Question (Yale, 2024);

Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Indiana, 1983);

Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World (Oxford, 2010);

Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites (Stanford, 2014);

Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (JPS, 1991).

The Bund by the Numbers: The Ebbs and Flows of a Jewish Radical Party by Joshua Meyers

Lital Levy reframes the question by asking not whether Arabic speaking Jews were really Arab, but what political and cultural meaning Arabness held for its Jewish speakers at different moments. The same three words, Arab Jew, meant different things in 1900, in 1938, and in 1988, and treating them as one continuous claim erases the history of each.

A category not yet in dispute, before the ninth century to 1914

Arab, although the term is often used interchangeably, means two separate things. The first is Arab as an ethnonym, ancient, describing Arabic speaking tribes of the Arabic peninsula. The second is Arab as a political and national category, the kind that could include or exclude a person as a citizen, the kind Ezra Haddad was claiming membership in when he wrote we are Arabs before we are Jews in 1936. Neither category was stable or continuous, and both were actively constructed rather than simply inherited.

Donner finds almost no evidence for a collective Arab political identity before the conquests that created the early Islamic empire, and calls reading modern nationalism back into that period the facile interpolation of concepts that only came into existence in the late nineteenth century. What emerged afterward was weak, confined to the ruling caste, and never seriously challenged tribal identity as the primary loyalty. Webb pushes this further: even the genealogical, ethnic sense of Arabness was substantially assembled under the Abbasids in the ninth century, centuries after the conquests it claims to describe, non-Arab converts actively claimed Arab lineage and were absorbed into it, and the fullest literary version of ancient Arab history was written down in the tenth century at precisely the moment actual Arab political presence in Iraq’s cities was already receding.

Rogan, describing the 1517 Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt and Syria, writes that it was too early to speak of a distinct Arab identity objecting to foreign rule, and cites the chronicler al-Jabarti’s approving account of the transition along with Aleppo and Damascus welcoming their new rulers without recorded ethnic grievance. Arabs were, in his phrase, pragmatic rather than ideological about four centuries of Turkish-speaking rule. Hourani notes that Arab nationalism became explicit only in reaction to Ottomanism’s collapse and the Young Turks’ 1908 centralizing policies, rooted at first in a small circle of Damascus intellectuals and a few Syrian and Lebanese Christian writers, not becoming a real political force until the two decades before the First World War.

Arabism emerged in Beirut after the 1850 Aleppo massacre and the 1860 killings in Damascus and Lebanon, as a deliberate Christian-Muslim reconciliation project: Christian intellectuals trained in classical Arabic through Protestant mission schools built explicit alliances with Muslim counterparts, replacing religious community with shared language as the basis of political belonging. It was not built against Jews. It was built to solve a Muslim-Christian problem, and Jews had no part in either the conflict or its resolution. Their formative experience of nineteenth-century sectarian violence had come mainly at Christian hands, not Muslim, and they passed through Alliance schools rather than the Protestant pipeline that produced the Christian Arabist generation.

For most of the late Ottoman period, then, Arab in the political sense had no meaning, because it had not yet crystallized into something anyone needed to be included in or excluded from. People organized around religious and ethnic community, Shi’i, Kurdish, Yazidi, Jewish. Writers of the period referred to Jews using a shifting set of terms, al-ta’ifa al-isra’iliyya, al-isra’iliyyun, banu isra’il, occasionally al-yahud, but essentially never al-yahud al-’arab, except for the ancient pre-Islamic Jewish tribes of Arabia.

Political absence did not mean cultural absence. Where Jews did engage with Arabic-speaking society in this period, it was through a literary and journalistic movement, not a political one, the Nahda, an Arabic cultural revival centered first in Beirut and then Cairo. Historians of the period describe Jewish involvement in it as a marginal current, not a shared project with Christian and Muslims.

Stillman states plainly that Jewish involvement in the Arabic literary revival never approached the role Syrian Christians played in it. Masters is equally direct: “very few Arabic-speaking Jews participated in the secular Arab literary revival before the First World War.” Diner independently reaches the same conclusion, describing the Nahda and Arab nationalism as having “attracted a limited number of Middle Eastern Jewish intellectuals and artists.” The figure Stillman and Masters both single out as the exception proves the rule by being cited repeatedly as one: Yaqub Sannu, the Egyptian Jewish playwright writing as Abu Nazzara, whom Stillman calls “a unique phenomenon” and “the enigmatic and highly individualistic... a singular exception,” and whose few later followers into Arabic letters were, in Stillman’s words, “still the exception and not the rule.” When one historian, Landau, suggested Jewish involvement in early Egyptian nationalism might have been more substantial, Stillman’s direct rejoinder was that “just how substantial this number actually was is questionable.”

The term arrives, 1920s to 1940s

Everything changed with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of organized Arab nationalism. Arab identity itself only became a popularized, naturalized category across the Arabic speaking world in this time period, which means the moment Arab national identity crystallized into something people could claim or be denied is essentially the same moment Jews began emigrating from Arab lands en masse. The two developments are not unrelated.

It was in this interwar period that al-yahud al-’arab acquired genuine currency, used by Jews themselves. In Baghdad in 1936, the Iraqi Jewish educator and translator Ezra Haddad put the claim in five words: nahnu ‘arab qabla an nakun yahudan. We are Arabs before we are Jews. In the summer of 1938, a group of Iraqi Jewish doctors and lawyers issued a public statement identifying themselves as shabab al-yahud al-’arab, young Arab Jews, declaring their support for an Arab Palestine. This was not fringe rhetoric. It was published, organized, and directed at a general Arab audience, by people staking their professional standing on the claim.

An entire press network carried this identity into public life across the Mashriq. Israel/Yisrael ran in Cairo from 1920 to 1939. Al-’Alam al-Isra’ili, the Jewish World, ran in Beirut from 1921 to 1946. Al-Ittihad al-Isra’ili ran in Cairo through the 1920s. Al-Misbah ran in Baghdad from 1924 to 1929. Al-Shams ran in Cairo from 1934 to 1948 and campaigned explicitly for tamsir al-yahud, the Egyptianization of the Jewish community. None of these papers made building an Arab Jewish identity their stated mission. They advocated for their communities, for Zionism, for national independence, variously and sometimes simultaneously, and the shared identity emerged as a byproduct of Jews across Baghdad, Cairo, and Beirut reading and writing for one another in this common idiom.

The claim these interwar intellectuals were making sits inside a much older pattern. Sorkin's comparative history of Jewish emancipation across five centuries insists that claims of this kind, securing legal standing and civic belonging within an emerging political order, were never simply strategic performances, Jews across every region he examines "were active agents" making the claim in earnest because the stakes were real. Haddad's declaration and the 1938 statement fit that pattern precisely: a claim about what Jews could still become inside an emerging Arab order, made by people who believed integration remained genuinely possible.

The foreclosure

That possibility did not survive the 1948 war and its aftermath. In Iraq, the nationalist press turned interwar Arab Jewish identity into a targetable liability rather than a claim to citizenship. Al-Yaqdha, the mouthpiece of the al-Istiqlal party, ran a sustained campaign from 1949 into 1951 built on a single premise, that all Iraqi Jews were Zionists by nature. The paper published the names of ordinary Jewish clerks and teachers alongside insinuations of Zionist activity, argued that Jews who renounced citizenship should be treated as prisoners of war, and asserted that a Jewish doctor who publicly declared his intention to stay had already registered to emigrate. There was no answer that counted as evidence of loyalty. The category was not abandoned by Jews so much as it became impossible to hold.

Reinvention, not recovery

The term resurfaced in the late 1980s, carried by a different generation making a different argument. Shohat’s 1988 essay “Sephardim in Israel,” and the subsequent work of Chetrit and Shenhav, reclaimed Arab Jew for an explicit political purpose, as a deliberate intervention against the normative terms of Zionist and Israeli discourse, growing out of a Mizrahi political movement that only later became academic.

Levy’s assessment of this reclamation, made independently of any advocacy stake in the outcome, is: post-Zionist discourse did not recuperate the idea of the Arab Jew so much as it reinvented it. The interwar claim leaned toward the future, an argument about what Jews could still become inside an Arab nation being actively built by people staking real professional and civic standing on it. The post-1980s claim leans toward the past, a statement of loss made from a position of exile by people who mostly never lived in an Arab country at all, addressed not at securing integration going forward but at rejecting the Eurocentric terms of an Israeli identity already fixed. Shohat, writing from an explicitly post-Zionist and postcolonial position opens with the declaration I am an Arab Jew, then immediately qualifies it with a list of places, Iraq, Israel, the United States, England, Holland, in which the word Arab itself does not reappear.

Neither side of the contemporary argument about this term is fully right. The claim that Arab Jew is a pure retrojection with no historical basis is wrong, Haddad’s own words and the 1938 statement and the mastheads of five newspapers are primary sources, not invention. But the claim that today’s use simply continues an unbroken tradition running back to the Nahda is also wrong. What existed before 1920 was a minority current among an already small population, described as such by the historians who study it. What emerged after 1920 was a mass phenomenon with its own press and its own public claims. What exists now is neither’s continuation but a third thing, invented from a position of loss rather than integration, by people addressing a different problem entirely.

Sources/Further Reading:

Lital Levy, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98:4, 2008.

Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, Harvard, 2010.

Webb, Imagining the Arabs, Edinburgh, 2016.

Rogan, The Arabs: A History, Basic Books, 2017.

Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, Belknap, 2003.

Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, Jewish Publication Society, 2003.

Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, Cambridge.

Diner, in The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, Oxford, 2021.

Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries, Princeton, 2023.

Bashkin, New Babylonians, Stanford, 2012.

I had 4 people make pledges to my substack and after a lot of thought, I’m turning on paid subscriptions this week, and I want to be clear about what that does and doesn’t change.

Nothing here is going behind a paywall. Every post stays free, forever, for everyone. What paying gets you is early access, subscribers see new posts a few days before they go up publicly. That’s it. If you can’t or don’t want to pay, you lose nothing except a head start on reading.

A quick note on where the money goes; it will go toward books. This project runs on primary sources and the secondary literature that takes them seriously, and that’s an ongoing expense. Subscriptions help cover it.

As for what this project is: I’ve spent about a decade reading seriously in Jewish history, with a particular focus on Sephardi and Mizrahi perspectives that don’t show up much in mainstream Jewish discourse. That eventually got me to AskHistorians, and from there to questions I kept wanting to write about but that nobody was asking. That’s how this started. It became a project about antisemitism more than I originally planned. Most of you found your way here from the colonialism series, and I’m told that post on Reddit and series has changed some minds on Israel. I’ll take it.

The other thing: I’m launching a new series called Shtuyot.

Shtuyot is a claim-genealogy series. Each entry takes one specific historical claim that circulates in public discourse, the kind of thing you see stated confidently in a thread or a comment section, and traces where it actually comes from. Not whether it’s right or wrong in some abstract sense, but what the sources it’s built on actually say, once you go and read them.

The first two entries are ready and will show up in the coming weeks. One takes apart the claim that Jewish anti-Zionism represented a majority or even a substantial minority position historically, and finds that the books most often cited to support that claim say the opposite when you read past the introduction. The other traces the term “Arab Jew” itself, not to settle whether the label is valid, but to show that it meant something different in 1900, in 1938, and in 1988.

If there’s a claim you keep seeing repeated with total confidence, something that gets stated as settled fact in comment sections or arguments, and you’re not sure if it holds up, send it my way. That’s exactly the kind of thing Shtuyot is for. I can’t promise I’ll get to everything, I have a lot of things built up from answering questions on AskHistorians and claims I see circulating on Reddit, but I would also like to know what else it out there.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who’s been part of this so far. Also, I didn’t call out the people who made pledges, but if you would like public recognition please feel free to message me.

The questions it asks are large ones. What is the correct political response to antisemitism? What does Jewish solidarity look like? What is the relationship between Jewish identity and the state of Israel? The answers are organized around a single axis: the Bund’s Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking, eastern European tradition against Labor Zionism’s Ashkenazi, eastern European supposed settler-colonial project. The frame is complete. Approximately half of world Jewry is not in it.

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The device and who built it

Crabapple deploys a postcolonial and critical-theory framework throughout the chapters on Palestine. Zionism is assumed to be a European colonial imposition on a non-European space. The Histadrut’s exclusion of Arab workers is understood through structures of colonial hierarchy.

The scholar who first applied these tools systematically to Israel/Palestine was Ella Shohat. In her 1988 essay “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims” (Social Text, nos. 19-20), Shohat used postcolonial analysis not to produce a binary of Jewish settlers versus Arab natives but to show that Ashkenazi Labor Zionism was itself a colonial project directed against Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews. The Zionist pioneers who arrived in Palestine brought a European framework that classified Mizrahi Jews as inferior, traditional, and culturally deficient. The same Histadrut Crabapple describes as a “Jewish-only labor union that locked Palestinians out” was an Ashkenazi-dominated hierarchy in which Mizrahi workers occupied the lower tier.

Crabapple borrows the form of postcolonial analysis without applying it consistently. Shohat built her framework to expose a three-way relationship, Ashkenazi Zionism as simultaneously oppressive to Palestinians and to Mizrahi Jews. Crabapple uses it to produce a two-way relationship that Shohat’s work was specifically designed to complicate.

What the framework requires you to classify

The settler-colonial framework as typically applied to Israel relies on a specific premise: that Zionism was a European colonial imposition on a non-European space, and therefore that Israeli Jews are best understood as European settlers. This claim is consistently deployed against the Ashkenazi Labor Zionist pioneers Crabapple is writing about. It does not work for the other half of Israel’s Jewish population.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, writing in the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, notes that the categorization of Sephardi, Middle Eastern, and North African Jews under a European settler framework, “has the ironic effect of denying Middle Eastern Jews’ identity as indigenous North Africans and Middle Easterners.” She also documents that “Zionist pioneers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were more inclined to see non-Ashkenazim as potential laborers than co-architects of a Jewish state,” precisely the internal hierarchy Crabapple’s own critical framework should be equipped to identify.

A Yemeni Jew whose family had lived in Sana’a for two thousand years before being expelled in 1948 is not a European settler. An Iraqi Jew whose community predates the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia by a millennium is not a European settler. Classifying them as such requires the colonial framework to do exactly what it claims to oppose. Erasing indigenous identity in service of a totalizing narrative.

Approximately half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from communities indigenous to Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere across Southwest Asia and North Africa. Many arrived as refugees, expelled or fleeing persecution from Arab states after 1948. Beinin’s The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry documents how Egyptian Jews who arrived in Israel were absorbed into an Ashkenazi-dominated state apparatus that dismissed their cultural heritage as inauthentic, funneling them into development towns and border neighborhoods. The settler colonial claims consistently ignore these populations because they are not cleanly cast into a narrative.

Yemenite Jews began arriving in Palestine in August 1881, several months before the eastern European First Aliyah. Stillman’s The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times documents that roughly three thousand Yemenite Jews immigrated to Palestine between 1881 and 1914, “impelled primarily by a wave of messianic fervor as well as by the harsh and unstable conditions of Jewish life in Yemen.” These were Ottoman subjects from Sana’a with no ideological connection to European Zionism. When they reached Jerusalem, the Old Yishuv’s existing charity networks refused to admit them because they did not fit existing ethnic patterns. They built their own community in Shiloah, outside the Old City walls.

Then the Ashkenazi Labor Zionists arrived. During the Second Aliyah, Zionist organizers recruited Yemenite Jews specifically as what Shapira (Israel: A History) calls “natural workers,” brought to replace Arab labor on Jewish settlements. They were instrumentalized by the same Labor Zionist movement Crabapple treats as simply “Jewish,” faced exceptionally harsh conditions with high mortality, and most eventually left the settlements for the cities. The Histadrut that administered this system was the same institution Crabapple calls a simple “Jewish-only labor union.” Cohen’s three-way account documents exactly this hierarchy. It is invisible in Crabapple’s binary.

The Histadrut she describes

Hillel Cohen’s Enemies, a Love Story: Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism documents what the Histadrut actually was as a social institution. “The labor movement, composed mainly of eastern European pioneers, gained hegemony in the Jewish Yishuv. During this time, social and political fissures appeared along ethnic lines, and a Mizrahi lower class was created.”

The same institution Crabapple calls simply a “Jewish-only labor union” was an Ashkenazi hierarchy. It excluded Arab workers and marginalized Mizrahi Jewish workers under Ashkenazi leadership. The word “Jewish” in “Jewish-only” collapses a stratified institution with significant internal ethnic hierarchy into a simple binary of Jewish versus Arab. Cohen’s detailed analysis, drawing on primary sources, presents a three-way account of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi-Arab relations that cannot be accommodated within that binary.

Crabapple cites Cohen elsewhere in the book for the Haganah and sexual torture claim examined in the first post in this series. Like other sources, she uses his work selectively. His broader argument about Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relations within the Yishuv, which would significantly complicate her framework, is absent.

The Bund had nothing to say to the Jews of Baghdad

The Bund was an explicitly Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking, eastern European movement. Doikayt was a doctrine about Jewish life in Poland. It emerged from the specific conditions of the Russian Pale of Settlement: tsarist restriction, Jewish proletarian politics, the contested relationship between socialist internationalism and Jewish national minority rights within a multinational empire. It had nothing to say to the Jews of Baghdad, Sana’a, Fez, or Aleppo.

The book presents doikayt as the model for contemporary Jewish political identity. “The Bund’s demand of solidarity across difference,” Crabapple writes, “is the only way to get there.” Young Jews in Berlin, New York, and Vilna are raising the Bund’s banner. The revival is framed as universal Jewish political wisdom.

A political doctrine that emerged from the Pale of Settlement, addressed to Ashkenazi Jews in the Russian Empire, revived as the template for all Jewish political identity, is itself an act of Ashkenazi centrism. It centers the eastern European Jewish experience as universal, while the Mizrahi majority of world Jewry, who have their own histories of relations with Arab neighbors, their own experiences of Zionism, and their own political traditions, remains completely absent from the frame.

What consistency would require

Shohat’s framework, applied consistently rather than selectively, produces a three-way analysis. Ashkenazi Labor Zionism marginalized Arab workers and Mizrahi Jews. The same pioneers who built the Histadrut built the ethnic hierarchy Cohen documents. The Revisionist movement examined in Post 3 contained its own liberal constitutionalist tradition alongside its fascist challengers, a complexity that also disappears in Crabapple’s account.

A consistent application would have to ask what doikayt meant for Jews who were not from the Pale, what solidarity across difference looks like from the standpoint of a Mizrahi Jew whose community was expelled from Iraq and who arrived in Israel to face a second marginalisation by Ashkenazi Zionists, and whether reviving a specifically eastern European Ashkenazi political tradition as a universal Jewish model is itself the kind of cultural erasure the book claims to oppose.

These questions are not asked. The tools to generate them are available. They are the same tools the book uses for everything else.

A book that deploys critical theory to condemn the erasure of Arab workers by Ashkenazi Labor Zionism ends up performing its own erasure, using the same Ashkenazi-centric view of Jewish history that the Labor Zionist movement it condemns was itself built upon.

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Sources and further reading

A bibliography for the Here Where We Live Is Our Country series

The book under review

Crabapple, Molly. Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Penguin Random House, 2026.

Primary sources

Jabotinsky, Vladimir. “The Iron Wall.” Originally published in Russian as “O Zheleznoi Stene” in Rassvyet, November 4, 1923. English translation available at jabotinsky.org.

Jabotinsky, Vladimir. The Jewish War Front. George Allen and Unwin, 1940.

JTA wire report. “Musa Kazem Pasha, Arab Executive Head, Dies in Palestine.” March 28, 1934. jta.org/archive.

Warsaw Institute Foundation. “Poles and Jews in the Struggle for Independence, 1918-1948.” 2018. warsawinstitute.org.

On the Bund and Jewish labor politics

Blatman, Daniel. For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939-1949. Vallentine Mitchell, 2003.

Jacobs, Jack. Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland. Syracuse University Press, 2009.

Johnpoll, Bernard K. The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917-1943. Cornell University Press, 1967.

Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars. Indiana University Press, 1983.

Melzer, Emanuel. No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry, 1935-1939. Hebrew Union College Press, 1997.

On Zionism, Labor Zionism, and Arab-Jewish labor relations

Bernstein, Deborah. Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine. SUNY Press, 2000.

Frankel, Jonathan. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Lockman, Zachary. Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. University of California Press, 1996.

Shapira, Anita. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948. Stanford University Press, 1992.

Shapira, Anita. Israel: A History. Brandeis University Press / Schusterman Series, 2014.

Shafir, Gershon. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. University of California Press, 1996.

On Revisionist Zionism and Jabotinsky

Heller, Joseph. The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940-1949. Frank Cass, 1995.

Penslar, Derek. Zionism: An Emotional State. Rutgers University Press, 2023.

Segev, Tom. A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.

On Palestine and the Mandate period

Cohen, Hillel. Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929. Brandeis University Press, 2015.

Provence, Michael. The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Rogan, Eugene. The Arabs: A History. Basic Books, 2017.

On Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews

Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. University of California Press, 1998.

Cohen, Hillel. Enemies, a Love Story: Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism. University of California Press, 2023.

Shohat, Ella. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.” Social Text, nos. 19-20, 1988, pp. 1-35.

Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. “Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries since 1492.” In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Martin Goodman. Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 327-362.

Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Jewish Publication Society, 2003.

Diner, Hasia R. “Diasporas in the Land of Israel.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, edited by Hasia R. Diner. Oxford University Press, 2021.

On the 1938 elections and Bundist historiography

Blatman, Daniel. “The Bund in Poland, 1935-1939.” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 9 (1996): 58-82.

Jacobs, Jack. Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland. Syracuse University Press, 2009. [See especially pp. 19-21 on competing explanations for the 1938 surge.]

On the Musa Kazim death

Provence, Michael. The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Cambridge University Press, 2017. [See pp. 240-242.]

JTA wire report. “Musa Kazem Pasha, Arab Executive Head, Dies in Palestine.” March 28, 1934.

On the Yemenite aliyah

Druyan, Nitza. “Yemenite Jewish Women: Between Tradition and Change.” In Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, edited by Deborah Bernstein. SUNY Press, 1992.

National Library of Israel. “The Forgotten Pioneers: The Story of the Yemenite Aliyah.” blog.nli.org.il.

Shapira, Anita. Israel: A History. Brandeis University Press, 2014. [See pp. 63-64 on Yemenite workers and the conquest of labor.]

Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Jewish Publication Society, 2003. [See pp. 68-69.]

On critical theory and postcolonial frameworks

Efron, John, et al. The Jews: A History. Routledge, 2018.

Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Martin Goodman. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, edited by Hasia R. Diner. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Near the end of the book, Crabapple describes a conversation. Someone challenges her: the Bund failed. She pushes back:

“’Lost,’ I answered, more sharply than I meant.”

“’What’s the difference between failed and lost?’ he responded.”

“’Failure is what happens to those overcome by their own faults and errors. To lose is to succumb to greater force.’”

This distinction is central to the book’s argument. It is also the mechanism that protects that argument from the question any historian of the Bund must eventually face.

What the framework does

The failure/loss distinction is not a neutral historiographical category. It is a verdict delivered before any evidence is examined. By definition, the Bund lost rather than failed. This means whether the Bund’s strategic choices, its sustained opposition to emigration, its insistence that Jewish salvation lay in Poland, its active discouragement of Zionism as an escape route, contributed to the deaths of its membership cannot be asked. Every defeat is attributable to a superior external force. No evidence could, in principle, count against this.

The book is admirably honest about the historical record. The postscript acknowledges: “Though individuals escaped in various ways, there was no way out for Eastern European Jews as a collective. Not as long as they were fighting alone. No small minority could have rescued themselves from the horrors of the twentieth century.”

This is the correct historical conclusion. The Holocaust was not a problem that political strategy could have solved at the collective level. But it is a different question from the one the failure/loss framework forecloses: whether Bundist strategy affected individual outcomes, whether the movement’s active discouragement of emigration cost the lives of people who might otherwise have left, whether the leaders who told their followers that salvation lay here and nowhere else bear any analytical responsibility for what followed.

The framework converts these into unanswerable questions not by examining them but by defining them out of existence.

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The hidden hope and what it reveals

The postscript contains a striking confession:

“I had a hidden hope. By studying the Bund’s story, I wanted to find out if there was some way that my people, the Jews of Eastern Europe, could have saved themselves. The more I wrote, the more I realized the wrongness of my premise.”

She reaches the right conclusion. There was no collective escape. The historian in her understands this.

But the book then does something the historian should resist: it presents the political movement that most actively discouraged individual escape as a model for contemporary Jewish politics. The doikayt revival among young Jews after 2023, Jewish Voices for Peace, the sit-in at Trump Tower — the postscript frames these as the Bund’s vindication, its ideas resurfacing “like land mines or buried gold.”

The gap between “there was no way out for Eastern European Jews as a collective” and “therefore the movement that told Jews there was no need to leave is prophetic” is enormous. The failure/loss framework is what spans it. Because the Bund lost rather than failed, its strategy cannot be examined. Because its strategy cannot be examined, its revival can be presented as straightforwardly redemptive. The two moves depend on each other.

The practitioners who left, and what the “I was right” motif erases

“I die knowing that I was right,” runs the book’s recurring motif. The Bundist periodicals “kept the same line, even as they faded into irrelevance.” The man going to the gallows “resembles a prophet.”

A prophet of what, exactly? The Bundist who died in the Warsaw Ghetto, insisting he was right, was right about many things: that antisemitism was structural, that Jewish workers deserved solidarity, that Yiddish culture had value. He was not vindicated in his use of doikayt as a survival strategy. The place he stayed was annihilated. The doctrine that salvation lay here, not in emigration, led followers into a catastrophe that emigration would have avoided for many of them.

The book transforms ideological commitment under persecution into strategic vindication. These are different things. A person can maintain their beliefs under torture and still be wrong about the strategic question. Moral courage in the face of death is not evidence that the strategy was correct.

The record of who actually survived clarifies this. Bernard Goldstein, one of the Bund’s most prominent figures, whose memoirs Crabapple cites extensively throughout the book, survived in Queens. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s leading theorist of doikayt, died in Brooklyn in 1923. Sophia Dubnova fled to New York in 1940 and died there in 1986. Raphael Abramovich ended his life in New York. These are not peripheral figures. They are central to the movement’s history, and their association with Bundism did not prevent them from leaving.

The people who stayed, who followed the movement’s own logic to its conclusion, were murdered at approximately ninety percent rates. The failure/loss framework is what allows Crabapple to describe this movement as prophetic without examining this record. Because they lost to a greater force rather than failing through their own errors, their rightness is confirmed rather than complicated by the outcome. The framework does not invite scrutiny of this gap. It closes it by definition.

The contemporary argument and what it requires

The postscript is explicit about the book’s purpose. The Bund’s anti-Zionism “would lead a new generation to embrace them. In Berlin, in New York, and even in their birthplace, Vilna, young people have raised the Bund’s banner in support of Hereness, of democratic socialism, and of Palestinian liberation.”

In 2023, after the Hamas massacre, “Israel began a genocide in Gaza.” The book presents this as settled historical fact, not a contested claim. Bundist refugees fleeing Nazism and Palestinians in Gaza function as structural analogs in the postscript’s closing pages. “The inheritors of Zion would liquidate their very own ghetto in Gaza beside the sea.”

The structural analogy is the book’s most explicit political move, and it is also the one that most requires the failure/loss framework to hold. If the Bund’s strategic choices are available for historical scrutiny, and if the question of whether doikayt, as a survival doctrine, contributed to the deaths of its followers is a legitimate historical question, then the revival of doikayt as a contemporary political program also becomes available for scrutiny. The framework that protects the past from that question also protects the present from it.

A book that cannot ask whether the Bund’s insistence that salvation lay in Poland cost lives cannot ask whether the insistence that solidarity across difference is “the only thing that can save us” is adequate to the political conditions of 2025. These are related questions. The framework forecloses both.

Using an unfalsifiable structure to protect a political movement from historical scrutiny, when the people who followed that movement are dead, is not an act of solidarity with the dead. It is the use of the dead as political decoration. The Bundists who went to the Warsaw Ghetto, insisting they were right, deserved a historian who asked what they were right about, what they were wrong about, and what the difference cost.

Next in the series: The erasure the framework performs — what Here Where We Live Is Our Country does to Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, and why the analytical tradition it invokes should have caught it.

“The Iron Wall” is four pages. Vladimir Jabotinsky published it in Rassvyet in November 1923. Crabapple cites it in Chapter 17 as the definitive statement of Revisionist Zionism’s ideology toward Arab Palestinians. She summarises it as arguing that peace was “impossible” and that a Jewish state “could only be built by subjugating the native people.” She cites the primary text directly, and the subsequent mischaracterization is entirely her own.

Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in 1880, outside the Pale of Settlement, in a cosmopolitan city shaped by Mediterranean trade and Russian secular culture. His given name was Vladimir, his native language was Russian, and his formative intellectual influences were Italian nationalism and European liberalism. Shapira notes in Land and Power that “absent in Jabotinsky’s experience was the twisted and tempestuous legacy of the Pale of Settlement.” He did not tend to categorize the world into Jews and non-Jews. He believed, like Herzl, in “the conscience of the civilized world, in the omnipotent power of a just cause.” This is the man Crabapple presents as the ideologist of permanent Arab subjugation.

Crabappel’s argument proceeds in two stages. The first is rendered accurately: Palestinian Arab resistance to Jewish immigration is rational and will not be overcome by diplomacy or goodwill. Arabs are not villains in this account. They are a people reacting to what they perceive as a threat to their majority status. No agreements, no partnership gestures, no promises will change this as long as they believe there is any prospect of reversing Jewish immigration. An iron wall of military strength is therefore necessary, not because Arabs are enemies to be permanently subjugated, but because their resistance is rational, and only when it becomes futile will a genuine political settlement become possible.

The second stage is what Crabapple drops:

“But if and when they find that further attempts at converting us are useless, then they will drop this stand, and both peoples will live together in the land as good neighbors, and mutual respect will grow. We do not want to expel the Arabs... we must ensure to the Arab minority a good and secure life.”

This is the goal Jabotinsky’s essay is designed to reach, and the Iron Wall is a strategy for getting there. Dropping the conclusion changes the argument from a tragic calculation about the conditions for peace into an endorsement of permanent subjugation.

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From the Iron Wall to The Jewish War Front

The endpoint was not rhetorical. By 1940, Jabotinsky had elaborated it into specific constitutional provisions in The Jewish War Front. The envisioned Jewish state would guarantee that “in every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice versa.” Parliament would operate on ethnic proportional representation. Arab language and culture would have full official status.

However, the Iron Wall is not without errors. It treats ethnicity as the fundamental unit of political organization, and it defers Arab political rights to a future settlement whose conditions Jabotinsky controls. Biale notes the tension in his thinking: he had argued in his 1912 law dissertation for a full system of national minority autonomy, yet the Iron Wall withholds collective national rights from Arabs even as it promises individual equality. Heller puts the precise distinction this way: “In accordance with good liberal principles, the Arabs would receive equal individual rights, though of course no national rights.”

Even with these issues, Individual rights with constitutional guarantees, cabinet power-sharing, and official cultural status are distinct from permanent subjugation. The framework Jabotinsky was building, however imperfect, was a liberal constitutionalist one.

His 1937 testimony before the Peel Commission makes this legible. Presented with Arab claims to Palestinian sovereignty, he did not dismiss them. He said: “It is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, or No. 6 — that I quite understand; but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation.”

This is a tragic necessity argument. It acknowledges Arab legitimacy explicitly and argues that Jewish survival takes moral precedence in a specific historical moment, the moment of European fascism and closing immigration routes. Whether one accepts it or not, it is not the argument Crabapple attributes to him. Heller describes Jabotinsky as someone who “considered himself a devout liberal throughout his life.” The Peel Commission testimony is consistent with that.

The movement Crabapple doesn’t describe

The deeper problem is not the Iron Wall itself but what treating it as the definitive statement of Revisionist ideology requires ignoring.

The Revisionist movement in the 1930s was not ideologically uniform. It contained a serious internal far-right challenge that Jabotinsky spent years fighting. Abba Achimeir led a faction that, as Heller documents, “believed in integral nationalism and admired Il Duce, rejected parliamentary democracy and demanded that Revisionism emulate the fascist model.” This pressure forced Jabotinsky to defend his liberal commitments against members of his own movement who found them insufficient. The crisis reached its height in 1932-33 and was contained only by Achimeir’s arrest. By 1937, a new maximalist faction led by Uriel Heilperin was again attempting to transform Revisionism into something that Jabotinsky explicitly resisted. Avraham Stern’s 1940 split, which produced Lehi, was the culmination of that internal pressure.

Jabotinsky’s Odessa formation placed him at a significant remove from the Pale-of-Settlement world the Bund inhabited, and that Crabapple’s book centers on. The Bundists were shaped by the cramped, threatened, Yiddish-speaking world of tsarist restriction. Jabotinsky was shaped by Garibaldi, Mazzini, and the Roman law faculty. Treating these as two poles of a single ideological conflict, Bundist universalism versus Revisionist settler-colonialism, flattens the degree to which they were products of entirely different Jewish experiences and entirely different European intellectual traditions. Shapira describes him as a man with “a natural and relaxed attitude both toward himself and his non-Jewish surroundings,” for whom the Pale’s legacy of fear and restriction was simply absent. The Revisionist movement he founded reflected that formation and was contested internally by forces it could not ultimately contain.

His heart, as Shapira puts it, “was in his political doctrine” of a Jewish state achieved through European diplomacy and military organization. He consistently resisted the movement’s drift toward violence as an end in itself. The Revisionist factions that actually carried out the most aggressive operations of the Mandate period, the Irgun after Jabotinsky’s death, and Lehi, were products of exactly the breakaways that his liberal constitutionalism could not contain.

Presenting Revisionism as a coherent bloc defined by the Iron Wall’s first half, while ignoring the essay’s conclusion and the movement’s internal fractures, yields a simpler, more politically usable account than the historical record guarantees.

The framework is applied selectively.

Postcolonial and critical theory frameworks were developed to resist this analytical move: reducing a politically heterogeneous movement to a single ideological essence, erasing internal dissent, and treating a complex historical formation as a monolithic bloc.

Crabapple applies this framework to Labor Zionism’s treatment of Arab workers and finds real structural exclusions underneath the rhetoric of solidarity. She applies no equivalent pressure to her own treatment of Revisionism. The Iron Wall becomes the essence of the movement, the movement’s internal critics disappear, and seventeen years of Jabotinsky’s subsequent writing on Arab rights in the Jewish state are simply absent.

The result is not historical analysis but a political symbol, constructed by reading a movement through half of a single document, discarding that document’s conclusion, and erasing the factions within the movement that explicitly rejected what the document claims to support.

Next in the series: Failure, loss, and the framework that makes the Bund’s strategic choices unexaminable.

This is the second in a series on Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country (Penguin Random House, 2026). The first post examined four specific factual errors in the Palestine chapters. This post examines the sourcing structure that enables those errors.

The book has 1,914 endnotes. Several reviews have cited the number as evidence of research depth. It appears in the book’s write-ups as a signal of scholarly seriousness.

The number is real. What it answers is another matter.

Chapter 17, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country,” has more footnotes per thousand words than any other chapter in the book, including the Holocaust chapters, running at approximately 111 per thousand words. The Palestine chapters, as a block (Chapters 16 through 18), average 92 footnotes per thousand words, compared with 35 for the early Bund history chapters and 67 for the Holocaust chapters. By any measure, the Palestine material is the most heavily cited in the book.

Seventy-seven percent of the footnotes in Chapters 16 through 18 cite Bundist and Polish sources: Bernard Goldstein’s memoirs, the papers of Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, Bernard Johnpoll’s political history of the Bund, the Yiddish press, JTA wire reports on events in Warsaw, and Jack Jacobs on Bundist counterculture. These are citations for the Warsaw content in those chapters, and that content is well-sourced. When Crabapple writes about what the Bund did in Poland in the 1930s, she has the documentation.

The Palestine-specific claims in those same chapters, Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, the Histadrut, the Haganah, and Musa Kazim, rest on approximately ten citations in total. This is the 5 percent doing the contested work, while the 77 percent supplies the appearance of rigor.

The first post in this series examined four of those ten citations in detail. Each one misrepresented its source. Here, the focus is on the citation that best illustrates the structural problem: Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (University of California Press, 1996).

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Comrades and Enemies, misread

Chapter 17 describes the Histadrut as “a Jewish-only labor union that locked Palestinians out of the Zionist economy.” The endnote cites Lockman.

Comrades and Enemies is the most sustained scholarly treatment of Arab-Jewish labor relations in Mandatory Palestine, drawing on Hebrew, Arabic, and English archives across four decades of labor history. His thesis statement, page 83, reads:

“The result was a complex series of interactions, a pattern of cooperation and conflict deeply enmeshed within, but always seeking to transcend, its larger political context, the Zionist-Palestinian struggle for control of the country.”

This is not a description of a simple lockout. Lockman spends four hundred pages documenting the Palestine Labor League, the Histadrut’s vehicle for organizing Arab workers, and the ways in which Jewish labor organizers genuinely believed in Arab-Jewish worker solidarity while simultaneously serving a Zionist project that structurally undermined that solidarity. His conclusion is that the labor-Zionist movement “consistently declared its adherence to the principle of friendship, solidarity, and unity between Jewish and Arab workers in Palestine,” stated not as an endorsement but as an accurate description of what the movement said, set against the complicated reality of what it did.

Crabapple has cited the scholar most sympathetic to Jewish-Arab labor cooperation in the available literature to support a claim of total exclusion.

The irony goes further. Deborah Bernstein’s Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (SUNY Press, 2000), which covers the same ground from a more critical angle, explicitly criticizes Lockman for focusing too heavily on cases of cooperation. Bernstein’s central conclusion is that “the most salient outcome was the drive of Jewish labor for organization and separation, for closure, and for the construction of boundaries.” She writes that Lockman, “by confining himself to those cases of direct interaction and cooperation between Jews and Arabs, he seems, much of the time, to ignore the separation between them, so pervasive in the lives of both.”

The scholarly position is this: Lockman is criticized by peers for potentially underplaying the importance of separation by focusing on cases of cooperation. Crabapple uses Lockman to support a claim of total exclusion. The source she chose to support the simple lockout is the source her peers say may be too optimistic about cooperation.

The citation is from the wrong decade

The Histadrut claim also cites Jonathan Frankel’s Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1981) at pages 385-86.

Chapter 8 of Prophecy and Politics covers Russian-Jewish youth in Palestine between 1904 and 1914. The Histadrut was founded in December 1920. Pages 385-86 fall in a chapter that predates the institution by six years. Whatever Frankel says on those pages cannot describe the Histadrut’s exclusionary policies, because the Histadrut did not exist when those pages were written.

This is a different kind of error from the Lockman inversion. The Lockman error requires checking what the source argues. The Frankel error requires only checking when the chapter ends.

Of the ten Palestine-specific citations in Chapters 16 through 18, here is the status of each:

Citation Problems:

• Segev, A State at Any Cost, p.49 — appears accurate

• Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929, p.209 — individual policemen become institutional Haganah policy

• Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, pp.385-86 — predates the Histadrut by six years

• Lockman, Comrades and Enemies — source argues the opposite

• Kijek, “Violence as Political Experience,” p.257 — cited for a militia that didn’t exist until 1940

• Warsaw Institute web article (2018) — non-scholarly partisan source; contradicts the claim

• Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine — PLO political pamphlet, not scholarship

• Lundsten, “Wall Politics” (1978) — appears accurate

• CJPME advocacy fact sheet (2022) — advocacy NGO used for empirical claim

• Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall” (1923) — primary source mischaracterized by omission

Eight of ten Palestine-specific citations have confirmed or significant problems. Two appear to be correctly used.

What the architecture does

A reader moving through Chapter 17 encounters a densely footnoted text. The footnotes are real. The sources are real. The Warsaw material, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of what those footnotes source, is carefully documented. The reader who glances at the endnotes sees Goldstein, Erlich, Johnpoll, Jacobs, the Yiddish press, JTA archives. The page looks like serious historical work.

What the architecture conceals is the switch. When the chapter moves from Warsaw to Palestine, from the Bund’s activities to claims about Zionism, the Histadrut, and the Iron Wall, the quality of the sourcing changes dramatically. The footnotes continue. They remain dense. But they are now citing a source that argues the opposite of the claim, a chapter from a book that predates the institution being described, a web article from a Polish nationalist foundation, and a primary source from which the conclusion has been removed.

The density is uniform. The quality is not. Because the reader has no way of knowing from the page that 77 percent of the footnotes source the Warsaw content and 5 percent source the contested Palestine claims, the impression is one of consistent scholarly rigor across the entire chapter.

The credibility earned in Warsaw is spent in Haifa. The reader cannot see the transaction.

A note on the scholars she chose

The Lockman inversion is not a case of reaching for an obscure or marginal source. Lockman is a respected scholar; Comrades and Enemies is a serious contribution to the historiography of Palestine. The same is true of Hillel Cohen, whose Year Zero is a genuinely critical account of Jewish conduct in 1929, and of Jabotinsky’s essay, which she cites from the primary text.

The sourcing problem cannot be explained by careless selection. Even choosing the most sympathetic available scholars, and Lockman is the most sympathetic on Arab-Jewish labor relations, she still had to distort what they said to make the specific claims she needed. The claim exceeded the source. In each case, the reader has no way of knowing this without going back to the source itself.

Next in the series: The Iron Wall, read in full — what Jabotinsky actually argued and why the omission matters.