Antisemitism Has Never Been About Jews What did Jews have to do with the French Revolution? Not much, by any measurable standard. They were 0.7% of the French population. They had no army, no political power, no significant institutional presence. France in 1789 had far more pressing concerns — an existential war with England, a collapsing economy, a monarchy being dismantled in real time. And yet a search of ARTFL's digitized corpus of 473 canonical French texts from the period finds Jews mentioned more than twice as often as the English and the British combined. Let that sit for a moment. France is literally at war with England. England is blockading French ports, funding counter-revolutionary coalitions, and posing an existential military threat to the Republic. And the 0.7% — with no army, no navy, no foreign backing — occupy more of the French political imagination than the actual enemy. How do you explain that? You cannot explain it as a response to Jewish power, because there was none. You cannot explain it as a response to Jewish visibility, because 0.7% is by definition invisible in any normal social accounting. You cannot explain it as political threat assessment, because no rational threat calculus produces this result. The only explanation the data is consistent with is this: the mentions have nothing to do with anything Jews were actually doing. They reflect a psychological need — a society that cannot confront its own internal contradictions directly, and assigns them to a figure small enough to be safe to blame. This is not unique to France. It is the structure of antisemitism across every context in which it appears. Ancient Egypt needed an explanation for social tension in a rigidly hierarchical society. Medieval Europe needed someone to perform the economic functions Christian doctrine forbade and then needed someone to blame for performing them. Spain needed an internal enemy to anchor the myth of blood purity at the moment of national unification. Germany needed an explanation for national humiliation that located the cause outside the German self. In each case the Jews were not the cause of the problem. They were the answer to a question the society needed to ask — a question whose actual answer was too painful to face. Which brings us to today. When you see the same accounts that were posting about climate, then BLM, then COVID, now posting about Israel — ask yourself what the common thread actually is. It is not concern for Palestinians. It is not geopolitical analysis. It is the same ancient need for a container, updated with a cause célèbre that provides social acceptability the raw sentiment would not otherwise have. Gaza is real. Palestinian suffering is real. Those are legitimate subjects of political debate with legitimate arguments on multiple sides. But antisemitism is not a response to Gaza. It never arrives because of what is actually happening. It arrives because of what is happening inside the people who need it — and finds whatever is available in the news cycle to wear as clothing. The French Revolutionary corpus doesn't just tell us something about 18th century France. It tells us something about a pattern so consistent across millennia and cultures that it cannot be explained by the behavior of the 0.7%. The question antisemitism is really answering has never been about Jews. The question is always about the people asking it. (Source: Ronald Schechter, ARTFL corpus analysis, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)

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