(or how to abolish antisemitism)

I reference many (historical) minorities, but I am mainly thinking about the Jews. As a Christian, the idea of ‘Jew’ is important to me. I am wondering why, of ALL the minorities in the world, antisemitism is so pervasive? The Jews harp on about it, but in all honesty it is justified. The questions I want to ask are: 1. What should be done about it? 2. What are the Jews doing wrong?

I made a simple, more philosophical case for it previously. But this time, the focus is on practical specifics.

Of course, as soon as you ask that question, you are accused of victim-blaming. You will believe what you do without my assurances to the contrary, so I will just say that in my mind, if the whole world (many, many nations) are all antisemitic, there must be a reason. Maybe if we are allowed to investigate the reasons without the Holocaust being weaponised, we may discover the real reasons and the real fixes.

As an aside: Many countries are now grappling with the question of dealing with large numbers of Muslims entering countries. It is an interesting thought experiment to look at their behaviours and what this ‘framework’ suggests is the correct approach.

Across continents and centuries, certain minority communities have managed something extraordinary: they have survived—sometimes even flourished—without a homeland, without demographic strength, and often without political protection. Their endurance is not random. It reflects a set of behavioural patterns that echo across history, forming what sociologists might call a survival repertoire.

This repertoire is not about submission or erasure. It is about the delicate craft of becoming familiar without dissolving, distinct without provoking fear. When we look closely, we see a coherent framework emerging—one that aligns with the work of scholars like Fredrik Barth on ethnic boundaries, Edna Bonacich on middleman minorities, Gordon Allport on prejudice reduction, and Rogers Brubaker on diaspora identity.

What follows is a narrative synthesis of these patterns, illustrated with examples from multiple groups and grounded in sociological insight.

Becoming Familiar: The First Gesture of Safety

When a minority enters a new society, the majority instinctively asks: Are you part of our world, or a world apart?

Groups that survive long-term often answer with a kind of strategic familiarity. This echoes Gordon’s classic assimilation theory (Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 1964), particularly the early stages of cultural assimilation—language, dress, public behaviour—without necessarily adopting full structural assimilation.

The Parsis in India exemplify this. They adopted Gujarati, wore Indian clothing, and participated in civic life, while keeping Zoroastrian rituals private. Their distinctiveness became subtle rather than confrontational. The Thai-Chinese followed a similar path, adopting Thai names and integrating into national customs, eventually becoming nearly indistinguishable from the majority in public life.

This aligns with Barth’s insight that ethnic groups survive not by building walls, but by managing boundaries (Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969). The boundary becomes soft, porous, and non-threatening.

The sociological principle:
Familiarity reduces perceived threat; soft boundaries reduce the salience of difference.

Soft Boundaries: Neither Fortress Nor Free-for-All

Barth argued that ethnic groups persist not because of cultural content, but because of boundary maintenance. Yet the boundaries that endure are rarely rigid. Rigid boundaries—strict endogamy, visible separatism—can provoke suspicion. Total assimilation dissolves identity.

Successful diasporas cultivate semi-permeable boundaries.

The Jains of East Africa maintain dietary rules and religious practices, but quietly. Their temples are discreet, their festivals internal, and their boundaries porous enough to allow intergroup friendships and business partnerships. They exemplify what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “primordial attachments” that are emotionally meaningful but socially flexible.

The sociological principle:
Identity survives best when it is neither aggressively defended nor passively abandoned.

The Occupational Dance: Escaping the Middleman Trap

Edna Bonacich’s “middleman minority theory” (1973) explains why groups concentrated in brokerage roles—finance, trade, moneylending—often become targets of resentment. They sit between elites and masses, benefiting from both but trusted by neither.

Some diasporas have learned to disperse economically as a survival strategy.

The Lebanese in West Africa diversified into agriculture, construction, and hospitality rather than clustering exclusively in commerce. The Armenians of the Middle East balanced mercantile roles with craftsmanship, administration, and the arts. The Ismailis in East Africa moved into education, medicine, and civil service.

This dispersal reduces the perception of monopolising chokepoints—one of the triggers Bonacich identified for scapegoating.

The sociological principle:
Economic dispersion diffuses envy and reduces structural vulnerability.

Civic Quietism: Loyalty Without Loudness

Political visibility is dangerous terrain. Too little, and a minority appears aloof. Too much, and it risks accusations of manipulation.

Successful diasporas practice what political sociologists call civic quietism—participation without partisanship.

The Parsis served in the British Indian administration and later in independent India, but never as an ethnic bloc. The Thai-Chinese supported the monarchy and national institutions without forming separatist political movements. The Ismailis emphasise service, education, and development rather than ideological activism.

This aligns with Rogers Brubaker’s argument that diasporas survive best when they avoid becoming “political entrepreneurs of identity” (Nationalism Reframed, 1996).

The sociological principle:
Visible loyalty reduces suspicion; political modesty reduces threat perception.

Emotional Predictability: The Psychology of Safety

Allport’s Contact Hypothesis (1954) emphasises that prejudice decreases when interactions are predictable, cooperative, and equal-status. Many resilient diasporas cultivate public behaviours that are emotionally restrained, polite, and conflict-avoidant.

The Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia developed reputations for diligence and low public confrontation. The Ismailis emphasise courtesy and calmness. These behavioural norms reduce the psychological “threat cues” that often trigger prejudice.

The sociological principle:
Predictability reduces fear; fear reduction reduces scapegoating.

Philanthropy as Social Glue

Sociologist Marcel Mauss, in The Gift (1925), argued that gift-giving creates social bonds and obligations. Diasporas that survive often make their contributions visible—hospitals, schools, libraries, scholarships—benefiting the majority directly.

The Parsis built some of Mumbai’s most important hospitals and educational institutions. The Armenian diaspora in Lebanon founded schools open to all. The Aga Khan Development Network invests in infrastructure and healthcare across multiple countries.

Philanthropy reframes success as service rather than competition.

The sociological principle:
Public generosity transforms economic success into communal benefit.

Narrative Alignment: Becoming Part of the National Story

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) reminds us that nations are built on shared myths. Minorities that survive long-term often adopt or adapt these myths.

Thai-Chinese communities celebrate the king’s birthday with fervour. Parsis emphasise their role in India’s industrialisation. Japanese Americans, after WWII internment, aligned their identity with American civic ideals, contributing visibly to science, arts, and public service.

This reduces symbolic competition—one of the most volatile forms of intergroup tension.

The sociological principle:
Shared myths reduce symbolic distance.

In Summary: The Framework

Across history, the minorities that endure are those who master the art of non-threatening distinctiveness—remaining themselves without triggering the majority’s fears.

They do this through:

This is not a guarantee of safety—history is too unpredictable for that. But it is a pattern, a repertoire, a set of strategies that have repeatedly helped vulnerable communities survive without a state, an army, or demographic strength.

It is, ultimately, the quiet art of endurance.

Franck Zanu once identified this erroneous belief as problematic: 

Once you have been wronged, you can never be wrong

 - sounding as a warning to (his) black community. This is such a prophetic truth.

Antisemitism is not something Jews “caused.” It is something done to Jews, largely generated and weaponised by majority cultures, churches, states and ideologues. Any analysis of “what Jews did wrong” can very quickly slide into victim‑blaming if it isn’t framed structurally.

With that in mind, what follows is not a moral indictment but a structural comparison: moments where Jewish life in the diaspora had multiple cultural mis-fires.

Where the framework was structurally impossible

A. Forced “middleman” status and economic visibility

For centuries in Christian Europe, Jews were legally confined to certain economic niches: moneylending, tax farming, small‑scale trade, urban professions. They didn’t choose “middleman minority” status; it was imposed by exclusion from land ownership, guilds, and many crafts and offices. That structural position perfectly matches the pattern Bonacich later theorised: a small group between masses and elites, easy to blame when economic tensions rise.

Modern scholars like Brustein and King show that spikes in antisemitism in Europe between 1899–1939 correlate strongly with economic crises and Jewish immigration SAGE Journals. In other words: the position Jews had been pushed into—visible, urban, intermediary—became highly combustible when economies faltered. Therefore

B. The “dual chosenness” conflict: symbolic rivalry built in

Christian Europe didn’t just see Jews as “different”; it saw them as a theological rival. Jan Assmann and others have argued that Judaism and Christianity both carried a claim to unique divine truth—a form of competitive chosenness. Christian Europe told itself it was the true “New Israel,” while Jews retained their own covenantal self-understanding. One recent summary from Princeton notes this as a clash between “two chosen cultures,” each claiming divine election Princeton University Press.

That creates:

In reality, maybe sadly, survival is easier when minority narratives don’t compete for the sacred centre. Jews in Christian Europe were almost structurally fated to be read as theological competition, whatever they did.

C. Ambivalent assimilation: Emancipation without full acceptance

The 19th century emancipation of Jews in Western and Central Europe—granting civil equality, access to professions, universities, and urban life—meant Jews moved very quickly from segregated ghettos into the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Levels of socio‑economic modernisation and cultural influence rose rapidly (Department of History).

But—as historians repeatedly note—the age that brought emancipation also produced a new, modern antisemitism(Department of History.) Liberal, secular societies remained strangely permeable to anti‑Jewish animus. The dynamic looked something like this:

God’s blessings on the Jews (talents) were also the curse that caused a misalignment:

2. Where the framework partly broke – on both sides

Now to the more provocative part: places where some Jewish strategies or self-understandings (probably) inadvertently increased vulnerability—not as causes of antisemitism, but as missed chances to blunt it and compounding it

A. Uneasy relationship with “narrative alignment”

In some European contexts, Jews embraced national identities enthusiastically—French Jews becoming passionately French, German Jews deeply invested in German high culture. But that narrative alignment was often one‑sided: Jews embraced the nation more fully than the nation embraced Jews. Many remained “Germans of Mosaic persuasion” in theory, but “Jews” in the eyes of antisemites.

At the same time, parts of Jewish discourse (understandably, given persecution) retained strongly 'particularist' language: a special people, a unique historical mission, a distinct destiny. When filtered through hostile eyes, this looked like arrogance or separateness—the kind of symbolic competition the world does not love.

B. Global networks and the “world Jewry” trope

One strength of the Jewish diaspora has been its dense global networks—family ties, philanthropy, trade, religious and intellectual exchange across countries. In benign conditions, this is an asset. In paranoid conditions, it is weaponised as “evidence” of a “global cabal.”

Over-indexing on achievement can easily look like conspiracy to control

Antisemites constructed myths of a transnational Jewish conspiracy long before any Jewish political organisation existed. But in the 20th century, the combination of:

gave propagandists “material” to twist into the “world Jewry” fantasy.

(I have written elsewhere about the futility of paying reparations, for instance, and the Jews have been guilty of weaponising the Holocaust, and have institutionalised the process of claiming ‘reparations’ to the tune of over $60Bn. When these claims become perpetual, it is only natural that support becomes ambivalence and turns into fatigue. The same sociological forces are at play at the time of writing (Dec 25) with the growth in ‘black fatigue’.)

This is not a critique of having networks (that is natural in any community); it’s recognition that in a hostile interpretive environment, any transnational linkage is vulnerable to conspiracy projection.

3. Strategies that might help reduce future antisemitism

Antisemitism, like other racisms, is driven far more by majority anxieties and ideologies than by minority behaviour. Some strategies might reduce the “surface area” available for antisemitic narratives to latch onto—without asking Jews to erase themselves.

A. Radical coalition‑building rather than exceptionalism

One of the traps of having undergone the Holocaust is the sense of unique, unshareable suffering. There is something singular there—but if uniqueness hardens into exceptionalism, it will isolate Jews from other oppressed groups. There have been many, even worse extermination events in history–The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Stalin’s Great Purge and associated mass famines, The Rwandan genocide–which are allowed to fade into history.

This doesn’t dilute the specificity of antisemitism; it situates it in a coalition‑friendly framework.

B. Narrative alignment around universal civic values

Instead of emphasising 'chosenness' or specialness in the public sphere, Jewish communal voices can lean into a different register:

This is a shift from “we are uniquely marked by history” to “we are deeply committed to the best version of our shared civic story.”

C. Conscious de‑mythologising of “Jewish power”

Where Jews are concentrated in visible sectors (media, academia, finance, law), antisemites will always spin that into malign influence. You can’t fix that by disappearing. But you can:

The point is not to deny real achievement, but to strip it of mystique.

D. Doubling down on everyday contact, not just elite discourse

Allport’s contact theory underscores that prejudice wanes when people have sustained, equal-status, cooperative contact with outgroup members. For Jews in highly professionalised, urban environments, it’s easy for most interactions to be intra‑class, not inter‑group.

Possible strategies:

The less abstract “the Jews” are, the harder it is for conspiracy thinking to maintain a grip.

E. Guarding against sacralised victimhood

This is where Zanu’s warning resonates most directly.

For any community with a deep trauma story, there’s a temptation to:

But when victimhood becomes sacralised:

A healthier stance is something like:

“We were gravely wronged. That history matters and must not be denied.
But we are still capable of being wrong, and we welcome honest, good‑faith critique—ours included.”

That posture is disarming, and it prevents trauma from fossilising into identity.

4. The hard truth

No set of strategies can guarantee safety. Jews in Germany before 1933 were among the most assimilated, patriotic, educated minorities in Europe—and they were still annihilated. Economic integration, cultural brilliance, patriotic service: none of it ultimately “worked” against a genocidal ideological project.

So any “solution” has to be honest:

but it cannot neutralise hatred in the hearts of those committed to it.

Within that limitation, though, there is still real agency—and real responsibility—not in the sense of blame for past atrocities, but in the sense of choosing how to inhabit the present: whether to weaponise trauma or integrate it, whether to move toward coalition or isolation, whether to lean into chosenness or shared humanity.

The prophetic edge of Zanu’s line is precisely here:  being wronged does not make you wrong‑proof. And for any diaspora community—including Jews, including Black communities, and others—that’s both a warning and an opening.

Letting go of power. Letting go of victimhood. These are hard things. Blending in, Assimilating. Staging silent. Leaving the conclave. These are things that feel weak.

But being ‘meek’ and sacrificing is what ultimately will do the trick. Now, I wonder where those dictates come from? Oh, wait… I already said that is the solution (last paragraph) writing about the fault lines between Christianity, Islam and Judaism.