I have long looked for a definition of antisemitism that could help me explain to Christian’s why this targeted hatred of Jewish people is a spiritual battle that’s playing out in real time right before our eyes.
I finally found it in the words of Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who captures antisemitism with rare clarity.
He argues that antisemitism is “an ancient idea that recurs throughout history—the archetype that Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world.”
That definition gets to the heart of something many political commentators, academics, and activists miss entirely. Antisemitism isn’t ultimately about stereotypes, war, money, power, or politics. It’s about a deeper belief embedded across civilizations; it’s the belief that the Jewish people are the obstacle preventing the world from becoming what it ought to be.
For years, I’ve heard evangelicals insist that antisemitism is more than prejudice—that it is spiritual warfare, a satanic assault against the people God chose to bear His promises.
I agree!
But if we want to confront the rising tide of Jew-hatred—especially now that it spreads far beyond the progressive left, infecting conservative spaces and even Christian communities—we must go deeper.
If antisemitism is satanic, we must ask what Satan is actually trying to accomplish, and Gur’s framing, in my opinion, provides the key.
If the Jewish people are seen as the barrier to global redemption, then antisemitism is fundamentally a theological grievance disguised as political, cultural, or racial critique. It is the same ancient lie retold in new vocabulary. Antisemitism is a shapeshifter that has taken on three dominant forms throughout history.
The first is the oldest, religious antisemitism—the belief that Jewish faith and Torah observance are what threaten the world’s progress. That lie surfaces in the book of Esther when Haman describes the Jews as a people who refuse to obey the king’s laws. It resurfaces centuries later in Antiochus Epiphanes, a Greek king who outlawed Jewish practice because it interfered with his imperial vision of cultural conformity. It appeared in Medieval Spain, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella insisted Jewish difference was so intolerable after the Reconquista that Jews must convert, leave, or die.
Religious antisemitism persists today; it can be seen in Islamic teachings and certain Christian doctrine. Last year, social media influencer Father Calvin Robinson went on a viral rant claiming that there is no such thing as “Judeo-Christian” values, only Christian values. He refused to use the word Judeo. His post was received with acclaim by many, including Candace Owens, who said she’s stopped Judeo because of its “overtly political history.”
Religious antisemitism claims that Jews are a problem because they will not “become like us.”
A second form of antisemitism took shape in the modern era: racial, genetic antisemitism. Unlike earlier hatred, which targeted what Jews believed, this newer version targeted who Jews were. Jewishness became a biological stain, an inborn problem, a threat embedded in DNA. A Jew could be secular or observant, religious or an atheist—it didn’t matter. Their very existence, their bloodline, was now seen as the source of society’s corruption.
This is the worldview Adolf Hitler seized upon, accusing the Jewish people of poisoning Germany and dragging it into humiliation after World War I. Nazi propaganda went so far as to invent physical identifiers, like the infamous “Jewish nose,” even though scientific studies disproved such claims.
But the truth was irrelevant.
Demonization was the goal. And genetic antisemitism gave Hitler the ideological foundation to murder six million Jewish men, women, and children in the Holocaust. It didn’t matter what Jewish people believed; the problem with Germany and the world was the Jew.
A third form of antisemitism has become unmistakable in the 21st century: statehood antisemitism. It claims to be political, offering critiques of Israeli policy, but always ends by targeting Jewish people—anywhere, everywhere.
You see more clearly since the Hamas massacre on October 7, Jewish students on college campuses have been shoved, harassed, screamed at, and excluded from classrooms—many of them aren’t even Israeli.
Synagogues, kosher restaurants, and Jewish community centers across the world have been vandalized or threatened. The message is unmistakable: Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is the problem, and therefore Jews everywhere must pay the price.
Statehood antisemitism pretends to be about geopolitics. But it functions the same way ancient hatred always has: it collapses Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people into a single target. The war in Gaza becomes a pretext for hostility toward Jews in New York, Paris, or London who may have never set foot in Israel. This is not “critique.” It is the same old lie wrapped in modern language.
As I considered these three expressions of antisemitism through Gur’s definition, one truth became impossible to ignore and helped me see Satan’s goal.
Every form of Jew-hatred aims at undermining the foundational promise God made to Abraham in Genesis 12—God’s promise of a land, a people, and a blessing for the nations.
Religious antisemitism attacks the blessing by targeting the Jewish faith through which Scripture, covenant, and the Messiah came into the world. Genetic antisemitism attacks the people by attempting to erase them entirely, which would make God’s promises void. Statehood antisemitism attacks the land by denying Israel’s legitimacy and centrality in God’s redemptive plan.
In other words, antisemitism tries to dismantle the Abrahamic covenant from every direction. And that is why it is satanic. Not simply because it is bigotry or hatred—though it is—but because it is a direct assault on God’s credibility. If Satan can convince the world that the land no longer matters, that the Jewish people are not chosen, that the blessing through Abraham is irrelevant, then he can convince the world that God is unfaithful.
This is why antisemitism is so persistent. It is why it mutates from religious to racial to political forms. It is why it appears on the left and the right. And it is why today’s Jew-hatred looks eerily like yesterday’s, even when the rhetoric has changed. The covenant God made with Abraham remains, and therefore the hatred remains.
But the Scriptures are clear: the Jewish people are not the obstacle to the redemption of the world—they are the vehicle of it. Through them came the Word of God, the prophets, the Messiah, and the promise of restoration that would begin in Jerusalem and extend to every nation. And through them God pledged to bless all the families of the earth. A promise that still stands!
That is the truth Satan seeks to erase through antisemitism. And that is why confronting antisemitism is not merely a political or moral duty—it is a spiritual one. To stand with the Jewish people is to stand with the covenant God made with them, going back to the moment Abraham took that step of faith to heed God’s call in Genesis 12. To resist antisemitism is to celebrate God’s promise to Abraham. And to proclaim the truth is to declare, again and again, that God’s promises still stand.
According to God, the Jewish people aren’t the obstacle to global redemption; their salvation is the pathway!
