Ashkenazi-Jewish Hatred for Gentiles: Historical Theology of Genocidal Redemption

The violence witnessed in the ongoing Gaza democide often escalates to levels that can only be described as grotesque and unhinged, with scenes of children queuing for food being routinely bombed and gunned down by the world’s only self-declared Jewish state and its supposed “most moral army in the world.” The constancy and potency of such attacks make it impossible to dismiss them as mere “accidents” or as wartime collateral damage. Rather, the frequent and repeated (clearly deliberate) targeting of civilians, especially those that are the most vulnerable, reveals a discernible pattern—a pattern which suggests an underlying ideological framework driving these actions rather than just being due to some random unfortunate miscalculations.

This animosity toward Gentiles is not merely political or strategic. In fact, it appears to be embedded deeply in certain theological and cultural attitudes. Such sentiments find articulation in foundational Jewish texts, such as the Talmud, which contain passages that distinguish Jews from non-Jews in moral worth, rights, etc., sometimes in very stark and unsettling terms.

At Muslim Skeptic, we have explored a number of these theological underpinnings. You may refer, for example, to the following analyses:

You’ve Heard of Amalek, Now Let’s Talk About Edom: Judaism on the Destruction of Christianity

What Judaism Really Thinks about Non-Jews: Response to Jewish Apologists

Do Jewish Lives Have Infinitely More Value Than Non-Jewish Lives?

“Non-Jews Have Satanic Souls”: The Spiritual Mentor of Ben Shapiro

Rabbi Kahane: A Look into Unapologetic Jewish Supremacism and Terror

Israeli-Jewish historian Israel Jacob Yuval, however, offers an important ethnological nuance to this discussion. According to his research, hostility toward the Gentiles has been crystallized into an explicitly genocidal project within the Ashkenazi-Jewish community in particular. This radical and supremacist development was specific among the Ashkenazim, the branch of the Jewish diaspora that settled in Western and Central Europe, in contradistinction to the Sephardi-Jews, who lived predominantly in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa; and the Mizrahi-Jews, who remained in the Middle Eastern heartlands.

In his book Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, originally published in Hebrew in 2000, Yuval highlights how the socio-political contexts of medieval Europe—marked by Christian hostility, crusades, and pogroms—may have catalyzed an especially radicalized and exclusivist outlook among Ashkenazi-Jews. However, he also notes that such views may predate Christian persecution and find their roots in the Jewish religious texts.

Hereunder are some selected passages from the book:

This [final] Redemption… will involve the ruin, destruction, killing and eradication of all the nations: they, and the angels who watch over them from above, and their gods…The Holy One blessed be He will destroy all nations except Israel.

 

These words come from Sefer Nizzahon Vetus, a book written in thirteenth-century Germany describing the messianic era. The author’s use of language, taken from the Book of Esther, where the intentions of Haman, the archoppressor, are described, demonstrates the power of the notion that during the messianic era the tables will turn and that a complete and final annihilation shall be in store for the Gentile nations. (p. 93)

The dominant view in Ashkenaz saw the annihilation of the Gentiles as a principal component of the messianic vision. This is a notion that wishes to correct history retroactively, assigning to vengeance the role of correcting the past before a new world order can be established. What is the background for this view? Under what historical conditions did it emerge?

 

In a lament for Tisha b’Av composed in wake of the pogroms of 1096, liturgical poet Kalonymus ben Yehudah wrote:

 

Drops of my blood are counted one by one
And spray their life-blood on your porphy­rion [a royal garment of crimson]
He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses.

 

This is a literal accounting by blood. Every drop of blood of Jews killed by Gentiles is recorded in a divine “ledger” in the form of a scarlet garment. The account will be settled—if one can say such a thing—to the last drop of blood. This metaphor of the crimson divine garment also appears in a Midrash cited in Yalqut Shim’oni:

 

“He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses” [Ps 110:7]. Our Rabbis said: For every single soul of Israel that Esau killed, the Holy One blessed be He took from their blood and dipped it in His porphy­rion until it was the color of blood; and when the Day of Judgment comes and He sits upon the dais to judge him [Esau], He will wear that porphy­rion and show him the body of every righteous person that is recorded on it, as it is said, “He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses.” At that selfsame time, the Holy One blessed be He executes against him a double vengeance, as Scripture says: “O Lord, thou God of vengeance, thou God of vengeance, shine forth!” [Ps 94:1] (p. 95)

The biblical source for this appears in Isaiah 63:1–6, which describes God’s vengeance against Edom. When asked, “Why is thy apparel red, and thy garments like his that treads in the wine press?” God replies: “I have trodden the wine press alone… I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my raiment.” God is compared to one who treads the winepress, trampling the grapes, or the Gentiles; during the treading, their blood is sprayed on the divine garments, which are stained red. Here, the staining of God’s apparel will occur during the vengeance against the Gentiles, and the blood to be sprayed on his apparel will be not that of the martyrs, as in the Midrash and the Ashkenazic piyyutim, but of the Gentiles whom he punishes.

 

Thus, the notion that at the End of Days God will avenge the blood of the martyrs is not a Franco-German innovation. Identification of the Midrashic source that the Ashkenazic poets drew on for their ideas indicates its continuity with the Palestinian Haggadic tradition. (p. 98)

In his well-known kerovah (a piyyut recited in the Amidah prayer), “Vayehi bahazi halaylah,” Yannai enumerates one by one the various horrors involved in the smiting of the firstborn in Egypt. Such a detailing of the deliverance from Egypt is intended to serve as a paradigm for the vengeance awaiting the Gentiles at the End of Days, for “what was at the beginning will be at the end.” And indeed, immediately following the lines describing the smiting of the firstborn we find a direct transition to the final deliverance, emphasized by the recurring phrase shoah u-meso’ah (utter devastation).

 

That is, just as God punished the Egyptians by smiting the firstborn, so will he smite and annihilate the nations of the world in the final Redemption. This is the view underlying several seder customs and sections of the Haggadah. There is an Ashkenazic custom to spill drops of wine from the glass at mention of each of the ten plagues of Egypt, alluding to messianic vengeance. This is explained in Sefer Maharil: “He [God] will save us from all these [plagues] and bring them upon our foes.” Sefer Amarkal cites a homily in the name of Rabbi Eleazar Rokeah, according to which one spills sixteen drops of wine (ten drops on mention of the plagues; three drops for their mnemonic acronym; and three drops for ‘blood and fire and pillars of smoke’), corresponding to ‘the sword of the Holy One blessed be He [that has] sixteen sides.’ (p. 100)

The Ashkenazim developed and enhanced this Palestinian tradition after 1096. However, the expectation of vengeance as a central component in the process of Redemption had already been expressed even earlier. It was not the atrocities of 1096 that spawned the longings for vengeance against the Christians, nor are these aspirations merely the emotional reaction of a grieving poet, motivated by pain and bereavement. Rather, they are part of an entire messianic teaching, as shown by the presence of this motif in Ashkenazic piyyut even before 1096. Rabbi Simeon ben Isaac, who lived at the beginning of the tenth century, in the selihah entitled Arkhu ha-yamim, asks God to avenge the blood of his servants and to “fill a deep and broad cup with laughter and derision” of their enemies.

 

In a kerovah for the seventh day of Passover, Rabbi Shimon follows in Yannai’s path and draws an analogy between the deliverance from Egypt and the future Redemption:

 

Let him wreak his vengeance in Edom before our eyes
because the vapor of Esau will come to Him at the time of His remembrance.
His seed, and his brethren, and his neighbors are despoiled, and are no more
they have drunk the cup of bitterness
…
For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver
The Lord is our king—He will deliver us.
And as Egypt were made to hear, so shall our enemies
Edom and Ishmael and all our oppressors. (p. 102)

I could elaborate further, but readers will have grasped the essential idea by this point: within the Ashkenazi-Jewish milieu, messianic redemption was envisioned as being contingent upon the total annihilation of the Gentile nations, especially those of “Edom” (Christianity) and “Ishmael” (Islam). Their foretold tribulations are compared explicitly to the biblical plagues that had been visited upon Egypt. As such, these eschatological imaginations extended to the notion of eliminating the firstborns of the Gentiles, a notion that inevitably calls to mind the present suffering of the children in Gaza. Moreover, in some of these apocalyptic narratives, the suffering of non-Jews during the end times was described using evocative terms such as “Shoah,” which later acquired its now-familiar association with the Holocaust. There is also the presence of some crude anthropomorphism, as God is pictured wearing “bloody garments”, the blood being that of slaughtered non-Jews. Beyond theory, this whole eschatological symbolism permeated certain ritual and liturgical motifs within the Ashkenazi-Jewish tradition, where the word “wine” came to be used as a metaphor for the blood of the Gentiles, a cannibalistic allegory not too dissimilar to how most Christians conceptualize the Eucharist (in which wine consumed during communion symbolically represents the blood of Christ).

RELATED: Christian Cannibalism: A Critical Look at the Eucharist

All of this is significant because, as is well known, Ashkenazi-Jews have come to dominate Israeli society across virtually all domains, from politics and military leadership to cultural and intellectual life. The longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is himself of Ashkenazi descent and has at various points openly invoked messianic language and aspirations in his rhetoric. It is not unreasonable to surmise that such theological and historical narratives, with their apocalyptic undertones and genocidal view of the Gentile world, inform, whether consciously or unconsciously, aspects of his worldview and political agenda.

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For readers who might be interested in exploring these themes in greater depth, I would recommend the book by the late Jewish-American historian Elliott Horowitz, titled Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence. In this work, Horowitz examines many of the same dynamics, including how medieval Jewish communities in Europe would at times, during festivals such as Purim, engage in subtle or less subtle acts of aggression against Christian icons and symbols. However, his focus extends beyond these ritualized expressions to a broader investigation of the theological underpinnings of such behaviors—particularly the roles of Purim, the figure of Amalek, and the enduring scriptural injunctions that are associated with them—in shaping Jewish attitudes toward violence and Gentiles or non-Jews.

We remain hopeful that the many decent and conscientious Jews (who undoubtedly exist), particularly the decent and conscientious Jews among the Ashkenazi-Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, will find the courage to speak out against and vehemently condemn these extreme ideological currents, perhaps even confront them with force, especially now, as such ideas appear to be manifesting in practice amid the ongoing democide of Gaza.

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