Introduction: The massacre of October 7, 2023, caused an earthquake whose shockwaves continue to reverberate throughout the Jewish world. In Israel, it reactivated the specter of pogroms, which the state was supposed to have made impossible; in the diaspora, it revealed the fragility of a security that was thought to be guaranteed. In this lecture given in Bern on October 9, historian Jacques Ehrenfreund examines what this event says about our times: the end of the post-Shoah era, the dissolution of European moral standards, and the persistence of a hostility that history seemed to have disqualified.[1]

In 1936, Yitzhak Baer, an eminent specialist in medieval Judaism and the first holder of a chair in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, set aside his research to write a short essay entitled Galut (Exile). Shocked by the Nazis’ rise to power three years earlier, Baer issued a chillingly lucid warning to the Jews of Germany. He had perceived the unique nature of the threat hanging over them and placed it in the context of the long history of the Jews; what was at stake in his eyes was the very possibility of Jewish existence in the diaspora. The history of the Galut is at a fatal impasse, he prophesied, just a few years before the systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe.
In June 1940, faced with the collapse of France, another medievalist, Marc Bloch, chose to put his studies on hold. As soon as he was discharged from military service, he wrote L’étrange défaite (The Strange Defeat) in a hurry, a book in which he sought the deep roots of the event he was witnessing; why did the French elites fail at the most crucial moment, how did the Republic find itself unable to face the challenge presented by Nazism?
I would not have the audacity to compare myself to these two giants, but it is under their authority that I place myself in attempting to reflect on the present, mindful of doing so as a historian. Indeed, history is also a practical knowledge that should help us to understand what has never happened before. What can be said about what we are currently experiencing, which erupted in an unprecedented outbreak of violence two years ago to the day?
On the morning of October 7, two contradictory interpretations of the event were put forward, revealing a major divide that has only deepened since then and has gradually isolated Jews. For most of them, October 7 instantly brought back the specter, not so distant after all, of annihilation—in indiscriminate massacres, looting, rape, the systematic destruction of kibbutzim and towns, the relentless attacks on living and dead bodies, the mass taking of women, children, and elderly people hostage, and above all, the jubilation of those who carried out all this and the enthusiasm their actions aroused among the Palestinian population. All saw this as a genuine genocidal impulse.
October 7 also brought back to Jewish memory the specter of the pogrom, that archaic form of hatred so appallingly described by Haim Nachman Bialik in his 1903 poem Ba Ir Haarega. Yet Israel had been conceived as a response to the pogrom. The state was supposed to be the guarantee that it could never happen again, since Jews were now presumed capable of defending themselves; yet it was in Israel that the pogrom resurfaced. This fact has caused turmoil and trauma whose full extent has not yet been realized; on October 7, Israelis experienced something they thought was reserved for Jews in the diaspora, a tragedy that Zionism was supposed to have made obsolete.
Echoing this, the sudden outbreak in Europe and the United States of a wave of hostility on a scale not seen since 1945 gave Jews in the diaspora a glimpse of the precariousness of their condition. They thought that this vulnerability belonged to the past, so it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under their feet.
The entire Jewish existence, both in Israel and in the diaspora, was hit hard by an event that brought together the two distinct parts of this unique people. They found themselves facing the same challenge, united in the face of the resurgence of an ancient hatred that they had hoped had disappeared, whether it be called Judeophobia, anti-Judaism, antisemitism, or anti-Zionism.
On October 7, Israelis experienced something they thought was reserved for Jews in the diaspora, a tragedy that Zionism should have rendered obsolete.
For, from October 7 onwards, a contradictory interpretation of the event was put forward and imposed in the public sphere, where it has reigned supreme ever since; it contested the antisemitic dimension of Hamas’s actions, explaining them exclusively by the colonial nature of the State of Israel. The day after the massacre, the UN Secretary-General condemned it half-heartedly, but called for it to be “put into context”. Judith Butler, a leading figure in postmodern and postcolonial thought, declared in March 2024 at a conference in Paris, “I think it is more honest, and more historically accurate, to say that the uprising of October 7 was an act of armed resistance (sic). It was not a terrorist attack, it was not an antisemitic attack: it was an attack against the Israelis.”
Western campuses, including those in Switzerland, immediately erupted in an outcry that erased and redefined the massacre, interpreting it as a revolt of the oppressed against their colonizers. Israel was instantly held responsible for what had just happened to it, even as Hezbollah joined Hamas on its northern border and launched attacks that forced 100,000 Israelis to flee their homes, and even as hostile statements preceded missiles and drones from Iran to Yemen. What prevailed on campuses, social media, and in the press was a postcolonial interpretation of Hamas’s actions.
However, positing a causal link between Israeli colonial policy, however reprehensible, and October 7th, is to falsify the central dimension of the event; it effectively strips the event of the meaning that the members of Hamas who carried it out wished to give it, filming themselves and posting their most cruel and transgressive actions online. Let us remember that the pogrom was carried out on Israeli territory, which is undisputedly recognized by international law, not in the West Bank settlements. What has therefore emerged at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an event in which Jews are attacked not for what they do, but for who they are.
Even a quick reading of the Hamas Charter reveals the centrality of its antisemitism, explicitly inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its primary goal is the eradication of Israel. The redemptive dimension of this antisemitism stems from the fact that salvation itself depends on this eradication; it is what guides the movement and gives meaning to its actions. In the eyes of Hamas, the disappearance of Israel is more important than the establishment of a Palestinian state. How else can we understand the billions in humanitarian aid that have been diverted and invested in the incredible network of tunnels, accessible exclusively to members of the militia, built to the detriment of the well-being of the enclave’s population and seriously jeopardizing its future?
Since coming to power through elections in 2006, Hamas has had no other concern than to prepare for the eradication of its neighbor, and on October 7, the attackers were not shouting “death to the Zionists” or “death to the Israelis,” but “death to the Jews.” Furthermore, they explicitly called for attacks on Jews around the world, and last week’s attack on the synagogue in Manchester is only the latest example of the lack of distinction between Israelis and Jews in the eyes of Islamists.
To posit a causal link between Israeli colonial policy, however reprehensible, and October 7 is to distort the central dimension of the event; it is, in fact, to strip it of the meaning that the members of Hamas who carried it out wished to give it.
It is precisely the centrality of antisemitism that post-colonial thinkers and their many supporters have sought to render invisible. This concealment has as its corollary the premise of Israel’s colonial essence since its founding. From this perspective, Jews are seen as an alien population with no connection to Palestine, and Zionism as nothing more than the latest incarnation of European colonialism or American imperialism.
At best, the postcolonial interpretation reveals a profound ignorance of Jewish history and the connection that has developed over the centuries with the land of Israel. Unfortunately, it is more likely that this ideology is based on a conscious and explicit denial of this history. It often explicitly challenges the very principle of the Jewish state’s right to exist. The slogan “From the River to the Sea,” the rallying cry of all demonstrations since October 7, calling for the removal of Jews and their state from Palestine, is an almost perfect synthesis of anti-colonialism and ignorance. Is this slogan ultimately so different from the one calling for a Judenrein Europe in the 1930s?
Accusatory inversion is the traditional modus operandi of both anti-Judaism and antisemitism; it aims to make Jews responsible for what has just been done to them or what one fantasizes about inflicting on them. Medieval expulsions were preceded by accusations of poisoning wells or murdering children for ritual purposes. Christian anti-Judaism culminated in the accusation of deicide; accusing Jews of the death of God himself made them the most hateful enemies, but also the most formidable ones imaginable.
Modern antisemitism, for its part, has been structured around conspiracy theories; these postulate that Jews have a secret plan to pervert and dominate society and that violence against them is therefore only preventive or defensive.
What prevails in both anti-Judaism and antisemitism, beyond their notable differences, is the assumption that Jews are uniquely dangerous. They are feared for their capacity to cause harm, as well as despised for their supposed stubbornness. This is what sets these forms of hatred apart and differentiates them from other forms of racism.
Since October 7, the accusation of committing genocide—the crime of crimes—has replaced that of deicide; it is this accusation that underpins all the mobilizations and justifies the violence, as well as the most extreme actions.
This new reversal of accusations is no coincidence; it refers to another central objective of post-colonial thinking, which sees the Shoah as a protective barrier for Israel that must be broken down. Desingularizing, that is, trivializing the destruction of the Jews of Europe, is what has been at work for the past two years in the jubilant reiterations of accusations against the Jewish state of committing genocide, like the Nazi state.
In mid-October 2023, Omer Bartov, a specialist on the Shoah in Ukraine, was quick to dispute the genocidal nature of October 7, warning instead that Israel’s response, which had only just begun, would be just that. On November 1, 2023, Didier Fassin, an eminent Parisian sociologist, followed suit and published “The Specter of Genocide in Gaza.” The thesis is simple: Israel is a settlement colony, and this form of domination produces legitimate resistance from the colonized; the colonizers repress the revolts with increasing violence, until they finally eradicate the indigenous people completely. It is therefore because it is a colonial state that Israel is committing genocide; the act stems, so to speak, from the nature of the state and does not need to be documented.
The accusatory inversion associated with the term “genocide” is not accidental; it refers to another central objective of postcolonial thought, which sees the Shoah as a protective barrier for Israel that must be broken down.
This accusation, which is a radical demonization and delegitimization of Israel, obviously has immeasurable effects on Jews. It is in the name of genocide that calls for boycotts of Israel, its universities, its artists, its athletes, its teachers, and even Jews in other countries who are supposed to be its supporters are justified. When the owner of a movie theater that has hosted the Geneva Jewish Film Festival for 15 years recently justified his refusal to continue renting out his theater, he argued that what was happening in Gaza cast a definitive negative shadow over Jewish culture and history as a whole. For some time now, the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has disappeared completely: when the mayor of Lausanne declares that Jewish community leaders should publicly condemn Israeli policy in order to combat antisemitism, he is positing a link between the two and effectively making them jointly responsible for the latter. When a memorial to the Righteous is desecrated in France with the slogans “Free Palestine” and “stop genocide,” when French children are expelled from a Spanish plane because they are singing in Hebrew, when the Spanish Prime Minister laments that his country does not have nuclear weapons to “stop the genocide,” when children in France are denied access to an amusement park because they are Israeli, we have entered a new era. What is at work here is something quite different from legitimate criticism of the excessive actions of a state.
Israel’s war has claimed a considerable number of innocent victims, a fact that puts even Israel’s most loyal friends to the test. All human lives are of equal value, a self-evident truth that must be remembered, and Palestinian victims deserve, without the slightest restriction, the same attention and compassion as all innocent victims. However, describing Israel’s war as genocidal points to something else entirely; it constitutes a distortion of the memory of the Shoah, which is purely turned against the Jews and against Israel.
We may therefore fear that October 7 marks the end of a parenthesis in Jewish history that began after the Shoah. In the decades following their destruction, the hatred of Jews that had previously been a defining feature of society suddenly became unacceptable. “Hitler disgraced antisemitism,” wrote George Bernanos at the end of the war. This strange phrase sums up what underpinned that era: Jews were certainly not particularly likable, Bernanos posited, but treating them as the Nazis and their collaborators had done, amid the indifference of the majority, had become intolerable. The memory of what had just happened protected the Jews and ensured that the State of Israel, established only three years after the genocide and populated by survivors, enjoyed almost natural sympathy. What remains of this today?
Times have changed, and it is to be feared that October 7 marks the end of a parenthesis in Jewish history that began after Shoah.
Europe has thought of itself as a model for the world ever since it began to hate and admire itself for having carried out and then atoned for the extermination of the Jews. It believes it has learned the right lessons from this history by entering a period that can be called “post”: it is postmodern, that is, primarily post-historical, since it posits that historical narratives are myths; it is post-national because, in its view, nations are “social constructs” that necessarily lead to nationalism and war; it is post-colonial, since it rightly repents for the domination it imposed on countless populations who had not asked for it. It posits that the peace it has managed to establish between former enemies should be an example to all. Even the outbreak of war in the heart of Europe in February 2022 has only marginally shaken these certainties. Europe thinks all this largely because it is convinced that it has learned the only possible lessons from the Shoah.
Have the Jews, for their part, learned the same lessons from their destruction? Not quite. They established a state in 1948 to remedy their vulnerability; this state does not hesitate to use force and even wage war to defend itself; they conceive of this state as a continuation of the long Jewish history, which has its origins in an ancient text that combines historical narrative and religious words. But perhaps above all, in Israel as in the diasporas, Jews consider it legitimate to want to persevere in being who they are, without seeking to blend into a larger whole. These are the ingredients for a growing misunderstanding, the effects of which are shaking Jewish life.
The confrontation between Israel and the Arab-Muslim world has been going on for several decades; the first phase of the conflict began with the rejection of the UN partition plan on November 29, 1947. For thirty years, all Arab states maintained their rejection of a Jewish state and initiated wars aimed at destroying it. The last of these began with a joint offensive by Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur in 1973. Israel, attacked by surprise, initially suffered its greatest defeat, then, after a costly human effort, achieved a huge victory. As a result, Egypt, realizing the impossibility of destroying its neighbor, abandoned this goal and obtained, through negotiation, the return of all the territories lost in the Six-Day War.
A second cycle of confrontation began when the Islamic Republic of Iran took up the torch of “resistance” against Israel in 1979, gradually forming an “axis” consisting of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad regime in Syria, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Yemen. October 7, 2023, Simchat Torah, was chosen as the day to strike Israel and attempt to achieve the goal that the “axis of resistance” had set for itself: an Islamist Palestine “from the River to the Sea.” What began as the greatest catastrophe Israel has experienced since its creation is now coming to an end with the defeat of the “axis of resistance.” Will this defeat bring this second cycle of confrontation to a close and allow for a peaceful and just solution to the Palestinian question?
Although it has been defeated militarily on various fronts in the Middle East, the “axis of resistance” paradoxically counts its last allies in the West; they do not seem ready to give up the delegitimization of Israel, with the profound effects of this policy on the Jews of Europe. It may well be that a virtuous dynamic is set in motion in the Middle East, but that the situation of Jews in Europe continues to deteriorate.
“Zionism,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “was the only political response that Jews ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology that took seriously into account a hostility that would place Jews at the center of world events. ” Israel and the Jews are undoubtedly the focus of attention disproportionate to their demographic weight, which in fact resembles an obsession. October 7 revealed that the existence of a Jewish state was still not a given. Hamas and the “axis of resistance” have not given up on destroying it, and this desire has found significant support in a world that was thought to be immune to hatred of Jews. Faced with this twist of history, Zionism remains more than ever the only serious response to antisemitism.
Jacques Ehrenfreund
Notes
1 | This text is a revised and expanded version of a speech given in Bern on October 7 at a commemorative ceremony organized by the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities and the Swiss-Israel Association |