Tracing the Roots of Antisemitism

At a time of growing antisemitism, SPA Professor Thomas Zeitzoff set out to examine whether education reduces prejudice. With co-authors Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth University) and Shun Yamaya (Stanford University), he recently published the results of this study, "How the Relationship Between Education and Antisemitism Varies Between Countries," in Research and Politics.

"Antisemitism is on the rise not only in the U.S., but around the world," said Zeitzoff. "At this moment, it is crucial to understand the conditions through which antisemitic attitudes form."

The authors used data on antisemitism gathered by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 2013-2017 representing 60,000+ individuals in more than 100 countries-possibly the largest-ever dataset on antisemitism. As a proxy measure for elite antisemitism in individual countries, they looked at whether countries supported United Nations statements condemning Holocaust denial (in 2007) and antisemitism (in 2015).

They found a relationship between higher levels of education and antisemitism. However, this depended on the presence of elite antisemitism. In countries that actively supported those recent UN statements, more education is associated with reduced antisemitism and prejudice towards Jews. By contrast, in countries that declined to endorse these statements and have greater levels of elite antisemitism, more educated people are more likely to endorse antisemitic stereotypes than those less educated.

"The general conventional wisdom is that education breeds tolerance, but, and we want to be careful, because that is a correlation," cautioned Zeitzoff. "We found that, in countries that didn't sign on to those declarations, greater education was actually associated with more antisemitism." In other words, rather than reducing prejudice, education in certain countries can expose people to prejudiced ideas like antisemitism. The content of education and statements of political elites may be more important than the number of years of schooling in shaping antisemitic worldviews.

He also points out the significance of our current historical moment to discussions of antisemitism. "The last survivors of the Holocaust are dying out," said Zeitzoff. "Antisemitism is rife on social media-in fact, one folk theorem of social media is that if any conversation that goes on long enough, somebody will call somebody else a Nazi or engage in those kinds of comparisons."

In the current U.S. election season, Zeitzoff notes, accusations of antisemitism and debates around its definition are growing increasingly central to the political dialogue. "Whether you look at criticisms of the associations of Republican Party leaders, in particular Donald Trump, with white supremacists who engaged in Holocaust denial, or, on the left, . . . groups protesting Israel's actions in Gaza, there are [mounting accusations] of one side or the other slipping into antisemitism . . . As somebody who's Jewish, that's concerning."

Though Zeitzoff admits that the correlational nature of the data makes it difficult to make causal claims, he looks forward to new research that further examines this font of information on antisemitism.

"Antisemitism is, in some ways, the oldest conspiracy theory, and central to many stereotypes (e.g., 'Jews control everything,' or 'Jews are not loyal')," said Zeitzoff. "In an era marked by a lot of conspiracy theories, it is a short leap from 'they' are doing things out there to 'the Jews' are the ones doing it."