Dylan Ifrah
Staff Writer

Pro Palestinian activists often claim that since Israeli Jews are allegedly colonizers, they must have a country for them to go back to. In their collective imagination, these countries are almost always someplace in Europe. We often hear that Jews are really just Polish, Russian, Romanian, German, or Hungarian. But are these claims true? Can Israelis really pack their bags and go back “home”?
Before addressing these claims, it is important to note that today, the majority of Israelis are Mizrahi or Sephardic, meaning that their ancestors were mostly part of diaspora communities in North Africa and the Levant. The ancestors of these Jews lived in Arab countries such as Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq for thousands of years, and the vast majority never stepped foot in Europe. Today, these Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews make up 55% of Israel’s Jewish population, while Ashkenazim (European) Jews make up around 45% of the Jewish population, with a large and growing portion of the population being of mixed ancestry.
These demographic and historical facts greatly diminish the claim that Jews are European. Regardless, it may still be worthwhile to investigate these claims.
Of course, one has to start with the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, in which six million of Europe’s nine million Jews were killed. However, the Holocaust was not an isolated event. Europe has a long history of Jewish presence - and antisemitism.
Before the Holocaust, most of Eastern Europe’s Jews lived in shtetls (isolated Jewish towns or settlements), where they spoke Yiddish and were completely removed from the non-Jewish societies of the places they lived in. From 1791 to 1917, the Jews of Tsarist Russia were only allowed to live in a specific region of the empire called the Pale of Settlement (comprised of Bulgaria, Moldova, and parts of Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, and Latvia). Life in the Pale was hard and most Jews struggled to earn a living, working hard jobs where they earned meager pay. Most importantly, Jews were almost completely separated from their neighbors.
Jews were seen by their neighbors as foreigners and others, not as Europeans or locals. In Ukraine, during the 17th century Cossack Uprising, Jews were seen as allies of the Polish rulers, and were attacked and murdered on numerous occasions, suffering at least 10,000 deaths. In Poland, where 87% of Jews spoke Yiddish (not Polish) as their mother tongue in 1931, they were unsurprisingly not seen as Polish by ethnic Poles, but as Jewish. In Russia, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published in the Russian newspaper Znamia in 1903. This text is the retelling of an invented set of 24 meetings, in which the authors imagine the Jews conspiring to create a global government in which all gentiles were to be enslaved.
Texts such as these were immensely popular in Russia and reinforced the notion of the Jew as a homeless, rootless traveler, whose only goal was to cause harm wherever he went. The trope of the Wandering Jew remained popular throughout the early twentieth century up to the rise of Nazi Germany, where the identification of the Jews as “other” reached its apex.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship, banned them from practicing professions such as law and medicine, classified those who were of mixed Jewish and German origin as Mischlinge (half-breeds), and forbade Jews from marrying Germans for fear they would poison the “pure” German bloodline.
Indeed, the Nuremberg Laws made no reference to Judaism as a religion, and emphasized that Jews were ethnically separate. As a result, secular Jews, atheists, and Jews who had converted (or whose parents had converted) to Christianity were murdered in the Holocaust for being Jews. These laws represent hundreds of years of attitudes across Europe that saw Jews as a foreign people, whose presence in the lands they were visiting was not meant to, and would not last.
Ultimately, the answer lies in the name. The word “Jew” has nothing to do with the religious observances of the people who follow Judaism. It refers to Judea, the homeland of Judah, the most important tribe of ancient Israel, and the location of its most important city (Jerusalem) and site (the Holy Temple).
People who claim that Jews should go back home may be right. However, that home is not in Poland or Russia. The home of the Jews is the land they have continuously inhabited for over 3500 years, yearned for while in exile for 2000 years, and where their state exists today: Israel.
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