Figurations of Jews in Discourses About European Identity, Antisemitism and Migration: Forbear, Victim, Model Minority, Mastermind

Abstract

This article analyzes the contemporary debate on the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe and the way it is tethered to discourses about European identity, migration and the viability of the liberal project. The debate on antisemitism has become explosive, with commentators sharply disagreeing about its claimed transformation into a “new” antisemitism which is primarily anti-Zionist in focus. In this article, I reframe these debates about antisemitism by foregrounding the “deep time” of Judaizing, or rather, anti-Judaizing tropes within them. The figuration of Jews, I argue (borrowing from David Nirenberg), far exceeds the range of concepts usually associated with antisemitism. This brings us face to face with a genealogy in which Jews were the primary figure of “difference” through which European societies thought about and negotiated the relationship between particularism and universalism and a whole slew of other social phenomena. I bring this genealogy to the surface in a close reading of a 2004 speech on antisemitism by then President of the EU Commission, Romani Prodi. I argue that in the speech, which kicked the EU’s combat against antisemitism into high gear and spotlighted the question of the relation between the resurgence of antisemitism and migration, we can detect the shadow of the so-called “Jewish Question”, which has always been about the limits of minority “emancipation” and belonging, whether on a national or a supra-national level. It attests to the aporia and blind spots in discourses about Jews, the Holocaust and antisemitism in Europe and showcases how reductive and instrumentalizing the institutional discourse is. Critically evaluating these figures of thought and their genealogy is strategically important considering the role they play in the constitution of a projected field of politics, especially when it concerns the resurgence of antisemitism, the securitization of Europe’s migrant and Muslim populations, the rehabilitation of the far right and the normalization of states of exception.

1. Introduction

On 19 February 2004, Romani Prodi, President of the European Commission, gave the opening speech at a seminar held in Brussels entitled “Against Anti-Semitism, For a Union of Diversity” jointly organized by the European Commission and the European Jewish Congress.

The organization of the seminar took place almost a year after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) organized its first international conference on antisemitism in Vienna in June 2003 in response to a surge of antisemitism linked to the Second Intifada and widely attributed to Europe’s Muslims (Romeyn 2020, p. 209; Renton 2025, p. 13). A few months later, in November 2003, a major controversy embroiled a primary EU think tank, the European Monitoring Centre against Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC, later renamed the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA)) when it was reported that in 2002 it had shelved its first report on antisemitism from the German Centre for Research on Antisemitism (which the EUMC itself had tasked with evaluating data collected by a network of European NGOs). The suppressed report suggested that a coalition of “pro-Palestinian leftists,” Muslim minorities, migrants and people of African origin were a “new source of anti-Semitism” in Europe (Finn 2003; Bunzl 2005, p. 500). The EUMC defended its action by calling the report of “poor quality and lacking in empirical evidence” and accused it of disproportionately stigmatizing European Muslim communities. It published a counter report which argued that much of the resurgence of violent antisemitic agitation came from “young, disaffected white Europeans” and that the “far right remained the main promoter of antisemitism” in Europe (Finn 2003; Bunzl 2005, p. 500; Whine 2004; Romeyn 2014). In response, the leadership of the European Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress accused European institutions of “intellectual dishonesty and moral treachery” and called the withholding of the first report and failure to act on its findings on the part of the European Commission politically motivated (Whine 2004). Prodi responded by creating an official oversight committee to monitor antisemitism and by organizing the seminar that convened in February 2004.

In this article, I revisit Prodi’s speech to analyze its key rhetorical gesture: that of installing Jews at the core of European identity as prototypical Europeans, while at the same time highlighting their status as Europe’s paradigmatic minority. I will suggest that this rhetorical double move is not so much about actual Jews and their place in European societies as it is revelatory of a projection of figures of Jews that, as David Nirenberg has argued, have a long track record of serving as a key epistemological framework for making sense of basic questions of society, human relationships, and the world. I am interested in how this “deep time” of figural conceptions and tropes of Jews and Judaism, which Nirenberg terms “Judaizing” habits of thought, manifests itself in a text that is ostensibly about antisemitism (Nirenberg 2013, p. 3). As Nirenberg points out, the signifying role of Judaizing, or rather, “anti-Judaizing” tropes and figures of Jews predates and far exceeds the range of concepts usually associated with antisemitism, even if antisemitism is informed by, and mobilizes some of its features. Antisemitism, Nirenberg argues, is so “resistant to reflection” precisely because (anti) Judaizing discourse is foundational to Western thought and provides the epistemic tools and concepts that shape our perception of reality. Moreover, critical thought often has “imagined itself as an overcoming of Judaism” and has used Judaism as the “foil” against which it defines itself (Nirenberg 2024).

In that sense, Prodi’s speech is revelatory: it attests to the aporia and blind spots in a discourse about Jews and antisemitism in Europe and showcases how reductive that understanding of antisemitism is. Even though the speech itself was given more than twenty years ago, its political stakes were substantial: it articulated viewpoints that have formed the backbone of the strategic framework of the “combat” against antisemitism for the past two decades. Post-October 7, the stakes of that combat have become even more politically explicit and explosive, providing an important incentive to more closely investigate its underlying assumptions, especially where these hinge on figural projections of Jews and Jewishness.

Nirenberg ends the introduction of his book with a plea for the “possibility of thinking critically about our own habits of thought … for the possibility of reflection, even on “Jewish” questions that have a long history of reflection to it” (Nirenberg 2013, p. 12). I respond to Nirenberg’s cue about using anti-Judaism as critical theory by asking what contemporary “Jewish questions” Prodi’s speech articulates and how he answers them. I analyze Prodi’s text for how it “thinks with Jews” about the EU, late modernity, minorities, immigration and global capitalism. Using the insights of Nirenberg, I will argue that the key work of “Judaizing” figuration in the text is to spawn filiations, supersessions, displacements and substitutions of Jews. My analysis therefore focuses on how Prodi’s text creates Old Jews and New Jews and traces the genealogy of these figural displacements and substitutions, and their implications, especially where it concerns their employment in the articulation of European identity, the resurgence of antisemitism, the demonization of Europe’s migrant and Muslim populations and the revalidation of European extreme right.

My argument consists of three parts: First, I outline how the construction of European identity in Prodi’s speech hinges on a supersessionist logic in which the figure of Jews is included as an exemplary core, which is universalized and “fulfilled” in the European Union in the domains of the EU’s supernationalist commitment to “unity in diversity”, mobility, and ethics (European values) symbolized by a commitment to Holocaust memory and anti-antisemitism. I argue that the act of “incorporating” Jews in the European “family” follows a figural and supersessionist logic that constructs the moral, affective-political space of European belonging as well as its exclusions and exceptions. Secondly, I demonstrate that the parameters of this space of belonging displace the Jewish Question (now presumed solved in the form of the European Union) and project these (Judaizing) figurations onto a new set of Others (Muslim minorities and migrants in particular). And thirdly, I conclude that one consequence of this construction of European identity is that it structures Europe’s post Holocaust ethical redemption around the battle against antisemitism. While the resurgence of antisemitism is deeply troubling, the terms on which this battle is conducted (which, not surprisingly, ignore the archive of figurations of “the Jew” central to Western thought) have provided an easy opening for the European extreme right to capture the moral high ground of anti-antisemitism and link it to its extreme anti-migrant and anti-Muslim platform, as well as its attack on liberal democracy and the European Union. My article, then, ultimately makes a plea for a critical reckoning with the genealogy of Judaizing figures of thought and the way they continue to shape the relationship between majorities and minorities (Jews and non-Jews) in Europe.

The text unfolds as follows: In the first section, I will draw on Nirenberg’s analysis of figuralism, Judaizing figures of thought and Jewish questions to analyze how they manifest in Prodi’s speech. My jumping-off point is Prodi’s designation of Jews as both the “archetype” of European identity and as Europe’s archetypal minority. This leads me into a discussion about the figural construction of Jewishness as a “norm” of Europeanness and the distribution of (differentializing and racializing) value that it carries in the articulation of European identity, particularly in three domains: (neoliberal) mobility, European “core” values, and redemptive anti-antisemitism and Holocaust memory. In the concluding section, I suggest how this figural logic continues to shape the contours of contemporary politics.

2. Supersession

In his provocative book Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition, David Nirenberg’s argument starts with his observation of the disproportionality between the prevalence and intensity of discourses about Jews and Judaism in many cultures through the centuries, and the actual numbers and influence of Jewish populations.

He arrives at the following conclusion: discourses about Jews, Jewishness and Judaism have been concerned more with “questions of how humans relate to each other” than with “real” Judaism and living Jews in society (Nirenberg 2013, p. 3). “Judaism, then, is not only the religion of a specific people with specific beliefs, but also a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world”, Nirenberg concludes. Nor is “anti-Judaism” merely an attitude towards Jews and their religion; it is foundational to Western thought, providing epistemic tools for examining and explaining the world (Nirenberg 2013, pp. 3–4). Christian culture, for instance, thought of basic aspects of society such as “money” and “property” as “Jewish”; proximity to or use of these aspects could produce the “Jewishness” of those who used them, regardless of whether those users were Jewish or not. Jewishness and Judaism, then, function as a framework of categorization and a grammar for understanding the world which has continued to evolve in response to the important questions and obsessions of the culture and the times.

The earliest Christian discussions about Judaism were informed by the issue that lay at the heart of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism: supersession. Jews’ rejection of Christ as Savior created a conflict between Jewish prophecy and law and its “fulfillment” through Christianity. Christian universalism, however, did not recognize this as a “true” conflict, because from its perspective supersession is both the fulfillment and the overcoming of dualism. The historical truth of the Old Israelites was incorporated into the spiritual truth of the “New” Testament rather than cast off completely. The doctrine of Christian supersession, then, was founded on a structuring principle which involved a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. The method of this incorporation was typological interpretation. Christian typology (or figura in the terminology of Auerbach (1938)) establishes a teleological connection between the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and between events or persons separated in time and space. In Christian figural interpretation, the first signifies not only itself but also prophesies and foreshadows the second, while the second encompasses and fulfills the first (Elsky 2025, p. 14). For example, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac acts as a figure for the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

This figural relationship simultaneously meant that Jewishness was archaic and left behind by the “unfolding of prophecy” and progressive time; and that the world could not be purged from Jewishness: Judaism, Judaizing and Jewish questions were kept alive and became metonymic “proxies” to talk about other things. In Christian theology, Christian supersession was interpreted as a “freeing from the bondage of Judaism” and as the substitution of a new law for the old through the elevation of spirit over body; faith over intellect; Christian universalism over tribal particularism. This gave rise to centuries of Judaizing figures of thought and a practice of hermeneutics which turned on a series of metonymies of Jewishness and Christianity, in which binary oppositions between “Jewish” materialism and “Christian” spirituality, flesh and spirit, law and grace, materialism and idealism, particularism and universalism were the essential encodings of the figural grammar.

Just as the continuation of Judaism and Jewish existence after Christ functioned as a refutation of Christian claims to a superseding, universalistic gospel and haunted Christian theology, the persistence of Jewish difference haunted the Enlightenment project of political emancipation and modern political life (Nirenberg 2013, pp. 402–5; Ratskoff 2020, p. 25). During the Enlightenment, crucial questions of modern life (and the very conceptual tools of philosophy and social theory to analyze modernity) were encoded as Jewish questions and projected onto figures of Judaism. Tolerance, the key philosophical concept of the Enlightenment, was “Judaized” by Enlightenment philosophers who encoded “intolerance” as a “Jewish” attribute, while tolerance was typologically figured as the conversion from Judaism (paradigmatic of religious intolerance) to Christianity. As Nirenberg observes, this paradoxically made the Jew both the paradigmatic progenitor of religious persecution and (as primary victims of the religious intolerance at the hands of the Inquisition) that persecution’s exemplary object (Nirenberg 2013, p. 349).

Similarly, 19th and 20th century debates about contractual economies and capitalism carried the weight of the figuration of “Jewish” materialism. Despite the attempt by Max Weber in The Spirit of Capitalism to situate the origins of capitalism squarely in Protestant religion (which its opponents saw as a Judaized version of Roman Catholicism because of its emphasis on scriptural text, while for its proponents it was Roman Catholicism that was Judaized in its contamination by ritualistic and formulaic practices (Topolski 2020)), capitalism was widely characterized (not only by Marx) as Jewish. Werner Sombart, in his refutation of Weber’s thesis, argued that “capitalism had nothing to do with Christian theology but instead was driven by the migration of the Jewish people” and “the progressive colonization of the world by Jews” (Nirenberg 2013, p. 441). In later writings, Sombart introduced a split in capitalism between the bourgeois commercial spirit (which he called “homo Judaeus”) and the “entrepreneur, who exhibited the essence of the German spirit (Volksgeist)” (Nirenberg 2013, p. 444). By the late 19th century, the liberal political order itself was attacked by its conservative opponents as Jewish (Nirenberg 2013, p. 440).

The key Jewish question from the late 18th century onward (which, as Ben Ratskoff notes, was fundamentally a Christian question (Ratskoff 2020, p. 21)) revolved around the question of how Christian-centric European states could accommodate Jewish difference, whether the Jewish people could or should be integrated into modern society, and if Jewish emancipation, the granting of civil rights to Jews as citizens, was conditional upon Jews giving up their communal religious identity as a “Jewish nation”. Enlightenment debates structured Jews as the limit test of civil emancipation and of the possibility of assimilation of national and religious minorities through education and civic “improvement”. In intellectual debates, emancipation was framed through Judaizing tropes and seen as the attainment of individual freedom from (intellectual and religious) bondage (to Jewish law) and as a “conversion” to (universal) individual rationality/reason, secularism, tolerance and “civilization”. This implied a subsequent question of whether emancipation also meant that Jews would have to (or could) cease to be Jews—a question that was hotly debated and inherently racialized in evocations of a supposed Jewish “immutability” that had been the subject of speculation since at least the Spanish Reconquista and the Inquisition, which inflected theological anti-Judaism with a nationalist and statist impulse (Balibar 1991a, pp. 23–24). For that reason, Jewishness was always more than religion, and emblematic of the race–religion nexus that curses (largely unacknowledged) through European history (Jansen and Meer 2020).

This imputed Jewish immutability acquired the contours of modern antisemitism with the emergence of racial science and the consolidation of the race concept during the Enlightenment (Nirenberg 2013, p. 356). But even if modern antisemitism refers to what Étienne Balibar calls “bodily stigmata”, these function more “as signs of a deep psychology, as signs of a spiritual inheritance rather than a biological heredity”. Moreover, “the Jew is more ‘truly’ a Jew the more indiscernible he is” precisely because the Jewish essence stems from a cultural tradition (Balibar 1991a, pp. 23–24). Balibar considers antisemitism to be the prototype of what in contemporary discourses has come to be termed “culturalist racism” or “differential racism”, which explains human difference and im/mutability (particularly when it concerns migrants) in terms of belonging to historical cultures (or religions) rather than biology, blood or even genes. In his words: “Anti-Semitism is supremely ‘differentialist,’ and in many respects the whole of current differentialist racism may be considered, from the formal point of view, as a generalized anti-Semitism” (Balibar 1991a, p. 24).

Aamir Mufti has identified the Jewish question in Europe as “the foundational, exemplary model for how modern nation-states handle minority identities—by simultaneously including them within national discourse and excluding them socially, creating an enduring crisis” (quoted in Ratskoff 2020, p. 22). This crisis has its basis in the tension between the universalist aspirations of the ideals around which the nation is organized (equality and inalienable human rights), and the bounded context of the particularist community of national belonging in which they are embedded. As Balibar points out, nationalism is caught in the contradiction between universality and particularism. It acts as a “force for uniformity and rationalization” but also fetishizes the idea of an original national core that needs to be preserved from dispersal and corruption (Balibar 1991b, p. 54). Within this framework, Jews represent the prototypical disruption of what Derrida calls “ontopology” (the linking of the “ontological value of present-being (on) to … the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general”), by “the excess of the foreign guest, who remains a stranger, no matter what his/her state of incorporation” (Derrida 1994, p. 103).

Jewish emancipation in the secular democratic state, then, does not escape the problem of Jewish difference but rather displaces it from religion to civil society, thus indicating the very limit of “emancipation” (Ratskoff 2020, p. 26). As Marx already observed, “the dissolution of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is not a denial of citizenship or an avoidance of political emancipation, … it is the political way of emancipating oneself from religion” through the construction of an “abstracted individual subject” (Marx quoted in Ratskoff 2020, p. 26).

This abstraction has two components: universalization in theory, whiteness in practice. The abstract individual subject, Ben Ratskoff notes, is a universalized version of the “dichotomized self” that has its origins in the Christian subordination of flesh to spirit (Ratskoff 2020, pp. 25–26). Moreover, the ability to “abstract” oneself was defined as an attribute of whiteness (and masculinity), as the “ideal of abstract individuals equally deserving of respect” was accompanied by the “routine restriction of full personhood to whites, and the consignment of non-whites to subordinate moral status” (Mills 1997, p. 70, quoted in Ratskoff 2020, p. 29). Whiteness, meanwhile, as Richard Dyer has pointed out, was defined not as “color” but as the absence of color and exemplified not by body but by precisely the transcendence of the body by “spirit” (Dyer 1997). The configuration of whiteness, then, borrowed from the metonymic figural encoding of Jewish particularism as bounded by flesh and law, and Christian universalism as transcendent in terms of spirit and grace.

It was racial whiteness that “neutralized” religious differences between Europeans and unified the citizenry into “an abstract bloc of equalized monads” who could now be subject to a democratic distribution of power (Ratskoff 2020, p. 29). Here it is worthwhile to recall Balibar’s observations on the paradox of nationalism caught in between universalism and particularism, and on the supplement that racism brings to this constellation, “both on the side of the universal and the particular” (Balibar 1991b, p. 54). As a “supplement” to the nation, racism involves the valorization of a human ideal. This ideal links the past (the original forbear who is non-degenerate, and therefore purest) and the future as fulfillment (in the form of an idealized “superman”). It therefore seeks to isolate, eliminate and expel “the ‘false’, ‘exogenous’, ‘cross-bred’, ‘cosmopolitan’ element”. Indeed, the obsession with the spurious common “essence” of the nation and its nationals feeds into “the racialization of social groups whose collectivizing features will be set up as stigmata of exteriority and impurity, whether these relate to style of life, beliefs or ethnic origins” (Balibar 1991b, p. 60). Racism operates through inversion and projection: “the racial cultural identity of ‘true nationals’ remains invisible, but it can be inferred (and is ensured) a contrario by the alleged, quasi-hallucinatory visibility of the ‘false nationals’: the Jews, ‘wogs’, immigrants, ‘Pakis’, natives, Blacks”. However, “the fact that the ‘false’ is too visible will never guarantee that the ‘true’ is visible enough” (Balibar 1991b, p. 60).

Modern nationalisms also stretched the category of the nation towards “supranationalism” in their idealization of timeless or transhistorical communities such as the “Indo-Europeans”, “the West”, or “Judaeo-Christian civilization” and borrowed from the racism of the universalist theologies and their idealized versions of humanity. This, for Balibar, explains how antisemitism functioned on a European scale. Jews constituted a racial signifier that transcended national differences and cemented “‘transnational’ solidarities so as to be able, in return, to ensure the effectivity of nationalism”. In the figure of the Jews (conceived paradoxically as both inassimilable and cosmopolitan, as an original people/nation and as stateless/rootless), each nationalism recognized its own specific enemy and the representative of all other “hereditary enemies” (Balibar 1991b, pp. 61–62). This transnational solidarity was further solidified by the fact that at the same time, during the race for Empire, European or Euro-American nations recognized their communality through that very competition for colonial empires, to which they gave the name “White” (Balibar 1991b, p. 62).

The universal subject of liberal freedom cannot accommodate genuine, long-term difference, and the “constitutive freedom of the abstract subject … is brought into crisis in the minor practices, narratives and locations of Jewish existence” (Mufti 2007, p. 40 in Ratskoff 2020, p. 25). Thus, the “crisis of enduring minority (i.e., Jewish) difference haunts the project of political emancipation and the democratic nation state” (Ratskoff 2020, p. 25). Wendy Brown frames the dilemma in slightly different terms, extending its implications beyond the Jewish Question to cultural and religious minorities in general. In its universalist aspirations, liberal tolerance, even in its multicultural form, assumes a position “above” the particularism of culture and religion, and the concreteness of corporeal embodiment. Liberalism “masters” culture (or religion) by privatizing and individualizing it, distinguishing essentially between those who are “mastered’’ by culture/religion, and those who master themselves (as autonomous individuals) and relate to culture and religion as “optional” (Brown 2006, pp. 23, 45, 94–95). The universalist premises upon which liberalism and the democratic nation-state rest, then, continue to be disturbed by (and at the same time defined against) the particularism embedded in cultural or religious formations (Romeyn 2014, pp. 88–89).

3. The EU and Filiation: On Jewish Forbears and European Supersession

In his landmark 1938 essay Figura, philologist and literary scholar Erich Auerbach traces the history of figural interpretation by demonstrating not only how figura connects Hebrew scripture to Christian fulfillment, but how it contributes to a teleological view of history where everyday reality holds transcendental meaning, a concept that formed the argumentative structure for Mimesis (Auerbach 1953), his seminal work on the foundations of Western literary realism. In Auerbach’s interpretation of figural reasoning, Christian supersession is coded as “grace” (a metonymy for Christianity) “surmounting” the ghostly Law (a metonymy for Jewry) and the “primitive belief” of the Christians’ Jewish forebears (Elsky 2025, p. 12).

It is interesting, then, to see the figure of the Jewish “forebear” make an appearance in Prodi’s speech. It indicates that we are presented with a form of figural grammar that has a long genealogy.

Prodi’s speech, entitled “A Union of Minorities,” sets out as follows:

I believe we can learn a lot from the history of the Jews of Europe.

In many ways [Jews] are the first, the oldest Europeans. We, the new Europeans, are just starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances—allegiance to our hometown, to our own region, to our home country, and now to the European Union.

The Jews have been forced to master this art since antiquity. They were both Jewish and Italian, or Jewish and French, Jewish and Spanish, Jewish and Polish, Jewish and German.

Proud of their ties with Jewish communities throughout the continent, and equally proud of their bonds with their own country.

(Prodi 2004)

Prodi’s figuration of Jews as the “oldest Europeans” sets up a family lineage, a “filiation” for the “new Europeans”, which both contains but also supersedes, through universalization, the “oldest Europeans”. Europeans, then, in a sense, are the “new Jews”, now too living with “multiple allegiances”. Homo Europaeus both incorporates and fulfills, or supersedes, Homo Judaeus. It is also pertinent here to recall the observations of Balibar which I discussed above: Prodi’s rhetorical gesture sets up the valorization of a human ideal, linking the past (the original forbear who is tribal and non-degenerate, and therefore purest) and the future as fulfillment (here in the form of an idealized transhistorical (Judaeo-Christian) civilization and the supranational community of the European Union).

A similar figural move pertains to Prodi’s “Union of minorities”. Here, Prodi proceeds to give his interpretation of the Jewish question. As Prodi continues:

Historically and culturally, the Jews are Europe’s archetypal minority. They were deprived of rights that others enjoyed, and they were persecuted throughout Europe.

It has been said that civilizations can be judged by the way they treat their minorities. The way a society behaves towards its minorities reveals a lot about its underlying values and its culture.

So the way Jews were treated is a sort of litmus test of civilization. And we all know that over the last two millennia the results across Europe were often shameful…

In the next segment of his speech, Prodi projects the EU as the “Aufhebung”—the sublation of the problematic of both the Jewish question and nationalism:

The European idea was based on the firm determination to make sure the Europe of the future would be different—a Europe of peace, tolerance, and respect for human rights. A Union of diversity where differences are accepted and perceived as enriching the whole. Most importantly today, we also share the same core values. Respect for human rights, respect for minorities and respect for human dignity are the founding principles of the European Union…

I have called the Europe we are building a “Union of minorities”. A union where no single national, ethnic, religious or cultural component can lord it over the others … We must ensure the Europe we are building is a true “Union of Diversity”.

(Prodi 2004)

The Jewish people, then, are the archetypal minority. But in the new Europe where “no single national, ethnic, religious or cultural component can lord it over the others”, Europeans are all minorities.

By all becoming “minorities” in a “Union of Minorities”, the EU has resolved the so-called Jewish question: minorities become the ‘norm’ and thus are normalized. Jews, Matti Bunzl states, “no longer figure as the principal Other but as the veritable embodiment of the post-national order” (Bunzl 2005, p. 502).

But even though Prodi projects the EU as having resolved the Jewish question and the paradox of particularism and universality, the discourse of the speech resorts to and reinscribes (anti) Judaizing figurations. The figuration of the Jew, David Nirenberg and Sarah Hammerschlag point out, historically has been characterized by its oscillations. “Whatever the political ideal, the Jew was its antithesis” (Hammerschlag 2010, p. 7). “For the Enlightenment, with its investment in universalism and civilization, the Jew was a symbol of particularism, a backward-looking, pre-modern tribal culture of outmoded customs and religious tutelage; for a nationalism based on roots, the distinctiveness of cultures, and allegiance to a shared past, the Jew was an uprooted nomad or a suspect ‘cosmopolitan’ aligned with ‘abstract reason rather than roots and tradition’” (Romeyn 2014, p. 92; Hammerschlag 2010, pp. 7, 20).

For the post-Cold War European Union, the Jews are the “original Europeans”, the prototype of “Homo Europaeus”, forbearers of a mode of belonging beyond the nation-state. Prodi inscribes Jews into the self-realization of the European Union, there to certify Europe’s restored humanity and redemption as tolerant, post-national, post-racist, and cosmopolitan. The figure of the Jews, in their “excess”, their “disruption” of “ontopology”, is transformed from pariah to exemplary object of desire, a figural representation promising the sublation of a past defined by nationalist, tribalist essences (for which Jews served as the figure) and an entry into an imagined European cosmopolitan, post-national future (for which Jews also served as the figure), in which Jews alongside other (European) post-nationals share the same moral space, defined by Europe’s “core values”. The figural Jew, then, is both (tribal) forbear and, as the (uprooted) antithesis of the nationalist state, a shortcut to a “desired European future”, in which this difference is effectively subsumed and superseded (Tzuberi and Samour 2022). It is worth noting here that beyond their “excess” to the nation-state, in Prodi’s speech the minority status of Jews is emptied of all content—there is no mention of Judaism or Jewishness as religious or cultural difference. The (racialized) surplus to the nation-state that defines the minority status of Jews, now positioned as the “norm” of Europeanness, is dissolved, “abstracted” into the “hyphen” of the nation: Jewish-Italian; Jewish-German, etc.

This abstraction has two components, to which I alluded earlier: universalization in theory, racial whiteness in practice. The figuration of Jews as an “archetypal” minority in a European Union of Minorities carries the abstraction of Jewishness into universal personhood and into the realm of racial whiteness. For Dean Franco, “Jewish mobility in and out of whiteness exposes how whiteness works both as a proxy for the sovereign state”—in which whiteness serves as “metaphor of the nation and its regulation of who gets to live and how” and “as mechanism for manipulating levers of institutional power” (Franco 2020, p. 140). The “cunning of recognition” embeds the figure of the Jew in “whatever version of the racial state at hand” (which also explains the oscillation of the figurative Jew). The exemplification of Jews as “model minority” occurs within broader discourses of the racial neoliberal capitalist state and serves to consolidate power around the set of norms and ideals the “model” evokes (Franco 2020, p. 156).

This whiteness, however, is dissimulated by the universalist pretensions incarnated in “shared core values”. In his speech, then, Prodi not only confers a postmortem badge of whiteness upon Jews. Installed as the norm of Europeanness, Jewishness also becomes the racial state’s object lesson and, with that, indicative of late liberalism’s distribution of value(s). Within this index of value, three key arenas in which Europeanness is articulated through Judaizing figures stand out:

(1)

Mobility within the perimeters as defined by the Schengen agreement

(2)

European core values

(3)

Anti-antisemitism

For each of these arenas, Jewish “forebears” stand in a figural relationship to their fulfillment in the European Union. I will explore each of these categories as they are touched upon in Prodi’s speech and present a broader contextual analysis of each of these arenas within the context of the discursive and regulatory construction of EU identity.

4. Neoliberal Mobility: Cosmopolitanism, Uprooted Nomads Globalization

In Prodi’s trope of Jews as archetypal Europeans, the condition of Jewish uprootedness, vagabondage and nomadism becomes exemplary for cross-border mobilities and hyphenated or dual loyalties (national and European), and paradigmatic for a form of cosmopolitan belonging in a supranational Europe, which supposedly sublates Jewish particularism and resolves the history of centuries of Jewish religious and racial unbelonging.

The ideal of the European Union as defined by mobility and through the figure of cosmopolitanism harks back to the Enlightenment. It drew inspiration from Kant’s writings on the Idea for a Universal History (1784) and on Perpetual Peace (1795), in which Kant prophesied that after the age of revolution “nature’s supreme aim, a universal cosmopolitan state-of-affairs [Zustand]… will at last be realized” in a federation of republican nation-states. “Just as individuals are willing to overcome their urge to … kill each other by subjecting themselves to the social contract of the republic, so each individual republican state wants to protect itself against its self-destructive tendencies by entering a cosmopolitan federation of states within its region” (in Verstraete 2010, p. 23). Kant’s idea of European and world federations of peace was uniform and premised on the privileged subject of the Aufklärung, the white, unfettered, geographically mobile, autonomous male individual. It did not include Jews, who, as Kant prophesied, would convert collectively to Christianity as humanity progressed toward “freedom” and “truth” (Nirenberg 2013, p. 395).

Ginette Verstraete has argued that the equation between European citizenship and movement was baked into the eighteenth-century idea of Europe as the beacon of progress and liberty and its final destiny as the cosmopolitan nation-state. Belonging to European civilization “involved movement to or within a mythical space of freedom”. This idea, which took its model from a mythology that framed humanists traveling through Europe as agents of Europeanization, returns in the principle of European “unity in diversity” (Verstraete 2010, p. 14). In his speech, Prodi replaces this mythologized de-territorialized traveling humanist with the figurative Jew.

Prodi’s Jewish cosmopolitan European forebear also has a specific Jewish genealogy. In nineteenth (and twentieth century) philosophical and political discourses on the Jewish question, Jews were constructed as a figure for deracination and the rupture of the structure of national belonging, the eternal “stranger” in our midst (Hammerschlag 2010, pp. 12–13). For Voltaire, Jews were “vagabonds upon the earth”; Herder cast Jews as uprooted and alienated (Hammerschlag 2010, p. 24). Hegel thought of Abraham as “a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike. Among men he always was and remained a stranger”. Nationalist firebrand Maurice Barrès constructed the French nation in opposition to the “enemy” inside: the rootless Jew (Hammerschlag 2010, p. 27). For Jewish intellectuals, however, Kant’s Enlightenment cosmopolitanism promised to turn this Jewish “excess” into an asset and transform Jews from pariahs to exemplary citizens. In fact, Jews’ own existence, which superseded the nation, validated cosmopolitanism’s viability. To many 19th and 20th century members of the European Jewish intelligentsia, Kant’s vision of unitary humanity promised emancipation and equal membership in the national and cosmopolitan community. As Malachi Hacohen has argued, German acculturated Jews were cosmopolitanism’s main carriers because “They were the only group that could gain nothing from ethnonationalism”. Cosmopolitanism “represented the response of the losers of ethnopolitics” (Hacohen 1999, pp. 106–7).

The theme of cosmopolitanism was taken up in the period between the two World Wars by the Viennese Jewish philosopher Karl Popper, who elaborated his philosophy of an “open society” by converting Kant’s cosmopolitanism into a liberal framework. Popper’s open society promised a culturally diverse home to those who lived “in-between nationalities, belonging to none” (Hacohen 1999, p. 110). But like Kant, Popper’s stumbling block was the realities of ethno-nationalism in which German and Jewish/cosmopolitan identities were becoming mutually exclusive. Popper’s solution for the coexistence of national and cosmopolitan identities also recapitulated Kant’s, but on a supranational scale: he envisioned his cosmopolitan state as imperial, modeled on the Habsburg empire.

In his figural vision, it was Jewish tribalism, based on Jewish monotheism and religious intolerance, that provoked antisemitism. Jewish tribalism, petrified in the Jewish ghetto, was the fountainhead of all tribal nationalisms, including that of the German racial state, which for Popper was the epitome of the closed society (for which Jewish tribalism served as the original figure). Popper’s solution was Jewish assimilation to appease barbarous ethno-nationalist tribalism, thus echoing Marx on the Jewish question: “the question is not the emancipation of the Jews, but rather, the emancipation from the Jews”. Only the disappearance of the Jews would vanquish German racism and usher in a utopian cosmopolitan future (Hacohen 1999, pp. 139–45). (This is of course not so different from the contemporary idea that racialized minorities are responsible for the racial hostility of host societies). In the postwar period, Popper’s cosmopolitan open society became the basic framework for Atlantic Cold War liberalism. Like Kant’s cosmopolitanism, it failed to negotiate between universal and particularist identities (Hacohen 1999, p. 109).

In the Europe of the Schengen zone, the mobility of the politically and economically privileged European subject is imagined as the pathway into a European cosmopolitan future. Transnational mobility, intertwining ideas of freedom, the autonomous abstract individual, and travel as agent of Europeanization, improvement, civilization and capital, produces neoliberal cosmopolitan subjects by challenging nation-based territorial attachments (Lähdesmäki et al. 2021). The ideal mobile European subject “has learned to navigate between the traps of particularity and universalism, materiality and spirituality, dispersal and return to the self or the community” (Verstraete 2010, p. 30).

What is omitted in the idealization of the mobile European subject is that European mobility has always been imbricated in the logic of racial capitalism, and worked in the service of commerce, colonialism and (neo) imperialism. The Schengen zone of “free circulation” is the space dictated by neo-liberalism and globalization which hinges on large-scale movements of people, goods, capital, services and information across the world. As these multiple and intersecting flows de-territorialize and unsettle fixed categories of nation, ethnicity, community, place and state, they not only create new economic, social and political geographies on multiple scales, but make dislocation, displacement, disjuncture and diaspora, associated with (the figure of) Jewish nomadism and with migrant subjectivity, a widespread global condition. In the 1990s, globalization theorists like Arjun Appadurai assumed that the unsettling of bounded categories such as territory, culture and belonging and of the identities attached to them would usher in a cosmopolitan age (Appadurai 1990). Critics saw global capitalism less as ushering in an age of cosmopolitan openness than as compounding existing material and cultural inequalities that fed the politics of resentment of global populism.

However, the ultimate referent of belonging in the EU remains the nation-state. Europeanness is defined and delimited by citizenship in an EU member state. Access to cross-border mobility is uneven, creating a division between mobile and non-mobile citizens. Moreover, Prodi’s normative de-territorialized European subject is dissected by the flexible and differential management of mobility streams in Europe and is contingent on the selective and differential in/exclusion of migrants in the space of European citizenship. EU citizenship then boils down to a tiered system in which mobility exemplifies and determines the degree of “buy-in” and thus belonging in the European project (Bauböck 2019). Differential mobility, self-abstraction and cosmopolitanism are acutely racialized indexes of Europeanness.

Nor does Prodi’s model of de-territorialized European belonging imply actual support for the idea of multiple belonging and multiple citizenship. His “Union of Minorities” does not include de-territorialized migrant and minority populations increasingly faced with restrictive, culturalist modes of national belonging where “roots” and “cultural rootedness” signify the “true national” (El Tayeb 2011, p. 51). Indeed, Nina Glick-Schiller suggests, Prodi’s understanding of “minority” is based on the figural Jew as archetype of the hyphenated “foreign national” and thus formulates a normative diasporic identity that is conceptualized as a “long-distance nationalism”. The model for this understanding of minority as diasporicity, she argues, is Israel with its biological conception of the nation as “homeland” for all Jews, as expressed in the right of return (Glick-Schiller 2005, p. 528).

This perspective of diasporic identity fetishizes the idea of a peoplehood as “closed” (rather than “open” and cosmopolitan), linked by genealogy, culture and descent. It lends support to the externalization of diasporic communities, in which even second- or third-generation migrants are seen as “non-belonging” and suspicious in their loyalty to a “backward” culture and a distant “home” (El Tayeb 2011, p. 51). Indeed, in Prodi’s post-national, post-racial cosmopolitan Europe, the racialized tropes that applied to the figure of the Jew, and opposed sedentary and nomadic, rooted and uprooted, cosmopolitan and provincial, modern and backward, now are enlisted to support the characterization of migrants and minorities, particularly Muslims, as eternal “strangers” (Silverstein 2008; Romeyn 2014, p. 95). The racial exceptionalization of the figure of the Jew as exemplary model of the EU serves here to consolidate power around a narrow set of norms of belonging which are exclusionary of migrants and especially Muslim minorities (Franco 2020, p. 156).

The substitution of the category of immigrant for the notion of race is the hallmark of what Taguieff (1993) has called a differentialist racism, the prototype of which, Balibar reminds us, is antisemitism. Differential or cultural racism conceptualizes culture as genealogy, and postulates the incompatibility of lifestyles, religions, and cultural traditions. It uses anthropological culturalism and its recognition of the diversity and equality of cultures (which has informed the arguments of the post-WWII period humanist and cosmopolitan anti-racism) to naturalize “not racial belonging but racist conduct”. Its version of humanism recognizes “universal sociological laws of cultural distance” and “tolerance thresholds”, the “vital importance of cultural closures and traditions for the accumulation of individual aptitudes”, and, most importantly, the “‘natural’ bases of xenophobia and social aggression” (Balibar 1991a, pp. 22, 26).

5. European Core Values

Prodi’s promotion of a “Union of Minorities” or “Unity in Diversity” should be understood against the backdrop of EU expansion, and especially the 2004 enlargement. The induction of new member states complicated the EU’s earlier attempt to define Europe in terms of a fixed content based on specific cultural elements and (Christian, Judaeo-Christian, humanist) heritage. As a result, the EU shifted its discourse away from an ontological understanding of European identity towards a value-based identity that prioritized norms and mobility and presented European identity as dynamic, procedural, and rooted in abstract values such as liberal democracy, human rights, and freedom (Calligaro 2014). Prodi’s speech mentions the EU’s condemnation of “all forms of intolerance, racism and xenophobia” and its “commitment to human rights—especially the rights of minorities” as a key criterion for joining the Union and for remaining a member of it.

Here it is worth remembering that, as Loeffler (2018) has pointed out, the interest in human rights was (and remains) part of the Jewish Question and the protracted struggle over Jewish identity and destiny. The key human rights question was how the international community could protect a minority against persecution by its own government. After the failure of the post-WWI minority rights treaties, managed by the newly formed League of Nations in Geneva, to guarantee basic civil, political, and cultural rights of racial, religious, and linguistic minorities within the newly created or expanded states of Eastern Europe, the idea of an international guarantee for individualized human rights gained traction and ultimately resulted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the UN General Assembly in 1948. It is also worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s verdict on human rights, namely that the idea of human rights projects an ‘abstract” human who does not in fact exist: the supposed rights of the abstracted human are tethered to the nation-state and made co-eval with citizenship rights (Arendt 1951). As such, European universal values, chief among them human rights, continue to struggle to accommodate minority rights and cultural and religious differences that do not ‘abstract’ themselves, i.e., renounce themselves or relegate themselves strictly to the private sphere.

This has become obvious in contemporary Europe in the spotlighting of certain Muslim cultural and religious practices as problematic (ritual slaughter, the burqa, ritual circumcision, the avoidance of pork, minarets) and their proposed curtailment or banning based on universal human rights and essential values, such as tolerance, gender equality, and non-discrimination. These debates, in essence, reprise those associated with the Jewish Question and are about the “limits” to (especially Muslim) minorities’ “right to difference”, highlighting the “illiberal” dimensions of liberal tolerance. It has not escaped attention that a number of these practices are shared by Jews as well.

In France, the debate over the banning of the burka was led by the (Jewish) Alain Finkielkraut, who formulated his concern in terms of the return of tribalism in postmodernity, and appealed to the French republican tradition of resistance to “communitarianism” (which, as Sarah Hammerschlag points out, was traditionally coded as Jewish but also associated with fascist ideologies of intolerance, particularism and rootedness). Finkielkraut was joined by Alain Badiou, who protested the fetishization of the “right to difference” and “the proliferation of identities and the accompanying cultural relativism” from a position of Marxist universalism. For Badiou, the model for asserting the right to particularity that led to the “morass” of identity politics was the figural Jew, in his recalcitrant attachment to “the dead letter” of the law (Hammerschlag 2010, pp. 20–21).

The dynamics of exclusivity and exemplarity present in Judaizing discourses make it possible that Jewishness can exemplify “the condition of uprootedness” and hyphenated identities (now figured as the essence of Europeanness) and serve as a means of critiquing (or alternatively, valorizing) the “rootedness” of other particularist attachments and minoritarian communitarianism, for which Jews historically served as the figural template and which can include the Jewish “community” (Hammerschlag 2010, p. 18). This Jewish doubling is central in the debates about the “limits” of the right to minority identity in a plural, mobile, and supposedly cosmopolitan society. It also highlights how easily Jews can be moved in and out of racial whiteness and Europeanness.

6. Anti-Antisemitism: Haunting and Redemption

Prodi tethers his “Union of Diversity” directly to the memory of the Holocaust and the fight against antisemitism and “new forms of prejudice”. In his words,

The Shoah was the most horrendous crime ever committed on European soil. The immense suffering it caused has scarred the survivors and the Jewish people as a whole forever.

The horror of the Shoah and the terrible loss of life caused by the Second World War deeply marked Europe’s founding fathers too. They set out to make sure the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s could never return.

(Prodi 2004)

Prodi’s speech evokes a history of uprooting, exile, and murder. It serves as a reminder that supersession was not just a figural structure. Indeed, Ratskoff points out that “Christian hegemony gave Jews their distinction as the Other-to-be-superseded (theologically)”; “practically, supersession took the form of expulsion, assimilation and extermination” (Ratskoff 2020, p. 23). Prodi connects Jewish suffering and Jewish bodies, however, with world-historical transformation exemplified by European unification. In Prodi’s origin story of the EU, “The European idea was based on the firm determination to make sure the Europe of the future would be different—a Europe of peace, tolerance, and respect for human rights” (Prodi 2004).

Adam Sutcliffe has remarked that “The idea that the Jews, as God’s chosen people, are marked apart for a special world-historical purpose, connected in some way to the advent of the messianic age, is axiomatic to both Judaism and Christianity” (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 226). That may be true, except that in the Christian figural tradition (just as spirit conquers flesh and grace supersedes Law), Jews may prepare the ground, but Christians fulfill the promise. Prodi, borrowing from this figural and prophetic repertoire, enlists Jewish bodies in the renewal of European spirit: It inscribes Jews into the self-conceptualization of the European Union, there to certify the fulfillment of the promise of progressive history and universal Reason.

In that sense, Prodi’s speech carries the imprint of what Sutcliffe calls liberal “redemptive anti-antisemitism”. “Redemptive antisemitism”, as Saul Friedländer termed it, was a fundamental driving force of Nazi ideology, in which Aryan Germans would replace the eliminated Jewish “chosen people” as transforming agents of history and deliver a “quasi-millenarian” rebirth of civilization. Redemptive anti-antisemitism re-inverts the Nazi inversion but keeps the understanding of Jewish world-historical purpose (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 228). Fulfillment of the promise of the rebirth of the EU through the “sanctification of the lessons of the Holocaust”, however, hinges both on Europe’s distance from its past (incarnated now not by the ‘dead letter’ of Hebrew Law but by murdered Jews) and on Europe’s incorporation of the memory of that past as the highest form of emotional and civic responsibility. The discourse of European identity in which Jews are defined as paradigmatic Europeans in a Europe defined as “unity in diversity” is benchmarked by Europe’s progress towards “overcoming” antisemitism, in which antisemitism stands for, is exemplary of, the ultimate racism.

As Sutcliffe points out, the so-called “boom” in Holocaust consciousness in the late 1980s and 1990s occurred against the backdrop of the optimism accompanying the end of Cold War ideological rivalry, the signing of Maastricht treaties, the founding of the EU, and the prospect of an enduring, post-ideological global peace that would include the Middle East. The onset of the age of globalization called for a “new language of political and moral education to replace outdated ideological templates”. A global, cosmopolitan Holocaust memory transcending ethnic and national boundaries could not only become the foundation for a transnational common European culture based on shared values. It could also provide an “emotionally powerful framework for promoting the betterment of the world” and lay the cultural bedrock for a global human rights politics (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 222; Levy and Sznaider 2002; Sznaider 2013). Globalizing Holocaust memory would spark the birth of a cosmopolitan identity and would mark a theoretical departure from “universalism and its neglect of particular experiences”, instead combining appreciation of difference and diversity with the conceptualization of new democratic forms of political rule beyond the nation-state (Sznaider 2013, p. 62). For James Renton, the institutionalization of Holocaust memory since the late 1990s, rather than simply part of the construction of common EU political identity or the search for a basis of international political ethics, was “driven by the remaking of the liberal democratic state, and its new claim to universal sovereignty after the end of the Cold War”. The “liberal democratic–Holocaust memory nexus” was meant by European political elites to form the backbone of a “new unassailable universal philosophy of liberal democracy, one that transcended the differences between the plurality of liberal state formations” and aimed to “establish the liberal democratic state as universally sovereign, a global template” (Renton 2025, pp. 2–3).

Holocaust memory, then, is both Europe’s and liberal democracy’s debt owed to the ghostly inheritance of dead Jews, and its fulfillment: as Tony Judt has argued, Holocaust memory became the “very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity” and the recuperation of its international universal mission (Judt 2005, p. 804; Derrida 1994, p. 114). It also implies the fulfillment of the providential “gift” of Jews to the “nations” of the world and especially to the EU, which is subsequently sublated in Europe’s universal gift to the world in the form of liberal democracy, human rights and anti-racism. It ensures that the Enlightenment heritage of tolerance could be revitalized to usher in a future of fundamentally “post-racial” European societies and a global, cosmopolitan community (Hesse 2004, 2007; Sayyid 2010, p. 16). Elaborating on this, one could say that figuratively, “Europeanness” means an act of “emancipation” from nationalist and self-enclosed identities for which Jews have served as the archetype, and a conversion to a “de-territorialized” cosmopolitan European identity for which Jews, too, are the prototypical figure.

Europe needs the excitation of Jewish corpses to redeem itself as universalist, cosmopolitan, post-national and post-racial. This is the implication of the moral injunction of “Never Again”, which is both a conjuration and an exorcism. This double movement takes the form of what Derrida describes as “hauntology”. For Derrida, exorcism is an incantation that the dead man is “really dead” (Derrida 1994, p. 59). But the past is never truly past when it needs to be kept alive to ensure it does not return. Hauntology, then, denotes the temporal disjunction created when “the dead belief system of an irrepressible past returns as a ghost to haunt the present is another version”. For Mark Windsor, the play between old and new belief systems, of “older, rejected convictions” that had been “ostensibly overcome” (superseded) but return in the form of “traces” or “residues”, becomes manifest as a “diachronic uncertainty” (in Elsky 2025, p. 12).

“The primitive Jewish forefather [who] keeps returning to haunt the present” (and is summoned in Prodi’s text), then, is the unsettling “figure of the uncanny”, which, as Martin Elsky points out, always accompanies figuralism and its disjointed historical temporality (Elsky 2025, p. 12). Therefore, as Derrida points out, “conjuration that calls for the dead … is never free of anxiety… It is anxiety from the moment it calls upon death to … enliven the new, to summon the presence of what is not yet there…” (Derrida 1994, p. 135).

That anxiety emerges in Prodi’s speech:

Europe’s cultural and ethnic diversity is one of its strengths. And along with the Union’s founding values, our cultural diversity and multi-ethnic character can vaccinate us against fresh manifestations of anti-Semitism and new forms of prejudice.

I am also firmly convinced that an awareness of the past is crucial—crucial if we want to root out any signs of intolerance or rejection of diversity—in schools, at the workplace and in political life.

Let us be clear. We do hear expressions of anti-Semitic prejudice. We do see vestiges of the historical anti-Semitism that was once widespread in Europe.

We do see attacks against synagogues, desecration of Jewish cemeteries and physical assaults on Jews. That is why we are here today.

But let us be honest and keep things in perspective.

Today’s Europe has unreservedly condemned the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s and continues to condemn any fresh manifestations of anti-Semitism.

(Prodi 2004)

Antisemitism does indeed strike at the heart of the European project: it functions as the signpost of the “transcendence” of its fateful history and the resumption of its universalist mission to the world. The cosmopolitan promise of the redemptive framework of anti-antisemitism hinges not on “the disappearance of Jews as Jews, but on the disappearance of antisemitism” (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 227). In invoking the figure of the Jew as the forbear of Europeanness and tethering Europe’s promise to the redemptive structure of anti-antisemitism, Prodi structures European identity as an “inheritance”. Inheritance from the “spirits of the past” implies, always, a borrowing. Borrowed figures, and figurality itself as “the figure of borrowing”, as Derrida emphasizes, “speaks…” This is the troubling core of supersessionism. “An inheritance is always the affirmation of a debt. There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility” (Derrida 1994, p. 114).

As Sutcliffe points out, the key component of the utopian horizon of cosmopolitan Holocaust memory was the idea that it would present a gateway to the “overcoming of all hatreds and prejudices” (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 225). This idea has informed the moral pedagogy embedded in Holocaust education since the late 1980s. As an extreme case object lesson for the consequences of all stereotyping and racism, it would provide a “pedagogical inoculation” (or as Prodi calls it, “vaccination”) against future atrocities through the cultivation of empathy with Jewish victims (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 222).

Empathy is a so-called “second order” emotion that is central to what has been called a “sentimental social contract” where questions of social inequality and social value are adjudicated in the register not of power but of sincerity and caring. The 19th-century sentimental novel, often seen as the basis of the “liberal” narrative of compassion, prompted the reader to identify empathetically with a suffering character and persecuted victims, often from a different social or racial group. The reader response aimed for in this exercise of moral pedagogy was a spontaneous burst of feeling that leads to a change in heart and an expansion of the field of compassion and liberal tolerance. This burst of feeling is brought about by a key scene of personal suffering, trauma, and pain. Empathy is therefore what political philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls a “narrative emotion” which is structured around the narration of injury (Nussbaum 2001; Keene 2007). The narrative of redemptive anti-antisemitism adds another layer to the sentimental narrative of liberal compassion, this one borrowing from a messianic conception of history in which Jewish suffering and world historical transformation are deeply connected (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 223).

By the early 2000s, however, the consensus around drawing universal lessons of empathy from antisemitism and Jewish victimhood had collapsed along with the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada and a surge of hate speech, synagogue bombings, desecrations of Jewish cemeteries and acts of murderous antisemitism. As Palestinians and Israelis engaged in intense competition for international public sympathy, racial justice and anti-colonialism activists resorted to rhetorical analogies like Israel = apartheid/Zionism = racism (slogans which can be dated back to the Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda campaigns of the late 1960s and 1970s (Romeyn 2020; Lubin 2014)) to shift the perception of victim and perpetrator. One of the casualties was the idea of the redemptive universal morality of empathy, seen on the right as hijacked by progressive, radical identity politics and on the left as monopolized by exceptionalist Holocaust education and Jewish exemplary claims on pristine victimhood (Sutcliffe 2024, pp. 234–35). Testimonials of “true pain” and injury did not lead to liberal “tolerance” but to competitive victimhood and forms of identity politics that framed the ‘injury’ of historical exclusion as the (morally pristine) ground for a claim for recognition (Brown 1995, p. 75; Hammerschlag 2010, p. 22; Rothberg 2019).

In this context, the idea of a ‘new’ antisemitism (which can also be traced back to the late 1960s and 1970s) that was primarily anti-Zionist and targeted Israel as the “collective Jew” regained traction (Romeyn 2020, pp. 206–7). According to advocates of the concept, the new antisemitism was rife among pro-Palestinian critics of Israel and concealed itself behind the mask of reputable speech, such as universalist human rights discourse, hijacking the emotion of empathy in favor of Palestinians (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 234). Moreover, the idea that a new antisemitism was endemic among Muslim populations of the Middle East, North Africa, and Muslim migrants in Europe fit in with post 9/11 scenarios of religious war and a clash of civilizations that reshaped global alliances around narratives of securitization, anti-migrant sentiment, and anti-terrorism (Romeyn 2020, p. 208). As James Renton argues, the “systemic shock” of 9/11 “enmeshed Holocaust memory culture and the war on terror” and steered the liberal democratic–Holocaust memory nexus into “its absorption into the global surveillance order”, with antisemitism as the “central node” (Renton 2025, p. 4).

Prodi’s speech is indicative of the straddling act that the fight against antisemitism at the level of the EU provokes. On the one hand, redemptive anti antisemitism conceptualizes the Holocaust and antisemitism as an exceptional but paradigmatic form and expression of racism. On that level, the fight against antisemitism continues to be embedded in the redemptive universalist, egalitarian, pedagogical framework of human rights, tolerance and anti-racism. Prodi, however, resolutely assigns this (European) antisemitism to the past. As he emphasizes, the EU has firmly condemned “the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s”, and despite incidental “expressions of anti-Semitic prejudice” and “vestiges of historical anti-Semitism” it has redeemed itself: EU “founding values, our cultural diversity and multi-ethnic character” provide immunity against fresh manifestations of this prejudice. However, he continues,

There is also another context in which a form of anti-Semitism may develop and which feeds on the unresolved conflict in the Middle East.

In Europe we see this conflict fueling the social frustrations of new minorities established through immigration in many Member States of the Union.

Such frustrations imported into Europe do sometimes translate into anti-Semitic acts, in some countries more than in others. Such acts must be dealt with severely.

This type of anti-Semitism represents a new challenge for the Union.

After having reclaimed European innocence by credo, Prodi explains resurgent antisemitism primarily in terms that effectively externalize, tribalize, and racialize it (along with the populations that supposedly espouse it) through what Özyürek (2016) has called an “export-import” theory of antisemitism. In the last part of his speech, when he mentions a “new type of anti-Semitism”, Prodi aligns himself with the European Jewish Congress, which, alongside other Jewish NGOs and backed by the newly established Israeli Monitoring Forum on Antisemitism, had been pushing the EU Commission to adopt a standalone definition of antisemitism that would distinguish it from “other forms of racism” and recognize the existence of an anti-Zionist “new antisemitism”.

In his speech, Prodi is careful to distinguish between critique of policies of the Israeli state as a “legitimate expression of democratic dissent” and “criticism of Israel … inspired by what amounts to anti-Semitic sentiments and prejudice”. But if Nirenberg’s work makes one thing clear, it is that the slippage between “reality” (and “legitimate criticism of Jews”) and unacceptable antisemitic ideas “has proven very hard to detect for even the subtlest lovers of knowledge” (Nirenberg 2024). The framework of anti-antisemitism as a conditionality for a redeemed Europe and a cosmopolitan, liberal democratic world order, however, calls for an “eliminationist” approach to antisemitism (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 240). As Prodi concludes, [a]nti-Semitic acts must be dealt with severely and the rights of our minorities must be safeguarded. There is no place for anti-Semitism in a Union of diversity” (emphasis mine).

The key here is Prodi’s emphasis on “our minorities”. As Hannah Tzuberi and Nahed Samour have pointed out, “Dominant identification with the figure of the Jew has multiple effects on the project of political pluralization…. [A] polity that defines itself via a conversion from anti-Semitism to anti-anti-Semitism needs someone else to stand in for everything that … today [it] is not: someone has to be the illiberal, undemocratic, and anti-Semitic threat against which the good citizen can define herself as that which she is no longer” (Tzuberi and Samour 2022).

Redemptive anti antisemitism, then, articulates boundaries of belonging and policy challenges that, in the context of the post-9/11 securitization and even more so in the wake of October 7, are increasingly framed in terms of “combat”, as an “ultrapolitics” in which the distinction between belonging/non-belonging easily morphs into that of “friend/foe” (Žižek 1999, p. 225). In that sense, the movement of Jews from outsiders to insiders and “archetypes” of cosmopolitan Europe facilitates “the production of a new set of outsiders, immigrants from postcolonial contexts, the global South and above all from Muslim societies” (Bunzl 2007, in Levi and Rothberg 2020, p. 10).

The “cunning of recognition” (Elizabeth Povinelli cited by Franco 2020, p. 156) that operates in the figuration of the Jew as model minority for Prodi’s Union of Minorities constructs the moral, affective-political space of European belonging as well as its exclusions and exceptions. Jewishness, here, acts as the distribution of value: The implied comparison contained in Jews as “our” minority is “to other racial and minoritized groups who are regarded as a pathological problem” (Franco 2020, p. 146). In the context of liberal, cosmopolitan, post-racial Europe, this is embedded in a form of racial governmentality that invests in what Ann Stoler has described as a “distribution of sentiment” which targets the “emotional standards” (cultural competencies, moral virtues, and character) that policymakers consider the benchmarks of national membership and European belonging (Stoler 2007 p. 7). One key index that marks the limits of cultural belonging is the new antisemitism, which (according to its definers) is immutable and thus, unlike the European antisemitism of old, not amenable to pedagogical correction. A key sentiment that marks Muslim minorities as deficient, as Esra Özyürek has shown in her study of Holocaust pedagogy in Germany, is their supposed misdirected sense or lack of empathic identification with Jewish victims (Özyürek 2018).

One can observe the paradox of universalism and particularism in the fact that, in the umbrage of the EU’s universal values (a reworked version of Europe’s universal mission to educate the human race) lies what Balibar calls the “differentialist revolution”: “the need to differentiate and rank individuals or groups in terms of their greater or lesser aptitude for—or resistance to assimilation”, under the pretext of protecting European culture and the European way of life. And behind this distribution of value, which recalls colonial distinctions between “‘closed’ and ‘open’, ‘static’ and ‘enterprising’, ‘cold’ and ‘hot’, ‘gregarious’ and ‘individualistic’ societies”, lies a variation of “the idea that the historical cultures of humanity can be divided into two main groups, the one assumed to be universalistic and progressive, the other supposed irremediably particularistic and primitive”, an idea key to Christian figuralism (Balibar 1991a, p. 24).

We are back at square one, with a figural grammar originally conceived through metonymies of Jewishness and Christianity, and binary oppositions between “Jewish” materialism and “Christian” spirituality, flesh and spirit, law and grace, closed and open, materialism and idealism, religion and secularism, intolerance and tolerance, particularism and universalism. The belief in anti-antisemitism’s “immaculate virtue”, baseline of a “post-ideological Euro-American moral consensus” and “constructed on deep Judaeo-Christian foundations of religious messianism and political hope” complicates critical reflection on the ways in which “anti-antisemitism is often separated from, and pitted against other strands of anti-racism” (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 237). As Balibar puts it, “the identification of racism with anti-Semitism—and particularly with Nazism—functions as an alibi: it enables the racist character of the ‘xenophobia’ directed against immigrants to be denied” (Balibar 1991b, p. 43). This, Sutcliffe adds, further blocks the recognition of the global legacy of slavery and colonialism (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 237). The erasure of the race–religion nexus in the discourses of antisemitism and anti-antisemitism does the same (Jansen and Meer 2020; Topolski 2020).

Most important perhaps is the lack of critical awareness of the influence of Judaizing tropes in the history of critical thought across the political spectrum, and a deep gap in understanding of the ways in which (anti) Judaizing figures continue to shape not only the contours of contemporary debates (about EU identity, migration, Jews and antisemitism) but the very concepts through which “social reality” is perceived and naturalized as “common sense”. As Nirenberg points out, “Because critical thought in the Western tradition has so often imagined itself as an overcoming of Judaism, it has the capacity to introduce Judaism in whatever it criticizes” (Nirenberg 2024).

7. Judaizing Figures and the Field of Contemporary Politics

This article argues that the discourse about antisemitism, migrants, minorities, and national and EU identity and belonging is informed by figurations of Jews and Judaism, whose genealogy is mostly unacknowledged. What is strategically at stake in this is the role played by this figurative grammar in the constitution of a projected field of politics. I will conclude by giving a brief synopsis of some of these political developments.

In response to the pressure to deal decisively with the resurgence of antisemitism, in 2005 the EUMC drafted a (not widely circulated) working definition of antisemitism, which it withdrew in 2012 because it feared it could be politically weaponized. That draft was picked up almost verbatim by the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) and has since been adopted by the EU and many governments and universities in Europe and the United States. IHRA’s (non-legally binding) “working definition” of antisemitism (also called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism) has been widely critiqued for its elastic definition of antisemitism, which identifies a broad “range of critical speech on Israel as potentially antisemitic” (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 239). The adoption and institutionalization of the IHRA definition occur in conjunction with the (increasingly religious and evangelical) signification of the new antisemitism as the ultimate evil. The exceptionalization of antisemitism (in its linkage to the Muslim “threat”, terrorism and the assault on the liberal democratic state) and its detachment from a broader antiracism and antidiscrimination platform opens the door for carving out states of exception within liberal democracies, and for illiberal democracy. Not surprisingly, the exceptionalization of antisemitism is linked to the far-right assault on human rights and anti-racism, as well as on the emotion of empathy, which is increasingly framed by far-right influencers as a toxic and “suicidal” emotion and a security threat (Saad 2026). This weaponization of anti-antisemitism, as George Prochnik argues, has opened more space for the implementation of autocratic, repressive agendas, the stifling of dissent and free speech, and the discrediting of universal human rights (Prochnik et al. 2023).

In the twenty years since Prodi’s speech, everywhere in Europe (and globally), Far Right talking points that were long considered taboo have been mainstreamed. In shifting its rhetoric from “racist ethnophobia” to “cultural ethnophilia”, the extreme right inverted the inclusionary agenda of the multicultural “right to difference” into a defense of ethnic differentialism, an exclusionary “multiculturalism of the right” which aims to preserve the “authentic” regions of Europe against the so-called onslaught of non-European immigrants and refugees and the “cosmopolitan” agenda of a technocratic European Union (Taguieff 1993; Holmes 2000; Spektorowski 2000; Bessis 2026). In this, the Far Right has borrowed from multicultural identity politics and the framework of “states of injury” (Brown 1995) to build a mythology of white victimhood. As Pierre-André Taguieff has noted, the “’ right to difference’ changed from being a means of defending oppressed minorities and their ‘cultural rights’ into an instrument for legitimating the most extreme appeals for the self-defense of ‘threatened’ national (and/or European) identities”. Indeed, Alain De Benoist, founding member of the Nouvelle Droite, has drawn explicit parallels between genocide incited by racist extremism and the current “slow ethnocide” by so-called anti-racists (Taguieff 1993, p. 125). The strategic co-optation of redemptive anti antisemitism alongside radical anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric has given traditionally antisemitic extreme right parties in Europe the veneer of legitimacy they have sought to regain since WWII (Sutcliffe 2024). The accusation of Muslim antisemitism functions as the ultimate marker of Muslim migrants’ and minorities’ national and European unbelonging. Hungary’s Viktor Orban justified his extreme anti-refugee stance by referring to alleged Syrian antisemitism. In the Netherlands, the populist extreme right Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders relentlessly ties Dutch Muslims to antisemitism to justify its extreme anti-migration stance and its support for the wholesale “repatriation” of Dutch Muslims (Romeyn 2014).

In that vein, the Far Right’s racially exclusivist, nativist identitarian framework takes Jewish particularism as a figural “model” against the universalizing framework of Christian humanism and the Enlightenment. This contributes to the convivial relations that the Far Right has established with the neo–Zionist right in Israel (considered by the Far Right to be the “most revolutionary ethno-state”) and elsewhere (Sutcliffe 2024, p. 237; Rosenberg 2017; Romeyn 2020). Indeed, the strategic decoupling of attitudes towards Israel from antisemitism against diaspora Jews indicates, as Subotic (2022, p. 470) points out, that anti-antisemitism is shaping the formation of new international alliances.

This has led to claims that Muslims in Europe are the “new Jews”. In this counterclaim against the new antisemitism, it is Islamophobia that is the new antisemitism. Rather than taking these claims at face value, Dean Franco has commented on the “prolific” use of the term “the New Jews” to “describe the experience of some racial, ethnic, or religious minority that either finds itself under siege or is emerging from a racial ghetto whose example affirms the liberal state” (Franco 2020, p. 144). As Franco perceptively points out, the concept “new Jews” implies “a racial continuum, with elimination at one end and full incorporation at the other”. It speaks to discursive and figurative formations of Jewishness that have nothing to do with actual Jews but instead are indicative of state power and its racial governmentalities (Franco 2020, pp. 145, 156). It highlights the double-sidedness of Jewishness, “either destined to be homo sacer or late liberalism’s object lesson”. This ambiguity, which has been the focus of my essay, also explains what Franco refers to as “the simultaneity of anti-Semitism and seeming philo-Semitism” so characteristic of the contemporary era, especially on the Extreme Right (Franco 2020, pp. 145, 147).

As Cesarini (2008) and Rensmann (2011) argue, Jews are “the new Jews”. The argument that anti-antisemitism has been weaponized does not imply that claims about rising antisemitism, especially after 7 October 2023, are exaggerated. Hate crimes and violent attacks against Jews, Jewish institutions, and synagogues continue to exceed those against all other minorities. Racist prejudices against both Muslims and Jews have seen a dramatic rise, and the correlation between holding unfavorable opinions of both groups is remarkably high (FRA 2024, 2026; PEW Global Attitudes Project 2008; Diamant 2018; Rensmann 2011, p. 560; Rensmann 2021, p. 309). Moreover, while overt antisemitism may have become largely taboo in mainstream public discourse, this does not apply to coded forms and figures of Jewishness and anti-Jewish stereotypes, including the Jew as “cosmopolitan” that Prodi himself borrows from.

There are, then, definite reasons to singularize antisemitism. As Lars Rensmann argues, building on an argument made by Zygmunt Bauman and before that by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Antisemitism has generalizable dimensions, which are similar to other forms of racial discrimination, and specific dimensions: antisemitism is a conspiracy theory and, ultimately, a world explanation that, among other things, personifies problems of the modern world with Jews and explains these problems by pointing to Jewish machinations” (Rensmann 2011, p. 546). But doing so should entail placing antisemitism within the genealogy of (anti) Judaizing tropes and “Jewish Questions” I have examined in this article and be wary of the instrumentalization of anti-antisemitism for the purpose of excluding other minorities, the curtailment of free speech, the legitimation of states of exception and the rehabilitation of the far right.

For European and transnational populist movements on the right and the left, antisemitism continues to function as a key ingredient of a vernacular critique of globalization, liberal values and global political norms and institutions. Here, the trope of the cosmopolitan Jew is updated (and often coded as “Zionist”) to explain global modernity and its crises, including American and Zionist imperialism, the global financial system, global capitalism, the global erosion of the nation-state, and mass migration (Rensmann 2011, p. 565; Subotic 2022). The “Great Replacement Theory”, one of the most powerful white nationalist and racist political discourses in the US and Europe, actively promotes the idea that conspiratorial Jewish powers (headed by George Soros and aided by corrupt liberal national and supranational governments “soft” on border enforcement and migration) are replacing “indigenous” white Christian majorities with non-White or non-Christian (especially Muslim) immigrants, and plotting “white genocide”. In another example of the ambivalent doubleness of figurations of Jews, in this scenario “Jews” exemplify both global rootless cosmopolitans undermining national identities and the “archetypal minority” exemplary of (white) minoritized identities under attack and threatened with extermination. One of Hungary’s cultural commissioners went so far as to describe George Soros (a Hungarian-born Jew and Holocaust survivor who, inspired by Karl Popper’s vision of an “open society”, has spent the last 40 years investing in liberal and progressive causes around the world) as a “liberal Führer” and Hungary and Poland as “the new Jews”. “Poisonous gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life, and we, the nations of Europe, are doomed to try to fight for the last sip of air by climbing on each other,” he wrote in 2020 (Subotic 2022, p. 466; Kalmar 2018; RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service 2020; Zonszein 2017).

At the January 2026 International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, the pastor of Charlie Kirk accepted an honorary award in his memory. In his speech, he blamed DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and critical race theory not only for undermining Western civilization, but also for the antisemitism of embittered young white heterosexual men feeling “replaced” and at the “bottom of the totem pole” of diversity, equity and inclusion. Amichai Chikli—Minister of Diaspora Affairs of Israel—stated that Canada, France, the UK, and the Netherlands had “become unrecognizable” because of migration. He pointed to Orban’s Hungary, with its strict migration laws, as an example of a safe place for Jews (CBN News 2026). In the late 19th century, the liberal political order was attacked by its conservative opponents as Jewish (Nirenberg 2013, p. 440). There is a profound irony in the fact that, at the January 2026 Combating Antisemitism conference, U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz declared the entire Democratic Party antisemitic (CBN News 2026).

8. Conclusions

This article aspires to broaden the scope of scholarly and public reflection on the genealogy and continued circulation of figures of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism in contemporary political debates about European identity, migration, minority belonging, and antisemitism. It builds on the framework of investigations of the race–religion nexus by borrowing from David Nirenberg’s call to use the framework of “anti-Judaism” as a critical tool to investigate what one might call Jewish questions in contemporary European society, especially the relationship between particularism and universalism, and between majority cultures, Jews, migrants and other minorities. It argues that the reductive understanding of antisemitism (conventionally tied to the genocidal antisemitism of the Nazi era) detaches the phenomenon of antisemitism from the “deep time” of figurations and tropes of Jews and Jewishness. It identifies these Judaizing figures of thought in a manifesto by Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, in February 2004, which articulates the centrality of Jews and anti-antisemitism for the project of the “New Europe”, and ties this centrality to the contemporary debate over migration and belonging.

Beyond their implication for Jewish subjects, the article argues that (conditional) inclusion of Jews within the moral affective political space of a redeemed post-Holocaust, “post-racial” European order hinges on filiations, supersessions, displacements and substitutions of Jews, replaying the Jewish question which was always about the limits of minority belonging. The analysis therefore focuses on how the text creates Old Jews and New Jews and traces these displacements and substitutions, and their implications especially where it concerns the employment of Jewishness in the articulation of a “redeemed” European identity, the governmentality of the racial state and its construction of racial whiteness, and the distribution of value(s) marking the limits of minority belonging, particularly of migrant and Muslim populations. In addition, the ambivalent doubleness of figures of Jewishness accounts for the seemingly paradoxical combination of antisemitism and (supposed) philosemitism that characterizes the politics of the contemporary populist far right. The instrumentalization of anti-antisemitism by the far right not only serves its pursuit of political legitimacy and its authoritarian agenda. It also masks its political antisemitism, which exploits current European and globalization crises by revamping paranoid (anti) Judaizing tropes and cultivating a hostility towards Jews that, as Rensmann remarks, is in lockstep with, and complements, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim resentments (Rensmann 2011, p. 567).