The Oldest Hatred, Rising Again

Something is happening in the world that deserves more than a headline.

In 2025, violent antisemitic attacks killed the highest number of Jews in over 30 years. Twenty people were murdered in four separate attacks across three continents, including a Hanukkah attack in Sydney, Australia, that killed 15 members of the Jewish community in a single night. According to Tel Aviv University’s Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2025, published in April 2026, the total number of antisemitic incidents in every Western country remains significantly higher than in 2022, the year before the Gaza war began.

This follows what the World Zionist Organization called a peak year in 2024, when global antisemitic incidents surged 340% compared to 2022. In France, incidents had risen over 1,000% in the three months after October 7, 2023. In the Netherlands, 818% in a single month. In the UK, nearly sixfold.

The trigger was Hamas’s massacre of over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. But what followed was not simply a reaction to a war. It was the release of something that was already there.

Raheli Baratz, head of the Department for Combating Antisemitism at the World Zionist Organization, put it plainly:

“The 340% increase in antisemitic incidents poses a real threat to the foundations of Western democracy, where the new antisemitic discourse erodes the fundamental values of democratic society and creates cracks in the wall of pluralism and tolerance.”

This Has Happened Before

Anyone who knows history will recognize the pattern. Jewish communities have faced expulsion, massacre, and scapegoating across thousands of years and dozens of nations. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in the years 500 to 1500, Jews as a religious and cultural minority were consistently preyed upon across Europe. From massacres such as York in 1190 to ethnic cleansing through expulsions from England in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492, no generation passed without a pogrom. The 20th century industrialized the hatred into genocide. Six million dead.

What is remarkable is not just the violence but the consistency. The accusations change. Jews as Christ-killers, then as well-poisoners, then as Bolsheviks, then as capitalists, now as colonialists. But the targeting never stops. Every few generations, in a different country, under a different ideology, the same people become the enemy.

Today the ideological driver has shifted again. In 2024, far-left ideology accounted for 68.4% of all documented antisemitic incidents globally, driven by radicalized social movements and anti-Israel activism. The hatred has found new clothing, but the body underneath is familiar.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

There is no single secular explanation that fully accounts for it. Political scientists point to scapegoating during crisis periods. Historians trace it to religious and racial ideologies. Psychologists describe in-group and out-group dynamics. These frameworks are useful, but none of them explains why the same people, across every era and culture, attract the same irrational, murderous hostility.

From a Christian perspective, the answer reaches deeper. God made an unconditional covenant with Abraham and his descendants. “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse” (Genesis 12:3). That covenant was never revoked. Paul writes in Romans 11:29 that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” The Jewish people remain central to God’s purposes in history, which makes them a target in a conflict that goes beyond politics.

The hatred of the Jewish people is not merely human. It has a spiritual dimension. Throughout history, every attempt to destroy the Jewish people has ultimately failed. Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Rome, Nazi Germany. The people remain. That survival is itself a testimony.

What It Means Now

The current wave is significant not only in scale but in where it is coming from. Universities, city streets, and Western democracies that rebuilt themselves on the memory of the Holocaust are now hosting chants calling for the elimination of the Jewish state. Jewish students are hiding their identity on campuses. Synagogues are being defaced and burned. And as the CNN report on the 2025 data noted, in some cities the end of the Gaza ceasefire was followed not by relief but by an increase in antisemitic incidents.

This is not only a Jewish problem. It is a moral test for every society in which it is occurring, and a spiritual signal for those paying attention. Jesus himself said that his followers would be hated by all nations (Matthew 24:9). He also wept over Jerusalem. The city, the people, and the land are not incidental to the story of redemption. They are woven through it.

Christians who take Scripture seriously cannot be indifferent to what is happening to the Jewish people. We are grafted into their story (Romans 11:17). Their God is our God. Their Scriptures are our Scriptures. The man we call Savior was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died in Jerusalem.

Where This Leads

History does not repeat perfectly, but it rhymes. The last time the world saw antisemitism at this scale, it ended in Auschwitz. That is not a prediction. It is a warning about what happens when hatred is normalized in stages, when each escalation is tolerated until the next one becomes thinkable.

For Christians, the response is not panic. It is clarity. Stand with the Jewish people not out of politics, but out of conviction. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6). Refuse the replacement theology that has fueled so much historic Christian complicity in Jewish suffering. And pay attention, because what is happening now has been written about for a long time.

Sources

Tel Aviv University — Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2025, April 2026

CNN — Antisemitic Violence Worldwide in 2025 Killed Highest Number of Jews in 30 Years, April 2026

World Zionist Organization / Jewish Agency — 2024 Annual Report on Global Antisemitism, January 2025

Combat Antisemitism Movement — Global Antisemitism Incidents Rise 107.7% in 2024, April 2025

Anti-Defamation League — Top 5 Global Antisemitic Trends Since October 7, November 2024

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Christian Persecution of Jews over the Centuries