Did the Nazis Bring Antisemitism to the Islamic World?

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The far-left Anti-Defamation League has warned in recent years of a rise in Jew-hatred, and for once it was quite right: after October 7, that hatred broke out into the open. Yet the ADL itself has concentrated overwhelmingly on antisemitism that has emanated from right-wingers, many of whom identify themselves as Christians. It has largely ignored the rise in Islamic and leftist Jew-hatred. In fact, in the case of Islamic antisemitism, there are widespread denials that it even exists or is an integral aspect of the Islamic faith.

At a November 2023 panel at George Washington University, “Antisemitism in the Middle East: Unpacking the Root Causes and Implications for Regional Stability,” Evin Ismail, a senior lecturer in political science at the Swedish Defense University, announced confidently that “I view Islamism as a politicization of Islam. And Islam is understood as a spiritual faith. To make this distinction clear, many scholars have stated that the Quran is not antisemitic. However, Islamists have developed an Islamist antisemitism where they claim that Muslims are in a permanent war with Jews.”

Ismail claimed not only that the Qur’an was not antisemitic, but that the introduction of antisemitism into Islam transformed the hitherto presumably peaceful religion into its politicized and bastardized form, “Islamism”: “My main argument is antisemitism is an integral part of Islamism, antisemitism as in the ideology that politicizes Islam and not the religion itself, was born out of antisemitism and still depends on it for its survival. Here the Muslim Brotherhood plays a key role as the first Islamist movement.” The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, so in Ismail’s view, we should see no antisemitism in the Islamic world before that date.

The German historian Matthias Küntzel, who was also on this panel, agreed, although he appeared to place the introduction of antisemitism into the Islamic world nine years later: “The Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, this ecstatic killing, proved that Nazi-like antisemitism flourished still today. And it proves that we have to find out how this Nazi-like hatred of Jews reached the Arab world and Hamas. Islamic antisemitism, it was only from the year 1937 onwards that Berlin began massively to intervene in the Middle East conflict. It wanted to prevent the establishment of even a tiny Jewish state.”

According to George Washington University’s GWToday, Küntzel claimed that initially, “the Nazis had difficulties spreading their propaganda in the Middle East because Muslims were not ready to accept the racist antisemitism. Nazi propaganda then sought to embed antisemitism into the consciousness of the Arab world through the use of tailored antisemitic interpretations of Islam and the Quran.”

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor of CyberWell then noted that “traditional media was hijacked by the Nazis in the Middle East to popularize this idea of antisemitism or antisemitism that’s rooted in Islam, through radio and traditional media.”

This was just one panel, but it was representative of a tendency.

Largely unexplained and unexamined in this theory, however, is why National Socialist anti-Jewish literature and other modern forms of antisemitism found such an eagerly receptive audience in the Islamic world. The scholars who have formulated and propagated these fashionable theories don’t seem to consider the possibility that many Muslims were perfectly capable of seeing world events through the prism of Qur’anic passages that excoriated the Jews; in fact, the core Islamic idea that the Qur’an is the perfect book that is valid for all times and in all places essentially requires them to do this.

Consequently, the idea that Muslims were largely indifferent to the Qur’an’s anti-Jewish material and were not imbibing modern charges against the Jews until the National Socialists or Christians brought these “tropes” to them is based on a shallow and inadequate understanding of the role of the Qur’an in Islamic theology and how it is understood to apply in the life of individual Muslims.

Many of these scholars are also attempting to prevent the image of Islam from being sullied by association with National Socialist Jew-hatred. Those Muslims who were receptive to Amin al-Husseini’s appeals were falling for “tailored antisemitic interpretations of Islam and the Quran.” The Qur’an, as Evin Ismail said, was “not antisemitic.” Only when Islam was twisted into “Islamism” did it become so.

Anyone who reads the Qur’an, however, knows this isn’t the case. The Jews in the Qur’an are called the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); they fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they claim that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies (5:41); they disobey Allah and never observe his commands (5:13). They are disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. They are under Allah’s curse (9:30), and Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them under Islamic hegemony (9:29).

The Nazis didn’t have anything new to say to the people who read and revered this book.