The Longest Hatred

Antisemitism has often been called the world's oldest hatred, but how has a single prejudice survived across two millennia?

From the cultural clashes of the Greco-Roman world to early Christian theological disputes, anti-Jewish hostility began not merely as local friction, but as an enduring ideological framework. Over centuries, these ancient grievances transformed into deadly medieval blood libels, inquisitorial purity laws, and catastrophic crusade massacres. With the dawn of the modern era, religious hatred evolved once again-mutating into nineteenth-century racial pseudo-science, state-sanctioned pogroms, and the industrialized terror of the Holocaust.

In The Longest Hatred, historian Raphael Afilalo delivers a sweeping, meticulously researched analysis of how anti-Jewish hostility adapts to shifting cultural, political, and economic landscapes. Tracing its path through Soviet purges, Middle Eastern conflicts, and into the algorithmic echo chambers of today, this vital work exposes the recurring myths that continue to surface across the globe.

Essential, sobering, and profoundly insightful, this book offers an indispensable guide to understanding the mechanics of prejudice and the urgent necessity of confronting it in our modern world.