By David Nataf, International Election Observer in Asia and Vice-President of B'nai B'rith Portugal

In psychoanalytic theory, the figure of the Other is never simply the neighbour or the stranger. It is the locus of language, law, and desire, but also the site of a fundamental lack. The petit autre - the semblable, the one who resembles me yet is not me - functions as a mirror and a rival. This uncanny proximity generates the most violent effects. Nowhere is this mechanism more brutally revealed than in antisemitism, a hatred that is not merely racist but ontological: a jealousy directed at what the Jewish people embody as a sur - être (a surplus of being).

Importantly, this Jewish sur - être does not imply any hierarchical or racial superiority over other peoples. It designates a specific ontological position: a direct, unmediated relation “en - soi” with the Eternal - the God of the Covenant - without any human, institutional, church, or idolatrous intermediary. The Alliance and the Law create a fullness of being that the antisemite experiences as intolerable. The Jew becomes the semblable who is not me: too close, too full, too sovereign in his relation to the divine. From this surplus arises the passion of hatred.

The Narcissism of Minor Differences and the Chosen People

Sigmund Freud located the deepest roots of antisemitism in the “narcissism of minor differences.” Groups maintain cohesion by exaggerating tiny distinctions from their closest neighbours; the more alike two peoples are, the more ferociously they hate one another. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud suggested that the Jewish claim to be the “chosen people” provokes envy. The monotheistic revolution - abstract God, ethical Law, circumcision as real mark of the covenant - created a people who possessed an unmediated relation to the Father. Christianity never fully digested this priority. The Jew became the eternal elder brother who kept the original privilege. Antisemitism is the resentment of those who feel disinherited.

The Nazi biologisation of this hatred (Judenrass, “Antisemitismus” a German neologism by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 in a scientific attempt to define the hatred of the jews) translated the theological drama into racial science. The Jew was accused of racial impurity, a parasite threatening the Aryan body. The mechanism remained identical: hatred of the Other who is too close, too full, too en - soi.

Lacan: Jouissance and the Rejection of the Other’s Surplus

Jacques Lacan placed jouissance at the centre. Racism rejects the Other’s jouissance; the subject cannot bear that the Other enjoys in a way that escapes him. Antisemitism is paradigmatic because the Jew embodies the exception to the universal. Through the Law and the Name - of - the - Father (the Father metaphor), the Jewish people occupy a position of surplus within the symbolic order. Circumcision inscribes the subject in the covenant without mediation. The Jew appears to the antisemite as the one who has “something in excess” - an object that resists assimilation. Lacan’s formula for racism finds its purest expression here: the Other is supposed to enjoy in a way I cannot. This is why the semblable who is not me becomes lethal. The Jew is the brother who kept the treasure the others renounced. Hatred attempts to tear out that surplus.

Sartre: Bad Faith and the En - Soi of Antisemitic Existence

Jean - Paul Sartre’s Anti - Semite and Jew (1946) provides the existential complement. The antisemite chooses bad faith to escape the anguish of freedom. He wants to be pure en - soi - a fixed essence - rather than the pour - soi condemned to lack. To achieve this, he creates the Jew as the absolute Other: mobility, intellect, rootlessness, refusal of soil and blood. In hating the Jew, the antisemite petrifies himself into a racial en - soi. Antisemitism is a total choice of being: hatred as ontological security. The Jewish sur - être - the direct relation to the divine Law - exposes the antisemite’s own void. The Jew’s existence is intolerable because it reveals that the en - soi the antisemite craves is already realised elsewhere.

The Christian Unconscious: Only the Suffering Jew Can Be Adored

Christianity resolves this ontological tension in a singular way. In the Christian imagination, the only Jew worthy of adoration is the suffering Jew nailed to the cross: Jesus Christ. Only when the Jew bleeds, marked by ultimate Passion, sacrifice, and love, does he become an object of veneration - the bleeding Jew signed with the sign of passion and adoration.
In all other cases, when the Jew refuses this sacrificial position and continues to exist in his living, direct sur-être with the Eternal, he is cast as guilty of every evil. He becomes the deicide people - the murderers of God - and, by symbolic extension, the authors of regicide. The inscription on the cross - “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” - fuses deicide and regicide: the killing of the Son is also the killing of the King of the Jews. The living Jew, who maintains an unmediated relation to the divine without passing through the Cross, is intolerable. He must be punished, expelled, or exterminated.

The Extreme Jouissance of the Portuguese Persecution

Destroying the Sur - Être from Within In medieval and early modern Portugal, the extreme jouissance of the Inquisition found one of its most perverse expressions in accusations of crypto - Judaism against New Christians. Denunciations by close family members - sometimes the accused’s own children or in - laws - were motivated by the desire to seize lands and property. Once arrested, the victim’s assets were immediately sequestered, his children deported in São Tomé. Many prisoners, subjected to prolonged isolation, interrogation, and torture in the secret dungeons, lost their sanity and died mad in prison, without a final sentence.

This was not an anomaly but a structural feature. The Inquisition turned the intimate circle of the semblable (family) into the instrument of destruction of the Jewish sur - être. The living Jew - or the one suspected of remaining secretly faithful to the Covenant - had to be broken, his goods confiscated, his mind shattered. Only the suffering, confessing, or dead Jew could be tolerated. The accusation “he remained a Jew in secret” became the perfect weapon combining ontological jealousy and material greed.

From Antisemitism to Anti - Zionism: Hatred of the Jew as Nation

Contemporary anti - Zionism displaces the structure onto the Jew as a nation. It targets the collective embodiment of Jewish sur - être in sovereign form on ancestral land.
Johann Gottfried Herder conceived the nation as Volk - an organic cultural entity animated by its Volksgeist, bound by shared language, culture, history, and character forged by its environment. Ernest Renan defined a nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle”: the possession of a rich legacy of memories and the present - day consent - the daily plebiscite - to live together.

Zionism fulfils both: it revives Hebrew language and culture (Herder), draws on shared memory of Exodus, Torah, and persecution (Renan), and expresses the collective will to live together on the promised land. Yet anti - Zionism denies this right to the Jewish people.
Here lies the paradox: the only nation in the world refused the right to constitute itself as a nation on its historic land is the very people who invented the biblical and covenantal model of nationhood. Through the Torah, a band of slaves exiting Egypt becomes a people under divine Law, marching toward “a land flowing with milk and honey.” The Jewish people gave the world the archetype of a nation forged by Law, memory, and land. In anti - Zionism, this invention is turned against them: the Jew may be a religion or a culture, but never a
sovereign nation en - soi on its own soil. The semblable who is not me must remain forever rootless, forever guilty. He has the right to suffer and die an errant jew.

In the night recounted in the Book of Genesis, Jacob wrestles with the angel at the ford of the Jabbok. This founding scene - where Jacob becomes Israel - is not merely a struggle; it is a demand. “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Wounded, limping, he still holds on. He compels even the angel - fallen if need be - to yield a blessing that does not arise from force, but from an irreducible insistence on remaining in relation, on being recognized, on being loved.

Perhaps this is the secret that runs through this entire history: even in a mortal struggle against evil, the Jew does not relinquish this paradoxical demand - not merely to survive, but to be recognized in his verticality, in his amida before God and isn't that the reason why he is called “yashar - El”? To stand upright, wounded yet standing, between earth and heaven, without mediation, in a fidelity that both exposes and unsettles.

And if one day a new Jerusalem rises elsewhere - on Mars, in space - born of human labor, where Jews, Druze, Bedouins, Muslims and Christians choose to live together in a city of heaven forged by their own hands, the scene will not disappear. It will be displaced. For there will always be, somewhere, an AI powered robot at a bar leaning in to whisper, adjusting its language to its listener: “From the river to the sea, from the rings of Saturn to the Galaxy… Palestine will be free.”

Yet the most widely read “analysis” of antisemitism today is not a complex article like this one. It is a short, viral joke that has been shared hundreds of thousands of times this week:
A man enters a luxury restaurant and is greeted by a perfectly dressed robot waitress. “I’m sorry, sir, all tables are occupied; you’ll have to wait half an hour. But the house offers you a drink at the bar, and we can chat to make the wait pleasant.” The client agrees. The robot asks: “Would you mind telling me your IQ? It’s to know what to talk about.” The man says: “160.” For half an hour, the robot discusses cultural events, the global economy, market trends, and the latest scientific advances with ease and charm. Impressed, the client returns and claims his IQ is 90. The robot talks only about Football, TV gossip, show business, and trending TikTok videos. Curious, he returns a third time and says his IQ is only 40. The robot leans close to his ear and whispers conspiratorially...

“It’s all the fault of the Zionist plot… it’s the Jews who control the media and the world economy. Free Palestine!”

Complex psychoanalytic and philosophical analyses reach only a handful of readers. But the raw, conspiratorial antisemitism circulates virally, adapting its language to the listener’s level while always returning to the same obsession: the Jew as the cause of all ills, the surplus that must be denounced.

Psychoanalysis does not promise to abolish alterity. Its ethical task is to make it liveable - to recognise that the sembler who is not me, in his unmediated sur - être with the Eternal and in his right to nationhood, is the condition of our own humanity. Until then, the struggle continues - not to achieve a final victory, but to wrest, again and again, a blessing from history itself, and to sustain, against all odds, that impossible and necessary position: to remain standing, and to continue, nevertheless, to ask to be recognized.