Modern antisemitism built on old Jewish stereotypes and tropes, royal commission told

Old tropes about Jewish people – such as those found in the fraudulent and debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion – have morphed and been melded into modern-day antisemitism, the royal commission has heard.

On Thursday morning, the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion heard from Dr Dave Rich, the Community Security Trust’s policy director.

Most of the hearings at the commission, set up in the wake of the Bondi terror attack, have focused on people’s lived experiences of antisemitism.

Thursday’s hearing was about how antisemitism developed, and how it should be defined.

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Rich described antisemitism as “prejudice, discrimination, hostility or hatred towards Jewish people, Jewish organisations, Jewish institutions, or people perceived to be Jewish” that can manifest in both violent and non-violent ways.

“Broadly speaking, it’s built on a set of negative stereotypes, attitudes and tropes about Jews,” he said.

Governments must define antisemitism in order to develop policies against it, he said, while acknowledging there would always be “edge cases”, where there are good faith disagreements on whether something is antisemitic.

He talked about the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is used by many groups, including in Australia, and has been criticised for seeming to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

He said it’s a “practical tool” to identify antisemitism and people shouldn’t get hung up on it as a “definition”.

Its imprecision is its strength, he said, and people on both sides misread and over-interpret it.

In other cases, Rich said, antisemitism is very often a “shadow form of legitimate discussion”, and that sometimes “we have to tread delicately in teasing them apart”.

“It’s a very emotive debate,” he said.

“People have very strong feelings which are often very linked to their personal identity.

“I think it is only right that when a complaint is made and an investigator comes to that complaint, all these things are taken into account … rather than just branding someone an antisemite because they used a particular word or a particular phrase.”

Rich, who has written an expert report on antisemitism, took commissioner Virginia Bell through the long history of antisemitism, and how those tropes developed and persist.