In incidents six months apart to the day, White supremacist shooters walked into American synagogues with the sole purpose of killing Jews. It seems that lethal anti-Semitism has returned. But in reality, it never went away. It’s simply been dormant, like an ancient pathogen that reawakens when the environment once again becomes hospitable to it.

Judging from what I’ve read, and from the conversations that I’ve had with students, friends, and colleagues, many Americans think that the synagogue shootings were motivated by religious hatred, just as many believe that the Nazis persecuted Jews because their Jewish faith. This is seriously and troublingly wrong. To the Nazis of the past, as well as the neo-Nazis of the present, a person is a Jew because of their race. During the Third Reich, you didn’t have to practice the Jewish religion to end up in the ovens of Treblinka. And conversion to Christianity or to atheism didn’t make you any less Jewish. Race was all that mattered.

As historian Michael Berkowitz observes in his book The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality:  

The crackpot notion that Jews are a distinct race and that Germans are a pure Aryan race colored almost every facet of the Nazi state and all it held in its grasp. Once in power, the Nazis expended copious amounts of time and energy subduing and annihilating those they deemed a racial menace. Racism was clearly central to the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust.

The racialization of Jews didn’t begin with the Nazis. It stretches back at least to 15^th century Spain, and probably much further. The idea that Jewish “blood” can contaminate the purity of the White race has been around in the US for quite a while too, as is evidenced by the American eugenicist Madison Grant’s 1916 remark that, “Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type…. the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

Americans have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that anti-Semitism is racism because they so often equate race with skin color. It’s a view that’s demonstrated time and again when people describe a person’s race as “the color of their skin.” This is a profoundly misleading way to think of race, because race is a political category, not a chromatic one.

Unlike many philosophers who take an interest in these matters, I’m not especially concerned with what’s called the “metaphysics of race”—the philosophical enquiry into the question of whether races are real, and if they’re real, what it is that makes them real. Instead, I’m concerned with what I call the folk-metaphysics of race—the gut-level assumptions that people make about the nature of race (including the assumptions that we philosophers make when we’re out on the street instead of teaching in the classroom or buried in the study).

The most common folk-metaphysical picture of race goes like this. There are a small number of fundamentally different kinds of human beings, and everyone on earth is either a “pure” specimen of one of these kinds or a mixture of two or more of them. Although most members of each kind have an appearance that’s typical of their kind (skin color, hair texture, facial features, psychological dispositions, and the like), these observable features aren’t what make a person the race that they are. They’re merely surface features, but a person’s race is something that’s deep inside of them—it’s something that’s unalterable, that’s in their blood or in their genes, that’s handed down biologically from parents to their offspring, and that constantly presses for expression. Philosophers call this the idea of a “racial essence.”

Although a person’s appearance is taken to be a pretty reliable indicator of their racial essence, it can belie their true nature, and allow them to pass themselves off as belonging to a different race. This is why White supremacists believe that a person can display all the outward signs of Whiteness without really being White. That’s where Jews come in. Many Jews look White without being White. Like the Nazis of the past, today's White supremacists think of Jews as especially menacing because they can so easily disguise their true racial identity and insinuate themselves into White society, where they work to destroy White race (in their jargon, “White genocide”). That’s why the aggrieved torchlight marchers in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us!”  

Even though racial essentialism is scientific nonsense, it maintains an iron grip on the human imagination. And in the case of right-wing extremists, the metaphysics can turn deadly. The two synagogue shootings with which I began this essay were both racially motivated, as are many of the other episodes of anti-Jewish violence that are occurring with increasing frequency both in the US and abroad. In light of this, it’s a serious and perhaps even dangerous mistake to distinguish anti-Semitic violence from racist violence. Anti-Semitism is racism. Let’s stop courting confusion and call it what it really is.