This May 3, 2026 Op-Ed by CAMERA UK’s Adam Levick appeared in JNS. It is the debut installment of CAMERA’s regular Sunday column at the news agency.
Even before Israel’s modern-day rebirth in 1948, Jews routinely stood accused of not possessing sufficient loyalty to the nations where they resided.
Photo by Jnn13, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
One of the earliest examples of this libel was the suspicion in parts of medieval Christian Europe that Jews were in league with some Muslim powers.
The charge of dual loyalty could be seen in the 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France through the Nazis’ rise to power; indeed, this notion in large measure underlays the failure of Jewish emancipation in Europe. In the United States in the 1920s, Henry Ford published The International Jew, which alleged, along with other calumnies, that Jews were pushing America toward war for financial gain and world domination.
Its contemporary manifestation almost always centers on the charge that Jews are more beholden to Israel than their own nation. Often, the dual-loyalty charge is infused with a narrative imputing enormous power to Jews and Jewish communities, which typically represent a tiny fraction of the overall population.
Read the rest of Adam Levick’s column at JNS. For the Hebrew version of this Op-Ed, please see Makor Rishon.