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Indonesia exemplifies a case of “antisemitism without Jews.” In the late colonial period, there was a small but vibrant Jewish community of European and West Asian origin, and in the 1930s many of the resident Dutch had Nazi sympathies. It was under the Japanese occupation during World War II that indigenous Indonesians first became acquainted with antisemitic conspiracy theories, but only from the 1980s onwards do we find a flood of antisemitic literature in Indonesian, translated from the Arabic. Most of this literature, which circulated in Islamist environments, consisted of European and North American antisemitic tracts from the interbellum. It fed conspiracy theories in which “Jew” stood for all perceived enemies of political Islam, especially the Indonesian Chinese, but which did not concern the few remaining Indonesians of actual Jewish descent. Other segments of Indonesia’s Muslim community held generally more positive views of Judaism as a religion, seen as closer to Islam than any other religion, and of Jews as a people though not necessarily of Israel. Indonesian nationalists have perceived a close parallel between their own struggle against Dutch colonialism and Arab resistance to Zionist settlement in Palestine. Independent Indonesia never established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel, and there is a Palestinian embassy in Jakarta but not an Israeli one. Although Islamists applaud the non-recognition of Israel and may conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the policy was conceived and carried out by secular nationalists inspired by Third World solidarity.
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Published in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 32 (2023), Metropol
