Individual and Institutional Antisemitism

This essay defines and tests antisemitism at the individual and organizational levels, deliberately set apart from antisemitism as a political instrument, which a companion essay treats on its own terms. Individual antisemitism is defined as categorical prejudice in which actual, perceived, or associated Jewishness supplies a reason for adverse judgment, a test that separates it from double standards, criticism of Israeli policy, and collective-responsibility reasoning that fail on closer examination. Two independent historical survey reanalyses, American and Soviet, show that Jewish-specific prejudice correlates with generalized prejudice without reducing to it, and that its several manifestations move together without collapsing into one dimension. A four-part life history, acquisition, activation, legitimation, and maintenance, separates psychological processes usually treated as a single attitude. At the organizational level, archival evidence from Harvard's admissions system shows a Jewish classification and numerical restriction that survived the president who created it, demonstrating that prejudice can be stored in institutional rules independent of any one person's current belief, and comparable evidence from McGill, American medical schools, and British and Australian golf clubs shows the pattern was not unique to one university. The essay closes by stating what would falsify each of its claims and by refusing common shortcuts in both directions: treating every criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and treating every disparity involving Jews as evidence that it is. A summary of Schwabe, Daniel, Antisemitism beyond Political Instrumentality Individual and Organizational Mechanisms (August 31, 2026). Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7384598