In June 1917, the great historian Simon Dubnow spoke at a mass meeting of Jews in St Petersburg about the political upheaval roiling Russia. “It is true that a few demagogues,” he intoned, “have come out of our midst too. They appear under Russian pseudonyms because they are ashamed of their Jewish origins (Trotsky, Zinoviev and others). But it would be better to say that their Jewish names are pseudonyms; they are not rooted in our people.” Dubnow’s observation operates in reverse today. We now live in a world where those who have long disowned their Jewish origins, long regarded their Jewishness as incidental, or long disengaged from the Jewish community opportunistically proclaim that they are Jews. They do so to claim standing (“I am a Jew, therefore I speak with authority”) and to disassociate (“I am a Jew, but not one of the bad ones.”) First and foremost, they do so to attack (“I am a Jew and that allows me to make outrageous claims about other Jews.”) David Lewis reminded us that he’s “also a Jew” in a column published in this newspaper (“Jewish identity and dissent in the shadow of war,” May 12). He did so before assailing the inaugural lecture I gave last month at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where I am a professor of historical studies and director of the only Jewish Studies research centre in Africa. The lecture is on YouTube and is already the most watched inaugural by a UCT professor, an admittedly low bar.Such declarations of Jewishness typically follow a predictable script. Lewis, for example, walks in the footsteps of lifelong communist Ronnie Kasrils, who rediscovers he is a Jew whenever he has something negative to say about Israel (“SA must step up to the plate on Cuba”, April 22). As with Kasrils, Lewis’s declaration of Jewishness is followed by a bingo card of bigotry directed at Jews. By his own account Lewis is more Jew than Kasrils. After all, he invokes challah and Jewish humour. I have no need or desire to pass judgement on his Jewish identity, but I am interested in why he feels the need to invoke Jewishness at all. Are his arguments not strong enough without it? Is it an act of expiation? Is it a claim of expertise? Lewis may know little of Jewish history — I was savaged by a dead sheep — but that is not his purpose. He is the preacher of the true faith, wielding his Jewishness to attack those who he imagines do not share his views about Israel and Zionism. He insists on an ideological purity test applied only to Jews: denounce Israel or else. We do not make such demands of other ethnic or religious groups, that Indian or Chinese South Africans renounce their ancestral homelands, for example. But when it comes to Jews in South Africa those who disagree with Lewis’s views about Israel are axiomatically supporters of genocide. He appears not to have listened to my inaugural lecture with any care, but I wonder whether the rage he directs my way reflects recognition. After all, I did offer some thoughts about the phenomenon he appears to embody. “As in times past, some of the flag-bearers for these malevolent messages have been Jews. A small minority of Jews have presented themselves as truth-tellers, ‘good Jews’ who are at odds with the morally blind ‘bad’ Jewish majority. They appear to have built an identity around this role, revelling in the attention and validation that they receive publicly for having seen the light. “This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in academia, perhaps because it inverts a standard status hierarchy. Suddenly they transcend their whiteness. They have a rapt audience who celebrate and amplify all they have to say, particularly when it is directed at other Jews or the Jewish community, or about matters about which they have no expertise, like the history and nature of anti-Semitism.“Somehow, as Jews they know the truth. The standards of evidence and analysis that we would otherwise expect and demand in academia evaporate in the face of their truth. And because they are Jews — and therefore paraded as preachers of the true gospel — others are able to safely echo their opinions. “They provide licence and cover to others. Society typically frowns on lecturing religious groups about their beliefs, or generalising about ethnic groups, or accusing the victims of prejudice of inflating and inventing the prejudice they experience, but this dynamic neatly bypasses that problem.” I illustrated this with examples drawn from some of my less temperate colleagues at UCT. I said nothing in my lecture about Israel; my focus was on the historical and present-day experience of Jews in South Africa. Seemingly, my sin was to explain why most Jews in South Africa are Zionists. My comments about Zionism were apparently sufficient for Lewis to label me a “sophist” who presents “glib and downright false arguments to support genocide”. Quite a claim. To say that taking the view that Jews have a right to self-determination in the state of Israel makes one a supporter of genocide is lamentably stupid. So too is reducing Jews and Israelis to a monolithic caricature. I thought of Simon Dubnow last month when visiting the Rumbula forest on the outskirts of Riga, the site where he and 25,000 other Jews were murdered over a two-day period at the end of 1941. For unlike Lewis I study genocide. And unlike Lewis I know a thing or two about Jewish history. Echoing Nazi propaganda, the locals who participated in the mass murder at Rumbula and so many other sites like it were convinced that they were ridding the world of a dangerous and racially inferior “Bolshevik-Jewish menace”. Jews had been rendered “unpeople” by years of false history and dehumanising language. Rumbula reminded me that words matter — glibly and falsely labelling someone a supporter of genocide, for example. That is something everyone, Lewis included, ought to remember. • Mendelsohn, an expert on Jewish history, was head of the department of historical studies at UCT until he was suspended from that position in 2024 after challenging in court two controversial resolutions passed by the UCT council that related to Israel, the definition of anti-Semitism and academic relations with institutions linked to the Israel Defense Forces.