The 'dual loyalty' accusation

What it is

Dual loyalty is the accusation that a Jew holding one country's passport is really serving somewhere else. The claim is about what Jewishness supposedly does to a citizen, which is why disproving it in one person's case never retires it.

The charge in its modern form arrived with the thing that was supposed to end it. Over the nineteenth century, European states wrote constitutional equality into law, lifted restrictions on where Jews could live and what work they could do, and opened land ownership, the civil service, and army commissions to them. ¹ What followed emancipation was a new political antisemitism, described by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as secular, social, and shaped by economic grievance, running alongside the older religious stereotypes rather than replacing them. ¹ Among its central accusations: that Jews were secretly disloyal even while enjoying the benefits of citizenship. ¹ The museum's general entry puts the family it belongs to plainly, calling nationalist antisemitism a set of stereotypes that Jews are suspicious "alien" outsiders or disloyal and unpatriotic citizens, a form that grew as nationalism became a powerful force in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ²

The case that gave the charge its permanent name is the one the U.S. House of Representatives reached for when it wrote the accusation into a resolution more than a century later. H. Res. 183 describes "the Dreyfus affair, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery captain, was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background." ³ The resolution, passed March 7, 2019, states that "accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to the Jewish community than to the United States constitutes anti-Semitism," and rejects what it calls "the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance." ³ It also refuses to treat the charge as a Jewish problem alone, listing alongside Dreyfus the wartime incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent on grounds of alleged dual loyalty, the questioning of President John F. Kennedy's loyalty because he was Catholic, and the treatment of Muslim Americans after September 11. ³

The accusation is also named in the definition most governments now work from. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted its working definition on May 26, 2016, and among its eleven illustrative examples is "Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations." ⁴ The same document says that criticism of Israel similar to criticism leveled at any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. ⁴ In the United States, Executive Order 13899, signed December 11, 2019, directed federal agencies enforcing civil rights law to consider that definition and to consider the contemporary examples as possible evidence of discriminatory intent, while stating that this must not curtail rights under the First Amendment. ⁵

Why it still matters

The belief is not marginal. In a survey of 4,007 Americans fielded by ADL and NORC at the University of Chicago in September and October 2022, 39 percent agreed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. ⁷

The definitions themselves are contested. Critics of the IHRA text argue that it equates antisemitism with criticism of Israeli policy and is open to being weaponized against advocacy for Palestinian rights, particularly on campuses; Kenneth Stern, who drafted it, later objected to that campus use on free expression grounds. ⁴ Those objections produced a rival document. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, launched March 25, 2021 and signed by more than 400 scholars, defines antisemitism as "discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)," and its guidelines state that evidence-based criticism of Israeli policy, boycott and divestment campaigns as political protest, and criticism of Zionism as a form of nationalism are not antisemitic. ⁶

The Jerusalem Declaration, which disagrees with the IHRA definition about nearly everything else, agrees on this: it lists as antisemitic the assumption that non-Israeli Jews are inherently more loyal to Israel than to their own countries, along with holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel's conduct and requiring Jews to condemn Israel publicly on account of their identity. ⁶

This is our opinion rather than any document's: criticism of a policy, a lobby's budget, a senator's vote, or an arms transfer is politics, and it stays politics no matter how sharply it is put. It becomes the trope when the explanation offered for someone's position is their Jewishness. The first argues about what the United States should do. The second argues about who counts as an American.

The premise underneath the charge also fails on the numbers. Pew Research Center surveyed 4,718 Jewish adults between November 19, 2019 and June 3, 2020 and found American Jews split by generation on Israel itself: 35 percent of Jews under 30 said caring about Israel is essential to what being Jewish means to them, while 27 percent said it was not important, against 51 percent essential and 10 percent not important among Jews 50 and older. ⁸ Roughly half of Jews under 30 described themselves as emotionally attached to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of those 65 and up. ⁸

The words you'll hear

Dual loyalty. The accusation that Jewish citizens are more loyal to Israel, or to Jews elsewhere, than to their own country. H. Res. 183 calls it a myth and states that making the accusation constitutes antisemitism. ³

The IHRA working definition. The definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance on May 26, 2016, with eleven illustrative examples, one of which is the loyalty accusation. ⁴

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. A rival definition launched March 25, 2021 by more than 400 scholars, drafted in response to concerns that the IHRA examples could be used against criticism of Israel. It also treats the loyalty assumption as antisemitic. ⁶

Emancipation. The nineteenth-century process by which European states granted Jews legal equality, including access to the civil service and army commissions, and the period in which the modern disloyalty charge took shape. ¹

Executive Order 13899. The December 11, 2019 order directing U.S. agencies to consider the IHRA definition and examples when enforcing civil rights law, subject to First Amendment limits. ⁵