The Invention of the Goy

How Jews and Christians Created the "Gentile"

Goy. What a loaded word.

First, what exactly is a goy? Antisemites would have you believe that Jews use the term because they hate non-Jews and consider them animals. These same antisemites gleefully adopt the label for themselves, believing they have stumbled upon the ultimate Jewish slur for the non-Jews. You see it in the Goyim Defense League, Goyim TV, and even in internet slang like “goyslop” which has slowly crept into the mainstream.

Apologetic Jews claim that it’s a completely neutral term. Goy just means “nation.” They point to the Torah and explain that even the Jewish people are referred to as a goy kadosh, a holy nation. However, this defense suffers from what is known as the Etymological Fallacy. It assumes that the oldest or most historical meaning of a word is its “correct” one. But language evolves. Today, goy no longer means nation. When I walked into Yeshiva wearing jeans and my rebbi screamed, “You’re dressed like a goy!” he certainly didn’t mean I was dressed like a nation.

So what is it? A goy is a catch-all term for every single non-Jew. The more accurate translation is “gentile¹.” Using it completely flattens 99.8% of the human population. You’re no longer Russian, Japanese, or Arab. You’re just a goy. A non-Jew. That is the only part of your identity that matters. Not one of us. Is it a slur? It functions a lot like the term “muggle” in Harry Potter. The Wizarding World is strictly split into wizards and muggles, non-wizards. For some Jews, the world is similarly split into Jews and goyim.

However, when you use a word like “muggle” to flatten everyone who isn’t a wizard, you inevitably get dark wizards like Voldemort and Grindelwald who view muggles as subhuman. The exact same dynamic exists in Judaism.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller, a massively popular Ultra-Orthodox orator, represents this perfectly in one of his Q&A sessions:

Q: What should a person think when they’re walking down the street and surrounded by goyim? What should your thoughts be?

A: When a person walks in the street surrounded by goyim? What do you think when you’re surrounded by trees? It’s trees. You don’t want to knock down the tree for nothing. Trees are important. Goyim are important. This goy is a bricklayer, this goy is a bus driver. We need them. We need goyim. We need trees. But of course you’re one. מי כעמך ישראל גוי אחד בארץ (Who is like Your people Israel, one nation in the earth). You’re the only one in the world that Hashem is interested in. Goyim we need.

Now you have to practice on goyim good middos (character traits). If you practice good middos on goyim, you’ll practice good middos to Jews too. But if a person is insolent and fresh to goyim, he’ll do the same to Jews too.

So use goyim as a middah, as a means of practicing good character. Say to goyim please and thank you, and then you’ll say please and thank you to your father and mother too, maybe.

Basically, shiksas are for practice.

Once you adopt a term like “goy,” it paves the way for extremists like Rabbi Avigdor Miller to compare actual human beings to trees and background scenery.

How Did We Get Here?

How did we go from the Torah, where goy simply meant “nation,” to a world where every individual can be stripped down to a “goy”?

This is the question Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir tackle in their book, Goy: Israel’s Others and the Birth of the Gentile. They trace the diachronic development of the “goy”, which is a fancy way of saying they track how the word evolved over time.

In the Torah, the boundary between Jew and non-Jew is not a rigid binary. The Torah is far more concerned with the boundary between Hashem and foreign gods. For example, Deuteronomy explicitly forbids intermarriage with the seven nations of Canaan, but not because those nations are essentially or genetically inferior. The prohibition exists purely because those specific local wives might lead the Israelites to worship other gods. King Solomon actually married women from many nations, and this exact fear materialized when they brought their idols with them.

The Torah does not view the non-Jewish world as one monolithic block of “goyim.” It has specific, distinct rules for different peoples. You are permanently forbidden from marrying an Ammonite or a Moabite because of what they historically did to us, yet an Egyptian is welcomed into the assembly after the third generation. You must remember Amalek’s attempted genocide and wipe them out yourself. You cannot allow the Canaanite nations to live among you because of their depraved idol worship. Yet, a “stranger” (ger) is welcomed. In fact, the Torah commands the Jews numerous times to love the stranger and “strangers within your gates” are implored to rest on the Sabbath. The Torah treats each non-Jew individually, based on their specific faith and nationhood.

Furthermore, the Tanakh concerns itself deeply with the non-Jew. It begins not with Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, but with Adam, the father of humanity. God is the God of all. He negotiates with Abraham over the fate of Sodom. He commands Jonah to save the non-Jewish city of Nineveh. He clearly cares a lot about these so-called “trees.”

Similarly, Isaiah’s vision of the Messianic era is a more cosmopolitan ideal:

“And it shall come to pass in the end of days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many peoples shall go and say: ‘Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that He may teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths.’” (Isaiah 2:2-3)

These texts refuse to lump all non-Jews into a single category. They recognize distinctions and see a place for everyone in the eschatological future. So when did the shift happen?

The authors point to Ezra as the beginning of this shift. In the Book of Ezra, intermarriage with any outside nation is outlawed for the first time. Ezra calls the Jewish people zera kadosh, the “holy seed,” warning that they cannot mix with the peoples of the land. In one heart-wrenching scene, the Jews gather in Jerusalem and expel all their non-Jewish wives. The text then spends 24 verses naming and shaming every single man who intermarried. By labeling Jews as “holy seed,” Ezra frames them as wholly distinct from their neighbors. It was no longer just about belief or a covenant with Hashem, their very essence was now considered different and must not be intermingled with others.

This idea of an intrinsic, essential difference continued to crystallize during the Second Temple period. We see a major step in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah used by Alexandrian Jews starting in the 3rd century BCE. While the Hebrew Torah uses the word goy for both Jews and non-Jews, the Septuagint introduces a deliberate split. It uses laos (people) exclusively for the Jews, and ethnē (nations) for everyone else. We see this exact same shift occurring concurrently in Judea; in texts like the Book of Maccabees and the Dead Sea Scrolls, words like ethnē and goyim were now being used exclusively to describe non-Jews.

Still, the ultimate concept of the “gentile” had not fully formed. Jews knew they were different, but the outside world was still made up of distinct groups like Greeks, Romans, and Persians. You couldn’t just point to a Greek and call him a generic “goy.”

The person responsible for inventing the true binary, a term that strips away all unique cultural traits and frames the “other” solely by what they are not, was arguably the most influential Jew of all time. Paul.

Paul was born Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee who studied under Rabban Gamliel. He became Christian on the famous road to Damascus and singlehandedly revolutionized Christianity. In its early days, Christianity was just another apocalyptic, messianic Jewish sect (much like Chabad). Its followers were all practicing Jews. Paul shattered this exclusivity and made Christianity open to the masses, declaring Jewish law unnecessary for non-Jews to serve God and follow Jesus. To understand how radical this was, we have to look at the ancient polytheistic world, where nations had their own personal gods. Conquered people might add a Roman god like Jupiter to their pantheon, but they didn’t throw away their ancestral deities.

Paul created a universal Church where your old identity didn't religiously matter. He asked Greeks, Romans, and Africans to worship the ethnic God of the Jews as the creator of the universe, and to completely discard their own gods. To do this, he had to split the world cleanly in two: those who serve God, and those who don’t. Believer and non-believer. Jew and gentile. He did this by radically transforming the Greek word ethnē.

Prior to Paul, ethnē was largely used (even in the Septuagint) to describe distinct “nations.” But across his letters, Paul used the term forty-five times and applied it to individuals. When addressing his congregations, he stripped away the spiritual significance of being Roman, Greek, or Galatian. Instead, he grouped them all into a single, abstract category, ethnē, defined purely by their position outside of Jewish law. By systematically using ethnē to refer to individuals in this no-man’s land, Paul effectively birthed a new category of human, the gentile.

This theological framing was useful for the Rabbis who concretized the essential difference between Jews and non-Jews. Following the destruction of the Second Temple and the trauma of exile, the Rabbinic project was born out of a desperate need to preserve Jewish continuity. Scattered without sovereignty, the Jews needed a survival mechanism. This strict binary distinction between “us” and “them” became an incredibly useful tool for the rabbis to prevent assimilation.

Like Paul², every non-Jew, regardless of origin, became a “goy.” The specific biblical nations, like Amalek, Moab or Ammon, no longer mattered. The Talmud justifies this by explaining that the Assyrian King Sennacherib “mixed up the nations.”

They also eliminated the Biblical concept of the ger as a friendly sojourner. Ger, stranger, became synonymous with “convert”³. The biblical commandment to “love the stranger” is now “love the convert.” And when a person converts, their old identity is entirely erased and they become legally reborn as a Jew:

“גר שנתגייר כקטן שנולד דמי”
“A convert who embraces Judaism is like a newborn child.” (Yevamot 22a)

The Rabbis developed completely separate legal codes for Jews and goyim that were highly discriminatory towards gentiles⁴. And in one text, Zecharia’s grand vision of all nations learning to worship God is replaced by fantasies of gentiles grabbing hold of each Jew’s tzitzis and becoming slaves to Israel.⁵

This hard distinction provided the fertile soil for ethnocentrism to grow. It led to thinkers like Yehuda HaLevi claiming that Jews are inherently, essentially superior. It led to the Ba’al HaTanya asserting that while both share an animal soul, only Jews possess a higher, divine soul that a goy can never attain. And it eventually led us to the modern era, where Rabbi Avigdor Miller can comfortably compare a passing bus driver to a tree.

Throughout Jewish history, however, there have always been voices pushing back against this simple binary. Giants like Maimonides viewed Jews and non-Jews as theological equals, both fully capable of attaining spiritual greatness. In modern times, leaders like Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks celebrated diversity and the unique contributions of every culture. In direct contrast to Rabbi Miller, Sacks declared:

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing Him to remake me in His.”

While most modern Jews resonate with this more egalitarian approach, the Chareidi view represented by Miller is undeniably closer to how ancient Rabbinic texts actually treated goyim. Yet, as Ophir and Rosen-Zvi masterfully demonstrate, the concept of the goy is an invention. It changed and hardened over time. Because of this, a more modern pluralistic vision is actually far more aligned with the original, unflattened world of the Biblical texts.

​The rabbinic “goy” was invented after a traumatic break in Jewish identity. It served as a survival tool for vulnerable Jews in exile. But it also obscured an older Biblical concept where goy just meant nation and we saw the humanity in each distinct culture. We know first hand what it looks like when your identity is flattened and you're viewed as lesser than. Instead of staying hidden in our ghetto walls like Rabbi Avigdor Miller, we can choose to go back to Isaiah's messianic vision that saw every nation as equal under God:

“In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth; for that the Lord of hosts hath blessed him, saying: ‘Blessed be Egypt My people and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance.’” (Isaiah 19:24-25)

1. Which actually also meant nation originally, stemming from the latin word gentilis.

2. The claim that the rabbis were inspired by Paul is the most radical one in their book. Christine Hayes (ironically the only non-Jew in the field of Rabbinics), challenged the book’s general thesis in her review and felt the rabbis were inspired by Ezra, not directly by Paul.

3. While the Rabbis did retain a hybrid category called the ger toshav (a resident alien who follows basic moral laws without converting), they relegated it to purely theoretical law, deciding it was practically irrelevant without a standing Temple.

4. Although it is worth noting they lacked the authority to enforce these laws on anyone outside their willing followers. The laws around goyim were more theological and theoretical exercises for an oppressed people with no political power.

5. To be fair, there are rare rabbinic texts that represent a more tolerant and loving approach but these are the exceptions rather than the rule