This week’s Torah reading of Vayyeitsei describes the patriarch Jacob’s extended stay with his uncle (and later father-in-law) Laban, who tries, and ultimately fails, to exploit Jacob through various acts of deceit. According to a midrash, cited in the Passover Haggadah, Laban “tried to destroy” Jacob and, had he succeeded, would have nipped the nascent Jewish nation in the bud. Jonathan Sacks tries to make sense of this surprising statement, which seems to exaggerate Laban’s malice, by understanding him as a paradigm of all future anti-Semites:
Laban begins by seeming like a friend. He offers Jacob refuge when he is fleeing from [his brother] Esau, who has vowed to kill him. Yet it turns out that his behavior is less generous than self-interested and calculating. Jacob works for him for seven years [to marry Laban’s daughter] Rachel. Then on the wedding night Laban substitutes Leah for Rachel, so that to marry Rachel, Jacob has to work another seven years. When Joseph is born to Rachel, Jacob tries to leave. Laban protests. Jacob works another six years, and then realizes that the situation is untenable. Laban’s sons are accusing him of getting rich at Laban’s expense. Jacob senses that Laban himself is becoming hostile. . . .
[Ultimately], Laban treats Jacob as his property, his slave. . . . In his eyes Jacob has no rights, no independent existence. He has given Jacob his daughters in marriage but still claims that they and their children belong to him, not Jacob. He has given Jacob an agreement as to the animals that will be his as his wages, yet he still insists that “the flocks are my flocks.”
What arouses his anger, his rage, is that Jacob maintains his dignity and independence. Faced with an impossible existence as his father-in-law’s slave, Jacob always finds a way of carrying on. . . . In a seemingly impossible situation Jacob retains his dignity, independence, and freedom. Jacob is no man’s slave.
Laban is, in effect, the first anti-Semite. In age after age, Jews sought refuge from those, like Esau, who sought to kill them. The nations who gave them refuge seemed at first to be benefactors. But they demanded a price. They saw, in Jews, people who would make them rich. Wherever Jews went they brought prosperity to their hosts. Yet they refused to be mere chattels. . . . They had their own identity and way of life; they insisted on the basic human right to be free. The host society then eventually turned against them. Its members claimed that Jews were exploiting them rather than what was in fact the case, that they were exploiting the Jews. And when Jews succeeded, they accused them of theft. . . . The fact that Jews had salvaged some self-respect, some independence, that they too had prospered, made them not just envious but angry. That was when it became dangerous to be a Jew.
Read more on Orthodox Union: https://www.ou.org/torah/parsha/rabbi-sacks-on-parsha/birth-worlds-oldest-hate/