Antisemitic trope

Antisemitic tropes, also known as antisemitic canards or antisemitic libels, are "sensational reports, misrepresentations or fabrications" about Jews as an ethnicity or Judaism as a religion.

Since the 2nd century, allegations of Jewish guilt or cruelty have become a recurring motif in antisemitic tropes. Antisemitic tropes tend to take the form of libels, stereotypes or conspiracy theories, which typically construe Jews as cruel, powerful or controlling. They can also take the form of denying or trivializing any historical injustices towards Jews, which have caused violence, pogroms, genocides, persecution and systemic racism towards Jews throughout history.

Antisemitic tropes mainly evolved in monotheistic societies, whose religions were derived from Judaism. Many tropes were traceable to Christianity's early days. The most common trope was the Jewish deicide, which accused Jews of being "collectively responsible" for the death of Jesus. These tropes were later mirrored by Quranic claims that Jews were "visited with wrath from Allah" due to their "practice" of usury and "disbelief" in His revelations. In medieval Europe, antisemitic tropes were expanded in scope to justify mass persecutions and expulsions of Jews. Particularly, Jews were repeatedly massacred over libels of "causing" epidemics, especially the devastating 14th-century Black Death, and "ritually consuming Christian babies' blood".

In the 19th century, lies about Jews plotting "world domination" by "controlling" mass media and global banking spread, which mutated into modern tropes, especially the libel that Jews "invented and promoted communism". These tropes fatefully formed Adolf Hitler's worldview, caused WWII and the Holocaust, which killed at least 6 million Jews (67% pre-war European Jews). Since the 20th century, antisemitic libels' usage has been documented among "anti-Zionists".

Most contemporary antisemitic tropes feature the denial or trivialization of atrocities against Jews, intertwined with the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust, or of the Jewish exodus from Muslim countries. Holocaust denial and pre-existing antisemitic tropes are inextricable, typical of which is the libel that the Holocaust was "fabricated" or "exaggerated" to "advance" the interests of the Jews and Israel. A more recent example is the denial or revisionism of the October 7 massacres, with the victims overwhelmingly Jewish, including a number of Holocaust survivors.

Political tropes

World domination

Main articles: International Jewish conspiracy, Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory

A Nazi German cartoon c. 1938 depicting Churchill as a Jewish-natured octopus reaching across the globe.

Nazi propaganda poster entitled Das jüdische Komplott ("The Jewish Plot").

Article The International Jew: The World's Problem in Henry Ford's newspaper The Dearborn Independent, May 22, 1920.

The publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 is usually considered the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature. The trope embodied by the book is manifested in both writings and imagery, where Jews are accused of plotting world domination nefariously. Typical examples include Nazi-originated cartoons depicting Jews as a giant octopus reaching across the globe. A 2001 Egyptian reprint of Henry Ford's antisemitic text The International Jew, with the same octopus imagery on the front cover.

Among the earliest refutations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery were a series of articles printed in The Times in 1921. The series revealed much of The Protocols to have been plagiarized from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, an earlier satire without antisemitic themes. Since the forgery's first print in 1903, the publishers have offered contradictory testimonies on the origin of the original manuscript.

The forgery was popularized by Russian Empire's supporters to discredit the Bolsheviks by accusing the Jews of "orchestrating" the Russian revolution, which was co-opted by the Nazis following Soviet Union's rise. Weaponizing pre-existing antisemitism in society, the myth was fabricated for releasing public anxiety from the political upheaval to try to maintain national unity by scapegoating Jews as the leading subversive force.

The myth spread westward, while the Great Depression and Nazism's rise catalyzed the forgery's propagation, which is still being used by antisemites for claiming the existence of a "powerful Jewish cabal" in both the Middle East and the United States. Simultaneously, the Nazis, accusing the "international Jewry" of "plotting" WWII with its "control" of the states that formed the Allies, threatened to annihilate the Jews. Whereas, a contemporary form of the trope goes by the name Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), which accuses the Jews of controlling Western governments. The ZOG lie is peddled by Neo-Nazis, White nationalists, black supremacists and Islamists worldwide.

Malcolm X, a famous Black American activist, deemed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion authentic and introduced it to the members of the Nation of Islam (NOI), leading to its circulation among Black Americans. Malcolm X broke with the NOI in March 1964.

On 16 October 2003, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed drew a standing ovation at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference after claiming:

Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them [...] They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong [...] they have gained control of the most powerful countries.

The New Black Panther Party (NBPP), a black separatist group, has actively promoted antisemitic tropes. In the leadup to a 2006 Democratic primary runoff in the U.S. state of Georgia, the NBPP claimed,

So-called Jews in Israel in what's really Palestine…some player haters, some Zionists, some so-called Jews who the Book of Revelations […] calls the Synagogue of Satan.

When the NBPP-backed candidate Cynthia McKinney lost to her rival Hank Johnson, NBPP's members alleged "Jewish [electoral] domination",

You got what you damn wanted. You got your Uncle Tom [...] You ain't in Israel [...] Gonna get your Jewish [...] You wanna know what led to the loss? Israel. The Zionists. You. Put on your yarmulke and celebrate.

In April 2017, the Politico magazine published an article alleging "links" between the then-U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Jewish religious group Chabad. Jonathan Greenblatt (CEO) of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned the article as "evok[ing] age-old myths about Jews".

In December 2023, Australian Green MP Jenny Leong, echoed Mahathir Mohammed's 2003 speech at a Palestine Justice Movement forum:

the Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby are infiltrating into every single aspect of what is ethnic community groups [...] they rock up to every community event because their tentacles reach into the areas that try and influence power.

She apologized after being condemned.

The "Jewish power" myth persists to this day. It is often veiled as a "criticism" of "Jewish plutocrats" allegedly behind perceived political changes. For instance, QAnon conspiracy theorists believe in the existence of a satanic cabal of global elites (or globalists) drinking children's blood to achieve immortality and "world domination". Two-time heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury has spoken of his belief in a "Zionist" plot to "brainwash people" and "lower moral standard" via the "media and finance". According to Argentine-Israeli Jewish educator Gustavo Perednik, antisemites often pass off their aggressive instinct as a "struggle" of "the oppressed" against the "powerful Jews".

Controlling the media

First edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

1930 Spanish reprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Another common antisemitic trope is that "the Jews control the media and Hollywood".

In Eastern Europe, the Czech politician Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, believed that Jews "controlled the press", despite his previous objection to antisemitism during the Hilsner affair. In Western Europe, Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Féin party that won Ireland's independence, was also a promoter of the "Jewish media control" trope. Griffith alleged that Dublin newspapers were

almost all Jew rags [...] Fifty other rags like those which have nothing behind them but the forty or fifty thousand Jewish usurers and pick-pockets in each country and which no decent Christian ever reads except holding his nose as a precaution against nausea.

Griffith's antisemitism is still present in the party. For instance, lower house parliamentarian Réada Cronin claimed in 2020 that Jews were "responsible for European wars" and "Adolf Hitler was a pawn of the [Jewish] Rothschilds [...may] not have been too far wrong".

In the United States, J.J. Goldberg, The Forward's editorial director, published a study of such trope in 1997. He concluded that Jewish Americans "do not make a high priority of Jewish concerns" despite holding prominent positions in the American media industry. Variants on this theme focus on Hollywood, the press and the music industry.

White genocide conspiracy theory

Main articles: White genocide conspiracy theory and White nationalism

Further information: List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups § White nationalist

Since 2015 when the European migrant crisis happened, the White genocide conspiracy theory, also known as the Great Replacement, has gained traction among white nationalists, especially in the United States, where hate speech is less regulated than in the EU countries. Jews have been accused of encouraging unrestricted non-white immigration to change the fabric of White-majority society. This libel is often promoted in conjunction with older tropes, like the "Jewish power" or Zionist Occupation Government myth, to increase its plausibility among the targeted audience. It is claimed that such sentiment is caused by an extinction anxiety about the majority White population being gradually outnumbered by the non-white population, who are always assumed as "foreign" and "incompatible" with the dominant culture.

In the United States, there have been several terrorist attacks associated with the belief in such theory, the most recent of which include the 2017 Unite the Right rally, where dozens of casualties occurred in a car ramming attack, and the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, where 11 were killed and 7 injured and which has been the deadliest massacre of Jews in American history, seconded by the 2019 Jersey City shooting committed by a radical Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI). The perpetrators in both cases are found to have believed in the theory. The SPLC noted,

The "great replacement" theory is inherently white supremacist. It depends on stoking fears that a non-white population, which the theory's proponents characterize as "inferior," will displace a white majority. It is also antisemitic. Some proponents of the "great replacement" do not explicitly attribute the plot to Jews. Instead, they blame powerful Jewish individuals such as financier and philanthropist George Soros or use coded antisemitic language to identify shadowy "elites" or "globalists."

Elon Musk, the current owner of X (formerly Twitter), is also accused of endorsing such theory in November 2023, when he expressed approval of a post with relevant insinuations. He later visited the Auscwhitz concentration camps in Poland, with Ben Shapiro, European Jewish Association Rabbi Menachem Margolin and Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev.

Economic tropes

Controlling the global financial system

Main article: Economic antisemitism

The ADL documented various antisemitic tropes that had associated Jews with banking, including the lie that "global banking is dominated by the Jewish Rothschild family", and that "the Jews control America's Federal Reserve". Such trope is traceable to the medieval prevalence of Jews in the money-lending profession. In response to such trope, anti-racist activist Tim Wise wrote,

Of course, in keeping with the logic of anti-Jewish bigots, perhaps one should ask the following: If media or financial wrongdoing is Jewish inspired [...] should the depredations of white Christian-dominated industries (like the tobacco or automobile industries) be viewed as examples of white Christian malfeasance? After all, 400,000 people per year die because of smoking-related illnesses, and tobacco companies withheld information on the cancerous properties of their products. Likewise, should executives at Ford and Firestone be thought of as specifically white Christian criminals, due to recent disclosures that defective tires were installed on SUVs, resulting in the deaths of over 150 people worldwide? Is their race, religion or ethnic culture relevant to their misdeeds? If not, why is it suddenly relevant when the executives in question are Jewish?

Usury and profiteering

In the Middle Ages, Jews were restricted from most professions and were pushed into socially undesirable marginal occupations, such as tax collection and moneylending, due to the Roman Catholic Church's prohibition on Christians from charging interest for debt. For instance, the 1179 Third Council of the Lateran threatened excommunication for any Christians lending money at interest, which caused those who desired loans to approach Jews. Natural tension between gentile debtors and Jewish creditors reinforced pre-existing biases against Jews.

In England, the departing Crusaders were joined by debtors in the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190. In 1275, Edward I of England punished Jewish creditors by passing the anti-usury Statute of Jewry. Many English Jews were arrested, 300 of whom were hanged. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. German-American Jewish historian Walter Laqueur further noted,

The issue at stake was not really whether the Jews had entered it out of greed [...] The high tide of Jewish usury was before the fifteenth century; as cities grew in power and affluence, the Jews were squeezed out from money lending with the development of banking.

Propagation of Communism

Main article: Jewish Bolshevism

White Russian anti-Communist and antisemitic propaganda poster, c. 1919. Senior Bolsheviks – Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Radek – sacrifice an allegorical character representing Russia to a statue of Karl Marx.

In the early 20th century, newer allegations of Jews masterminding the propagation of Communism emerged, including the notable example of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903). The term "Judeo-Bolshevism" was popularized by Hitler's regime to conflate Jews with communists, present Jews as an existential threat to Germany in order to justify the Holocaust. A Polish equivalent of this trope is Żydokomuna, which accused "most Jews" of having "collaborated with the Soviet Union" in "importing communism" to Poland. Candace Owens, an American ultraconservative pundit, is a proponent of such libel. She claimed in August 2024 that "Stalin was a Jew" and "Stalinists were part of a Jewish cabal".

Kosher tax

Main article: Kosher tax conspiracy theory

The "Kosher tax" trope claims that food producers are "forced" to pay an exorbitant premium to indicate that their products are kosher, which is allegedly passed on to consumers by price increase. It is mainly spread by antisemitic white supremacist and other extremist organizations. Refuters contended that food producers would not engage in the certification process if it was not profitable to obtain the "kosher certification", which is actually a voluntary business decision, while the "resultant" increased sales would lower the average cost.

Religious tropes

Main articles: Religious antisemitism, Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism in Christianity, Catholic Church and Judaism, Antisemitism and the New Testament, and Antisemitism in Islam

A protest alleging Jewish deicide held by members of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Guilt for the death of Jesus

Main articles: Jewish deicide and Crucifixion of Jesus

Further information: Adversus Judaeos, Second Vatican Council § Decrees and declarations on the Church in the world, and Nostra aetate

The death of Jesus has long been falsely blamed on Jews as a people throughout generations:

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

– Matthew 27:24–25

Jewish deicide was legitimized in Christian theology by Saint John Chrysostom (c. 4th century), a prominent Church Father.

In the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965, Pope Paul VI issued the Nostra aetate, refuting the long-standing libel that Jews are "collectively guilty" for the Crucifixion of Jesus,

What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.

Against radical traditionalists' objection, it was distantly followed up by an apology in 2000 for the near-two millennia's Catholic persecution of Jews, amid claims of the Second Temple menorah still being hidden in the Vatican.

Radical Traditionalist Catholics (rad trads) who oppose Christian–Jewish reconciliation have continued promoting the Jewish deicide. Subreddits r/Catholicism and r/AskAChristian on Reddit are reportedly frequented by rad trads having spread antisemitism for years. According to the SPLC, the rad trads often cite content from the debunked The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their propaganda. Notably, the rad trads have peddled:

• Jews are the "perpetual enemy" of Christ
• Adolf Hitler was the end-product of the Kulturkampf of the "Freemason" Otto von Bismarck
• Nazism was the "result" of a 400-year "revolution" against the Divine Plan to effect man's return to Him via His Catholic Church abetted by Talmudists
• Jews have "infiltrated" the Catholic Church to induce changes in church doctrine for selfish gain
• Catholics cannot trust the Jews
• The Vatican II dialogue with the Jews is a pantomime to destroy Catholic militancy against Judaism

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) noted,

Traditionalist Catholics...continued to incorporate explicit antisemitism into their theology...a paranoid belief in Jewish conspiracies to undermine the church and Western civilization...preach that contemporary Jews are responsible for deicide, endorsed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and claimed that there was a factual basis for the medieval blood libel. One of its bishops, Richard Williamson, is a well known Holocaust denier.

Nevertheless, the Vatican and many Catholics worldwide are still denying the brutality of the Inquisition, with the victims heavily Jewish. Some Catholics tend to exaggerate Catholics' role in the rescue of Jews in the Holocaust to downplay the Catholic origin of post-antiquity European antisemitism and the irredeemable suffering they had inflicted on Jews throughout history.

Blood libel

Main articles: Blood libel and Statute of Kalisz

The blood libel accusation's origin dates to the 12th century. The first recorded accusation against Jews was associated with the death of William of Norwich.

Torture and human sacrifice in the blood libel run contrary to Judaism. The Ten Commandments forbid murder. The use of blood in cooking is banned by Kashrut as blood is deemed ritually unclean. The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and Halakha portray human sacrifice as one of the evils separating the pagans of Canaan from the Hebrews. Jews were prohibited from performed these rituals. Ritual cleanliness for priests prohibited even being in the same room with a human corpse.

Historian Alexis P. Rubin noted,

Church and secular leaders sharply denounced these defamations...people refused to abandon this myth...Popes, kings and emperors declared that Jews, if for no other reason than their strict dietary laws banning even the smallest drop of blood in meat or poultry, were incapable of the crime. The Christian populace was not impressed.

Among those who refuted the blood libel included Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1236:

We pronounce the Jews of the aforementioned place [Fulda] and the rest of the Jews in Germany completely absolved of this imputed crime.

Pope Gregory IX issued in a papal bull on 7 October 1272:

...we order that Jews seized upon such a silly pretext be freed from imprisonment and that they shall not be arrested henceforth on such a miserable pretext, unless – which we do not believe – they be caught in the commission of the crime.

Pope Clement VI said on 26 September 1348,

Jews are not responsible for the Plague.

Another blood libel was recorded in Damascus in 1840: Blood libel has frequently appeared in the state-sponsored media, TV, books and websites of most Muslim nations.

Nevertheless, a few Arab writers, who happened not to be antisemitic, condemned blood libel. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published articles by Osama Al-Baz, a senior advisor to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, explaining the origins of the blood libel and contending that Arabs and Muslims "had never been" antisemitic.

On the other hand, the blood libel is still promoted by some Christians in America, including the Radical Traditionalist Catholics and American ultraconservative pundit Candace Owens. Owens claimed in July 2024 that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched 101 years ago over false accusations of murdering a girl,

believed in pedophilia and incest [...] as the sacramental rites and they would commit these acts, things that would normally be termed blood libel were actually happening.

Host desecration

Main article: Host desecration

Jews burned alive for the alleged host desecration in Deggendorf, Bavaria, in 1338, and in Sternberg, Mecklenburg, 1492; a woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

16th-century painting accusing Jews of host desecration in Passau, Germany.

In medieval Europe, Jews were often accused of "stealing" communion hosts and "desecrating" them to "reenact" the crucifixion of Jesus by "stabbing" or "burning" the host. Such accusations were entirely baseless and malicious.

The first accusation of Jewish host desecration was made recorded in 1243 in Beelitz, near Berlin, and all Jews in Beelitz were burned alive, subsequently called the Judenberg, though historian Jeremy Cohen said that the first accusation occurred in 1290 in Paris. Cohen furthered:

The story exerted its influence even in the absence of Jews [...] Edward I of England expelled the Jews from his kingdom in 1290, and they would not reappear in Britain until the late 1650s. Yet the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the proliferation of the Host-desecration story in England: in collections of miracle stories, many of them dedicated to the miracles of the Virgin Mary; in the art of illuminated manuscripts used for Christian prayer and meditation; and on stage, as in popular Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which itself evoked memories of an alleged ritual murder committed by Jews in East Anglia in 1191.

In the following centuries, similar libels circulated throughout Europe, accompanied by genocidal massacres, which did not reportedly fade away until Sigismund II Augustus repudiated it in 1558. However, massacres resulted from host desecration libels happened until the 19th century. The last recorded accusations were brought up in Barlad, Romania, in 1836 and 1867 respectively.

Accusations of anti-Christian conspiracy

Main articles: Christianity and Judaism and Catholic Church and Judaism

For centuries, Christian antisemites had alleged that Jews either dislike Christianity or seek to "destroy" it. The prominent religious reformer Martin Luther wrote a 65,000-word treatise that espoused such libel, which is still being promoted. For instance, radio host James Edwards alleged that the Jews "hate Christianity" and "the WASP establishment", furthering that Jews "are using pornography as a subversive tool against us".

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) noted,

This is not to say that Jews have historically borne no animus towards Jesus and the Apostles, or towards Christianity as a whole. In the two-thousand year relationship between Judaism and Christianity, many of them marred by anti-Jewish polemic and Christian persecution of Jews, some rabbis have fulminated against the church [...] But contemporary anti-Semitic polemicists are not interested in learning or reporting about the historical development of Jewish-Christian relations. Their goal is to incite hatred against Judaism and Jews by portraying them as bigoted and hateful.

Demonization in Christianity

Main articles: Saint John Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos, Martin Luther § Anti-Jewish polemics and antisemitism: 1543–1544, and Martin Luther in Nazi Germany

Cranach the Younger portrait's of Martin Luther, widely used on postcards in Nazi Germany.

17th-century Judensau engraving, based on a 15th-century painting.

As early as the 4th century, Church Father Saint John Chrysostom described a synagogue as

worse than a brothel and a drinking shop [...] a den of scoundrels, the repair of wild beasts, a temple of demons, the refuge of brigands and debauchees, and the cavern of devils, a criminal assembly of the assassins of Christ.

His anti-Jewish homilies were legitimized in Christian theology, which formed the basis of Christian antisemitism for the millennia to come and was ultimately used by the Nazis to garner Christian support for the Holocaust.

Historian Jeremy Cohen wrote,

Yet the very impulse that propelled the Christian imagination from the Jew as a deliberate killer of Christ to the Jew as a perpetrator of the most heinous crimes against humanity also led to the portrayal of the Jew as inhuman, satanic, animal-like, and monstrous [...] By all accounts, the bestiality of the Jew climaxed in the image of the Judensau.

Judensau (German for Jews' sow) is a dehumanizing imagery of Jews that appeared around the 13th century. Its popularity lasted for six centuries until revival by the Nazis. Sculptures of Jews, typically portrayed as "obscene human contact" with unclean animals like pigs and owls, were often found on cathedral or church ceilings, pillars, utensils, etchings etc. The images always combined multiple antisemitic motifs, which sometimes included derisive prose or poetry.

Martin Luther, pioneer of the 16th-century Reformation and one of the most crucial figures in history, was noted for his vicious antisemitism. Luther wrote a 65,000-word thesis demonizing the Jews. In Luther's thesis, not only did he describe Jews as

a base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth [...] full of the devil's feces [...] which they wallow in like swine [...] and the synagogue [...] incorrigible whore and an evil slut.

but also called for the elimination of Jews by

• burning down Jewish synagogues and schools and warn people against them
• refusing to let Jews own houses among Christians
• taking away Jewish religious writings
• forbidding rabbis from preaching
• offering no protection to Jews on highways
• giving young, strong Jews flail, axe, spade, and spindle
• letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow

Martin Luther was elevated to an unprecedented status in Nazi Germany. It is claimed that Luther's antisemitic thesis is considered by many Western historians to have brought about the Holocaust despite the 400-year lapse.

Demonization in other religions or movements

Main articles: Black Hebrew Israelites, Black supremacy, Black nationalism, Black separatism, and Cultural appropriation

Further information: Groups claiming affiliation with Israelites and List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups § Black separatist and black nationalist

Beyond Abrahamic religions, the demonization of Jews is also common among new religious movements, one of which is the "Black Hebrew Israelites". Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI) believe that African Americans are descendants of ancient Israelites. However, the BHI are not associated with either Judaism or Christianity. Just as the movement of Messianic Judaism founded by Conservative Baptist Association's Evangelical priest Moishe Rosen, the BHI do not meet any criteria for being considered Jewish.

Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI) have seen themselves as the only "real Jews". They deny the Jewish ancestry and historical connection to Israel of contemporary Jews. BHI have accused contemporary Jews of being "European converts to Judaism" and running the Atlantic slave trade, implying that contemporary Jews are "White oppressors".

A number of BHI sects were classified as hate groups by at least two American civil rights groups, the ADL and SPLC. The ADL noted,

Some, but not all, [Black Hebrew Israelites] are outspoken anti-Semites and racists.

Such BHI-espoused antisemitic tropes have been popularized to discredit Jews by subtly associating them with White supremacy. BHI sects deemed antisemitic include the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge (ISUPK), House of Israel (HOI), Nation of Yahweh (NOY), Israelites Saints of Christ, True Nation Israelite Congregation and The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ (ICGJC).

The ADL summarized the commonly used BHI slurs:

• Jew-ish: Negative term for depicting Jews as "imposters"
• So-called Jews: Casting doubt on the Jewish identity of mainstream Jews
• Synagogue of Satan: An ancient slur borrowed to express dislike of Jews

BHI groups or members have also been involved in domestic terrorism towards Jewish Americans since the 1970s, the most recent of which include the Jersey City Shooting (7 dead and 3 injured)."Antisemitism in the Black Hebrew Israelite and Christian Identity Movements". Pogram on Extremism, George Washington University. 1 August 2024.

Just as Louis Farrakhan's ideology, BHI ideology has gained traction among Black Americans discontented with systemic racism, which has caused many of them hardship and a rise in racial tension. The BHI, to some extent, managed to desensitize the public to their anti-Jewish terrorism by appropriating Jewish symbols and misusing their historically oppressed status to gain sympathy from anti-racist intellectuals.

The Unification Church (UC), founded by South Korean religious leader and messiah claimant Sun Myung Moon in 1954, was criticized for demonizing Jews in its manifesto Divine Principle. A multi-faith panel that included Rabbi A. James Rudin, the assistant director of the American Jewish Committee's department of interreligious affairs, said that the manifesto had 125 antisemitic references, including the libel that Jews were "collectively responsible" for the crucifixion of Christ. Rudin argued that UC's manifesto included "pejorative language, stereotyped imagery, accusations of collective sin and guilt", including its claim that "Jews had gone through a course of indemnity" due to John the Baptist's "failure to recognize Jesus as the Messiah". Rudin also said that the UC's text claimed that the Holocaust was a "divine punishment". The UC denied the AJC's charges as "distortion" and "obscurations".

Male menstruation

The false belief of Jewish male anal menstruation emerged in the 16th century, which formed part of the canard that all Jews were somehow female. The false belief was allegedly based on scripture associating Jews with bleeding, particularly the description of Judas' death in Acts 1:18–19, where his belly was allegedly burst open, which inspired further accounts of heretics having their blood or entrails spilled via the anus at death. It was, in the 12th century, referenced to the blood curse invoked by the Jews at Jesus' trial before Pilate (Matt 27:25). In the following century, a pseudoscientific explanation based on humoral medicine was added, supplemented by a verse from Psalms 78:66.

By 1302, it was alleged that Jewish male descendants of those having taken "responsibility" for the Crucifixion would suffer a monthly bleeding. A 1503 account of the 1494 ritual murder trials at Tyrnau consisted of the earliest mention of the alleged monthly male bleeding. In 17th-century Spain, the notion was revived by physicians, including the king's, conflating menstruation with hemorrhoids, which contributed to the "legal concept" of "impure blood" in a family or race.

Well poisoning

Main articles: Well poisoning and Persecution of Jews during the Black Death

Medieval depiction of a Jew poisoning a well during an alleged ritual murder.

During the devastating 14th century Black Death, crowded cities were hard hit, with death tolls as high as 50%. Emotionally distraught survivors scapegoated Jews opportunistically. Such accusation later became an antisemitic trope, which evolved into the one fabricated by Joseph Stalin as the doctors' plot in the early 1950s, then the charges of Jews "spreading" largely incurable diseases like the AIDS in the late 20th century.

Soon after the Black Death's entry to Europe in 1346, a massacres of Jews broke out between 1348 and 1351 based on false charges of Jews "spreading" the epidemic. The first massacres happened in Toulon in 1348, where the Jewish quarter was sacked and 40 Jews murdered, then in Barcelona. In 1349, massacres and persecution spread across Europe, including the Erfurt massacre (1349), the Basel Massacre, and massacres in Aragon and Flanders. 2,000 Jews were also burned alive in the Strasbourg massacre on 14 February 1349 by antisemites who justified the massacre as a "preventive measure".

Other tropes

Causing wars, revolutions and calamities

Further information: Wandering Jew, List of editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion § 1920.5, Franklin Prophecy, and Jewish war conspiracy theory

1941 antisemitic poster in German-occupied Serbia showing a Jew behind both capitalism (represented by money) and communism (Stalin).

German politician Heinrich von Treitschke in the 19th century coined the phrase "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" ("The Jews are our misfortune!") adopted as a motto by Der Stürmer several decades later.

Efraim Karsh noted,

Jews have traditionally been accused of lacking true patriotism to their countries of citizenship, and instead seeking to embroil their non-Jewish compatriots in endless conflicts and wars on behalf of such cosmopolitan movements and ideals as 'world imperialism', 'international bolshevism', or 'world Zionism'.

Both ends of the political spectrum have accused American Jews of "dragging" the country into World War II and the Iraq War, exaggerating the influence of an alleged Israel lobby, the idea of which was promoted by political scientist John Mearsheimer in a 2007 book, which was criticized for legitimizing the trope of "Jewish domination" and stoking up antisemitic violence. In the UK, a civil service group was suspended in March 2024 over the use of the term in a webinar.

The Franklin Prophecy was unknown before its appearance in 1934 in the pages of William Dudley Pelley's pro-Nazi weekly American magazine Liberation. According to the US Congress report, Anti-Semitism in Europe: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations (2004):

The Franklin "Prophecy" is a classic anti-Semitic canard that falsely claims that American statesman Benjamin Franklin made anti-Jewish statements during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It has found widening acceptance in Muslim and Arab media, where it has been used to criticize Israel and Jews ...

Turning people LGBT

In 2016, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) highlighted a video in which a Kuwaiti Salafi preacher claimed that SpongeBob SquarePants and other children's cartoons were created by Jews in order to promote homosexuality, atheism, Satanism, and the emo movement.

In 2018, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan accused Jews of "turning men into women and women into men" with a "specially concocted strain of marijuana" invented to make Black men gay and effeminate.

In 2020, conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles, through his disinformation site TruNews, endorsed a claim by self-identified "Messianic Jews" Steve and Jana Ben-Nun that "Zionists" seek to "make all of humanity androgynous" in accordance with the Kabbalistic concept of Adam Kadmon. The alleged plot supposedly involves "Zionists" supporting transgender rights, as well as actually making people LGBT by "putting specific things in food, in drink".

Contrarily, some lesbian feminists have accused Jews of being "killers of the Goddess" over the perception of the god of Israel being male, which also lead Jews to be blamed for patriarchy.

Controlling the weather and causing natural disasters

Further information: Trayon White § Jewish conspiracy theory controversy, and Marjorie Taylor Greene § Camp Fire conspiracy theory

On March 16, 2018, Council of the District of Columbia member Trayon White posted a video on his Facebook page showing snow flurries falling, alluding to the conspiracy theory of the Rothschild family conspiring to manipulate the weather. In his post, he stated, "Y'all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation ... And that's a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful." The comment was widely reported in Washington and worldwide media as an endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The Washington City Paper reported on March 19 that this was not the first time White alluded to a Jewish conspiracy to control global weather.

The idea that Jews use space lasers to manipulate the weather, or cause natural disasters, also dates back to 2018, when U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that the Camp Fire wildfires in Butte County, California were caused by lasers emitted from "space solar generators" in a scheme involving companies such as Rothschild & Co and Solaren. Despite Greene denying antisemitic intent in this theory, supporters of Greene quickly blamed the wildfires on Jews. Greene was condemned by the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Christians United for Israel. Journalist and author Mike Rothschild, who is unrelated to the Rothschilds, also condemned these statements.

Provoking or fabricating antisemitism

Main articles: Hamas, 1988 Hamas charter, Hamas war crimes, Antisemitism in Russia, and Protocols of the Elders of Zion

During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler accused "international Jewish financiers" of seeking to start a world war, but that this would be turned against them in an "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe", for which the Jews would be fully to blame.

In 2002, the then-Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi asked, "People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, 'What did the Jews do to the Germans?'" Gilad Atzmon stated, "Jewish texts tend to glaze over the fact that Hitler's 28 March 1933, ordering a boycott against Jewish stores and goods, was an escalation in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership."

In January 2005, 19 members of the Russian State Duma demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned in Russia. "Their seven-page letter ... accused Jews of carrying out ritual killings, controlling Russian and international capital, inciting ethnic strife in Russia, and staging hate crimes against themselves. 'The majority of antisemitic actions in the whole world are constantly carried out by Jews themselves with a goal of provocation', the letter claimed. After sharp protests by Russian Jewish leaders, including Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, human rights activists, and the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Duma members retracted their appeal."

Dual loyalty

Main article: dual loyalty

A trope found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but originating long before that document, is that Jews are more loyal to world Jewry than to their own country. Since Israel's reestablishment in 1948, libels of Jews being more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence and citizenship have become widespread in different countries.

Cowardice and lack of patriotism

Main articles: Dreyfus affair, Stab-in-the-back myth, Antisemitism in France, Antisemitism in Germany, Antisemitism in the Soviet Union, Antisemitism in Europe § Poland, and Racism in Poland § Jewish people

"12,000 Jewish soldiers died on the field of honor for the fatherland." A leaflet published in 1920 by German Jewish veterans to counter the stab-in-the-back myth

Part of a permanent exhibition dedicated to the antisemitic purge of 1968 under the Polish communist regime at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

With the rise of racist theories in the 19th century, "[a]nother old anti-Semitic canard served to underline the putative 'femininity' of the Jewish race. Like women, Jews lacked an 'essence'". In Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations, Kurt Jonassohn and Karin S. Björnson wrote:

Historically, Jews were not allowed to bear arms in most of the countries of the diaspora. Therefore, when they were attacked, they were not able to defend themselves. In some situations, their protector would defend them. If not, they only had a choice between hiding and fleeing. This is the origin of the anti-Semitic canard that Jews are cowards.

Jews were frequently accused of being insufficiently patriotic. In late 19th-century France, a political scandal known as the Dreyfus affair involved the wrongful conviction for treason of a young Jewish French officer. The political and judicial scandal ended with his full rehabilitation.

During World War I, the German Military High Command implemented the Judenzählung (German for "Jewish Census"), which was designed to "confirm" allegations of the "lack of patriotism" among German Jews, but the results of the census disproved the accusations and were not made public. After the end of the war, the stab-in-the-back myth alleged that internal enemies, including Jews, were responsible for Germany's defeat.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, the statewide campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans", a Soviet euphemism for Jews, was set out on 28 January 1949 with an article in the party's official newspaper Pravda:

unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitans, profiteers with no roots and no conscience ... Grown on rotten yeast of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, decadence and formalism ... non-indigenous nationals without a motherland, who poison with stench ... our proletarian culture.

Such propaganda was followed by state campaigns of persecution until Stalin's death in 1953, which involved mass termination of Soviet Jewish doctors and liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee based on false charges of treason, espionage and association with Zionism. The anniversary of the murders was commemorated by Soviet Jewry Movement's activists from the 1960s until the end of the Soviet Union.

In 1968, the Soviet-controlled Polish communist regime exploited pre-existing antisemitism to promote similar claims, equating Jewish origins with "Zionist sympathies" and "disloyalty", to blame Polish Jews for the anti-regime mass protests that had happened. A nationwide purge of Polish Jews, most of whom were Holocaust survivors, ensued. The purge caused the exodus of 5,000-10,000 Polish Jews – around 20-33% of those remaining at the time. An official apology was made by the democratic Polish government in March 2018.

Ethnocentrism

Many conspiracy theory websites, run by Neo-Nazis, White supremacists, Islamists, communists and radical leftists in academia, cherry-picked quotes from Jewish religious writings to justify the libel that Judaism is "racist...teaching Jews to hate non-Jews."

According to rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,

Even as the Jew is moved by his private Sinaitic Covenant with God to embody and preserve the teachings of the Torah, he is committed to the belief that all mankind, of whatever color or creed, is "in His image" and is possessed of an inherent human dignity and worthiness. Man's singularity is derived from the breath "He [God] breathed into his nostrils at the moment of creation" (Genesis 2:7). Thus, we do share in the universal historical experience, and God's providential concern does embrace all of humanity.

According to the minutes of a 1984 hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations in the US Congress concerning Soviet Jewry,

This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Fabricating or exaggerating the Holocaust

Main article: Holocaust denial § Examination of claims

Further information: Holocaust trivialisation and secondary antisemitism

Constructions within the Auschwitz concentration camps would always stand as a testament that antisemitism caused the worst genocide in human history.

Holocaust memorial outside Auschwitz concentration camp I.

Holocaust denial consists of claims that the genocide of Jews during World War II – usually referred to as the Holocaust – did not occur at all, or it did not happen in the manner or to the extent which is historically recognized. Key elements of these claims are the rejection of the following facts:

• The Nazi regime had a policy of deliberately targeting Jews for extermination as a people
• At least six million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies
• Genocide was carried out at extermination camps using tools of mass murder, such as gas chambers.

Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax committed out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy to advance the "Jewish interests" at the expense of other peoples, For this reason, Holocaust denial is generally considered to be an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Holocaust deniers are criticized for ignoring extensive evidence pointing to the contrary of their biased presuppositions, with some of them referring to it as the "Holohoax" in far-right online spaces.

Holocaust deniers include the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, late French professor Robert Faurisson, French teacher Vincent Reynouard, British author David Irving and Germar Rudolf.

In 2010, a poll found that 56% of citizens in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the UAE believed that the Jews "deserved the Holocaust", most of whom were found to hold the false beliefs that

• A Jewish propaganda machine had promoted the Holocaust myth to extract huge sums of money from Germany and justify the founding of the state of Israel
• The Jewish victims died of natural causes or were sentenced to death for criminal reasons
• The Allied Powers deliberately inflated the number of Jews killed during the war

In 2014, another global survey found that almost half of the world did not know that the Holocaust ever happened.

Holocaust inversion

Main article: Holocaust inversion

Further information: Holocaust trivialization and IHRA definition

Antisemitic poster spotted at an allegedly anti-war rally in San Francisco on February 16, 2003, which incorporated both the motifs of "money-minded Jews" and "Zio-Nazis". The slur ZIONIST PIGSwas also used.

Antisemitic graffiti in Madrid, 2003, equating the Star of David with the dollar and Nazi swastika.

Whereas, "[t]he main motif in Arab cartoons about Israel features 'the devilish Jew'" and "[t]he core anti-Semitic motif of the Jew as the paradigm of an "absolute evil" has a set of submotifs. These, in turn, recur over the centuries but are differently cloaked according to the predominant narrative of the period." Such demonization of Jews associated with Israel is strongly correlated with Holocaust inversion. Holocaust inversion presents itself as an inversion of reality where Jews, as the primary victims of the Holocaust, are depicted as the primary perpetrators, to the effect of whitewashing the perpetrators' war crimes while erasing Jews' historical victimhood. In addition, Holocaust inversion is a form of Holocaust trivialization. According to the World Jewish Congress, Holocaust inversion often comes in such forms:

• Portraying Jews as Nazis
• Comparing Israeli prime ministers to Hitler and portraying the Star of David as equal to the swastika
• Images showing Anne Frank wearing a kaffiyeh
• Comparing the Nakba to the Holocaust
• Comparing the Gaza Strip to Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust

The French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy also remarked,

a mass movement demanding the deaths of Jews will be unlikely to yell "Money Jews" or "They Killed Christ."...in order for such a movement to emerge, for people to feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large number of rabbis… an entirely new discourse way of justifying it must emerge.

Terms like Zio, Zio-Nazi and even Zionist can be used deceptively by antisemites to air their prejudices against Jews while maintaining plausible deniability. David Duke, the former KKK's Grand Wizard, reportedly invented Zio as a slur against Jews by exploiting the fact that Zionism is popular among contemporary Jews, especially in the United States and United Kingdom. Renowned Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer classified "Zio-Nazi" as hate speech. The Meta recently announced that these terms would be restricted on Facebook and Instagram. Nevertheless, it is notable that Cold War communist regimes, including the Soviet Union and its puppet state in Poland, had an often neglected history of persecuting their Jewish subjects based on "anti-Zionism".

Controlling the Atlantic slave trade

Main article: African American–Jewish relations

Further information: Black nationalism, Black separatism, Southern Poverty Law Center, and List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups § Black separatist and black nationalist

Exploiting the pre-existing racial tension between Black and Jewish Americans, antisemites have exaggerated Jews' role in the Atlantic slave trade to demonize them in the eyes of Black Americans. It is the central tenet of the American Islamist hate group Nation of Islam (NOI), led by Louis Farrakhan, that Jews "orchestrated" the Atlantic slave trade. A number of historians, including Saul S. Friedman, conducted research into the matter. Friedman published the book Jews and the American Slave Trade to summarise his findings, concluding that Jewish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was negligible, thereby disproving the rumour. Also, in 1995, the American Historical Association (AHA) explicitly condemned "any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Atlantic slave trade".

Organ harvesting

Palestinians

See also: 2009 Aftonbladet Israel controversy and religious antisemitism

In August 2009, an article in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet accused Israeli troops of harvesting organs from Palestinians who died in their custody. Henrik Bredberg wrote in the rival newspaper Sydsvenskan: "Donald Boström publicized a variant of an anti-Semitic classic, the Jew who abducts children and steals their blood." In a video on their website, Time magazine quoted the 2009 Swedish Aftonbladet's unbacked variant of the classic antisemitic blood libel accusation as fact and retracted the allegations that Israeli soldiers had harvested and sold Palestinian organs in 2009 within hours on 24 August 2014 after a denouncing report from HonestReporting came out.

In December 2009, Israel's Channel 2 published an interview with Yehuda Hiss, the former chief pathologist at L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, where he accused workers at the forensic institute of taking skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from deceased Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers without permission in the 1990s. Hiss was dismissed as head of Abu Kabir in 2004 after discovery of the use of organs. Israeli officials acknowledged that isolated incidents had taken place, but the vast majority of cases involved Israeli citizens and no such incidents had occurred for a protracted period, while Hiss had already been removed from his position. In a state inquiry report, they also found “no evidence that Hiss targeted Palestinians...The families of dead Israeli soldiers were among those who complained about Hiss's conduct.” Despite this, similar accusations have continued to be recycled and propagated by different members of society, including the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

Haiti

In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Israel sent 120 staff, doctors and troops of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to Port-au-Prince. The IDF set up a field hospital that performed 316 surgeries and delivered 16 babies.

On 18 January, an American "activist" called T. West posted a YouTube video calling on Haitians to be wary of "personalities who are out for money", which he referred to as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). To explain his allegations, West stated that in the past "the IDF [had] participated in stealing organ transplants of Palestinians and others", thus echoing the Aftonbladet Israel controversy. West, who claimed to speak for a black-empowerment group called AfriSynergy Productions, stopped short of making more explicit accusations against the IDF's behaviour in Haiti but he noted that there was "little monitoring" of it in the quake's aftermath, insinuating that organ theft was at the very least a strong possibility. The Iranian state outlet Press TV promoted the allegations. In a speech on 22 January, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said "There have been news reports that the Zionist regime, in the case of the catastrophe of Haiti, and under the pretext of providing relief to the people of Haiti, is stealing the organs of these wretched people", again without citing any evidence. On 27 January, a Syrian TV reporter described T. West's video as "document[ing] this heinous crime and ... show[ing] Israelis engaged in stealing organs from the earthquake victims" (despite the fact that the video quite evidently does no such thing).

On 1 February 2010, "The Palestine Telegraph" accused the IDF of harvesting organs in Haiti for sale based on the said YouTube video by T. West whose material was re-used from Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV. In the United Kingdom, Baroness Jenny Tonge was removed from her role as Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman as a result of an interview in which she suggested that an independent inquiry should be established.

Israeli media and Jewish groups fought back against the claims immediately. In an interview with the Ynetnews, West re-iterated his accusation of IDF's past organ theft and cited Operation Bid Rig as further "evidence" of Jewish "involvement" in organ trafficking. The Anti-Defamation League responded, labeling West's allegations as an antisemitic "Big Lie", while an author for the Jewish Ledger referred to the rumors as a renewed blood libel.

9/11 conspiracy theories

Main article: 9/11 conspiracy theories § Antisemitism in conspiracy theories

Some conspiracy theories hold that Jews or Israel played a key role in carrying out the September 11 attacks. According to a paper published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have not been accepted in mainstream circles in the U.S.", but "this is not the case in the Arab and Muslim world". A claim that 4,000 Jewish employees skipped work at the WTC on 11 September has been widely reported and widely debunked. The number of Jews who died in the attacks – typically estimated at 400 – tracks closely with the proportion of Jews living in the New York area. Five Israelis died in the attack.

In 2003, the ADL published a report which attacked "hateful conspiracy theories" that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Israelis and Jews, saying that they had the potential to "rationalize and fuel global anti-Semitism". The ADL's report found that "The Big Lie has united the American far-right, white supremacists and the Arab and Muslim world". It also asserted that many of the theories were modern manifestations of the 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to "expose" a "Jewish conspiracy for world domination". The ADL has characterized the Jeff Rense website as carrying antisemitic materials, such as "American Jews staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their own financial gain and to induce the American people to endorse wars of aggression and genocide on the nations of the Middle East and the theft of their resources for the benefit of Israel".

The Black supremacist New Black Panther Party also accuses Jews of masterminding the 9/11 attacks. The accusation has gained traction among anti-Zionist Black Americans, one of them being Jamaal Bowman, a Black American congressman backed by pro-BLM American progressives with dominating influence in academia. Bowman was found to have shared videos alleging Jewish orchestration of the 9/11 attacks and regional wars. He later lost his primary reelection bid.

Contradictory accusations

Various researchers noted the irrational contradictions in antisemitic tropes. Leon Pinsker noted as early as in 1882:

Friend and foe alike have tried to explain or to justify this hatred of the Jews by bringing all sorts of charges against them. They are alleged to have crucified Jesus, to have drunk the blood of Christians, to have poisoned wells, to have taken usury, to have exploited the peasant, and so on. These and a thousand and one other charges against an entire people have been proved groundless. They showed their own weakness in that they had to be trumped up wholesale in order to quiet the evil conscience of the Jew-baiters, to justify the condemnation of an entire nation, to demonstrate the necessity of burning the Jew, or rather the Jewish ghost, at the stake. He who tries to prove too much proves nothing at all. Though the Jews may justly be charged with many shortcomings, those shortcomings are, at all events, not such great vices, not such capital crimes, as to justify the condemnation of the entire people.

In her 2003 book The Holocaust and Antisemitism: A Short History, Jocelyn Hellig wrote:

Michael Curtis has pointed out the many directly contradictory accusations, claiming that Jews are simultaneiously:

• alienated from society but also cosmopolitans
• isolationed but also intermingled among other peoples
• individualist but also communal
• capitalist exploiters and international financiers but also revolutionary Marxists
• materialistic but also people of the Book
• militant aggressors but also cowardly pacifists
• arrogant but also timid
• superstitious but also promoters of secularism
• upholders of rigid law but also morally decadent
• a chosen people but also an inferior race
• crucifiers of Christ but also inventors of Christianity

Curtis stated:

no single group of people could feasibly have such a total monopoly on evil.

Gustavo Perednik wrote in Judeophobia:

The Jews were accused by the nationalists of being the creators of Communism; by the Communists of ruling Capitalism. If they live in non-Jewish countries, they are accused of double-loyalties; if they live in the Jewish country, of being racists. When they spend their money, they are reproached for being ostentatious; when they don't spend their money, of being avaricious. They are called rootless cosmopolitans or hardened chauvinists. If they assimilate, they are accused of being fifth-columnists, if they don't, of shutting themselves away.

Comments about tropes

According to defense attorney Kenneth Stern, "Historically, Jews have not fared well around conspiracy theories. Such ideas fuel anti-Semitism. The myths that all Jews are responsible for the death of Christ, or poisoned wells, or killed Christian children to bake matzos, or 'made up' the Holocaust, or plot to control the world, do not succeed each other; rather, the list of anti-Semitic canards gets longer." Hannah Arendt, in analyzing antisemitism in the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, shared a joke:

An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asked the one; the other replied: Why the Jews?

See also

• Conspiracy theory
• Expulsions and exoduses of Jews
• False accusation
• Geography of antisemitism
• Jewish history
• Moral panic
• Persecution of Jews
• Scapegoating
• Stereotypes of Jews
• Timeline of antisemitism
• Timeline of Jewish history

Further reading

• Ostow, Mortimer (1996). Myth and Madness: The Psychodynamics of Anti-Semitism (1st ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781351293167. ISBN 9781351293167.

External links

• Antisemitism Uncovered: A Guide to Old Myths in a New Era. Anti-Defamation League.