Antisemitic trope

Antisemitic tropes or antisemitic canards are "sensational reports, misrepresentations, or fabrications" that are defamatory towards Judaism as a religion or defamatory towards Jews as an ethnic or religious group. Since as early as the 2nd century, libels or allegations of Jewish guilt and cruelty emerged as a recurring motif along with antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Antisemitic tropes have often taken the form of popular libels, conspiracy theories, or the denial or minimization of past atrocities against Jews. Antisemitic tropes generally construct Jews and Jewish communities as sinister, cruel, powerful, or controlling. These libels, conspiracies and accusations often led to violence, vandalism, lynchings, or mass killings such as pogroms. Many antisemitic tropes or false accusations developed in societies practicing monotheistic religions which were themselves derived from Judaism, and date back to the birth of Christianity, such as the allegation that the Jews are collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. These tropes are paralleled in later 7th century descriptions of Jews in the Quran which state that they were visited with wrath from Allah because they disbelieved in Allah's revelations, for taking usury, and condemned to punishment. In Medieval Europe, the scope of antisemitic tropes expanded and became the basis for regular persecutions and formal expulsions of Jews in England, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal. It was widely believed that Jews caused epidemics like the Black Death, or other illness by poisoning wells. Jews were also accused of ritually consuming the blood of Christians.

Starting in the 19th century, the notion first emerged that Jews were plotting to establish control over the world and dominate it by promoting capitalism and engaging in banking and finance. In the 20th century, other antisemitic tropes alleged that Jews were responsible for the propagation of Communism and trying to dominate the news media. Those antisemitic tropes, which had political and economic contexts, became political myths central to the worldview of Adolf Hitler, and persist to the present day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the propagation of antisemitic tropes and libels have been documented in the anti-Zionist movement.

The denial and minimization of atrocities committed against Jews is also a classical antisemitic trope of its own, for example by Holocaust denial, or the denial of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world. Holocaust denial may manifest intertwined with a conspiracy theory because of its position that the Holocaust was a hoax or misrepresentation and was designed to advance the interests of Jews and/or justify the creation of the State of Israel. More recently, denial of the October 7 massacres has emerged as an example of this type. Denial of particular attacks on Jews may focus on singular events as a broader way to deny the existence or prevalence of antisemitism in society at larger scales.

Economic and political tropes

Further information: Economic antisemitism

World domination

Further information: Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory, New antisemitism § Anti-globalization movement, Serpent seed § Christian Identity movement, and Our Race Will Rule Undisputed Over The World

A Nazi German cartoon c. 1938 depicts Churchill as a Jewish-controlled octopus who is encircling the globe.

The publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 is usually considered the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature.

This trope is often manifested in both writings and graphic imagery in which Jews (or their supporters) are accused of trying to control the world through nefarious means. Examples of this type of imagery include Nazi cartoons that depict Jews as octopuses which are encircling the globe. A more recent example is the 2001 re-printing in Egypt 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 as a forgery were a series of articles printed in The Times of London in 1921. This series revealed that much of the material in The Protocols was plagiarized from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, an earlier political satire that did not have an antisemitic theme. Since 1903, when The Protocols first appeared in print, its earliest publishers have offered vague and often contradictory testimony detailing how they obtained their copies of the rumored original manuscript.

The text was popularized by supporters of the Tsarist regime. Such supporters, in an effort to discredit the Bolshevik movement that succeeded their regime, claimed that the Jews were the conspirators behind the Russian revolution and held power within the Bolshevik regime, a claim later picked up by the Nazis. The protocols falsely conclude that Communism was fabricated by the Jews for the purpose of stirring up a political revolution to destabilize society, ultimately gaining control and instituting a repressive transnational political system amid the chaos. By framing the Jews as a central conniving power, the protocols developed and popularized the theory of Jewish domination for the sake of preserving monarchic systems, blaming Jews for attempting to undermine Christianity. In this way, the antisemitic world domination trope weaponized the long-standing tendency to use Jews as scapegoats, turning it into a conspiracy theory. This distinctive brand of Jewish scapegoating sought to release anxiety at instability and political change in society—especially rupture that threatened groups and governments that had historically been in power and in the majority—by casting social change as the scheming of Jews eager to undermine the status quo.

These allegations quickly spread Westward from 1920 onward. The Great Depression and the rise of Nazism were important developments in the history of The Protocols, and the hoax continued to be published and circulated despite its debunking. Despite the fact that numerous independent investigations have repeatedly proven The Protocols to be a plagiarism and a literary forgery, the hoax is still frequently quoted and reprinted by antisemites, and is sometimes used as evidence of an alleged Jewish cabal by antisemitic groups in the United States and in the Middle East.

Nazi propagandists, accusing "international Jewry" of plotting and extending World War II through its supposed control of Allied governments, threatened to annihilate the Jews as justified retaliation.

Another world-domination conspiracy goes by the name Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) and various other names, and it claims that Jews secretly control the governments of Western states. The expression is used by white supremacist, white nationalist, far right, nativist, black supremacist, or antisemitic groups in the United States and Europe.

Malcolm X, a famed American Black rights activist in the 1950-60s, believed in the content of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He introduced the forgery to his then-fellow members of the Nation of Islam (NOI), who went on to promote it to the broader Black American community from which they drew widespread sympathy.

On 16 October 2003, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed drew a standing ovation at the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference for his speech, in which he said:

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 so that they can enjoy equal rights with others. With these, they have gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.

He further urged Muslims to emulate Jews in this regard in order to achieve similar results.

In April 2017, Politico magazine published an article purporting to show links between US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Jewish outreach organization Chabad-Lubavitch. The article was condemned. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said that it "evokes age-old myths about Jews".

In December 2023, at a Palestine Justice Movement forum in Bankstown, New South Wales, Australian politician Jenny Leong echoed Mahathir Mohammed's 2003 speech with her accusation that "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 later apologized.

The trope of Jewish governmental and international domination often appears in the twenty-first century in coded terms that cast Jewish domination plots as the exploits of elite individuals, and like with the history of the protocols, this often seeks to scapegoat Jews for orchestrating broader political changes or perpetuating great social ills. For example, it has been linked with the conspiracy theory QAnon, a conspiracy theory which purports that a secret, evil cabal of global elites is harvesting children for world power. The trope of the "globalist" slur is another example of the coded deployment of this antisemitic idea of Jewish world domination.

Two-time heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury has spoken of his belief in a Jewish/Zionist plot to brainwash people and lower moral standards by utilising influence held in the media and financial industries.

According to Gustavo Perednik, unlike any other group hatred, antisemitism tries to disguise brutal instincts as a struggle against "the powerful" embodied in the Jew, no matter how defenceless the actual victim.

Controlling the media

First edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

One antisemitic cliché is that "the Jews control the media" and Hollywood. Despite the fact that he opposed antisemitism during the Hilsner affair, Czech politician Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk believed that Jews controlled the press and helped the nascent state of Czechoslovakia during its struggle for independence. Czech historian Jan Láníček comments that "The great philosopher and humanist Masaryk was still using the same anti-Semitic trope found at the bottom of all anti-Jewish accusations." In Western Europe, Arthur Griffith – the founder of the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party conductive to the independence of Ireland in 1922 – was also a promoter of the myth of Jewish control of mass media. He once claimed 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."

J.J. Goldberg, editorial director of the Jewish-American newspaper The Forward, in 1997 published a study of this myth regarding the United States, concluding that, although Jews do hold many prominent positions in the U.S. media industry, they "do not make a high priority of Jewish concerns" and that Jewish Americans generally perceive the media as anti-Israel. Variants on this theme have focused on Hollywood, the press, and the music industry.

Attorney and scholar Alan Dershowitz said of the subject:

Many of these individuals are Jewish only in the sense that their parents or grandparents happen to be Jews. They do not live Jewish lives or support Jewish causes. They certainly do not conspire to exercise any sort of "Jewish control" over the areas in which they work. Indeed, many individual Jews who are in positions of authority are anti-Israel and critical of Jewish values. Others simply don't care about these issues ... So let's stop all this nonsense about Jewish control over the media and praise those individual Jews who, by dint of hard work and talent, have earned their place, as individuals, in so many areas of American life. I always thought that was the American dream.

Controlling the global financial system

Main article: Economic antisemitism

See also: Medieval antisemitism

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) documented various antisemitic tropes concerning Jews and banking, including the myth that world banking is dominated by the Rothschild family, the myth that Jews control Wall Street, and the myth that Jews control the United States Federal Reserve. The ADL has said the trope is traceable to the prevalence of Jews in the money-lending profession in Europe during the Middle Ages due to a prohibition against Christians in that profession. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion repeats this trope.

In an article about tropes which accuse Jews of controlling the global financial system, the 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, since Jews are prominent in media and finance, 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

Main articles: Usury and Stab-in-the-back myth

In the Middle Ages, Jews were ostracized from most professions by the Christian Church and the guilds and were pushed into marginal occupations considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending. At the same time, church law and rulings prohibited Christians from charging interest. For instance, the Third Council of the Lateran of 1179 threatened excommunication for any Christian lending money at interest. People who wanted or needed to borrow money thus often turned to Jews. Natural tensions between creditors and debtors were added to social, political, religious, and economic strains:

Financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the unpopularity – and so, of course, the pressure – would increase. Thus, Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practised it were excommunicated. But Christians also imposed the harshest financial burdens on Jews. Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending.

Peasants who were forced to pay their taxes to Jews could personify them as the people taking their earnings while remaining loyal to the lords on whose behalf Jews worked. Gentile debtors may have been quick to lay charges of usury against Jewish moneylenders charging even nominal interest or fees. Thus, historically attacks on usury have often been linked to antisemitism.

In England, the departing Crusaders were joined by crowds of debtors in the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190. In 1275, Edward I of England passed the Statute of Jewry which made usury illegal and linked it to blasphemy, in order to seize the assets of the violators. Scores of English Jews were arrested, 300 hanged and their property went to the Crown. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England, allowed to take only what they could carry, the rest of their property became the Crown's. The usury was cited as the official reason for the Edict of Expulsion. According to Walter Laqueur:

The issue at stake was not really whether the Jews had entered it out of greed (as antisemites claimed) or because most other professions were barred to them. ... In countries where other professions were open to them, such as Al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire, one finds more Jewish blacksmiths than Jewish money lenders. 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.

During World War I, Alfred Roth claimed, without evidence, that Jews in the German Army were profiteers, spies and defeatists.

"Kosher tax"

Main article: Kosher tax conspiracy theory

The "Kosher tax" (or "Jewish tax") trope claims that food producers are forced to pay an exorbitant amount to obtain the right to display a symbol on their products that indicates it is kosher, and that this cost is secretly passed on to consumers through higher prices which constitute a "kosher tax". It is mainly spread by antisemitic white supremacist and other extremist organizations.

Refuters of this trope state that if it were not profitable to obtain such certification, then food producers would not engage in the certification process, and that the increased sales resulting from kosher certification actually lower the overall cost per item. Obtaining certification that an item is kosher is a voluntary business decision made by companies desiring additional sales from consumers (both Jewish and non-Jewish) who look for kosher certification when shopping, and is sought by marketing departments of food production companies.

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 20th century allegations started to surface that Jews were responsible for the propagation of Communism, the most notorious example being The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903).

The term "Judeo-Bolshevism" was adopted and used in Nazi Germany to refer to Jews and communists together, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests. A Polish equivalent of the term is Żydokomuna, a canard alleging that "most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union" in "importing communism" into Poland, or that there was an "exclusively Jewish conspiracy" to do so. Żydokomuna is related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.

Religious tropes

Main articles: Religious antisemitism, Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism in Christianity, and Antisemitism in Islam

Guilt for the death of Jesus

Main article: Jewish deicide

The blame for the death of Jesus has often been falsely placed on Jews. Matthew 27:24–25 has been invoked to blame Jews "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.

These verses appear in a narrative in which there was a custom of releasing "a prisoner". This content appears nowhere in the Bible except in Matthew. According to The New Oxford Annotated Bible there is no independent evidence of the custom, and the word "children" refers to the generation that lived to see the destruction of "Jerusalem in 70 CE" and "not all subsequent Jews".

During the Second Vatican Council which was held from 1962 to 1965, the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI issued the document Nostra aetate, which repudiated the belief that Jews are collectively guilty for the Crucifixion of Jesus.

Host desecration

Main article: Host desecration

16th-century painting showing alleged host desecration by Jews in Passau, Germany

During the Middle Ages in Europe, it was claimed that Jews stole consecrated Hosts, or communion wafers, and desecrated them to reenact the crucifixion of Jesus by stabbing or burning the host or otherwise misusing it. The accusations were often supported only by the testimony of the accuser.

The first recorded accusation of host desecration by Jews was made in 1243 at Beelitz, near Berlin, and in consequence of it all the Jews of Beelitz were burned on the spot, subsequently called Judenberg. Jeremy Cohen states that the first host desecration accusation occurred in 1290 in Paris and continues:

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 accusations circulated throughout Europe, often accompanied by massacres. The accusation of host desecration gradually ceased after the Reformation when first Martin Luther in 1523 and then Sigismund II Augustus in 1558 were among those who repudiated the accusation. However, sporadic instances of host desecration libel occurred even in the 18th and 19th century. In 1761 in Nancy, several Jews from Alsace were executed on a charge of host desecration. The last recorded accusations were brought up in Barlad, Romania, in 1836 and 1867.

Ritual murder and blood libel

Main articles: Human sacrifice and Blood libel

Jews were accused of the ritual murder of William of Norwich in 1144.

"The blood libel accusation, another famous anti-Semitic canard, is also a twelfth-century creation." The first recorded ritual murder accusation against Jews was that of William of Norwich, reported by a monk Thomas of Monmouth.

The descriptions of torture and human sacrifice in the antisemitic blood libels run contrary to many of the teachings of Judaism. The Ten Commandments forbid murder. The use of blood (human or otherwise) in cooking is prohibited by Kashrut and blood and other discharges from the human body are considered ritually unclean. (Lev 15) The Bible (Old Testament) and Jewish teachings portray human sacrifice as one of the evils that separated the pagans of Canaan from the Hebrews. (Deut 12:31, 2 Kings 16:3) Jews were prohibited from engaging in these rituals and were punished for doing so (Ex 34:15, Lev 20:2, Deut 18:12, Jer 7:31). Ritual cleanliness for priests prohibited even being in the same room with a human corpse (Lev 21:11).

When "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. In 1385, Geoffrey Chaucer published his Canterbury Tales which included 'The Prioress's Tale', an account of Jews murdering a deeply pious and innocent Christian boy. This blood libel became a part of English literary tradition."

Among those who refuted the blood libel against Jews were 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 in a papal bull dated 7 October 1272: "We decree ... that Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type, and 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 on 26 September 1348: "Jews are not responsible for the Plague."

Another blood libel was described in Damascus in 1840: "An Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Many Jews in that city were charged with ritual murder and tortured until they confessed."

Blood libel stories have appeared in modern times on many occasions in the state-sponsored media of a number of Arab and Muslim nations, their television shows and websites, and books alleging instances of the Jewish blood libels are not uncommon there.

Some Arab writers have condemned blood libel. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published a series of articles by Osama Al-Baz, a senior advisor to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He explained the origins of the anti-Jewish blood libel and said that Arabs and Muslims have never been antisemitic as a group and urged people not to succumb to "myths" such as the blood libel.

Anti-Christian bias

Throughout the years, some antisemites within the Christian community have claimed that Jews either dislike Christianity or are trying to destroy it. On the Jews and Their Lies, which was written by Martin Luther, is one literary work which espouses this claim. The claim has continued to be espoused to the present day, with radio host James Edwards claiming that Jews "hate Christianity" and "the WASP establishment" and further claiming that Jews "are using pornography as a subversive tool against us".

The Anti-Defamation League has written the following statement on the subject:

This is not to say that Jews have historically borne no animus (hostility) 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, and in some places Jews developed a folk literature that demeaned Christianity. 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, accusations of impurity

Main articles: Demonization, Judensau, and Der Stürmer

Jeremy Cohen writes:

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. ... Popular traditions of the later Middle Ages, for example, characterize Jews as having a distinctive foul odor. ... By all accounts, the bestiality of the Jew climaxed in the image of the Judensau ...

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

Judensau (German for "Jew-sow") was a derogatory and dehumanizing image of Jews that appeared around the 13th century. Its popularity lasted for over 600 years and was revived by the Nazis. Jews, who were typically portrayed as having obscene contact with unclean animals such as pigs or owls or representing a devil, appeared on cathedral or church ceilings, pillars, utensils, etchings, etc.

Often, the images combined several antisemitic motifs and they also included derisive prose or poetry. Cohen continues:

Dozens of Judensaus ... intersect with the portrayal of the Jew as a Christ killer. Various illustrations of the murder of Simon of Trent blended images of Judensau, the devil, the murder of little Simon himself, and the Crucifixion. In the seventeenth-century engraving from Frankfurt ... a well-dressed, very contemporary-looking Jew has mounted the sow backward and holds her tail, while a second Jew sucks at her milk and a third eats her feces. The horned devil, himself wearing a Jewish badge, looks on and the butchered Simon, splayed as if on a cross, appears on a panel above.

More recently, "[t]he main recurrent motif in Arab cartoons concerning Israel is 'the devilish Jew'" and "[t]he core anti-Semitic motif of the Jew as the paradigm of 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."

Male menstruation

The Christian belief that Jewish men menstruated, which appeared in the 16th century, was part of the overall antisemitic concept that all Jews were of feminine gender. This belief, first arising around 1500, was based on biblical passages connecting Jews with bleeding, which were however not suggesting anything in terms of gender. Such were the description of the death of Judas in Acts 1:18–19, with his belly bursting open, a detail inspiring other accounts of heretics spilling their blood or entrails through the anus at their death. This was linked in the twelfth century with the so-called "blood curse" invoked by the Jews present at Jesus' trial before Pilate (Matt 27:25). In the following century, an allegedly rational explanation was added based on ancient humoral medicine, supplemented with a verse from the Psalms offered as an argument supporting the idea of anal bleeding as a supernatural punishment: "And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts" (Psalm 78:66, King James Version). Already in 1302 Christians alleged that Jewish men who were direct descendants of those who had taken responsibility for the crucifixion in the "blood curse" would suffer of a monthly bleeding. In 1503, an account of the ritual murder trials held in Tyrnau in 1494 contains the earliest mention of gendered, monthly bleeding.

In 17th-century Spain the old notion was recycled with the help of physicians, including the king's own, and combining the accusation of menstruation with that of hemorrhoids, at a time when there were efforts underway of establishing a legal concept of "impure blood" connected to family or caste. These have been interpreted as attempts at creating the legal notion of racial impurity.

Well poisoning

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

2000 Jews burned to death in Strasbourg 1349 during the Black Death

Medieval depiction of a Jew poisoning a well while performing a ritual murder

During the Black Death (often identified as bubonic plague epidemic) throughout the late Middle Ages, crowded cities were especially hard hit by the disease, with death tolls as high as 50% of the population. In their distress, emotionally distraught survivors searched for something, or someone, to blame. Jews proved to be a convenient scapegoat. The accusation entered into the repertoire of antisemitic language, showing up again in contexts as diverse as Stalin's doctors' plot and charges of Jews spreading AIDS or other infectious diseases.

A series of violent attacks broke out in Europe from 1348 to 1351 targeting Jewish communities blamed for an outbreak of the Black Death. The first massacres directly related to the plague took place in April 1348 in Toulon, where the Jewish quarter was sacked, and forty Jews were murdered in their homes, 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. Two thousand Jews were burned alive on 14 February 1349 in the Strasbourg massacre, where the plague had not yet affected the city.

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

See also: 1933 anti-Nazi boycott

1941 antisemitic poster in German-occupied Serbia showing a Jew behind both capitalism and communism

German politician Heinrich von Treitschke in the 19th century coined a 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'.

Karsh furthered that American Jews were accused of "dragging" the country into World War II and the Iraq War by antisemitic individuals on both ends of the political spectrum. He claimed that such phenomenon was related to exaggerated claims about the "influence" of the "Israel lobby", especially made by controversial political scientist John Mearsheimer who wrote the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy promoting the claims thereof, which was considered by critics to have legitimised the trope of "Jewish domination" and encouraged antisemitism in society. Due to Mearsheimer's influence in academia, his rhetoric has been co-opted by antisemitic groups on both ends of the political spectrum in diplomacy-related discourse. 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 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 ...

Making people LGBT

In 2016, 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 claimed that Jews are "turning men into women and women into men" and using a specially concocted strain of marijuana which is designed to make Black men gay and effeminate.

In 2020, conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles, through his website 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".

Controlling the weather, 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

During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler ascribed the blame for the future "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" on international Jewish financiers who were seeking to start a world war.

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

In 2002, the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi said, "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 were staged by Russian Jewish leaders, including Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, human rights activists, and the Russian Foreign Ministry, Duma members retracted their appeal."

Dual loyalty

Main article: dual loyalty

A trope found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but dating to before that document, is that Jews are more loyal to world Jewry than to their own country. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, this trope has taken the form of accusations that Jewish citizens of other countries are more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence.

Ilhan Omar, a progressive U.S. House representative from Minnesota, made a speech in March 2019 allegedly suggesting that American Jews held dual loyalty to Israel, which drew criticisms. David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, praised Ilhan Omar's speech.

Cowardice and lack of patriotism

Main articles: Dreyfus affair, stab-in-the-back myth, Antisemitism in France, and Antisemitism in Germany

"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.

Main articles: Antisemitism in the Soviet Union, rootless cosmopolitan, Doctor's Plot, and Night of the Murdered Poets

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 on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the purge.

Despite such historical precedents, a significant number of left-wing "anti-Zionists" in Western countries have reportedly not shown sufficient willingness to acknowledge the close correlations between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Racism

Further information: Jews as the chosen people § Ethnocentrism

A number of books and websites which are run by Neo-Nazis, advocates of white supremacy, adherents of Christian Identity, radical Islamist and progressive groups contain quotes which they claim are authoritative quotes from rabbinic literature, all in an attempt to prove their belief that Judaism is a racist religion which teaches its adherents to hate non-Jews by espousing the belief that they are not even human.

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 record 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.

Inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust

Main articles: Holocaust denial, Holocaust trivialisation, and Evidence and documentation for the Holocaust

See also: Secondary antisemitism

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

Killing field at Auschwitz concentration camp I, where thousands of prisoners were shot during the camp's operation.

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 they openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy to advance the interests of Jews at the expense of other peoples, For this reason, Holocaust denial is generally considered to be an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The methodologies of Holocaust deniers are criticized for ignoring extensive historical evidence pointing to the contrary of their presuppositions, with some of them referring to it as the "Holohoax" in far-right online spaces. On 25 January 2024, Dawn Queva, a senior BBC staffer came under investigation for using the epithet in some of her tweets.

See also: Antisemitism in the Arab world, Arab nationalism, and Palestinian nationalism

Holocaust deniers include the prominently anti-Zionist former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, French professor Robert Faurisson, French teacher Vincent Reynouard, British author David Irving, Germar Rudolf, who had been convicted by a German court of inciting racial hatred etc.

In 2010, a regional poll conducted by the University of Maryland in cooperation with the Zogby International found that 56% of citizens in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the UAE did not sympathise with the Holocaust in the sense that the Jews "deserved it". For interviewees in denial, they held 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, a global survey by the prominent American civil rights advocacy Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that almost half of the world did not know that the Holocaust happened. In the same year, Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian peace activist and professor who took his students on a trip to the Auschwitz concentration camps to learn about the Holocaust, was forced to resign by antisemitic administrators of the Al-Quds University, who accused him of promoting "Zionist narrative to gain international support for Israel". He justified Holocaust education as a prerequisite for peace,

Holocaust denial and distortion are historically incorrect, and factually wrong, and constitute a significant threat to morality and human dignity...

Controlling the Atlantic slave trade

Further information: Jewish views on slavery § Modern era

Exploiting pre-existing racial tension between Black and Jewish Americans, antisemites have exaggerated Jews' role in the Atlantic slave trade to demonise 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 whose ideas wield tremendous influence over Black Americans, that Jews "orchestrated" the Atlantic slave trade. As of 24 September 2024, the NOI-published book that promoted such an antisemitic conspiracy theory is still being sold on the platform Black History Books UK alongside publications associated with Black studies.

A number of historians, including Saul S. Friedman, conducted in-depth 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 soundly disproving the conspiracy theory. 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, blood libel, 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 publicised 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 said that workers at the forensic institute had taken skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from deceased Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers without permission during 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 famous model Gigi Hadid and 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, who was only known as T. West, posted a video on YouTube in which he called for Haitians to be wary of "personalities who are out for money" and he also called for Haitians to be particularly wary of the 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 television station Press TV reported on the allegations and 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 Gaza-based The Palestine Telegraph, of which Baroness Jenny Tonge was a patron at that time, published the claim that the IDF were secretly harvesting organs in Haiti and selling them on the black market, based on the above-mentioned YouTube video by T. West, in which video material was re-used from Hezbollah's Al-Manar television broadcast with no cited evidence to support it. 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 immediately fought back against the claims. In an interview with Ynetnews, West re-iterated his accusation about past incidents of organ theft by the IDF and cited Operation Bid Rig as further evidence of Jewish involvement in organ trafficking. The Anti-Defamation League responded, labeling West's allegations as antisemitic and as a "Big Lie", while an author for the Jewish Ledger referred to the rumors as a "blood libel".

9/11 attacks conspiracy

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 American far-right extremists and white supremacists and elements within the Arab and Muslim world". It asserted that many of the theories were modern manifestations of the 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to map out 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".

Contradictory accusations

A number of researchers noted the contradictions and irrationality which exist across antisemitic myths. Leon Pinsker noted as early as 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 said 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 that no other group of people in the world has been charged simultaneously with the following, among others:

• Alienation from society and cosmopolitanism;
• Being isolationists and intermingling with other people;
• Being capitalist exploiters and agents of international finance, as well as being revolutionary Marxists;
• Having a materialistic mentality and being people of the Book;
• Acting as militant aggressors, and being cowardly pacifists;
• Adhering to a superstitious religion while also being agents of secularism;
• Upholding a rigid law while also being morally decadent;
• Being a chosen people, but having an inferior human nature;
• Being both arrogant and timid;
• Emphasizing individualism while upholding communal adherence;
• Being guilty of the crucifixion of Christ, and being blamed for the invention of Christianity.

Curtis points out that "this catalogue of contradictory accusations cannot possibly be true because no single group of people could feasibly have such a total monopoly on evil."

Gustavo Perednik wrote in his book The 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."

See also

• Conspiracy theory
• Dehumanization
• Demonization
• Expulsions and exoduses of Jews
• False accusation
• Geography of antisemitism
• History of antisemitism
• History of Zionism
• Islamophobia
• Jewish history
• Moral panic
• Persecution of Jews
• Pogrom
• QAnon
• Scapegoating
• Stereotypes of Jews
• Stochastic terrorism
• Timeline of antisemitism
• Timeline of anti-Zionism
• 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.