Antisemitic trope

Antisemitic tropes, also known as antisemitic canards or antisemitic libels, are "sensational reports, misrepresentations or fabrications" directed at Jews as an ethnicity or Judaism as a religion, while Jews and Judaism are not interchangeable because Jewishness can be defined by ancestry or religious identity. In this article, both antisemitic tropes directed at Jews and Judaism are included.

As early as the 2nd century, libels or allegations of Jewish guilt or cruelty emerged as a recurring motif in antisemitic conspiracy theories. Antisemitic tropes tend to take the form of libels, stereotypes, or conspiracy theories. Antisemitic tropes can also manifest as the denial or trivialization of any instances of past atrocities or discrimination against Jews in any regions or institutions., typically construing Jews 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 developed in monotheistic societies, whose religions were derived from Judaism, many of which could be dated back to the birth of Christianity, such as the accusation that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus and the blood libel. These tropes were paralleled by claims in the Quran that Jews were "visited with wrath from Allah" because they "disbelieved in Allah's revelations" and "took usury". In medieval Europe, antisemitic tropes were expanded to justify persecutions and expulsions of Jews from England, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal etc., when Jews were often accused of "causing" epidemics like the 14th-century Black Death by poisoning wells. Jews were also accused of ritually consuming the blood of Christians.

In the 19th century, the rumour that Jews were seeking world domination by attempting to gain control of capitalist commerce, banking and mass media emerged. In the 20th century, newer antisemitic tropes emerged to promote the idea of Jewish creation and propagation of communism. These tropes formed Adolf Hitler's worldview, caused WWII and the Holocaust. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the propagation of antisemitic tropes and libels have been documented in the anti-Zionist movement.

The denial and trivialization of historical atrocities against Jews are typical contemporary antisemitic tropes, mainly Holocaust denial and trivialization. or of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world. Holocaust denial tends to intertwine with pre-existing antisemitic canards, typical of which is the trope that the Holocaust was "fabricated" to "advance" the "interests" of "Jews" and Israel. A more recent example is the denial of the genocidal nature of the October 7 massacres, with most victims being Jewish, a sizeable proportion of whom were also Holocaust survivors. Denial of the presence or severity of antisemitism in any part of present society is also a form of antisemitism.

Economic and political tropes

Further information: Economic antisemitism

World domination

Further information: Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, New World Order 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 Neo-Nazis, White nationalists, black supremacists and Islamists around the world.

Further information: Malcolm X, Black supremacy, Black nationalism, Black separatism, Black Panther Party, New Black Panther Party, New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers, African American–Jewish relations, and List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups § Black separatist and black nationalist

Malcolm X, a famed American Black rights activist in the 1950-60s, believed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. X introduced the forgery to his then-allies within the Nation of Islam (NOI), who went on to promote it among Black Americans from which they drew widespread sympathy. New Black Panther Party, a black separatist successor to the Malcolm X-inspired Black Panther Party, is still promoting his antisemitic ideas. In the leadup to a 2006 Democratic primary runoff election, NBPP's members employed antisemitic tropes in their rhetoric,

...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 Democratic candidate Cynthia McKinney lost to her partisan rival Hank Johnson, NBPP's members blamed it on imaginary "Jewish domination",

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

The NBPP was also responsible for incidents of voter intimidation and pro-BLM mass shooting in the 2010s, while similar rhetoric was allegedly employed by Cori Bush, a progressive Black American Democratic congresswoman, when she lost her primary election to Wesley Bell, which led to a rebuke by the White House.

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 fight back using similar tactics.

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. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned the article as "evok[ing] 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 persists in the twenty-first century, veiled as criticism of particular Jewish plutocrats or politicians seen as secret movers behind broad political changes and social ills. For example, the QAnon conspiracy theory believes in a cabal of satanic global elites who drink the blood of children to achieve immortality and world power. The "globalist" trope is another echo of this idea. Two-time heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury has spoken of his belief in a Jewish/Zionist plot to brainwash people and lower moral standards through the media and finance. According to Gustavo Perednik, unlike any other group hatred, antisemitism tries to disguise its aggressive instincts as a struggle of the oppressed against the "powerful Jews", no matter how defenceless their actual Jewish victims.

Controlling the media

First edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

A common antisemitic cliché 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 opposition to antisemitism during the Hilsner affair. Czech historian Jan Láníček said,

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 Sinn Féin party that won the independence of Ireland, was also a promoter of the "Jewish media control" trope. Griffith 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.

Griffith's antisemitism still has some adherents at present. 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 Rothschilds...[may] not have been too far wrong".

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

Attorney and scholar Alan Dershowitz commented,

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 accusing "most Jews" of having "collaborated with the Soviet Union" in "importing communism" to Poland. Żydokomuna is also related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.

Religious tropes

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

Guilt for the death of Jesus

Main articles: Jewish deicide and Adversus Judaeos

Further information: Second Vatican Council § Decrees and declarations on the Church in the world, Nostra aetate, and Christian–Jewish reconciliation

The death of Jesus has long been falsely blamed on Jews as a people. 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.

Jewish deicide was legitimized in Christian theology by Saint John Chrysostom, one of the prominent 4th-century Church Fathers.

In the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) between 1962 and 1965, the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI issued the document Nostra aetate repudiating the long-standing canard 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 the objection of radical traditionalists, the initiative was distantly followed up by an "apology" in March 2000 for the almost 2,000 years of Catholic persecution of Jews, amid claims of the Second Temple menorah still being hidden in the Vatican.

Radical Traditionalist Catholics – nicknamed rad trads – who oppose Christian–Jewish reconciliation have continued promoting Jewish deicide and engaging in anti-Jewish violence alongside non-Catholic extremists. Subreddits r/Catholicism and r/AskAChristian on Reddit – one of the most visited forums in the world – are reportedly frequented by rad trads who have been spreading virulent antisemitism for years without any administrative interventions despite repeated Reddit's rule violations. The American civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) commented that Reddit was the "home of the most violently racist internet content", which had replaced traditionally far-right websites like the Stormfront in terms of racist content's frequency and quantity. The SPLC's view on Reddit was shared by the ADL and prominent intellectuals.

According to the SPLC, the rad trads – just as Neo-Nazis – often cite content from the anti-Jewish forgery 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 church doctrine changes for selfish gain
• Catholics cannot trust the Jews
• The Vatican II dialogue with the Jews is a pantomime to destroy Catholic militancy against Judaism

Anti-Defamation League (ADL), another American civil rights group, noted,

Traditionalist Catholics...believe that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic church...continued to incorporate explicit antisemitism into their theology...a paranoid belief in Jewish conspiracies to undermine the church and Western civilization...Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), which is the foremost global Traditionalist Catholic organization...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.

Further information: Inquisition, Spanish Inquisition, Historical revision of the Inquisition § Antisemitism and the "conversos", and Historical negationism

Nevertheless, the Vatican and many Catholics worldwide are still denying the scale or brutality of the Inquisition, with the victims heavily Jewish. Some Catholics tend to exaggerate Catholics' role in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust to minimize the Catholic origin of post-antiquity European antisemitism and irredeemable suffering they had inflicted on Jews, while showing a tendency to accuse critics of "anti-Catholic bias" in relevant discussions.

Blood libel

Main article: Blood libel

Further information: Statute of Kalisz

Jews were falsely 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 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. (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 performed these rituals (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).

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:

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 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 extreme Christians in America, including the Radical Traditionalist Catholics and ultra-conservative firebrand Candace Owens. Owens claimed in July 2024 that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched 101 years ago over false accusations of murdering a young 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

A 15th-century German woodcut showing an alleged host desecration.
1: the hosts are stolen
2: the hosts bleed when pierced by a Jew
3: the Jews are arrested
4: they are burned alive.

16th-century painting imagining 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.

Accusations of anti-Christian conspiracy

Main articles: Christianity and Judaism, Catholic Church and Judaism, and Protestantism and Judaism

Throughout the years, some antisemites within the Christian community have claimed that Jews either dislike Christianity or are trying to destroy Christianity. On the Jews and Their Lies, which was written by Martin Luther, is one literary work that espoused such a claim. The claim is still being espoused, 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 (ADL) noted,

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 in Christianity

Main articles: Demonization, Saint John Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos, Judensau, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther in Nazi Germany

Further information: Der Stürmer, Nazi racial theories, and Religious views of Adolf Hitler

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 demonized Jews by describing 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.

Saint John Chrysostom's homilies against Jews were legitimized in Christian theology and ultimately used by the Nazis in WWII to garner Christian support for the Holocaust.

On the other hand, 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...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.

Judensau (German for Jews' sow) is a dehumanizing imagery of Jews that appeared around the 13th century. Its popularity reportedly lasted for six centuries before being revived by the Nazis. Sculptures of Jews, typically portrayed as "obscene human contact" with unclean animals such as pigs and owls, were often found on cathedral or church ceilings, pillars, utensils, etchings etc.

The images always combined multiple antisemitic motifs. They could also include derisive prose or poetry. Cohen continued,

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...and the Crucifixion. In a 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...

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 to demonize Jews. In his 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 Jewish swine...[and the synagogue]...incorrigible whore and an evil slut,

but also called for the elimination of Jews from the territories of the Holy Roman Empire by

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

Martin Luther was elevated to an unprecedented status in the Nazi era, with the Nazi Party's mouthpiece Der Stürmer touting him as "one of the greatest anti-Semites in German history." It is claimed that Luther's antisemitic thesis is widely considered by Western scholars to have brought about the Holocaust, despite the 400-year lapse. Since then, the book has reportedly been denounced by several Lutheran churches. Whereas, Martin Luther remains a divisive figure among churches due to systemic antisemitism, with some churches downplaying his impact on German antisemitism that ultimately contributed to the Holocaust.

Demonization in other religions or movements

Main articles: Black Hebrew Israelites, Black supremacy, Black nationalism, Black separatism, Cultural appropriation, and Passing (racial identity)

Further information: African American–Jewish relations § Black Hebrew Israelites, Groups claiming affiliation with Israelites, List of new religious movements, and List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups § Black separatist and black nationalist

A group of Black Hebrew Israelites promoting their ideology in New York City, 1995.

Early image of the menorah on a coin minted under Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean king of Judea (r. 40–37 BCE).

Magdala Stone (1st century), with a menorah sculped, found in Magdala during Migdal Synagogue's discovery.

Religiously motivated demonization of Jews is not unique to old Abrahamic religions. New religious movements have also had a track record of demonizing Jews, a famous example of which is the "Black Hebrew Israelites". Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI) believe that African Americans are descendants of ancient Israelites, but BHI have no associations with either Jews or Christians. Just as the Messianic "Judaism" movement founded by Conservative Baptist Association's Christian Evangelical priest Moishe Rosen, the BHI do not meet any criteria for being considered Jewish, regardless of their claims and appropriation of Jewish rituals or symbols.

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 in the same manner as most Islamists and far-left "anti-Zionists" do. BHI have accused contemporary Jews of being "European converts to Judaism" and running the Atlantic slave trade, thereby smearing contemporary Jews as a group of "White oppressors" devoid of history, culture or virtues, which is also a trope commonly used by radical backers of the Palestinian side in debates over the Gaza War.

Some BHI have gone as far as denying the Holocaust, akin to their concurrently Islamist counterparts Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam (NOI) followers, who are far more influential in academia among socially active scholars of Black studies, Islamic studies and Critical Race Theory. These caused the BHI to be classified as an antisemitic black separatist hate group 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.

On the other hand, political observer Ralph Lenoard further analyzed the BHI,

Black Hebrew Israelism is an ideology which holds that all the original Jews of the Bible were black...Jews, then...are white interlopers who have stolen and distorted an 'African religion'...obviously a racist cult...their mantra that 'black people are the real Jews' has permeated into some sectors of African-American consciousness, given that big-time celebrities like West, Irving, and DeSean Jackson and Nick Cannon...amplified some of these views...this blatant anti-Semitism — is a kind of 'Jew envy'...

Such BHI-espoused antisemitic tropes have been popularized to demonize and incite racial aggression on Jews under the guise of "anti-imperialism" via subtle association of Jews with White supremacy, despite Jews having historically been the most hard-hit group under White imperialism.

Sects of the BHI that have been propagating vicious antisemitism include but not limited to the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge (ISUPK), Sicarii Hebrew Israelites, House of Israel (HOI), Nation of Yahweh (NOY), True Nation Israelite Congregation (or True Nation) and Israelites Saints of Christ and The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ (ICGJC). The ADL summarized the commonly used BHI slurs, including but not limited to:

• Jew-ish: Negative term for mainstream Jews and used to depict them as imposters
• "So-Called": Draw doubt to identity labels. Jews are referred to as so called Jews, and members subscribed to BHI ideology so called Blacks, Hispanics and Native Indians", to highlight aspects of stolen and forced identity
• Synagogue of Satan: Antisemitic term used by groups to express their dislike of Jews and refer to their ostensible nefarious actions

Alongside the pre-existing anti-Jewish KKK, Neo-Nazis, Islamists and far-left "anti-Zionists", the BHI have committed countless acts of terrorism against Jews since the 1970s, the most recent of which include but not limited to the Jersey City Shooting (7 dead and 3 injured) and Monsey Hanukkah stabbing (1 dead and 4 injured). 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 – creating a false impression of "internecine conflict" – and misusing their historically oppressed status to gain sympathy from anti-racist intellectuals to whitewash themselves academically.

Unification Church (UC), a Christian equivalent of the BHI (3 million members worldwide, 100,000 in America) founded by South Korean priest Sun Myung Moon in 1954, was also criticized for demonizing Jews in its manifesto Divine Principle. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) pointed out that the UC's manifesto included a series of "pejorative language, stereotyped imagery, accusations of collective sin and guilt", including their claim that "Jews had gone through a course of indemnity" due to John the Baptist's "failure to recognize Jesus as the Messiah".

The UC rejected AJC's criticisms as "distortion" and "obscurations", especially by Mose Durst, a convert from Judaism and the then-president of the Unification Church of the United States, who accused his Jewish community of "insecurity" and being "hateful". Despite the UC's claims, Sun Myung Moon held an interfaith march with Louis Farrakhan, the most influential antisemite in America, in Washington D.C..

Male menstruation

The Christian belief that Jewish men menstruated anally, first arising around 1500, was part of an overall concept that all Jews were somehow female. The belief was based on biblical passages connecting Jews with bleeding, such as the description of the death of Judas in Acts 1:18–19, with his belly bursting open. This detail inspired other accounts of heretics spilling their blood or entrails through the anus at death. This was linked in the twelfth century with the so-called "blood curse" invoked by the Jews at Jesus' trial before Pilate (Matt 27:25). In the next century, a pseudo-scientific explanation was added based on humoral medicine, supplemented with a verse from the Psalms: "And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts" (Psalm 78:66, King James Version). By 1302, it was claimed that Jewish male descendants of those who had taken responsibility for the crucifixion would suffer a monthly bleeding. A 1503 account of the ritual murder trials at Tyrnau in 1494 contains the earliest mention of male monthly bleeding.

In 17th-century Spain, the notion was revived by physicians, including the king's own, conflating menstruation with hemorrhoids and contributing to a legal concept of "impure blood" in a family or race.

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 (bubonic plague epidemics) of the late Middle Ages, crowded cities were especially hard hit, with death tolls as high as 50% of the population. Emotionally distraught survivors blamed Jews as a convenient scapegoat. This new accusation would enter the repertoire of antisemitic language and continue as late as Stalin's doctors' plot and charges of Jews spreading AIDS and other diseases.

Soon after the epidemic's entry to Europe in 1346, a series of violent attacks broke out in 1348 to 1351, targeting Jewish communities blamed for the outbreaks. The first massacres directly related to the plague took place in April 1348 in Toulon, where the Jewish quarter was sacked and forty Jews 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, a preventive measure as 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 (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 controversial political scientist John Mearsheimer in a 2007 book , which was criticised 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 ...

Making 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 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 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".

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 claimed that international Jewish financiers were 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.

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 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 the establishment of the state of Israel, this has developed into claims that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence and citizenship.

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 criticism. 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 correlation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Ethnocentrism

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 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. On 25 January 2024, Dawn Queva, a senior BBC staffer came under investigation for using the epithet in some of her tweets.

Further information: Antisemitism in the Arab world, Arab nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, and Islamo-Nazism

Holocaust deniers include the 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 poll found that 56% of citizens in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the UAE, when asked about the Holocaust, believed that the Jews "deserved it". Interviewees with this view 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 found that almost half of the world did not know that the Holocaust happened. In that year, Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian peace activist and professor took his students on a trip to the Auschwitz concentration camps to learn about the Holocaust, and 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...

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 – representing money – and the Nazi swastika.

In recent decades, "the 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 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." The said widespread 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 turned into the primary perpetrators of it, to the effect of whitewashing the perpetrators' war crimes, expunging their guilt while achieving the erasure of Jews' historical victimhood. In addition, Holocaust inversion is a form of Holocaust trivialization, which is officially considered antisemitic. According to the World Jewish Congress, manifestations of Holocaust inversion include but not limited to

• 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 claimed,

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 holds such widespread appeal among contemporary Jews that it has become an integral part of many of their identity, especially in the United States and United Kingdom with which Israel is allied. Renowned Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer classified "Zio-Nazi" as hate speech. The Meta recently announced that these terms would be subject to restrictions on Facebook and Instagram. Having said that, 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 under the guise of "anti-Zionism".

Controlling the Atlantic slave trade

Main articles: Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam, and 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 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 25 September 2024, the NOI-published book that promoted such a canard is still being sold on the platform Black History Books UK alongside publications associated with Black studies, while a "verified" YouTube channel promoting Louis Farrakhan's antisemitic ideas has accumulated over 507,000 subscribers and 45,002,712 views.

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 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" 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 TV 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, pro-Hamas outlet 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 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 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 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".

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 widely 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

A number of researchers noted the contradictions and irrationality in 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 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 states: "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
• 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
• Racism by country
• Religious terrorism
• Right-wing terrorism
• 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.