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through-the-digital-mirror · 25 days ago

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Antisemitism IS Being Weaponized (Against Non-Jews)

[Non-Jews are invited and encouraged to reblog this post]

It's absolutely true that non-Jews are being manipulated by weaponized antisemitism.

Antisemitism isn’t just an old hatred. it’s a reliable tool used to manipulate people, to keep them angry at the wrong things, to ensure they are distracted from real threats, to consolidate power or unite the gullible against a common enemy.

The following are just a handful of the many examples in which those in power used Jews and/or antisemitism to manipulate non-Jews and protect their own power.

If you want to understand how deceptive political narratives are crafted today, you need to recognize the old tricks.

Ancient Rome (1st Century CE): Make an Example of the Weirdos

After the Jewish revolt against Roman rule, the empire crushed the rebellion and destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, but the Roman victory wasn’t complete until they won the PR battle. Jews were painted as strange, subversive, and dangerously stubborn. Not eating pork? Not bowing to the emperor? What a bunch of freaks!

The messaging wasn’t really about Jews. It was aimed at everyone else in the empire.

The Jews became the ultimate Roman imperial cautionary tale: defy the system, and this will happen to you. Romans turned Jewish resistance into a morality play that taught the masses the one thing which could save them from Roman might: obedience.

The Arch of Titus still stands as a monument to this strategy - not just celebrating a military win, but showcasing the cost of rebellion. Antisemitism here wasn’t religious - it was strategic.

History’s First Viral Misinformation Campaign?

When Europe got hit by the Black Death, people were terrified and clueless because like RFK Jr, they didn't believe in germ theory. (Unlike RFK Jr., they had the excuse of being born centuries before it was discovered.)

Instead of asking awkward questions about hygiene or rats, leaders found a simpler solution: Accusations that Jews had poisoned wells or killed Christian children took off like wildfire.

Why spread these lies? Because fear is easier to manage when it’s directed. If the peasants were upset about death and disease, channeling that rage toward a convenient minority was both effective and politically safe for those in power.

Kings and clergy didn't let pogroms rage because they believed the rumors, but because it kept the mob from turning on them. When people are burning down Jewish homes, they’re not storming the castle or asking about tax hikes.

Jews were cast as a threat to public health, morality, and safety in an early version of crisis exploitation.

Convert, Confess, or Be Conveniently Condemned

After Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many converted to Christianity under pressure, but the paranoia didn’t end - it escalated.

What if these "New Christians" were secretly Jewish? Enter the Inquisition, where you could be tortured and executed on vibes alone.

The real goal, though, wasn’t purity of faith. It was purity of power.

Spain was trying to build a unified national identity, and nothing creates unity like a common enemy. Accusing someone of "Judaizing" became a political weapon. It didn’t matter if they were actually secretly Jewish.

The message to the masses? Trust no one, conform completely, and prove your loyalty constantly. Bonus points if you denounce a neighbor.

Antisemitism here wasn’t a social panic. It was an engine of authoritarianism with Jews as the fuel - a way for the powerful to keep the rabble in line.

Russia Invents the Modern Antisemite

Late imperial Russia was a hot mess with poverty, revolution, and a wildly unpopular monarchy. Instead of reforming, the Tsars served up a distraction. The infamous pogroms (organized massacres) weren't just random, grass-roots explosions of violence. They were tolerated and even encouraged in order to keep the mob occupied.

To pour gas on that fire, they produced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a completely fake document "leaked" by Russian secret police that claimed Jews were plotting world domination. Perfect for stoking paranoia and deflecting blame.

While peasants were burning Jewish shtetls, the aristocracy kept their heads on their shoulders and their power intact. Jews weren’t a threat to Russians, they were a diversion.

As a result, Russia became less stable, more paranoid, and even more antisemitic. But hey, at least the regime bought itself a few more years of survival with all those Jewish deaths, right?

The Ultimate Political Unifier

After World War I, Germany was humiliated, bankrupt, and bitter. Hitler needed a villain to unite the fractured nation, and Jews fit the bill. Not because they were powerful, but because they could be painted as too powerful. Banking? Media? Culture? Filled with those sneaky Jews...!

Nazism weaponized antisemitism like a Swiss Army knife. It justified economic collapse, explained national humiliation, and required embracing political repression. Jews became the root cause of every problem, which made the solution feel heroic: mass-murdering the foreign infiltrators would solve the problems.

Average Germans didn’t have to face hard truths. They just had to believe. If your life sucked, it wasn’t your fault - it was a cabal of scheming outsiders.

This wasn’t about theology. It was about crafting a false but emotionally satisfying worldview to manipulate Germans, one that replaced accountability with hate.

And it worked amazingly well.

When was a Bad Thing to be a Jewish Doctor

Stalin's Soviet Union was built on fear and suspicion. After World War II, that paranoia found a familiar outlet. In 1952, Stalin accused a group of Jewish doctors of plotting to kill Soviet leaders. The whole thing was a lie, but that didn't matter.

Why Jewish doctors? Because they were educated, urban, and often treated high-level officials. Accusing them served a double purpose: it terrified the elite and signaled to the public that no one was safe.

This wasn’t antisemitism out of ideology. It was cold-blooded political strategy. By turning Jews into symbols of treachery, Stalin reinforced the culture of fear that kept him in power.

Once again, Jews weren’t the problem, but they were a perfect target.

The Soviets also invented "antizionist, not antisemitic," but that's a topic for another time.

In every one of these examples, antisemitism served someone’s agenda for manipulating non-Jews.

It united mobs. It protected tyrants. It distracted from failure. It created identity through opposition. It played on fears and worries to convince people to commit atrocities.

It wasn’t about theology, culture, or actual grievances. It was about power.

If you want to understand how people in charge manipulate the public, learn how they talk about Jews. Not because Jews run the world - but because lies about Jews have been the tools of those who do.

Okay, so by now you can see the pattern in history. Can you recognize it today?

Putin used Antisemitism to Justify his Invasion of Ukraine

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he didn’t just roll in tanks, he also rolled out a twisted narrative. His main claim was that Russia had to "denazify" Ukraine...a country led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Jewish man whose family members were murdered in the Holocaust. Putin insisted that Russia was the heroic figure, here to save the day from those terrible Ukrainian antisemites.

This wasn’t about fighting actual antisemitism; it was about weaponizing the word. Accusing your enemies of being Nazis has long been a go-to move in Russian propaganda.

Meanwhile, Putin's pals were cozying up to actual far-right, antisemitic groups in Europe, and while he called Ukrainians fascists, his government was busy banning books, jailing historians, and polishing the turd of Stalin's legacy.

Putin's "denazification" claim was a case of geopolitical gaslighting.

Donald Trump Uses "Antisemitism" to Justify Authoritarianism

Donald Trump said if he lost the election, it would be the fault of the Jews - and that was chilling enough.

What's far worse is how Trump uses the excuse of "fighting antisemitism" to attack institutions which he sees as potential obstacles to his authoritarian consolidation of power.

Harvard, Columbia, and others do have an antisemitism problem, but that's not what is motivating Trump - and the vast majority of US Jews oppose his assault on higher education which is supposedly for their benefit.

Regardless what I think of Mahmoud Khalil, he deserves due process and Trump has sought not just to circumvent due process, but make it look like US Jews approve while most of us would prefer he keep our language out of his mouth:

Trump absolutely knows this puts Jews in even more danger from left-wing extremists while he promotes fascism in the name of a Jewish American community which overwhelmingly disbelieves his intentions and vehemently opposes his methods.

____________

The antisemitism isn’t always obvious. Sometimes it’s dressed up as anti-Zionism. Sometimes it hides in jokes, memes, or coded language on right wing social media. Sometimes a president will use it as an excuse to attack democracy itself - but the function is always the same: mobilize emotion and manipulate the masses by pointing at the Jews.

The target audience of antisemitism isn’t ever the Jewish community, non-Jewish friends.

It’s you. Your attention. Your anger. Your loyalty.

Next time someone says, "Well, the Jews..." please ask yourself: who benefits if I believe them?

____________

Receipts and further reading:

Ancient Rome: Jews as a Political Warning

Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War. Loeb Classical Library https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL203/1927/volume.xml

Sanders, E. P., Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE https://archive.org/details/judaismpracticeb0000sand_i5n5

Gruen, E. S., Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans, Harvard University Press, 2002. https://archive.org/details/diasporajewsamid0000grue/page/n5/mode/2up

Medieval Europe and the Black Death Scapegoating

Tuchman, Barbara, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century https://griersplagueyear.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/a-distant-mirror-the-calamitous-14th-century-barbara-w-tuchman-1.pdf

Cohn, Samuel K. Jr., “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past & Present (1980). https://www.academia.dk/MedHist/Sygdomme/PDF/Past-and-Present-2007-Cohn-3-36.pdf

The Dehumanization and Demonization of the Medieval Jews Amsterdam University Press (2019) https://annas-archive.org/scidb/10.1017/9781641890083.004/

Spanish Inquisition and Conversos

Bethencourt, Francisco, The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Kamen, Henry, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale University Press, 1997. https://archive.org/details/spanishinquisiti00henr

Netanyahu, B, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain https://annas-archive.org/md5/d91e2ea112c03ff863fb6ac94eacdfe1

Tsarist Russia Pogroms and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Klier, John D., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://archive.org/details/pogromsantijewis00john/page/n423/mode/2up

Cohn, Norman, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion https://archive.org/details/warrantforgenoci0000cohn

Nazi Germany and Antisemitism as Political Unifier

Kershaw, Ian, Hitler: A Biography, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.

Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, 1951.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Nazi Propaganda

Soviet Union and the "Doctors' Plot"

Gellately, Robert, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, Knopf, 2007. https://annas-archive.org/md5/f0ec3897e774bd59abc5265c957c67d9

Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar https://archive.org/details/stalincourtofred0000seba_b0e7/page/n787/mode/2up

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