On the last day of Passover 2019, a teenager dressed in a military-style vest walked into a synagogue in Poway, California, with a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire.
One shul-goer, Lori Gilbert Kaye, was shot dead on the spot and three others were horrifically injured, including Kaye’s rabbi.
The attack prompted near-universal horror and outrage. But as the media picked over the grim details, one key element was largely forgotten.
The killer, 19-year-old John Timothy Earnest, had left behind a manifesto giving his reasons for the mass shooting. Among them was the role of Jews in “peddling pornography” and “their degenerate and abominable practices of sexual perversion”.
John T. Earnest stands at his arraignment hearing in San Diego County Superior Court on April 30, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Nelvin C. Cepeda-Pool/Getty Images)
Three years later, on May 14, another teenager, also armed with a semi-automatic weapon, walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and murdered ten people, all of them black. He also left behind a manifesto accusing Jews of sexual perversion.
Flowers are left at a makeshift memorial outside of Tops market in Buffalo after mass shooting (GettyImages)
In both cases, the sexual accusations were later dismissed as the crude invective of angry young men, but the allegations were much more than that.
A core tenet of far-right ideology is the belief that Jews are orchestrating a sado-sexual plot to weaken Christian people. This bizarre conspiracy theory has a surprisingly long history in Western civilisation.
Going back to the Middle Ages, European art and literature have depicted the Jews as perverse, predatory vampires of the Orient. That ghoulish portrait — the “lust libel” — is one of the more enduring antisemitic stereotypes. Today, it is all over the internet.
Among the notorious antisemitic tirades launched by US rapper Kanye West was one in which he blamed Jews for salacious news about his ex-wife’s sex life. “It’s Jewish Zionists that’s about that life,” he said in a viral video.
Kanye West, wearing a black fabric mask over his face, appearing on Alex Jones panel show, December 1, 2022 (Credit: Infowars)
It is likely that West picked up these notions from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom West has called his “sensei” [or “guru”]. Within the American black community, Farrakhan has for years preached conspiratorial sexual ideas about Jews.
“Do you know that many of us who go to Hollywood seeking a chance, we have to submit to anal sex and all kinds of debauchery, and they give you a little part?” Farrakhan said in a 2018 sermon. “The couch where you have to sit, it’s called the ‘casting couch’. That’s Jewish power.”
Last month, flyers were handed out throughout California that accused Jews of performing sexual acts on children. And in February, Neo-Nazis harassed theatregoers outside a musical in New York about Leo Frank — a Jewish man lynched in 1915 after being (almost certainly wrongly) convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl — by resurrecting claims that Frank was a paedophile.
Sigmund Freud famously speculated in his book Moses and Monotheism that European antisemitism might be, in part, an unconscious reaction to the Jewish practice of circumcision, a custom recalling “a portion of the primaeval past which is gladly forgotten”.
He suggested that the circumcision ritual provoked bu ried European fears of castration, which prompted a “disagreeable, uncanny impression” of the Jewish community that “declared itself the first-born, favourite child of God the Father”.
Freud knew that his castration theory would “not seem credible” to those who do not already subscribe to his assumption that the “deeper motives for hatred of the Jews are rooted in the remotest past ages”.
But his assumption is not without evidence. It is a fact that medieval pictorial renderings of the “blood libel” legend do sometimes fixate on male genital mutilation.
Witness the woodcut by German artist Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519), which portrayed the “Jewish” ritual murder of a Christian child named Simon in the Italian city of Trent.
The artist organises the castration scene so that the viewer’s eyes cannot but focus on the gushing blood from the boy’s loins. His naked body, held and spread by lascivious Jews, is poked and pulled and pinched.
Adding such grotesque paedophilic details to the castration scene has proven to be a potent artistic choice, impacting Western perceptions of Jews up to the present day.
Pallbearers carry the casket of shooting victim Lori Gilbert Kaye during a graveside service on April 29, 2019 in San Diego, California. Lori Gilbert Kaye was killed inside the Chabad of Poway synagogue on April 27 by a gunman who opened fire as worshippers attended services. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Before the Poway synagogue rampage in 2019, the shooter felt compelled to write down in his manifesto that “you are not forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven”. John Timothy Earnest’s manifesto can be traced back to what was said about Jewish child abuse in the 1700s.
“Concerning the horrifying murders of tender, innocent little children by Jews there is much to write,” Orientalist Johann Andreas Eisenmenger wrote in Judaism Unmasked (1710), an influential antisemitic polemic. Even distinguished thinkers in this “age of reason” were taken in by these tales of Jewish sexual abuse.
No less a rationalist than Voltaire (1694-1778), who sternly frowned on the descriptions of promiscuity in the Hebrew Bible, suggested that Jewish men and women hunger for carnal relations with goats.
Associating pornography, promiscuity and prostitution with Jewish culture was also a recurring theme in the productions of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
The infamous “documentary” film, The Eternal Jew (1940), attributed global prostitution to the Jews, asserting the following outlandish proposition: “In 1932, the Jews, who made up only 1 per cent of the world’s population, accounted for … 98 per cent of dealers in prostitution.”
Are there any useful psychological explanations for the lust libel? History demonstrates that many of those spreading the vile lie were themselves guilty of harrowing depredations in their personal lives and were therefore probably projecting their own repressed impulses onto the Jewish population.
Adolf “Uncle Alfie” Hitler sexually preyed on and may well have murdered his enslaved niece. And, of course, many other “chivalrous” Nazi officials raped and prostituted female prisoners.
There are reasons to believe that a similar psychological dymanic is present today. The Southern Poverty Law Centre in the US has documented numerous cases of marital abuse, infidelity and domestic violence on today’s far right.
Because of its vulgar and embarrassing language, the lust libel has gone mostly unanswered within the Jewish community. It is critical to raise public consciousness so that it is as recognisable as any other form of antisemitic calumny. No one should again be fooled into echoing this ancient lie.
Jonah Cohen is the director of communications for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis. This is an abridged version of an essay that appeared on Fathom.org
