Antisemites have long depicted the Jews as a perverse, predatory, and pornographic people; horny vampires of the Orient. That ghoulish portrait — which, for short, can be called the ‘lust libel’ — is one of the more enduring of the classical antisemitic stereotypes. Today, it is all over the internet, influencing not just disaffected, and sometimes murderous, angry white men but even some prominent members of American popular culture. Jonah Cohen examines the history of the lust libel and its role in contemporary antisemitism.
On the last day of Passover 2019, a teenage gunman opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and injuring three other people. Among his reasons for the mass shooting, according to his manifesto, were the Jews’ ‘role in peddling pornography’ and ‘their degenerate and abominable practices of sexual perversion’. Three years later, another teenager likewise left behind a manifesto accusing Jews of sexual perversion before he went on a racist shooting spree at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Their sexual accusations were later dismissed as the crude invective of angry young white men, but the allegations were 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, pornographic, horny vampires of the Orient. That ghoulish portrait — which, for short, can be called the ‘lust libel’ — is one of the more enduring of the classical antisemitic stereotypes. Today, it is all over the internet, influencing not just disaffected white men but even some prominent members of American popular culture.
Part 1: The Lust Libel Today
Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan
A salient example is Kanye West, of hip hop fame, who recently 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. ‘That’s telling this Christian woman that has four black children to put that out as a message in the media.’ Elsewhere, he said that ‘you guys,’ the Jews, try to ‘blackball anyone’ who ‘opposes your agenda.’ It is likely that West picked up these notions from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom West has called his ‘sensei’. Within the American black community, Farrakhan and his followers have 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.’ In another sermon he informed listeners that ‘the Jews’ are ‘responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out: turning men into women, and women into men.’
The Alt-Right and #MeToo
Similar ideas were readily seen on the internet whenever a Jewish celebrity’s name was added to the roster of sex offenders during the height of the ‘#MeToo’ campaign to stop sexual violence against women. AltRight.com, a website founded by white nationalist Richard Spencer, declared that the disgraced film producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein was ‘just one degenerate Jew’ amid ‘the massive hive of degenerate Jews at the heart of Hollywood’. Lurid claims about Jewish lust spewed from the pages of the Daily Stormer, whose neo-Nazi founder, Andrew Anglin, laughed that the media is finally waking up to ‘the revelation that the perverted Jew Harvey Weinstein is in fact a Jewish pervert’. With similar humour, longtime Klan leader David Duke said sarcastically on his podcast that it is ‘really shocking to think that this Jewish pervert could be revealed to be a Jewish pervert’.
At the alt-right blog Vox Popoli, the science fiction writer Theodore Robert Beale (aka Vox Day) contended that there was a Jewish plot to protect the child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. According to Beale, ‘if you believe that Jews have ever conspired at anything for their self-perceived mutual benefit, you are a hater and an antisemitic conspiracy theorist manifestly guilty of the crime of Noticing.’ Supposedly involved in the plot was Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, which apparently guards the world’s child sex trafficking market like a pimp defends his street corner. According to alt-right podcaster Nick Fuentes, an important ‘take-away’ from Epstein’s suspicious suicide in a New York federal detention facility in 2019 is that ‘he was best friends with the Israeli government.’ Becoming furious, Fuentes shouted into the camera during his livestream: ‘Jeffrey Epstein was a Jew! And he was … working with the Mossad, all factual, and they [the Jews] don’t care that you know any of that. They don’t care …. They killed him essentially to send a message to say, “this is how powerful we are”.’
Likewise, Rick Wiles of far-right ‘TruNews’ asserted that Epstein was a Mossad agent who gathered blackmail material on influential Americans ‘so the Jews can screw America’. American politicians, he said, are ‘raping little American girls’ and being ‘videotaped by Israeli Mossad so that Israel can blackmail American politicians’. As if to add statistical validation to these stories of malevolent Jewish sexuality, the Jewish ethnicity of other accused celebrities — Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Anthony Weiner, to name three — were often cited on fringe channels. Over and over, far-right activists have been promoting the notion that Jewish culture and ethnicity are designed, as if by nature, for criminal sexual offenses, rather like sharp teeth are meant for tearing meat.
The Lust Libel is Spreading
Inevitably, the lust libel has spread out to the wider public through social media posts and memes. Mainstream media coverage of the various sex scandals of the rich and famous was not responsible for this outburst of antisemitic commentary; serious news, judiciously reported, showed that criminal or aggressive sexual behaviour can be found across ethnic and religious lines. But in the years since the ‘#MeToo’ scandals began to make headlines, the lust libel has taken on new life in a torrent of articles and videos that has little or nothing to do with the actual problem of male assaults on women and children, but instead points to an old and deep suspicion of sexuality in Jewish life. Connecting today’s libel to the long history of accusations of Jewish sexual depravity is a story worth telling for the light it shines upon the modern incarnation of the lust libel — and the hatred and murder that it is helping to trigger.
Part 2: A Brief History of the Lust Libel
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 buried European fears of castration, which in turn 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 an arresting 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 pedophilic details to the castration scene has proven to be a potent artistic choice, impacting Western perceptions of Jews up to the present day. Wolgemut’s imagery likely played a role in the Poway synagogue shooting in 2019. Before the rampage, 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’. A year later, the well-known Italian painter, Giovanni Gasparro, unveiled on Facebook his own version of Simon of Trent, again combining the imagery of a child’s male sex organ with Jewish torture and pedophilia.
The Poway shooter’s cri de coeur for children can be traced back, almost verbatim, 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 that ran to more than two thousand pages. Even distinguished thinkers in this ‘age of reason’ were taken in by these sordid tales of Jewish cruelty and 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 (an animal often symbolic of unrepentant sinners). ‘Pray, gentlemen, why are you [Jews] the only people on earth whose laws have forbidden such commerce?’ Voltaire asked rhetorically. ‘Would any legislator ever have thought of promulgating this extraordinary law if the offense [copulating with goats] had not been common?’ Some of Voltaire’s readers must have wondered whether bestiality was a prevalent sex urge among those alien Jewish communities residing on the outskirts of their towns and villages. Lurid questions, along with medieval blood accusations, continued to lurk in people’s minds even as liberal laws began to be passed in some European capitals during the 1800s.
Contrary to popular assumptions of a repressed Victorian age, sexual themes were in fact common in the antisemitic propaganda of the time. ‘In the 19th century imagination, miscegenation with “non-European” races, particularly Jews and blacks, who were deemed figures of pathological and deviant sexuality, was posited as a key source of the physical degeneration of the ‘European’ individual, race and nation,’ historian Patricia Szobar has shown. An example of such propaganda was the publication of The Original Mr. Jacobs: A Startling Exposé (1888), in which classical Greek historian T.T. Timayenis meditated at length on how ‘the Jew has called to his assistance not only his blackmailing press, but also obscene publications, in a word, pornography’ as a ‘means of attack against the Church and clergy’. Timayenis went on to claim that, according to the Talmud, ‘it is a good omen to dream of filth. Nearly all obscene publications are the work of the Jews’, who have ‘established in France the indecencies formerly practiced in the orgies of Bacchus, without, however, the artistic side that was prominent at Rome and Athens’.
Even some prominent 19th century writers, who today are not typically remembered for their antisemitism, tapped into the public’s appetite for garish news of Jewish depravity. Sir Richard Burton, the celebrated scholar-explorer, is a case in point. In his book The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam (1898), Burton concluded his account of the Jewish people with a chronological list of ‘what history tells us concerning the Jews, their crimes, and their condemnations’. In his list, he recited sadistic legends of murdered children who suffered ‘a thousand outrages’ at the hands of Jewish perverts, ‘all vying in brutality and enjoying the torture’. Burton’s sado-sexual intimations were by no means unusual at the time. The eminent historian of antisemitism, Richard S. Levy, has noted that many 19th century ritual-murder trials were ‘invested with overtones of sexual depravity’. In just nine years, between 1891 and 1900, there were at least 120 stories of ritual murders in antisemitic newspapers. Emerging from the erotic insinuations of these stories, the lust libel came into its own as a distinct category of antisemitic thought, a twisted offshoot of the medieval blood libel legend.
Its deadly effects were on full display in 1915 in Marietta, Georgia, when the Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank was abducted from jail by a local mob and lynched for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan. During the trial that occurred prior to his abduction from prison, accusations of occult ritual murder largely disappeared from the public conversation about his case, but the lust libel continued to haunt people’s perceptions. Frank’s seedy Jewish ethnicity supposedly influenced his sexual behaviour like too much liquor influences a bar brawl. As historian Steve Oney pointed out about the trial, the prosecution’s star witness, Jim Conley, whom some believe was Mary Phagan’s actual murderer, focused the court’s attention on Frank’s circumcision, as if it showed that Frank was ‘not built like other men’ and therefore capable of murderously deviant sex. Another historian, Kristoff Kerl, has observed that the ‘description of Leo Frank as a “libertine reprobate”, as a “sexual pervert” or as a “filthy and murderous Sodomite” permeated the reporting of the Leo Frank Case in The Jeffersonian’, which was a popular local paper that further reported: ‘when good-looking girls depend on their work for a living, and take employment under Jewish libertines, like Leo Frank, they either have to submit to his lusts, leave his employment, and lose their lives, as Mary Phagan lost hers’. In other words, Frank was not a mere libertine like other men; he was a Jewish one with a uniquely malevolent kind of lust — the kind that ends in the lethal rape of a non-Jewish child.
Photo of the Leo Frank lynching.
A sizeable number of Europeans and Americans by this time had already come to believe that Jewish leaders admitted to nefarious sexual intrigues against the Christian world. In the antisemitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (c. 1898), in a subsection titled ‘Pornography and Future Literary Activity’, conniving Jewish patriarchs were presented as orchestrating Europe’s underground smut market, using it as a weapon in their stratagem to weaken the morale and culture of European peoples: ‘We have created, in the so-called leading states, a mindless, dirty, repellent literature,’ the Jewish Elders were portrayed as saying. ‘We shall favor this tendency for a little while after the achievement of world domination. In this way, the nobility of our political plans and speeches will stand out in sharper contrast [to the smut].’
Soon after, in 1903, came the strange racial-sexual musings of Otto Weininger, the suicidal Austrian Jewish philosopher about whom Hitler’s mentor, Dietrich Eckart, reportedly said: ‘I only knew one decent Jew and he committed suicide when he realised that the Jew lives upon the corruption of peoples.’ Unlike the Protocols, a hoax, Weininger’s writings on Jewish perversity really did come from a Jew and therefore seemed to lend undeniable testimonial credence to past sexual accusations. ‘Men who are match-makers have always a Jewish element in them,’ Weininger wrote in his influential book Sex and Character. ‘The Jew is always more absorbed by sexual matters than the Aryan, although he is notably less potent sexually and less liable to be enmeshed in a great passion.’ According to Weininger, the less potent Jews nevertheless have a ‘racial failure to comprehend asceticism’ and ‘have always been addicted to speculations as to the begetting of children and have a rich tradition on the subject’.
Along with addictively speculating about fornication, the Jews were also soon blamed for child sex trafficking, an accusation which would play a role in the justification of the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler’s 1920 speech ‘Why Are We Antisemites?’ received applause in a beer hall in Munich when he told the crowd that ‘just as his [the Jew’s] patriarch Abraham had pimped for his own wife, so he [the Jew today] finds it not unusual if he pimps for young girls, and through the centuries we can encounter him everywhere, in North America and in Germany, in Austria-Hungary, and throughout the Orient, as a dealer in human wares…’ Hitler went on:
For the Germanic sensibility there would be only one punishment possible here: the punishment would be death – for people who cruelly exploit something that to a million others means the greatest happiness or the greatest misfortune, people who conceive of this merely as a business, a product. But to those Jews, love is nothing but a business by which they can earn money. At any time, they are ready to destroy the happiness of some marriage or other, if only thirty pieces of silver can be gotten out of it.
Hitler later underlined this theme in Mein Kampf: ‘For hours the black-haired Jewish boy lies in wait with satanic joy on his face for the unsuspecting girl whom he disgraces with his blood and thereby robs her from her people,’ he wrote. Much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jewish males were thereafter portrayed during the Nazi period as foul in blood, parasitical, materialistic, the despoilers of virgins — notions that even entered grade school curricula. German children were taught to read from a ‘Jew-themed’ alphabet book which featured creepy caricatures of licentious Jews who stood beside the letters of the alphabet. ‘I remember one in particular,’ recalls Hans Werk in Final Account, a documentary film about ordinary Germans who lived under Nazi rule:
It showed a butcher’s shop that was really greasy and filthy. It showed a disgusting Jew, one with dirty long hair and a hat, behind the counter. And next to him, there was a blonde German girl with a white apron. The Jew had his hand where it shouldn’t be.
Around the same time, in 1936, a popular school storybook called Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath warned children in Bavaria that lustful Jewish men were on the hunt to defile pretty blonde German girls. ‘I defy pornographers to show me a picture viler than any of the twenty-two illustrations that comprise the children’s book,’ the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote indignantly about the text in 1937, calling it ‘a pedagogy of hatred’. One of the book’s illustrations ‘shows a lecherous dwarf trying to seduce a young German lady with a necklace’, Borges observed. Behind the lecherous dwarf is what appears to be Hitler’s ‘black-haired Jewish boy’ eyeing ‘with satanic joy on his face’ an ‘unsuspecting’ blonde girl whose mouth is agape. The story concludes with a word of caution for all German children: ‘Don’t trust a fox on the greensward. And never a Jew on his plighted word!’
From the Nazi children’s book Trust No Fox. Source: USHMM.
Julius Streicher’s weekly newspaper Der Stürmer, meanwhile, teemed with similar warnings and imagery of spooky Jewish men degrading ‘Aryan maidens’ who, in contrast to Jewish males, were depicted as wholesome, innocent, vulnerable, if not asexual. One cartoon, with a caption which said ‘the natural and the unnatural’, juxtaposed two romantic dates: on one side of the illustration, a fit young Aryan man with a mandolin is seen with a relaxed lady in the bright outdoors; while on the other side of the cartoon, a fat middle-aged Jewish man hunches next to a tense woman in a darkened cinema as they watch a porn film called ‘The Sweet Sin’. The title of the cartoon: ‘Jewish Culture’.
Source: German Propaganda Archive. Translations by Professor Randall Bytwerk.
Another Der Stürmer illustration shows an image of an upright and modestly dressed Aryan lady who is meeting a Jewish man on a sunlit street. Then, after meeting the Jew, it shows her devolution into a scantily dressed lady of the night. Behind her in the shadows lurks a hooked-nose Jewish pimp. The caption says ‘the beginning and the end,’ signifying the Jewish corruption of German womanhood and dignity.
Source: German Propaganda Archive. Translations by Professor Randall Bytwerk.
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.’ Later in the film, audiences saw a series of erotic images put together with sinister Jewish faces, while the narrator tells viewers, ‘In the guise of scientific discussions, they [the Jews] tried to direct mankind’s healthy urges down degenerate paths.’ Historian Elizabeth Heineman has noted that these persistent Nazi claims of Jewish sexual danger helped to make ‘ordinary Germans’ indifferent to the passage of anti-Jewish legislation and the disappearance of Jewish neighbours.
A 1935 poster in Der Stürmer supporting the prohibition of ‘interracial’ relationships between Jews and Aryans. Source: USHMM.
And indeed the unremitting sexual propaganda successfully laid the ground for the far more terrifying Nuremberg laws — officially called the ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor’ — which forbade romantic relations between Jews and Germans. Nearly two-thousand cases of ‘race-defilement’ were prosecuted between 1935 and 1940. ‘Though the avowed aim of the Nuremberg Laws was to quash all interracial sexuality, legal discourse paradoxically narrated the proliferation of illegal and “deviant” sexual encounters,’ historian Patricia Szobar has shown in her valuable study on sex crime cases in Nazi courts. ‘In eliciting a level of descriptive and explicit detail well in excess of what was necessary from the standpoint of legal proof, investigators turned the trials into a dramatic reenactment of deviance’, a telling indication of the repressed sexual drives of the state officials in charge. Szobar’s description of the representation of Jewish masculinity in Nazi legal discourse is worth quoting at length:
Jewish men were portrayed as deviant by definition; they were called the ‘seducers of maidens’ who displayed ‘unbridled appetites’, ‘unnatural inclinations’, and ‘perverse desires’. Jewish male sexuality was represented as animalistic and base yet possessed of a calculated, ‘shameless and criminal’ desire to defile the Aryan woman. Here legal discourse echoed longstanding myths that branded Jewish men as pimps, pornographers, and ‘white slave traders’ whose sole desire was to sexually exploit ‘German women’ and spread syphilis and other sexual diseases through the population in a plot to undermine the Aryan race. Jewish employers, in particular, were repeatedly accused of wishing to molest any Aryan girl or woman under their employ, which served to buttress the rationale for prohibiting the employment of Aryan domestic help in Jewish households. Another common theme expressed in the investigative records was that the Jewish man had ‘concealed his Jewish identity’ and made false promises of marriage in order to make the Aryan woman amenable to seduction. Time and again, the courts heaped abuse on Jewish men, who ‘in typical Jewish fashion’ tried to exploit Aryan women ‘for their own sexual gratification’. Such sexual hysteria, in turn, was extremely effective in fomenting anti-Semitic discrimination and widespread public and police harassment of Jewish men.
But not just Jewish men. Jewish women were similarly slandered as slutty, deceitful, manipulative, carriers of sexually transmitted diseases. Szobar cites, for example, a 1937 verdict in a race-defilement case in which a Jewish female witness was labeled ‘a sexually predatory, morally depraved Jewess. With her unrestrained sexual drives and her brazen behaviour she held the two accused men in thrall’. Another court remarked on her ‘exceptional tenacity’ in seduction, like a femme fatale of hardboiled fiction. Many other race-defilement cases likewise represented Jewish women in sexually insulting language, prompting Szobar to conclude poignantly: ‘Both Jewish men and women were depicted as sexual predators intent on spreading disease and degeneracy throughout the population, thus rhetorically legitimizing their exclusion from the body politic.’
One could go on with more historical examples of ‘sexual antisemitism’, to use psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s term for the lust libel. But Wolgemut’s imaginings of pedophilic torture, Voltaire’s inquiries into bestiality, Burton’s sado-sexual insinuations, the Nazis’ fixations on racial defilement, the many antisemitic ‘news’ articles, films, stories, cartoons, books, confessions, whisper campaigns, and trial transcripts of Jewish ‘degeneracy’ over the years in Europe and America — all these are sufficient to demonstrate that the lust libel is a distinct and enduring concept in Western consciousness. When the ‘#MeToo’ stories started to dominate news headlines in the 21st century, the antisemitic side-effects were the predictable manifestation of the libel’s ongoing grip on some European and American minds. That some mainstream celebrities such as Kanye West eventually stumbled into it is not at all surprising, given its long and ubiquitous history. And yet its simple weirdness, not to mention its seemingly immortal presence in Western civilisation, would seem to merit a deeper scrutiny into why the calumny continues to resurface with murderous rage. What exactly is fueling it?
Part 3: Explaining a Myth
To briefly state the obvious: it’s a smear. Judaism does not recommend deviant sexual acts. Nor is there ethnographic evidence that Jewish households typically encourage their members to find employment in pornography and other sex trades. A strict marital sexual ethic has long been the ideal in Jewish societies, with sometimes severe punishments for those who transgress. Even in predominantly liberal civilisations such as the United States, premarital sex is mostly discouraged across the various Jewish denominations, as can be seen in scholarly reviews of the contemporary literature. What Judaism does have is a view that sexual relations between a husband and wife are not mere obligations but should be enjoyed by both partners. Conservative defenders of Judaism’s traditional sexual ethic argue that, in fact, this morality has elevated the status of women and family life in Western civilisation, while progressive critics argue that it has contributed to the West’s oppressively patriarchal and heteronormative culture. But rightly or wrongly, Judaism’s conventional boundaries continue to influence, however unconsciously, mainstream Jewish feelings about such things as promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography. One can plainly see this in Israel, where most citizens get married by the age of twenty-five, where hiring a prostitute is illegal, where campaigns to ban pornography often occur in the legislature, and where sex offenders are anathema in the mainstream press and in the courts (a former Israeli president, no less, was imprisoned for sexual misconduct). None of those societal features are what one would expect to find in a Jewish-run state if the lust libel were true. Given, then, the religious and sociological evidence against the libel, we must look to psychology to explain its persistence. At least three psychological factors seem to be involved.
Psychological Explanations (1): The antisemite’s own repressed sexual desires and guilt
The lust libel is likely rooted in a mental process known as ‘projective inversion’ whereby ‘A accuses B of a misdeed which A really wishes to carry out him or herself’. Anthropologist Alan Dundes identified this psychological phenomenon in his studies of blood libel legends, where he showed that dominant European theological beliefs and violence were falsely projected onto the Jewish minority in the Middle Ages. History similarly demonstrates that many of those spreading the lust libel were themselves privately guilty of harrowing depredations in their personal lives and were therefore probably projecting their own repressed impulses onto the Jewish population as a whole. Adolf ‘Uncle Alfie’ Hitler sexually preyed on and may well have murdered his enslaved niece. Julius Streicher was a notorious lecher whose lascivious behaviour got so disgusting that he had to be reined in by Nazi party elites. And, of course, many other ‘chivalrous’ Nazi officials raped and prostituted female prisoners and slaughtered children by the million. Behind all their finger-pointing at the Jews loomed a dark Jungian shadow. There are reasons to believe that some similar psychological dymanic is present today.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented numerous cases of marital abuse, infidelity, and domestic violence within today’s radical right. ‘As it turns out, the racist right has historically been a troubled group when it comes to the behavior of men,’ the organisation reports. ‘It is not uncommon to hear stories of abusive control, tales of violence against women from men in the movement, even stories of women being passed between men as if casual possessions.’ Consider David Duke, an infamous womaniser known for his prurience and infidelities. ‘We used to tell people, “When Duke comes to town make sure your wife is safely locked up and don’t let him near your daughters,”’ neo-Nazi Tom Metzger reported about his racist colleague. Or consider far-right ‘comedian’ Owen Benjamin (real name: Owen Smith), who regularly fulminates against ‘Jewish homosexuality’ and ‘Jewish pornography’ during drunken YouTube rants, but who himself stands accused of sexual assault against another man, and who, in Oedipus fashion, is on video fantasising about torturing his father for alleged homosexual prostitution and child abuse. Or consider Germar Rudolf, a German-American publisher of antisemitic propaganda, who in 2020 was convicted of indecent exposure and lewdness in a children’s playground in Pennsylvania. Even Kanye West, although not a member of the far-right, seems to display similarly repressed sexual-emotional dysfunctions in some of his music (for example, his song ‘Drunk & Hot Girls’ that apparently recounts his own predatory behaviour, promiscuity, and ‘frustrations with extremely drunk but incredibly hot girls’).
Antisemitism is clearly not the only psychological disorder afflicting these men. To paraphrase Alan Dundes, what is happening inside those who preach the lust libel is not ‘you, Jews, are sexually degenerate’ but ‘I am worried that I might be’. By sanctimoniously blaming the world’s Jewish minority for mankind’s unrestrained sexual behaviour, contemporary purveyors of this slander are trying to deflect rebuke from their own secret excesses, their own shadow-selves.
Psychological Explanations (2): The need for Jewish sexual confessions in order to justify antisemitic violence
People who promote the lust libel are not only very keen to cite anecdotes of Jewish sexual misbehaviour; they are also eager to show that Jews themselves have admitted to the sado-sexual role of antisemitic fantasy. Bogus Talmudic sources about pedophilia are especially prevalent in their online commentary. In the Buffalo, NY shooter’s racist manifesto, for instance, he cites a number of purported passages from the Talmud, claiming, for example, that ‘Yebhamoth 11b’ says that ‘sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three years of age’. Many other white nationalists adduce this fake Talmudic quote, frequently citing it as if it were canonical Jewish belief. As was the case in Nazi Germany, the psychological motivation for referencing such purported confessions is (a) to try to convince oneself and others that Jews themselves admit to being dangerous sexual perverts and (b) to justify acts of violence and discrimination against them. (For rebuttals of common antisemitic lies and distortions of Jewish legal sources, see Gil Student’s ‘The Talmud does not permit sex with a three year old’ and ‘The real truth about the Talmud’; also see Michael L. Brown’s book Christian Antisemitism: Confronting the Lies in Today’s Church).
Still other disturbing examples of ‘Jewish confessions’ can be found in the polemics of far-right American Catholic writer E. Michael Jones. Like Eisenmenger before him, Jones has written thousand-page tomes on Jewish villainy, a subject he frequently discusses on extremist social media channels as well as on Iranian state television. To support his conspiracy theories, Jones will cherry pick a handful of Jewish pornographers and other Jewish deviants in history whom he presents as representatives rather than oddball exceptions of the Jewish community, fallaciously ascribing transgressive values to most Jews on the basis of the obscene acts of a few. From such elementary fallacies — and from, apparently, viewing many X-rated films — Jones asserts in his book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit that ‘the standard porn scenario’ is ‘a Polish Jewish fantasy, the horny Jew schtupping the Catholic shiksa’. Pornography as a whole, he claims, is ‘a Jewish weapon based on Jewish fantasies of defilement’. Elsewhere in the book, Jones informs readers that the Jewish people have confessed to their communal vileness by virtue of Woody Allen’s popular movies: ‘Since Woody Allen is a cultural icon for most Jews, most Jews have defined themselves as sexual degenerates.’
It is tempting just to roll one’s eyes at these non sequiturs. But the diatribes about Jewish sexual confessions can be made to serve a frightening agenda. From Leo Frank’s lynching to today’s mass shootings, such fallacies can be relied on to justify antisemitic murder. ‘You [Jews] have undermined the moral order and now don’t be surprised if people start acting out their aggression towards you,’ E. Michael Jones lectured the Jewish community after a gunman murdered 11 Jewish worshipers, including several Holocaust survivors, at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018.
Psychological Explanations (3): Some Jews internalise the language of their oppressors and thereby perpetuate the lust libel
It is well known that victims of emotional and sexual abuse sometimes come to mimic the words and behaviour of their abusers. In like fashion, members of historically oppressed minorities are vulnerable to parroting their persecutors, as psychiatrist Kenneth Levin documented in his book The Oslo Syndrome, a major work in the psychological history of the Jews. Throughout the ages, some Jews have consciously imitated the language of their abusers because they hoped that the verbal mimicking would protect them from further harassment. Other times, they would mimic unconsciously, simply because their habits of mind were influenced by the wider culture – by what Levin calls ‘the corrosive effects of chronic denigrating assaults’.
A significant modern example of this phenomenon can be found in an essay titled ‘Triple Exthnics’ by Jewish film scholar Nathan Abrams, which appeared in Jewish Quarterly in 2004. It is difficult to overstate this essay’s importance in contemporary expressions of the lust libel. David Duke admires how it ‘discusses things that Gentiles are just not supposed to know about’. Mark Collett, former publicity director of the fascist British National Party, describes Abrams as ‘the world’s most renowned authority on the Jewish role in pornography’ in the 2017 ‘documentary’ titled The Jewish Role in the Porn Industry, a film based almost entirely on the supposed veracity of Abrams’s arguments. At the white nationalist website, National Vanguard, Abrams is praised in numerous articles for his ‘candor’ and for proving that ‘Jews are aware of the subversive nature of their activities’.
Abrams garnered the far-right’s applause because he mirrored what antisemites have long been saying about predatory Jewish pornography. Using anecdotal evidence, he argued sweepingly that (1) though ‘Jews make up only two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent in pornography’ and that (2) Jewish involvement in the adult film industry may well be ‘the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they [the Jews] are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion’, a thesis enunciated long ago, as we saw, in The Original Mr. Jacobs. Abrams even cited E. Michael Jones in the article as though Jones were a credible scholar rather than the rank antisemite that he is.
As a result, far-right publications have linked so often to ‘Triple Exthnics’ that Jewish Quarterly appears to have removed the article from its website. Abrams, too, eventually revisited the piece in his book Jews & Sex wherein he conceded that there was ‘a conspicuous lack of academic and historical research into Jewish involvement [in pornography]’. His previous assertions about the disproportion of Jewish participation in this worldwide murky business were, it turns out, based on imprecise estimations from non-academic sources — in particular from the claims of a nutty sex-blogger named Luke Ford, ‘a self-styled adult industry gossip monger’. Correcting the record, Abrams now says:
Those who allege a Jewish dominance of the adult industry do so largely based on information emanating from Ford’s websites which, subsequently, provide the sources for further speculations. Thus, Ford has had a disproportionate influence in shaping the writing about Jews and porn. Beneath or within the topic of the Jewish invasion or domination of porn, therefore, lies the journalistic-gossip of Ford. I confess that, in my original article on this topic, which appeared in the Jewish Quarterly in 2004, I was one of these, perhaps naively and uncritically accepting of many of Ford’s unconfirmed statements.
The far-right has, of course, entirely ignored Abrams’s updated views, continuing to reference his erroneous older article. But Abrams’s initially naïve and uncritical acceptance of age-old antisemitic discourse highlights the third main reason for the lust libel’s persistence: Some Jews, like some child abuse victims, imitate the degrading sexual language of their persecutors — which, in a nefarious feedback loop, encourages further abuse.
Another notable example of this feedback loop happened when Tablet Magazine, an American online Jewish magazine, published an ill-considered interpretation of Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes. ‘Harvey, sadly, is a deeply Jewish kind of pervert’ who is ‘playing out his revenge fantasies on the goyim’, the magazine’s senior editor Mark Oppenheimer asserted in his article ‘The Specifically Jewy Perviness of Harvey Weinstein’, published in 2017. The article, which was heavily influenced by the lust libeling literature of novelist Philip Roth, contended that Weinstein’s Jewishness had made him angry, vengeful, performative, tormented by inadequacy, ultimately motivating his criminal behaviour and thereby distinguishing him from other powerful men caught in similar misdeeds. ‘It goes without saying that nearly every one of these women — Rose McGowan, Ambra Battilana, Laura Madden, Ashley Judd, etc. — was a Gentile, all the better to feed Weinstein’s revenge-tinged fantasy of having risen above his outer-borough, bridge-and-tunnel Semitic origins,’ Oppenheimer concluded. ‘Harvey can run from who he is, but he can’t hide.’ The far-right cheered. White nationalist Richard Spencer praised the essay as ‘powerful’ while David Duke gleefully tweeted, ‘Major Jewish Mag Admits Weinstein is a Jewish Racist Who Wants to Defile White People.’
Tablet’s decision to run the article resulted in so much hurt, anger, and revulsion in the Jewish community that the magazine almost immediately issued an apology. Oppenheimer later acknowledged that his essay was a ‘stupid piece’ and ‘wrong on the facts’ and, on a personal note, he admitted that the public’s critical response had left him in solitary misery at home: ‘After my wife and children were all asleep,’ he wrote, ‘I found myself under some blankets on the sofa, trembling, worried that the wheels would come off and I’d lose everything.’
Oppenheimer, like Abrams, deserves credit for admitting his error and should be given some empathy. That even intelligent Jewish writers in respectable publications can get entangled in the perverse logic of the lust libel goes to show ‘the corrosive effects of chronic denigrating assaults’. After centuries of sexual disparagement, the collective unconscious of both Jews and non-Jews has been affected.
Conclusion
Because of its vulgar and embarrassing language, the lust libel has gone mostly unanswered within the Jewish community. Many people, as a result, are only vaguely or marginally conscious of its lurking presence. Like an invisible reptilian tail, it has been fiendishly pinned to the Jews’ backside for centuries. Today, it is partly feeding the rage of young men such as the recent mass shooters and even pop cultural icons like Kanye West. This article has therefore attempted to spotlight how their sexual accusations are the outgrowth of a centuries-old lie, which has been perpetuated because of three main psychological causes: the antisemite’s own sexual guilt and projections; the antisemite’s need for Jewish confessions in order to justify antisemitic violence; and, finally, those members of the Jewish community who unconsciously mirror the degrading sexual language of their persecutors. Little can probably be done to stem the first two causes, as they are deeply rooted in an antisemitic personality type that goes back to the remotest past ages, as Freud observed. But the third cause — the thoughtless mimicking — can be addressed. To begin, the most crucial step is to raise public consciousness so that the lust libel is as recognisable as any other form of antisemitic calumny. No decent and educated person should again be fooled into echoing this ancient lie.
