Much antisemitic propaganda reuses a small set of old myths. The medium, the wording, and the named target change from one era to the next. The claim underneath often stays the same, so a reader who knows the old myth can recognize a new version of it.
Today this propaganda often travels through the ordinary channels of online life: short clips in a video feed, comments under a post, memes passed between friends, the chat channels of online games, and anonymous image boards. An old charge recast as a joke or a reaction image spreads quickly. It can also be denied as “only a joke” and can look harmless to readers who do not know the history behind it.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an American organization that monitors antisemitism, groups the recurring claims into seven tropes in its guide Antisemitism Uncovered. Most have a long history and a present-day form. The Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter sets out each one.
| The myth | Where it came from | The modern costume |
|---|---|---|
| Power | The claim that Jews secretly control governments, banks, or the media. Its template is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery first published in Russia in 1903. | A named individual or institution stands in for the imagined cabal, as in the “globalist puppet-master” meme. |
| Disloyalty | The claim that Jews answer to their own people and not to their country. In the Book of Esther (3:8), Haman tells the king that the Jews do not keep the king’s laws. The charge returned in medieval Europe and in France’s Dreyfus Affair (1894). | Jewish citizens told that their loyalty is conditional or suspect. |
| Greed | The medieval stereotype of the Jewish moneylender. Nazi posters gave it the coin-clutching caricature. | The same caricature recycled in cartoons and online memes, such as the “Happy Merchant” drawing described in the Hate Symbols guide. |
| Deicide and demonization | The charge that the Jews collectively killed Christ (deicide, “the killing of God”), developed in the Adversus Judaeos (“Against the Jews”) writings of early Christian authors. In 1965 the Catholic Church repudiated the charge in its declaration Nostra Aetate. | Dehumanizing language that strips away individuality and assigns shared guilt. |
| Blood libel | The medieval accusation that Jews ritually murder Christian children. | Modern descendants the ADL traces, such as cartoons and posts accusing Israel of stealing the organs of Palestinians. |
| Holocaust denial | Postwar in origin. In France, Paul Rassinier claimed by 1964 that the gas chambers were an invention, and the Institute for Historical Review, founded in California in 1978, gave denial the costume of scholarship. | The claim that the genocide was faked, exaggerated, or inverted, now spread through edited clips and “just asking questions” posts. |
| Anti-Zionism | The ADL’s seventh category covers claims about the Jewish state since its founding in 1948. Whether and when anti-Zionism is antisemitic is a contested question. | Blood-libel or Nazi imagery turned on Israel or Israelis, two of the examples in the working definition of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body. The same definition says criticism of Israel like that leveled at any other country is not antisemitic. |
Three questions turn knowledge of the myths into recognition: