The piece has been published in Real Clear Politics by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

The trial of Robert Bowers for the murder of eleven wor­ship­pers in a Pitt­s­burgh synagogue in October 2018 has brought into focus the nature of racial hatred and the power of con­spir­acy theories. Bowers entered a synagogue with an arsenal of advanced weapons and proceeded to murder eleven mostly elderly people quietly gathered for Saturday morning prayers. The youngest victim, David Rosenthal, was 54 years old. He had learning dif­fi­culties and was shot beside his older brother. The oldest victim was Rose Mallinger, age 97.

Bowers didn’t see retired account­ants, grand­par­ents, and a pion­eer­ing doctor who treated AIDS patients, holding the hands of those once deemed untouch­able. Bowers, a prolific poster in far-right online forums, believed the Jews to be “the children of Satan” who were con­spir­ing to eliminate the white race by flooding the United States with refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. Bowers saw demons he was determ­ined to slay. “The Jews are killing our children,” he told a police officer after sur­ren­der­ing at the scene of his carnage.

Bowers’ ideology is typical of antisemitism through­out history. He perceived a rapidly changing world. He clung to a nostalgia for what he thought was a better, purer bygone age. Unable to ration­al­ize the world around him, he devolved into racial hatred for Arabs and Africans and into con­spir­acy theories that the Jew con­trolled them and were plotting the downfall of humanity.

Bowers had swallowed a myth, or more precisely, a col­lec­tion of them. He believed the Jews to have a thirst for blood, par­tic­u­larly that of children. He believed the Jews to be con­spir­ing to seize control of the levers of global power – media, gov­ern­ment, finance. He believed the Jews to be killers of Christ and therefore irre­deem­ably evil.

He believed in a myth­o­lo­gic­al Jew, a creature conjured to lay all the ills of modernity upon some living breathing thing. The “dop­pel­gang­er,” as the novelist Philip Roth once observed, that entered the con­scious­ness of the enlightened West in place of the real, flesh and blood Jew. Bowers could not dis­tin­guish between the two. He thought he was des­troy­ing the incarn­a­tion of total evil, the consort of the devil. In reality, he murdered pen­sion­ers and faithful community volun­teers.

This is the nature of antisemitism, the manner of its expres­sion and the sum of its misery. It is a condition more than it is a form of racial hatred. It has the unique quality of shifting from a prejudice to a quest, one that only ever ends in the blood of the innocent. It is also a problem that does not only affect its primary target. Once an indi­vidu­al, movement, or society is captive to con­spir­acy theories and can longer dis­tin­guish myth from reality, the ability to reason and function effect­ively is lost.

The solution is two-fold: education and engage­ment. The nature of mythology is that it cannot coexist with reality. The myth­o­lo­gic­al Jew, cloaked in centuries of absurdity and dis­in­form­a­tion ceases to exist when one is also presented with the actual Jew, in all its diversity, com­plex­ity, and humanity. The more oppor­tun­it­ies that can be created for Jews and non-Jews to sit together, learn together, work together, the lesser the tempta­tion to slide into paranoia and fear.

Napoleon said that without education “there is no present and there is no future.” By becoming educated on the origins of these myths, who started them, for what sinister purpose, and what these myths look like today, the mind is inocu­lated against these absurdit­ies.

A striking example of the power of ration­al­ism took place in Damascus in 1840, after several prominent members of the city’s ancient Jewish community were accused of murdering a monk to use his blood to bake the unleavened bread Jews eat during the festival of Passover.

The Sultan Abdul Mejid ordered an invest­ig­a­tion of the accus­a­tions and issued a searing denun­ci­ation:

An ancient prejudice prevailed against the Jews. The ignorant believed that the Jews were accus­tomed to sacrifice a human being, to make use of his blood at their feast of Passover … The religious books of the Hebrews have been examined by learned men, well versed in their religious lit­er­at­ure, the result of which exam­in­a­tion is that it is found that Jews are strongly pro­hib­ited not only from using human blood but even that of animals. It therefore follows that the charges made against them and their religion are nothing but pure calumnies … we cannot permit the Jewish nation whose innocence of the crime alleged against them is evident to be vexed and tormented upon accus­a­tions which have not the least found­a­tion in truth.

As the Sultan demon­strated, even the oldest myths crumble in the face of truth. In this spirit, a new movement of tolerance founded on education and engage­ment beckons.