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.