ANDREW JOYCE: Reflections on the History of the Jewish Hoax. [archive]

The reality of the tradition of Jewish power and economic exploitation during this period has been smothered by an extremely effective Judenscherz based, like the accounts of Josephus and Philo, on fictionalized accounts of extreme violence. Historian Jonathan Elukin writes that “violence is traditionally perceived to be at the core of the Jewish experience in Medieval Europe.”[10] Like the earlier accounts, we see multiple references to spontaneous “rising levels of anti-Jewish polemic, accusations of atrocities, physical attacks, and finally expulsion.”[11] However, contrary to the Judenscherz, violence was in fact extremely rare, and even its alleged high point, the Second Crusade, “brought with it little actual violence against European Jewry.”[12] The much-lamented ‘blood libel,’ supposedly the arch-provocation for much of this alleged violence, was in reality so sparse and ineffectual against entrenched Jewish power that “most Jews lived their entire lives without direct experience of those accusations.”[13]

All of this is of course very reminiscent of the Judenscherz of the Russian pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, also of alleged atrocities committed by the German armed forces during World War Two. In these instances, allegations of extreme violence played a key role in galvanising Jewish cohesion and manipulating non-Jews — in the case of the Russian ‘pogroms,’ manipulating Western Whites into accepting millions of Jewish economic migrants masquerading as ‘refugees.’ Then, as during the current invasion of Muslims and Africans, Europeans were inundated with stories of suffering, resulting in an outpouring of empathy. During a British parliamentary consultation on the ‘pogroms’ in 1905, a Rabbi Michelson claimed that “the atrocities had been so fiendish that they could find no parallel even in the most barbarous annals of the most barbarous peoples.”[14] . . .

It was only in the 2000s that the Judenscherz of the Russian pogroms came under systematic attack when Catholic scholar John Doyle Klier (1944–2007) began publishing on the subject, in turn revealing the mechanical and procedural elements in the development of a Jewish hoax.