The ongoing global health crisis arose quickly, with clusters of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, in December of 2019. By early January, they reported their first death, and a little later that month, other countries began to confirm cases of their own. Before the end of that month, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency. Here in the United States, as early as the beginning of March, comparisons were being made between the novel coronavirus epidemic and the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001. At first, similarities were noted in the effects of these two tragedies on airlines and that industry’s need for a federal bailout. Very quickly, then, it became a touchstone. There have been numerous articles holding up the death toll of this novel coronavirus to that of 9/11, and as the number of casualties surpassed those of September 11th, more articles have appeared that contrasted that tragedy and the current one. Some opinion pieces have argued that the two should not be equated, being that 9/11 was a deliberate attack and was only theoretically preventable while the spread of the coronavirus was an act of nature (unfounded conspiracy theories about virus engineering notwithstanding) about which we had definite foreknowledge, suggesting that, at least in the U.S., but also in other countries, high death tolls are far more incontestably attributable to the inadequate response of governments. In some ways, the comparison to 9/11 may have been inevitable, as not since then has such a sudden and devastating phenomenon changed U.S. and global cultures so drastically. Indeed, an article in the Atlantic declared that the 9/11 era has concluded, and that we have entered the COVID-19 era, making the comparison apt insofar as they are both era-defining calamities. And there is a further comparison to be made, although it may not have been as apparent at first. After 9/11, many conspiracy theories emerged as to who was responsible for the attacks, and of course we have already seen something similar with coronavirus. Self-proclaimed 9/11 “truthers” make numerous arguments about who was behind the 2001 attacks, many unsupported and irrational and others more denialist in nature in that they seem academic but are convincingly refuted by experts. Among these conspiracy theories are that the attacks were orchestrated by the government, a claim that we see mirrored in conspiracy theories that the coronavirus was engineered as a biological weapon and was perhaps purposely released in China. But there is another, more despicable conspiracist claim that unites these two catastrophes, as well as many others. During the years after 9/11, far right extremists in the U.S. as well as Muslim and Arab hate groups claimed that Jews were actually responsible for the attacks of September 11th. And now, already, similar conspiracy theories blaming the novel coronavirus on Jews have reared their ugly head, conforming to a long tradition of attributing major tragedies to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

In late April 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic continued ravaging the world, the Kantor Center for the Study of European Jewry published its annual report on global anti-Semitism, which reported a sharp rise in anti-Semitic speech related to the pandemic. Some of this hate speech was perhaps not surprising, considering its sources, such as far-right preacher and fake news purveyor Rick Wiles suggesting that coronavirus was spreading in Israel as a punishment for rejecting Christ, or white supremacist groups encouraging the infected to purposely transmit the virus to Jews. Numerous memes encouraging such intentional spreading of the virus among Jews and characterizing its spread among them as divine retribution continue to circulate on anonymous and encrypted social networks known for their far-right user bases, like 4chan, Telegram, and Gab. The “jokes” made in these memes range from talking about using the Israeli flag as an alternative to toilet paper to suggesting that Chinese struggles to cremate the remains of COVID-19 victims prove the Holocaust didn’t happen. Here we see the age-old claims of a Jewish World Conspiracy rearing its hideous head once again. We saw the medieval origin of this conspiracy claim in the blood libel, the myth that Jews conspired to ritually murder Christian children in every country of the diaspora, which I discussed in depth a few years ago, and we saw it take more definite and modern form in the dissemination of the plagiarized forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which I discussed in a follow-up episode. Thus, when white supremacist leaders and anonymous internet denizens spread the claim that the pandemic has been orchestrated by Jewish conspirators, much as they did after 9/11, they are taking part in a long tradition of hate, falling into a predictable pattern of racist conspiracism and scapegoating that in many ways is perfectly embodied in another medieval legend, that of the Wandering Jew, a figure that can be taken to represent wildly different views of the Jewish people, depending on one’s prejudices and knowledge of history.

A 1934 imprint by the so-called "Patriotic Publishing Co." of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, possibly a propaganda product of Nazis operating in the USA, via Wikimedia Commons — A 1934 imprint by the so-called "Patriotic Publishing Co." of *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, possibly a propaganda product of Nazis operating in the USA, via Wikimedia Commons

The legend of the Wandering Jew serves as a metaphor for many of the baseless conspiracy claims about Jews that we see on the rise again today, for it was an inherently Anti-Semitic myth from the beginning. It is a spinoff from the story of the Passion of Jesus Christ, much like the story of Veronica and her veil, which I have discussed in a patron exclusive podcast episode, it tells of an otherwise unrecorded encounter with Christ on the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Suffering. It tells us that, while bearing his cross, Christ stopped to momentarily rest on the doorstep of a local Jewish man, a shoemaker who told Christ to move on. In response, Christ said he was on his way but asserted that this Jewish shoemaker would wait for his return. And that, so the legend says, was the moment the shoemaker became cursed to live until the Second Coming. According to some versions of the legend, the shoemaker felt compelled to follow Christ to Golgotha and felt compassion for his suffering and horror at the cruelty inflicted on him. Forever after, this Jew was said to wander as a devout witness to the truth of Christ’s divinity and sacrifice. It was clearly a piece of propaganda meant to affirm the Christian faith and cast the Jews in a negative light. In one version of the legend, in fact, the shoemaker had been a vocal opponent of Christ, among the first to call for his crucifixion. Here we see the persistent theme that Jews are to blame for the death of the Christian Messiah, and in fact, in some tellings, the shoemaker is even said to have struck Christ for loitering at his door, portraying the Jews and not the Romans as torturers of Christ. Therefore the tale of the Wandering Jew stands as an allegory for the notion that Jews deserve eternal punishment for their treatment of Jesus, a hate-filled claim we see endlessly repeated, even from supposed leaders of religion like Rick Wiles when he paints the coronavirus outbreak in Israel as divine punishment.

As with the legend of Veronica’s Veil, this encounter is not mentioned in the gospels. The closest thing that can be found would be Christ’s words that “there be some here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom,” but that has traditionally been thought to refer to the Beloved Disciple, whose mysterious identity I have discussed in another episode, for he had elsewhere said of this nameless disciple, “If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you?” So the canonical scriptures are silent on the existence of this shoemaker cursed by Christ to wander the Earth until the end of the world. The first record of the legend is from the 13th century, in the writings of Matthew Paris, who recorded it thirdhand from the chronicles kept at the Monastery of St. Albans, which told of a visiting Archbishop from Armenia who claimed to have met a man that said he was this Wandering Jew, although in this earliest version, he was a porter serving Pontius Pilate rather than a cobbler. Lest one think this Armenian bishop invented the tale, the account indicates that he shared his encounter after having been asked if he had ever heard of the Wandering Jew character, “a man of whom there was much talk in the world.” Curious then that we see no further records of the legend until almost 300 years later, when stories of him appear in the Middle East and across Europe during the 16th and early 17th centuries, with encounters in Persia, Hungary, Moscow, Bohemia, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Spain, Italy, France, England, and Scotland. The figure’s story may have changed in some particulars but remained largely the same. Even then, some of these figures were suspected of being frauds, or even madmen, and today it is tempting to accept this as an explanation for the origin of the legend. Perhaps one vagabond discovered that he could dine out on the tale, and as it spread, other drifters took it up, with the mentally ill among them perhaps even beginning to believe the imposture.

A depiction of the Wandering Jew drawn by the nineteenth-century American cartoonist Joseph Keppler, via Wikimedia Commons

Over time, though, as the legend evolved through its many tellings, so too did its interpretation. Among many, the coming of the Wandering Jew was seen as a portent of calamity, for it was believed that he brought flood, famine, and disease with him. In France, for example, the coming of a storm was popularly attributed to the Wandering Jew passing through their neighborhood. This conception of the figure as a harbinger of doom likely grew out of the notion that he was cursed to suffer ceaselessly. Think of him with a cartoonish miniature storm cloud fixed over his head. Or there is the idea that he wandered in search of the death that God denied him, which would suggest he was drawn to places that would soon be visited by death. Some versions of his story even have him fighting in every war he could find, endlessly chasing after the sweet release of being killed. Many believed him an apocalyptic figure, since it was said he would survive until the end of the world. Thus, in Russia, they expected his arrival in 1666, the year when it was believed the Anti-Christ would rise. When pogroms in Russia sent Jewish refugees into France, however, the figure of the Wandering Jew was seen more and more as a metaphorical embodiment of the Jewish diaspora, forced to wander as a nomadic people—an aspect of their history since the periods of Assyrian and Babylonian exile. This archetype of the Jew as perpetual exile was folded into other anti-Semitic stereotypes. For example, early psychiatrists liked to suggest that Jews were more prone to neurological disorders, like nervousness and psychopathy. When one psychiatrist managed to find a Jew who suffered from “travelling insanity,” which today psychologists might characterize as a fugue state, he found the perfect literalization of the Wandering Jew motif, and thus it was claimed that Jews have a psychological predilection toward itinerancy and the legend of the Wandering Jew was tied into false notions of Jewish constitutional inferiority.

So the figure of the Wandering Jew evolved from being a piece of Christian propaganda to becoming a symbol of the Jewish people themselves, and as such, notions of the Wandering Jew clearly parallel the false allegations historically made against the Jewish people. Almost all the claims about a Jewish World Conspiracy can be boiled down to the assertion that Jews are responsible for most catastrophes, from war to economic collapse to the spread of disease. Anti-Semites believe not only that disaster follows them as it does the Wandering Jew, but that they orchestrate it for their own benefit. However, some fictional depictions of the Wandering Jew characterize him as blameless and even mournful about the catastrophe that dogs his heels, such as in Eugène Sue’s novel of that name, which has the Wandering Jew bemoan, “A solitary wanderer, I left in my track more mourning, despair, disaster, and death, than the innumerable armies of a hundred devastating conquerors could have produced.” In Sue’s novel, the figure realizes that cholera strikes wherever he goes, much like he brought the bubonic plague with him during his wanderings hundreds of years earlier. But of course, the Wandering Jew by this time had come to represent Jewry as a whole, and the notion that Jews spread disease, not passively but purposely, was a longstanding pernicious claim being incorporated into the symbolism of the Wandering Jew. The truth is that even before the folklore of the Wandering Jew came to include the notion that his appearance presaged disaster, Jews had been blamed for spreading what was arguably the worst plague in history: the Black Death.

Medieval illustration depicting Jews engaging in ritual murder and poisoning wells, from Karenett at Hebrew Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 — Medieval illustration depicting Jews engaging in ritual murder and poisoning wells, from Karenett at Hebrew Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Recently, out of Turkey and Iran, some variations on a conspiracy theory theme arose, asserting that, rather than the Chinese, International Jewry and their American allies were responsible for engineering the virus in order to wipe out Muslim populations. Likewise, when Israel announced progress in the development of a vaccine, hatemongers online immediately suggested that they had the cure first because they were behind the virus, even though all the Israel Institute of Biological Research actually announced was the identification of a potentially useful antibody, not a working vaccine, which will of course take them time to test just like every other major medical research center racing to develop one. Even more troubling than the obvious falsehood and misrepresentation in these anti-Semitic claims, however, is their similarity to historical accusations of Jews poisoning wells. The phrase “poisoning the well” may be very familiar to students of rhetoric as a logical fallacy, a kind of smear tactic that inserts irrelevant negative claims or implications to predispose an audience against an opponent. It is an appeal to hate, and we could certainly find examples of it in anti-Semitic speech, but in this case, we mean something far more literal. When the bubonic plague struck Europe in the mid-14th century, Jewish communities were accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells, rivers, and food supplies. While today we better understand what caused the plague, at the time, layperson and doctors alike had little idea of what the plague’s origin might be. They blamed an angry god, a sinister alignment of heavenly bodies, apocalyptic floods of toads and snakes and mysterious many-legged worms whose terrible odor caused disease, and even supernatural weather in the form of a black snow that could melt a mountain to the ground. Perhaps it’s not so surprising, in this time of uncertainty, that Europeans also looked for a scapegoat on whom to blame the plague, and that, as happens again and again throughout history, they chose the Jews. Between 1348 and 1351, in cities across Europe, thousands upon thousands of Jewish men, women and children were herded into public squares, tortured into confessing, and burned alive. Records of these false confessions under duress were dispatched from one region to another, providing false evidence that could thereafter be used in another pogrom. This was itself a holocaust, prefiguring the Holocaust 600 years later, and even then, there were some who denied its occurrence, such as in Frankfurt, where one chronicler asserted that the entire Jewish quarter of the city had burned to the ground because of an accident rather than a massacre.

The history of Western Christians using Jews as scapegoats and accusing them of outrageous acts is long. After the murder of William of Norwich, the accusations of ritual murder as a way to reenact the execution of Christ led to the absurd claim that Jews regularly conspired to steal blessed eucharist wafers from Christian churches in order to desecrate them. As this sacramental bread was believed to literally “host” the body of Christ, it was claimed that Jews just couldn’t refrain from driving their sharpened daggers into it. Imagine hating and fearing a group so much that you’d believe they wanted nothing more than to stab bread just to defile your god, even though this would mean that they actually believed a central tenet of your faith, the conversion of the eucharistic elements into Christ’s body and blood, and by extension acknowledged his divinity. This conspiracy claim made of Jews a people defined by unrepentant evil. Therefore it would require no stretch of the imagination to think of them inciting war and revolution for their own nefarious purposes, an anti-Semitic conspiracy that flourished with the rise of Communism and Bolshevism, which were commonly blamed on Jews, as seen in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery. And accusations of Jews poisoning and spreading disease has recurred numerous times as well. In the early 1950s, Stalin made baseless accusations that a group of Jewish doctors was actually a poisoning network that planned to assassinate Soviet officials. In the late 1980s, an extremist anti-Semitic sect of the Black Hebrew Israelites spread the claim that Israel and South Africa engineered the AIDS virus in order to wipe out Africans, and a few years after that, the Nation of Islam published a book entitled The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, which portrayed Jews as the perpetrators of pogroms and holocausts, rather than the victims, asserting with no evidence that Jews ran the trans-Atlantic slave trade and that Jews spread smallpox to Native Americans with infected blankets. Even as recently as 2016, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas repeated a debunked claim about rabbis urging Israelis to poison Palestinian water supplies. Thus current rumors of Israelis or Jews in general creating and intentionally spreading the novel coronavirus fit clearly into the historical tradition of a long disproven accusation. Even as far back as the days of the Black Plague, the obvious logical problem with these accusations was seen and pointed out by Pope Clement VI in a papal bull: Jews themselves were dying from the plague just as much as Christians. The same sad fact offers a simple refutation for claims about Jews spreading AIDS and the novel coronavirus.

A depiction of the burning of Jews during the Black Death epidemic, 1349, via Wikimedia Commons — A depiction of the burning of Jews during the Black Death epidemic, 1349, via Wikimedia Commons

Some historians have argued, however, that the burning of Jews during plague outbreaks had little to do with the notion that they were poisoning wells, that such accusations were not actually believed and were only made as a rationale for massacring Jews. These historians argue the burning of Jews in this time had more to do with class unrest and social conflict. By their reckoning, these were popular uprisings against Jewish people because the poor resented their wealth and the usurious practices of Jewish moneylenders. However, Samuel Cohn, in his article “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” makes a convincing argument that this view is itself based on stereotypes and assumptions rather than evidence. According to his extensive research of primary source material, most pogroms during plague outbreaks appear to have been initiated by the elite, by patricians and noblemen rather than poor townsfolk and peasants. In fact, the debtors of Jewish moneylenders were typically aristocrats, not the peasantry, and none of the many recorded confessions of well-poisoning extracted under torture mention anything about usury. In fact, it would seem that Jewish moneylenders typically offered loans at lower rates than Christian moneylenders, such that in some places where Jews had been expelled, the populace demanded that they be allowed to return. Thus, the true reason for blaming the plague on Jews seems to have been simple hatred, as evidenced by the fact that on some occasions other common targets of public hate were also accused of poisoning wells, such as the poor and other foreigners. However, this assumption by historians certainly does speak to the prevalence of another anti-Semitic canard, that Jews control the world economy through their dominance of global banking and finance systems.

As the modern plague of COVID-19 continued its spread, the famously racist KKK figure David Duke claimed that Jews had planned the pandemic in order to destabilize the global economy. Jewish involvement in finance goes back to the Middle Ages and the fact that, barred from many occupations, they were frequently obliged to work in fields that Christians held in disdain, like pawn brokerage, tax and rent collection, and moneylending. Such occupations were often considered unethical and immoral, creating something of a self-fulfilling prophecy with regard to the general estimation of Jewish people’s character. Among the only occupations available to them were those considered dishonest or parasitic, leading to widespread views that Jews were dishonest and parasitic, as proven by their gravitation toward those occupations. The fact that some Jewish families managed to make their fortunes in those trades should have been a credit to their work ethic and business acumen, but instead spawned resentment over their wealth and power. 12th century England provides a useful example of this. William the Conqueror had invited Jews into the country in hopes their services would be a boon to the economy. The murder of William of Norwich started the spread of the blood libel and the Crusades whipped up religious fervor, but anti-Semitic violence was kept minimal until Jews began to rise to prominence and become as affluent as their white Christian counterparts, with Aaron of Lincoln, a Jew, becoming the richest man in England. When King Richard I was crowned and wealthy English Jews paid him homage, the resentment reached a boiling point and violence erupted, with bloody pogroms thereafter in London and York. In 1218, Henry III issued an edict requiring Jews to wear a badge identifying them as Jewish, and in 1290, Edward Longshanks expelled them from the country, both of which events should ring bells as being similar to the eventual actions of the Nazis.

13th century English depiction of “Aaron, Son of the Devil,” a caricature of the Jews, seen wearing a badge identifying his Jewish heritage, via Wikimedia Commons

With the establishment of the Rothschild banking dynasty in 19th century France, this resentment of prosperous Jewish individuals and affluent Jewish families evolved into the fear over an international Jewish cabal bent on economic supremacy, an idea expressed clearly in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgery: “We shall surround our government with a whole world of economists…. Around us again will be a whole constellation of bankers, industrialists, capitalists and—the main thing millionaires, because in substance everything will be settled by the question of figures.” Thus the fear of Jewish influence in banking, industry, and finance evolved from a resentment that this marginalized group managed, historically, to succeed despite limited opportunities. And today, as the name of the Rothschilds is still breathlessly mentioned by conspiracy theorists alongside more modern figures like George Soros, we still commonly see claims that Jews control every lucrative industry, from Hollywood to the food industry, which they are said to profit from through a “Kosher Tax” that doesn’t exist, and that they even control the stock market by dominating the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. But of course, as antiracist essayist Tim Wise has pointed out, this supposed domination of boards of directors is misrepresented, with any number of Jewish directors being seen as over-representation even when they are in the minority, representing perhaps nine to thirteen percent of a given board’s membership. And after all, even if Jews did represent the majority of a board of directors, Wise shrewdly notes that this doesn’t make the wrongdoings of the company attributable to Jews generally any more than the wrongdoings of a tobacco company can be blamed on Christians generally because its board is dominated by Christians.

Fundamental logical flaws like this are characteristic of many anti-Semitic arguments. It has been pointed out that nearly every accusation made against the Jews is contradictory. They are said to be exploitative capitalists but also communist revolutionaries, accused of being inciters of war but also pacifists and cowards, of holding themselves too separate from society but also of intermingling too much, of being too secular and materialistic but also too religious and spiritual. Somehow they are criticized for being bold schemers at world domination and simultaneously for being nervous, timid, and inferior. The cognitive dissonance boggles the mind, and as with the other images of Jewish people embodied in the legend of the Wandering Jew, so too is this contradictory nature. In nearly every telling of the Wandering Jew’s tale, he is given a different name, a sure sign that it is mere folklore or myth. He is called Cartophilus, Ahasverus, Buttadeus, Isaac Laquedam, and Juan Espera en Dios, along with numerous permutations of those. Livia Bitton, in an article on the topic for Literary Onomastics Studies, sees a contradictory tradition in the etymological development of these names. Some, such as Cartaphilus, which means “well loved,” would seem to identify the Wandering Jew with the Beloved Disciple, often believed to be John, whose grave, according to another Christian legend, was found to be empty. The first name John likewise corresponds to some other first names given to the Wandering Jew, like Juan, Johannes, and Giovanni. However, the name Buttadeus seems to refer to the Wandering Jew striking Christ, making him the “God-batterer.” Therefore, the Wandering Jew was either beloved of God or a cursed enemy of God, and in some cases both, as some accounts combined the names, as with the Latin Johannes Buttadeos. So the legend of the Wandering Jew even reflects the dichotomy of views about Jews as either chosen people or villains. It can be seen as an allegory for all the traditions of anti-Semitism whose paths can be traced throughout history and which seem to have swelled again during this Coronavirus Era. It depicts hatred for and fear of the Jews as unending, going on and on and on, just as the Wandering Jew is said to continually march through history, eternally suffering and feared by others. But there is an alternative interpretation of the legend, one that makes of the Wandering Jew more an allegory for all humanity, his suffering and his search for peace universal. This is the meaning we must take from the legend, for this, after all, is what anti-Semites and racists of every stripe fail to recognize: that they are the same as the people they hate, that they share the same struggles, seek the same comforts, and fear the same cruelties.

“The Wandering Eternal Jew,” a Nazi propaganda poster, via Wikimedia Commons

In the Footsteps of the Wandering Jew: Anti-Semitic Canards in the Coronavirus Era

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