The San Diego shooter’s manifesto is a modern form of an old lie about Jews
A medieval mind-set is at the heart of anti-Semitism, even when it spreads on Zig Forums.
On Easter Sunday, 1475, the body of a 2-year-old Christian boy named Simon Unferdorben was discovered near a Jewish home in the northern Italian city of Trent, then a province of the Holy Roman Empire. Immediately, authorities arrested every Jew living in the city. Even as they awaited sentencing, a mythic narrative sprang up around the dead toddler: that he was a saintly martyr, a victim of ritual murder by the Jews, who had killed him to use his blood in the baking of their Passover matzohs.
After prolonged torture, eight Jews were beheaded or burned at the stake for their alleged role in the crime. The late medieval Christian networks of communication broadcast the myth of Simon’s martyrdom at the hands of a cabal of evil Jews across languages and countries.
If, in the 1400s, anti-Semitic myths were transmitted by means of beatific poetry, legends of martyrs and claims of miraculous healing by pilgrims, today such lies are transmitted far more easily.
But it is a mark of how unchanged such myths are that John Earnest — the 19-year-old man who police say entered a Southern California synagogue, murdered a 60-year-old woman and injured several more people on Saturday — claims to have acted, in part, to avenge the death of Simon of Trent.
“You are not forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven,” he wrote in a manifesto uploaded to the text repository Pastebin and posted on the anonymous message board Zig Forums. The dissemination of the manifesto was instantaneous, reaching thousands of readers on the message board and around the world. But the hatred at its core could have been plucked directly from the 15th century.
Over the last 500 years, anti-Semitism has evolved to suit changing times, but it has never receded. The rhetorical utility of redirecting popular anger against a reviled minority has retained its power; therefore, so has the notion that Jews are a nefarious fifth column, a “synagogue of Satan” whose sole urge is parasitism and destruction. Where once Jews were accused of poisoning wells to spread bubonic plague, contemporary white nationalist rhetoric posits instead that Jews seek the destruction of the “European” or “white” race by encouraging interracial marriage and mass immigration.
If the manifesto on Zig Forums is any guide, Earnest subscribed fully to this pernicious myth, which far-right ideologues call “white genocide,” and preached it as sincerely to the web-savvy readers of his text as any medieval preacher ginning up a pogrom by spreading the blood libel. (That the majority of American Jews tend to lean politically left, and therefore generally endorse more open immigration policies and oppose racism, provides a far-right, radicalized, conspiracy-drunk subculture all the proof it needs.)
Earnest’s alleged manifesto is an incitement to both homicide and suicide, a terrifyingly nihilistic screed that casts the slaughter of Jews as a noble act against an implacable foe. “I would die a thousand times over to prevent the doomed fate that the Jews have planned for my race,” he wrote. There is a striking casualness to the way Earnest discusses murder, a video-gamey distance from the horrors he planned to inflict; he called murdering as many Jews as possible achieving “a high score.” According to Bellingcat analyst Robert Evans, responses to the alleged killer’s Zig Forums thread and on his Facebook page were full of fellow message-board members urging him on, telling him to “get the high score.”
It’s easy to look at a man wielding an assault weapon, receiving and disseminating radicalized ideas through the Internet and urging supporters to create memes lauding his actions as a profoundly modern phenomenon. But in the end, it’s not all that different from the bishop of Trent commissioning poems to create the myth of a martyred saint and ordering Jews burned at the stake. The goal is the same: to cast Jews — each individual Jew, and Jews as a whole — as the driving force of the world’s evils; and to build, on their corpses, a world cleansed of sin.
Hatred of Jews, no matter how savvy its technological promulgation, retains both the crudity and the violence of a medieval mind-set. In such a worldview, a child saint can cure a painful hernia, every individual Jew is plotting the dilution of the white race through miscegenation, murder is a sacred duty, and holy war is a mere provocation or two away.
That such a mind-set proved fatally appealing to a teenager in California is frightening; that the movement is international, metastasizing from Norway to Pittsburgh to New Zealand to Poway, Calif., is indisputable.
