by Israel National News
Modern antisemitism thrives when ancient blood libels are repackaged as respectable journalism and smuggled into public life through elite institutions.
In this world, there are many, many things I don’t know. I don’t know New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for example. Beyond the limited knowledge that he is a progressive who once wanted to be the governor of Oregon, I don’t know much about Kristof’s politics. I don’t know if he is antisemitic or if he is just naïve about what it means to support Palestinian “liberation” and the globalization of the Intifada. I don’t know if he really believes that dogs can be trained to rape people or if he thinks that might be implausible. I don’t know if he truly supposes that Hamas-connected sources can be trusted or if he has decided that sources don’t matter as much as the airing of allegations, no matter how unsubstantiated.
As I said, there’s a great deal I don’t know.
What I do know, however, is that none of the above really matters. Whether Kristof is a genuinely good person who thought he was doing a genuinely good thing and making a genuinely positive contribution to the world’s understanding of the Israel–Hamas conflict is entirely irrelevant.
For my part, I think that Kristof, like many progressives of his generation, largely has good intentions. I don’t think that he is an antisemite, at least not intentionally. I think he probably believes, deep down in his heart, that his Times column the other day—in which he accused Israeli prison guards of unspeakable sexual torture against Palestinians—was valid and legitimate and important.
But again, that doesn’t matter. Regardless of his intentions, when placed in proper historical and political contexts, Kristof’s column is an ancient and noxious libel in the same tradition as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The most prominent theories about how and why the Holocaust occurred and why the Nazis targeted Jews specifically are unsatisfactorily explanatorily—at least when considered in isolation. Two of the more prominent, however, when taken together, explain a great deal.
Hannah Arendt’s explanation for the Nazis’ antisemitism is highly controversial, mostly because some see it as blaming the victims. Her conclusions, which she drew in The Origins of Totalitarianism, are purely political. For the most part, Arendt blames the conditions that gave rise to totalitarianism in general: the disintegration of the nation-state’s 18th-century settlement, the emancipation paradox (formal equality without social belonging), and the rise of pan-ethnic movements that scorned the confines of the territorial state. She added some Jewish-specific conditions—i.e., the role of Jewish financiers in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and the collapse of that role in the 20th century—but kept the explanation purely political. She wanted, very clearly, to separate modern antisemitism from the medieval antisemitism that had plagued Europe for centuries before.
The most reasonable interpretation of Arendt’s insistence on a new and purely political antisemitism was her desire to avoid the continuity narrative, the belief that European antisemitism was the primeval and inevitable descendant of early Christian Jew-hatred. Not only did she want to explain the Holocaust in terms of totalitarianism, but she also wanted to forestall the argument that the Nazis and their collaborators were distinguished from their European ancestors in scale and efficiency only, that they were no different and, by extension, no more evil than the perpetrators of the York Massacre of 1190.
Unfortunately, Arendt’s explanation, while politically astute, was nevertheless incomplete. Although it did account for the rise of antisemitism during the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century, it failed to explain how that antisemitism became so potent and how it came to legitimize the murder of two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. Enter the British historian Norman Cohn.
In his 1967 book Warrant for Genocide, Cohn filled in the gaps in Arendt’s theory, first by accepting her definition of political antisemitism and then by denying her principal historiographic claim. Cohn’s argument was that the specifically genocidal version of modern antisemitism—the version that produced the “Final Solution”—requires something more compelling, more intoxicating, than mere Jew-hatred. It required a fantasy of cosmic conspiracy. It required the conclusion that Jews were categorically alien and not merely different, not merely evil in an ordinary sense. In short, Cohn argued that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion set the stage for the Holocaust and for modern antisemitism by connecting Europe’s contemporary cultural and political trends to its medieval demonological imagination. For centuries, Cohn contended, Europeans had indulged fantasies of Jewish spiritual malevolence, from the “blood libel” in the William of Norwich case to the “well-poisoning” conspiracies during the Black Death to the Sandomierz blood libels of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Protocols, in turn, marked the secularized reinvention of this fantasy, not the political invention of a new conspiracy.
Between Arendt and Cohn, then, we arrive at a fairly complete explanation for the Holocaust. Arendt provides the means, the political upheaval of the era, and the specific conditions that made Europe’s Jewish population vulnerable, while Cohn provides the motive, the secularized version of the enduring fantasy that turned Jews from mere outsiders into literal demons.
In his follow-up to Warrant for Genocide, Cohn revisited the idea of a cosmic conspiracy, tracing its roots to antiquity and following it through the Middle Ages and early modern Europe. In the book, Europe’s Inner Demons, Cohn posits the existence of a recurrent fantasy, the belief “that there existed, somewhere in the midst of the great society, another society, small and clandestine, which not only threatened the existence of the great society but was also addicted to practices that were felt to be wholly abominable in the sense of anti-human.” He continues, noting that those “wholly abominable” practices generally take the form of a fairly consistent cluster: nocturnal assembly, infanticide, ritual cannibalism (often involving the consumption of children’s blood or flesh), incest or sexual orgy, and worship of an anti-god, frequently in animal-headed form. Interestingly, Cohn’s focus in the book is the application of this fantasy by Christians to other Christians, heretics, or other outsiders who had to be destroyed and eliminated. Indeed, his specific interest is in the “witch-sabbat” fantasies from the 15th century onward.
In Cohn’s reading of “the fantasy,” the Jewish blood libel is just one application of a perpetually transferable European cultural template. For centuries, Europeans turned their paranoia and insecurity on outsider sects, imagining the existence of small, clandestine, and strictly “anti-human” sub-societies, demonic in nature, which therefore had to be destroyed. It was only when this template was applied in the political context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was secularized in the form of The Protocols that it became the fantasy that enabled the Holocaust.
To return to where we started, what Nick Kristof wrote the other day is a textbook example of the “blood libel.” Whether he intended it to be or not, his column is a classic application of the fantasy of the cosmic conspiracy. Kristof does not allege that some Israeli guards have committed sexual abuse. If that happened, it would be a reportable, prosecutable offense, the likes of which Israel has previously pursued. Rather, he alleges that sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners is a systematic, organized, state-sanctioned practice. He shifts the charges from “individuals did wrong” to “this is the secret rite of the institution,” which is precisely the shift described by Cohn in Inner Demons. Medieval accusers did not allege that some Jews had killed some Christians; they said that there was a hidden Jewish council coordinating the practice as a perennial ritual. Kristof makes the fantastical but damning leap here, alleging misbehavior not by lone criminal individuals but by an organized demonological system.
In Kristof’s telling of the story, the dog-rape fantasy is critical. Gavin Langmuir, a historian who also studied the origins and repetition of the “blood libel,” used specific terms to distinguish mere prejudice from the descent into demonic fantasy. He distinguished xenophobic assertions, which exaggerate or unfairly generalize from some real feature of a group, from chimerical assertions, which describe practices no human group actually engages in. A claim that IDF guards have humiliated, beaten, or even sexually assaulted detainees is xenophobic in form, which is to say that even when those claims are wrong or overstated, they point to recognizable human behavior. By contrast, Kristof’s claim that Israeli forces have trained dogs to rape prisoners as institutional practice is chimerical in form: it describes a scene—choreographed bestiality, the animal as instrument, the victim as passive ritual object—that has no plausible institutional reality, the purpose of which is purely symbolic rather than evidential. Kristof’s charges function to depict the Israelis—and all Jews, by extension—as categorically alien, not merely different from “the rest of us,” but irredeemably so.
In the days since Kristof’s column was published, many observers have called for The New York Times to retract the piece or to issue a statement of correction. Either would be nice, but neither would be sufficient. Kristof’s column is part of the recurrent accumulation of cultural permission to view Jews as totally alien and, frankly, demonic. It incrementally renews the cultural availability of the “abominable and anti-human” template inside a respectable institution. That is what the template’s transmission has always required, and that is what makes this column so dangerous, regardless of its author’s intent.
While he may not have meant to do so, Nicholas Kristof signed a new “warrant” with his column last week, one that follows an old and treacherous pattern.
Israel National News
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/18/from-the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-to-the-new-york-times/
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