Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Yesterday he sent out a column to his Arguable subscribers (of whom I am one). He he has now made the column accessible here (with numerous links) on his personal site.
The column hit home for me. Jeff has kindly granted us his permision to republish it on Power Line along with his best wishes for a safe and happy Passover to those of us who begin our celebration of the holiday tonight. His decency shines through this column. Note: Jeff calls Candace Owens “a MAGA fanatic.” I think it would be more accurate to call her a fanatic simply or soneone suffering from bats in the belfry, but that is a small point. Michael Oren, whom Jeff cites, lumps her in among “lunatic influencers,” which suffices as well.
Reminder: see his colum linked above for its numerous links. Jeff writes:
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As Passover returns this week, Jews the world over will gather around the Seder table to recount, as they have each spring for 34 centuries, the great narrative of how God liberated their ancestors from slavery in Egypt and set them on their long journey through history. In the course of retelling the story, they will quote the passage from the first chapter of Exodus in which Pharaoh justified the unspeakable repression he intended to inflict on the Hebrews.
“Come, let us deal wisely with them,” he exhorted his nation. “Otherwise they may become so numerous that if there is a war they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the land.” Though the tyrant’s idea of dealing wisely with the Hebrews began with slave labor, it wasn’t long before he advanced to murder. “Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying: ‘Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile.’”
Pharaoh’s false accusation set the pattern for what became one of the history’s most durable antisemitic conspiracies. Down through the millennia Jews have been portrayed as a fifth column, malevolently disposed to betray the nations in which they live. Again and again, the libel resurfaces: When war comes, it will be the Jews who caused it, or who had the most to gain from its outcome, or who manipulated others into fighting and dying. The libel is as old as the Pyramids — and as current as today’s news.
To be clear, this is not an essay about antisemites. It is addressed to good and reasonable people who would never knowingly endorse bigotry.
Michael Oren, the distinguished historian who was Israel’s ambassador to Washington during the Obama administration, observed recently that the war against Iran has revived “the slanderous claim, from right and left, that Jews have dragged America into a futile war.” The ideological range of those promoting that accusation spans the spectrum. Oren quotes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, podcaster Tucker Carlson, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and MAGA fanatic Candace Owens. He could have easily extended his list.
But this is only the most recent incarnation of Pharaoh’s logic.
The modern template was forged in the early 19th century, when propagandists began insisting that the Rothschild banking family had used secret foreknowledge to profit from the Napoleonic Wars — and that if Jews could profit from wars, Jews must engineer wars.
Henry Ford, who was both a brilliant industrialist and an obsessive pacifist, blamed Jews for World War I. “Ford attributes all evil to the Jews or Jewish capitalists,” his friend John Burroughs, a renowned naturalist, wrote in 1919. “The Jews caused the war; the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbing all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy.” Ford bought a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to spread his vitriol. He ran articles with headlines like “Jewish Dictatorship of the United States during War” and claimed that while millions suffered, Jews had “found wealth in the debris of civilization.”
A generation later, Charles Lindbergh revived Ford’s smear. At a 1941 America First rally in Des Moines, the aviator accused Jews of being “war agitators” who were “pressing this country toward war.” His words echoed those of Adolf Hitler’s notorious 1939 Reichstag speech, in which he denounced “international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe” for seeking to “plung[e] the nations once more into a world war.” Seven weeks after Lindbergh’s rally, Pearl Harbor made plain who the real war agitators were.
The calumny is indestructible. In 1990, when President George H.W. Bush assembled a coalition to roll back Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, former White House aide Patrick Buchanan, a prominent conservative commentator, railed that only two groups were “beating the drums for war in the Middle East” — the “Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” The war came and went. The accusation waited until it could be resurfaced again.
The 9/11 attacks spawned a fresh iteration. Within days, there was a rumor that 4,000 Jews had been warned to stay home that morning from their jobs at the World Trade Center — fueling lies, still circulating, that Zionists had orchestrated the attacks for their own purposes.
By 2003, the charge that Jews had manipulated America into waging war was being dignified as scholarly analysis. Harvard’s Stephen Walt and University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer published a paper insisting that “Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war.” A few years later, Walt put it even more bluntly: “Virtually all neoconservatives,” he wrote in Foreign Policy, “are also deeply committed Zionists who believe that the United States should use its military power to promote Israel’s interests,” The underlying allegation — Jews maneuver others into wars that benefit Jews — was the same one Lindbergh had made in Des Moines, and Ford had made before him, and Pharaoh had made before either of them.
So here’s a question for those whose outrage at the current war seems to orbit around Israel, Zionists, or Jewish influence: Shouldn’t this history give you pause?
I am not questioning your honesty. I am not calling you antisemitic. I am asking you to consider something more unsettling: What makes you sure you’re different from all those people in generations past who sincerely believed the same thing about Jews, but that you know were wrong?
Perhaps Pharaoh was being cynical when he claimed the Hebrews had to be suppressed before they started a war. But there were doubtless vast numbers of Egyptians who took their ruler at his word and never doubted that the threat was real. It is hard to believe that Ford and Lindbergh, two of the most celebrated and gifted Americans of their era, would have staked their towering reputations on lies they knew to be false? But even if they did, what of the throngs who subscribed to Ford’s newspaper, or packed America First rallies to cheer Lindbergh? Was it all an act? Or, like so many people before and since, were they seduced into believing a sickening lie about Jews, on the theory that where there is so much smoke, there must be fire.
My purpose isn’t to convince you that your views about Israel and the Iran war are wrong. It is to remind you that Jews have been falsely blamed for the world’s wars throughout history — and that there have always been reasonable people who were persuaded that this time the accusation was grounded in facts, not prejudice.
Every Passover, Jews recount the story of Pharaoh’s slander and what it led to — not only as ancient history, but as living warning. “In every generation,” the Haggadah teaches, “they rise up against us.” For millennia, the world’s wars have been blamed on Jewish cunning and Jewish manipulation — the same “hateful old lie,” as Oren calls it. When you find yourself reaching for an explanation that sounds remarkably like the one Pharaoh offered 34 centuries ago, are you sure you’re making an argument grounded in truth? Or are you, just possibly, recycling the oldest lie in the world?
