Robert Spencer’s Anti-Semitism, History and Myth debunks persistent falsehoods—Jewish media control, Holocaust denial, blood libels, and Talmud distortions—exposing how myths twist truths like Jewish influence in finance or socialist ties to persecution. Post-October 7, even respected figures revived these narratives, he notes, while tracing roots from Roman-era Christian-Islamic rivalry to modern Islam’s hostility (Quranic verses, Iran’s "death to America" stance). The Abraham Accords’ future hinges on Iran’s survival, as Sunni states may abandon deals if Tehran falls. Spencer argues Western media’s bias against Israel stems from leftist opposition to unassimilable groups, leaving real genocidal threats unaddressed. A sharp rebuttal to anti-Semitism’s enduring, evolving lies. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with the great Robert Spencer.
He has written a new book called Anti-Semitism, History and Myth.
And I think it's obviously a very important subject for the moment.
When I was a young man, one of my first, the first novel I actually ever published under my own name had a line in it about the fact that we were living in a time of holiday Jews, by which I meant the Holocaust that so shamed Western culture into abandoning anti-Semitism.
But that wasn't going to last because anti-Semitism, Jew hatred is a permanent facet of the West.
It is, I believe, based in a hatred of the God of the Jews, who is now the God of everybody because of Jesus Christ.
And I think that that is why people want to expel the Jews, because they want that God out of their life where he keeps bothering their conscience about their sins.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shulman Fellow at the David Harwitz Freedom Center.
He's written 30 books, many of them examining, turning a very harsh light on Islam.
But his new book, as I say, is Anti-Semitism, History and Myth.
Robert, it is great to see you again.
Thank you for coming on.
Andrew, always good to talk to you.
Thank you.
So you start this book with a, actually you end this book, I should say, with a line that really caught my attention.
It says, the idea for this book arose from discussions with two people I had respected and admired, but not in the usual way.
After the October 7 massacre, they stunned me with their open avowals of age-old anti-Semitic myths that I thought no sane and rational individual took seriously anymore.
The Jews control the media.
The Jews control the international organizations and so forth.
I was really caught by that idea.
First of all, I was wondering when, I don't want you to give anything away.
You obviously don't want to name these people.
But when you say you respected and admired them, not in the usual way, what do you mean not in the usual way?
Can you tell me that?
Oh, I mean that the book was not inspired by people I respected and admired.
I see.
I see.
They would say, hey, I got a great idea for you.
They actually inspired it in a negative way by surprising me with their anti-Semitism.
So now I have run into this many times.
And just like all racial hatreds, it always picks on elements of truth.
I mean, there's always stereotypes that have, you know, connect to the truth.
And there are a lot of Jews in the media.
And the Jews have a lot more wealth and power than their numbers and all this stuff.
What was your response to these people when they say these things?
How do you come back at them?
Or do you just let it pass?
Well, when it came to specifically to the media, I said if the Jews control the media, a very bad job of it.
Because if you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, all the rest of them, they are relentlessly anti-Israel.
It's always Israel kills so many Palestinians.
And we don't hear until paragraph 57, if at all, that these guys were Hamas terrorists.
We constantly got uncritical repetition of Hamas's casualty figures as if they were fact from all the establishment media until Hamas itself rolled them back.
Yeah.
And so the idea that the Jews are in control of the political discourse or the media discourse, I mean, okay, the Jews control the political discourse.
Well, they couldn't prevent the Democrats from nominating an open anti-Semite for mayor of New York just the other day.
Yeah, it's amazing.
They can't result in facts again and again and again.
Yeah, they somehow can't use their space lasers to keep people from hating and killing them all over the place.
So you call the book history and myth.
What do you mean by myth in this case?
The first half of the book goes through four major sources of anti-Semitism in history.
Christianity, with of course Christianity being the only one that's renounced it and rejected anti-Semitism, but also Islam, National Socialism, and International Socialism.
Then the second half of the book takes some of the common myths about Jews and shows how they're false.
Like chief among them, I think, nowadays is the idea that the Talmud is some kind of manual for subversion and hatred of non-Jews, and that it directs Jews who that and all Jews read it, apparently, and internalize it and act upon it at all times.
And so I go through how the Talmud is actually understood in Jewish tradition, what it really is, and how it's not even remotely what the anti-Semites say that it is.
I also go through Holocaust denial, the blood libels, and European history, and some of the other things that are common myths that unfortunately are coming back today and show how they're all a lot of nonsense.
But why they still have this appeal goes back to the ultimate idea of universalism and collectivism and this stubborn people that won't join the larger collective.
It starts before Christianity, doesn't it?
I mean, the Jews.
Where does that come?
How did that manifest itself?
You know, it's wild.
These were things that I had not been aware of to a tremendous degree before I started doing the research for the book.
And one of the early chapters of the book is about pre-Christian anti-Semitism and how there were Egyptian writers who disputed the biblical account of the Exodus and gave a pro-Pharao spin.
And there were some ancient Greek pre-Christian writers who alleged that the Jews had secret rituals, that they had things set up in the Holy of Holies that were contrary to what they teach in outwardly in the Torah.
And these things, those myths actually persist and are still heard to this day in various forms.
And not many people realize that they're repeating things that come from people like Philo of Alexandria from 200 BC and things like people like that, that were dealing with Jews in a vastly different cultural context and political context from what we encounter today.
When you get to Christianity, I mean, it's one of the amazing things about Christianity.
I mean, I'm a Jew who converted to Christianity, so I'm very sensitive to that divide.
But, you know, when you read Paul and he says, don't offend the Jews.
Remember, your strength comes from your roots, not from the branches, talking about the branches being the Gentiles, the roots being the Jews.
But somehow it has all become about the Jews killed Christ.
I mean, that's at least what it became in the Middle Ages, the Jews with the deicides, which is insane.
I mean, it's kind of like the idea that this was not a universal, I mean, they're only Jews in the Bible.
This was a universal event.
How did that get started?
How did they move into that venue?
I mean, I guess there was so much hostility between Jews and Christians, Jews and Christians to begin with.
Maybe that had something to do with it.
Yeah, and it was also competition.
And so I wanted to say it first as we're speaking about this today, that I'm a Christian who is often taken for being Jewish.
And so I've had people, you know, call out on the street in New York City and say, hey, rabbi, and start throwing pennies at me and stuff like that.
And so as a Christian, I'm sensitive to this charge.
And so I went into this with tremendous interest and found that at the beginning, you know, in the early days when Christianity was outlawed in the Roman Empire, and the Jews were not so well regarded by the Romans either, both of them started to grow, Judaism and Christianity, as movements that were kind of countercultural and opposed to the Roman values,
which were widely seen as celebrating debauchery and decadence to an unacceptable degree.
And so a lot of the early Christian writers are very harshly critical of Jews and Judaism in a way that comes more from a competitive aspect in the empire itself,
even after Christianity, actually especially after Christianity was legalized and became the official religion of the empire, rather than the position of medieval Christianity of a vast majority persecuting a persistently unassimilable minority.
And of course, the problem is that it's really fundamentally incoherent, Christian anti-Semitism, because the whole idea of Christianity is that our sins, your sins, my sins, everybody's sins, put Christ on the cross and that he is expiating the sins of all mankind.
And so if you turn around then and say, yes, but it's the Jews' fault, they crucified Christ, you're really contradicting the whole essence and purpose of Christianity.
And so I find Christian anti-Semitism to be really very curious, although persistent.
And it's remarkable that of the four major sources of anti-Semitism, Christianity is the only one that's renounced it.
The Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council, many Orthodox leaders, many leading Protestant groups, they have all rejected Christian anti-Semitism in a way that you do not see in Islam, and certainly not from Nazism or communism.
You know, it is interesting.
It's incredibly moving to me, actually, that Americans really don't understand.
Until recently, we didn't see this kind of Christian-based anti-Semitism.
When I was working for Thomas Nelson, I was writing books for Thomas Nelson.
I remember the Southern Christians saying to me, you know, why are the people, why are Jews hostile toward Christians when we all have the same God?
And I was like, well, you have to go back in history, you know, because before you guys, it wasn't as nice.
People weren't as nice as they are now.
But it's lovely to see American Christians who have renounced this and have made common cause with their brothers, as Pope John Paul II said, their brothers, the Jews.
Can you talk a little bit about the blood libel?
The blood libel is very haunting to me because I love ghost stories.
And one of the first ghost stories in English is one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is the blood libel.
Where does this come from?
And is there any basis in truth?
How does that develop?
And maybe you should explain what it is, too.
Yeah, well, you have some Christian children who were found dead in the Middle Ages, and Jews were blamed and were forced under duress to confess that they had killed the Christian children in order to secure their blood to mix it into the Passover matzah.
Now, this doesn't make sense on a number of levels because actually Jewish law forbids Jews from ingesting blood.
And your Orthodox Jews don't even eat rare meat because there might be blood in it.
And so this is something that goes against all the teachings of Judaism.
What it really was was a recurring phenomenon of people scapegoating Jews so that the real perpetrators could get off and so that the Jewish property or possessions could be plundered.
And you have this again and again and again.
I think one of the most notorious incidents actually comes quite much more recently than some of the more famous ones where in the 19th century, this Italian woman disappeared for a week.
And I talk about this in some detail in the book.
And some leading Jewish entrepreneurs and businessmen of the community were accused of killing her for in this ritual murder.
And then it turned out that, well, she was having a dalliance with a man in the next town and didn't want to get caught.
So she blamed the Jews.
And this kind of thing happens over and over again, unfortunately, in medieval history.
There isn't a single incident of Jewish people confessing to this, not being under duress and not being under torture.
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Middle East Dynamics00:12:16
And even the fact that they, it's kind of a reversal of the mass of, you know, the bread and wine.
It just, it doesn't sound like it comes from a Jewish mind in the first place.
You know, there's always a way with bigotry.
Kind of, I feel like this is what Othello is about.
There's always a way in bigotry in which the bigot turns the person into the image that they hate.
So the Jews were permitted very few opportunities in Christendom in the Middle Ages.
And among them was the ability to loan because Christians weren't supposed to take interest.
And so Jews were allowed to do that.
And then, of course, you were in debt to the Jews.
You hated the Jews.
They were greedy.
You know, they were blood-sucking, evil loan givers.
And they were frequently chased out of countries so that the king could retake the wealth.
He wouldn't have to pay them back.
It was like forgiving, a harsh way of forgiving the loans.
Is there a sense?
Is there something about the Jews today that when people look at them and say, oh, they do this or they do that or they're full of fire, they run finance, they run this.
Is there something where they have been created into the image of the bigots?
Or is that still just mythology?
Well, it's certainly mythology, but like you said earlier, all of these things are based upon fact.
Right.
to some degree that is twisted or rendered or interpreted in a negative way.
So when you have the Christian prohibition of usury and Jews prohibited from taking so many different jobs and taking up so many different kinds of professions, they go into finance and then the Christians blame them for being usurers and engaging in finance.
And then you have centuries later people who have been engaged in this kind of business for centuries.
And, you know, even in the modern age, it's still very common for people, the children in a family to take up the business that the family has been involved in.
And so you have a lot of Jews in this field.
You also have a culture that celebrates and encourages learning and hard work.
And very simply, that's going to mean that people who engage in those activities are going to rise to the top of various professions.
And then other people who don't necessarily engage in so much learning and hard work are going to say, wow, the Jews, they got it made.
They get each other into these jobs or whatever.
And really, that's just their spin on the fact that if they engaged in the same kind of hard work and study, they would also succeed in the same way.
You know, before I want to get to the political part of this, but before that, could you elaborate a little bit more on the Talmud?
Because, I mean, one of the things I find a little comical is people will pick out anti-Christian remarks in the Talmud as if these people should be persecuted, but they should just love the people who are persecuting them, who are Christians to begin with.
But the Talmud is not what people, what anti-Semites say it is.
Can you explain that a little bit?
Yeah, in the first place, a lot of people think that the Talmud is the scripture or even worse, the secret scripture that the Jews really revere and not the Torah or the Hebrew scriptures in general.
And of course, in the first place, it's not scripture.
It is certainly very highly respected among Jews, but it's also so voluminous.
Every English translation of it is 20-some volumes that very few Jews have actually read the whole thing.
And even fewer live by it as if it were every word were scripture.
That's not even how it's understood in Jewish tradition.
It's not scripture like the Quran or like some Protestants read the New Testament, that every word of it is to be applied to your life as if it were God speaking to you directly.
The Talmud is a series of commentaries on the Hebrew scriptures and then commentaries on the commentaries with rabbis talking to one another and extending conversations sometimes over centuries because it's written down and it's written commentaries on earlier written writings.
You can have these conversations that do last across generations.
But that means that opinions are thrown out there and rejected.
And a lot of times what the anti-Semites pick up on are the statements that one rabbi says that another one says, no, that's not right.
And it's certainly not true that Jews think of these things as something that they have to follow.
And so you have some very harsh things that some people say are written about Jesus in the Talmud.
And as you noted, these things didn't arise in a vacuum.
These things were written in the context of very harsh things being said about Jews and Judaism by some of the leaders of the church.
And in the book, I actually place these things in that context and show that, well, obviously, you know, if somebody is saying all these things about you, you're not likely to just say, wow, yeah, you're right.
I guess I am the son of Satan or something like that.
You might just fire back with your own rhetorical ammunition.
But other people say these things don't even have to do with Jesus of Nazareth at all.
And there are multiple people named Jesus who were referred to in the Talmud.
And so there's a difference of opinion about these things.
Nobody is saying that they are binding upon all Jews for belief, much less for action.
So now the Jews are caught in this kind of unbelievable, like unholy trinity, the kind of opposite of the Trinity.
You've got the communists or the socialists who hate the right wing, the far right.
You got the far right who hate the communists.
And you got both of them antithetical to the beliefs of the Islamists, and yet they all hate the Jews.
How do we get there?
How does that happen?
Well, I think that it all comes from the, like I said before, the collectivist impulse and that you have this one group of people that won't join the collective.
And so there's always a collectivist impulse in the human heart.
I mean, obviously, Christianity is a universal appeal to all human beings.
Islam is as well.
And National Socialism actually is, although it exalts the so-called Aryans as supreme, it's saying that this kind of race-based idea is the valid way to look at the whole world.
And the Jews in this scenario are the evil outsiders.
It's actually the same thing for the communists.
Not many people know this, but Karl Marx wrote a polemical treatise identifying the Jews with the capitalists and saying what the Jews have to do to be good proletarians is to give up all traces of their Judaism.
They have to melt into the larger collective, which is exactly what Islam and Christianity say, or at least some understandings of Christianity.
And so this is something that the Jews have always thought to be antithetical to their responsibility before God to maintain their own beliefs and traditions and customs as being something that demonstrated their loyalty to him.
And so this is nowadays becoming kind of a perfect storm with, well, you know, that Mark Lehrer, is it Mark Lehrer?
What was that?
That Tom.
The humorist, he had that song, National Brotherhood Week, and this group hates that group and that group hates this group and everybody hates the Jews.
It's true.
Everybody does it for different reasons, but it all comes back to that.
We're talking to Robert Spencer, his new book, Anti-Semitism, History and Myth.
To move to another topic, while I have you here, I've got to ask you about what you're thinking about the Middle East right now after Trump's bombing of the Iranian nuclear facilities.
Do you feel that this could have a positive, permanent positive effect on the Middle East?
It could have a positive effect, but nothing's permanent in the Middle East.
It's about as changeable as the weather in San Francisco or something.
It's, isn't it San Francisco where they say, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes?
And Nashville, too.
Yeah.
Yeah, there you go.
So it's a good thing because the Islamic Republic has been very severely set back.
It would be an even greater thing if it turns out that the Islamic Republic can't survive this, which could well happen because its own people hate it.
The only thing is, as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran exists, it will keep trying to destroy Israel and America.
Remember that the Ayatollah Khamenei said a few years back, when we chant death to America, it's not just a slogan.
It's a policy.
It's the foundational goal of our whole regime.
You have been a very harsh observer of Islam.
Your knowledge of Islam is incredibly deep.
I've heard you debate people, and it's always a little, I always feel a little bad for them because you bitch Trump all over them.
But Donald Trump has somehow managed to play the Iranian card in such a way that others in the Middle East have thought, well, maybe we should make common cause with Israel.
Do you see that as a possibility?
Is the commitment to destroying Israel so great, so enduring that it cannot be overcome by national interests?
Or do you think there is a chance?
Depends on Islam, really.
It depends on the commitment of each country to Islamic principles.
I mean, you take the Abraham Accords.
All the countries that joined are Sunni Muslim states who are threatened by Shiite Iran.
If Shiite Iran is no longer a threat, I don't think the Abraham Accords will survive because each one of those Sunni countries is under pressure from hardliners in those countries who think how terrible it is that you've made a deal with the Jews.
And that is because of, once again, Islam and the Quran, which says that the most vehement in hostility of all people toward the Muslims are the Jews.
And so if the Quran says your worst enemies are the Jews, then they're always going to be believers in Islam.
Not all of them, obviously, but some of them who think, how can you make a deal with our worst enemies?
Now, they might think the Iranians, the Shia, are a more immediate threat.
And so they're willing to deal with Israel on that basis.
But I don't know that the Abraham Accords would survive the fall of the Islamic Republic.
Interesting.
As long as the Islamic Republic endures, the Abraham Accords could grow and expand.
That's really interesting.
Well, all right, so we're talking about your book, Anti-Semitism, History, and Myth.
Now we're talking about the Middle East.
Israel is the only country in the Middle East where every religion is freely treated.
I guess maybe Abu Dhabi, I think like some no?
Okay, I'm being too open.
Not in any real effective way.
I mean, you have a church for the foreigners, but if an Emirati wanted to go in and convert to Christianity, no way.
I got it.
Okay.
But in Israel, you can do all that.
Women are free.
Arabs and Muslims can rise up in government and in other professions.
And yet, and yet, they're tarred as an apartheid nation, and they are called genocidal when they're the object of genocide.
Press Picks of Persecution00:03:44
And our press picks that up.
What is our press seeing that makes them look through those glasses?
What is it about our press that does that?
Well, the media is the arm of the left.
It's a propaganda ministry for the international left.
And the international left hates Israel precisely because the international left are socialist internationalists who want to destroy nation states and even destroy everything that makes for individual identity in order to fit us into their glorious collective.
And so, you know, you look at communist China, look at the cultural revolution when Chairman Mao was there and everybody's wearing those little blue suits because if your clothes are nicer than mine, then we're not equal.
If we want to have real equity, we all even all have to wear the same things.
And so that, I think, is the highest level of communism that we have seen so far.
And that's what the left wants.
So they hate the idea of a stubbornly individualistic, unassimilable people that is going to keep to its own traditions no matter what.
On the right, you frequently get the accusation, and there's some truth to this, that Jews have been high up in the socialist movement.
Why do you think that is?
And why do you think, especially when the socialists always end up persecuting the Jews as well?
What is it about socialism that has attracted intellectual Jews?
I suspect that the attraction comes from a total weariness of having to endure all the persecution throughout the centuries.
And so there's a certain idea that if we join this collective, actually, as Marx had called the Jews to do, then there won't be any more persecution, which is something that Jews have always considered to be a remote have always considered to be a remedy for the persecution throughout history.
Convert to the dominant religion, join the dominant culture, and then everything will be okay.
And of course, Hitler, when he even persecuted Jews who had converted to Christianity, he went against that.
But that had been something that previously had actually spared Jews from persecution, indeed, although a lot of critics would say, well, sure, but at the expense of the Jewish identity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And even converts were always suspect.
I mean, they were always suspecting the Muranos and people like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, it always depresses me to talk to you, but you're but you do manage.
I have to say, anti-Semitism, history and myth, like all of your books, you managed to bring enormous scholarship to bear in a very readable way.
And I think this subject is something people have to learn about because the lies come out so quickly that it's hard to counter them.
And you do a great job of exposing the mythology that just runs through all of this.
Robert Spencer, always great to talk to you.
I really appreciate it.
And I hope you'll come back soon.
Thanks, Andrew.
Always good to talk to you.
One more time, Robert Spencer, anti-Semitism, history, and myth.
You know, it's just amazing that a lot of people aren't writing books like this, but this is a good one.
And it's a very complete one.
And if you ever feel like these anti-Semites, these Jew haters are getting under your skin and making you think, well, maybe they've got a point.
He shows you why they don't in great detail, but also in very readable detail.
Also, also, if you just want a truth to pour down you like a rushing river, come in to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.