By Howard Jacobson, Tablet Magazine, 10-5-26
"Has there ever been a people more frequently or more preposterously lied about than the Jews?
"I don’t ask that in expectation of sympathy. It’s perversely flattering to excite the sort of malign curiosity that cannot be satisfied by what’s observably true. But there’s also been a heavy price to pay for being a figment of such superstitious fear and loathing that even the presence of Jews isn’t necessary for fear and loathing to take root and flourish. Distant hearsay can be enough.
"That the Elizabethans would go to the theater to scream and spit at Shylock several hundred years after Jews had been expelled from Britain attests to the astonishing staying power of the Jew as idea. As does the persisting fear of tainted Jewish blood in Spain, long after the Inquisition had converted, tortured, expelled, and executed every living Jew it could find. The bacillus of antisemitic mendacity thrives out of time, Jews or no Jews.
"Some lies learn to adapt and linger longer than others. The belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death by poisoning wells, a charge with which the sardonic Barabas made merry in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta—
As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls.
Sometimes I go about and poison wells—
"can still be traced in accusations that Israelis withhold water from Palestinians and contaminate what they do let through. The effigy of Judas Iscariot, the fictitious Jew said to have sold Jesus for a handful of silver, continues to be burned in some Easter festivals in Eastern Europe and Latin America, no matter that the incendiaries don’t always know whom they’re burning. And folklore hasn’t quite given up on the figure of the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth homeless as punishment for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. Long before academic anti-Zionists began to call for the expulsion of Israelis from Israel, Luther had posited their eternal exile as an expression, sanctioned by God, of their vagabondage of soul. And as for the Jew as companion of the devil, not to say the devil himself, I can personally vouch for the tenacity of that superstition, as more than one of my schoolfellows have asked—in Prestwich, north Manchester, England, 1954—if I would show them what remained of my tail.
"Regarding the Blood Libel, the malicious medieval defamation that told of Jews kidnapping and killing Gentile children for their blood, either to add zest to matzah or to replenish the blood of male Jews who menstruated profusely as a consequence of circumcision—another fantasy, too lurid and deranged to be simply called a falsehood—it too has resurfaced in recent years, determining the way the deaths of Palestinian children in the latest Gaza war have been presented as the result of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killing little ones “for sport” and laughing as they do so. No footage of such vile behavior exists, of course. I myself was widely misreported as arguing, in a piece in the [London] Observer a couple of years ago, that the press should cover up all word of such deaths. In fact, I argued for no such thing, nor would the left-leaning Observer have printed the piece had its staff thought that was my meaning. My target was the narrative strategy of the BBC and other news outlets, in which nine stories out of 10 led with the latest death count of Palestinian children—too cruel had they been even a quarter true, but which time and again proved unverifiable. The BBC reported first and ascertained second. But neither belated correction nor half-hearted apology did anything to alter the conviction that Israel’s first aim was the murder of Gazan children.
"How one tells a story is the story, and this story looked too like the old one for comfort. To argue against the framing of this narrative or the excited bloodthirstiness of the reporting was not to call for censorship of the truth. But that’s how I was reported. Enter a web of lies as ancient and entangled as this one, and whoever doesn’t repeat the mantra of the child-murdering Jews must be a liar or an accomplice to the lying.
"The charge of genocide leveled at Israel, a charge that invariably comes with the pseudo-authoritative definite article—the genocide, to muffle dissent and to rejig the hierarchy of genocides in favor of Israel’s victims—could be said to be the biggest lie of all. It does not diminish the horror of the flattening of Gaza one wit, or make light of the tragic loss of Palestinian lives, to insist that a genocide, let alone the genocide, has not occurred, even if lawyers with a vested interest in proving Israel guilty of something terrible redefine the word genocide to include normal conduct according to the laws of war.
"Yet words do matter. If the Nazis’ attempt to destroy the Jews necessitated the invention of the word genocide, it was because no existing word adequately described the scope of their ambition. What was envisaged at last as a Final Solution intended nothing less than the destruction of an entire people—not just the Jews of Germany, but also wherever a Jew could be found, and not just Jews in person, but also their property, their religion, their history, their philosophy and art, the very idea and principle of Jew, its spiritual no less than its physical being, until not a trace or memory of them should remain. Has so complete an annihilation of all that constitutes a people and their peoplehood ever been imagined let alone attempted before?
"If a word to encapsulate this crazed and pitiless ambition did not yet exist, that is all the more reason to respect its specificity and rarity. Employ it to describe a war, even a savage war, and we lose the wherewithal to differentiate. It might not be saying much, but Israel does not scour the world to find Palestinians to kill. Whatever conclusion to the fighting Israel hopes for, no one in their right mind can truly believe it seeks a destruction of the Palestinian people, their history, their art, their thought, their spiritual being, with the express intention of making them vanish from the minds of men. We who believe in the grandeur of Israel’s earliest ambitions and cannot imagine a world safe for Jews without it wish we could say more; wish we could support the country’s actions at every turn; wish that time and endless war and tiredness had not tarnished so much and turned one-time devotees into doubters. But disappointment doesn’t excuse falsehood. There are degrees of wrong, and the job of language is to distinguish, not confound.
“Genocide is the icing on the cake,” an actor friend of mine told me recently. He had family members who had cheered on the Oct. 7 massacre. They welcomed, at whatever cost to Palestinian life, what they knew would come next. Let Israel do its very worst. The prize at the end of all the killing would be the final proof that the Jews were no longer worthy of the world’s pity. The genocide! Abracadabra—the world would be released from the guilt of having set the stage for and been complicit in monstrous crimes against the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, by showing the Jews themselves to be the true criminals, with the Palestinians taking their place as innocent victims! The entire world is thereby granted a get-out-of-jail-free card, Hamas terrorists included, to be paid for in Jewish blood.
"In truth, to aficionados of the new, revisionist colonial history of Israel, Jews haven’t been the good guys for a long time. If the genocide is the icing on the cake of lies, the cake itself is Zionism, that fragile hope for liberation, rescue, and reaffirmation that had lived long in the breasts of Jews over time and across the world and which, when realized, against all odds, seemed nothing short of a miracle.
"That hope has since been ruthlessly and cynically disfigured by its enemies to the point where the very word itself hisses with sinister intent. Bad luck for Zionism that the word begins with a Z, a letter suggestive of the same unfathomable necromantic malice that medieval Jews brought to the killing of Gentile children.
"It has, of course, taken more than a Z to make Zionism the hated thing it is today for millions of people who have, and want to have, no understanding of its meaning, its ambitions, its history. Of all attempts to vandalize an ideal—allowing that ideals have a way of maiming themselves over time—few can have been so dishonest or, sad to say, so successful. Dishonest, above all, because most of those who have made the discrediting of Zionism and Zionists their life’s work are historians who cannot fail to know how much more vexed and varied the story always was, how very different from one another in their ambitions and philosophy the first Zionists were. That historians sin against their own profession is a matter for them, their consciences, and the institutions they discredit.
"The damage their persistent falsehoods and omissions do is less easily put aside. Paint Zionists as foreign invaders, and it’s plain sailing thereafter to remove them from civilized society, deplatform them, censor them, and at last silence them. Ignore the reality that the majority of Israelis trace at least some of their direct ancestry to the countries of the Middle East, including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, where they lived for centuries and millennia and which are all now effectively Judenrein—while millions of Arabs today live as Israeli citizens with full legal and civil rights. The goal of this academic campaign is clearly not to combat genocide and ethnic cleansing, but rather to rid the world of Zionists, and to rid the world of supporters of Zionism, too. For what we are witnessing is a purge not only of the guilty, but also of those guilty by their shared history, guilty by hearsay, guilty—remembering the foetor judaicus—by virtue of foul smell.
"And it isn’t as though the false reading of Zionism’s history requires expert skills to unearth. The settler-colonialist smear gives its own game away to anyone who has spent 10 minutes in the company of an academic postcolonialist and heard the hackneyed accusation drop from his lips as slogans such as “Enemies from within” and “Card-carrying communists” once littered the speeches of McCarthyites. But only ask how a people can colonize their own aboriginal homeland, or in the name of which European colonial power bruised refugees effected a takeover of someone else’s country, and you are an apologist for genocide.
"I recently came across a passionate anti-Zionist recruiting Einstein and Stefan Zweig to his cause, as though Jews who were to the slightest degree equivocal about Zionism in its early days would surely think as any extremist thinks about it today. In fact, though Einstein had his doubts, he changed his mind as the world changed in front of his eyes and went so far, in letters to his family, as to declare himself, happily, a Zionist. As for Zweig’s early opposition from the safety of Vienna, one cannot imagine many hate-marchers sharing his love for the Diaspora Jew, buzzing brashly about the world, a citizen of everywhere. Zweig’s is a tragic story of a gifted Jew imagining himself proof against Jew-hating in whatever form, having to run from his bright, beloved Vienna, fleeing the Nazis who banned and burned his books, and ending up taking his life in Rio de Janeiro, an exile from everywhere, a victim of that fanciful Diaspora that kept many from embracing Zionism and some wishing at the last that they had better understood what Zionism was for.
"It’s not in any spirit of I told you so that I write the above words. No Jew was obliged to embrace Zionism. And it can hardly be said to have solved for all Jews the problem of existence in a hostile world. But the witness of such Jews as Einstein and Zweig cannot be adduced as evidence of Zionism’s monolithic evil. What they show, rather, is that Zionism was never an undifferentiated mass of ill intent with only theft and conquest on its mind. It was an idea, a longing, a necessity to some, and a wild fancy to others, and it probably never struck two Jews or sympathetic non-Jews the same way. To argue otherwise is bad faith and twisted history and, like all political falsehoods, serves no purpose but to awaken an old abhorrence.
"The great lie that all Jews, except for those who noisily forswear Jewishness, think and act as one Jew has fueled the pogroms and inquisitions of the past. We fancied we’d seen the last of it, but here it is again: a universally resonating slander that aims at nothing less than the wholesale vilification of a people, and the denial of their right to either live separately as a nation or live peacefully among other nations. They are hell-bent—the liars and defamers—on resurrecting the concept of genocide, but ask yourself why genocide is once again on their minds."
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Howard Jacobson is a novelist and critic in London. He is the author of, among other titles, J (shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize), Shylock Is My Name, Pussy, Live a Little, and The Finkler Question, which won the 2010 Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel, Howl, was published in 2026.
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