Frankists, Talmudists, and Zionists: Shifting Sands of Antisemitism in 2024

When you see the term “Talmud” trending on X, that’s never a good sign. A series of memes claiming to expose the dastardly pronunciations of the Mishnah and Gemara began flowing across right-wing accounts, occasionally making their way onto the Left. The argument these commentators were making was not unfamiliar: the crimes of the IDF can be explained by the Jewish supremacy inherent in the Talmud, a document that gives Jews permission to steal, rape, and kill Gentiles. 

This emerged at the same time as the anniversary of the lynching of Leo Frank, leading Candace Owens to announce her latest theory about Jews. Owens believed that Frank was a pedophile who was part of a long-standing demonic Jewish cult who killed Gentiles as a component of an esoteric rite aimed at cultivating their powerful grip on the world. “[This] Frankist cult, which is masquerading behind Jews, still participates in this shit to this day,” she said on a later livestream, outlining a baroque conspiracy theory involving blood magic, global power networks, and Jewish mysticism (“they worship the Kabbalah”). 

Inside the Frankist Cabal

Most experts in these questions had never even heard Owen’s gothic fantasy before in the annals of antisemitic conspiracism. But the story of the closet Frankist Illuminati was not particularly new, I had come across it in white nationalist message boards and comments sections over a decade previous. Most recently, it was a key feature of an article that many friends had sent me that began by alleging I was a covert FBI agent and ending with prolix screed about how the Jews are descended from Khazars instead of the Ancient Israelites and that a demonic sect of Frankist Jews created the Zionist movement, engage in blood libel, and are now controlling Israel and all world institutions so as to engage in sacrificial rituals. The website touted itself as an anarchist publication, which featured folk-punk musician David Rovics as an official contributor and a guest on their podcast, and had done several articles decrying what David had declared “cancel culture” after some people had voiced criticism of his relationship with neo-Nazis and Holocaust Deniers. Author Tovid Owl believes a conspiracy is a foot amongst a kabbalistic group of Satanic Jews in collaboration with a Masonic-Illumniati-Marxist-Rothschild alliance, all to engage in occult-war that began by drinking the blood of Gentile children and ends with Israeli genocide. Tobin cites the antisemitic conspiracy tract Under the Sign of the Scorpion: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, which imagines conspirators ranging from communists to freemasons, Rothschilds, and Jews at large. Owl also seems to believe there was no moon landing, that viruses don’t cause diseases, and that vaccines cause cancer. The rest of the Nevermore website is a mix of conspiracy theories, random antisemitic invective, rather open racism and far-right populism, and a pathological hatred of Big Vaccine. 

The Frankist sect is not actually a secret of history, it was a well-documented schism emerging from the earlier break presented by Sabbatai Zvi. The most comprehensive scholarship on Zvi remains from Gershom Scholem, the pathbreaking scholar of Jewish mysticism, who wrote Zvi’s definitive biography and researched his religious descendents. Zvi was a well known Kabbalist who declared himself Moshiach, the Messiah, and created a theology based on rejecting Hashem's commandments and amassed a huge following before abandoning Judaism for Islam. While this left his followers lost and deflated, a few carried the flame.

Scholem tracked Sabbatianism through its evolution into Frankism, a more explicitly radical sect created by Jacob Frank that is mainly remembered for its lurid sexual escapades (think orgies with rumors of incest). The last big push of the German Offenbach Frankists was in 1799 that offered up a typic “mystical theory of revolution” that synthesized their heterodox reversal of Jewish commandments with idiosyncratic delusions of grandeur. This treatise, a letter called the “Red Epistle,” was intercepted by government officials who read their narrative and reference to “Jacob” to suggest they were secret Jacobins that were trying to radicalize the ghetto. “The hopes and beliefs of these last Sabbatians caused them to be particularly susceptible to the ‘millennial’ winds of th times,” wrote Sholem in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (140), noting that they largely merged with the larger Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, into various trends of Jewish secularism and, to a degree, assimilation. These various revolutionary predilections may be where the idea that the Frankists were a part of some covert political cadre, a secret society not unlike those that featured prominently in the conspiratorial imaginations of the period: Jesuits, Freemasons, Illuminati, and all manifestations of the Hebrews. The Frankists did not survive long and became an echo of its former coherence by the beginning of the 20th Century, with Scholem tracking down the brief recollections that descendents of Frankdists still held onto in their old age. There is no evidence of any Frankists existing anywhere in the world for many decades. They left a blip, and only scraps remain. 

Until Candace Owens and the very-online anarchists of Nevermore Media, I had mostly seen conspiracy theories about the Frankist Illuminati on a mix of Christian Identity and Esoteric Hitlerist Internet message boards, so watching Owens unabashedly present her case was shocking even for the most jaded. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was created by the Jewish lodge B’nai B’rith in 1913 after Georgia public school superintendent Leo Frank was convicted of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Phagan at a trial that has overwhelmingly been determined to be an antisemitic charade (Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986). The ADL was formed as a moderate vessel to fight for Jewish civil rights, noting that even this well educated, affluent, and assimilated Jew could not escape the violent, and in this case state sanctioned, hand of antisemitism. It echoed the Dreyfus Affair, still relevant in the minds of global Jews, promising that even the liberal democratic project of the West could not probably provide Jewish safety. In 1915, after Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life, he was drug out of his cell and lynched by a group of townsfolk who then took photos standing below his hanging body. There was a recent scuttle last year when a Broadway play based on Leo Frank’s murder went to stage, with antisemites heckling the production with accusations. Frank’s lynching puts antisemitism into a uniquely American framework of Southern racist “justice,” so it has commonly been a target of antisemitic revisionists hoping to impugn the story that antisemitism is actually a part of the U.S. story.

Owens, and a growing chorus of online commentators (not surprisingly common on X), take these accusations a step further and suggest this strange fruit was not the result of an antisemitic miscarriage of justice, but that Frank had it coming. Leo Frank’s last name is operative here because Owens alleges he was part of a secret Frankist sect who led pedophilic blood rituals (no documentation supports this). Owens then says the Zionists were Frankists, including Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl, and were actually murdering and exsanguinated Jewish children around Europe, part of why Christians wanted them out of Europe. The problems with this analysis are plentiful, not the least of which is that the blood libel traced back to 1144 with the death of William of Norwich, hundreds of years before the birth of Sabbatai Zvi and six hundred years before the creation of Frankism. 

The idea that Leo Frank was a pedophile who was rightfully killed spread like a virus, flowing far past just the isolated corner that Owens leads. "[A] 13 year old little girl named Mary Phagan was ruthlessly raped and murdered by a wealthy, power pedophile named Leo Frank,” wrote Eygptian scholar Bassem Yousef on X, which prompted a response from Jeff Mellnick, a primary scholar of the Frank case, to reply and mention that none of this is true.

Talmud EXPOSED

Owens went on a Twitter space (a video-livestream) that featured alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate and Dan Bilzerian, a manosphere prophet of the mythic "sigma male” and professional poker player. Bilzerian made a video where he contests that atrocities happened on October 7th and then makes a series of antisemitic straw men about Jews and Judaism, slumped in his chair, hands folded in resigned confidence. It is in this caldron of debates that he released his memes alleging the horrors of the Talmud, such as the idea that it instructs Jewish readers to the ethics of raping children under the age of 9. The tradition of “exposing” the Talmud is one of the oldest forms of antisemitic propaganda and works primarily because of the fact that Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic is seldom mastered outside of the Orthodox world and almost no non-Jew or non-scholar would have the context necessary to jump into any page of Talmud (translated or not). Rather than blunt legal pronouncements, the Talmud includes debates on arcane matters mixed with mystical interpretations and flourishes. In 827, the archbishop of Lyon, Spain wrote a tract called Juaicis Supersitionibus where he alleged the Talmud was a secret occult grimoire, the essence of the Jewish religion was this type of malevolent magic. The 1300s began a centuries long quest to allege the Talmud as a largely anti-Christian, heretical and blasphemous work, leading to the seizing and destruction of these volumes. Karaite Jews, who rejected the Talmud, partnered with the Catholic Church and claimed that the “blood libel” is described in the Talmud, proving that everyone’s worst fears about European Jews were verifiably true. This became a huge force of the violence against Jews, with Martin Luther writing “I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.”

When I spoke with white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, he repeated back to me various anti-Christian tracts he believed were in the Talmud. When I asked for the citations so I could check, he began to stutter, reluctantly mumbling that he had never actually seen a Talmud and instead read this in antisemitic pamphlets. The Talmud has continued to be an easy target because its arcane text can easily be projected onto if you lack the background necessary to engage in the rabbinic process: interpretation and debate is what the text is built for. “[The] Talmud is not a law of righteousness for all mankind, but a meticulous code applying to the Jew alone,” wrote conspiracy theorist Nesta Webster in “The Real Jewish Peril” in 1924, going on to suggest that Jews are prohibited from saving the life of non-Jews or to “have pity on him,” and that the the kabbalah predicts the conquest of the Jews over the rest of humanity. This is ultimately the core of the antisemitic argument: the Talmud actually instructs Jews on the ways of Jewish supremacy, and the cruelty they are legally allowed to enact on unsuspecting Gentiles.

For anyone that has read the Talmud, the first thing they will notice is the agonizing debates over how to welcome a stranger into the front door of your home, and the complex analogies used to understand even the most seemingly mundane commandments. That is because it is a process of thinking that invites a type of egalitarian conversation amongst the observant, but never does it legislate the kind of clannish cruelty so often ascribed to it. In the various allegations that Bilzerian’s meme cites he either gets the meaning of the text wrong or entirely manufactures old claims best known from the Nazi era. He then points to the Israeli far-right’s use of Jewish sources to justify their fascistic agenda, forgetting to remind everyone that those opinions are rightly considered frightening even inside Israel and in now way represent consensus Judaism. For example, he cites the book King’s Torah, which caused incredible controversy in Israel when it claimed that it was legally permitted to kill a non-Jewish baby if it was believed that child could grow up to be a threat to Jews. Bilzerian then cites this as normative Judaism, forgetting that the book caused outrage from every corner of the Jewish world and its followers are considered little different from fascist Christian sects that are outside of mainstream Christian life. This sleight of hand, to cite the most extreme racist invocations of Jewish tradition and then to suggest those are normative, seems to be the only way Bilzerian knows how to make sense of the horrors of Gaza. It’s not that colonialism, nationalism, and imperialism have invoked some Jewish texts, it’s the Jewishness itself from which the violence emerges.

Owens then put Andrew Meyer, a Jewish far-right conspiracy theorists, on the “space” to defend the Talmud, where he largely confirmed Owen’s worldview and did little to shield Judaism from the accusations. These narratives spread, with online personalities like Shaun King even retweeting Bilzerian’s antisemitic rants alongside photos of dead children pulled from the rubble that Israel air raids wrought. Owens' Frankist assertions were only her most recent antisemitic claims: she believes Freud was a secret kabbalist out to protect pedophiles, she said Germans faced a more severe genocide in World War II than Jews and that the stories of Dr. Mengele’s crimes are “bizarre” propaganda tales, she suspects Israel had a role in 9/11, and that Jews control Hollywood, the media, and the economy, as well as were behind communism (including arguing that Stalin was a secret Jew). There is nothing new here, except that it gained purchase far beyond its core and set against the increasingly dire backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, more people seemed willing to transgress the taboo on open antisemitism to suggest that something was rotten at the center of the Jewish collective.

ZOG Worm

This may be why in the same time frame, a series of leftist commentators began suggesting that the neo-Nazi term “Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG)” was a reasonably accurate assessment of the U.S. government. This happened after both Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were defeated, in part, through a massive flood of AIPAC funding, likely targeting them for their support of a ceasefire in Israel’s assault on Palestine. Max Blumenthal of Grayzone, known for defending far-right authoritarians under the guise of "multipolarity," said that the U.S. was "one nation under ZOG," while others said that advocates shouldn't have to modify what is ultimately a true assessment just because some antisemites used it decades past. This assertion emerges as a kind of vulgar re-statement of the “Israel Lobby” thesis, the claim by scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that a network of pro-Israel lobbying organizations have captured the U.S. foreign policy and is shifting it towards a dangerous direction. “The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide,” wrote Mearsheimer and Walt in 2006. “Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.”

The power of groups like AIPAC remain obvious, as do Christian Zionist organizations like Christians United for Israel (CUFI). But the singular focus on the all-powerful “Israel lobby” takes complex geopolitical issues and reframes them in terms easily turned towards a conspiratorial direction. The U.S. is staunchly pro-Israel because it is in its imperial interests to do so as a settler colony that helps establish the interests of Western corporations in the Middle East. To assume that the U.S. is Zionist Occupied is to believe that Palestine itself is not actually occupied by a colonial Western empire of which Israel is simply a piece. And despite the fact that the term ZOG is a well established part of the antisemitic Right, and we saw over the past decade of rising far-right antisemitism that neo-Nazis and white nationalists often try to mobilize faux Palestine solidarity to gain recruits, many thought so little of the implications of this term that they thought there was little reason to avoid it.

On both the Left and the Right, there has been public denunciation and shocking gasps of horror, disbelief that people would publicly vocalize such claims. “As someone with antifascist politics, I have long considered any use of the term ‘ZOG’ to be an obvious indication that someone held fascist beliefs and likely harbored fantasies about “cleansing” society of marginalized people,” wrote Truthout editor and Movement Memos host Kelly Hayes. “So, why are some people on the left using this language?”

But while this is the only natural reaction, it seems to forget a couple of standard realities of a crisis like the genocide in Gaza. When it comes to the Left, the fact that mass murder is happening has led to a moral crisis so severe it verges on a collective political frenzy. How do you react when a genocide is taking place, unimpeded, with the support of both sides of the political aisle? Strategic thinking is not working, and our anger seems to pale in comparison to the atrocities we see nightly. To transgress, to break the rules and engage in a kind of verbal harm, seems only appropriate given that we live in extraordinary times. As we saw pithy comments calling the U.S. government ZOG, it became clear that people were not only saying it because it was true, but because it was transgressive: they want to offend. The desire to push past moral boundaries is a common response to trauma, and with antisemitism as an issue owned by the political Right and used primarily to shield Israel and Zionism there is a certain logic to those who just jump in head first.

The same is true of the Talmudic debates, whereby conventional conversations about politics as usual seem unable to explain the nearly cosmic violence we are watching at a distance. Instead, a radical answer, which often simply means a new answer, is necessary, something to illustrate why so much blood has been shed. Conspiracy theories, antisemitic ones in particular, are themselves a way of breaking out of the bounds of conventional politics, of rejecting the frameworks we have been offered. Even radical politics come from the world of historical dialectics and social movements, and despite that rich history and inspiring activism of the past year, the genocide continues. To decide it is a conspiracy driven by an ancient evil provides an emotionally satisfying answer while also denigrating your enemies (and those who remain complicit). This pattern is familiar, particularly when people engage in mass organizing that has little effect, thus leading to disaffection, alienation, and even accelerationism. Conspiracy thinking and moral transgression may seem the only logical answer.

Looking at the Rest of 2024

There are a few relevant questions about the direction each of these antisemitic flashpoints, and what happens next will be dictated by our community reactions rather than just what those with the largest social media platforms say. While there were several erstwhile defenders of the ZOG reference, even commentators like Mehdi Hassan softly signaling to the phrase as a restatement of the “Israel lobby” thesis, the majority of people responded with horror. Sarah Hurwitz’ article was the cited source in many of the most popular ZOG tweets, something she immediately repudiated since her article made no such claim (and she had to delete the tweet that was reshared with ZOG messaging). As Kelly Hayes said immediately after: “We don’t talk like Nazis.” This very quick response from much of the Left came from the fact that antifascism has become such a visible and mobilizing piece of the larger radical coalition since the mid-2010s. This means that consciousness of far-right antisemitism has become more ubiquitous, we generally have a better sense of what this looks like and what its implications are. 

Since ZOG was never a neutral statement but a key rhetorical tool by neo-Nazis, and because fascists often try to appropriate elements of the Left or recruit from weak points in radical movements, this trend created an eerie level of Deja Vu. The appropriation of this neo-Nazi framework showed how some rhetoric used ostensibly in the service of Palestine solidarity is drawing from a less-than-liberatory history. These phrases are a political version of “cutting corners”: picking quick and edgy messaging that matches the level of anger we’re feeling, but without considering the consequences. Resistance to Israel’s genocide and even Zionism itself comes from a place of universal liberation, not because Jewish nationalism is somehow uniquely threatening or evil. All states, colonial movements, and empires are a threat to the mass public. Any criticism of Israel must be rooted in this motivation, not in the particularism that the far-right approaches it with.

But while many on the left responded well to the ZOG incident, there was less reason to be optimistic about the other recent antisemitic trends. When Shaun King retweeted Dan Blizerian, many people were horrified, but they also forget that King has less of a history of informed activism and is more often accused of being a social media grifter (he eventually deleted that and many other tweets). There are hundreds of social media accounts sharing images of the genocide in Gaza who’s larger political orientation is dubious at best, and we have seen trending videos of people harassing hasidim under the guise that they are “Zionists.” But when we look deeper at the more involved claims, whether about Zionist power or the Talmud or, of course, the alleged Satanic Frankist cabal, they emerge overwhelmingly from the far-right. And it is in that environment that there is little reason to purge the offenders since exclusionary nationalism, xenophobia, and conspiracy theory are their foundations, which makes the Right antisemitism’s natural home.

After Owen’s declarations and Blizerian’s Talmud tweetstorm, there were certainly condemnations, though mostly in the Jewish press. For the larger mediasphere, the main feature of the story that made news was that her father in law repudiated her claims (and, interestingly, most stories led with the fact that he still supports Israel). This could be because these arguments from Owens were a long-time coming since she has escalated and increased the frequency and intensity of her antisemitism over the past eighteen months, but also because her appeal was always due to her verbose conspiracy theories. Her YouTube video outlining her entire complex theory about the Jewish-Frankist domination of Earth remains online with nearly a million views, with many comments hailing her as the greatest truthteller fo the 21st Century. Since leaving The Daily Wire she has her own financial infrastructure, which includes the sponsorship outsider companies like American Finance supporting her and receiving subscribers on the platform Locals, which has not taken any action against her. So, if anything, the controversy only drew more followers to her by raising her profile and making her a scion on what conspiracy theory reacher Michael Barkun calls “forbidden knowledge”: she offers something no one else can give you because it is too verboten for public consumption. So this locks in a certain kind of audience, and with the increasing reliance on conspiracy theories in the larger Right that means that even her audience of fringe believers has become larger than it would have been even a couple years ago. In the weeks since this claim she went further, going on Piers Morgan to debate a rabbi and claiming that the Lubavitcher Rebbe was teaching Jewish supremacy, something which led to her mass denunciation from the Orthodox world. She is now pointing her followers to the “seventh tower,” a “9/11 Truth” claim that the seventh tower of the World Trade Center was destroyed through a “controlled demolition” as part of a secret plot.

But perhaps even more concerning was the fact that her rather blatant antisemitism proved too meek to those on her Right, who are pushing her to simply go public and “name the Jew.” White nationalist Nick Fuentes, who appeared rather closer to Owens in terms of relationships and ideology, went on his livestream shortly after Owens’ declaration to chastise her for not going further. "[That's] what always happens is people discover that there's something going on with this conspiracy. They figure out something's up. But then they can't really commit,” said Fuentes, calling her to back away from this Frankist nonsense and just say Jews. “[She] insists it's the Frankists. And it's like, OK, so that's just not true. And at that point, I question what is even the value of having somebody talk about this stuff?” 

Fuentes is picking up on a position that many white nationalists who came of age during the heyday of the alt-right have had, where they are shifting their perception on what they think a positive example of their influence is. For years, the shifting dog-whistles and conspiracism of the mainstream Republican base was celebrated within the alt-right as a successful consequence of them moving the “Overton Window,” but as the Trump years commenced and moved into the Biden Presidency, many started to rethink this. White nationalist leader Richard Spencer, in particular, shifted his perception majorly, thinking that the “big tent” alt-right he helped create, which normalized street violence and worked with Proud Boys and militia groups, was the wrong move, and he looks at Qanon believers and January 6th insurrectionaries with total disdain: they don’t represent his vision of an elite white ethnic consciousness, but, in fact, the stupid inheriting the Earth. Fuentes is offering a similar analysis, saying that since Owens’ is ducking behind this particularist version of antisemitic conspiracy theory by saying it’s “these Jews” rather than Jews as an ontological category who are responsible for our problems. In doing so, she continues to create a distraction rather than pointing her followers to the true culprits.

If you look into Owen’s own followers, you can see Fuentes’ sentiment echoed again and again. “You might think it helps to dodge it - It's Zionists, Frankists, the CIA - and have Jеwish people speaking on your behalf. They don't care. They will destroy you if they have the chance. Calling them Frankists will not change that,” wrote one Twitter account called ClassicGroyp (a reference to Fuentes’ groyper movement) on one of her antisemitic threads. 

So this pressure from Owens’ Right and the fact that few moderates want any relationship with her may actually move her to simply declare Jews as her primary enemy, eliminating all obscurantism. While she is already speaking with relative clarity about who she thinks runs the world, even more explicit rhetoric will do little other than further normalize blatant antisemitism and give more people on the edge of the conservative talk sphere permission to do the same. And while earlier generations kept a taboo on open antisemitism under the guise of a post-cold war Judeo-Christian consensus, that has broken down more fully as national populism and conspiracy theories become the binding element of the new Conservative coalition. With open Christian nationalism becoming the most energetic area, these ideas are only going to proliferate, and since the majority remain enthusiastically in support of Israel all major communal institutions ostensibly tasked with fighting antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in particular, will do little to intervene when their focus is instead on left-wing campus protesters. Jewish Republican leaders seem more than willing to allow this acceleration of Christian nationalism continue unabated. National Conservative leader Yoram Hazony seems to see the Christian nationalist U.S. as in keeping with his virtuous nationalism since, in Hazony’s mind, Jews already have a different country they should be heading to. While the moves from Owens, Tucker, and Musk have raised their establishment eyebrows, the reality is that their silence on the broader trend towards right-wing antisemitism has meant that they have too little momentum to stop the shift in explicitness once it begins. The fringe is moving to the new center, and when it happens at this snail's pace it allows the fascists to avoid interference and build up a new financial support system while doing so. There is little that can be done to Owens today as she hides behind alternative platforms and payment processing systems, and further attempts to silence her will only allow her to point to her “forbidden knowledge” as evidence of the conspiracy.

What this ultimately requires is a consensus response from the Left about what kind of rhetoric is antisemitic, and a united front in blocking it no matter what the perceived ties of the people involved. If softer versions of the Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory allowed to pass in ostensibly Left discourse on Palestine, then it normalizes the discourse enough to give a pass to those who take a further step to the Right. Understanding antisemitism has always been foundational to building an antifascist praxis and the refusal to reckon with these questions are part of the problem to begin with, the inability, or unwillingness, of those on the Left to engage in self-reflection, modification, and growth. Even while the genocide in Gaza is taking place a universally liberatory stance is always going to remain necessary, otherwise we will end up feeding nationalist forces on the Right whose vision is overwhelmingly at odds with teh impulses that brought us in solidarity with Palestinians in the first place. 

If we refuse a concrete analysis on antisemitism, we cede to the Right in two ways. First, it means that only right-wing and pro-Israel voices speak on this issue, and so if this issue is meaningful to someone then our absence makes the case that the Right has their best interests at heart. And, second, without a clear force to address antisemitism, we have no way to combat an increasingly volatile and radical Right that is using antisemitic conspiracy theories as a centerpiece of its ideology. If we want to be equipped for what comes next, we need to talk about antisemitism now.