Pagans and Jews

One of the difficulties of identifying antisemitism as a uniquely Christian provocation is that we still have to explain how antisemitism can appear not just in non-Christian areas, but even amongst communities that consider themselves at odds with key features of Christianity. Some of the most arcane antisemitic ideas produced by Christianity now feature prominently in conspiracy theories found in some Muslim majority countries, where those holding the beliefs may have no familiarity with the Christian theologies that birthed antisemitism in the first place. But this dynamic can also be true of newer spiritual movements attempting to reclaim ancestral pathways demolished by Christian imperialism, and who often see themselves as opponents of Christian nationalism.

For those who keep an eye on pagan communities in the U.S. and Europe, there has been a battle for what types of ideas, and which voices, are going to define their community. While most pagan, wiccan, and related traditions are more likely to lean progressive, there is also a pagan far-right that has been trying to build a spiritual worldview that positions itself as the most effective enemy of modernity and Christianity, which it sees as a particularly Jewish ideology offering the lie of human equality. But antisemitism also operates as an unspoken bias, and ugly ideas about Jews can be carried even into circles that define themselves as inclusive, egalitarian, and against all forms of oppression.

The Pagan Fascist Problem

In 2022, 24-year-old Army private Ethan Melzer pled guilty to planning to sacrifice his unit to jihadi militants in an effort to create a "mass casualty" event. Melzer was a neo-Nazi, but he was far from a Christian:  he was a member of the esoteric Satanist movement called the Order of Nine Angles, a fascist occultist ideology that seeks to destabilize the current social order through terrorism and acts of extreme disruption (a perspective often called “accelerationism”). What many people will have noticed is that many white supremacists, from the terrorists of Atomwaffen to the white separatists of the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA), have rejected Christianity altogether, creating some confusion about how to think about their antisemitism. Christianity has influenced the thinking of more than just Christians, and their ideas about Jews are a blunt example of this. Antisemitism is so central to white nationalism that many of these fascists take the Christian ideas about Jews and focus on them so completely that they eclipse Christianity itself. Some go even further, to say that the Jewish conspiracy is so totalizing that Christianity itself is a Jewish plot to take down European whites.

There is a certain assumption that simply because antisemitism is a Christian construct, an exit from Christianity will necessarily yield a more accepting attitude for Jews. This mistakes how modern antisemitism works, which secularized the earlier theological anti-Jewish ideas of imperial Christianity, recasting it in terms of racial pseudo-science. The modern white nationalist movement emerged out of the romantic nationalist tradition of the 19th Century, which itself was a reaction to modernity, urbanity, and contemporary social alienation. Antisemitism was part and parcel of this European nationalist awakening, including when these nationalists left their Christianity behind and instead believed resurrecting pre-Christian folk beliefs would be a more authentic pathway for national renewal. This created a particular lineage of racist and antisemitic paganism that has run through the entire history of the contemporary far-right, and the anti-Christianity of this component of the fascist movement often indicates an even more profound anti-Jewish hatred than even amongst Christian nationalists.

While Christians were forced to explain the ongoing existence of Jews after their church supposedly superseded them, fascists from the Nazis onward have had to answer for the supposed Jewish roots of Christianity. For racist pagans, Christianity has been reframed as the worship of a foreign, non-European ethnic God that has offered a message of weakness rather than strength. The “turn the other cheek” lesson runs counter to what many nationalists argue should be the warrior ethos to protect their people, and the egalitarianism found in Christian salvation has the ability to undermine ethnic boundaries. In this line of reasoning, the problem with Jews goes all the way back to the beginning, and is seen even in the text of the Torah and what they re-interpret as Jewish malfeasance. Instead of reading the Jewish scriptures in a way that defines out Jews (as Christians do), they often say that what occurs in the Tanakh is just another example of the demonic behavior of the Jews.

This is why many fascists have made an exit from Christianity, turning to pagan revivalism. The most prevalent has been Nordic paganism, often called heathenism, which revives the Germanic pantheon led by Odin. Neopaganism traces a history back to the romantic movements responding to modern dislocations from agrarianism, part of the many attempts to reclaim a supposedly lost authentically spiritual life. In the early 20th Century, heathenry became a go to for the far-right, citing the essay “Wotan” by Carl Jung who suggested the Nazis were reviving Odin in the spiritual psyche of the Germans. This idea has been evolved over the years by figures like Else Christiansen and, more recently, Stephen McNallen, founder of the Asatru Folk Assembly, who believe the Gods are specific to the psyche and spiritual consciousness of the people whose genes trace to their earliest stomping grounds. Heathenry has become a major force in white nationalism, from the pseudo-scholarship of the alt-right all the way to the street violence of the Vinlanders Social Club, and the many pagan paths represented across Europe and Russia have become different vessels that far-right movements are trying to build an ethnic consciousness. Some, such as the far-right philosophers of the European New Right, interpret these sorts of ideas simply as a powerful metaphor, while others take a slightly more metaphysical approach. This trend of racialist paganism, called “folkish,” made up a significant piece of the heathen world with organizations like the AFA and the Asatru Assembly, not to mention scores of books and podcasts, and only became fully estranged from the pagan world after groups like Heathens United Against Racism fought to have them excluded from the broader community at the same time as AFA members got more involved in open white nationalism and the alt-right.

In the argument made by many white nationalist pagans, Christianity universalizes the message of Judaism, acting as a type of colonialism whereby European whites are roped in to service a Levantian God, undermining their survival instincts. Christianity is then, as the fascist Odinic Rite calls it, “cultural Marxism,” a universalizing force that pathed the way for materialism, the enlightenment, and modernity. The Judaic calls for equality and universalism are a virus destroying Germanics, subsuming them into degeneracy and mass immigration. In Nazi Germany, many Christian churches in the “German Christian Movement” went so far as to try and remove the Old Testament to disaffiliate from any potential Jewishness and reframe Jesus as an Aryan enemy of Judaism. Some movements, like Wotanism, put Jews at the actual center of their theology since the entire function of their appropriation of the heathen Gods is an effort to awaken a type of racial consciousness and to prepare its adherents for war. Wotansvolk, co-created by neo-Nazi terrorist David Lane, stuck with the name Wotan because it was an acronym for Will of the Aryan Nation, and he believed that Christianity was a plot to slowly cause Aryan’s to forget their identity. He called for a revival of white vikings to fight the Jewish masters who control the world and to liberate all whites from their psycho-spiritual prisons, which could only be done by awakening the Gods within. While groups like the AFA will claim that theirs is more focused on heathen spirituality, much of the heathen Gods and texts are understood metaphorically as a way of maintaining a type of imperial spirit and European ethnic consciousness. This line of logic has led to many of the more dynamic projects in modern white nationalism, such as the Wolves of Vinland and their outreach project Operation Werewolf, and it has flowed through the neofolk, black metal, and industrial music scenes.

In the traditionalism of figures like Julius Evola, races were said to have essences, so Jews carried with them “modernity,” which to Evola was the primary force of destruction. Some occultists went even further, constructing elaborate cosmologies to explain Jewish perfidy, with Christianity as a weapon to capture Aryans. In a series of interlocking and contradicting ideologies known broadly as “esoteric Hitlerism,” figures like Miguel Serrano posited the idea that [Adonai], the God spoke of in the Tanakh, is a demon who is capturing Aryans in his grasp during an intergalactic battle. Savitri Devi brought Hitler worship into Hinduism, viewing Hitler as an avatar of the Vedic God Vishnu after becoming appalled as a youth by the sight of Europeans worshiping a Jewish God (Jesus). The occultic movements that pre-saged the Nazi genocide were rooted in the notion that racial biology had a pure “essence” tied to it, such as the spiritual bond that united the German volk, and then Jews were interpreted as an “anti-race” that was in perpetual war with the pure and noble Aryans. These ideas have been revived in the alt-right, the idea of the Jewish God being a “Volcano demon” becoming a meme whereby fascists suggest everything from the mass circumcision to global warfare (which they say is orchestrated by Jews) is all blood sacrifices to their ethnic demon. This runs close to the Satanic fascist ideas of movements like the Order of Nine Angles, which posits a type of “theistic Satanism” as actually a battle between competing Gods, one who represents enlightenment, strength, and freedom (Satan), and another who represents repression, destruction, and pain ([Adonai]). 

While these ideas may seem fringe, they have motivated some of the most severe acts of violence in the neofascist movement, from the bombings and assassinations of the Years of Lead to accelerationist terror networks like The Base and Atomwaffen. Large portions of the alt-right and identitarianism are motivated by anti-Christian antisemitism, building a supposedly more authentic spiritual foundation for their seething racial rage. One “religious” faith, called the Creativity Movement, led huge parts of the neo-Nazi movement in the 1990s, tied to bombings, street attacks, and murders. As sort of an “anti-religion,” it saw white people as “creators” who built all civilization and were natural enemies of non-whites, who they called “mud people,” and of Jews, who were the primary foil to white dominance. Christianity was just a Jewish “Essenes’ cult” repackaged for non-Jews and responsible for superstition, false morality, and self-destruction. That “church” nearly collapsed when their leader, Matthew Hale, was sentenced to forty years in prison for plotting to murder a federal judge. 

The anti-Christian stance of a lot of these movements has been used by Christian leaders to insulate them from associations with antisemitism, but it is within the church where these ideas began. There is an inescapable feedback loop in these movements, and while paganism made huge inroads in white nationalism over the past several decades, Christianity still outpaces it.

A Broader Problem

But one issue with focusing on the pagan far-right is it often exceptionalizes how antisemitism functions in a pagan context, offering only the most extreme examples as the potential archetype. The larger pagan and wiccan world leans much further to the left and tries to embody egalitarian principles, yet there are often underlying antisemitic ideas that are often carried even in this context. Books like Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future often present Judaism as the origin point for what they see as a patriarchal, authoritarian Western spiritual system that eradicated the allegedly pluralistic pagan traditions that came before, thus covering for power and inculcating the planet into an oppressive religious system. In much of the commentary on “monotheism” offered in neopagan writing, anti-Jewish stereotypes persist, including accepting Christian apologetics about the alleged toxic legality of the Jewish rabbinic system as accurate statements of fact. Jewish scriptures are saddled with the responsibility for undermining feminist pagan spiritualities of the Levant, and this is often tied directly to Christianity’s turn towards imperial power. Jewish feminist Annette Daum discussed this in the 1980s lesbian feminist anthology Nice Jewish Girls with regards to her experience of anti-Jewish ideas in the development of goddess worship communities in the Women’s Movement. She notes the heavy Christian bias that many in these communities project onto Judaism, particularly Christian interpretations of Jewish scriptures for which Jews often read much differently.

“The term ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ crops up again and again…as if Judaism and Christianity were one,” writes Daum. But she also points out that one of the longest standing origin points for Christian antisemitism, the charge of deicide (that Jews killed Jesus), is actually maintained in some of these pagan re-appraisals of monotheism: that Jews killed the “Hebrew goddess” or, through monotheism’s spread, other goddesses, as well. Distortions of Judaism abound in these types of commentaries, whether it is making moral judgements of scripture without considering context or how Jewish readers actually interpret them. She points to books like Carol Ochs Behind the Sex of God that misunderstand stories like the “binding of Isaac” to assume that perhaps the origin point of patriarchy in Judaism. In the world of pagan spirituality, critique is a centerpiece because the overwhelming majority of adherents are leaving a largely monotheistic religious culture and reclaiming an alternative. But it is worth remembering that even our critical judgment is shaped by Christian hegemony and the underlying narratives that are shaped by power, so resistance to authority is no guarantee that we are offering liberation.

By accepting Judaism as the origin point for Christianity, and thus the oppressive consequences that Christianity wrought, critics often accept the Christian nationalist framing of Judeo-Christianity, which is a way of rhetorically bringing Jews into what is a largely Christian worldview and socio-political position. Judaism is likewise accused in many neopagan sources of “de-sacralizing” the world (a claim repeated by white nationalist pagans) by creating a distance between humans and the divine, thus removing the “natural” animist tradition and allowing for a materialist culture that willfully destroys the earth. But these critiques come from a willful distance from what Judaism actually teaches. For example, the Jewish mystical narrative is based in G-d’s immanence, the presence of the divine in all elements of the physical world, a kind of animism in its own right. But this element is invisibilized by universalizing narratives about monotheism, as if billions of believers all hold parallel ideas, as well as creating a caricature of pre-modern pagan traditions that are likewise inaccurate. This can repeat the dynamic that medieval scholar David Nirenberg noted whereby Jews the “anthesis” to whatever value a particular community is trying to be. If the new spiritual values are social equality, the resurrection of the divine feminine, and forgiveness and ecumenicism, then Judaism is then presented as its opposite, thus creating a foil by which the new virtuous community can define itself against. 

While pagans have grappled with questions of “cultural appropriation” heavily the past several years, it remains an open problem as people wrestle with how to create a modern tradition with some degree of removal from its origin point. For pagans this is a fine balance considering the “folkish” argument that only people of a certain genetic lineage can take up a particular tradition, one that antiracists reject out of hand. But there is still a long history of white, Westerners appropriating indigenous spiritual practices through colonialism, using them out of context and disrespectfully, and enacting various types of harm through the erasure of the folkways in which they came or entirely recasting the narrative on what those religious paths were. 

For Jews the same cultural appropriation of Jewish spirituality, and mysticism in particular, has also been connected to some of the most violent periods of antisemitism. As Joshua Trachtenberg wrote in The Devil and the Jews, antisemitic ideas emerged from the notion that Jews were engaged in occultic activity, either communing with demons or casting spells, and this was behind the “blood libel,” the notion that Jews use the blood of Gentile children in rituals (Jews are prohibited from consuming blood of any kind). This began the idea that the Jews were not really particularly human, but something else entirely, a concept that evolved into the “anti-race” notion that permeated Nazi thinking. “The Church in its campaign against heresy and sorcery created a pattern of occult practice which the masses transferred to the Jew,” wrote Trachtenberg in 1942, looking at one of the ways that the false image of “the Jew” was projected into European consciousness. And it was the mass campaign against sorcery that helped to do this since Jews were, without a doubt, agents of this malevolent cosmic force.

But one thing that is interesting about bigoted assumptions is that it can often be viewed as an asset by others. In the development of medieval occultism, Judaism often became an object of appropriation and fetishization, whether it was misappropriating the kabbalah to create the outline of much of the Western magickal canon, or even just using mistranslated Hebrew or utilizing Jewish ritual items or customs seemingly at random.

Ezra Rose chronicles this process in their pamphlet FYMA: A Lesser Key whereby many grimoires claimed to be ancient Jewish magic while often having little or no connection to Jewish history, magical or otherwise. For example, "Solomonic" magic, such as the goetic grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon, claims to be a demonological guide the King Solomon used to build the Israelite temple. There is not just no Jewish source that supports it, it runs in direct contrast to Jewish self-conception and would be considered deeply offended by those who still venerate the site of the temple as sacred. Rose tracks how Christian perceptions of King Solomon were passed along by the Greeks, and like the later re-appropriation of kabbalah, have little connection to the people who actually developed these systems. If you look at many of these grimoires, something strange is apparent. As Rose writes, "One aspect of the Solomonic grimoires that confused me initially was how anyone ever believed they were authentically Jewish. To a Jew, at least, the non-Jewish framework that these books are built on is easily recognizable, from the use of cross imagery and Greek or Roman characters in the sigils to the heavily Christian views on demonology. Even the Hebrew included is often shaky." Because much of the association between Jews and sorcery led to the violent persecution of Jewish communities, Rose notes that "[the] direct harm to Jews and Jewish culture wrought by Solomonic magic, key ancestor of the ceremonial tradition, is difficult to overstate."

But Rose is not just pointing to history, but the current state of the occult world. Enochian magic, Western ceremonial magic, Hermetic qabalah, Thelema, and just about any system that intersects different modes of magick and worship is foundationally built on appropriated elements of Judaism, usually profoundly distorting Jewish ideas and taking them out of their context. As is noted with many indigenous spiritual practices, Judaism is a closed system for a specific group of people. Anyone is welcome to join that community, but it requires a formal, halachic (Jewish legal) process whereby you become a member of the Jewish people, a tribal group. So it is worth considering how Jewish iconography and mystical concepts are used when building ritual and joining esoteric orders, and whether or not it feels ethical, or even accurate to your spiritual intentions. Many of these occult traditions now have centuries of practice so it would be hard to simply undo the appropriation, but it’s worth considering how these came to be and how, if you are drawn to those traditions, what it means to operate from a place of proper reverence.

Solidarity Is the Answer

The most effective tool to confront underlying bigoted baggage is to actually build cross-communal relationships where people can have a real stake in learning about each other and addressing their underlying assumptions. As we have discussed elsewhere, antisemitism is not just an idea about Jews and Judaism, but it is a false story about how power and privilege works, and it is a piece of how the Right and those in power create narratives they can use to attack all marginalized communities and shore up support from the masses. So it is in the interest of the entire working class to take on these issues if we are going to create an effective mass movement to confront inequality and injustice of all types. This is the solidarity of revolutionary organizing, the knowledge that we are stronger together and that we have more in common than keeps us apart.

But there are also moments when the material conditions of what we are going through makes the dynamics of that shared struggle exceedingly clear. And in a moment when Christian nationalism is becoming the overwhelmingly dominant force on the Right, there is a unique threat to pagan communities at the same time as antisemitic incidents are hitting a record frequency. Because of conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, the belief that there are demonic, pagan forces threatening our youth are as popular as they have been since the Satanic Panic, the period of the 1980s and 1990s where people believed Satanic cults were abusing children across the country. Even the pagan far-right has seen a decline because of this shift, and white nationalists like the Nick Fuentes-led “groyper” movement are turning on their racist pagan comrades in favor of white Christian nationalism.

At Pagan Pride, Between the World and other religious events, attendees are being assaulted and accosted by Christian protesters who are attempting to shut down their constitutionally protected congregations. In 2022, street preachers made news when they attacked Witchfest USA, and there were several of these incidents at events since 2016 as Trumpism, the MAGA Movement, and revived Christian nationalism grew. Long-time pagans know that this kind of harassment isn’t new, but it is growing, and it creates a clear shared interest in partnerships between Jews and pagans since those threatening our communities are largely the same. We all share an interest in multicultural and cosmopolitan communities, religious freedom, freedom of assembly, and having the right to dissent from the dominant religious norms of the country. The world that Christian nationalists are fighting for is not one that is friendly to either communities, so creating ecumenical organizing opportunities where we can create cross-communal support will prove to be an important piece of fighting back on these assaults. 

And this is a lesson that many pagans have already learned as they build up a pagan presence in antifascist organizing and confront racist organizations that try to make a claim to the Gods. Antisemitism does not operate in isolation and is part of the larger social systems that keep our communities divided, so bridging the divide and creating unity across lines of difference is the only way to build up the strength necessary to take on a threat as dynamic as we are seeing today.