Authoritarian power, fascism especially, often rests on the persecution of a group. Fascists ascribe the problems of society to the influence of a minority and argue that controlling or eliminating that group will solve a social ill. The most popular target for this form of social weaponization, for hundreds of years, has been the Jews.

Making up 2% of the U.S. population, and only 0.2% of the world’s population, Jews are, year after year, the target of more anti-religious hate crimes than any group. In the two-year period 2001-02 bookending 9/11 — when Islamic terrorists killed 3,000 people — the FBI identified 636 anti-Islam hate crimes in the U.S., up from just 61 in the two prior years. Over the same period the FBI identified 1,974 anti-Jewish hate crimes — three times as many as directed at Muslims, more than half the religious hate crimes committed during the period.

The anti-Islam number was the anomaly. Year after year, more hate crimes are committed against Jewish Americans than against any other group except Black Americans. (There are six times as many Black Americans, and in total they suffer twice as many hate crimes.) The situation is similar abroad and over time. Persecution of the Jews is so common, there’s a Yiddish word for being massacred: pogrom. QAnon is strange and vile, but likely ends up only a stain on this American era. Antisemitism is history’s most enduring and deadly conspiracy theory. MORE