Editor’s note: I am posting this not as a claim that Dr. Montanari’s ideas on the virus are correct—I do not have knowledge in this area— but only that his views should be aired. We are living in a time when science has become politicized and the claims of establishment scientists have become political orthodoxy and dissenters punished. In my field, psychology, decades-old findings have been to be unable to be replicated. Yet they are still to be found in textbooks because they favor leftist and environmentalist explanations for human behavior, particularly regarding racial differences, and dissenters are shunned and denied academic positions. Climate science has become completely politicized, so non-experts are left not knowing what to think while the establishment media and academic groups cling to an orthodoxy and brand anyone who disagrees as intellectually deficient and morally suspect. Can anyone trust the pharmaceutical industry (e.g., the Sacklers and the opioid crisis) or experts on nutrition? So much of what is produced in these fields is subject to financial motivations, and again, the average person is left wondering what drugs to take and what foods to eat. So let’s be open to Dr. Montanari’s ideas. Personally, I find many of his ideas quite compelling, and he is definitely well-versed in the field.

As the following content may be controversial, I do not pretend to truth, even to the truth of him whose thought and findings I report. My basic knowledge rests on the understanding that the property of rain is to wet and of fire to burn, and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun.

Furthermore, given the current rapidity of the information flow, it is possible that what I relate here, by the time it is published, may have become the majority’s opinion. Though probably not, for we should keep in mind that, historically, the fabric of superstition (religious or even scientific) has often defied the feeble efforts of reason.

Which is why I begin with Galileo. It is universally known that Galileo was tried for his unorthodox notion that the earth circled around the sun, rather than otherwise. He had to recant his findings to avoid what happened to Giordano Bruno. Hence Galileo’s reported legendary mumbling as he left the court, “And yet it moves” (‘it’ being the earth in its revolution around the sun).

Theoretically speaking, the theologians may have had a point. Those readers who in their youth used trains instead of planes for transport, may recall what happened when they sat on a train waiting to depart, while another identical train was stationed on the adjacent rail. When your train, or the other began to move, for one second or so it was difficult to say if it was yours or the other train that was moving. A phenomenon consistent with the general notion of relative motion.

But Galileo’s assertions proved even more heretical when — using his DIY telescope — he discovered that Jupiter had satellites. For the finding disproved the assumption whereby the earth is the exceptional celestial object around which all other worlds orbit — the astronomical equivalent of the ‘exceptional’ nation of Obamanian memory.

Faced with the dilemma, the bishop of Pisa issued a directive to the parishes, admonishing that it was sinful to look through a telescope, because it showed objects that didn’t exist.

As of now, it is uncertain whether the world is a large assembly of bishops of Pisa or, as it may still be not sinful to hope, common sense will prevail.

One prevailing characteristic of the current Coronavirus metaphorical fever is the fantastic and logical inconsistence of the reports.

The Latin dictum or principle “Natura non facit saltus” (nature makes no leaps) has been an important principle of natural philosophy.  The sentence is attributed to Gottfried Leibniz, (1646–1746), one of the inventors of the infinitesimal calculus — though perhaps better known for his assertion, reached through elaborate reasoning, that ours is the best of all possible words.

The principle is/was also an essential element of Charles Darwin’s treatment of natural selection in his Origin of Species. And while many may take issue with Leibnitz’ opinion of our world, fewer probably disagree with the notion of natural selection.

As readers know, Italy is at the forefront of the coronavirus phenomenon because of the extraordinary higher number of cases and terrifying death toll, even exceeding China’s, where it all started.

At which some dissenting voices began to be heard, disputing the earlier findings — and/or at least disputing how they were reported.

The bitter and obstinate opposition made to those who, however clearly and with tenable arguments, disputed the data, induces the unbiased observer to at least hypothesize that some dormant privilege or as yet unexplained assumption has been attacked.

I would suggest disregarding the ‘battle of qualifications’ whereby a graduate of university X knows more than a graduate of university Y. As I mentioned before, my (however tentative) assessment of the plausibility and credibility of an explanation rests on:

1. Whether the explanation is consistent with common sense and with what is commonly known on the debated issue;
2. Whether the person in question has direct experience (and for how long) with the problem on which he expresses his views; and
3. Whether his physiognomy is in reasonable harmony with perceivable symptoms of credibility—an idea elaborated in extreme detail in a massive study, by the Swiss author Johann Lavater, at the end of the 1700s.

I will begin with Dr. Stefano Montanari, a nano-pathologist who, for over twenty years, along with his wife, has researched nano-pathogens, the very minute illness-causing particles that typically float in the air of all crowded, polluted, highly trafficked, industrial cities, as well as factories.

[For Italian speakers, the link to the original interview is at https://bit.ly/2UBuRX2 ]

The prefix ‘nano’ refers to the dramatically small size of the items studied. It takes 25,400,000 nanometers to make an inch. The size of the smallest particle recognizable by the naked eye is 100,000 nanometers. Therefore nano-pathogens are dramatically small, though the damage they cause to the lungs is inversely proportional to their size.

The size of a nano-pathogen is between 5 and 200 nanometers. Considering that a virus is considered large at 250 nanometers, nano-pathogens and viruses (corona or otherwise), have the same order of magnitude. For expedience I will signal the questions put to Dr. Montanari in bold.

— Where did the virus originate?

All the news we have had so far is varied, fragmentary, and unverifiable. First it seemed it was born in China, then not in China (see previous article “Science and Fiction” — where virologist Dr. Wodarg claimed that some coronaviruses, belonging or related to the current entity called ‘the’ coronavirus, were already discovered in Georgia, USA in 2015).

Some said they come from bats, some that they were created in a laboratory to exterminate people en masse. Someone may know but they are very few. As for the bats, we may as well add the unicorn and we have completed the picture.

The fact that ‘this’ coronavirus is considered new, is anything but exceptional. There are very many coronaviruses. The common cold is often due to a coronavirus. They are viruses that by themselves cannot cause death, and very often are totally innocuous. This new strain is very infective, which means that it can more easily enter into people.

However, in the overwhelming majority of people it remains innocuous and without showing clinical indication of symptoms. But it hits, as an illness, old people, especially old people who take medicines used to treat other pulmonary diseases, or who have other pathologies.

Healthy people suffer absolutely no damage from this virus(es), which is probably ubiquitous and can be found everywhere in the billions, like billions of other viruses. Therefore I am convinced that, if we sought the virus in the 60-million Italians, we would find it at least in 30 million and probably more. As I said, this virus is found everywhere and it stays there without absolutely causing any harm, just like the enormous number of other viruses, present but harmless.

Mortality from the virus is very low and probably non-existent. But an illness with the virus is another matter. Yesterday evening [about Mar 23] we heard a primary doctor in a hospital saying that the virus is the same as an illness. This gentleman should go back to school, but not to university, a bit further back, to elementary school. It is a statement that makes no logical sense.

To die of an illness means that the illness is the cause of death. For example, a myocardial infarction is a cause of death. If someone is run over by a train, the ensuing trauma is the cause of death. If he who is run over by a train happens also to have a cold, the cold is not the cause of death. He casually happened to have a cold.

I am convinced that if all deaths were checked — about 650,000 people die in Italy physiologically every year — you would find more than half having the coronavirus, probably many more than half. For they are old people who have this coronavirus in their body. The omnipresence of the coronavirus type and other coronaviruses is a fact, not a hypothesis.

— I see here the latest numbers from the official press service, indicating that Italy surpassed China in number of deaths during a single day, 475, of which 319 were in Lombardy. Therefore, I am asking you, Dr. Montanari, if you still use the adjective ‘harmless’ referring to the virus.

No, the virus is not harmless. It affects the lungs, just as there are viruses that affect the guts, hence diarrhea, the stomach, hence vomiting, the nervous system, hence headaches etc.

It means that, in certain cases, especially the old, they need respiratory care. If you examine the age of the dead, they are on average eighty-years old. A respirator is common equipment in a hospital. I have spent more than 40 years in hospital operating rooms, and it is absolutely standard equipment.

That we do not have them or have too few (in Italy) is due to our having, through the last 10 years, destroyed our health system. We have closed entire hospital departments, as well as many smaller hospitals.

The purchasing system is bad, and all that is needed in a hospital costs double than in other countries  because the purchasing system is corrupted at the capillary level. [My note: the very governor of the region of Lombardy was recently condemned to six years in jail for a monstrous misappropriation of funds (in the hundreds of millions) destined for health care.]

We are facing an emergency — if we can thus call it — because we are not prepared, due to the 10-year long process of dismantling the system. And when I hear it said that the Italian health system is the best in the world, my arms fall, and maybe not just the arms.

— But how do you explain the images of coffins carried away by military trucks from hospitals in the city of Bergamo. Would you still maintain that the cause of the death was not the coronavirus?

Look, and I am quoting the National Institute of Health, the actual deaths attributed or certified as having been caused by the corona virus were 3 (this was a few days ago when the numbers reported were already in the hundreds).  And when I hear Mario Giordano (a well-known journalist) say that we should not divulge this news, I wonder what kind of journalism we have in Italy (and maybe in the world). I’m not talking about the parish newspaper, I’m talking about a journalist of great notoriety, who says something contrary to the very ethics of journalism… This man is advocating disinformation.  It is a shame.

— If this virus mutates quickly does it mean that maybe the Italian virus is not the same as the Chinese?

It is not maybe, for sure it’s not the same as the German virus isolated in Germany, nor it is the same as the Chinese virus. It is the nature of viruses — they look for stability, for a state to be in in for a while. To achieve this, the virus mutates at great speed.   Tomorrow it will no longer be what it is today, and so on. But (the coronavirus) is not the only virus behaving this way. We host a huge number of viruses in our body. Many of them are also indispensable for our life.  They are not even beings as such — they are a kind of chemical chains. The current type (Coronavirus) is peculiar for its relationship to RNA and DNA but let’s not go into this.  There are many with similar structural characteristics.  They mutate very quickly — therefore when attempting to look for a remedy for this or that virus you run after something that runs faster than us.

— But how about the images from hospitals showing people with respirators. Is your explanation that the phenomenon is not due to the severity of the virus but to the cuts to health care?

We are not prepared for a disease that affects the lungs. For our politicians have destroyed our health system. You know very well, as a journalist, how easy it is to manipulate text and images to create a message.

There are definitely people with respirators who definitely need it — and they must be helped by it. But all these coffins are part of the 650,000 deaths we have every year in Italy — there is no increase in mortality. And if you go to any hospital, you see coffins coming out every day. Many years ago I turned down a job in childhood oncology, precisely because I could not stand the spectacle of the white coffins that passed by me constantly. We are talking about nothing and, as I said, you know that it is possible to manipulate images and context to achieve the impression you wish to convey. (What follows are examples of unforgettable momentous events that are quickly forgotten)

Here we are talking of 3 people’s death attributable to coronavirus. If the number does not please the media, that is another matter, but the facts are what they are — and that number, as I said, comes out from the National Institute for Health.

— But then is the pneumonia caused by the covid-19 is different from the pneumonia we have known so far?

It is an interstitial pneumonia; it is a viral pneumonia, but there have been these types of viruses in Italy for several months. We never talk about it, but already, for example, in October, about 5–6 months ago, there were patients with atypical pneumonia — pneumonia not normally seen and about which we knew nothing. The source was unknown, it was impossible to counteract the virus pharmacologically, and we had to wait for those sick people to heal themselves. They healed by themselves, because, contrary to what some try to make you believe, we have immune defenses that are very much stronger than the vast majority of drugs.

We have on our skin various bacteria, fungi and viruses that are there to contrast and counteract pathogenic bacteria and fungi, meaning carriers of illness. In fact when we wear gloves to combat the coronavirus, we are not helping because we do not allow our bacteria, fungi and viruses present on the skin to interact with the pathogenic ones. Then with gloves-covered hands we touch our clothes, we touch the money handed by the cashiers from the stores still open — the same gloves on which the viruses came to rest. Hence those gloves are distinctly worse than non-gloves. We are dealing with imbeciles, ignorant of the elementary principles of biology.

— Therefore, it is as if we couldn’t build antibodies in this way …

We don’t build antibodies to this virus — we already have immune defenses. From rhinos to elephants to goldfish, we all have the capacity to heal ourselves. If you have a headache, and I give you some enamel to apply to your nails, it was not the enamel that cured the headache. It was just that by the next day the body eliminated the headache — and this happens at large.

My old professor of physiology used to say that an untreated flu lasts 7 days, a treated flu lasts one week. This means that we presumptuously interfere with nature without realizing what we are doing so.

As for the masks… they are useless. There are millions, billions of viruses for every square meter of the earth, on the sidewalk and so on.  It’s an illusion following from the (imagined) idea that viruses are as big as sewer rats. A notion that perhaps arose from the words of Ms. Lorenzin when, as Minister of Health, she said that viruses crawl and jump around (as if they were animals).

Viruses exist in enormous quantities and can enter in enormous quantities inside the cells, which are a few thousandths of a millimeter wide. Wearing a mask compares with raising a gate to prevent mosquitoes from entering your house.

— But if the disease is not so serious why every day more and more restrictive measures are placed on us? How do the authorities of the institutions justify their behavior?

The major issue at stake is, or are, the vaccines. The regime that now encompasses the world will force the world to vaccinate — that is to vaccinate with and against a virus that does not give immunity, as this (the coronavirus) is the case.

If 50 years ago, at my exam of pharmacology, I had told my examining professor — who was one of the most knowledgeable pharmacologists of the time — something like that, I would have been thrown out of the door. For only an incompetent can imagine a vaccine against a virus that does not give immunity and has no chance of being effective. We are talking about a virus that mutates at very fast speed and we cannot possibly run after it (i.e., its mutations).

It’s a virus somehow similar to the cold virus, whose family it belongs to. You can’t vaccinate against the common cold because the common cold does not give immunity. In the course of a life, a person can have a cold 200 times, and at no time will that cold will give immunity (against the next). It is a colossal fraud. We are close to 8 billion people forced to be vaccinated and it will be an unimaginably enormous business.

— But then, if the most immediate defence consists in keeping the lungs efficient how does a smoker deal with the issue?

Badly. We all have bronchi. They are tubes that become thinner and thinner (as they approach the lungs). They convey air to the 600 million small bags, called pulmonary alveoli, in which oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged.

Along the bronchial tubes all healthy people have a thin, but indispensable layer of mucus, which envelopes and blocks dust, viruses and bacteria. Furthermore healthy people have, in the bronchi, what are called vibratile cilia — they are a kind of whips whipping out of the lungs these dust, viruses, bacteria and fungi.

The smoker has a layer of mucus that is relatively enormously thicker. The vibratile cilia not only cannot throw out what has been enveloped by the mucus — which in the smoker becomes catarrh — but they become paralyzed. What happens then is that the invaders slip down, slip into the pulmonary alveoli and do not come out anymore. Consequently the smoker gets viruses, bacteria, fungi in much greater number than a non-smoker does.

— On the subject of swabs (to verify the presence of the coronavirus), I would like to know from you what do you think of the governor of Veneto (Mr. Zaia) who said that we will take swabs from everybody.

The governor is clearly incompetent and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Besides, for the analysis of the swabs special equipment is needed. The analysis cannot be done in the kitchen — both equipment and expertise are required.  And then there is a further problem. The results, in more than 80% of the cases are false positive. Therefore there is a real risk of telling a person that he is  ‘positive’ when he is not.

But there is more. Most of those who are actually positive have no symptoms — as is the case with the vast majority of viruses that exist in this world. Therefore, should we isolate and turn perfectly healthy people into sick people?

This is very serious, because — and this has been known for many decades — depressed people have lower defenses against pathologies and get sick more often. You take from these people the possibility to go out in the sun — without which the body cannot properly metabolize vitamin D, which is essential to protect our immune system.

So we stay at home in a bad mood, we cannot metabolize vitamin D and we get sick more easily. All these ideas, taken by perfectly incompetent people, are deleterious and worsen the situation.

People should be told to stay outside in the sun, to walk, to move around, to try staying healthy and eat healthily.  Not to stay indoors, in the dark and without sun. These incompetents don’t realize the harm they do or maybe they realize it, I don’t know.

— This seems a vicious circle. But, compared to the SARS (epidemic) what are the differences?

(The coronavirus) is one of the many lung viruses (like SARS), causing an atypical pneumonia. They are cousins, almost brothers. And SARS did not cause disasters.

There have been other similar pathologies, the swine flu, the avian flu… In the case of the avian flu Italy bought 27,000,000 vaccine doses and disposed of 26,700,000 of them. We paid all that money for vaccines that we threw in the sewers. We have no money for respirators but money to buy a vaccine.

We are ruled by the incompetent and I do not wish to talk about corruption, though I am tempted to. It’s like commander Schettino to the umpteenth power [Schettino was the commander of the Cruise Liner “Costa Concordia” that ran aground near an island close to Tuscany in 2012. He wanted to blow the ship’s horn to wish a Happy Birthday to a friend in the island, while showing off for his Moldavian girlfriend, a personal friend as well as unregistered passenger on board — 32 people died, the cost of the damage was in the billions range).

— There are those who claim that the coronavirus is seasonal. Could you give a prediction on when this emergency will end?

I cannot say whether it is seasonal or not. Like almost all viruses it can be affected by temperature. It is certain that nature is wiser than our statesmen and many doctors. Besides, it is not corrupt.

Nature knows well that when we get sick , the body raises the temperature because, from the point of view of fighting the illness, the higher the temperature, the more efficient is the illness-fighting system — meaning that the temperature improves the efficiency of our immune system and decreases the vital capacity of bacteria and fungi — assuming that the viruses have a life.

But what do the doctors do? They gives the patient Tachypyrine — which takes away that defense connected with higher temperature. The doctor prescribes Tachypyrine when his patient has a 37.8 C  (100.04 F) temperature. It compares to a besieged city throwing down the walls to let more air in.

It is pure folly.

As for the coronavirus, it happens that in the summer the temperature rises and it is possible that this reduces the virus’s vital capacity. Vital capacity is a wrong expression, but let’s say so for simplicity.

It is possible that in the summer the virus presence drops. Even so, the matter is not that relevant. Every year we have 20,000 deaths from influenza but no one talks about it. Furthermore, we have 49000 deaths per year due to infections contracted in the hospital. The data are official. 49000 people (130–140 people per day) die because they are admitted into a hospital, say, for an appendicitis and then they die of pneumonia. No one is talking about it, but we have many more deaths from these infections than we have had from a coronavirus, even since the beginning of this farce. We are facing something beyond absurd, which at least invites suspicion.

— Therefore, in summary, one cannot die of covid-19 unless the patient has previous pathologies.

Listen. If I throw you from the tenth floor and you had a cold or flu or had arthritis, I cannot say that you died of arthritis, flu or cold. You died because I threw you from the tenth floor.  Go and see the data from the Higher Institute of health. You find that those who died from coronavirus are all people who have cancer, who have a very strong diabetes, who are obese, who are old. Eighty-year-olds, as is the average death-norm in Italy, and 80 years also remains the death-norm associated with coronavirus, because they are all people who die of other diseases.

— How about the latest news about the death of a 32-year-old young man (from coronavirus)?

I cannot blame them but I did not understand. How sure are we that he died of coronavirus and not ‘with’ coronavirus? This patient had several health problems, some caused by an infection contracted in Cuba 2 years ago. Is this not meaningful in your opinion?

Surely you cannot think that if one is infected with coronavirus, then he should heal from cancer or from whatever other disease.  If someone has cancer, or a heart condition, and also accidentally the coronavirus, what does it mean? We are really facing a colossal scam.

— Do you agree, however, that it is good that the most affected, the weakest should stay at home?

No, it’s good for them to go out, to sunbathe, to stay outside, to stroll, to stay healthy, because if they remain locked in the house, they are more likely to die. Do you want to speed-up the death of the elderly? Should we keep them out of the air, out of the sun? They must walk, they must stay in the sun, they must exercise. In summary, they must do all that has always been said (as good for health) and that today is denied to them for interests that are abhorrent.

 

—  Let’s move on to England and Boris Johnson, as the last question. He wanted to rely on ‘’Herd Immunity’ but then he retracted…

His reasoning  resembles his hair. We are facing pure madness. First, herd immunity is a brilliant invention and fantasy created by the pharmaceutical industry. Only an imbecile can believe that there exists such a monstrosity as herd immunity, which simply doesn’t exist.

If you wish, we can make another show where I’ll explain why (herd immunity) is a scam. But even if it existed, how does herd immunity exist for a disease that does not give you immunity? It is as if you were saying that herd immunity exists for colds. We’re really in front of a character (Boris Johnson) who speaks because he has a tongue. He is dangerous and should be stopped.

— He cannot because he is the Prime Minister of Great Britain. We have touched on the most important points. Have we left anything out?

There is one point we did not touch — the economic, which is not part of my competence.  We are now blocking the world and, as for Italy, the economy was already at a low point. What do they do? They freeze all activities but keep the stock exchange open. Stocks reach a low bottom. What does it mean? The ultra billionaire can easily purchase companies that are now worth pennies.

When eventually it will be decided that the (coronavirus) farce is ended — and nothing will end because this virus will continue undaunted to do what it’s doing now (or its evolving strains will do), the ultra-billionaires will own everything. The rich (a degree below the billionaires) will have bought, say, 3–4 restaurants and/or 10 stores that had to close. In summary, all who were rich will be infinitely richer, But we will also have a flood-tide of people who will always be poorer. This will be another consequence of this fake epidemic, perhaps, who knows, created on purpose.

—  I would like to close with your comment on the possible correlation between pollution and the development of the virus…

We have talked and studied this for many years. When there are dusts, micro and nano particles, the viruses — all almost infinitely small —stick to the nano-particles, which then become the vehicles for the viruses, as well as for dioxins, furans (another toxic compound), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and an infinite number of other substances.

All this is widely known — but now some pundits say so as if it were a novelty.  We have been saying this for 20 years.

End of the interview.

I started with Galileo, because I had a cunning plan to bring him up again at the end. The Vatican chief prosecutor of Galileo was Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, the same, by the way, who was instrumental in condemning Giordano Bruno to the stake. In the circumstances Galileo’s decision to officially renege on the on the geo-centric theory of the universe was wise.

We should, however, consider that both Galileo and Bruno lived during the peak times of the Counterreformation. The Counterreformation was the Catholic response to Lutheranism, just as the Patriot Act (never rescinded, by the way), was the response to 9/11.

Still, Cardinal Bellarmino had some remarkable skills. One of them was persuasive oratory. He attracted both Catholic and Protestants to his debates and was skilled at counter-arguing and rebutting the Calvinist theories that were spreading rapidly in the Dutch provinces.

In the case at hand, Dr. Montanari found a contemporary Cardinal Bellarmino in the shape of a Dr. Burioni, who has become a TV celebrity (corporate official channels) and made big bucks as an adamant advocate of the universal power of all vaccines.

It goes without saying that the pharmaceutical lobby ensures that only pro-vaccine voices are heard in the syndicated (there are no other) corporate channels. The situation mirrors the US. In fact, Dr. Montanari could only be heard on an Internet channel.

But whereas Cardinal Bellarmino was acknowledged as an intelligent individual — though misguided at least from a Christian or humane point of view — Dr. Burioni is an ass who uses his ass as an instrument of cogitation.  And this not for his views on vaccines, which are a matter of opinion, but for his reaction to Dr. Montanari’s interview, when it became clear that it was circulating more widely than expected.

Among other things Dr. Burioni is the head of a nebulous “Coalition Across Science,” whose funding is obscure but whose aim is to make all scientists agree with Burioni’s interpretation of the coronavirus and with the worth of a forthcoming vaccine. Hence the “Coalition Across Science” even includes sociologists, behaviorists and ethologists who, for example, study the mating behavior of bonobo monkeys.

To fight Dr. Montanari, Burioni has filed a legal suit, seeking penalties or incarceration for Dr. Montanari and the closure of the Internet station that published the above rendered interview.

I will spare the reader the lengthy motivations in the accusations of the braggart Burioni. The most interesting and to any same person incredible are:

Montanari is a scientific popularizer — therefore his voice is perceived by people as authoritative and therefore his statements take on an even more serious aspect….

It is therefore up to the judicial authority to determine whether there are any criminal wrongdoings in Montanari’s video and in particular a breach of Art 656 (publication of criminal information or dissemination of exaggerated or tendentious false news, likely to disturb public order)….

Art 656 prescribes a prison sentence of at least 3 months and a monetary penalty.

When the judicial authority verifies criminal offences in the conduct described, it will have to consider the adoption of any measure, also aimed at obscuring and seizing the YouTube channels where these videos are present, if not already removed.

The patient reader who read so far, may or will draw his/her own conclusions. The information published here is clearly inconsistent with the perception conveyed by the corporate channels — suggesting massive coronavirus deaths and great dangers to disbelievers or disobeyers of the safety injunctions.

Puzzled by the inconsistency — and to run a check, however minute -—I travelled around two local hospitals near the emergency section and saw nothing unusual, at least as measured by the traffic of ambulances.

As for judging who is telling the truth and who isn’t, let any of my 25 readers decide. As for me I am reminded of the advice that Timon of Athens gave to two robbers who came to see him, “Trust not the physician, for his antidotes are poison, and he slays more than you rob.”

Which single invention has contributed most to our understanding of reality? Appropriately enough, it’s easy to overlook one of the best candidates: the microscope. It revealed whole new worlds existing not merely under our eyes, but actually within our eyes and every other organ of the body. The microscope taught humanity that the minute can be mighty. For example, we learnt that hitherto unsuspected organisms, invisible to the naked eye, had been shaping human history and evolution for countless millennia. Witness the Corona virus and the Black Death. Both the physical size and the genetic complexity of the virus are far less than those of human beings, but the virus is now re-shaping human history as the plague bacillus did in the Middle Ages.

Applied ambiguity

But that lesson of micro-might was apparently lost on the sociologists, anthropologists and other “experts” who drew up a statement on “The Race Question” issued by the United Nations in 1950:

From the biological standpoint, the species Homo sapiens is made up of a number of populations, each one of which differs from the others in the frequency of one or more genes. Such genes, responsible for the hereditary differences between men, are always few when compared to the whole genetic constitution of man and to the vast number of genes common to all human beings regardless of the population to which they belong. This means that the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences. (“The Race Question,” UNESCO, Paris, July 1950)

Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg), chief writer of “The Race Question”

The statement is dishonest, because it exploits the ambiguity of the phrase “far greater.” Does the phrase mean “far more numerous” or “far more powerful”? The compilers of the statement, like the Jewish anthropologist Ashley Montagu (né Israel Ehrenberg), wanted to use the undoubted truth of the first meaning to imply the falsehood of the second meaning.

Humans, chimps and gorillas

Using that kind of dishonest reasoning, you could also say that the likenesses among primates — the group that contains humans, chimpanzees and gorillas — are “far greater” than their differences. Clearly, the genes that primates have in common far outnumber the genes responsible for anything unique to Homo sapiens. For example, only a tiny number of genes underlie the human faculty of language. And those genes seem to have appeared in an eye-blink of evolutionary time.

But that one small genetic difference outweighs the vast number of shared genes among primates. The tiny minority of genes-for-language had a decisive effect, turning one group into a new kind of creature — a creature that spoke and reasoned, and thereby cooperated in new and uniquely powerful ways. Language made us human. In time, you could say that it made us superhuman, allowing us to transcend death and distance with a form of magic called writing.

Eugenic processes at the center of Judaism

Writing is undoubtedly the most important invention in human history. Indeed, it created the very concept of “history.” But not all human “populations” have been exposed to the written word for the same length of time and to the same degree. Writing created a new cultural environment in which existing and emergent genes were favoured or disfavoured by natural selection. There is good evidence, for example, that some groups have acquired genetic adaptations for reading: see Peter Frost’s fascinating discussion of the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), for example. Such “literacy” genes, as they might be called, would be a tiny fraction even of the tiny fraction of genes responsible for the faculty of language in the first place. But that fraction of a fraction might, again, have had decisive effects on human history.

After all, one obvious group for selection-by-literacy is Ashkenazi Jews, whose culture — and marriage prospects — centred for many centuries on the mastery of complicated texts like the Talmud and Torah. As Kevin MacDonald has noted: “success as a scholar was valuable because it allowed the scholar to contract a desirable marriage, often to a woman from a wealthy family. At the very center of Judaism, therefore, was a set of institutions that would reliably result in eugenic processes related to intelligence and resource acquisition ability.” I argued in “Gas-Bags Are Not Great” that the very fluent and prolific Christopher Hitchens was, in effect, a “reading, writing rabbi,” able to absorb and emit words at high speed thanks to his part-Ashkenazi ancestry and descent from generations of highly literate Ashkenazim.

Trotsky as Talmudist

And Hitchens himself said that his great hero Leon Trotsky (né Lev Bronshtein) “would have made a brilliant Talmudist.” So would Ashley Montagu, Morris Ginsberg and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who were three of the ten so-called experts who drew up the UN Statement on “The Race Question” quoted above. They were all Ashkenazi Jews, which is statistically anomalous even before you consider that Ashley Montagu was the dominant figure behind the Statement. If “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences,” how is that the tiny minority of Ashkenazim can be represented so disproportionately among the ideologically influential? The likenesses should swamp the differences and Ashkenazim shouldn’t appear so often in situations like that.

In fact, of course, small differences — like genes for language — can have huge consequences. Small genetic differences underlie the higher average IQ and literacy of Ashkenazim, but those small genetic differences have given Ashkenazim huge advantages in cultural and ideological competition. But I’d also suggest that Ashkenazim enjoy small but decisive differences in genes for an ingroup-outgroup morality — or rather, for lack of any sense of moral obligation to non-Jews. It’s also statistically anomalous that world-historic fraudsters like Robert Maxwell and Bernie Madoff should be Ashkenazi. Not to mention prolific sex-criminals like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Minority predators, majority prey

All four men were predators and among lower animals predation is an evolutionary strategy under genetic control. Why should predatory behaviour not also be genetically influenced or controlled among human beings? For example, psychopathy is what called an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), in that it can exist and be advantageous at a certain low level in a population because psychopaths are not encountering other psychopaths often enough to be disadvantaged in their habitual predation and immorality.

Two Ashkenazi predators and possible psychopaths: Sir Philip Green and Harvey Weinstein

In other words, psychopaths have to be a minority to be successful. Does that have any genetic implications for racial minorities like Jews and Gypsies living among the White racial majorities of Europe? It may indeed have such implications, particularly if the minority in question evolves cultural taboos and punishments against predation on the in-group rather than the out-group. But Jews and Gypsies prey on the out-group in different ways suited to their vastly different levels of intelligence and literacy. Ashkenazim have had a culture centred on books; Gypsies have had a culture centred on low-level parasitism. And that Gypsy culture has produced another statistical anomaly: Tyson Fury, the current heavy-weight champion of the world, is a “self-proclaimed Gypsy King” and drawn from a tiny minority within Europe’s population, let alone the world’s.

Minority might: the “Gypsy King” Tyson Fury

And although Fury may be less Gypsy than Irish Traveller, the two groups have inter-bred and have similar cultures of fighting, philoprogenitiveness and contempt for education. Presumably they’ve evolved in similar ways, as fast-reproducing nomadic predators on a settled and genetically pacified out-group. Fury’s wife Paris wants their children to follow Gypsy tradition and leave school at the age of 11 as Fury himself did, and in early 2020 Fury faced accusations of fraud over a drug test. Criminality is another tradition among Gypsies and Travellers (see my discussion of the serial rapist Joseph McCann). But Fury seems to be of above-average intelligence even by White standards — he both out-fought and out-thought his “fearsome” Black opponent Deontay Wilder — and perhaps that explains his involvement in another kind of criminality. When the Guardian reported Fury’s victory over Wilder, the newspaper made sure to remind its readers of his previous record of crime-think: “In the past Fury has equated homosexuality and abortions with paedophilia, claimed ‘Zionist, Jewish people … own all the banks, all the papers, all the TV stations’ and ‘a woman’s best place is in the kitchen and on her back’.”

Public Enemy #1 among Jews

Fury might not know the word “hyperbole,” but he’s intelligent enough to know that he was using it when he made his claim about “Zionist, Jewish people.” Obviously, they don’t own “all” of the things he named. But they own a hugely disproportionate amount and exercise hugely disproportionate influence in media and finance. However, they don’t always use that influence in the best interests of the out-group. Interestingly, both Jews and Gypsies have contemptuous terms for the out-group: goyim and gorja, respectively. And while the Jewish fraudster Robert Maxwell (né Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch), who preyed on the goyish out-group, was buried with the highest of honours on Israel’s most sacred ground, the Jewish fraudster Freddy David, who preyed on the Ashkenazi in-group, has described himself as “Public Enemy #1 in the Jewish community” of London:

A financial adviser who stole £15 million from investors failed to attend court on Wednesday as his lawyer claimed he feared he would not be able to prepare kosher food for himself if he moved to a tougher jail. Freddy David, 51, used his good reputation within the Jewish community as managing director of HBFS Wealth Management to sell non-existent investment products to his clients.

David transferred his mother around £176,000 while under investigation and spent around £36,000 on gambling just a few days before he was finally arrested, Southwark Crown Court heard. He used part of an £80,000 investment from one victim to set up a restaurant called “Let’s Meat”, visit Greece and Israel and feed his gambling addiction.

After his arrest, David, who also paid his children’s private school fees with the cash, told police: “I am public enemy number one in the Jewish community and understandably so. I have very very few friends left and I understand why.” David stole a total of £14,545,594 from a total of 55 clients over ten years. (Fraudster who stole £15m from community fails to attend confiscation hearing over kosher food claim, The Jewish Chronicle, 26th February 2020 / 1st Adar 5780)

Freddy David, “Public Enemy #1” among Jews

Freddy David’s risible “kosher food claim” is also an example of the verbal slipperiness that may be familiar to anyone who has argued with an Ashkenazi Jew. And let’s return to another claim by Ashkenazi Jews: that “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences.” Again, the claim is slippery, because it relies on the ambiguity of “far greater.” If you own a hundred quartz pebbles and I own ninety-five quartz pebbles and five diamonds, the likenesses between our assets are, in one sense, “far greater than the differences.” In another sense, the differences are far greater than the likenesses.

Artistic abortions

The huge genetic likenesses among humans are quartz. The tiny genetic differences are diamonds. And what price would you put on the tiny genetic differences that allow humans to speak and keep chimpanzees dumb? But sometimes humans are also unable to speak: there are laws and social sanctions against “hate” which stifle debate on the very topic of human differences. I’ve argued in articles like “Free Speech Must Die!” that Jews have played a central role in this kind of censorship. For Jews, “free speech” means speech that frees them to prey on the White majority and subvert that majority’s culture. And speaking of subversion (while I still can), here’s a final statistical anomaly:

Aliza Shvarts (born 1986) is an artist and writer who works in performance, video, and installation. Her art and writing explore queer and feminist understandings of reproduction and duration, and use these themes to affirm abjection, failure, and “decreation”. Simone Weil’s idea of decreation has been described as “a mystical passage from the created to the uncreated” and “a spiritual exercise of mystical passage: across a threshold, from created to uncreated”.

Shvarts’ 2008 performance Untitled [Senior Thesis], 2008 was the center of the so-called Yale student abortion art controversy, generating an international debate. The work explores ideas of fiction and doubt, and engages feminist inquiries into the medical, political, and legal frameworks of gender and reproduction. …

Over the course of nine months, Shvarts used donated sperm to inseminate herself as often as possible between the ninth and fifteenth days of her menstrual cycle. On the twenty-eighth day of her cycle, she took herbal medications meant to induce menses or miscarriage (although she never knew if she was pregnant). Shvarts intended to exhibit video of herself experiencing vaginal bleeding on four sides of a clear plastic cube, which would be wrapped with transparent plastic lined with samples of the discharged fluid. (See Aliza Shvarts and Yale student abortion art controversy at Infogalactic)

The pretentious and repulsive Aliza Shvarts

Like Bernie Madoff and Tyson Fury, Aliza Shvarts is what might be called a behavioural outlier. Madoff did something exceptionally greedy and dishonest; Fury did something exceptionally athletic and aggressive; Shvarts did something exceptionally pretentious and repulsive. But how can minorities regularly supply outliers like that if we’re all the same under the skin?

They can’t, but that doesn’t matter, because we aren’t. A minority of genes separates humans from other primates, and a minority of genes separates Jews or Gypsies from other humans. In both cases, the minority is mighty.

“The libel that Jews were continually plotting to poison the world had particularly tragic results during the Black Death of 1348–49.
Dennis Prager & Joseph Telushkin Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism^[1]

“There is no direct link between the massacres and the plague.”
Iris Ritzmann, “The Black Death as a cause of the massacres of Jews: A Myth of Medical History?”^[2]

I’ve been fascinated in recent days by Jewish commentary on COVID-19, which ranges from paranoid conspiracy theories about white nationalists to blunt admissions of intense Jewish ethnocentrism. In the first instance, the FBI’s apparently permanent and unironic surveillance of teenage chat sites has resulted in a stern but ludicrous warning that “extreme right-wing groups in the US are telling their members to deliberately spread the deadly new coronavirus to police officers and Jewish people.” Aside from conjuring mental images of ultra-orthodox Jews being chased by coughing skinheads, the ADL has taken to shaking its begging bowl in regards to rumors that Jews created the novel coronavirus in order to sell vaccines and “take advantage of the markets collapse through insider trading.” This petri dish of paranoia coexists with awkward Jewish discussions of the fact that Jewish communities are ideal incubators of disease because, in the words of The Forward, “the density of Jewish social networks across all denominations is almost twice as thick as that of the average American.” Less than a year after New York’s orthodox Jewish communities became epicenters for a resurgence of measles, concerns are already growing that the same communities are going to be a devil’s playground for COVID-19, which has already claimed the lives of two ultra-orthodox Jews in London.

Both inspired and disgusted by this mixture of contemporary disease and paranoia, I thought I’d revisit some historiographical material I prepared several years ago that concerns the same themes. The following essay concerns the putative allegation that Jews caused the Black Death, Jewish apologetic narratives in historiography, and the broader role of myth in Jewish self-understanding.

Accusations of Accusations

Anyone confronting mainstream Jewish historiography for the first time is overwhelmed by the victim paradigm inherent in most scholarship, a key part of which is the idea that Jews have been irrationally scapegoated countless times over many centuries. I’ve previously described the victim paradigm:

Jewish historiography is saturated with allusions to the “unique” status of Jews, who have suffered a “unique” hatred at the hands of successive generations of Europeans. In essence, it is the notion that Jews stand alone in the world as the quintessential “blameless victim.” To allow for any sense of Jewish agency — any argument that Jews may have in some way contributed to anti-Jewish sentiment — is to harm the perpetuation of this paradigm. In this sense, the ‘victim paradigm’ also contributes heavily to the claim for Jewish uniqueness and, as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, one can clearly see in many examples of Jewish historiography the tendency to focus not so much on the “suffering of Jews” but rather on the simple fact that “Jews suffered.”^[3] As a result, the paradigm offers no place to non-Jewish suffering. … The omission of the Jewish contribution to the development of anti-Semitism (be it in a village setting or a national setting), leaves the spotlight burning all the more ferociously on the ‘aggressor.’ Within this context, the blameless victim is free to make the most ghastly accusations, basking in the assurance that his own role, and by extension his own character, is unimpeachable. The word of this untainted, unique, blameless victim is taken as fact — to doubt his account is to be in league with the ‘aggressor.’ 

Jewish historiography can be interpreted in some ways as little more than a catalog of “accusations of accusations,” to the extent that such works invariably explain historical European behavior, often exaggerated, by positing Europeans as acting on a number of irrational and fanatical beliefs about Jews. This is true of historiographical accounts of almost every historical outbreak of violence against Jews, in which Europeans are presented as indulging in pogroms because of religious fanaticism during the Crusades or putative panics about alleged Jewish ritual murder. Certain fringe elements of European folklore about Jews, such as the idea that male Jews menstruate or that Jews buried their dead with rocks so that they could throw them at Christ in the afterlife, are brought front and center in mainstream historiography and used to explain very complex situations that certainly require a more nuanced understanding.

Arguably, similar results are achieved in more contemporary history through a mainstream scholarship that argues that mass Jewish casualties during World War Two were the result of another alleged European fantasy—that of race science. The actual role of Jews in European society prior to the war can be discarded, and in fact largely has been discarded, in favor of an approach that attributes Jewish deaths to just another manifestation of European irrationality and fanaticism. As stated above, however, making the case that perhaps race science wasn’t irrational, or a fantasy, is tantamount to an admission to being in league with the ‘aggressor’ — something that few or no mainstream academics are willing to do.

The result is a body of historiography that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, bases its argument on the idea that historical Europeans were profoundly ignorant and superstitious. Such perceptions, of course, live on in the Jewish mind, and one can only interpret aspects of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat (2006), especially its depictions of Eastern Europeans who believe that Jews hatch from eggs and can shape-shift into cockroaches (and can be persuaded to leave by having cash thrown at them), as a reinforcement of Jewish conceptions of their history. A scene depicting Cohen lying in bed, in terror at finding himself in the home of two old Jews, and clutching a cross and a fistful of cash, is intended as the ultimate parody of the historical Christian and his alleged fantasies about Jews — both religious and economic. We are encouraged to laugh alongside Jews at the apparent stupidity of our ancestors.

The Black Death in Jewish Historiography

One of the most oft-repeated of these putatively parody-worthy historical European “canards” is the idea that Jews in some way caused the Black Death (Great Bubonic Plague), an epidemiological disaster that claimed the lives of somewhere between 30% and 60% of the European population in the middle of the fourteenth century. In mainstream Jewish historiography, the most politically useful, and therefore most prominent, aspect of this particular “canard” is the notion that Jews caused the plague by poisoning the wells of Europeans. Thus we are encouraged to see such a belief as a variant on the “Blood Libel” that Jews perform ritual murder of Christians. Added to this basic framework are multiple allusions to Christian suspicions that Jews engaged in well-poisoning out of a desire to wipe out or subjugate Christians and pave the way for Jewish world domination. The underlying message of the focus on such beliefs is therefore the idea that historical Europeans were ignorant (scientifically and morally) and paranoid about Jews to the point of irrationality. Because significant numbers of Jews were set upon and killed during the years when the Black Death was active, such narratives about Europeans contain the additional message that Europeans are dangerous fantasists, and that Jews are their unfortunate and blameless victims.

The problem with historiography like this is that it’s yet another example of taking what were really just fringe beliefs and placing them as the primary motivation for complex and deep-rooted inter-ethnic hostility. The result is a wholesale condemnation of European society. For example, Robert Wistrich, now deceased, was a prominent producer of anti-European histories of anti-Semitism and claimed in one of his most famous works that “The Black Death which raged in Europe between 1347 and 1360 added yet another deadly accusation against the Jews — that of poisoning wells in order to wipe out Christians and establish their domination of the world. There is no doubt that the masses believed this charge.”^[4] [emphasis added] The Israeli historian Mordechai Breuer (1918–2007) wrote in one of his seminal essays on “The Black Death and antisemitism” that “the destruction of the Jews in the days of the plague was associated with the well-poisoning libel … There is no doubt that the masses believed all the stories of the atrocities attributed to the Jews.”^[5] [emphasis added] The similarity between these phrases, together with certain other textual “coincidences” have always suggested to me that Wistrich basically engaged in a quasi-plagiarism of the volume in which Breuer’s essay appeared (Antisemitism Through the Ages, 1988) for his own Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, which appeared a few years later (1991). Regardless of such finer points, patterns of mutual reliance, often devoid of reference to verifiable contemporary primary material, are endemic in the Jewish writing of histories of antisemitism. Breuer simply had to assert that it was beyond doubt that “the masses” were beholden to irrational myths, and this was sufficient in itself for Wistrich to repeat.

Mutual referencing over time led to a situation in which the idea that Europeans irrationally blamed Jews for the Black Death is now ubiquitous. Frederic Cople Jaher writes that “Already deemed lethal foes of Christianity, Jews were blamed for causing the Plague by poisoning wells. … Another delusion about Jews that intensified at the time of the Black Death was the charge of a world Jewish conspiracy against Christianity.”^[6] An entire chapter of Norman Cantor’s In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (2001) is devoted to an attempted deconstruction of claims of “The Jewish Conspiracy,” with Cantor arguing that Christians “made scapegoats of the Jews, charged them with spreading the plague by poisoning wells, and unleashed horrific pogroms on them.”^[7] Mark Cohen has written that the Black Death “witnessed massive pogroms against the Jews, who were believed to have poisoned wells in an attempt to destroy Christian civilization.”^[8] Perhaps the most savage character assassination of the European peoples, however, was carried out by the highly-incentivized non-Jewish historian Gavin Langmuir, who was for obvious reasons a firm favorite in the Jewish establishment. In his extravagantly-praised History, Religion, and Antisemitism (1990), Langmuir opined in relation to the Black Death that:

It would be hard to find a clearer example of irrational scapegoating. … By the late Middle Ages, in order to dispel doubts about their religion and themselves, many Christians were suppressing their capacity for rational empirical thought and irrationally attributing to the realities they denoted as “Jews” unobservable characteristics.^[9]

But is any of this true?

The Myth of Irrational European Pogroms

Some of the most recent, cutting-edge historiography from non-Jewish academics continues to chip away at some of the Jewish-led consensus that formed between the 1960s and early 2000s.^[10] For example, as the scholar Cordelia Hess has touched upon in her Berghahn-published The Absent Jews (2017), at least some of the historiographical accounts of anti-Jewish massacres alleged to have occurred during the Black Death are now acknowledged as being based on little more than hearsay, unreliable sources, misreadings of verifiable sources, and, to use Hess’s words, “no actual evidence of anti-Jewish pogroms.”^[11] In fact, it has now been discovered that some alleged pogroms have been attributed to German towns where there had never been Jewish settlements.^[12]

Of course, some violence against Jew did occur, and it occurred right across Europe. But was it motivated by “irrational” ideas about well-poisoning based on little more than fanatical religious bigotry? Contrary to the assertions of the Jewish academics named above, due to a scarcity of contemporary primary sources there is actually no definitive methodology for ascertaining how widespread certain beliefs were among “the masses” in this instance, and certainly nothing that would justify such claims as “there is no doubt the masses believed this charge.” What we do have are a relatively small number of accounts of attacks on Jews from contemporary chroniclers that paint a rather nuanced picture of what really occurred. Take, for example, the following extract from the records of the chronicler Conrad von Megenburg:

In many wells, bags filled with poison were found, and a countless number of Jews were massacred in the Rhineland, in Franconia, and in all the German countries. In truth, I do not know whether certain Jews had done this. Had it been thus, assuredly the evil would have been worse. But I know, on the other hand, that no German city had so many Jews as Vienna, and so many of them there succumbed to the plague that they were obliged to enlarge their cemetery greatly and to buy two more buildings. They would have been very stupid to poison themselves. … But I do not wish to whitewash the wickedness of the Jews.

What stands out here is von Megenburg’s scepticism. My own interpretation of the third sentence, assuming “the evil” to be the massacres and not the act of poisoning, is that if definitive proof had been found against certain Jews in regards to the bags of poison that had in fact been found in “many wells,” then the violence would “have been much worse,” and this would indicate the violence itself was at least not solely rooted in the accusation of well-poisoning, since some doubt was evidently present among those who carried out the killings. Alternately, if “the evil” being referred to was the act of poisoning, this account would suggest the author believed there was a possibility of two different events occurring — both a plague of undetermined cause, and a mass poisoning campaign orchestrated by Jews.^[13] Whether Jews did or did not place bags of poison in European wells strikes me as entirely beside the point. If they did not, the question remains as to why someone would accuse them of it, or frame them for it, and Borat-like ignorance and religious hostility is simply insufficient to contextualize and explain this behavior. If some Jews did engage in the poisoning of wells, and we certainly know that it was not uncommon for medieval Jewish communities to possess their own private wells and water supply within their walled districts, this doesn’t detract from our current knowledge about the origins, nature, and spread of bubonic plague, and we would be left with certain other questions about the nature of this inter-ethnic hostility.

The question remaining is why some Jews were attacked and killed during the Black Death. Here, again, modern scholarship is reversing some of the received wisdoms of older Jewish historiography and casting doubt on some long-held assumptions. The German scholar Iris Ritzmann, for example, has argued that “there is no direct link between the massacres and the plague,” and has suggested that a much deeper undercurrent of socio-economic friction between Jews and Christians merely found expression during a time of heightened social anxiety. Ritzmann has gone as far as to argue that relations were so bad that massacres may have occurred even without the plague as a trigger event.^[14] Mordechai Breuer concedes that “none of the traditional motifs” of religious anti-Semitism feature in the minutes of the interrogations of the Jews accused during the Black Death, adding “at most, they came up in connection with distant rumors about the matter.”^[15] There were almost no attempts to convert the Jews, and Breuer further adds, quite contrary to some of his other assertions, that “the attackers had no intention whatever of forcing the Jews to change their faith and this was not the focus of what was happening.”

What, then, was happening?

Again, in contrast to his overall conclusion and blanket accusations against the historical European masses, Breuer is forced to concede in the middle of his own study that “an analysis of what occurred during the days of the plague indicates that social, economic, and political factors were of much greater import in fanning the flame of antisemitism than is generally understood.” Most of the aggressors during the Black Death were craftsmen and artisans who had been lent money by Jews “at usurious rates of interest.”^[16] These craftsmen, essentially the middle class of their day, resented the formation of a mercantile alliance between the aristocracy and the merchant class that exploited their labor and suppressed the prices of their goods. Moreover, underpinning this alliance was a system of Jewish loans that upset the natural order they were used to. Rather predictably, anti-Jewish violence was ruthlessly suppressed by urban elites everywhere because these elites were tightly connected to Jewish finance. Documents still survive from Cologne, Freiburg, Basel, Heilbronn, Strasbourg, and Erfurt showing that city councils interpreted all anti-Jewish actions as a more general attack upon the elite status quo. Breuer comments that “by the beginning of 1349 it was clear that a number of city councils wished to suppress the popular uprising from fear that the mobs might oust them.” The European “masses” described in Jewish historiography were in fact divided into factions, each with its own particular interests, and genuine adherence to “irrational” notions of well-poisoning was of minimal import. The bottom line was that Jews were regarded as having a negative effect on the social, economic, and political fabric of the nation, and not without cause.

Conclusion

One wonders if, decades or centuries from now, Jewish historians will lament the persistence of antisemitism by explaining that Europeans once “irrationally” blamed the Jews for COVID-19. As evidence, perhaps they’ll point to some excerpts from 8chan and argue that this was the belief of “the masses.” Here I’m employing a caricature of sorts, but one not totally detached from precedent. Many decades of Jewish effort have gone into pushing the idea that our ancestors were unsophisticated Borat-like brutes who subjected the Jews to countless irrational massacres. And, although modern scholarship is chipping at the edges of this edifice, new discoveries and arguments remain far from the mainstream. One persists in seeking immunity to the contrivances of Jews and plagues.

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^[1] Prager, D. & Telushkin, J, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 85.

^[2] Ritzmann I. [The Black Death as a cause of the massacres of Jews: A Myth of Medical History?] Medizin, Gesellschaft, und Geschichte : Jahrbuch des Instituts fur Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung. 1998 ;17:101-130.

^[3] Finkelstein, N. ‘The Holocaust Industry,’ Index on Censorship, 29:2, 120-130, p.124

^[4] Wistrich, R. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Methuen, 1991), 32

^[5] Breuer, M. “The Black Death and antisemitism,” in Almog, S. 1988. Antisemitism through the ages. Oxford, England: Published for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, by Pergamon Press, 140-1.

^[6] Jaher, F. A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Antisemitism in America (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1994), 68.

^[7] Cantor, N. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 152.

^[8] Cohen, M. R. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 169.

^[9] Langmuir, G. I. (1990). History, Religion, and Antisemitism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 301-2.

^[10] The work of the late John Doyle Klier on the mythic elements of the Russian pogroms is almost certainly without peer in this regard.

^[11] Hess, C. The Absent Jews: Kurt Forstreuter and the Historiography of Medieval Prussia (New York: Berghahn, 2007, 204.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] For a more contemporary parallel one might point to the post-war plot by Israelis to poison the German water supply that was only abandoned when it was disrupted by British authorities.

^[14] Ritzmann I. [The Black Death as a cause of the massacres of Jews: A Myth of Medical History?] Medizin, Gesellschaft, und Geschichte : Jahrbuch des Instituts fur Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung. 1998 ;17:101-130.

^[15] Breuer, “The Black Death and antisemitism,” 144.

^[16] Ibid., 145.