For those who need convincing that sexual depravity and repression are at the very heart of antisemitism, here is a somewhat comprehensive overview. And it explains why the worst of the emerging modern antisemites – from Candace Owens to Tucker Carlson, from Nick Fuentes to Dan Bilzerian, from Andrew Tate to Kanye West, and so on and so on, all evince, have discussed, have condemned, or have been accused, of extreme sexual decrepitude or engage in constant sexual condemnation, especially of my international best-selling book Kosher Sex or my daughter Chana’s company of the same name.

Sexual repression and sexual unease are at very root of antisemitism, racism, and bigotry. Let’s dive deeper.

Psychologists and historians have long observed a link between sexual repression and extremist hatred. The premise is that unresolved or deviant sexual urges can be “sublimated” into aggression toward scapegoated groups. In other words, sexual psychosis – extreme anxiety, perversion, or obsession around sex – often finds an outlet in hatred of an “other.” We now explore how repressive attitudes toward sex, women, and desire have fueled antisemitism and other hatreds throughout history. From medieval clergymen demonizing lust and Jews in the same breath, to modern totalitarian and fundamentalist regimes obsessively policing sexuality, we will see a recurring pattern. The case studies range from Adolf Hitler’s perverse relationship with his niece to the Taliban’s draconian dress codes. Each example illustrates how twisted sexual psychology and misogyny have contributed to history’s worst outbreaks of antisemitism and group hatred.

Ancient and Medieval Foundations: Demonizing Sex and the “Other”

One striking symbol of this overlap is the depiction of Ecclesia and Synagoga in Gothic cathedrals. The Church (Ecclesia) is shown as a virtuous crowned woman, while the Synagogue (symbolizing Judaism) appears as a defeated female figure – often blindfolded with a broken staff. The blindfold and fallen posture signified Jews’ supposed spiritual blindness and moral corruption. Notably, both are female figures, reflecting how medieval Christians feminized Judaism as a lustful, fallen woman. Such imagery sent a clear message: false religion (Judaism) and uncontrolled female sexuality were twin evils. By portraying Jews as morally weak “daughters of Eve,” medieval society justified harsh measures against them. This climate of sexual fear fed blood libel myths – accusing Jews of ritually killing Christian children and using their blood for their Passover matzo – and other paranoid fantasies, all rife with the language of impurity and defilement.

The medieval Catholic Church further institutionalized this mindset by equating piety with celibacy and bodily denial. Natural sexual desire was cast as sinful unless strictly controlled for procreation. Church authorities relentlessly warned that lust could doom one’s soul – and by extension, the community’s salvation. This obsession with purity found scapegoats in any group associated with carnal “impurity.” Women, labeled daughters of Eve, were obvious targets. Jews, seen as the killers of Christ, were likewise cast as agents of the carnal world or even literal partners of Satan. It’s no coincidence that demonology manuals of the Middle Ages often lumped together witches (almost always women) and Jews as servants of the Devil. In 1494, for example, the Nuremberg Chronicle depicted a monstrous synagogue personified by a woman riding a pig – a vicious slur linking Jewish worship to filthy lust. Such grotesque images reveal how sexual disgust was weaponized into religious and racial hatred.

Repression and Rage in the Inquisition Era

By the late medieval and early modern period, anxieties about “impurity” reached fever pitch in institutions like the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition enforced rigid Catholic orthodoxy, including sexual morality, through terror. Its leaders, notably Tomás de Torquemada (Grand Inquisitor from 1483–1498), were celibate clerics living in extreme sexual repression. Torquemada himself was rumored to have converso (Jewish-convert) ancestry, and some historians suggest this fueled his zeal to prove his “purity” by persecuting Jews. Under his influence, Spain issued the Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelling all unconverted Jews. The rationale wasn’t only religious but explicitly biological: fear that “impure” Jewish blood would mix with Christian through intermarriage. This is evident in Spain’s first racial laws, the limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) statutes, which barred anyone of Jewish descent from many positions. In essence, the Inquisition viewed Jewish lineage like a sexual contamination of Christian society.

Spanish churchmen often framed Jewish practices in lurid sexual terms. They accused secret Jews (crypto-Jews) of indulging in lecherous orgies during Sabbath or of corrupting Christian morals. In reality, many conversos lived ordinary family lives – but inquisitors projected their own morbid fantasies onto these communities. Torture chambers of the Inquisition even had a perverse sexual tinge: prisoners were stripped and physically violated under the guise of extracting confessions. This state-sanctioned sadism targeted heretics, witches, and Jews alike. Notably, the same era that saw mass trials of Jews also saw witch-hunts that burned thousands of women. Both phenomena sprang from the same source – a pathological fear of sexuality and an urge to purge society of imagined “pollution.” The Inquisition’s violence thus embodies how institutional repression of sex can mutate into genocidal hatred.

Martin Luther: Sex, Misogyny, and Anti-Jewish Fury

The Protestant Reformation did little to temper these dark undercurrents – in some ways, it intensified them. Martin Luther (1483–1546), the ex-monk who shattered Catholic celibacy rules by marrying a former nun, had a complex relationship with sex and hatred. On one hand, Luther affirmed marriage and sexual intimacy within it, rejecting Rome’s demand of clerical celibacy. Yet he still absorbed his era’s misogyny and harbored violent loathing toward Jews when they refused to convert to his new church. Luther’s later writings drip with vitriol: he called Jewish synagogues “devil’s houses” and urged faithful Christians to burn them down. His 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies is among history’s most antisemitic documents.

What drove Luther’s anti-Jewish turn? Biographically, Luther struggled as a young monk with intense guilt over sexual thoughts – by his own account, he engaged in self-flagellation and prayer to suppress “carnal lusts.” Such inner turmoil may have predisposed him to harsh judgment of others’ faith and morals. He also equated the “carnality” of the Catholic Church (which he saw in its lavish rituals and corruption) with Jews – an age-old Christian trope. Fascinatingly, Luther at times conflated Jewish women with witches in his imagination. A recent analysis notes Luther’s “overlapping fears” of women and Jews, especially embodied in the figure of the “Jewish witch”. In other words, Luther’s mind linked the two great bogeymen of medieval lore: the seductive woman and the blasphemous Jew. This overlap reinforced his conviction that Jews were agents of the devil’s work – much as misogynist folklore saw witches.

Though Luther’s Reformation ended mandatory celibacy for clergy, it didn’t end repression. Protestant regions were just as eager to police sexuality (fornication, adultery, etc.) and to hunt witches as Catholic ones. In some Lutheran territories, authorities enforced modest dress and harsh punishments for sexual “sin.” Luther’s own sermons thundered against “whoredom” and urged women’s subordination in the home. All of this created a culture where deviating from sexual norms (or religious norms) provoked hysteria. Within that climate, scapegoating Jews as a source of social ills found fertile ground. Luther’s case thus illustrates how even a theological revolution failed to escape the shadow of sexual anxiety and antisemitic tradition. If anything, his disinhibition (after breaking from Rome) made his language toward Jews even more shockingly violent and obscene – as if all the repressed fury had to find a new target once the pope was out of reach.

The Third Reich: Hitler’s Perversion and Purity Obsession

No discussion of hatred and sexual pathology is complete without Adolf Hitler. Hitler and the Nazi regime exemplify sexual repression twisted into genocidal antisemitism. On the surface, Nazi ideology championed “family values” and condemned the decadence of Weimar-era liberalism. The regime outlawed pornography, persecuted homosexuals, and promoted a cult of wholesome Aryan motherhood. But beneath this puritanical facade ran currents of fetishism, hypocrisy, and personal perversion – starting with Hitler himself.

Hitler’s own sexual psychology was deeply troubled. He famously carried on a secret relationship with his half-niece, Geli Raubal, which combined avuncular control, jealousy, and quite possibly incestuous obsession. For over two years in the late 1920s, Hitler kept the much younger Geli as a close companion, living together under the same roof and controlling every move she made. Contemporary accounts and later testimonies suggest the relationship was volatile and unhealthy. Geli grew restive under Hitler’s tyrannical protectiveness – he dictated whom she could befriend or date, even while he himself flirted with other young women. According to friends, their fights were intense, and Geli at times feared Hitler’s rages.

Most disturbingly, multiple sources (including Hitler’s close associates and the testimony of Otto Strasser to U.S. intelligence) indicated that Hitler forced Geli into degrading sexual acts to satisfy his peculiar fetishes. Strasser recounted that Geli described “disgusting” acts demanded by Hitler – things she “had never dreamed could happen,” comparing them to cases from Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. In interviews with the OSS in 1943, Strasser divulged specifics: Hitler would make Geli undress and urinate on him as a form of stimulation. Geli reportedly told another confidant that Hitler’s perverted desires “sickened her,” but she complied because she didn’t want to lose his favor. This grotesque picture – a man aroused only by humiliation and dominance – suggests a severely warped sexuality at Hitler’s core. Geli Raubal’s tragic fate, dying of a gunshot wound in 1931 in Hitler’s apartment, widely deemed a suicide under duress, only underscored the pathological nature of Hitler’s intimacy.

Hitler’s sexual impotence and paraphilias dovetailed eerily with his antisemitic fanaticism. In his manifesto Mein Kampf, Hitler repeatedly casts the Jew as a sexual menace. He fulminated that syphilis – the era’s most feared sexually transmitted disease – was a “Jewish” plot to corrupt Aryans. He wrote that “the prostitution of love” and the spread of venereal disease were the result of “Judaization of our life” and the “mammonizing of our mating instinct”, poisoning the blood of German youth. In Hitler’s mind, Jews literally embodied pollution of the pure German body through sex. He railed that even noble families had allowed “any department store Jewess” to bear their children – a “sin against blood and race” that he called “the original sin of the world”. These are explicitly sexualized accusations: Jews were corrupting Aryan purity by sleeping with them, introducing financial motives into marriage, and spreading disease. Hitler’s fixation on racial purity was at heart an extreme sexual anxiety projected onto an entire people.

It is telling that Hitler’s trusted propaganda chief in Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, was himself a sexually deranged personality and pervert. Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer specialized in pornographic antisemitism – it printed lurid cartoons of Jewish men molesting blonde German maidens and grotesque tales of Jewish sexual crimes. Streicher seemed obsessed with sexual depravity, to the point that even fellow Nazis found him repulsive. By 1940 his reputation as a “corrupt, sadistic sexual pervert” had become an embarrassment. After the war, at the Nuremberg Trials prison, Streicher would make lewd comments to female staff and even washed his face in the toilet bowl – earning him the moniker “the dirty old man” of the Nazi prisoners. A prison doctor wondered whether Streicher’s “lewd sexual perversions and rabid anti-Semitic writings” sprang from the same diseased mind. Indeed, the pattern of the sexually depraved anti-Semite recurred in Nazi ranks. Another infamous example was Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” who was notorious for sexual sadism toward camp inmates. The Nazi movement thrived on projecting its own covert lusts and vices onto Jews as an “evil” to be eradicated.

In Nazi ideology and policy, this translated to concrete sexual persecution. The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 criminalized intercourse or marriage between Jews and “Aryans” as Rassenschande (“racial shame”). Propaganda like the film Jud Süß (1940) revolved around the trope of a lecherous Jew preying on a German woman, reinforcing the fear of Jewish sexual predation. Meanwhile, Hitler’s regime promoted early marriage and childbearing for “pure” Germans, but also enforced sterilization of those deemed genetically or morally unfit (including sexual “deviants”). Any non-conforming sexuality – from homosexuality to interracial relations – was harshly punished, always under the pretext of protecting the Volk’s purity. In sum, the Nazi war on the Jews cannot be separated from this sexual panic. As psychoanalysts observed at the time, Hitler’s personal impotent rage was writ large as state policy: an entire genocide grounded partly in terror of “impure” sex. Hitler’s own words tie it together chillingly: “Sin against blood and race is the original sin”. He was, in effect, sacralizing sexual purity – and sentencing millions to death for allegedly violating it.

Islamist Extremism: The Veil, the Whip, and the Enemy

In more recent times, we see similar dynamics in religious fundamentalist movements, particularly Islamist extremism. Groups like Iran’s Islamic Republic, Hamas, and the Taliban combine virulent hatred (often including antisemitism) with obsessive control of sexuality and women’s bodies. Their ideologies make female modesty and sexual morality a pillar of identity – as important as, if not inseparable from, their enmity toward Jews or “infidels.”

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established a theocracy that harshly polices personal behavior. Khomeini and his clerics developed an almost surreal focus on sexual “sin.” In his writings and sermons, Khomeini issued detailed pronouncements on sexual matters ranging from marital relations to bizarre hypotheticals about bestiality and incest. For example, in a 1961 legal manual, he calmly ruled on scenarios like: “If a man sodomizes the son, brother, or father of his wife after their marriage, the marriage remains valid”. He even addressed intercourse with animals: “If a person has intercourse with a cow, a sheep, or a camel…”, describing how it would render the animal’s milk impure. Such fixation on sexual minutiae earned the post-revolutionary regime a reputation for hypocrisy and prudish absurdity. As one commentator put it, “in the Islamic Republic of Iran all politics may not be sexual, but all sex is political.”

This extreme sexual puritanism went hand in hand with fierce antisemitism and anti-Westernism in Iran’s official ideology. The hijab (veil) was made compulsory for all women – not just as a religious rule, but as a revolutionary symbol. In fact, Iranian officials often cite the hijab as one of the regime’s three core ideological pillars, alongside opposition to the United States and Israel. The message is stark: if the veil were removed, the entire Islamic Revolution’s integrity (including its stance against Israel) would collapse. Khomeini regularly referred to America as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan,” casting the political struggle in religious terms loaded with moral disgust. The regime’s propaganda frequently depicts Israel (and Jews by extension) as a corrupter of Islamic values – spreading immorality, drink, and unveilings. In this narrative, defending Islamic sexual morality (e.g. strict gender segregation, modest dress, no LGBTQ tolerance) is part of defending the ummah (Muslim community) against Jewish and Western plots.

Iran’s theocracy has enforced its sexual code with brutality reminiscent of the Inquisition. Morality police patrols have beaten or arrested women for a wisp of hair showing, and courts have ordered floggings and even stoning for adultery. In recent years, brave Iranian women’s protests against forced hijab have been met with incarceration and violence. Meanwhile, state media spews Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracy theories, blaming social ills on unseen Zionist puppeteers. The psychological interplay is clear: to maintain an iron grip on sexuality, a regime needs internal and external enemies to blame for any cracks. If youths are tempted by Western music or premarital relationships, it must be the “Zionists” corrupting them via the internet or satellite TV. This convenient scapegoating sustains both the sexual repression and the hatred. As journalist Maziar Bahari observed, Iran’s recent turmoil is “the culmination of 60 years of sexual suppression by Ayatollah Khomeini” – repression that bred such frustration that it’s now boiling over.

Hamas: Demonizing Sex and the Jew

After seizing power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas incrementally imposed its moral code on the population. By 2009, it launched a self-described “virtue” campaign to curb “immoral” behavior in Gaza. Armed Hamas police would stop couples in public to verify they were married or related, and they even beat young men for swimming shirtless on the beach. That year, Hamas authorities also began enforcing Islamic dress on women and schoolgirls. Human rights monitors reported that school administrators, under Hamas orders, turned away female students not wearing a hijab and full-length robe; in one case a schoolgirl was slapped by the administrator for not wearing the jilbab (long gown). Women in Gaza suddenly found themselves policed in their clothing, segregated in schools (Hamas passed a law in 2013 mandating gender segregation even in co-ed institutions), and publicly shamed for any perceived un-Islamic behavior.

This Islamist modesty drive exists alongside Hamas’s intense propaganda against Jews and Israel. To Hamas, there is a cosmic battle between Islamic virtue and the “degenerate” influence of the Jewish state. Israeli society is portrayed as morally corrupt – secular, permissive, full of unveiled women – in contrast to Gaza’s supposedly pious resistance society. Some Hamas preachers have gone so far as to blame plagues on women’s behavior; for example, a Hamas-affiliated columnist absurdly claimed that Palestinian women’s immodesty was responsible for the spread of swine flu in 2009. By castigating women for disease, they redirected public anger toward “moral failures” rather than government shortcomings – a tactic familiar from medieval scapegoating. And by extension, the Jew (or Zionist) lurks behind the moral failures, egging on the society to abandon its purity. Indeed, Hamas’s literature often asserts that Western and Zionist forces deliberately spread pornography, drugs, and liberal ideas to undermine Muslim communities. Thus, cracking down on social vices is packaged as part of the anti-Israel resistance.

The Taliban and Others: The War on Women = War on Enemies

Perhaps the starkest modern example of institutional sexual psychosis is the Taliban in Afghanistan. Although the Taliban’s main ideological enemy has been the West (and internal dissenters), they share the jihadist antisemitic worldview common to Islamist extremists. More importantly, their treatment of women is illustrative. During their regime (1996–2001 and again since 2021), the Taliban imposed one of the most draconian gender apartheid systems in history. They forced women to wear the burqa, a head-to-toe shroud with mesh over the eyes. Girls were banned from attending school past puberty, and women were not allowed to work or even leave home without a male guardian. Any deviation was met with public floggings or executions – stadium spectacles were held where “adulteresses” were shot in the head or whipped. In their twisted interpretation, female visibility and education were threats to the moral order.

This pathological misogyny correlates with the Taliban’s embrace of violent jihad. Their fighters, cloistered away from any normal interaction with women, are promised 72 virgins in paradise if they martyr themselves – a fantasy that exploits their sexual deprivation. The demonic bargain of sex in exchange for murder is startling. The Taliban and similar groups (like Boko Haram in Nigeria) frame their war in terms of protecting their women’s honor from infidel influence. It’s notable that when the Taliban conquered territory, one of the first things they often did was destroy anything deemed “immoral” – they smashed televisions (to prevent Western images), banned music and dancing, and beat men who didn’t grow beards (to enforce a stern, ascetic image). This puritanical zeal is inextricably linked to their hostility toward all outsiders. In their rhetoric, Westerners and Jews (often conflated in conspiracy theories) are seeking to defile Muslim women and pollute Islamic culture. So long as a woman’s ankle is considered an existential threat, the mentality that justifies massacring perceived enemies is easily sustained.

Other secular tyrannies have also exhibited sexual pathology in service of hate – from Stalin’s purges (accompanied by a prudish public line on sexuality) to certain elements of the alt-right today (which blends neo-Nazi antisemitism with toxic masculinity and hatred of feminism). Across cultures, there is a recurring profile: the man (it is almost always men) who cannot handle women’s autonomy or his own desires, and who finds release by lashing out at another group. The incel (involuntarily celibate) subculture, for instance, has bred terrorists who target women and also echo white-supremacist, often antisemitic, talking points. These are modern manifestations of an ancient syndrome.

The Perils of Repression

History’s worst fanatics, racists, and especially antisemites were not merely ideologues in a vacuum – they were humans with private demons, often centered on sex. Whether it was a celibate monk like Torquemada compensating for fleshly temptations by punishing Jews, or Hitler projecting his impotent rage onto an entire race, the pattern is disturbingly clear. Sexual psychosis breeds hatred. When natural desires are twisted into guilt, fear, or obsession, they seek a scapegoat. Women, as the bearers of sexuality, and Jews, as the eternal “outsider,” have been frequent targets. The examples in this chapter have shown how controlling women’s bodies and demonizing sexual freedom go hand in hand with violent antisemitism and bigotry:

• Medieval clergy vilified women’s lust and cast Jews as devils, merging misogyny and antisemitism into a single demonology.
• Inquisitors and reformers enforced chastity and piety while unleashing fury on “impure” heretics and Jews.
• Nazi leaders thundered against sexual “degeneracy” and fantasized Jews as sexual predators, even as their own sexual perversions festered.
• slamist regimes and militias obsess over veils, virginity, and virtue, elevating the control of female sexuality to an ideological pillar on par with hatred of Israel and the West.

In our own time, combating hate requires more than challenging an ideology in abstract. It may also require shining light on the human aspects – the fears, shames, and frustrations – that extremists twist into fuel for hate. Healthy attitudes toward sex and women, openness and education, might undercut the psychological root that makes a young man susceptible to blaming Jews for his own woes. As the cases here demonstrate, societies that celebrate life, love, and equality tend to be inoculated against the virus of violent hate. In contrast, societies (or subcultures) that repress and deny the vital part of human nature that is sexuality often breed monsters in the dark. It is an enduring lesson.

When Eros (love) is shackled, Thanatos (death) is unleashed – a lesson written in the blood of history from Geli Raubal’s Munich apartment to the streets of Tehran and Gaza.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, widely known as “America’s Rabbi”, is one of the world’s most recognized and influential Jewish voices. A bestselling author, award-winning columnist, global human rights advocate, and dynamic public speaker, he has dedicated his life to spreading Jewish values, defending the Jewish people, and championing universal human dignity. The international bestselling author of 36 books that have been translated into multiple languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, his works—including Kosher Sex, Kosher Adultery, The Kosher Sutra, and Kosher Hate—blend timeless Jewish wisdom with modern relevance, challenging readers to rethink love, intimacy, ethics, and spiritual life. His writings are known for their boldness, accessibility, and unapologetic defense of morality in the modern age. In 2000, Rabbi Shmuley became the only rabbi to win The Times of London’s prestigious “Preacher of the Year” competition, and remains the record-holder to this day. He has also been honored with the American Jewish Press Association’s highest award for excellence in commentary, cementing his reputation as one of the foremost Jewish communicators in the world. Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.