Randy Settenbrino is a writer, artist, and public intellectual whose work bridges theology, philosophy, and psychology. He is a passionate advocate for Israel and Jewish-Christian solidarity, and the founder of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel—recognized by National Geographic as one of the 150 most unique projects in the Western Hemisphere. A father of IDF soldiers, Torah scholars, and holy daughters, his work is devoted to truth, faith, and cultural restoration.
Egyptian polemicist Manetho fabricated grotesque myths that became the pattern of antisemitism ever after. He denied that the Israelites were a people chosen by God, portraying them instead as a horde of lepers led by a renegade Egyptian priest. Absurd slanders that should have vanished in laughter were instead preserved, repeated, and transmitted, generation after generation.
“Economic distress, political pressure, and social obloquy already drive us from our homes and from our graves. The Jews are already constantly shifting from place to place.” — Herzl, Der Judenstaat
“If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”- Albert Einstein
Religious Hatred
“For the mountains may be moved and the hills may falter, but My kindness shall not be removed from you, and My covenant of peace shall not falter — said the Lord, Who has compassion on you.” Isaiah 54:10
In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, theology weaponized contempt.
Muhammad’s wars with Jewish tribes in Arabia echo in the cry of Khaybar Khaybar! and there is an infamous Hadith that proclaims the Last Day will not come until every Jew is hunted down—until even the stones and trees cry out:
“O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”- Sahih Muslim 41:6985
Christianity’s most exalted theologians—Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Thomas More—draped their gospel of love in venom against the Jew. Augustine consigned him to endless wandering, Luther urged burning synagogues, Calvin called him accursed, and More spat at him as an obstinate dog.
The Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth until the Second Coming, became the symbol of exile. If the Jew is to wander forever, as Church dogma once insisted, then the State of Israel is nothing less than a theological conundrum.
The Perfidious Jew (perfidia Judaica)—ritually invoked in Good Friday prayers—was branded treacherous, obstinate, and blind. Yet history tells another story. Instead of the “perfidious Jew,” there have been countless who healed the sick, cured plagues, and even saved nations. The so-called “traitors of mankind” have in truth gifted humanity its medicines, its sciences, its moral revolutions, and its technological wonders.
Antisemitism in Literature and Folklore
High culture was no refuge. Shakespeare’s Shylock, Chaucer’s child-murdering Jews, Molière’s miser, Dickens’s Fagin—literature etched the Jew as villain, miser, or criminal.
Folklore was even bloodier.
- In Norwich in 1144, Jews were accused of murdering a Christian child for Passover—the first blood libel.
- Soon followed the charge of host desecration, the absurd claim that Jews stabbed communion wafers to “re-crucify Christ.”
- During the Black Death of 1348-50, entire communities were burned alive under the accusation of poisoning wells.
- The Inquisition hunted Marranos—Jews who had converted under duress—torturing and killing them for “secret Judaism.”
- In the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648-49, hundreds of thousands were butchered, whole towns erased, and tens of thousands of orphans left wandering, until a people once numbering millions were reduced to barely a million souls.
When the fires of theology dimmed, the poison did not fade—it merely changed costume, donning the language of science.
From Pseudoscience to Genocide
When religion waned, pseudoscience stepped in. Antisemites like Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Édouard Drumont cast the Jew as a corrupt race—biologically unassimilable, forever alien.
Hitler fused this myth with his “blood and soil” creed. Sermons were replaced by calipers; skulls, noses, and ears were measured like cattle—but the verdict remained unchanged: the Jew must die.
Goebbels perfected the lie:
“Eine Lüge, tausendmal gesagt, wird Wahrheit.”
“A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth.”
These were not new charges but ancient projections, recycled by societies that had always seized and controlled Jews as chattel. The lies, first whispered in Egypt and Rome, carried forward through nations that confiscated possessions, burned holy books, and imposed forced conversions.
Millennia of soaking the continent with Jewish blood—of filling its soil with the bodies of murdered Jews—raised up a Hitler. He annihilated two-thirds of European Jewry, erased ten thousand Jewish villages, and decimated a culture that had evolved for centuries and contributed unparalleled genius to every field of human endeavor.
And yet, even after the Reich lay in ruins, the obsession did not die. It endured, reborn in new empires, preached by new tyrants.
Stalin’s Plot
Stalin, too, sought to erase the Jew, purging writers and doctors as “traitors.” He intended to finish Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry.
The Doctors’ Plot accused Jewish physicians of poisoning inoculations meant for children and high-ranking members of the Communist Party—an eerie echo of the medieval libel that Jews poisoned wells, and the Soviet public was swallowing it with the same enthusiasm that Germany once did.
Stalin prepared to deport all Soviet Jews eastward—trains set to “accidentally” crash, survivors herded to Siberia, where flimsy huts would leave the winter to finish the task.
“But despite all this, while they are in the land of their enemies, I will not have been revolted by them nor will I have rejected them, to obliterate them, to annul My covenant with them — for I am the Lord, their God.” -Leviticus 26:44
But providence struck: on March 1st, after Jews around the world had finished celebrating Purim, Stalin was found collapsed in his room. He was undone like Haman, his decree collapsing with his breath.
The Psychology of Hatred
“The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution.”— Herzl, Der Judenstaat
Max Nordau exposed the mechanism:
“The Jews are not hated because they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because they are hated.” — The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization
From Manetho to Hitler to Stalin, the labels changed—leper, wanderer, cosmopolitan, Zionist—but the verdict never shifted: guilty for existing.
“For I am with you, declares the Lord, to save you;
I will make a full end of all the nations among whom I scattered you,
but of you I will not make a full end.” — Jeremiah 30: 10-11
Thus antisemitism, unmoored from reason, becomes infinitely adaptable—a mirror for every ideology to project its fears.
Supremacist Ideologies — Opposites Attract
Antisemitism unites what should be irreconcilable enemies.
- The white supremacist damns the Jew as orchestrator of Black liberation.
- The Black supremacist damns him as the slaver.
- The far-left damns him as capitalist.
- The far-right damns him as communist.
In Poland, Jews wrapped their children’s feet in rags for winter yet were caricatured as wealthy usurers. In Tsarist Russia, Jews were simultaneously “exploiters” and “Bolsheviks.” In Weimar Germany: “too rich” and “too radical.”
I myself saw the surreal sight of white racists and their once-segregated Black neighbors both shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’—united in hatred of the Jew, hurled at a gentle soul who had lived in that community for 45 years, a personal heroine of mine. She was Annie Katz, who survived Kristallnacht and the entire war in Berlin by passing as a German, going from place to place through Hitler’s rise and fall. At war’s end, she climbed the steps of the Reichstag and declared aloud: I’m still here—and now you, Hitler, will face the true Judge. Although not a blood relative, I adored her and called her Tante Annie. I became a witness to the witness.
The Digital Age
In our time, these ancient hatreds have found a new engine—not pulpits or pamphlets, but platforms and pixels.
Today, antisemitism spreads at light speed. Lies once whispered in alleys are amplified by algorithms and broadcast by pundits with millions of followers. If such rhetoric targeted Blacks in America or Muslims in Europe, outrage would topple walls overnight. But the reckless endangerment of Jewish lives is met with silence.
Figures like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Piers Morgan give airtime to sick conspiracists who claim Jews killed JFK, engineered 9/11, or caused October 7th—and who exploit the sins of heretical outliers like Epstein, Weinstein, and Soros as “proof” of a secret cabal. In this way, they smear an entire people with the crimes of the disgraced few, recasting Israel as the culmination of two millennia of libels: Jews as poisoners, aliens, betrayers. They don’t just feign impartiality; they dignify madness, embolden incitement.
The danger is not abstract. My own family has received over 1,500 death threats. Words metastasize into violence. Hatred is not “just opinion.” It festers until it strikes.
The Jew Problem Is Not the Jew’s Problem
Antisemitism is not the Jew’s problem. It is the world’s problem. As long as the Jew endures, so too endures the shadow of hatred cast upon his existence.
The common denominator of the millennia is proof: replacement is the goal. Block, erase, delete the Jew so that my movement can take precedence. Whether it is building a pantheon to atheism or an altar to an Abrahamic religion, the foundation must be cut away so that my people, my ideology can stand as Israel in its entirety.
The Jew’s task is not to plead for innocence, but to remain steadfast—focused on his people, his destiny, his unity. That is the only answer, the very remedy G-d seeks from His children as He presses them together.
Since the time of Josephus, Jews have wasted breath answering absurd charges—about who we are, where we come from, what we contribute. But the only truth that matters is this: the Jew must take responsibility for himself and for the protection of his people, and assert his place in the world regardless of the Goliaths who rise against him.
We will not spend a single ounce of energy defending the indefensible lies of the hateful. It is not our task to prove we are good or that we deserve life. We will save our mea culpas for God alone—for He has carried us through the death fields of Europe, Africa, and Asia. He alone will judge if we were faithful to the mission to live as His children, unbroken and unbowed.
“Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day,
and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night…
If this fixed order departs from before Me, declares the Lord,
then shall the offspring of Israel cease from being a nation before Me forever.”— Jeremiah 31:34-35
“All things are mortal except the Jew.”— Mark Twain