From Medieval Libels to Viral Lies: How Antisemitic Myths About Jewish Texts Are Flooding Conservative Social Media Once Again

By: Fern Sidman

By the time the first edition of the 19th-century pamphlet The Talmudic Jew was quietly withdrawn from circulation, its author had already been exposed as a fraud in an Austrian courtroom, his claims dismantled point by point by rabbinic scholars and secular academics alike. Yet more than 150 years later, the same discredited material is enjoying an eerie renaissance — not in dusty extremist newsletters, but across some of the most influential channels on conservative social media.

According to report compiled by VIN News on Wednesday, a growing number of high-profile commentators are reviving medieval-style allegations about Jewish religious texts, particularly the Talmud, presenting them as shocking revelations rather than the long-debunked slanders historians recognize. Among the most prominent is political commentator Candace Owens, who recently cited The Talmudic Jew — a tract written in 1871 by German polemicist August Rohling — during a broadcast to her millions of followers.

Scholars, Jewish leaders, and historians told VIN News that the episode marks not a spontaneous lapse in judgment but the re-emergence of a genre of antisemitic propaganda that once fueled inquisitions, book burnings, and ultimately the ideological scaffolding of Nazism.

The pamphlet Owens referenced was authored by Rohling, a Catholic cleric whose career collapsed after Rabbi Josef Bloch challenged him in an Austrian court in 1883. When pressed to defend his citations from the Talmud — which he claimed endorsed immoral behavior toward non-Jews — Rohling could not even read the Hebrew and Aramaic passages he purported to quote. His work was discredited publicly and permanently.

Yet as VIN News has documented, screenshots of Rohling’s fabrications are now circulating again on X, Telegram, Rumble, and YouTube, often stripped of historical context and framed as “suppressed truths.”

Owens is far from alone. Pastor Matt Powell has released multiple videos alleging that the Talmud condones sexual crimes. Influencer Nick Fuentes has woven similar claims into his livestreams, while social media personality Dan Bilzerian has echoed related tropes to his millions of followers.

The common denominator, Jewish leaders say, is the resurrection of a narrative that portrays Judaism as governed by secret moral codes hostile to the rest of society.

Rabbi Daniel Rowe, whose podcast Rabbi Rowe Reacts is dedicated to addressing these viral claims, told VIN News that the allegations recycle rhetorical techniques that date back to the Middle Ages.

“These are not discoveries,” Rowe said. “They are medieval polemics with Wi-Fi.”

Rowe traces many of the accusations to Christian disputations of the 13th and 14th centuries, when Jewish texts were confiscated, selectively translated, and presented to hostile audiences as proof of heresy. Entire arguments were constructed by removing sentences from complex legal debates and rebranding them as commandments.

“The same method is being used today,” Rowe said. “Strip a line of context, mistranslate it, and tell your audience you’ve uncovered a secret Jewish doctrine.”

One viral claim asserts that the Talmud endorses abuse of minors. Rowe points to extensive passages that explicitly forbid such conduct, describing even the attempt as a severe transgression. Those prohibitions, he said, are never shown in the clips that circulate online.

Another recurrent myth alleges that Jewish texts describe Jesus suffering eternally in hell. Historians have documented for centuries that references to a figure called “Yeshu” in the Talmud pertain to a person who lived nearly a hundred years earlier than the Jesus of Christian theology, in a different political era, with no resemblance to the Gospel narrative.

“These are settled historical facts,” Rowe told VIN News. “But they vanish when the objective is provocation rather than truth.”

What distinguishes the current wave from previous outbreaks, analysts say, is its velocity. Whereas Rohling’s book once required years to circulate across Europe, today’s distortions can reach millions in minutes.

VIN News reported that dozens of clips recycling these claims have gone viral in recent months, some accumulating hundreds of thousands of views before being flagged — if they are flagged at all.

“When influential figures repeat medieval slanders,” Rowe said, “they do not merely misrepresent Judaism. They lower the epistemic standards of public discourse.”

That degradation, he added, has consequences that extend beyond the Jewish community.

Experts told VIN News that the resurgence of these narratives coincides with heightened political polarization and social anxiety, a pattern that philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre identified decades ago. Antisemitic arguments, Sartre wrote, are often deployed not to persuade, but to intimidate — to derail reasoned debate by flooding it with bad-faith claims.

The current revival also mirrors the ideological lineage of 19th-century Europe, where Rohling’s writings were later embraced by Nazi propagandists as proof that Jews were governed by alien laws.

“These tropes do not exist in a vacuum,” Rowe said. “They prepare the psychological ground for exclusion.”

By portraying Jews as adherents of immoral secret codes, critics imply that Jewish citizens are not fully part of the moral community — a framing that has historically preceded discrimination, violence, and, ultimately, mass atrocity.

Rowe rejects the notion that the controversy pits Jewish values against Western ideals.

“The irony is profound,” he said. “The Talmud teaches exactly what these commentators claim to defend — that every human being is created in the image of God, that righteous people of all nations share in the world to come, and that integrity and compassion are universal obligations.”

Those teachings, he noted, are foundational to Western legal and ethical systems.

Yet as the VIN News report observed, such nuance rarely survives the editing room of viral media.

Jewish organizations told VIN News that the phenomenon underscores a structural problem: digital platforms reward sensationalism over accuracy. When inflammatory content drives clicks, even debunked material can find new life.

Rowe says his mission is not only to defend Jewish texts but to insist on intellectual honesty.

“The Talmud endured censorship, book burnings, and show trials,” he said. “It will endure TikTok too. The question is whether our public conversation will endure the return of ideas we already proved false.”

As the old libels find new screens, VIN News reported that scholars are racing not merely to rebut falsehoods, but to preserve the possibility of a discourse grounded in evidence rather than inherited prejudice.

For now, the ghosts of medieval polemics are once again walking the digital streets — not because they are true, but because, in an age of frictionless amplification, truth no longer sets the terms of circulation.