On her podcast the other day, Candace Owen accused Ben Shapiro of… I forget what it was. Taking over the banks, selling nuns into white slavery, setting orphanages ablaze, something along those lines. As evidence for all this, she waved a copy on a book published in 1871 titled Der Talmudjude.

Anti-Semites set great store in old, obscure books. It’s part of the conviction that there exists secret knowledge about a hidden history of the world known only to a few. It’s like the Necronomicon in H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories. These weird, forgotten volumes act as the key to all sorts of gnostic knowledge. Once you get hold of them you become “enlightened” as the anti-Semites put it.

The champion volume here is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a printed record of an actual meeting in which the Elders themselves discuss how they will take over the world, starting with the banks, make the Goyim into slaves, sell nuns into white slavery, and set orphanages ablaze. It has never been out of print since it first appeared, has sold millions of copies, and served as an anti-Semitic gospel to people like Henry Ford, Gamel Abdul Nasser, and numerous Nazis. (Though not Hitler, oddly enough. His sacred volume was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.)

The problem with Protocols is that they are a hoax. The Russian Czarist government was desperate to undercut the revolutionaries creating havoc across the country. They were convinced that the revolution was Jewish in origin. (It wasn’t.) So around 1900, the Paris office of the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police, set about forging a document that would shock all good Russians into turning against the revos. The local Okhrana commander Pyotr Rachkovsky oversaw the effort. Most of the work was done by Matvei Golovinski. 

This pair got hold of an 1864 political satire by French attorney Maurice Joly titled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written to ridicule the foreign policy of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Golovinski simply lifted entire passages from Joly’s book and threw in a few Jewish-sounding names along with updated references to make it sound contemporary.

The Protocols did little for Czarist Russia. But it was and remains a hit with anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. It’s in print to today in many Arab and Muslin countries as a ripped-from-the-headlines exposé of the secret plans of the perfidious Israelis. I’ve seen a copy printed in the U.S. that attributes it to Henry Ford. (To be fair to Henry, he did issue an apology to the Rabbinic Council of America once he learned that it was a hoax.)

While Der Talmudjude (The Talmud Jew) doesn’t hold the prominence of the Protocols, it too is highly valued among anti-Semites. It was written by sometime scholar (he actually taught at one time at a college in Milwaukee) and Catholic religious fanatic August Rohling. Rohling had serious problems with both Protestants and Jews, though he aimed most of his ire at the Jews, writing a number of anti-Jewish books and pamphlets. Der Talmudjude was his masterpiece, if that’s the word I’m groping for.

The book was presented as a scholarly attack on the Talmud, the world-renowned record of Jewish and religious thought. Rohling presented numerous quotes from the many volumes of the Talmud supposedly demonstrating that it was a handbook for carrying out conspiracies against the Goyim and undercutting the well-being of anyone who was not Jewish, going so far as to recommend human sacrifice of Christian children.

Like the Protocols, the Talmudjude had plenty of problems. It was also largely a plagiarism, of a previous anti-Semitic volume Entdecktes Judenthum (Judaism Unmasked). While Rohling presented himself as a serious scholar who had read the Talmud in the original Aramaic, there was plenty of internal evidence to suggest otherwise. The Talmud is a collection of thousands of pages of legal and religious debates on virtually every topic imaginable. Much of it is theoretical, concerning possibilities that have never occurred and are unlikely to occur. (My favorite involves a decision that, if a man were to fall off a ladder on top of a passing woman and accidentally penetrates her, he is not guilty of rape. This removed a heavy burden form my mind.)

Clearly, it’s easily possible to cherry-pick passages from the Talmud and present them as statements of intent by Jewish rabbis themselves, to act as “proof” of nefarious and vicious conspiracies by the Jewish community. Which is exactly what Rohling, and every other anti-Semite on the face of the earth, actually did.

Like the Protocols, the Talmudjude has been judicially demonstrated to be false. In the 1880s, Austrian Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch accused Rohling of fraud. Rohling immediately sued him for slander. When the trial began, it was proven in short order that Rohling couldn’t read any of the ancient languages that he claimed, knew nothing about the Talmud, and had copied much of the work. He was forced to drop the lawsuit.

Which didn’t stop the Talmudjude from becoming a prized exhibit for anti-Semites, any more than the exposure of the Protocols did. It remained in print worldwide, and is easily available today. (I was appalled to learn that it is sold by Walmart as a work “selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.” Rrright.)

What this means for Candace Owens is that she’s gone down in flames but doesn’t know it yet. Owens has followed the standard trajectory of the anti-Semite from vague insinuations to whining and complaints to defending herself with bogus scholarship. While she hasn’t discovered the Protocols yet, that may well be coming. Owens was never more than a minor player in American conservatism. At this point, she’s simply become an embarrassment. The sooner the book is closed on her, the better.  

Image: AT via Magic Studio