The European Disease That’s Mutated Through the Black Death and Covid
As the biological virus attacks bodies, the mental one of anti-Semitism infects hearts and cultures where hatred has never ceased to be endemic.
Sadly, still endemic.
Photographer: Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images
As the coronavirus spread through Europe last year, cartoons and posts began going up on French social media that might as well have come straight from the 14th century. In one series, Agnes Buzyn, who is Jewish and was France’s health minister until February 2020, was depicted with grotesquely distorted features dropping poison into wells.
This trope of Jews poisoning wells to kill Christians has made the rounds in most European epidemics since the Middle Ages, but it was particularly rife during the Black Death, when it led to pogroms and massacres of Jews throughout the continent. The vile meme is just one example of a shocking, if sadly unsurprising, surge in anti-Semitism that correlates with the pandemic. That’s the disturbing conclusion of a new report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank, for the European Commission.