Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Appalling Lie

At a recent dinner in Manhattan, Democratic presidential candidate and noted conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s touted the discredited theory that Covid-19 was engineered to target Caucasians and Black people, and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are somehow less prone to its ravages.

Kennedy has since apologized and said he was misunderstood.

It’s tempting to dismiss Kennedy’s comments. After all, Kennedy once implied that Holocaust victim Anne Frank enjoyed more freedoms than Americans living with public health restrictions did, and he recently tweeted support for the musician Roger Waters after Waters got into trouble for wearing a Nazi-like uniform on stage while he accused Israel of murdering children during a concert in Germany.

Yet Kennedy’s ramblings about Jews and Covid merit a closer look because they mirror age-old anti-Jewish slurs.

Medieval Slurs

Accusations that Jews spread disease to others while remaining immune themselves has its roots in Medieval Europe.

During the Black Death of the 14th Century, Jews were often blamed for spreading the disease. Professors Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama of George Mason University and Prof. Remi Jedwab of George Washington University studied what happened to Jews when the Black Death swept through Europe. Out of 363 European Jewish communities at the time, fully half experienced massacres by local Christians who accused Jews of spreading the plague. Jews were often thought to spread the Black Death by poisoning the wells of Christians. (Never mind that the Black Death actually spread by bites of infected fleas, not through tainted water.)

That mentality seems to have lingered in some corners of the popular imagination ever since. Take a look at Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who in 2010 accused Jews of introducing a curse into humanity “that has spread throughout the world. It has poisoned the bloodstream of Islam, of Christianity…”

Parroting Nazi Rhetoric

The incorrect notion that Jews spread disease and death fueled Nazi ideology and helped pave the way for widespread hatred of Jews. “Nazi propaganda often portrayed people persecuted by the regime as vermin, parasites, or diseases,” notes the United States Holocaust Museum. Listening to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s delusions that Jews are somehow immune to Covid-19 - and that they might even have been part of a plot to “target” white and Black people - sounds like a direct outgrowth of this outrageous Nazi slur.

Blaming Jews for Covid-19

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Jews found themselves accused of the most outrageous slanders that they somehow were responsible for spreading disease.

“Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic,” noted Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, in 2020, “there has been a significant rise in accusations that Jews, as individuals and as a collective, are behind the spread of the virus or are directly profiting from it. The language and imagery used clearly identifies a revival of the Medieval ‘blood libels’ when Jews were accused of spreading disease, poisoning wells or controlling economies.”

A 2020 study by Oxford University found that fully 20% of British people believed Jews were responsible for the creation and spread of Covid-19. The vile slander that Jews spread disease seems to take root whenever it finds the fertile ground of people willing to repeat it.

Standing up to Slurs

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s outrageous accusation matters because the more people hear the old lie that Jews cause and spread diseases, the more traction this dangerous canard gains.

In today’s polarized world, it’s more important than ever to call out lies when you hear them and to stand up for the truth. The world has seen what can happen when Jews and others are accused of malevolence and spreading disease. Let’s not allow Kennedy’s lies to go unchallenged.