Aviv J. Sharon, Ph.D.

The Amalek reference has become the far-left’s answer to the far-right & Christian antisemites’ long-running obsession with Jewish texts & their supposed covert evil messages. In the late 19th/early 20th century in Russia, members of the pogromist Black Hundreds movement fretted over the “hidden” meaning of various Talmudic & Torah passages. In their hate-filled writings, they presented these as “evidence” that Jews were the enemy of the Christendom in general & Russia in particular. Not only did the writers distort & misquote many of the passages - sometimes they invented them from scratch. This had real-life consequences. The misinterpretations were used to incite anti-Jewish violence & ensure that no progress was made in emancipating Russian Jews. In the 1913 Mendel Beilis blood libel trial, prosecution used the Black Hundreds’ interpretations of various Torah & Talmudic passages “to prove” that Beilis had killed a Christian boy to use his blood in Passover matzo. There is a parallel between the abuse of Jewish texts in the 1913 Beilis trial & the misuse of the Amalek quote at The Hague & elsewhere today. By latching on to the Amalec reference (and a wrong one at that, as Shany Mor shows!), the anti-Israel far-left has taken yet another step to erase the differences between itself & the antisemitic far-right.