Candace Owens speaks at CPAC on March 2, 2023. Photo: Lev Radin via Reuters Connect

In a recent viral video responding to Ben Shapiro’s accurate description of her long-standing pattern of spreading baseless fear and animus, Candace Owens urged her audience to “wake up” about Jews, Judaism, and what she called “Talmudic Jews.”

As part of that exhortation, she recommended a book titled The Talmudic Jew, presenting it not as a historical artifact, but as a suppressed key to understanding not only Shapiro, but Jewish behavior and morality writ large. 

This is not a new genre of argument. It is one of the oldest weapons in the antisemitic arsenal.

Owens’ framing follows a familiar script: for those predisposed to view Jews as powerful, alien, or suspect, the explanation is presumed to lie hidden in Jewish religious texts.

The Talmud, in this telling, is not a complex legal and ethical corpus but a secret code — one that allegedly explains Jewish behavior and justifies suspicion toward Jews as a group. Owens’ invitation for non-Jews to “wake up” is actually an invitation to stop seeing Jews as human beings — let alone as neighbors or fellow citizens — and to begin seeing them as something else entirely: a threat.

In the same video, Owens widens the accusation. She urges viewers to believe that Jews are behind conflicts pitting “Christian against Christian” and “Christians against Muslims” around the world — an echo of a medieval antisemitic fantasy that casts Jews as the hidden engineers of war and civilizational collapse. This trope, documented for centuries, has no basis in history. Its function is not explanation but absolution: it diverts responsibility away from actual political, religious, and imperial actors, and deposits it onto a convenient, ever-available scapegoat.

Owens then extends this logic further, telling Black audiences that “white people” were not responsible for the Transatlantic slave trade — or slavery more broadly — and that Jews were. This claim is not merely false; it is grotesque.

The Transatlantic slave trade was a European enterprise, driven by explicitly European Christian empires — British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and later American — whose colonial economies depended on enslaved labor. Likewise, the vast Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades were driven primarily by Arab-Muslim empires and traders over many centuries. Between roughly the 7th and 19th centuries, European and Arab imperial systems conquered and controlled much of the known world — and they were the principal engines of slavery wherever it was practiced. Jews, overwhelmingly a tiny, marginalized minority without imperial power, were not — and could not have been — the drivers of these systems.

The Talmudic Jew, the book Owens cites approvingly as the purported “key” to understanding Jews, was written by August Rohling, an Austrian, German-language Catholic theologian of the late 19th century whose work relied on mistranslations, selective quotation, and outright fabrication. Rohling did not attempt to understand rabbinic Judaism. His aim was polemical: to portray Judaism as inherently immoral and hostile toward non-Jews, and to argue that Jewish emancipation in Western Europe had been a catastrophic mistake.

Rohling’s book was discredited even in his own time. Contemporary scholars demonstrated that he mistranslated Hebrew and Aramaic texts, stripped legal debates of context, treated marginal opinions as binding doctrine, and in some cases invented quotations outright. Yet the book endured because it served a purpose: it gave readers permission to see Jews not merely as wrong, but as inherently dangerous.

That durability proved deadly. In the 20th century, Rohling’s arguments were revived and repurposed by Nazi ideologues, who cited anti-Talmud literature like The Talmudic Jew as supposed evidence that Jewish tradition itself justified exclusion, persecution, and annihilation. The book did not cause the Holocaust — but it helped supply the intellectual scaffolding that made genocide conceivable.

Owens’ amplification of Rohling is therefore not incidental. It places her squarely within a long and infamous lineage of antisemitic accusations that treat Jews as the hidden hand behind social conflict, moral decay, and historical evil.

When Owens speaks of “Talmudic Jews,” she is not describing a religious practice. She is issuing an indictment: that Jews are governed by a hidden code that renders them morally alien and hostile to the societies in which they live. That indictment depends on a fundamental misrepresentation of the Talmud itself.

The Talmud is not a single book or a secret code. It is a sprawling legal record spanning centuries, comprising 63 tractates and more than 2,700 folio pages, dense with debate, disagreement, and layered interpretation. It preserves arguments rather than decrees, questions rather than answers, and features minority opinions alongside majority rulings. To lift a line from this corpus and present it as “what Jews believe” is not scholarship. It is distortion.

That distortion is not accidental. It is the engine of a genre designed to turn Jewish complexity into Jewish hate.

Candace Owens presents herself as a truth-teller urging her audience to “wake up.” What she is really doing is attempting to mainstream a discredited and dangerous form of antisemitic propaganda — one that history has already tested and found catastrophic. When such claims are broadcast by someone with her reach and influence, they do not merely misinform. They habituate. They train audiences to see Jews as a civilizational menace. And once a people are cast as a menace, cruelty is easily rebranded as responsibility — and even as self-defense.

Terrible moments in history do not repeat themselves automatically. They are repeated when influential figures persuade their followers that ancient libels are newly discovered truths.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.

The late Professor Elie Wiesel, speaking at the Algemeiner’s 40th anniversary gala, on April 22, 2013. Photo: Sarah Rogers / Algemeiner.

As antisemitism is again surging across the world, it can feel frightening and isolating to be Jewish.

The familiar question returns: how do we hold on to our identity and our pride, when the world seems intent on testing both?

Every generation of Jews has faced its own test of endurance. Ours is unfolding now, as antisemitism again plagues our streets, our campuses, and our interpersonal relationships. Many Jews feel vulnerable, isolated, and unsure how to respond.

In 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Elie Wiesel answered that question in a speech at the United Jewish Appeal’s National Conference.

Wiesel addressed a Jewish community grappling with fear and uncertainty, reeling from the surprise attack that cost the lives of more than 2,500 Israelis. Decades later, that speech, titled Against Despair, offers a roadmap for reclaiming our pride by drawing strength from our history and traditions.

Against Despair begins with a striking observation about our people: “To me, the essence of Jewish history is mystical and not rational. From the strictly rational viewpoint, we should have long ago yielded to the pressures and laws of the enemy … The mystery of our survival is matched only by our will to survive in a society embarrassed and annoyed by our presence.”

It is a reminder that Jewish endurance stems from the countless generations of Jews who chose courage over surrender. We survive because our history, culture, and traditions carry us forward in a world that has too often attempted to eliminate all three.

As he continues, Wiesel reminds us that no Jewish person is ever truly alone. He says, “When Jews are sad in Jerusalem, Jews everywhere reflect their sadness … An assault on Jews anywhere means an attempt to humiliate Jews everywhere.”

The individual may struggle, but we are connected across time and space. Facing adversity is not only about personal resilience — it is about our collective responsibility to safeguard the moral center of our people.

Professor Wiesel shows us how to confront despair head-on. He teaches that surviving and resisting antisemitic persecution while remaining Jewish is more than a physical phenomenon; it’s an existential one that has sustained Judaism across millennia, a way to honor all those who came before. He reminds us that choosing life is an active endeavor that takes precedence over mourning. Jewish joy and Jewish education are themselves acts of resistance.

“Faced with despair,” said Wiesel, “the most difficult but most beautiful [option] of all [is] to face the human condition and do so as a Jew … We shall resist them in our own Jewish way, which means that we will not allow them to tell us when to be joyous and when to mourn, when to sing and when to be silent.”

This is the heart of Wiesel’s thesis: Jewish identity is itself a moral stance. To live as a Jew is to face life, history, and human cruelty with awareness, integrity, and hope. Even when the world seems hostile, even when antisemitism threatens, Wiesel shows us that we are called to endure, to remember, and to celebrate Jewish life with pride.

Reading Against Despair is a practical guide for living proudly and resiliently in a difficult world. Ultimately, Wiesel asserts that despair is not an option. Jewish survival has always required vigilance, courage, and the refusal to let hatred define us.

“For this is the essence of being Jewish; never to give up — never to yield to despair.”

Every Jewish person should read Against Despair. Not simply to reflect on the past, but to understand how Jewish history, values, and traditions offer strength for the present. For Professor Wiesel, hope is not something one passively receives. Instead, it is a necessary asset we must create for ourselves, a personal duty we owe to our forebears and our children alike.

Against Despair is more than a speech; it is a call to action. It shows us how to meet the modern expressions of age-old antisemitism with the ideas that sustained Wiesel and other Survivors in the darkest of times.

Our very existence is proof that Jewish hope is not naive. It is our essence and our inheritance. We must follow Wiesel’s example by reminding ourselves and the world of how we’ve endured for millennia: taking pride in our Jewishness and fighting to ensure that our descendants have the opportunity to do the same.

Mike Igel is the Chair of The Florida Holocaust Museum’s Wiesel Archive & Legacy Council.