As pandemics go, this has so far been a good pandemic for Jews. Not as individuals: too many have lost family members or suffered in other ways. But at least this time not that many people seem to think that we did it.
This is an advance. It’s become something of an accepted wisdom that the last few times there were massive, global outbreaks of an illness that seemed to affect the majority of people, sections of the populace decided that the Jews had something to do with it. Having got that into their heads, it then seemed appropriate to them to storm the Jewish quarter of Snotburg or Nowhereona, burn the houses, take the money and kill the inhabitants.
The formal medieval pattern seemed to work like this: Odo the clerk would say that he spotted a certain local Jew slipping something into the parish well, not long before the whole place came down with plague. So the Jew would be taken up by the local authorities and put to the torture to see if he would confess to his crime. Unremarkably, after a bit of crushing, burning and slicing, the Jew would say that, yes indeed, he had been interrupted poisoning the water supply. Not only that but, as often as not, he would also reveal that explicit instructions had arrived in the Jewish community from Rabbi ben Asher in Dresden commanding this act for the purpose of murdering Christians. The confessing Jew would be put to death quickly, a number of his co-religionists would also be executed, their money confiscated and the caravan would move on. The authorities wouldn’t approve but as long as things didn’t get out of hand, they could live with it. What they really didn’t like was a pogrom that got out of hand.
More recently, there has been something of a historical dispute about this causal link. Some historians have argued that the Jews were subject to much the same persecutions before any pandemic as after it. Your cattle are murrained? The Jews dun it. A child is found with his throat slit? Well, we all know who likes to drink blood as part of their incomprehensible rituals.
But in 2007 a building development in the Catalan town of Tarrega uncovered a number of communal graves dating from the mid 14th century. Jewish artefacts were found in the graves, suggesting a Jewish cemetery. Many of the bodies, of both sexes and all ages, showed marks of violence.
Spanish archaeologists, looking also at the written records, have concluded that the bodies were of several dozen Jews killed around the time that the Black Death arrived in Tarrega, having already ravaged the towns of Barcelona and Cervera.
Indeed, the reported pattern of attacks seemed to follow the sequential passage of the plague inland from the coast. This seems to constitute strong evidence for the contention that, whatever else the Jews were blamed for, a wave of persecution did indeed follow the journey of the pestilence.
But, today, it’s just David Icke. The goalkeeper turned turquoise messiah is the source of some of the most florid theories about how the world really works. The Queen is a lizard, part of a system of shape-shifting reptilian overlords who rule over the benighted human species. The system also involves the Rothschilds, naturally. And, by implication, you know who. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic (which, you might have thought, represented a considerable policy failure on the part of the lizard ruling class), Mr Icke specifically implicates the 5G network and an 18th-century Jewish sect — the Frankists — which itself was a split from another bigger Jewish sect and which, to all but him, seemed to be long defunct.
Of course, one big nagging question in all this is how you can have an all-powerful, ruthless aristocracy, whose principal enemy is one David Icke, and yet they somehow fail to knock him off. If you can give the world coronavirus, Mr Icke shouldn’t present a problem. True, the Silicon Valley lizards have had his stuff removed from Youtube, an act which is the modern equivalent of solitary confinement.
His large online following has upset them, and recent polls suggested that 51 per cent of Britons knew who Icke was and 12 per cent had viewed or read something by him. Including me. But Icke likes are harder to come by now.
In any case, online audiences don’t turn up on the fringes of Hampstead Garden Suburb or Radlett or Stamford Hill wielding lit torches and screaming for blood. So, unlike our ancestors, we don’t have to worry about baying crowds. All that might concern us is the sad male Ickean, solitary and questing, with an online manifesto and unfortunate access to an assault rifle or a lorry.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times
