Mark Oppenheimer: These crazy ideas about a Jewish conspiracy to basically control the world undermine true religion, et cetera, which pick up on vapors of the old Sabbatai Zevi through Jacob Frank, through Orthodox rabbi Marvin Antelman, then through David Icke and land with Candace Owens, a primary-

Jay Michaelson: Now we sound a conspiracy theorist.

MO: Hi, I’m Mark Oppenheimer and this is Arc: The Podcast. Arc: The Podcast is the audio companion to the web magazine Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. All of this stuff is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. And today on Arc, I’m bringing you something pretty special. One of our contributors at the magazine is Jay Michelson. Jay is one of the coolest cats I know, also one of the smartest. He is a lawyer, a rabbi, a Buddhist teacher, a psychedelic explorer, an activist, and somebody who just knows stuff that I tend not to know.

He’s also somebody who’s in touch with the far fringes of existence, kind of alternative spirituality, psychedelic infused spirituality, esoteric stuff that I normally would be very skeptical of. But Jay’s one of those people whom I trust. He’s like a sane person who travels to the fringes of sanity and comes back with reliable reports.

And he wrote a piece for Arc last week about Candace Owens. Now, if you’re lucky, you haven’t spent a lot of time with Candace Owens, but she is one of the most successful far right influencers. She has a podcast and a video channel that get millions of subscribers and she has these very, very wacky theories about the Jews and how the Jews have influenced world history. I’m not going to say more because we get to some of it in what I’m about to play for you.

So Jay wrote this article, it’s called “The Seventeenth Century Origins of Candace Owens’s Antisemitism.” It goes back to this figure you’ve probably never heard of and draws this line, this lineage of craziness up to the present day. And I said to Jay, “This article’s really, really good, but I think you would make for a great video explainer.” So we recorded this little film in which he explains it all, breaks it all down for you, and we intercut bits of Candace Owens’s own antisemitic rants.

And you can find the film on YouTube if you go to youtube.com/arcmagazine, that’s YouTube.com/arcmagazine. You can see the video, but I thought that for the podcast this week, I would just play the video for you. It works really, really well as an audio story and you’re going to learn a lot including a lot of stuff that you wish you hadn’t. So here’s me with Jay Michelson talking about Candace Owens.

So before we get into the history, the deep, deep backstory that you explained in this article for the uninitiated, who is Candace Owens and why should we care right now?

JM: So depending who you ask, Candace Owens is either the world’s most successful grifter.

Candace Owens: I won. I won. I didn’t expect it. I played it cool, but it’s recently now been announced that it is me. I am the antisemites of the year.

JM: The world’s most dangerous conservative.

CO: Stop telling people you’re chosen. You are not chosen to do shit except within the synagogue of Satan.

JM: Or a complete nutcase.

CO: The people that we are fighting are effectively pagan gypsies who have been wearing the cloak of Judaism, I would say, since the fall of the missing Khazarian Empire.

JM: Or possibly all three. Candace Owens in the last year or so has moved from the fringe to the mainstream.

CO: I think we’re going to actually cross a million views in less than 24 hours, which is just impressive.

JM: In terms of the kind of crazy lunatic end of MAGA, she has a very popular podcast and video platform where she spouts insane conspiracy theories.

MO: And you’ve traced the origins of one of her conspiracy theories.

CO: This unknown schism in which half of the world’s Jewry converted, or followed this guy who they believed to be the Messiah. His name was Sabbatai Zevi.

MO: What is the specific conspiracy theory that you give the backstory to, which we’ll get to in just a moment?

JM: So I did my doctoral work on an obscure eighteenth century false messiah named Jacob Frank, who followed in the footsteps of a slightly more famous but still obscure seventeeth century false messiah named Sabbatai Zevi. Nobody knows about these people. I wrote a dissertation. I wrote a book. It won an award. I was very happy, but it’s not like common knowledge, except now it is thanks to Candace Owens, who has a theory that it’s basically the Jewish conspiracy, the Illuminati running the world, except for the twist that it’s actually the descendants of this messianic movement from the seventeenth century, which is very bizarre that the one thing in my life that I thought would have absolutely no relevance to my journalism career suddenly is at the center of Candace’s Owen’s worldview.

MO: Okay. So she has a conspiracy theory that of course the Jews run the world and there’s a secret conspiracy, but she sees the antecedents, the ancestors of that conspiracy in sixteenth and seventeenth century figures, Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank.

CO: It became Jacob Frank. What came in the next century was Aleistair Crowley, again, always backed by the wealthiest people in the world. These were not like some poor people. I told you Jacob Frank who came about a hundred years later.

MO: So who were they?

JM: So in reality, there is, I just want to say like a slight grain of truth to the conspiracy theory, which I’ll get to in a moment.

In reality, in the year 1666, Sabbatai Zevi led the largest Messianic movement in Jewish history, second largest if you count Jesus as the first. And arguably the scholars debate the exact numbers, but between a quarter and a third of European Jews thought that the messiah might be walking the earth. He was active in the Ottoman Empire. If he were in present day New York City, he would be holding a poster saying “The end of the world is nigh” in Times Square, but he was discovered by a well-known Kabbalist, Jewish mystic and really caught fire. There was something about his message and his personality and his charisma that spread throughout Europe. And at the time, there really was a thought that the end of history was about to happen.

He got so popular that the Ottoman sultan gave him a choice between converting or dying and he chose to convert. And that was the end of the messianic movement. The messiah does not convert to Islam.

However, it did continue. The movement did continue among the faithful who call themselves the Ma’aminim, the believers, who believed that the conversion was just part of what the Messiah was always meant to do. Many of them converted outwardly to Islam but remained secretly Jewish. And the sort of small messianic movement continued as a subculture for hundreds of years, even until the present moment where there are still a few of the descendants of those original converts from the seventeenth century.

Jacob Frank was a subsequent sect leader about a hundred years later active in Poland, had a very radical program of kind of breaking religious law and self-actualizing and being kind of a leader in the world. That didn’t really work out for him. He was thrown in jail for a while, but he did lead a small esoteric sect and this is the grain of truth. There were some connections between Jacob Frank’s kind of strange and radical small sect and the Freemasons and threw the Freemasons to the French revolutionaries, but this is nothing like the Jews and the Illuminati caused the French Revolution. It was more like a few enterprising weirdos running guns and making money.

CO: Frankists went down to France and they went to overthrow it in a revolution because ultimately they believed that they would inherit the earth through deception. Through deceptive means and a ton of sexual rituals along the way, which they believed gave them power. The Frankists were behind the French revolution. The Frankists were behind the Russian revolution.

MO: Before we leave Jacob Frank behind, tell us a little bit more about the strangeness of his movement. Am I right that there was some free love going on?

JM: There was some kind of love going on. So there was both with the original Sabbatean moment and with the Jacob Frank movement. One of the longstanding ideas in Jewish mysticism is that when the Messiah would come, a lot of the rules of the Torah would be nullified, including many of the ones around sexual conduct. It’s a little bit similar to the kind of, this is called antinomianism against the law, the idea that the law is not ultimately the highest truth.

CO: I have fulfilled the law of the Torah and actually it is now called upon us to sin. And a form of that is apostasy, which is essentially you can convert in order to see people into different faiths. And I am proof of that. So even though I am converting, I’m becoming a Muslim, it doesn’t actually matter because laws have no meaning. Again, the Torah has been filled. I am the Messiah.

JM: It’s a litle bit similar to some Islamic ideas of the afterlife where things that are forbidden in this life are permitted in the afterlife. So this was a longstanding idea. It did get turned into reality in some Sabbatean sects and in the Frankist sect and scholars debate as to how much that was true. It probably wasn’t like fun free love. It was probably more like cultic, dynamic, sort of strangely, somewhat abusive sexual practices.

CO: Again, they believed in sexual rituals. So these were the sacraments. They believed Jacob Frank believed in incest. He believed in sexual rituals. This is the reason why the Jewish community was at war with one another. And it is a fact that when he got kicked out of Poland the first time after having this bizarre sexual ritual-

JM: But we don’t really know for sure. But that was kind of the tip of the antinomian iceberg. Jacob Frank really believed that law is holding you back. God wants you to be free and to be fully human and that he created his own kind of strange syncretistic religion combining aspects of Catholicism, Judaism, and Western esotericism.

CO: Has been infiltrated by people with the explicit aim as Sabbatai Zevi had of taking over the world, that through sin they would be redeemed. They had to commit sins. It’s a form of gnosticism. The more that you sin, the more egregious your sin we will inherit the earth.

JM: I wrote a book on that. Folks can Google it and if you’re a religion nerd it’s a lot of fun.

MO: Okay. So we have Sabbatai Zevi in the seventeenth century. He converts to Islam, but he has some spiritual descendants, including Jacob Frank. In the eighteenth century who comes along, he has this movement, this antinomian movement that if the messiah is here, all is permitted or a lot more is permitted. They have connections to the Freemasons and through that to the French Revolution, to whom some of his followers might have run some guns. And that’s all in the 1700s. What’s the connection that brings Frankism, which was a marginal movement at best into the twentieth century?

JM: So I’ll do the real, which is small and the fictive, which is large.

In reality, it is true that some Frankist followers later became active in what’s called the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. These were the rationalists and the reformers. This was not a conspiracy or any, and it wasn’t secret either. These were people who were already kind of free thinkers. And as the Frankist movement petered out, they turned toward what became a very significant movement of reform and rational, the enlightenment in the Jewish world. So that’s the kind of the true part. The fictive part is that in the late twentieth century, in the 1970s, an Orthodox rabbi named Marvin Antelman wrote a very bizarre book alleging that all of kind of leftism, communism, but also Jewish liberalism, also the ADL, which at that time was seen as part of liberal Judaism, was actually secretly Sabbatean.

CO: This is how the ADL was born. They were born of B’nai B’rith. B’nai B’rith was this Freemason chapter that was based in Atlanta and Leo Frank was the president of that chapter.

JM: By way of the Illuminati. So the Illuminati, which that’s kind of well known as a font of conspiracy theory Antelman said, that was actually the descendants of the Sabbateans. This is all a Sabbatean plot to destroy religion. And remember, it is partly true that Sabbateanism and Frankism thought that they were going to abolish part of religion, but not in their wildest dreams did they have a conspiracy that would last hundreds of years and actually influence world history.

CO: And then causing wars or participating in wars and upheavals is a very scary, not a thought and understanding that is an understanding. I don’t want to say it’s a thought. I just think this happened. Now I’ve read this and the implications there are quite severe, quite severe. So like I said, I can show you how all of our faiths have been infiltrated. And I say this, the Jewish faith, the Christian faith and of course the Muslim faith has been infiltrated by people with the explicit aim as sabotage I had of taking over the world that through sin they would be redeemed.

JM: So Antelman wrote this book as a way of attacking liberalism and his fellow Jews who were liberal. He was kind of alienated by white flight and changes in Boston in the 1960s. He joined the Jewish Defense League, famous for Meir Kahane, which then in true Jewish fashion split into the breakaway shul of more radicals and less radicals. And he was kind of a marginal figure. The book did however get noticed by antisemites. So not what Antelman had intended, but actually people who hated all Jews picked up on this book by an Orthodox rabbi kind of ratting out the Jewish Illuminati conspiracy. David Duke, Neo-Nazi in Louisiana, became enamored of the book and then later David Icke.

David Icke: In simple terms, there is a predator race which take a reptilian form. They’re feeding off humanity. They’ve turned humanity into a slave race. They demand human sacrifice. That’s where Satanism comes in.

JM: Who became an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist online became enamored of it and picked it up and quoted it in his books. And from there it spreads throughout the anti-Semitic internet. If you Google Jacob Frank on YouTube, the first hits you will get will be fundamentally anti-Semitic videos talking about the secret Frankist conspiracy and the occult and so forth. And that all derives from David Icke. And that’s where Candace Owens picks up on this theme that there’s a secret saboteon conspiracy.

MO: So it goes from Jacob Frank, lays low in the sort of underworld, pops up again in the 1970s with Orthodox Rabbi Marvin Anteman, who at one point convenes a sort of kangaroo court of Jewish judges to excommunicate Henry Kissinger among others. And then from Antelman, it gets picked up eventually by the rest. Oh, then from Antelman, it gets picked up by David Icke, who I know a litle bit about. I know that he’s a weird favorite of Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, but he also has various theories about Jews being lizard people. I don’t know if you’re an Icke expert at all, but can you say a bit about David Icke?

JM: I would call myself an Icke enthusiast. It’s not clear how this part of David Icke fits into the lizard people myth of David Icke.

DI: What they would do, among many other things, you’d have them in their robes and hoods all around here and you would have the sacrifice on the slab head.

This is the altar. This is their altar. Yeah. And I’ve been talking to you about a moon bloody matrix, shape shifting reptilians. A few families run the bloody world. I mean, whatever happened to you.

JM: People of, I guess, of our generation, certainly of Gen X might remember the TV show V, in which a reptilian alien race had kind of infiltrated the America and then I guess the world by pretending to be externally human, similar to some themes in the X-Files also.

David Icke appears to believe that this is true and these Hollywood artifacts are kind of little insider messages communicating the truth. And that is kind of a lot of the sort of QAnon-like conspiracy theorizing about the evil elites through Bilderberg and the rest controlling world history, for Icke also get connected to this idea that they’re actually aliens. How that exists together with the fact that they’re also secret Sabbatean, heretical Jews, I’m not sure, but these are two parallel…This is a kind of standard conspiratorial move. And in my article that’s in an Arc magazine this week, I talk about what question they’re trying to answer.

And the question is a fundamental one, which is why is the world so broken? Why are things so wrong? Why is it that there’s disorder and crime and a secret elite network of pedophiles running history and why are things so bad? And the answer is not human life is complicated and human beings are flawed creatures. Rather, it’s most of us are good, but there’s this little conspiracy of bad guys who are ruining everything.

CO: They are part of the elite and you have other people who are just bad faith actors. Okay. They are not worshiping the Kabbalah, but they are perhaps blackmailed and the people that are in control are very clearly in my view these people and they’ve always been in control. Like I said, it reappears as Aleistair Crowley. He was best friends with the editor over at Vanity Fair. He was friends with the people in that club, the Yale Club, the name is escaping me right now, but these were the elites. Okay?

MO: Now there’s this wonderful coda that you were just telling me about, which is these crazy ideas about a Jewish conspiracy to basically control the world, undermine true religion, et cetera, which pick up on vapors of the old Sabbatai Zevi through Jacob Frank, through Orthodox Rabbi Marvin Antelman, then through David Icke and land with Candace Owens, a primary-

JM: Now we sell like a conspiracy theorist. Should we do a chart with rope connecting all of these people?

MO: We will definitely have to do a chart, but you said there’s a sort of wonderful final chapter to this, which is that now Candace Owens and David Icke are mad at each other on the internet.

JM: That is true. So irony number one is, right? Marvin Antelman, extreme right-wing, hardcore Zionist, I hesitate to even call him a Zionist. I mean, he’s like the anti-Zionist caricature of a Zionist, like a real extremist, is now being used. His ideas are now being used to attack Israel, right? Candace Owens is saying, look, Israel is controlling the United States government and is controlling the world.

CO: A country should not be able to lobby to get what they want and control our congressmen. And you get to see them flex that muscle, like TikTok and things of that nature, when they are now interfering with our speech and they’ll get laws passed really quickly. It allows literally a foreign country to make decisions in our nation.

JM: So this great irony that this hardcore right-wing supporter of Israel is actually being used to oppose Israel and also not just anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic terms as well.

But right, so David Icke actually at one point accused Candace Owens of stealing some of his ideas and she kind of clapped back on Twitter saying that he put out his ideas as early as the 1990s when she says she was watching Barney at the dinosaur on VHS. So how could she have possibly absorbed his ideas, which is completely specious, right? I mean, his ideas are still there even though he first came up with them 30 years ago, they’re still out there on the internet and so that’s clearly where she picked them up because she just sort of photocopies a lot of his ideas.

And just one small note, so for Antelman, the Sabbateans are basically communists, right? They’re anti-religious communists. David Icke changes that and turns the Sabbateans into a kind of occult conspiracy, like a Jewish occult conspiracy and it’s that version that Candace Owens picks up.

MO: It’s hard to even know whom to root for in all this.

So if one is concerned about this, about this transmission of ideas that ends up in pure antisemitism as so many ideas do, is there anything to be done? Can we put this genie back in the bottle? Can we inoculate ourselves or is it just going to continue to be the case that when people google Jacob Frank, who is this interesting historical Jewish mystical figure, that basically what they’re always going to come up with is just antisemitic nonsense from now on until eternity.

JM: Somewhere in between. I think, look, there’s clearly a space for countering any antisemitic conspiracy theory sort of on the merits so to speak, right? Which say, well, here’s the factual record. None of this is true. Fun note that’s in the article, Gershom Scholem, the leading scholar of Jewish mysticism, was sent a copy. Anthelman sent him a copy of his book and Scholem wrote in his copy and this is in the archive and you can see it online. He wrote in English, “Nonsense, based on me.” Because it was Scholem’s own scholarship on these movements that was used by Antelman to create this web of nonsense. It’s important to call out nonsense and to point out that this is not true and I’m not concerned about the reputations of Jacob Frank and Sabbatai Zevi, although maybe I am a little bit, but really the fact that this gets weaponized against real people and this is stochastic terrorism that leads to actual violence.

CO: Yeah. If you look up this entry on the Leo Frank case on Wikipedia, again, the ADLs controlled it forever, they are still trying to shift the blame of this horrific murder, which I believe was a ritualistic murder that took place because I believe that he was a Frankist. He descended from Jacob Frank.

JM: And it’s hard to know whether actually countering the facts will do any good. I mean, people don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories because they’re persuasive. They subscribe to them because they resolve cognitive dissonance and that doesn’t go away even when a particular theory is disproven.
That being said, if you look at sort of the hardcore of QAnon, which was so popular even five years ago, ironically, as the Epstein Files has validated a version of QAnon except for the fact that the hero Donald Trump is actually one of the villains, small detail, actual kind of power of QAnon as a conspiracy theory has diminished somewhat.

So I think the text kind of comes and goes, but I think it is … I’m making light of this a little bit because it’s such a preposterous conspiracy theory, but obviously it’s not a joking matter when actual synagogues are being attacked and vandalized.

CO: And you are not chosen to do shit except within the synagogue of Satan.

MO: So final and most important question, if Candace Owens gets a hold of a copy of your book so she can learn more about Jacob Frank and invites you on her podcast, do you go?

JM: That’s a good question. I’ve been asked that about other podcasters I won’t name who are of even larger platforms. I mean, I would probably not go because I’m sure I would be being invited to just try to expose me as one of the bad guys.

Fun fact, I don’t think you know this about me, but I am a bit player in the chem trails conspiracy theory, which alleges that the contrails from airplanes are actually spraying chemicals on us all to keep us docile. And I once wrote an article about geoengineering and climate change and one of the proposals is to allow airplanes to fly a litle bit dirtier and that could reflect more of the sun’s radiation.

And somehow the chem trails people picked up on me and I became a player. I was either, they couldn’t decide whether I was one of the good guys or the bad guys. I might have been a mole or I might have been one of the malifactors. So I would probably say no, but not out of moral righteousness, only for fear of being exposed as a lizard person.

MO: Well, I hope that was worth the trip. I am Mark Oppenheimer, editor of Arc Magazine and host of Arc: The Podcast. If you enjoyed this, learned from it, maybe want something more in your earbuds next week from me, go to the podcast platform of your choice, whether it’s Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever, and please subscribe to Arc: The Podcast. We will be back with another podcast soon.

I want to thank the whole team that helped me produce this. That would include David Sugarman and at the Danforth Center, Debra Kennard and Mark Valeri and Abram Van Engen. I want to thank our interns, especially Caroline Coffey and Ben Esther, but also Sadie Davis-Suskind and Ezra Ellenbogan. But most of all this week, I want to thank Jonathan Kesselman. He is the video producer who cut this whole thing together, the audio and the video both.

Again, you can see his fine work if you go to YouTube.com/arcmagazine, but he also has a website. Go check him out. It’s Jonathan Kesselman. I’m Mark Oppenheimer till next time. Thanks for listening.