The spectacle of podcaster Candace Owens holding up an antisemitic tract and urging her growing audience to plumb its depths marks the depravity to which some precincts of the so-called right have fallen prey. The book recommendation came during a Saturday broadcast on Ms. Owens’s YouTube show on which she stuck back at Ben Shapiro for his criticism of her antisemitic drift. He delivered those remarks at Turning Point USA’s parley.

Enter Ms. Owen’s new favorite book, “The Talmud Jew.” It’s an English translation of a 19th century German screed, “Der Talmudjude.” Its author was one August Rohling, who wrote invective-spittled tracts against both Jews and Protestants. “Der Talmudjude” exerted a baleful influence over the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, who embroidered its calumnies into his newspaper, Der Stürmer. Who would want such a lineage?   

Ms. Owens on Saturday provided her summary of Rohling’s thesis, addressing Mr. Shapiro to declare that “You have absolutely no values that exist outside of the Talmud. You describe yourself as a Talmudic Jew. And I’ve learned what’s in that Talmud. I encourage other people at home to learn what is in that Talmud so that you know what Ben thinks of you because he doesn’t just hate me, he hates you, too, white men. He hates all black people.”

If Ms. Owens thinks that’s what the Talmud says, she might be interested in buying a bridge at Babylon. Or she’s been reading too much Rohling, who was also persuaded of the veracity of the blood libel. Ms. Owens updates that canard by accusing Jews of culpability for the slave trade and urging her listeners “to wake up to these people who believe that they are contract lords.” Mr. Shapiro, she asserts, is a member of the “synagogue of Satan.”

No doubt some of this invective is motivated by the bad blood that flows between Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Owens, who once worked for his Daily Wire only for the two to part ways in 2024. Ms. Owens’s Talmudic delusions, though, disclose a new abasement and define her as a fellow traveler of not only Rohling but also antisemites throughout history. In 1242 Louis IX  had 12,000 volumes of the Talmud burned at Paris. He expelled the Jews for good measure.

Perhaps no book has been more misunderstood in history than the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Jewry and second in authority only to the five books that Moses brought down from Sinai. It has been called central to “all Jewish thought and aspirations,” at least before the Enlightenment. Its very name means “learning,” and its texts record the centuries of disputations and conversations between the long-ago rabbis of Israel and Babylonia. 

So influential is the legacy of the Talmud that the whole of the modern world, it could be reckoned, owes a debt of gratitude to this Jewish opus and the sages who created it. Minds honed for centuries on the rigors of Talmudic argument revolutionized fields from finance to arts to science and beyond. Ms. Owens’s invocation of the Talmud may come amid a widening schism on the right over antisemitism. The Talmud, though, is likely to outlast them all.