In the turgid miasma of online antisemitism, one voice stands out: Candace Owens.

Owens is not one to traffic merely in familiar antisemitic cliches of Jewish control of Hollywood or finance. No, like her broad palette of conspiracy theories—e.g., that Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman and Emmanuel Macron’s father—her antisemitism is an outlandish concatenation of half-baked lunacies cobbled together from the fringes of the brain-rotted internet. To take but one recent example: Jews didn’t have Charlie Kirk assassinated merely because he questioned American support for Israel; rather, they offered him as a blood sacrifice (in cahoots with Erika Kirk) because they practice the occult.

But the most bizarre aspect of Owens’s antisemitic rants is their frequent references to hitherto obscure figures in Jewish religious history: the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and an eighteenth-century successor named Jacob Frank. Having spent much of my academic career studying these figures (and writing a book about one of them), it was disorienting to hear their names on Owens’s lips; I began to have questions. Why is Owens fixated on these mostly-forgotten figures in Jewish history? And how did she even find out about them?

Now, one caveat: Owens may just be grifting here. She is all about the Benjamins, and her followers on social media have almost doubled in the last year alone. And her views have been quite malleable in the past: Owens is a former progressive (her parents successfully sued her school district for failing to protect her from racial discrimination) and anti-harassment campaigner who abruptly switched teams in 2017 to join conservative Gamergate harassers Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannapoulos. She is also a one-time colleague of politically conservative Orthodox Jews Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, yet she now claims that Jews are or were in control of the slave trade, the Mafia, and the United States government. (Owens has clearly never been to a bar mitzvah; we can’t even control the lines for food.)

So maybe it’s a mistake to take anything Owens says seriously, if she’s reaching for whatever idea will get her more plays. Then again, given her 25 million YouTube followers, maybe it’s a mistake not to take her seriously. Let’s discuss, then, Owens’s analysis of early modern Jewish apostasy.

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