This Many Jew-Haters Can’t All Be Wrong. Moment 649 “This many people can’t all be wrong” sounds like a powerful argument — until you ask whether all those people actually arrived at their conclusions independently. That’s the mistake behind one of the oldest defenses of antisemitism: Jews have been hated and persecuted across so many countries and centuries that surely the Jews themselves must be the common denominator. But repeated accusations aren’t independent evidence when societies inherit accusations from one another. They’re even less impressive when the accusations are blood libel, well-poisoning, sorcery, plague-causing, world domination, and somehow simultaneously masterminding both capitalism and communism. Then add the human tendency toward information cascades and pile-ons; the extraordinary persistence of Jewish identity, which kept the same recognizable minority present across thousands of years; and the fact that similar majority-minority configurations can independently generate similar social dynamics. There really is a remarkable historical pattern here. But identifying a pattern and explaining it are two very different things. Perhaps the common denominator isn’t something Jews keep doing. Perhaps it’s something societies keep doing.