A paper was recently published by the Gino Germani Institute, written with his usual competence and clarity by Massimiliano Di Pasquale, documenting and analysing the link between Putin propaganda and the international spread of anti-Semitic prejudice and violence.

In photo, Massimiliano Di Pasquale

The key point is the use of anti-Semitism as a flexible language capable of adapting to different audiences: the radical right, the anti-system left, conspiracy circles, third-world pacifisms. In Di Pasquale’s paper, this dynamic is linked to the Soviet tradition of ‘active measures’, modernised in the digital era: disinformation, propaganda, agents of influence, and above all the online ecosystem of bots, trolls and alternative channels.

In this key, anti-Semitic rhetoric serves not only to convince, but to polarise: to make the image of the enemy ‘impure’, so as to corrode its legitimacy and transform political conflicts into identity clashes. Di Pasquale’s report is very insightful in identifying a mechanism of anti-Semitic emotional mobilisation, in which the Jew is portrayed as an agent of moral corruption or global domination and thus violence appears defensive, especially in contexts of crisis (such as wars, migration, pandemics).

From hate to common sense: how propaganda transforms prejudice

Putin propaganda uses anti-Semitism not as mere hatred, but as a geopolitical tool. By inserting and amplifying conspiracy codes, manipulating Holocaust memory and exploiting contemporary conflicts, this propaganda contributes to an information environment that makes prejudice more ‘believable’ and violence more ‘thinkable’.

And it is precisely there – in the transformation of hatred into common sense – that the ground is created on which aggression against Jewish people and communities becomes more likely and also, unfortunately, more accepted as an inevitable consequence of the wrongdoings of the ‘collective Jew’.

Since the Russian hybrid war has no constraints of ideological coherence, but only of systemic functionality, it should come as no surprise that in the Kremlin’s strategies, anti-Semitic propaganda coexists without bumps and clashes with anti-Islamic propaganda, because both, despite being seemingly opposites, rest on a common conspiratorial logic and have a common goal – to suggest suspicion of an enemy plot behind the screen of ‘democratic normality’ – even though they have different political targets.

The ‘accusation in the mirror’: Jews, Nazism and the war in Ukraine

For the same reason, anti-Semitic propaganda can easily mix with nominally anti-Nazi propaganda. For example, with respect to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin presented the war as a ‘denazification operation‘, using a mechanism called ‘mirror accusation‘: projecting onto the victim the act that the aggressor is performing against him.

Here again, a specifically anti-Semitic element comes into play: the evocation of Nazism and the Holocaust to demonise Ukraine, just as the evocation of Nazism is used to demonise Israel. Even with respect to Ukraine – Zelensky is in fact Jewish – the equivalence Jews equals Nazis is a classic motif of post-World War II anti-Semitic propaganda.