A viral post demonizing Zionist doctors sounds eerily like a Soviet antisemitic conspiracy theory
During the doctors’ plot, Stalin targeted the country’s Jews
How do you know if your doctor is Zionist? Courtesy of iStock
By Mira Fox January 4, 2024
The debate over whether anti-Zionism constitutes antisemitism has raged since long before the Israel-Hamas war. But since the war, as anti-Zionism has become an increasingly strong virtue signal, it has been used as a cover for more clear cut antisemitic conspiracies — such as in a viral post on X implying that Zionist doctors are out to harm their patients of color.
“Realizing how many American doctors and nurses are Zionists, and genuinely terrified for Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian and Black patients,” tweeted Saira Rao, who co-founded a company, Race2Dinner, offering antiracist dinners to white women for the price of $2,500.
While Rao has since made her account private, the post alleging that certain doctors’ political beliefs would lead them to violate their Hippocratic oaths found plenty of traction among people who agreed with her fears; many pointed out that bias against people of color is well-known within the medical system.
Users on X responded to Rao’s allegation with a community note, a function on X that allows users to identify misinformation in other users’ posts. The note points out that Israeli doctors often treat Palestinians. Many Palestinian, Arab and Muslim users commented or retweeted her post with fond recollections of their Jewish and Israeli doctors.
More pointedly, many noted that Rao’s post bore concerning similarities to a decades-old antisemitic conspiracy theory known as “the doctors’ plot.”
The doctors’ plot was a state-sponsored propaganda campaign in the U.S.S.R. in the 1950s alleging that a cabal of predominantly Jewish doctors were trying to assassinate Soviet government officials through incorrect and harmful medical treatments or purposefully incorrect diagnoses.
Josef Stalin had been suspicious of Jews for years, and accused them of being insufficiently loyal to the U.S.S.R. due to their Zionism. The pejorative term “rootless cosmopolitans” targeted largely Jews for their supposed treasonous cultural preferences.
Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign wasn’t against all Jews, but instead served as a political litmus test; those who would disavow Zionism, expose the “bad” Jews and pledge allegiance to Mother Russia were acceptable.
The doctors’ plot burst into the public view in 1953, when Stalin urged state newspapers to report a plot to assassinate Soviet leaders, including Stalin himself; he said that several Soviet officials had already died at the hands of these doctors.
Stalin had been building the accusation for some time. A cardiologist had sent a letter worrying that several doctors — none of them Jewish — had underestimated party official Andrei Zhdanov’s illness, leading to his death. Stalin later blamed this death on a specifically Jewish cabal of doctors via a Jewish doctor arrested as part of the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Facist Committee. After his death in prison, Stalin alleged that the doctor had revealed a cabal of Jewish doctors working to medically kill party officials, including Zhadanov.
Pravda, the party newspaper, accused nine doctors, many of them Jewish, connecting them to the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee, which it called “the filthy face” of “a Zionist spy operation,” and referenced “corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists” as the masterminds behind the supposed murderous plot.
Stalin died shortly after the article in Pravda was published, and the new leadership retracted the accusation. The doctors were freed and rehabilitated, while one of Stalin’s deputies was accused of fabricating the plot and executed.
On X, as Rao’s post seemed to resuscitate this conspiracy, many argued that her post accused “Zionists” of malpractice not Jews. But Zionists have long been rhetorically equated with Jews, and the term has been used as a dog whistle to cultivate antisemitic sentiment while maintaining plausible deniability — just as Stalin did when targeting Jews for their Zionism and insufficient loyalty to Russia.
The doctors’ plot is only the most recent form of an antisemitic conspiracy against Jews as poisoners or untrustworthy doctors. Conspiracies that Jews poisoned wells date back to at least the 14th century. Historically, Jews, unable to own land, ended up in the medical profession, but Christian bodies accused Jewish doctors of killing Christians, such as a 1322 statement from the Catholic Council of Valladolid that Jews “under guise of medicine, surgery, or apothecary commit treachery with much ardor and kill Christian folk when administering medicine to them.”
It’s notable that Jews were involved in one of the only cases of a doctor threatening an ethnic group with medical malpractice. But the doctor wasn’t Jewish — her targets were.
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