When it comes to scapegoating, the 10 craziest things people have ever pinned on the Jews read like a fever‑dream catalog of bizarre accusations—ranging from enchanted veggies to engineered Pokémon. Below we count down the most outlandish claims ever recorded.

10 Craziest Things People Have Blamed On The Jews

10 Russians Accused Jews Of Hiding A Magic Vegetable That Keeps You From Getting Drunk

During a tour of Russia, writer Andrew Solomon once asked a man why the people there had such hateful feelings toward the Jews. The man answered him without even pausing for a beat: “It is because the Jews have a secret vegetable they eat so they don’t become alcoholics like the rest of us. And they refuse to share that vegetable with anyone else.”

This wasn’t the rambling of some lone nut. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s come up in a few Russian sources. For hundreds of years, a smattering of Russian voices insisted the same thing: that the Jews are hiding a secret, hairy vegetable that lets them drink all the alcohol they want without getting drunk.

It’s even shown up in Russian folktales, where it’s often listed among the two secrets weapons of those crafty Jews: the magical vegetable that keeps you from getting drunk and the Judas lips that let you get away with lying in court.

9 Hitler Thought Modern Art Was A Jewish Plot To Crush The German Spirit

According to Adolf Hitler, modern art was nothing more than “an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit.”

While writing his daily list of things to blame on the Jews, Hitler apparently reminisced on his failed art career and decided that the Elders of Zion must have been behind the rise of experimental art. He wrote up a paper slamming all modern art as “degenerate” and “Jewish.”

He even put on an exhibit of modern art in Berlin just to show everyone how terrible it was. He called it the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, complete with a whole wing dedicated to “Jewish sculptures.” He filled it with posters explaining how the Jews had created it to mock the German people.

Hitler couldn’t quite find enough Jewish modern artists to back up his point. Only 6 of the 112 artists featured in his exhibition were Jewish. Still, he insisted that Jews were to blame. As he explained in the posters, the other modern artists might not have been Jewish themselves, but they had been “distorted and influenced” by the Jews.

8 Medieval Catholics Accused Jews Of Torturing Bread

In the 13th century, the Catholic Church became convinced that Jews were up to the ultimate evil: torturing bread.

They believed that a group of Christian‑hating Jews were stealing communion wafers just so that they could stab, torment, and burn them. To the Catholics, this was tantamount to torturing Jesus Christ himself. They believed that the communion wafers would actually transform into the physical body of Jesus and that these Jews hated him so much that they felt the need to torture him again in bread form.

Allegedly, the communion wafers would bleed and cry out in pain when their Jewish attackers tormented them. Some wafers would sprout legs and try to run away, but the hateful Jews would chase those wafers down and stab them.

Today, modern historians think the whole panic started with a priest finding red fungus on an overly ripe stash of communion wafers. The church decided that the fungus could only be blood and let insanity take him where it would.

7 Henry Ford Accused Jews Of Making Candy Taste Bad

Henry Ford was a man of a few talents. He was better at selling cars than any other person in the world—and he was even better at finding things to blame on the Jews.

Ford had a whole newspaper called The Dearborn Independent that did nothing but blame Jews for everything under the sun. The paper ran the headline, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” and spread so many conspiracy theories that even Adolf Hitler described himself as a fan.

But some were a bit crazier than others. The Dearborn Independent blamed Jews for everything you could imagine. According to the paper, Jews had invented jazz music. They were behind lynchings, which they provoked by poisoning normally sane white men with a secret concoction called “n—r gin.” And they deliberately sabotaged baseball just because they were too lazy to play sports.

It wasn’t just the paper, though. Henry Ford blamed everything imaginable on the Jews. He even blamed them when he bit into a candy bar and didn’t care for the taste. Reportedly, Ford frowned at the candy bar and declared, “The Jews have taken hold of it.”

6 Medieval Germany Accused Jews Of Causing The Black Plague

The Black Plague wiped out up to 200 million individuals in Eurasia, with the worst of it hitting Europe in 1347 to 1351. At that time, the people of Germany decided to get to the bottom of it. They already had a strong hunch they knew what was going on: It was probably those rascally Jews.

They didn’t exactly have any proof or reason to believe that Jews had caused the worst plague in recent history. But they knew that proof wasn’t important when you could torture people into confessing anything you wanted. So they beat and brutalized every Jew they could find until one, pleading for his life, agreed to put in writing that he’d been pouring poison into the wells.

Not everybody believed these stories, of course. Some people saw through the lies and knew that the Jews hadn’t done anything to the wells. These people insisted that the plague was nothing more than a divine curse from a furious God who was mad at them for letting Jews live.

The end result was the same either way. People across Germany—and later, the rest of Europe—slaughtered Jews en masse. In Frankfurt where the massacre was one of the worst, the Jewish population dropped almost overnight from 19,000 people to a mere 10.

5 An Egyptian Governor Accused Jews Of Attacking Them With Remote‑Controlled Sharks

When a shark attacked tourists in Egypt, Governor Abdel‑Fadeel Shosha was sure he knew what was afoot. This was nothing more than a Zionist plot to attack Egypt with remote‑controlled cybersharks.

Shosha wasn’t completely ready to commit to the cybershark theory right away. He kept things balanced and timid, telling the press that it could also be a “specially indoctrinated Zionist shark” or even an “Israeli agent in a shark costume.”

It was just too early to say for sure, Shosha said. He wasn’t saying anything definite. He just wanted time to confirm.

He was pretty certain, though, that Israeli intelligence was behind the shark attacks. After all, he’d heard rumors that there was a GPS on the shark. Although conservationists kept trying to convince him that they used these devices as a way of tracking animal behavior and that a GPS couldn’t be used for mind control, Shosha knew better.

4 Wahhabis Accused Jews Of Conspiring With ‘Jew Trees’

According to a fundamentalist group of Muslims called the Wahhabis, the Jews have already started conspiring with a secret ally: the Gharqad tree, or as the Wahhabis call it, the “Jew tree.”

According to a man who’d grown up in a Saudi Arabian Wahhabi school, he was assigned to read a book in the ninth grade that his teacher told him was a statement from the prophet Muhammad. Inside, it outlined in brutal detail how the Muslims were going to murder every single Jew on the planet:

“The day of judgment will not arrive until Muslims fight Jews, and Muslim will kill Jews until the Jew hides behind a tree or a stone. Then the tree and the stone say, ‘Oh Muslim, oh, servant of God, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.’”

According to the book, the Jews would only have one ally in all of nature: the Gharqad tree. The next lines read: “Except one type of a tree, which is a Jew tree. That will not say that.”

The lesson was clear: It wasn’t just that good Wahhabis can’t trust Jews. They can’t even trust their dirty Jew trees.

3 A Palestinian Newspaper Accused Jews Of Breeding Killer Super Rats

According to one Palestinian newspaper, Israel created a race of super rats that grow twice as big as a normal rat, purely to chase the Arabs out of Jerusalem.

The paper claims that the super rats are vicious, trained killers that are big enough to kill a cat. Jews will bring them into town in cages and unleash them on the Arab population. Then they’ll let the rats swarm on the Palestinians who live there and attack Arab children.

The rats spread quickly, too. They’ve been genetically engineered to breed at four times the rate of a normal animal. Most impressively of all, the super rats have been trained to sniff out Arab blood. The rats will leave every Jewish person they find alone and move on to hunt and kill Arabs.

2 The Nation Of Islam Accused Jews Of Tricking People Into Thinking Slavery Exists

According to the Nation of Islam’s Akbar Muhammed, the idea that slavery still exists in our world is nothing but a “big lie” started as part of a “Jewish conspiracy.”

Akbar was responding to news from Amnesty International that slavery and human bondage were still alive and well in places like Sudan, Mauritania, and Libya. He insisted that it was all a Zionist conspiracy, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan agreed.

“Where is the proof?” Farrakhan asked. “If slavery exists, why don’t you go as a member of the press, and you look inside Sudan, and if you find it, then you come back and tell the American people what you found?”

In response, The Baltimore Sun sent reporters into Sudan, bought two slave boys, ran a report on it, and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Still, even after the article came out, people continued to insist that it’s all made up. The government of Mauritania even released an official statement blaming The Baltimore Sun article on the Jews: “Slavery no longer exists, and talk of it suggests manipulation by the West, an act of enmity toward Islam, or influence from the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”

1 Iraqi Security Thought Pokemon Was Part Of A Zionist Plot

Perhaps the greatest of all Jewish conspiracies is Pokemon. According to an Iraqi security services report written in 2001, the world’s most popular game was created as nothing more than a Zionist plot to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi security services claimed that the name “Pokemon” was a Hebrew word that meant “I am a Jew.” Jewish conspirators supposedly created the game to infiltrate the minds of Iraqi children and turn them against Hussein. The report warned that the character Pokemon was already all over Iraqi markets and that the children “love it very much.”

It might seem a little unbelievable. One might cite petty details like “I am a Jew” in Hebrew isn’t pronounced “Pokemon,” Pokemon isn’t the name of a character, and Pokemon is Japanese.

Then again, how do you explain that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon came out in 2006, the very same year that Saddam Hussein was found in a mysterious underground dungeon?

Check and mate.

Among roughly 150,000 men of Jewish descent who fought in Hitler’s army, the stories of 10 Jews who served on the front lines reveal a paradox: while their families were being forced into ghettos and sent to death camps, these soldiers were stationed in Poland, France, or Russia, helping spread the very system that was slaughtering their own people across Europe.

Why 10 Jews Who Joined the Nazi Ranks?

10 Werner Goldberg

A familiar poster plastered throughout Nazi Germany showed a soldier with a swastika emblazoned on his chest, hailed as “The Ideal German Soldier.” Ironically, the model soldier was not a pure‑blood Aryan at all – he was half‑Jewish.

Werner Goldberg grew up unaware of his Jewish roots; his father never mentioned it. The truth hit him at fourteen when his school principal announced a “Jew‑free” policy and singled Werner out as the problem, publicly exposing his heritage.

Shunned overnight, Werner became desperate to belong again. He enlisted at the earliest opportunity, managing to join before the invasion of Poland, hoping military service would restore his place in society.

Back home, his father endured the horrors of the Holocaust. Werner leveraged his position to intervene repeatedly, even breaking into the prison holding his father when he learned of an imminent transfer to Auschwitz, rescuing him from certain death.

In the war’s aftermath, the Goldberg family suffered devastating losses—only his father survived. The reunion between Werner and his rescued father stands as a stark reminder of the personal stakes hidden behind the propaganda.

9 Nachemia Wurman

Debates have long swirled about how much ordinary Nazi soldiers knew about the atrocities in the camps. In the 72nd Infantry, one man certainly had a front‑row seat: Nachemia Wurman.

A Polish Jew, Wurman survived a 1944 labor camp where he witnessed his father’s execution and was forced to bathe in soap crafted from the bodies of fellow inmates.

After escaping and heading west in hopes of meeting Soviet troops, he instead ran straight into a German battalion. Knowing he couldn’t slip past them unnoticed, he boldly approached, shook hands, and introduced himself as “Marion Schmidt,” a German‑born chef.

He was promptly accepted into the unit, spending the remainder of the war with a swastika on his arm, cooking for the soldiers while keeping his true identity a secret. “The best hiding place was in the mouth of the wolf,” he later reflected.

8 Arno Spitz

Arno Spitz earned three Iron Crosses, the highest German decoration for bravery, making him one of the most decorated men in the Wehrmacht.

His father, a Jew, fled to the United States as persecution intensified. Arno, however, stayed in Germany and proved so valuable that when Himmler ordered half‑Jewish soldiers expelled in 1940, he was allowed to remain.

Spitz later insisted that fighting for Germany was not the same as supporting Hitler, telling Dateline NBC in 2002, “There is a difference.” His daughter later accused him of betraying his own people, but he refused to apologize, saying, “I didn’t do anything that is a crime.”

7 Hans‑Geert Falkenberg

“I did not want to join the army,” Hans‑Geert Falkenberg recalled. “I had to join the army.” He enlisted as soon as war was declared, hoping to prove his worth to a society that was already targeting Jews.

His teachers had been preaching Jewish inferiority, and he spent his teenage years excelling at everything the Nazis prized, seeing military service as the next logical step.

While fighting in France, he received letters from his grandmother describing the unfolding Holocaust. When the letters ceased, he learned she had been sent to a concentration camp, a blow that shocked him and his acquaintances alike.

His family had already fled to England, but trapped in occupied Europe, Falkenberg concluded that staying in the army was the safest way to survive, stating, “No question.”

6 Helmut Kopp

Helmut Kopp, the son of a German father and a Jewish mother, felt most alienated by his maternal side. His grandfather openly dismissed him, referring to him as a “goy” rather than a grandson.

When war erupted, Kopp filled out his enlistment papers as “full Aryan” and served in an artillery unit. He claimed to have been aware of the camps but chose to focus solely on his own survival, saying, “You didn’t think about the Fuhrer or the nation; I thought only about myself.”

5 Friedemann Lichtwitz

“In the German army, I was in a pretty good situation,” Friedemann Lichtwitz recalled. He felt accepted among his comrades, unaware of the growing persecution of Jews at home.

When the 1940 purge expelled half‑Jewish soldiers, he was sent to a forced‑labor camp and later, after a failed escape, to Dachau. Asked by an NBC reporter how it felt to transition from soldier to prisoner, he could only reply, “I can’t say; I don’t know how to answer that.”

4 Major Leo Skurnik

Major Leo Skurnik served as a doctor with Finland’s 53rd Infantry. Though Jewish by birth, his Finnish nationality placed him alongside German SS troops against the Soviet Union.

He tended to every wounded combatant, regardless of uniform, and even helped clear paths for German assaults. When a German soldier needed aid, Skurnik braved no‑man’s land to rescue him.

He organized the evacuation of a field hospital under Russian bombardment, carrying over 600 wounded—including SS men—across 8.9 km of bogland. Though offered an Iron Cross, he famously rejected it, telling his commander, “Tell your German colleagues that I wipe my arse with it!”

3 Harry Matso

Harry Matso, a Finnish Jew, fought for Finland’s army, an ally of Nazi Germany. He asserted, “We’ve been called ‘fascist,’ which is a lie,” emphasizing his opposition to Nazi ideology.

He explained that Finnish Jews fought for their nation’s independence, not for Germany’s war aims. Conscription forced him into service, even as rumors of the Holocaust filtered through.

Fearing Soviet domination as much as Nazi oppression, Matso chose to defend his homeland, refusing to salute German soldiers whenever he encountered them.

2 Emil Maurice

Emil Maurice, listed as SS Member #2—second only to Adolf Hitler—was, by Himmler’s own standards, a Jew.

He joined the National Socialist Party in 1919, rose to lead the Sturmabteilung, participated in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and even helped Hitler draft Mein Kampf while imprisoned.

Despite his Jewish ancestry being exposed, Hitler declared Maurice an “honorary Aryan,” shielding him from expulsion after Himmler demanded his removal.

1 Erhard Milch

Erhard Milch rose to the upper echelons of the Nazi war machine, serving on the German War Cabinet and as chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, despite the public knowledge that his father was Jewish.

His friendship with Hermann Göring secured his “full Aryan” status after Göring arranged for Milch’s mother to sign a statement denying his Jewish lineage.

During the Nuremberg trials, Milch faced accusations of conducting lethal experiments on Jewish prisoners in Dachau, including high‑altitude and hypothermia tests. He never expressed remorse, defending Göring and refusing to apologize for his role.