The shabby old man was a “loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved.” And he drew the boy, “a young friend of mine” he said, deeper into his clutches. He ensured that the innocent child “was seldom left alone; but was placed in almost constant communication with the two boys” whom the “repulsive” old man had already seduced.
It is a classic story of “grooming,” dating to a time long before that term acquired its menacing contemporary meaning; by degrees, the “villainous old man,” alternating between affection and threat “prepared” the mind of the boy in his clutches, “by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue for ever.”
In the overheated right wing moral panic over “groomers,” it is difficult for me to not think of these passages from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, where Fagin attempts to pervert the eponymous young hero’s pure soul. Fagin is what was known in Dickens’ time as kidsman, an adult criminal who kidnapped orphans, trained them in the arts of crime, and ran a stable of prepubescent cutpurses and pickpockets.
To the Victorian imagination, the mere thought of older men and homeless young boys – the “street Arabs” of London’s slums – engaged in a criminal enterprise evoked fevered fantasies of illicit sex. The historian Seth Koven notes in Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London that the two thoughts invariably ran together. Frederick Greenwood, a crusading London Journalist and social reformer “left no doubt” in his 1866 reformist classic A Night in the Workhouse that he had witnessed orgiastic “sex between men and youths.”
“What was done was worse than what was said,” Greenwood wrote, “and what was said was abominable beyond description or decent imagination.”
More explicitly to the Victorian mind, these kidsmen, and Fagin in particular, were invariably Jews. “Gonoph” was the slang used in 19th century London for young criminals, an anglicization of ganif, the Yiddish word for thief. And to make his point absolutely clear, Dickens refers to his sleazy, sexually questionable villain as “the Jew” more than 300 times in the pages of Oliver Twist, more often even than the name Fagin.
The narrative of “the groomer” promoted by Christian nationalist extremists like Ron Desantis, Madison Cawthorn, and Majorie Taylor Greene assembles all of this content. Indeed, the rhetoric has landed so effectively with the redhatted neototalitarian masses because it resonates with the most cherished myths of Christian antisemitism.
Over the last week, when the holidays of Easter and Passover overlapped, I could not help but reflect on the persistence of canards like how the mere presence of Jews defiled Christian society, by poisoning wells and seducing god-fearing maidens into prostitution – all so graphically evoked in the 1940 Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude. Or, perhaps more trenchantly, the Blood Libel, which usually arose around Easter and Passover, and especially when the holidays coincided.
The Blood Libel was always pretty much the same: In order to celebrate Passover, it goes, Jews – typically the Jews – would kidnap a Christian child (usually a young boy), ritually slaughter him, and use his blood in the Passover ritual, either as a component of matzoh, or to mark our doorposts against the Angel of Death. And the story has had a remarkable staying power, from the first accusation against the Jews of Norwich in 1144, to Simon of Trent in 1475, to the most recent Blood Libel in the United States in Massena, NY in 1928. The accusations usually led to the same result – bloody pogroms like the Rindflisch massacres in Germany in the 13th century, the judicial torture and execution of whole communities, as in Trent, and expulsion and exile. And Christians have, over almost a millennium, really enjoyed their Blood libel. It is a central theme in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, widely considered a monument of English literature, which inspired the Anglican folk veneration of “Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln;” even William Shakespeare evoked it in Shylock’s “pound of flesh” in The Merchant of Venice.*
While, for many years, polite people didn’t say such things in polite company, the rise of QAnon has given the age-old antisemitic libel a new lease on life. Only now, it’s not just the Jews, but liberals, the “radical left,” and the Democratic Party, which are controlled by Jews like George Soros – who is, according to believers, simultaneously a Communist, a Nazi, the Rothschild heir, the leader of the international Jewish banking conspiracy, and maybe a lizard-person, to boot – who are abducting innocent Christian children to harvest their blood and satisfy all kinds of sexual perversions.
QAnon believers see connections everywhere, and mobilize all of the beloved shibboleths of white, Christian, American batshititude going back to the early days of modernity. You know: banks and investment capital are the illegitimate tools of a shadowy cabal of Jews who are not really Americans (because they’re not Christians, and America is a Christian nation), but who have seized control of the State away from true Americans (who are white Christians), in order to advance an agenda to abolish slavery, so Black men can murder white men and rape their white wives and daughters, in order to create what the racist ideologue Madison Grant called a “mongrel race” that the Jews could dominate (since, you know white people are too strong for that shit when they’re pure),† exsanguinate, sell into sexual slavery, and exploit for our perverse sexual enjoyment.
Let me take a breath for a minute.
Only now, the story goes that there is a vast conspiracy of sexual predators (Jeffrey Epstein) protected and directed by the Democratic Party (George Soros), the “radical left” (Bernie Sanders), and global banking (the Rothschilds) with headquarters in pizza shops and schools around the country, using teachers (educated by Jewish intellectuals at those fancy colleges), and Hollywood (which is run by the Jews) to groom nice white Christian kids into perverts… All in order to undermine white, Christian manhood and bring about what Tucker Carlson calls The End of Men. The Jewish conspiracy stuff is in sotto voce, but it’s there.
I can’t make this shit up, even if I wish it was made up. The bottom line here is that the Christian nationalist narrative bears a striking resemblance to Dickens’ novel because they both draw on the same source material. Moreover, the “grooming” narrative, which holds that the use of certain pronouns and the mere mention of the existence of homosexuality in the classroom will corrupt children, has gained so much traction in such a short time (until about six months ago, grooming mostly happened to dogs)‡ because the redhat constituency was primed for it. Christian nationalists have always believed in the Blood Libel; Governor Desantis did not have to convince them of anything.
The “grooming” panic is just another wrinkle in a well-worn fabric of lies and myth that has disciplined Christian life and belief for almost two millennia by activating Christians’ abject terror of the other so they will step into line with their leaders. Whether it is Satan summoned by idle hands, immigrants with strange accents, people with darker skin or different sexual desires, or knowledge that does not come from the Bible or their pastors, what is new or different, they believe, can only corrupt and destroy. And the model for all of this is the Jews.
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* When Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice around 1596, he had never actually met a Jew, as the entire British Jewish community had been expelled more than 300 years before, and was certainly merely deploying old cultural tropes.
† “The world has seen many such mixtures of races, and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value,” Grant wrote in 1916.
‡ The “Child Grooming” entry on Wikipedia did not even exist before the end of February 2021.
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Image: “Oliver Twist’s First Introduction to Fagin (from the novel by Charles Dickens),” by Henry Benjamin Roberts (1831–1915), Walker Art Gallery, London