Tucker Carlson and the Blood Guilt Trope

Take the Log Out of Your Own Eye First

Pontius Carlson washes his hands of original sin, the death of Christ, and prior support for the Iraq war.

Tucker Carlson has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of trying “to punish two members of my family. . . . because he, as he has said in public many times, believes in blood guilt, Amalek. You know, when someone commits a crime against you, you punish not just him, but his family, his bloodline.” He went on to argue that “There’s no idea that’s less Western than that, more anti-Christian than that. Christians reject that. Netanyahu doesn’t.” Nor, per Tucker, is it Netanyahu alone who believes in blood guilt. He’s also claimed that “The Israelis have been happy to murder tens of thousands of children in Gaza because they believe in blood guilt. That’s just—that’s the truth. They say it out loud. Amalek, ‘We believe in blood guilt.’ Like the children are responsible for the sins of their parents, so we’re going to kill them.” For Tucker, it’s not just Israelis who are driven by bloodlust, either. Here he is in his interview with Hitler fan Nick Fuentes: “The current claims that I'm a cancer from Ben Shapiro, whatever. We need to be excised from the body of conservatism is a genocidal position that basically encourages violence, as they well know.” Actually, it was Steve Bannon who called Shapiro a “cancer,” but who needs accuracy when you’re bandying about false genocide accusations?

The link between Israel’s alleged policy of collective punishment in Gaza and Shapiro’s call for conservatives to reject antisemitism may seem tenuous, but for Tucker, they both reflect “an Eastern view . . . that's totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization.” For “Eastern,” substitute “Semitic,” and the connection becomes clearer. (Tucker also once called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” so at least there’s historical consistency in his derision toward Semites.¹) Now, to be fair, Tucker doesn’t explicitly say that Jews are inherently genocidal and opposed to Western civilization. Instead, he lets Fuentes say the quiet part out loud: “The plan of greater Israel, the blood-and-soil nationalism of Israel. It stems from this ethnoreligion, which is Judaism. . . . you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness, ethnicity, religion, identity.” Tucker implies Shapiro is anti-Western because he’s Jewish. Fuentes is at least honest enough to say it, with Tucker’s nodding affirmation. Tuckerism is Groyperism wearing the bowtie of respectability.

Blood Guilt in the Western Tradition

The irony of Tucker’s fixation on Jewish “blood guilt” is that it’s actually a deeply Christian idea. While the story of Adam and Eve is found in the Hebrew Bible, it was Augustine who systematized the doctrine of original sin, drawing in turn on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. According to Augustinian theology, which became Latin Christian orthodoxy, Adam’s sin of disobeying God was passed down to his descendants. Our inherited guilt (you might say “blood guilt”) can only be absolved through the grace of Christ, the second Adam. Indeed, though he’s called Christian Zionism a “heresy,” Tucker himself has been accused of Pelagianism—a heresy named after Augustine’s theological rival, Pelagius—for his denial of corporate guilt, and, by implication, corporate salvation.² But more directly relevant to Tucker’s attacks on Israel and Jews is the Christian notion of a “blood curse,” which is scripturally rooted in the Gospel of Matthew:

So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” Then he released for them Barab′bas, and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.

The accusation of deicide—that Jews, as a collective, are forever responsible for the death of Christ—is the oldest, deadliest, still-extant example of blood guilt there is. To be clear, many Christians reject the charge. According to the 1566 Roman Catechism, it is Christians themselves who bear special responsibility for Christ’s death since “If [the Jews] had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know Him, yet denying Him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on him.” Pope Paul VI’s 1965 Nostra aetate also explicitly declared that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” But Tucker’s claim that blood guilt is foreign to Christianity is simply a lie. It’s an especially pernicious lie because Tucker himself alluded to Jewish collective guilt when he likened Charlie Kirk to Jesus, whom he said was murdered by “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking!’” Never mind that it was the Roman governor Pontius Pilate who ordered Jesus’ execution (and Roman soldiers who physically crucified him), and a disillusioned Mormon who killed Charles Kirk.

In addition to this rather important detail about Pilate (does washing your hands really absolve you of your actions?), there are a number of other problems with the Jewish deicide charge, including:

1. It beggars belief that a crowd of ancient Jews would proclaim of Jesus that “His blood be on us and on our children!” If they didn’t view Jesus as the messiah, the claim would be meaningless, because his death would’ve been of no particular significance. If they did view Jesus as the messiah, then why would they volunteer to assign guilt for his death to themselves and their children? The more likely explanation is that Matthew was retroactively justifying the Roman destruction of the Temple via Jewish culpability for Christ’s death, and responding to the Jewish rejection of Christianity with the hostility of a wounded kinsman (Matthew himself being Jewish). It was also politically safer to blame the Jews—a subject people that was further disempowered following the failed Great Jewish Revolt of 66–73 CE—than the ruling Roman authorities.

2. Regardless of whether a Jerusalem crowd volunteered responsibility for Jesus’ death, there were as many as 5 million Jews in the world at the time. Who elected this crowd representative of all Jews? Even if we take Matthew at his word that “all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death,” 1st-century CE Judaism was not a monolith. Why should Dead Sea sectarians (who rejected the authority of the chief priests), the Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria, poor Galilean peasants, and Babylonian sages living outside the Roman Empire be blamed for the death of a man (or god) they’d never even heard of?³

3. Jesus and the apostles were Jewish themselves. So were the patriarchs and prophets of the Hebrew Bible, whom Christians adopted as their own. As Paul says of his fellow Jews: “to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.” If Jews deserve blame for killing Jesus, surely they also deserve credit for the messiah himself? Why focus on the Jewish crowd that allegedly called for Jesus’ death, and not, per Luke, “the great multitude of the people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him” on his way to Golgotha? At the very least, shouldn’t the two cancel each other out? Paul himself says of Jews that “As regards the gospel, they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”

4. The very idea that children bear responsibility for the sins of their parents is rejected by the Hebrew prophetic tradition held sacred by Christians. Ezekiel: “Only the person who sins shall die. A child shall not share the burden of a parent’s guilt, nor shall a parent share the burden of a child’s guilt; the righteousness of the righteous shall be accounted to them alone, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be accounted to them alone.” Jeremiah: “In those days, they shall no longer say, ‘Parents have eaten sour grapes and children’s teeth are blunted.’ But every one shall die for their own sins: whosoever eats sour grapes, their teeth shall be blunted.” Likewise, the Deuteronomic Code explicitly states that “Parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for parents: they shall be put to death only for their own crime.” Paul affirms that “each of us shall give account of himself to God.”

It’s on point #4 that Tucker is partially correct. While blood guilt is embedded in Christianity and the Western tradition, so is the competing principle of individual moral responsibility. But theologically, this principle was transmitted to Christianity via Judaism and then secularized during the Enlightenment. Jews can’t be anti-Western because they believe in blood guilt, because Western opposition to blood guilt is itself rooted in Judaism.

Amalek Through the Ages

In the Hebrew Bible, the Amalekites ambush the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt. Upon the Israelite victory, God tells Moses that “I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” Amalek was later identified with enemies of the Jewish people, but as an archetype, not an extant ethnic group.⁴ Rather, Jewish tradition holds that the Amalekites disappeared when King Sennacherib of Assyria mixed together different nations circa 500 BCE (which, incidentally, means that the Israelites didn’t actually destroy them⁵). Notably, Judaism considers Haman, the Persian villain of the Purim story, to be a descendant of Amalek, but not the Persians as a whole.⁶ Clearly, if Amalek were held to be a genealogically determined collective, this would be a nonsensical claim. (The Jewish tradition that descendants of Haman studied Torah in Bnei Brak also belies the trope of inherited enmity.) By contrast, for many medieval Christians, Jews were both a perfidious archetype and a living, neighboring community, which predictably led to outbreaks of violence. Symbolism isn’t blood guilt, particularly since Amalek is characterized in the Bible as an aggressor who “surprised you [the Israelites] on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.” Accordingly, Amalek is classically invoked as a response to violence, not as an incitement to violence.

It’s unsurprising that after October 7, when Hamas engaged in its own sneak attack on innocents, some Jews recalled their symbolic enemy. The biblical call to “Remember what Amalek did to you” also appears on Holocaust memorials in The Hague and Jerusalem. The intent isn’t to cast all Germans as members of an antagonistic Bronze Age tribe, but rather to link Nazi crimes with a symbol of evil in Jewish folk memory. Insofar as some Israelis do conflate every Palestinian (as opposed to just Hamas) with Amalek, they should be rightly condemned—with reference to Judaism’s own sacred texts. Certainly, there’s nothing inherently antisemitic about criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza or questioning America’s relationship with Israel. But the Groyper/Tuckerite American right is fixated on identity, not policy. For Tucker, the supposed Jewish belief in blood guilt is itself a form of blood guilt: a through line that connects Netanyahu with Shapiro with the “hummus eaters” who killed Jesus and Charlie Kirk with—as elaborated by his ally and id, Nick Fuentes—every other Jew. Rather than reviving ancient slanders, Tucker should study a more apt passage from the Gospel of Matthew instead: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

1. Though Qatari money seems to have cured Tucker of his contempt for Arabs.

2. Tucker also seems to be a latter-day follower of the Marcionite heresy. Marcion, an early Christian theologian formally excommunicated by the Church of Rome in 144 CE, called for the excision of the Hebrew Bible from Christianity. Indeed, the Christian canon as we know it was formalized in response to Marcionism.

3. In the 19th century, Avraham Firkovich, leader of the Crimean Karaite sect, successfully argued that his community should be exempt from Russian antisemitic laws since it wasn’t in Judea at the time of Christ’s death. The tsar apparently didn’t consider the related notion that no living Russian Jew was in Judea at the time of Christ’s death.

4. Amalek has also been psychologized as a symbol of the yetzer hara, evil urge.

5. It’s also impossible for Jews to literally “blot out the memory of Amalek,” since Amalek’s deeds are recorded in the Torah. For Arnold Eisen, “The only way to fulfill the commandment to forget . . . is to change the world so thoroughly that the sort of evil attributed to Amalek becomes utterly inconceivable.” More prosaically, Jews blot out the memory of Haman on Purim by shaking noisemakers and getting drunk.

6. Likewise, Ayatollah Khamenei—who died on the Sabbath before Purim—has often been compared to Haman, but not the Iranian nation that suffered under his reign.