Accusations of Jewish medical sabotage persisted from early modern Iberia into the twentieth century

Evidence

This state of affairs and difference in treatment between Jews and Muslims has survived into the modern era. Jewish doctors have continued to be suspected of medical machinations against Gentiles. In Germany, the Nazi propaganda outlet Der Stürmer accused Jewish doctors of experimenting on Christian patients, with fatal consequences for the latter, and of practising abortions on German-Gentile women in order to ‘destroy the German Volk’. In a similar vein, the French collaborationist and antisemite Doctor Fernand Querrioux published a violent pamphlet entitled La médecine et les juifs (Paris, 1940), claiming that, with the aid of the socialist Front populaire and freemasonry, medicine in France had become ‘a kingdom ruled by Jews’. Among the accusations hurled at the médecins-juifs was that, as covetous Jews, they wilfully neglected impecunious patients and allowed them to die. Even closer to the early modern Iberian example was the (in)famous ‘Doctors’ Plot’ in the USSR in 1952–53, which began with an article in the state newspaper Pravda denouncing a conspiracy of Jewish ‘saboteur-doctors’ and ‘poisoner-doctors’ with Zionist and imperialist sympathies, whose goal was ‘shortening the lives of leaders of the Soviet Union by means of medical sabotage’. The antisemitic medical purge in Russia that led to hundreds of arrests only came to a halt with the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 427

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the early modern Iberian blood-libel and Jewish-doctor accusations presumably covered earlier in this same book; also parallels ISIS/linked claims about Islam and medicine raised elsewhere.
• STORYSTEM: The Doctors’ Plot — a paranoid state purge of medics halted only by a dictator’s death — is a ready-made historical scenario for a thriller or alternate-history novel.