For decades, a Belgian Jew named Arthur Langerman has been assembling what can best be titled “antisemitica.” Ben Cohen describes this frightening record of the casualness, and obscenity, of European hatred of Jews:

Gathered entirely between the end of the Second World War and the present day, Langerman’s collection . . . spans several centuries, from a grotesque 16th-century painting that depicts the supposed slaughter of the infant Simon of Trent for Jewish ritual purposes to a contemporary cartoon that shows a menacing spider marked with a Star of David sinking its claws into a map of the Gaza Strip.

The images—widely considered the largest collection of its kind in the world—are drawn from across six centuries, from all over Europe, the Middle East, and North America. This spread in terms of geography and time is matched by the sheer range of formats: postcards, newspaper and magazine cartoons, paintings, sculptures, and everyday objects such as coffee mugs transformed into trinkets with the addition of a Jewish caricature. Taken together, they demonstrate that anti-Semitism was not just an ideology of hatred, but a perverse type of entertainment through which the non-Jewish creators of such content—in the main, artists and caricaturists who are themselves no longer remembered—stripped Jews of their humanity and dignity.

It’s not that the anti-Semitic motifs contained within are unfamiliar, more that the cartoons, paintings, and objects that showcase them across the years do so through the most virulent and repellent representations. Jews are invariably portrayed as ugly and corpulent, as demonstrated in the World War II-era caricatures of tuxedoed Jewish capitalists surreptitiously serving Communist interests; dirty, as demonstrated by a crude drawing from Poland showing a sinister Jewish family delightedly living in a hovel as one of its children defecates into a bowl on the floor; and predatory.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.