In July of 1968, Samuel Bowers sat down in his office with fingers poised over his typewriter keys, thoughts filled with fury. As founder and imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he cut a charismatic figure, though one with a militant Christian faith and a hate-filled mind. Just a day earlier, police had killed one of his most trusted assassins and severely injured another.
Bowers had spent the past few years masterminding bombings at Mississippi’s Black churches and, more recently, synagogues as well. His two foot soldiers now riddled with bullets had bombed the Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson on a foggy night nine months earlier and were en route to bomb a Jewish leader’s home when police gunned them down.
At the typewriter, Bowers pounded out a five-page missive to Thomas Tucker, a local police officer who shot one of the Klan members but had earlier faced suspicions of being a Klan sympathizer himself, journalist Jack Nelson wrote in his 1993 book “Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews.”
“Mr. Tucker,” Bowers wrote, “the principle of law as it has been twisted and abused by the animals in the Synagogue of Satan, one of which you were guarding and protecting.” The Klanswoman killed, he insisted, was an American Patriot “doing her limited best to preserve Christian Civilization by helping to destroy the body of an animal of Satan’s Synagogue.”
Flash forward almost 60 years after Bowers wrote his letter.
On Jan. 10, a whole new generation of congregants at Beth Israel, among Mississippi’s oldest synagogues, awoke to devastating news about their house of worship. Someone had set a fire inside. The blaze had started in the library, destroying it along with sacred Torah scrolls, prayer books and myriad other materials. Smoke had filled the sanctuary. No congregants were injured, but they would not be able to worship there for some time.
Later the day of the arson, a young man with scorched hands faced an FBI agent and others investigating the crime. Stephen Spencer Pittman was born in Jackson in 2006, the year Bowers died. Just 19 years old, he allegedly admitted to investigators that he set fire to the temple due to its “Jewish ties,” according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. He dubbed Beth Israel a “synagogue of Satan.”
The term refers to biblical passages in which Jesus described Jews in specific communities who were persecuting the early Christians. Antisemites like Bowers had co-opted the phrase to describe Jews broadly as agents of evil plotting against white Christians. He believed that Jews who hadn’t converted to Christianity were “heretics” and their houses of worship therefore legitimate military targets — especially those like Beth Israel, whose rabbi had been linking arms with civil rights protestors.
Why Pittman, who has pleaded not guilty, used those words remains unclear. But according to the affidavit, after the fire burned the temple, Pittman texted his father, “I did my research.”
What did that research entail? Little is known so far. It remains unclear whether the teenager knew much about the ideology of the people behind the 1967 bombing or if he followed any of today’s antisemitic influencers.
Pittman, a community college baseball player from Madison, Mississippi, did engage in substantial online activity. He appears to have created profiles on multiple social media platforms where he mostly posted about his sport, nutrition and his Christian faith. Yet, shortly before the fire, an Instagram account that appears to be his posted an antisemitic meme of a cartoon character with a prominent nose, a Star of David affixed to his chest and a money bag in each hand.
And across the online world that Pittman traversed, a crop of young influencers have been spreading antisemitism, often rooted in Christianity. They are attracting millions of followers, embracing conspiracy theories of global Jewish takeovers and using terms like the “synagogue of Satan” that people like Bowers would well recognize.
Back Then …
In many ways, the original sin of mass antisemitic disinformation stems from a text called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Published in the Russian empire in 1903, it claimed to be an insider account of Jews plotting world domination. The tropes in it weren’t new, but the text provided rich fodder to those who embraced its “evidence” that Jews were orchestrating a global plan to amass wealth and eradicate non-Jews.
“Only we, the Jews, are qualified to rule the world,” the text proclaimed. “We shall surround our government with economists, bankers, industrialists, capitalists — and the main thing — millionaires — for everything will be settled by gold.”
The fact that the text was proven a forgery did little to thwart those who embraced it. Adolf Hitler called the document “immensely instructive.” Klan groups adopted it as a foundational text.
Bowers used conspiracy theories rooted in “The Protocols” to contend that Jewish puppetmasters were the real masterminds behind the NAACP, the FBI and the young civil rights volunteers pouring into places like Mississippi and Black people were merely their pawns. With that framing, his followers could demean Black protesters and vilify federal agents and Jews, notably those who linked arms with their Black neighbors to demand equal rights — as the rabbi at Beth Israel had increasingly done before Bowers’ henchmen bombed his synagogue and then his home.
“It’s a way of rationalizing racism and finding a way not to acknowledge Black political agency and power,” said William Robert Billups, a University of Florida historian who hails from Mississippi and published research about Bowers and 1960s synagogue bombers in the Journal of American History.
Some like Bowers, later convicted of murdering a civil rights leader, also imbued their white supremacy with a militant theology known as the Christian Identity movement: Jews weren’t only political and economic threats. They were religious enemies, too, ones seeking to usurp white Christians from their place as God’s true chosen people.
“They didn’t see any daylight between Christianity and whiteness,” Billups said. “They did not believe that Jewish people were fully white and didn’t believe they were fully human.” He wrote in his research that Christian Identity followers believed that Jews’ “innate depravity” drove them to pursue world domination.
Christian Identity adherents tapped biblical phrases like the “synagogue of Satan” to justify their antisemitic views. Because they were religious, references from the Bible “came very easily to their tongues,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League who has spent three decades studying extremism.
The phrase appears twice in the New Testament. Both references deal with specific local conflicts between established Jewish communities and the early Christians they persecuted. Jesus was offering support to his faithful as they faced these hostilities, not making blanket statements about Jewish people.
“Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan who say they are Jews and are not but do lie. Behold, I will make them come and worship at thy feet and to know that I have loved thee,” Jesus assured a fledgling church in one of the passages.
But as Bowers continued typing his letter to the police officer that hot day in 1968, he added, “I just do not know what we Christians can do about these Synagogue of Satan Jews other than to oppose them in every possible way and pray for Divine Relief.”
… And Now
In 2015, the “alt-right” white nationalist movement ascended to extremist popularity online in the corners of 4chan and 8chan and on burgeoning white supremacist websites like The Daily Stormer, named for the Nazi Party’s newspaper. Followers often posted jokey, racy and racist memes where they could hide behind the plausible deniability of humor.
That summer, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, a move swiftly embraced by The Daily Stormer’s founder and others. The next day, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof drove to Emanuel AME Church, a historic Black congregation in downtown Charleston, South Carolina.
When Roof arrived, the church’s pastor invited him to join the small group of mostly older women gathered for weekly Bible study. Roof sat with them for about an hour, until the closing prayer. Then he pulled out a pistol.
As he fired more than 70 shots, killing nine people, he said, “Y’all raping all our white women and taking over the nation.”
Roof had discovered the “great replacement theory.” Adherents believe that an elite group, often Jewish and described in terms such as “globalists,” is orchestrating mass immigration of nonwhites along with social policies that reduce white birth rates and otherwise “replace” whites — and their control of the West.
It’s part of a shift in white supremacist ideology since the civil rights era from preserving white dominance to preventing white extinction. More recently, these notions have also bolstered a crop of influencers circulating versions of the ideology to new audiences.
In 2017, hundreds of white supremacists and other extremists flocked to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, brandishing torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” An 18-year-old named Nick Fuentes was in attendance and posted on Facebook that “the rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”
The rally proved a launching pad for a career in commentary that now draws millions of followers for whom Fuentes has described the great replacement theory as the “Great Replacement REALITY.” At a “Stop the Steal” rally in 2020, he applauded Trump for standing up to various groups including “the synagogue of Satan.”
But Fuentes is only one of a slew of influencers who have adopted similar anti-immigration rhetoric and frequently criticize what they perceive as Israel’s power in the United States, particularly related to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. (Supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance contend that the relationship benefits both democracies.)
Candace Owens, whose YouTube channel has 5.75 million subscribers, once worked for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and later at The Daily Wire until she was pushed out last year following conflicts with co-founder Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish. In 2024, she described an anti-Christian global conspiracy. “It does seem that they’re trying to almost now indoctrinate the entire world into their satanic faith. Like I said, it is my belief that this is a synagogue of Satan,” she told viewers.
Similarly, Andrew Torba, founder and CEO of the social media site Gab, popular with extremists, wrote last fall that the federal government is owned by Israel and “its powerful fifth column of Jewish elites in our country.”
“Naming the group that is the engine of our nation’s subversion isn’t bigotry,” Torba added, “it’s a Biblical diagnosis of a spiritual cancer. It is identifying the modern-day ‘synagogue of Satan’ that Christ Himself warned us about.”
There’s no indication that Pittman, the teenager charged in the Beth Israel fire, was aware of any of these comments.
ProPublica reached out to Fuentes on his website and on X and to Torba through Gab’s general email. We reached out to Owens on her website’s media request portal. (Her website tells users, “We do not allow pornography, incitement to violence or gore, discussions about active drug use and other topics in that vein.”) None responded to requests for comment about the Beth Israel fire and their use of the term “synagogue of Satan.” Torba’s X account posted our emailed questions with the message, “I regret to inform you that journos are at it again.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks antisemitic incidents including assaults, harassment and vandalism, found an 893% increase over the past decade with particularly large leaps in 2023 and 2024, according to its most recent audit. In 2024, it found 9,354 incidents compared to 1,267 in 2016. The audit also notes that much of the recent surge was related to protests, often on college campuses, against Israeli actions in Gaza, some of which included rhetoric such as “death to Israel.”
“Increasingly, extreme actors in the anti-Israel space have incorporated antisemitic rhetoric into their activism, and it has become commonplace for perpetrators across the political spectrum to voice hatred of Israel or conspiracy theories about the state in a range of antisemitic attacks,” the ADL report says.
Synagogues also received hundreds of bomb threats, and fears of violence remain a persistent part of what Jewish communities face. Indeed, in the early morning hours of Jan. 10, a man in a hoodie broke a window and slipped inside Beth Israel Congregation. He poured gasoline and ignited a fire near the spot where Klan members had burned the synagogue in 1967. Once again, the people of Beth Israel were left to rebuild from the ashes of antisemitism. Their library and offices will have to be demolished, it appears, but engineers found the sanctuary walls remain structurally sound.
Since the fire, at least 15 churches have reached out to Beth Israel saying, “Our house of worship is your house of worship,” said Zach Shemper, the synagogue’s president. “There has been such a lovely, almost overwhelming outpouring of love and compassion from our local community.”
The people of Beth Israel are, for now, holding services in a Baptist church in Jackson, one they opened their doors to in the 1960s, before the bombing. The Baptists needed temporary space then because they had just broken away from a church that refused to let in Black worshippers, and few other houses of worship would open their doors.
Great Job Jennifer Berry Hawes & the Team @ ProPublica for sharing this story.
