Baron Jacob Rothschild has died, baruch Dayan ha emet. He was eighty-seven, a financier and patron of the arts, not a person whose career I followed closely or someone whose circles – royalty, millionaires and business magnates – would ever intersect with mine.

I’m very sorry to say that his death has trended on X, formerly Twitter, with an explosion of gloating, ill will and cursing. Something similar happened when Henry Kissinger died a short time ago but Kissinger was a statesman with responsibilities on the world stage. I have even seen one of the gloaters remark that these are good times as first Kissinger and now Baron Rothschild has died.

If I were not familiar with the mythology surrounding the Rothschild family on social media, I would not understand the reaction but for a long time I observed the fandom of Jeremy Corbyn on social media, and I saw how ‘the Rothschilds’ were for many of them a malevolent folkloric entity, as represented in the theories of David Icke, who is dissimilar from Mr Corbyn but with an overlap in the support base.

Two years ago and at intervals since then, there was an outbreak of malice on Twitter concerning the untimely death of my friend Dr Pete Newbon, an activist against antisemitism and author and lecturer on the subject of Romanticism in English Literature. It was very painful to see strangers on a social media platform rejoicing in the suffering of this young man and taunting his friends with their graphic imaginings.

Well, I did not know Baron Rothschild so the abuse won’t hit me so hard but it is certainly disagreeable and even alarming.

Here are some examples from Corbynist groups on Facebook of the demonization of the Rothschild family. Needless to say, these are just comments I saw and caught in screen shots, a fraction of those which were posted.

All the above screen shots are from Facebook groups. As for Twitter, such is the glee expressed over the death of Jacob Rothschild, you would think he was Attila the Hun, or worse. This shows a very small sample of messages I personally received, since yesterday, when there were many more.