JTA — In the first episode of its second season of “The Bear,” Hulu’s acclaimed series, the character Richie describes damage at the titular restaurant as “the result of some failed Jewish lightning.”

As far as antisemitic slurs go, that’s a pretty deep cut. “Jewish lightning,” for the uninitiated, is a derogatory euphemism for arson, based on a historical accusation that Jews are predisposed to torch their homes and places of business for the insurance money.

How historical? That’s what independent scholar Jeffrey Marx set out to find out a few years back. In his new book “Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I,” Marx examines the origins of the stereotype, why it entered popular culture and — and this was touchy — whether there was any truth to the charge that arson was a particularly Jewish thing.

The result is either the book we need right now — at a time of economic anxiety and renewed scapegoating of immigrants  — or, given the rise in antisemitism, the last thing we should be talking about.

In a recent interview, Marx said he was aware that the project involved a delicate balance: examining antisemitic accusations without reinforcing them.

“I’m not sure, given the climate now, it’d be something that I’d be jumping feet first into,” said Marx, a former congregational rabbi. “There’s a little bit of hesitation of, again, is this good for the Jews?”

Ultimately, he thinks it is: “My research shows that arson is not an essentialist Jewish activity, it was practiced by a very small number, and again, in times of all sorts of economic ills and identity issues, the Jews are often the first to get blamed.”

Marx said the book began as an extension of his earlier book on “Abie the Agent,” the first American newspaper comic to feature a Jewish protagonist. (The strip’s creator, Harry Hershfield, hoped a sympathetic Jewish character would defuse antisemitic stereotypes.) In that research, he said, he kept encountering recurring stereotypes attached to Jews in late 19th- and early 20th-century American culture.

“Either cheap clothing salesmen or pawn brokers and arsonists,” he said.

What began as an observation about cultural tropes became a historical investigation into how those tropes spread — through “photograph records and silent movies, cartoons, newspapers and comic journals.” News syndicates had a field day with figures like “Sam the Burner,” a Brooklyn sewing machine operator turned arsonist for hire, and Ida Lieberman, a widowed mother of two who served four years in prison after torching her tenement apartment in 1893.

“Wherever I looked,” he said, “it seems I kept finding evidence of........

© The Times of Israel