Antisemitism by image, not by text? Iudeus-ex-machina visual strategies and indexical misrecognition in a Swedish media firestorm

This article investigates a media firestorm that broke out when a Swedish politician reposted material that was perceived by some as outright antisemitic and by others as a critique of antisemitic tropes. Our aim is threefold. Firstly, from an empirical perspective, we unpack the discursive contention surrounding the relationship between written language and image as potentially separate carriers (or not) of antisemitic meanings in digital environments. Secondly, on a theoretical level, we argue for the analytical value of bringing the Multimodal Discourse‑Historical Approach (MDHA) to Critical Discourse Studies into dialogue with a linguistic‑anthropological conceptualization of indexical misrecognition. MDHA helps trace how historically sedimented antisemitic tropes are multimodally constructed and recontextualized, while indexical misrecognition helps explain how different social actors arrive at competing interpretations of the same multimodal ensemble. Thirdly, methodologically, our analysis offers a cautionary counterpoint to corpus‑based, detection‑oriented paradigms of identifying antisemitic discourse; it underscores the need for quantitative hate‑speech analysis to move beyond isolated utterances and images and instead attend to the often ambivalent, latent, and contested nature of text/image nexus points on digital platforms.