Antisemitism and meaning-making on Telegram in Russia’s Muslim Republics: from distant war to local moral boundaries

Antisemitism increasingly circulates through digital networked publics where distant conflicts are reinterpreted as locally meaningful moral dramas. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of four influential Telegram channels based in Russia’s regions of Tatarstan and Dagestan, this article examines how Israel-related antisemitic narratives transform the war in Gaza from a remote tragedy into a local meaning-making event. Combining cultural trauma theory, social identity theory, and scapegoating approaches, the study conceptualizes antisemitism not merely as a pre-existing prejudice but as a symbolic repertoire that assigns roles of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, thereby stabilizing collective identities and establishing moral boundaries. The analysis identifies a hybrid narrative framework in which Soviet and post-Soviet anti-Zionist and conspiratorial tropes, including Nazi analogies and Holocaust inversion, intersect with contemporary anti-Western and pan-Islamic narratives, alongside blood libel, dehumanization, “Jewish privilege,” and self-victimization. Despite stark differences in socioeconomic, demographic, and institutional contexts, Dagestani and Tatar channels reproduce similar binary interpretative schemas. The findings show how networked scapegoating and mediated cultural trauma enable antisemitic discourse to flourish in semi-public, non-extremist spaces, organizing perceptions of global politics and legitimizing hostility toward an out-group while also illuminating broader dynamics of reactive conflict spillover and moralized enemy construction in digital environments.