@TurquoiseBaubles
Sometimes when I come across weird threads on twitter I don't know which is more worrying. The though that these people might be just making up what they write (and others are believing them) or the thought that they actually believe it themselves.
It's a real insight into the human brain, twitter. And I don't think I like it very much.
I think, in some cases, people are trying it on.
I came across a pseudo-academic comment on twitter about how goblins were a medieval anti-Semitic trope.
I specialise in narrative theory and allegory, and I've never come across this idea at all. In fact, it goes against what we know about how folklore and mythology forms, which tends to be a processing of collective historical memories of superceded cultures and peoples into the realm of the supernatural: female pagan herbalists and midwives become witches, Roman civilisation becomes the world of fairy, trolls and giants are the memories of neolithic European indigenous peoples with some sort of ancestral head worship practice etc.
So I look at comments about medievalism, and really wonder where this stuff is coming from. Someone even claimed they did a PhD in medieval anti-Semitic folkloric creatures and I really scratched my head at that one because I couldn't actually think of one instance outside maybe the concept of the Wandering Jew - - largely because there's just not really that much literary material in English to reference prior to the 15th century.
To find folkloric tropes about Jewish people, you'd probably be better looking at the Eastern Mediterranean region because you've got the appropriate length of settlement and displacement in that area.
And even then, the only references I could think of relating to a people living in cave systems in Anatolia were the Christian Armenians.
None of this tracks from a historical point of view. To some extent, it's like trying to argue that kelpies are an anti-Hindu trope because someone made a film where kelpie characters refused to eat beef.