After the Accusation Changes: David Deutsch's Pattern and the Evolutionary Persistence of a Moral Permission

David Deutsch characterizes the Pattern as a recurrent impulse to legitimize hurting Jews for being Jews. His proposal separates legitimation from personal hatred and direct violence, while acknowledging that its historical transmission remains unexplained. This paper develops that unresolved question through two distinct approaches. An institutional extension of extended phenotype theory examines how transmitted representations acquire external supports that affect their subsequent reproduction. Evolutionary game theory examines how promotion, toleration, and challenge can be sustained by interactions among differently motivated actors. Their combination yields a candidate mechanism: inherited channels alter the consequences of public conduct, and that conduct maintains or dismantles the channels. Historical illustrations concern Henry Ford’s publishing network, the Dreyfus affair, and the doctrinal reversal articulated in Nostra aetate. A dispute over long-run persecution in Germany supplies an identification warning. The analysis distinguishes persistence, indifference, and effective challenge without treating any of them as an inevitable outcome. Deutsch’s Newton analogy is interpreted as a demand for productive new problems, rather than a warrant for explanatory immunity. The contribution is a falsifiable mechanism and research design, not a validated general history of antisemitism.