Anti-Semitism lurks behind modern conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theories are more popular and more widespread in the 21st century than they have ever been. They are powered by the rise of the internet and social media, enabled by the declining influence of traditional gatekeepers of opinion such as newspaper editors, TV executives and book publishers, and encouraged by the spread of the uncertainty about truth and falsehood encapsulated in the perverse concept of “alternative facts” popularised by, among others, former US president Donald Trump and his spokespeople.
Over the centuries conspiracy theories have pointed the finger at many different groups, from the Jesuits to the Freemasons, but it is above all Jews who have been the object of the paranoia they represent.
A minority religious community in an overwhelmingly Christian Europe, the Jews were blamed in the Middle Ages and after for a whole range of seemingly inexplicable events, most notably perhaps the Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that killed half Europe’s population in 1348-1349, and the French Revolution which overthrew the traditional European order in the years after 1789. Massacres and pogroms were the result.
It was in Russia under Tsar Nicholas II that the most notorious of anti-Semitic tracts originated. Known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish “wise men” held in 1897 to plot the overthrow of civilization. It’s been described by many historians as a document of immense power, a “warrant for genocide”, inspiring Hitler to carry out the extermination of six million Jews in what he called “the final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe”. It’s been translated into many languages, reprinted many times, and it’s sold millions of copies.
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