Phil Mole. Skeptic. Volume 10, Issue 3, Fall 2003.
Not long after the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, the Internet teemed with legends and rumors about the cause of the tragedy. An alarming number of these legends implicated Jews in the attacks. The American website Information Times, using misinformation propagated by the Lebanon’s Al-Manar Television, claimed that 4,000 Jews were mysteriously absent from their jobs at the World Trade Center on September 11. This fictitious story was a clear attempt to demonstrate Jewish foreknowledge of the terrorist attacks, and possibly even blame them for planning the acts of terrorism as a means of prompting American retaliation against Israel’s Muslim enemies. More fantasies about the evil intentions of Jews would follow during the coming months. In March 2002, the Saudi-Arabian daily newspaper Al-Riyadh ran an article by Dr. Umaya Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faisal University in Al-Dammam claiming that Jews kill non-Jews and use their blood to make Passover matzos.
To many in the West, these claims are puzzling. However, Western Christian culture was the birthplace for many of the anti-Semitic attitudes currently expressed by Islamic extremists. The claim published in Al-Riyadh that Jews need Gentile blood for rituals, for instance, was popular in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. And even in contemporary Western culture, one occasionally finds hints of Jewish conspiracy theories, such as the common belief that Jews control the media.
The “media control” theory illustrates the difficulties involved in assessing the causes of anti-Semitic ideas. Although Jews represent only about 2% of the American population, they are dramatically prominent in the newspapers, television and film industries. The reason for this is traceable to complex social and historical factors, such as the large numbers of European Jews who arrived in the United States during the formative years of Hollywood, the cultural preferences of Jews for these occupations, and the social desire for Jews to live and work with their friends and relatives. Thus, notions of Jewish “domination” of the media aren’t entirely ridiculous, but they are also far from completely rational. Jewish over-representation in the media has certainly not resulted in frequent depictions of specifically Jewish issues on television. Jews working in the media need to appeal to a broad demographic base, and hardly find it prudent to promote pure “Jewish” interests foreign to most members of their target audience. Depictions of Jewish rituals such as hat-mitzvahs and Hanukah celebrations are much less frequent than corresponding depictions of such Christian cultural hallmarks as Christmas parties and church wedding ceremonies.
To realistically assess the causes of anti-Semitic theories, we need to carefully examine the specific times and places in which the theories originated, and avoid comforting oversimplifications of complex issues.
Beginnings: The Christian and Medieval Context
Many ancient peoples such as Egyptians and Romans expressed hostility toward Jews. This hostility could properly be considered anti-semitic when is focused on perceived “Jewish” traits such as exclusiveness. Still most modern anti-Semitic attitudes can be traced to the development and eventual success of the Christian religion, although this does not necessarily indicate that Christianity has been the most important factor determining expressions of anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew who claimed that his mission was to fulfill Jewish law, not to replace it. His followers also understood his role in human history in terms of the Jewish scriptures collected in the Septuagint, or Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. Christianity, in its early stages, was a fringe religion embraced by small groups of both Jews and Gentiles who saw in Jesus the embodiment of an ideal religious life.
Since Rome had crashed an uprising of Jewish revolutionaries in 70 CE, Christians did not wish to provoke further Roman wrath by publicly blaming the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate for the death of Jesus. Thus, the gospel authors were rather generous in their portrayals of Romans. According to the author of the Gospel of Luke, both Pilate and the Roman centurion present at the crucifixion proclaim the innocence of Jesus. Pilate even offers to release Jesus, finding he has done nothing wrong, but the Jewish crowds reject his offer (Luke 23: 4-5). The author of the Gospel of John also emphasizes Pilate’s failed attempts to free Jesus, and the bloodlust of the Jews in demanding his death. But John goes further in designating “the Jews” as a people different from Jesus and hostile to his mission. In John 8:44, Jesus tells “the Jews” that, far from being the children of Abraham or God, they are actually the children of Satan. Jesus, of course, could not have been making an ethnic or racial classification about all Jews, since he was also Jewish. But these distinctions would be lost in later times, when Christians would be fully separated from the Judaic roots of their religion and perceive “the Jews” more readily as a separate community. Jews, as a people, would be judged guilty of deicide.
After Rome officially recognized Christianity in the 4th century CE, Judaism was its main intellectual and spiritual rival. Many of the early church fathers frequently took opportunities to denounce Jews as the main contributors to Christian heresies such as Arianism (the belief that Jesus was not fully divine), and as general obstacles to the spread of Christian faith. One of the most persistent critics of these “Judaizing” tendencies in Christian thought was John Chrysostom. In many eloquent orations, he emphasized the dangers of Jewish religious beliefs, and reminded his listeners of the role Jews played in the arrest and execution of Jesus. While John did not seem to display any deep hatred for Jews in his personal interactions with them, there is no doubt that his sermons contributed considerable ideological grist for the anti-Semites of later times. Those who wished to view Jews as “Christ-killers” would often turn to Chrysostom’s sermons for confirmation of their biases.
Through its early conflicts with Judaism, Christianity acquired a certain set of attitudes and doctrinal assertions regarding the inferiority of Judaism. These attitudes did not always lead to acts of hatred, and actual expressions of anti-Semitism varied greatly between times and places. Still, Christian beliefs about Jews were often far more hostile than those expressed by adherents of other religions. For instance, the Islamic conquests of the Holy Land in the 7th century and the strong Muslim presence in Spain beginning in the 8th century placed many Jews under direct Muslim political control. Many more Jews flooded into the Islamic Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Catholic Spain in 1492. Jews did not have full political and civil rights under either Muslims or Christians, and encountered restrictions on their occupations and places of residence. There were some instances such as the attacks on the Jews of Granada in 1066 and 1090 when Muslims treated their Jewish subjects with considerable violence. Yet, their treatment as subjects of Islam seldom approached the worst moments of their lives in Christian nations. There are few events in the history of the Jews in Muslim countries before the 20th century comparable to the acts of hatred and intolerance they endured in Christian Europe.
Much of the differences in fortune between the Jews of Islam and those of Christendom can be traced to the differences in perception of Jews between the two religions. Muslims knew that Jews conspired against Mohammed, but they also knew that the Jewish plots ended in failure. Jews were a nuisance, but not a serious threat to most Muslims. Theoretically, Christians should also have perceived what they saw as Jewish actions against Jesus as fruitless, since alleged Jewish plots did not prevent Jesus from fulfilling his role as the Messiah. In practice, however, Christians dwelled on the sinister portrayals of Jews found in the New Testament and the teachings of the church fathers. To Christians, Jews were more likely to appear as menacing conspirators with a special mission to undermine the religious legacy of Jesus. This sinister image of Jews allowed Christians to develop various paranoid fantasies about diabolical Jewish rituals and conspiracies.
One of the racier charges against Jews resulted from, all things, the adoption of the church dogma of transubstantiation—the literal transformation of the Eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The magical aspects of this Church ritual spawned a variety of popular myths and legends. Not surprisingly, some of these myths involve nefarious schemes by Jews to steal hosts (and thus steal the body of Christ), and then mock or defile the host in rebellion against Christianity. According to one widely discussed account, two Jews in Passau in 1478 successfully schemed to obtain eight Eucharistic hosts. They stabbed the hosts until blood oozed from them and threw them into a fire, but they would not burn. Instead, an image of the Christ child appeared, and several doves and angels miraculously escaped from the flames. This host desecration charge would resurface with slight variations many times, and would find expression in popular art of the period.
However, the most sinister allegation against Jews in Medieval times was the charge of “ritual murder.” According to anti-Semitic theorists, Jews kidnapped Christian children and drained them of their blood, often killing the children in the process. Jews would then use the blood to perform religious or occult rites. Some Christians maintained that Jews used this ill-gotten blood to bake Passover matzos or anoint rabbis, while others argued that Jews needed the magical powers of Christian blood to remove the foul smell allegedly inflicted upon them by God for killing the messiah. Still more outlandishly, some believed that God cursed male Jews by making them weak and effeminate because of their complicity in the death of Jesus. Male Jews were supposedly so feminine that they menstruated, and required Christian blood to stop bleeding.
Table 1 shows the frequency of ritual murder charges in various European countries from the 12th through the 16th centuries. The first documented ritual murder accusation occurred in 1148 in England, and spread most quickly through German-speaking Europe, partially because large populations of Jews expelled from other areas of Europe had resettled in Germanic lands. One of the most famous ritual murder charges was the Simon of Trent affair of 1475, in which a 25-year old local Jew was blamed for the unexplained death of a 2-year old boy. Under heavy torture, the Jew “admitted” he had killed the boy and drained his blood for use in magic rituals. Such coerced confessions provided solutions for unresolved tragedies, and allowed neglectful or abusive parents to find scapegoats for the deaths of their children. Such charges would remain common until the 16th century, when Protestant polemics labeled belief in ritual murder as Catholic superstition, helping to discredit these allegations.
The reduced number of ritual murder charges during the 14th century was not due to any decrease in anti-Semitism. Instead, new conspiracy theories about Jews spreading the Black Death temporarily distracted popular attention from ritual murder paranoia. As in ritual murder trials, torture played a prominent role in extracting bogus confessions from Jews. Subjected to actual or threatened torture, Jews confessed to spreading the deadly disease by poisoning wells and public fountains. The charges linking Jews to the onset of the plague seemed to originate in southern France and in Spain, where a large share of Europe’s Jews lived prior to the expulsion edict of 1492. Soon, mob violence against Jews erupted in many European towns, including Barcelona, where 20 Jews were slaughtered and much property destroyed.
We must try to understand these expressions of anti-Semitic hatred in a larger context. Most acts of violence against the Jews originated in the underclasses, and not with incitement by church or government authorities. Sometimes, in fact, mob actions against Jews were part of larger reactions against the existing order. This was certainly true of the Cossack leader Bogdan Chmielnicki, who led an uprising against Polish overlords who exploited the peasantry. Many Jews died in the Chmeilnicki uprising, but largely because they were visible targets as financial mediaries responsible for collecting payments from the peasant classes. Official authorities were certainly not free of prejudice by modern standards, but they seldom condoned mob violence and often punished the perpetrators. During the height of the ritual murder accusations, for example, Austrian emperors placed Jews under their protection and sometimes explicitly forbade further ritual murder charges against them. Still, popular prejudice against Jews remained, and would nurture the development of a new kind of anti-Semitic theory in the 18th century.
The Growth of Conspiracy: Jews in the Modern World
Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, many anti-Semites portrayed Jews as bogeymen who plotted to harm Christians through ritual murder, well poisonings and various black arts. Those who were not inclined to attribute such magical and diabolical traits to Jews still tended to regard them as social undesirables who profited in peddling and money lending. But these ideas were not yet modern conspiracy theories, with their imagined secret networks of individuals controlling the politics and economies of entire nations. To understand how these theories arose, we need to examine the historical context of the period before and after the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Before the late 17th century, national and religious identities were intertwined. Most people assumed (as some members of the Christian Right still do) that a nation containing people of different religious affiliations would lack the bonds of spiritual and intellectual affinity necessary to survive. For if some citizens pursued a religious identity separate from the majority faith of their nation, they would not feel the same spirit of kinship shared by their countrymen. They would worship in different places and follow different religious rituals and holidays, reducing their communal ties with other citizens and compromising their suitability for civil and military service. For all these reasons, religious minorities were considered potential sources of subversion, and did not enjoy equal rights in any country.
Jews, of course, were a well-known and conspicuous minority. Partly because of the prohibitions limiting their choices of occupations and residence, and partly because of cultural and social ties characteristic of most minority groups, Jews were largely a separate people. They did not scatter diffusely across the population of Europe, but tended to concentrate within particular towns and communities. Their range of occupations was broader than contemporary accounts would have us believe, but nonetheless, large numbers of Jews did enter professions such as banking and usury. There were many factors influencing these occupational choices. Civil service positions and many other occupations were closed to Jews, and difficulties in obtaining land (coupled with the threat of expulsion by local governments) discouraged trades such as agriculture that required large investments in land and property. Cultural preferences for jobs shared by other members of their community was another important consideration. Jews, therefore, were culturally distinct from the larger society in which they lived.
Beginning in the late 17th century, a new generation of political thinkers challenged existing bonds between religion and state. To a growing number of modern thinkers, society was based on a contract between rational individuals seeking to safeguard basic rights and qualities of life. One could not justify the existence of a given society based on arguments from tradition and political or religious authority. The influence of these thinkers would spread throughout Europe during the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Enlightened Europeans often discussed their new philosophical ideas in salons or social clubs. Some of these clubs were professional associations of tradesmen, and adopted rituals of membership to establish their uniqueness. The Freemasons, originally an association of professional tradesmen such as stoneworkers (hence the name “masons”), was one such organization. With time, however, the society downplayed its professional affiliations to attract more members. By the mid-18th century, the Freemasons were primarily a philosophical club in which the latest intellectual trends would be discussed. Because of the society’s relative exclusiveness and involvement in political thought, many prominent political leaders were members. Eventually, a number of other new societies would model themselves after the Freemasons, with the Bavarian Illuminati being among the most famous of them.
The existence of these “secret societies” would intersect in important ways with the development of modern conspiracy theorists and their preoccupation with Jews. The democratic revolutions that swept through the West during the 18th century gave the new breed of political theorists a chance to put their ideas into practice. These revolutions caused social upheaval on unprecedented levels, and many people tried to understand the underlying reasons for the changes affecting their lives. The actual causes, of course, involved a complicated mixture of politics, religion, economics, and the contingencies of history. But most of us cannot, with any satisfaction, shake our fists in anger at impersonal social forces. We need to blame people for the perceived ills of society, and we need to imagine that these people are acting with established motives.
To many people, secret societies such as the Freemasons and Bavarian Illuminati seemed to be behind the sweeping changes occurring in their societies. After all, some prominent leaders belonged to these organizations, and political ideas were known topics of discussion at their meetings. As secret societies continued to spread and diversify across Europe, former members added to the growing paranoia by publicly “revealing” hysterically sordid details about life among their lodge brothers. Their motives in spreading these exaggerated revelations varied from spite to ambitions of political favor, but in either case they filled the public mind with fantasies about secret rituals, dark oaths, and evil plots.
It was also at this time that public attention began turning toward the political rights of Jews. The ideals of the Enlightenment declared that societies should be open to participation by all men, regardless of their religion. But in practice, political leaders questioned whether Jews could become fully integrated members of their larger nations. The “enlightened despot” Joseph II granted some civic rights to Jews in southern Austria in 1782, but the possibility of full political emancipation would not arise until the French Revolution. Many leaders, reviewing the isolation and perceived moral deficiencies in Jewish societies, expressed doubts that Jews could become ideal citizens. Others feared the power Jews “already seemed to have, and argued that giving them more freedom would harm gentile society. Despite protests such as this, political citizenship would come to French Jews in 1791, and other European countries would follow the French example. Still, many persisted in thinking of Jews as a separate and hostile social entity made all the more dangerous through their newly acquired rights. The phrase “state within a state” would increasingly be used to indicate the sentiment that Jews were a community unto themselves, and lacked full loyalty to their native countries.
Not surprisingly, Jews soon began to displace Freemasons and Illuminati as the prime suspects of conspiracy theorists. One of the fast linkages of Jews to the new political conspiracy theories arose in 1806, when Napoleon convened a special assembly of rabbis to discuss potential obstacles to Jewish assimilation. At this time, the French Jesuit Abbe Augustin Barruel circulated a forged letter blaming the Jews for the French Revolution. In an earlier pamphlet, Barruel had attributed the cause of the Revolution to a conspiracy organized by Freemasons, but he had no logical difficulty in updating his theory to match the times. By mid-19th century, the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy was also appearing in popular literature. Hermann Goedsche’s novel Biarritz (1868) included a chapter called “In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague” depicting a secret meeting of representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel. At the end of this fictional meeting, a rabbi gives a long speech expressing the hope that Jewish world domination will be complete by the time of the next gathering one hundred years hence. This speech, eventually known as the “Rabbi’s Speech,” would circulate independently through Europe in the late 19th century, although later copies would fail to mention its fictional origin.
Belief in Jewish conspiracies gained further plausibility from the appearance of prominent Jews and Jewish organizations in European society. The Alliance Israelite Universelle, founded in France in 1860 to help persecuted Jews in Russia and Rumania, soon became an object of suspicion and derision. For the first time, some Jews also earned high-ranking offices in government. In Britain, Lionel Rothschild entered the British Parliament in 1858, and Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister about a decade later. Although baptized a Christian, Disraeli possessed Jewish ancestry and continued to consider himself a Jew throughout his life. He also seemed to consider Jews a superior race with powerful influences on world politics and economics. In his novel Coningsby, the Jewish character Sidonia proclaims that “the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes”—a reference to the hidden levers of Jewish domination. The increasing prominence of certain Jews such as the famous Rothschild family seemed to verify Disraeli’s words. The Rothschilds were extremely influential in international affairs and exerted powerful influences on national policies. Thus, beliefs in growing Jewish power over international affairs were not entirely without foundation, however exaggerated they may have been.
Suspicions of Jewish power would eventually lead to the most infamous of all conspiracy theories: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The theory started in France but developed in Russia, a country where Jewish assimilation continued to lag behind Western Europe. In Russia, Jews constituted a “state within a state” more than anywhere else. Most Russian Jews still lived within the so-called Pale of Settlement, and constituted a culturally and physically distinct population. Russian Jews overwhelmingly spoke Yiddish instead of their country’s native tongue—a feature distinguishing them from the much more culturally assimilated Jews of German-speaking countries. While certain Russian Jewish communities (especially those of Odessa) achieved high degrees of cultural distinction, many others were very poor. For this reason, leftist revolutionary groups often contained significant numbers of Jews who wished to remodel the existing society into one more open to Jewish aspirations. Although the majority of Jews did not belong to these groups Gentiles paid special attention to those who did.
In 1881, revolutionaries assassinated Russian Czar Alexander II in Russia. Some Jews seem to have played a role in the assassination plot, along with many Gentiles, but popular outrage often focused exclusively on the dangers of the ‘Jews” to Russian society. A wave of Jewish persecutions started in Russia, often involving “pogroms,” or mob attacks on entire Jewish communities. Jewish shock at the violence committed in these pogroms was a major inspiration for the birth of the Zionist movement, which sought to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine where Jews could finally be free of the restrictions and persecutions they had known in Christian states. Led by the Austrian Jew Theodore Herzl, the Zionists held their first congress in Basel in 1897.
This is the context in which the Russian Sergey Nilus published the most popular edition of the Protocols in 1905. Most probably inspired by the continuing circulation of earlier anti-Semitic tracts such as “The Rabbi’s Speech,” the Protocols consists of 24 lectures allegedly given by the leader of a secret Jewish government regarding Jewish plots for world domination. According to this Elder, the Jews would accomplish this by amassing wealth at the expense of the Gentiles and ultimately bringing about the financial and political collapse of Gentile society. According to the sixth protocol, the Elder declares:
Soon we will start organizing great monopolies—reservoirs of colossal wealth, in which even the large fortunes of the Gentiles will be involved to such an extent that they will sink together with the credit of their government the day after a political crisis takes place … We must use every possible kind of means to develop the popularity of our Supergovernment, holding it up as a protection and recompenser of all who willingly submit to us.
Following the outbreak of World War I, the Protocols spread throughout Europe and were translated into many languages. still, not everyone accepted them with equal enthusiasm. In 1921, the London Times definitively proved the Protocols were a forgery based on an 1865 political tract by the Frenchman Maurice Joly called Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. A political tract criticizing Napoleon III, Joly’s book had absolutely nothing to do with Jews or their alleged conspiracies. It contained a fictional dialogue between the liberal political philosopher Montesquieu and the more cynical Machiavelli on the advantages and disadvantages of liberal democracies. Members of the Russian secret police apparently forged the Protocols by extracting some of “Machiavelli’s” statements about the need to manipulate the masses in order to maintain stable societies, attributing them to the Elders of Zion. In many places, the Protocols are almost an exact plagiarism of Joly’s text. Still, those who wanted to believe in the Protocols found reasons to consider them genuine. Confusing cause and effect, they could claim that the best proof of the truth of the Protocols was that their “predictions” about the changes in European society had been verified. (Of course, the Protocols originated at a time when these changes had already occurred, so this was no “prediction” at all). True believers could even claim, falsely, that Maurice Joly was a Jew, and his original text really was an expose of the Jewish conspiracy after all).
The Protocols found a particularly attentive audience in Germany after World War I. Prior to this period, Germany had actually been one of the more hospitable places for European Jews to live. Jews were largely assimilated into German culture, making many important contributions of their own, and enjoyed a large measure of political rights. Almost all observers, Gentile or Jew, agreed that Germany was a much better place for Jews to live than the more repressive societies of Russia and Rumania.
The Jewish situation in Germany would change only after disillusionment with the Versailles Treaty and the economic depression of the mid-1920s led to growing dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic. Some dissatisfied elements of the population came to regard Jews as the chief agent of Germany’s misfortunes, and interest in the message of the Protocols increased. One of the most fervent believers in the truth of the Protocols was Adolf Hitler, as seen in Mein Kampf:
To what extent the whole existence of this people [the Jews] is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their final ultimate aims.
With the triumph of Hitler and the Nazi Party, the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy would become, in the words of one eminent historian, a ‘Warrant for genocide.”
Epilogue: The Continuing Appeal of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories
The development of Jewish conspiracy theories depended upon a number of historical factors interacting in novel ways with the activities and culture of Jews. While them factors are complex, our analysis allows us to reach several general conclusions.
First, much has been made in recent years of alleged direct links between Christian doctrine and anti-Semitism. There is no doubt that Christian portrayals of Jews as Christ-killers found in the New Testament and the writings of the early church fathers created an undercurrent of hostility toward Jews in Christian culture. However, this hostility was often more latent than active. If Christianity was the primary cause of anti-Semitism, we should expect to find equal expressions of anti-Semitism among all of the Christian states of Europe. This is not the case. Anti-Semitic violence was rare in the Christian nations of Norway, Sweden, Britain, Italy or Denmark—a hard fact to explain if Christianity is the major determinant of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites may have tapped into Christian tradition for inspiration to nourish their hatred, but the motivations for their hatred were products of particular times and places.
Similarly, we cannot accurately explain the final culmination of Jewish conspiracy theories in the Holocaust by pointing to anything uniquely anti-Semitic in German culture. To be sure, many Germans did not like Jews, but some degree of aversion to Jews was common in “virtually every European country. Not all of these countries developed a Final Solution. Germany prior to 1917 was in many ways a model of Jewish cultural assimilation, and lacked the outbreaks of mob violence characteristic of turn-of-the-century Russia. We must seek explanations for the Final Solution in the contingencies of Germany’s post-WWI history instead of seeing it as the fruition of centuries of unalloyed anti-Semitism, as some recent historians have done.
Finally, modern Jewish conspiracy theories arose as people tried to explain the widespread changes in European society beginning in the late 18th century. Belief in conspiracies allows us to feel moral outrage against human enemies, instead of impotence in the face of impersonal historical forces beyond our control. To many, the growing prominence of Jews in late 19th century Europe was intricately linked to the changes in society. The explanation available to modern historians—that Jewish emancipation was simply a result of the same social forces driving the democratic revolutions—was not as emotionally satisfying as blaming the Jews for the social upheavals in Europe.
This need to explain unpleasant realities in emotionally appealing terms may well be the most important cause of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and may enhance the effects of the other factors. As a case in point, the most violent anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of today originate with militant Middle Eastern Muslims and other ideological opponents of Israel. Although Islamic doctrinal assessments of Jews had always lacked the special animosity of the Christian tradition, anger over the continuing existence of Israel now muses many Muslims to perceive Jews as a diabolical threat. Since these once mighty nations of Islam cannot drive out the “intruders” in their midst, some Muslims find something supernaturally evil in the Jewish character that enables them to resist defeat. It is surely no coincidence that Arabic translations of the Protocols began to appear after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, and mainstream Arabic newspapers now often resurrect medieval legends about Jewish ritual murder practices. Comic strips depicting the horrible consequences of continued Jewish power are also common in the Middle East. American right-wing extremist groups such as the Church of the Creator even blame Israel for 9/11.
Jewish conspiracy theories have gone from being a special lunacy of Western countries to an international problem, Unfortunately, it seems quite possible that all those disenchanted souls who reject certain aspects of the modern world will continue to view Jews with suspicion, and seek refuge in blaming familiar enemies.