The Jewish Conspiracy

What is the Jewish Conspiracy? What are the allegations?

The ‘Jewish conspiracy’ is yet another manifestation of antisemitism that has been created to encourage and incite hatred of Jews around the globe. The ‘Jewish conspiracy’ is an alleged plan of the Jewish people to world domination. For many centuries the Jewish communities around the world have been accused of conspiring against their governments in order to gain totalitarian control of the social, economical and political sectors in order to achieve world domination. The recurring themes of conspiratorial antisemitism are:

• the supposedly powerful 'Jewish lobby' which facilitates Jews around the world to acquire high-shot positions in politics and the financial world in order to control the world’s affairs;

• the assumption that Jews control every institution in the world;

• the belief that world Jewry has fingers everywhere and is constantly scheming a new plan for world domination;

• the supposition that all Jews are rich and successful

• the presumption that Jewish people obey a central authority - the shadowy and mystical “Elders of Zion”.

Where does it come from/its origins?

Earliest encounter of Jewish Conspiracy in Medieval France

It is difficult to give an accurate date of the origins of the Jewish Conspiracy theory. One of the earliest accusations of Jewish conspiracy involved the destruction of Christendom in medieval French Aquitaine in the 14^th century. The charge levelled against Jews needs to be understood in the context of two significant events: the terrible famine of 1315 to 1317 and the slaughter of Jews in Aquitaine by peasants who believed it is their divine mission to fight the ‘infidels’ and that by killing Jews they were serving Christ. In the following years a rumour circulated that Jews were planning to poison every well and spring to kill off all the Christians. The explanation given by the prominent French student of antisemitism, Léon Poliakov, points out the significant conjunction between the initial act of mass murder of the Jews and the charge of a Jewish conspiracy (he emphasises that from a fear of revenge the attribution of one’s own aggressive intentions to the victims is a common development; the same scheme was used by the Nazi killers to justify the Jewish massacres).

The Black Death that devastated Europe in the 14^th century was understood either as G-d’s punishment or Satan’s work, or both in some cases. It was a common belief that Jews were Satan’s direct helpers who helped carry out his wicked plan. Therefore, it was said that the Jews, eager to eradicate the Christian faith and to take over the world, appreciated the opportunity to assist Satan. It was assumed that the so-called Jewish messengers of evil were travelling to various parts of Christendom to spread the poisonous mixture in order to systematically poison all fresh water wells and springs. The Christian European population, hoping to end their own suffering by helping G-d to defeat Satan, initiated the fatal Crusades against thousands of Jewish town, villages and institutions. Entire Jewish communities were wiped out. [1]

Post- French Revolution 

In 1797, a French Jesuit named Abbe Barruel, a reactionary who opposed the French Revolution, published an article blaming the Revolution on a secret conspiracy operating through the Order of Freemasons. Originally Barruel did not blame the Jews who were enjoying liberties and legal equality as results of the Revolution. However, in 1806, Barruel circulated a forged letter that he supposedly received from the state police, who objected to Napoleon’s liberal policies towards the Jewish community. In this letter he insisted that the responsibility for the French Revolution lay with a Jewish conspiracy (rather than the Masons). 

Blaming the Jewish Conspiracy was a popular strategy in France, Russia, Germany and other European countries. It is still believed today, for example when notorious academics of the 20^th century claimed that the duty of the Jewish people was to “destroy every single surviving trace of true order and superior civilisation”.[2] From the beginning of the 20^th century, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been the bible of conspiracy theorist.

Nazi Germany

In the decades before World War I, a feeling of xenophobic nationalism was spreading across Europe. The Jewish people were believed to conspire against their countries and to threaten the very existence of the nation. The extreme racial nationalism provided the foundations for modern antisemitism and Hitler’s ideology.

Placing the nation above everything else, the extremist nationalists became increasingly intolerant towards minorities within and outside their borders. In the pursuit of national power, the adaptation of militaristic, racist and imperialistic principles soon led to a glorification of war as the only true expression of the nation’s will. Europe’s leading conservatives advocated nationalism, stripping it of all liberal ideals, equality and the peaceful coexistence with other nations. In addition to the rising of the extremist nationalists, the misconception and misuse of Darwin’s evolutionary theory was abused to justify racism and killing of the apparently inferior sub-humans. Hitler used the theory of the human struggle for survival and domination as a core doctrine; it provided him with the necessary ‘scientific’ and ‘ethnical’ justification for genocide.

After the defeat in World War I Germany suffered of great famine, high unemployment rates and the total collapse of its economy after the crash of the stock market. In such desperate situations the easiest way out is to find someone to blame the whole misery on which is precisely what Hitler did. When the National Socialist Party with Hitler as their victorious leader won the election, the whole country was hoping for a miraculous improvement out of their despairing situation. The need for blame and the search for scapegoats have not disappeared. Adolf Hitler, the populist he was, made sure to outplay the anxiety of his people and to put the greedy, Satanic, inferior sub-human Jews in the spot light for the crowds to discriminate and bully. Hitler claimed that the loss of the First World War was the result of treason and betrayal by a subversive Fifth Column in league with their enemies, namely the Jews. He soon came up with ‘evidence’ and various documents stating clearly the racial inferiority of the Jewish people who are secretly plotting to rule over Germany and the rest of the world. According to the Fuehrer, Jews were the source of all evil, defiling Aryan blood and trying to corrupt European culture. Hitler used the Protocols as a major empirical evidence to prove that Jews were indeed conspiring for world domination that would leave the non-Jews in complete and utter misery. The masses had accepted the Protocols as the absolute and unquestionable truth although proven to be fraud and hoax by many journalists before the rise of Hitler’s power.

Towards the 21^st Century

Since the 1960s, the former Soviet Union promoted allegations of secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist leadership. This was an attempt to undermine the suffering and hardship the Jewish people had to undergo during the Holocaust. It also went back to the old and well-known prejudice of the world wide Jewish conspiracy theory. It is said that in order to gain power, German money and the world’s sympathy, the 'Jewish lobby' had exaggerated the number of deaths during the Second World War.

After the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11^th, many Arabic and Middle Eastern newspapers published articles claiming that the attack was work of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. It was alleged to be part of the global Jewish plot of world domination. False rumours have been circulating the Arabic language media, such as the claim that there were no Jewish deaths amongst the Twin Tower attack victims. Accepted theories in the Arab States have included stories such as that the Mossad and Israel had warned ‘their’ people, the 4,000 Jewish World Trade Centre employees, not to turn up to work that day. This implies the allegation that Jews had prior knowledge of the attack by Israel and the Mossad, and were therefore responsible for 9/11. It is argued that 9/11 was an act of the Jewish conspiracy designed to gain absolute control over the Middle East. The logic is that the ‘Jewish lobby’ wanted to enrage the Americans against the Arab world in order to start a massive war in the Middle East against the Arab nations and then take over their oil and land.

The infamous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion still serve as a very strong and efficient instrument of inciting hatred against the Jewish people across the world, and particularly in Arab States. Despite the indisputable evidence and proof of the fraudulent and false nature of the frequently cited document, the Protocols are still given as much authenticity and validity as during the most awful pogrom-ridden times in modern history. Up to this day the Protocols serve as a justification for fighting the common enemy, the Jewish people, who allegedly threaten to conspire against the non-Jewish world in order to achieve total world domination.

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