The image and obsession of “the international Jew” as the ultimate conspiratorialist is over 1,000 years older than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent purloined in the 1920s. What probably is surprising to many is that the early history of this mental pathology is tied up with Jewish-Muslim conspiracy theories.
The current issue of the Forward includes an example of the resilience and relevance of this conspiracy theory. Donald Snyder writes about the resuscitation of the anti-Semitic Right that is underway in Poland in concatenation with the rise of Poland’s Law and Justice Party (polish acronym PiS) which has an absolute majority in the new Parliament. (http://forward.com/news/327387/poland-turns-hard-right-and-hits-the-jews/?attribution=home-hero-item-text-1)
When some 50,000 protestors demonstrated in Wroclaw, Poland’s fourth largest city, against the new government’s plan to pack the Polish Constitutional Court, the government-orchestrated counter-protest featured as placard deriding the democracy protestors as “the committee to defend Jewish-Communist wealth.” At another recent pro-government demonstrators shouted: “Wroclaw is being de-Polanized as the Jews are buying up homes in the city.”
At a third such demonstration protesting the European Union plan that would have Poland admit some 7,000 Syrian refugees, demonstrators chanting “God, Honor, and Fatherland” denounced the proposed immigrants as Islamists—and, one might think incongruously, set fire to a previously prepared effigy of a Hasidic Jew holding the E.U. flag. “Raped, beaten and murdered by the Islamic savages,” the also crowd shouted. “Do you want it on our streets?”
Strange as it may seem, the Jewish-Muslim conspiratorial nexus is nothing new. Significantly—and this is of particular interest to me as an historian of the slave trade—this conspiracy theory evolved in parallel with the much better-known charge that Jews bought, stole, and abused Christian children that escalated from the accusation that Jews were slave traders into the ritual murder myth.
The 150 known blood libels brought against Jews during the Middle Ages often reflected local conditions, but they were also typically viewed as Christian self-protection against an international Jewish conspiracy modeled on the slave trade. The first trial in 1150 in England which nineteen Jews were hanged for the murder six years before of the boy, William of Norwich, set the pattern when the monk Theobold, a converted Jew, claimed that “the chief men and Rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain assemble at Narbonne, where the Royal seed [resides], . . . and they cast lots for all the countries which the Jews inhabit” in order to pick the one country each year to target for child killing.
A generation later, the Jews of Winchester were blamed for murdering a French boy who had been sent to to them by the Jews of Rouen with a letter in Hebrew bearing lethal instructions. During the Middle Ages, this intentional Jewish conspiracy was alleged to victimize, not just individual children, but entire Christian communities like Visigothic Spain, which the Jews were said to have sold out to the Saracens in the eighth century, and Barcelona and Bordeaux, which were attacked by Vikings supposedly in league with Jews in the ninth century.
Eleventh century accusations that the Jews of Orleans had instigated the Caliph al Hakim to despoil Christians and Christian holy places in Jerusalem helped fuel the First Crusade during which Christian Crusaders on the way to the Holy Land despoiled, terrorized, and murdered so many German Jews. Later, during Shakespeare’s time, the playwright Christopher Marlowe's villain Barabas is the all-purpose betrayer betraying Christians to Turks, Turks to Christians, and even his fellow Jews. His conspiracies with the Turks are of special concern to the Christians of Malta.
In the international conspiracy game, the Jews can’t win no matter what. Hence, the counter accusation in Tehran as well as among Arab conspiratorialists that radical Muslim terrorism is a false flag operation by Zionists to defame Islam especially in the minds of Christians.
The near-unanimity of the organized American Jewish community in favor of giving haven to Syrian refugees today buys the Jews absolutely no good will—quite the opposite—in the global hatefest that is conspiracy theory.
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