littlegoythings:

For centuries and in almost every country, there has thrived the idea that Jewish conspirators are behind all the ills of the world. In the 14th century, for instance, the black death produced pogroms (anti-Jewish violence) as communities blamed Jews for the disease. The idea was remarkably tenacious. One study showed that, in German towns and villages where 14th-century pogroms had taken place, the Nazis did best in local elections in the 1920s.

The themes of the Protocols — the Jew as secret plotter, puppet master, subverter of nations, rootless cosmopolitan — were also found in the antisemitism of the Nazis and the paranoia of Stalin.

So when right-wing populist governments in Hungary and Poland select as their public enemy George Soros, a Jewish financial speculator, and accuse him of being the puppeteer behind a conspiracy to undermine their democracy, is it surprising that Jews are nervous about what is unfolding? Or that Jews should be concerned about any hint that such a campaign could be exported to Britain from countries where antisemitism has been historically so strong?

And on the left, of course, the same conspiracy theory thrives, just in a different guise. The international Jewish super-state is Israel and the elders of Zion are the plotters. Instead of being a tiny country the size of Wales, Israel is the seat of a Rothschild-Zionist plan for world occupation, having first secured the obedience of the United States by deploying Jewish money to organise a powerful lobby to which America is in thrall.

(Just to be clear, I have always believed that it is not antisemitic to criticise the government or history of Israel, but it is antisemitic to propagate the idea of a powerful global Zionist conspiracy).

There is even, on the left, a neat trick in which the Jews are either, as Zionist collaborators, blamed for the Nazis or have in fact become the Nazis, thus adding to the list of woes laid at the feet of the Jews the one thing you’d have thought we couldn’t possibly be accused of.

A common theme in these conspiracy theories is that Jews aren’t really citizens of anywhere, they are wandering Jews, forever working on their super-state. To be made exiles, as was the Hungarian-born George Soros and as were my parents, and then to be accused of rootlessness is surely the ultimate irony.

George Soros and the roots of antisemitism