The British royal family killed Princess Diana because she was supposedly carrying an illegitimate child. The CIA ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy because he had suspicions about the bureau’s motives and wanted to shut them down. Aliens are abducting humans because they use them as testing subjects for new technology. The Jews have a plan for global domination because they want—well, that part’s a bit unclear.
Although there are scores of publications providing evidence for the purported Jewish desire to take over the world, this particular conspiracy theory neglects to provide the reasoning behind such a plot, which begs the question: Why exactly are Jews seeking to control the world?
Since the Middle Ages, Jews have been blamed for a plethora of man-made and natural crises, including Wall Street crashes, kidnapped children, 9/11, AIDS, and various earthquakes. According to David Aaronovitch, a columnist at The Times and author of Voodoo Histories, most of these lead back to a hidden Jewish agenda to rule the world. In modern history, this belief stems from the widely-distributed circular The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a fictionalized account of powerful Jews discussing their plans for domination. Despite being proven as a forged piece of work, the tract has remained popular since its publication in 1905, and has consistently inspired anti-Semitic sentiments.
While Aaronovitch does an admirable job of deconstructing the validity of the Protocols, even he cannot provide the motives for the supposed plot in the first place.
“That’s a great question, isn’t it?” he said in an interview with FightHatred.com. “We live in a marvelously simplistic world though, and you can’t always say who is going to benefit in what way. That’s the peculiar construct of these types of theories.”
Aaronovitch attributes the persistence of this particular theory to the “exotic” nature of the Jews. They appear to have powerful roles in society, and yet they possess a certain exclusivity—their own language, rituals, and difficult conversion process—that makes them appear slightly secretive. The failure to truly understand the religion is what creates this Hydra-type conspiracy, where theories simply sprout from one other.
According to Mark Fenster, author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, this international Jewish conspiracy has become a matter of convenience, a distraction from the details of world affairs that doesn’t necessarily require a solid motive so much as a unifying attitude. Stopping the Jewish “threat” is used by many religious and political leaders as a rallying point for their own legitimacy. If these manifestations of hatred result from a sense of naïveté, then the means take precedence over the intended ends.
Presently, the situation in the Middle East and the Arab Diaspora is heightening the traditional role of Jews as evil masterminds. Allegations that Jews are after infinite money and power, or making Israel a bigger state, is providing another group with their own scapegoat for recent events.
“We tend to prefer to have some great big causality,” Aaronovitch said. “It’s more comforting to believe that the humiliation of Arab history in the last fifty years is because of incredible Jewish cleverness than the incompetence of a marvelous government which is too corrupt and is failing.”
Accusations of a Jewish quest for world domination do ebb and flow, but dispelling the belief completely won’t be easy. In fact, authors such as Fenster and Aaronovitch say the villainization of Jews has become more defined in past years; in turn, there is increased tolerance of anti-Semitism.
It seems then, that people are simply searching for an explanation to justify the fast and dramatic changes occurring in our world—regardless of any concrete final objective.
"It is like one of those novels in which the hero encounters an archaic or ancient legend which has somehow managed to survive, still potent, to the modern day," Aaronovitch said. "So, a Palestinian child in a Gazan class at the beginning of the twenty-first century may well be hearing things written by a Parisian lawyer about Napoleon III 140 years earlier, falsified by a Russian spy three decades later, and used as a pretext for racial mass murder in Germany."
View David Aaronovitch’s documentary “Blaming the Jews”. He also recommends Ben Goldacre’s columns and books, available at www.badscience.net.
