We think of classic conspiracy mythology as inherently rightwing; mostly due to the German National Socialists and radical Islam. If you don’t believe in a Jewish world conspiracy at all or only lightly you are not regarded as a trustworthy committed radical rightwinger or Muslim, but rather as someone who is gullible, a coward or a co-conspirator.
The origin of the ideology was clearly socialist however. Starting around the early 1800s the early leftwing in Europe created modern antisemitism with all the political, economical and espionage-related dimensions. The data on this is undeniable. We know the exact authors and we have the exact texts that were going viral in an age of pamphlets and print books.
In the past, antisemitism was primitive and built like the fairy-tales of the Brothers Grimm. In fact, one of the collected Grimm stories was “The Jew Among Thorns“. It’s about a young man who can torture a jew magically by playing a musical instrument. Another classic folk fairy tale was like a meme of the medieval times which was repeatedly localized and rehashed: A child murdered by jews is still somehow alive.
The modern antisemitic conspiracy mania was meant to appear scientific and alluded to real people with real corporations and banks which were sometimes used by European empires to equip and fund wars.
The early left subversives were keen to hide their true motives though for the antisemitism. Anybody, jewish or not, could be a player of capitalism which would inevitably lead to imperialism which would inevitably lead to a breakdown of humanity. Socialism was aimed at the entire world anyways, including the many places where nobody cared about Jewish people at all. So why bake in antisemitism into socialism? Two reasons:
- It was easier to get the anticapitalism past the censorship when it was dressed in antisemitism.
- It added a satanic element to capitalism.
Empires like the French were fragile constructs and needed to develop business and attract investments after the end of the monarchy and the end of the outdated peasant serf system in which most people labored on the fields producing grain. In pure empire logic the authorities needed to allow some criticism of the new ways and conditions; a kind of pressure valve. If this criticism was directed against jews and not directly against the government, there was a higher chance of circulation of the material. Throwing jews under the bus was seen as a calculated collateral damage for the advancement of socialism.
The satanic panic introduced through modern antisemitism was a booster for socialist subversion. Many elite circles in Europe had survived or even thrived in the era of enlightenment and kept using the old justifications for their power: God’s will and the necessary duty to lead and protect. Antisemitism claimed that capitalism was dominated by actual satanists and collaborators of those satanists. While ancient mystery cults had survived amongst European elites after the fall of the Western Roman empire, it is extremely hard to reconstruct those details beyond mere freemasonry.
The left subversion had a powerful secret ally in the form of the British Empire and more specifically the supercluster of very old aristocratic lines of Welfs, Wettins and Reginars. This supercluster had the aim of weakening its main rivals France, Germany and Austria. Any tool to achieve that aim was fair game. Socialist subversives destabilized Britain’s rivals while the British crown was slowly cultivating its own domestic controlled brand of leftism, later progressing into the Fabian society.
The early subversives
- The socialist French journalist Alphonse Toussenel published the book “The Jews, Kings of the Age: A History of Financial Feudalism” in 1846. James de Rothschild, who had acquired the railway line from Paris to Belgium, was used as a central figure. Toussenel warned emphatically that Jews would seize world power.
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) considered Jews an inferior race of people. Jews were always parasites, an “enemy of the human race.” Therefore, only two options remained: “This race must be expelled to Asia or annihilated. By iron, by fire, or by expulsion, it is necessary that the Jew disappear.”
- Edouard Drumont, a French journalist, published “La France Juive” in 1886, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
- Karl Marx, despite his own jewish family background, picked up the antisemitic tropes
Thomas Duncombe and the conspiracy template for the left and the right
As early as 1828, the leftwing British politician Thomas Duncombe loudly complained about Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s son, Nathan. He claimed Nathan possessed “unlimited wealth,” controlled “war and peace,” had couriers who allegedly delivered information faster than those of princes, paid ministers of state, had his fingers in other European governments, and aspired to dominate Britain.
This polemic already contained all the essential points that form the basis for the grand Rothschild tales and the overarching myth of a Jewish world conspiracy. Duncombe was considered a talented populist who had won his parliamentary seat with fiery speeches against the government. However, suspicions arose that these speeches had been written for him by Baron Henry FitzGerald de Ros, whose father was a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. The Baron’s maternal grandfather had been a member of the Royal Society, almost at the same time as the leader of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, John Robison, wrote the manipulative bestseller conspiracy book “Proofs of a Conspiracy.”
Thomas Duncombe, the spendthrift and British parliamentarian, likely adopted his views on the Rothschilds from other sources. Duncombe’s close friend was the French nobleman Alfred d’Orsay, whose mother was the illegitimate child of the Duke of Württemberg, whose mother, in turn, came from the Thurn and Taxis line. Which clan was implicated, through the agent Alexander Horn, in John Robison’s first modern bestseller conspiracy book? Thurn and Taxis.
Alfred d’Orsay served the French king and was present at the coronation of the British King George IV. In London, he formed a connection with the Earl and Countess of Blessington. He was also close friends with British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton of the Privy Council, who wrote the bizarre book “Vril: The Power of the Coming Race,” which was later enthusiastically received, particularly by German right-wing extremists.
Duncombe is responsible for the 1866 book “Jews of England – Their History and Wrongs.” He claims to be scholarly and fair and uses extensive footnotes. However, the work contains the template for the conspiracy mythology of the later leftwing and right-wing extremism.
The Jews for Duncombe were the main “capitalists of the time,” especially because of their banking activities. For him, an identical greed and ruthlessness could also be found among the king, the nobility, and the Church of the time.
The Jews’ “particular devotion to financial matters” made them the “dominant social class when it came to money,” much like the “Lombards of the 12th and 13th centuries.” In reality, the money market at that time was an experimental field closely monitored by the ruling aristocracy.
According to Duncombe, King William II used “his vassals of the race of Abraham” to increase his wealth.
Duncombe modernized antisemitism, transforming it from medieval fairy tales into a pseudoscience. He repeatedly refers to the Jewish “capitalists” of the time who exploited people’s misery. The aristocracy of the era allegedly became heavily indebted to Jewish moneylenders and, when faced with loan repayment problems, loudly and publicly denounced Jews as enemies of Christianity. Duncombe maintains that Jews were not only perpetrators but also victims, yet ultimately responsible for the misery themselves through their financial dealings.
Duncombe does concede, however, that the moneylender takes a great risk, and that high interest rates may have to compensate for this risk. He quotes pages upon pages from old documents detailing which nobles owed money to Jews. The implication is clear: Jews subsidized the nobility and, in return, received ever-increasing status and thus opportunities to expand their power. Ultimately, all ordinary people suffered as a result. At no point is the idea raised that the nobility had the means to completely use Jewish bankers as front men. What would prevent a nobleman from controlling the credit system himself with the help of Jews, who could be controlled using standard intelligence methods?
Duncombe essentially lumps together Jews and non-Jewish nobles, who also fall under Duncombe’s definition of “capitalists.” His book already contains the entire foundation of left- and right-wing extremism.
Duncombe describes pogroms against Jews to create the impression of fairness and scientific rigor, but in this context, he sees capitalism as the cause and the Jews as being to blame. Duncombe describes the omnipresent exploitation that inevitably had to erupt into violence.
Outside of Parliament, Duncombe advocated for the support of the working class. He chaired the National Trade Conference in 1845 and helped organize the National Association of United Trades for the Protection of Labor (NAUT), of which he was president for seven years. Duncombe was a frequent speaker at trade union rallies and publicly advocated for a number of strikes.
He himself was, of course, privileged, maintained close ties with the aristocracy, and sought to enjoy the benefits of capitalism. Through gambling, he amassed debts of £120,000 to £140,000. His creditors had him arrested in 1847, and he was heavily criticized for using parliamentary privilege to evade punishment. Indeed, his critics accused Duncombe of using a previous trip to Canada to support his friend and political patron, Lord Durham, as a ruse to escape his debts. The Earl of Durham was a member of the Privy Council.
Temporary pause of the mythology
Around the year 1850 the left subversives had spread wide and far. But so had capitalism and the dreaded bourgeoisie. This race could not be won with fearmongering about imperialism and a modern rehash of old blood libel stories about jews. The left needed another force which could further damage capitalism and the growing class of citizens who owned assets: A new radical rightwing movement which hated progress, individualism and capitalism. Again, Britain and the aristocratic supercluster would also benefit from such a movement destabilizing France, Germany and Austria.
The left started to drop or pause the antisemitism around the year 1950 and the new rightwing began to adopt it, almost verbatim. New groups popped up everywhere, often funded by aristocrats belonging to the supercluster.
But the left was not done with the antisemitic conspiracy mania. The Fabian Society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London. Actually an imperialist project of the crown to reshape the empire away from the outdated form.
John Atkinson Hobson, who came from an affluent family and fashioned himself an economist and social scientist, read the socialist publications of the 1880s in London and befriended several prominent Fabians who would found the London School of Economics, some of whom he had known at Oxford. Hobson’s publications during the 1890s led to the end of his former academic status and he went on to cover the Second Boer War in South Africa for the newspaper “The Manchester Guardian” as a correspondent. Up close and personal to the conflict, he claims to have had some sort of epiphany: Modern capitalism, like the actions of the mine owner Cecil Rhodes in Transvaal/Africa, would inevitably escalate to forms of imperialism which could never be resolved in a satisfying way.
It’s one thing to criticize different forms of imperialism but it matters how you do it. By the time Hobson published his “Imperialism: A Study” in 1902 the French and the American revolution were already more than a century old. It was perfectly normal for an American citizen at that time to reject the idea of “tyranny” and celebrate Independence Day for the “liberty” it symbolizes. Tyranny meant the British Empire under King George III. and liberty meant that Americans had broken away of that British empire.
Hobson only dusted off old ideas which Karl Marx had already played with and which Marx had lifted from older socialist authors. In Hobson’s version there was no talk of an inevitable socialist overthrow however. After all, he was under British jurisdiction and had to be careful. He advocated radical re-distribution of the national economic resources to create an equilibrium of production and consumer demand which would erase the necessity for using force against foreign lands in order to find new customers. The book became a smash hit and it it highly likely that this was due to his powerful Fabian friends. Lenin plagiarized much of the contents of Hobson’s study for his own work “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” in 1916.
Hobson’s writings in “The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects” attribute the war partly to Jewish influence, including references to Rothschild bankers. In “Imperialism” he toned down the antisemitism but still singled out the “men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience” and “are in a unique position to control the policy of nations.”
He advocated for a “repression of the spread of degenerate or unprogressive races”.
An important influence for Hobson was the English socialist writer Henry Mayers Hyndman, who also had been born into a wealthy family and had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hyndman formed Britain’s first socialist political party in 1881: The Social Democratic Federation (SDF). In 1911, he set up the British Socialist Party (BSP).
Hyndman also commented on the Second Boer War, blaming “Jewish bankers” and “imperialist Judaism” as the cause of the conflict. Hyndman charged “Beit, Barnato and their fellow-Jews” as aiming to create “an Anglo-Hebraic Empire in Africa stretching from Egypt to Cape Colony”.
Hyndman believed Jews were central to a sinister ‘gold international’. He supported the antisemitic Viennese riots of 1885, arguing that they represented a blow against Jewish finance capital. Of course he repeatedly denounced power of “capitalist Jews on the London Press”, believing that the “Semitic lords of the press” had created war in South Africa.
“Unless you said that they [Jews] were the most capable and brilliant people of the earth, you had the whole of their international agencies against you”.
The mythology fully becomes Lenin’s tool
Lenin was fully aware that the socialist literature for about 100 years had contained a full-fledged multi-faceted antisemitic conspiracy logic. It was a subversive tool to be used against the world outside of his Soviet Union.
He inherited the broken remains of the old Russian tsarist empire and its foreign policy goals such as gaining access to the Mediterranean and weakening the influence of the British and French colonial powers in the Middle East and Egypt. There had been earlier attempts at linking Islam with socialist thoughts, but the conspiracy mythology was another tool in the box to discredit Jewish Zionist settlements in Palestine alongside the French and British colonial aspirations in the region.
The person who had assembled the infamous forgery “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” during the tsarist era had joined the communists. Lenin owned him and the key evidence of the forgery process but the USSR kept that a secret for decades until its collapse.
Soviet agents posing as fleeing Russian emigrés brought the fake Protocols to the West from 1917 onwards. Soon an English translation became available, a German one, a polish one and as far as we can tell the first Arabic version or excerpts were circulated as early as 1920. Many people believed the Protocols alongside the additional previous literature of the same nature explained why the tsarist empire in Russia fell, why the German empire came to its end in 1918 and why the muslim Ottoman caliphate was over.
But the Romanoff supporters needed aid from outside Russia as well. To convince various powers that they ought to intensify their intervention in the Russian war, the emigres set out to depict the Revolution as the beginning of an international Jewish plot which one day could engulf them all.
By the end of 1919 the Protocols had begun their rise to world fame.
Two correspondents, Robert Wilton of the Times and Victor Marsden of the Morning Post, each of whom had lived in Russia and had adopted with a passion the views of Russian right-wingers, purveyed these notions. The Morning Post, in particular, played a key role in spreading the myth of Jewish conspiracy and the Protocols with a series of eighteen articles.
In Poland during the summer of 1920 the march of the Red Army near Warsaw served as the catalyst. The Polish episcopate issued an appeal for aid to Church leaders abroad, basing its plea largely on the allegations of the Protocols. And about the same time an Assumption priest published a Polish translation.
The following year the Arabs of Palestine and Syria took up the Protocols to rouse passions against the Jewish settlers in Palestine, a tactic which persists in the Middle East to this very day.
The Protocols: Myth and History, Anti-Defamation League
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact year in which the Protocols or excerpts were available for Muslims in their respective languages. The Jewish ADL (see the quote above) says it was 1921 in Palestine and Syria. The region was not monitored as well as Britain or France and sometimes Arabic translations were printed and distributed anonymously without mentioning a publisher or a translator. In 1924 “The Jewish Voice” reported about the Protocols being circulated in Palestine.
And by 1920, “The Protocols,” which was available in many languages, not yet in Arabic, but in English and French, were being cited by Palestinian nationalists for propaganda, and was picked up by anti-Zionist Arab nationalist agitators in Iraq and in Syria. And then it spread even more rapidly throughout the Arab world after it was translated into Arabic by a Maronite priest, Antun Yamin, in 1925 under the title “Mu’amarat al-yahudiyya ‘ala’l-Shu’ub,” “The Conspiracy of Judaism Against the Nations.”
Noam (Norman) A. Stillman: The Origins, Evolution, and Spread of Anti-Semitism in the Arab World,
The Protocols were not yet as big a phenomenon among the Muslims as they would become later. But the seed was there.
The First World War heralded the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. In the spring of 1920 France and Britain agreed on the exact division formula for the Arab territories of the former Ottoman Empire at the San Remo conference. The principal consideration underlying this formula as in the earlier Sykes-Picot Agreement was oil and communications.
In the nineteenth century, Beirut had been one of the most important ports on the eastern Mediterranean. During this time the majority of Jews were engaged in commerce, and according to travelers’ reports they were prosperous, with only a small number of poor.?! As the city developed, they took part in Lebanon’s domestic and foreign trade, banking, and tourism. a shift in prosperity from the old elites to a new rising trading class of Maronites, other Catholics, Jews, and Muslim minorities who flourished through their relations with the French and their freedom from Sunni dominion.
The Maronite community as a whole had a very good relationship with its Jewish neighbors. But this did not prevent the rather unfortunate attempt by Maronite priest Antun Yarnin in 1926 to try to blackmail well-off Jews. Failing to attain the desired money, he imported Arabic translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and tried to sell them. In this he was equally unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the Jewish community president appealed to the French High Commissioner Henri de Jouvenel to ban this publication under Mandate article 26.
The jews of Lebanon – Between Coexistence and Conflict KIRSTEN E. SCHULZE SECOND REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
sussex ACADEMIC PRESS
Additional Sources:
Russia and the Middle East by G.E. Wheeler for the publication Intrnational Affairs of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Vol. 35 No. 3 1959, Oxford University Press
The “Protocols” among Arabs 28 May 2010
Importing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – Antisemitism in Islamic societies von Thomas Schmidinger, Internationale Sommerakademie des Instituts für Geschichte der Juden in Österreich
The Origin of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – The Secrets of an antisemitic manipulation
The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East, Melanie S. Tanielian, November 2017
