The current status of American Jewry represents a paradox. Not since Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees has any Jewish community outside of the Holy Land found itself to be more physically secure, or sensed a warmer welcome among non-Jewish neighbors, or enjoyed greater prosperity and influence. No Jewish community has more reason for gratitude to the society that has ensured such success. Only the very elderly in this minority might harbor direct memories of the social barriers that may have impeded the quest for high socioeconomic status. Jews who are younger have had their crack at the American Dream. They are very unlikely to have faced the impediments of discrimination because of their faith or ancestry. In their own lives they have never experienced, with rare exceptions, the sting of antisemitism. The most recent survey coming from the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life revealed that Judaism has enlisted “warmer ratings” from Americans than any other faith community in the nation.[1]
The civic culture can help account for such good fortune. From the beginning of the republic, Jews enjoyed citizenship; it was never contested. The “father of the country,” George Washington, promised to the tiny seaboard communities of eighteenth-century America that the government he headed would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, pledged in Article VI of that document that no religious test would ever be imposed upon candidates for office in the republic; and he himself learned Hebrew. Madison’s closest ally among the Framers, Thomas Jefferson, coined the phrase that would ensure a neutral federal government within a multi-religious society and therefore protect religious outsiders: “a wall of separation between Church and State.”[2] Of course some of these commitments were aspirational. None could block the emergence[ or the persistence of the animus against a tiny minority group that happened to deny the Resurrection. The benevolent beliefs of the nation’s founders could not entirely repress the historic suspicions directed at the most conspicuous dissidents in Christendom, and in the course of the nineteenth century such hostility even managed to gain momentum. But twentieth-century liberalism flipped that trend; and Jewish defense agencies and their allies effectively discredited bigotry as un-American, as contrary to what the citizenry at its best would like to uphold. The past century also revealed the extreme terminus of hatred, which was exterminatory. To put it another way, the snobs who deemed Jews unfit to live in certain neighborhoods or to belong to certain social organizations or to enroll in certain schools and colleges were superseded by Nazis whose ideology deemed Jews unfit to inhabit the earth. The horror of the Final Solution thus foreclosed whatever limited respectability or sense of normality that the stigma once enjoyed.
Or should have. For the paradox of the condition of contemporary American Jewry is that the hatred is back. According to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, antisemitism in the United States is gaining some ground. In 2017 the violence, vandalism, harassment and hate speech directed at Jews increased by 67% over the previous year.[3] The baseline is admittedly thin; actual incidents remain extremely rare. But they are now more numerous, and they haunt the Jewish community in ways that were perhaps expected to trouble other sites in the Diaspora–but surely not at home. Though Republican politicians and publicists excoriated the Obama administration for its reluctance to use the term “radical Islamic extremism,” lest such language inflame Islamophobia,[4] “right-wing extremism” has become too delicate a term for the GOP to adopt. When John Boehner served as the minority leader of the House of Representatives, he objected to the term proposed by the Department of Homeland Security as follows. “Right wing extremism” is being distorted “to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.”[5] Yet the danger has been underestimated. The Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland has reported that terrorist incidents have tripled since 2013; the number of incidents that proved to be lethal quadrupled. One data analysis revealed that most of those crimes were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, often fueled by white racism and by antisemitism. In August 2017, post-Charlottesville, an ABC News/Washington Post poll, disclosed that about 10% of the populace (or about 22 million Americans) deem neo-Nazi or white-supremacist views “acceptable.”[6]
In 2018 the single most violent crime in the annals of American antisemitism occurred, with the murder of eleven worshipers in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The massacre was not the deranged act of the sort of “loner,” armed with an AR-15 assault rifle plus some handguns who has been an all-too-familiar figure in the nation’s collective portrait. D. H. Lawrence famously depicted “the essential American soul” as “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”[7] Robert Bowers may well fit that archetype. But to classify him as only that is to mischaracterize him. Bowers’ rage against the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which constituted his ostensible motive for the atrocity, must be contextualized, as part of the toxic nativism of President Trump and the Republican Party has exploited and intensified.
Coincidence cannot account for an episode like the Tree of Life killings occurring so soon after pipe bombs were sent to some of the most prominent Democrats in the country. The Internet rantings of the alleged culprit, Cesar Sayoc, were “were filled with conspiracy theories and violent insinuations,” according to columnist Eric Alterman of the Nation, who quotes Ronald Lowy, the attorney for Sayoc’s family. The suspect “had no interest in politics” until “the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who welcome all extremists, all outsiders, all outliers, and he felt that somebody was finally talking to him.”[8] Living in a van plastered with stickers, Sayoc was indeed what the Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, called him: a “partisan.” Sessions did not mention the cause on behalf of which Sayoc sent those letter bombs. But he had fully internalized the sense that Democrats were not merely a political party with a perspective that he did share. Instead they constituted a danger that had to be confronted and defeated with what historian Richard Slotkin called “redemption through violence.” Maybe Sayoc was merely “disturbed.” But if so, it was in a distinctive and increasingly evident way; his targets were certainly not malevolently chosen at random as figures of authority to be taken down. Only his technical incompetence subverted the elimination of the top leadership of the Democratic Party. Only his inefficiency prevented a calamity for which only the attempts on the lives of Union office-holders in 1865 serves as a precedent. Since John Wilkes Booth had determined to kill President Lincoln upon learning of his hope to give some freedmen the franchise (“nigger citizenship”),[9] that assassination would now be classified as a hate crime.
Of Sayoc’s intended victims, only one of them had never held public office; only one of them is a private citizen, living without any official duties in Westchester County, New York–and that he is Jewish is not irrelevant. At the very end of the 2016 Presidential campaign, a Trump political advertisement portrayed three “globalists” accused of acting against American national interest. They were the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein; the chairperson of Federal Reserve System, Janet Yellen; and the investor and philanthropist George Soros. All are Jews. Targeting this trio could scarcely have been more obvious than if the Trump campaign had pinned badges on them that depict yellow stars. But no “globalist” seems to have aroused more intense xenophobia, tinctured with antisemitism, than Soros. No backer of the Democrats has become so demonized not only on the wilder fringes of the far right but within mainstream ranks of the Republican Party than Soros.
His primary identification is Jewish, according to his son Alex.[10] But Soros is rootless. Born in 1930, he has denied “belong[ing] to any community.” He has homes in London as well as the United States. “As a Hungarian Jew,” Soros has asserted, “I had never quite become an American. I had left Hungary behind, and my Jewishness did not express itself in a sense of tribal loyalty that would have led me to support Israel.”[11] Even his surname is invented. He was the second son of prosperous, non-observant Jews named Schwartz, who changed the family name in George’s childhood to a palindrome. The word “soros” means “to soar” in the future tense of Esperanto, the artificial language that George’s father learned. Invented by a Yiddish-speaking Jew, Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof, Esperanto was devised to unite a humanity that national animosities have tragically cleaved. Against fanatical hatred, of course, a proposed universal language constituted no barrier.[12] (“Desperanto” might have been a more apt name.) The year that Soros had claimed to recall most vividly was 1944, when the Third Reich marched into Hungary to round up the largest remaining Jewish community still left largely intact and to send its members to Auschwitz. He was fourteen. He managed to survive the Holocaust, fled his Communist-ruled homeland and in 1948 reached London–penniless.
Perhaps no ascent was less predictable or more spectacular. He soared indeed. In 1956, four years after graduating from the London School of Economics, Soros arrived in New York to make money. Thirteen years later he created the Quantum Fund, or what one business journalist called “the most aggressive, high-profile, and successful hedge fund in the world.” (Based in the Netherlands Antilles, Quantum has been an offshore fund.) No investor has ever been cannier. Given his economic power, Soros has not been exempt from legitimate criticism, nor should he be. That he has provoked antisemitism does not mean that his career or his causes should be shielded from reproach. He was, after all, “the man who broke the Bank of England” in 1992, when Soros shorted the pound and made about $1 billion. The British government expressed its own grievance against him for having eliminated the sterling from the European Monetary System. Yet paradoxically “the president of the European Community and representatives of the French and Belgian governments have [also] accused him of orchestrating ‘an Anglo-Saxon plot’ to undermine the French currency,” business journalist Michael Lewis reported.[13] The United States gave Soros refuge but could not spare him from slander, that is, from extreme right-wing efforts to disseminate grotesque falsehoods about him. As a result, the effort to sort out fair objections to his practices as an investor or as a major donor to progressive causes from the legacy of virulent antisemitism is increasingly difficult to achieve.
For example, a species of off-the-charts rancor stemming from American conservatives is probably uninfected with bigotry, but has sought instead to weaken the partisan influence of his liberalism (and the financial impact of his liberality). Conservatives might normally be expected to consider Soros admirable proof of the workings of the invisible hand of the marketplace. Instead he has become an exemplar of the hidden hand. Thus the conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza recently accused Soros of supporting the vaguely anarchist and pugnacious protestors known as antifa, that is, of backing “domestic terrorism.” Of course no evidence whatsoever of that surreptitious support is extant. D’Souza, a felon who had violated a campaign law, was pardoned in late May 2018 by President Trump, whose office received a petition–submitted to www.whitehouse.gov–that drew over 138,000 signatories. They demanded that the chief executive “declare George Soros a terrorist and seize all of his related organizations’ assets under RICO,” which is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act that Congress designed to stifle organized crime. The petitioners’ accusation is especially wacko because, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, which produced an indisputable rise in hate crimes, Soros donated $10 million of his personal fortune to his Open Society Foundation in the struggle to prevent violent incidents.[14] Bill O’Reilly was probably intending to discredit Soros’s political influence–nothing more sinister should be ascribed to the Fox News television host–in condemning him as a “far-left radical bomb-thrower,” and even called him a “sleazoid.” Since Soros was intended to be the lethal victim of a far-right radical bomb-thrower, O’Reilly’s metaphor should have been retired. The latter smear is especially curious, because his television network fired him in 2017 after the revelation of six sexual harassment lawsuits that he had previously settled.[15] The charges that D’Souza and O’Reilly levelled against Soros satisfy no test of empirical validation or political seriousness; and if these are the sorts of enemies he has made, his reputation is if anything enhanced.
Those adversaries are entrenched at the upper echelons of the political party that has exercised predominant power in the United States. Even after the letter bomb was discovered at the Soros residence, Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader of the House of Representatives, issued a warning on Twitter that three billionaires, by supporting the opposition party, were seeking “to BUY this election!”[16] One was Soros, of course. The others were Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer (whose father happens to be Jewish). Maybe their ethnicity was just coincidental. McCarthy might have mentioned (but didn’t) another Jewish billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, who was presumably trying to buy the election too–but for the GOP. Again, Congressman McCarthy’s sly undercurrent may have been intended, or it may not exist there at all. He may not have blown a dog-whistle. Consider, for instance, the January 23, 1943 cover of Time magazine. It portrays a wealthy and very prominent American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. He is surrounded by greenbacks and coins. Is this background in some subterranean sense antisemitic? Or does the depiction of all that money merely reflect the obvious (as I believe), which is that Morgenthau was, after all, FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury?
What is more unambiguous is what the founder of the Quantum Fund and of the Open Society Foundation provokes, which might be termed Soros Derangement Syndrome. Those who are in its thrall take Soros to be a very busy guy. He has been accused of subsidizing the Black Lives Matter movement; the Women’s March that brought more protesters against Trump’s inauguration than any demonstration in the history of Washington, D. C.; and the decision of quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players to raise consciousness of racial injustice.[17][17] Congressman Steve King, Republican of Iowa and an ardent supporter of Trump, raised the stakes by concluding in 2017 that nothing less than “Western Civilization is the target of George Soros and the Left.”[18]
When Judge Roy Moore, who was twice elected Chief Justice of Alabama (and twice ousted), ran for the US Senate in 2017, he accused Soros of orchestrating a campaign to restore the franchise to felons, presumably with the intention of benefiting the Democrats. There was indeed such a campaign, but the claim of Soros’s involvement was false. Moore’s prediction that Soros, like other “people who don’t recognize God and morality,” would end up in Hell is unproven. “His agenda is sexual in nature, his agenda is liberal,” Moore added.[19] Again, such remarks reveal less about Soros than about Moore, who was accused of sexual assault against two adolescents, and who, when asked whether he had ever dated underage girls while in his thirties, replied: “Not generally.” He blamed Soros for paying the women to bear false witness about the sexual assaults; but, despite Trump’s full political support in the fire-engine-red state of Alabama, a Democrat defeated Moore in his race for the Senate. In the following year, when Missouri Governor Eric Greitens was caught in a sex scandal, the Republican Party of that state blamed Soros for arranging a “political hit job” against a once-rising GOP star.[20]
In the fall of 2018, when the refugees from Central American violence were making their way toward the Rio Grande, hundreds of miles away, a regular on Fox Business, Maria Bartiromo, stoked fears of imminent menace by floating the following conspiracy theory: “I mean, who do you think is behind these caravans? A lot of speculation is that it was George Soros.’” Also on Fox News, Congressman Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, insinuated that “the Democrats–perhaps Soros, others–may be funding this, thinking it’s going to help them.” It comes as no surprise that on Twitter the President accused Soros of paying protesters. (Minus money changing hands, why would anyone object to the policies of this administration?) And by the way, how did Soros become so rich? Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert ignored Soros’s creation of the planet’s most prosperous hedge fund, and once conjectured that his wealth came from “drug groups.”[21] The moral high ground that the Illinois Republican took later sank, when he was imprisoned for concealing evidence of having sexually abused at least four teenage wrestlers. The implausibility of Hastert’s charge against Soros nevertheless typified Republican accusations, which were oblivious to the canons of evidence. Soros has thus inadvertently shown an adeptness in activating “the paranoid style,” which is the indispensable phrase that historian Richard Hofstadter put into circulation a little more than half a century ago. Hofstadter acknowledged that conspiracies have marked history, but to believe that “history is a conspiracy” is something quite different.[22]
Soros’s subsidies to progressive causes and to Democratic Party candidates for high office can account for right-wing fantasies of how widely he exerts influence. But occasionally something specific triggers the effort to disparage him. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, Soros denounced Facebook as a “menace to society.” (The vulnerability of Facebook to trolls in eastern Europe in swinging the Presidential election toward Donald Trump is by now scarcely disputable.) The company responded to Soros’s claim by hiring Definers Public Affairs, a Republican-oriented lobbying firm based in Washington, to promote negative stories about him. Other critics were to be slimed as well, but Definers Public Affairs was instructed to concentrate on taking down Soros. When its role in deploying these black arts was revealed, Facebook fired the firm. Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, at first denied knowing that it had hired Definers, and declared: “I have great respect for George Soros.”[23] Her praise lent a special twist to his acknowledgment that “I’m not happy to have that many enemies. I wish I had more friends.”[24] That Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg serve as Facebook’s two top officers suggests a certain interpretive limit to the function of antisemitism in the demonization of George Soros.
Cutting some slack on judeophobia makes less sense elsewhere. Take two stories in the May 12, 2018 edition of the New York Times. They seem to offer contrasting accounts of the fate of democratic values and institutions in an era of rampant “populism.” From Budapest, a triumphant Viktor Orban announced that “the era of liberal democracy is over.” In challenging Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel in particular, the prime minister of Hungary vowed instead to “build a twenty-first century Christian democracy,” the term that he now prefers to his earlier “illiberal democracy.” The opposite political news occurred in Kuala Lumpur, where Mahathir Mohamad was swept into power as prime minister of Malaysia, heading a multi-racial coalition. The Times lured its readers with a headline that hailed Mahathir as a “Champion of Democracy,” and called his electoral victory “a burst of hope in Southeast Asia, where democracy has ebbed in the face of populist autocrats.”[25]
The newspaper left it up to its readers to note an eerie similarity between the two leaders, however. In campaigning for a third consecutive term, Orban “demonized nearly daily” the American hedge fund manager who had been born in Hungary. Soros had supposedly plotted to flood his native land with Muslim refugees in order to subvert Christianity. Legislation was predicted that would be “aimed squarely at institutions” connected to him, such as the Central European University, which was founded in Prague in 1991 and moved to Budapest two years later. That campus faced foreclosure in 2018, and is likely to move to Vienna. The office of the Open Society Foundation has relocated to Berlin.[26] In 1997, which happened to be exactly three decades after the publication of Norman Cohn’s classic book on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, entitled Warrant for Genocide, Prime Minister Mahathir blamed the collapse of the Malaysian ringgit on the Jews who inhabited the “jungle of ferocious beasts” otherwise known as currency markets. Even though the debt into which he had sunk the Malaysian government had caused the fall of the ringgit, he blamed a cabal of Jews who allegedly ran the world. Mahathir singled out Soros for a disturbing pattern: “The Jews robbed the Palestinians of everything, but in Malaysia they could not do so. Hence they do this–depress the ringgit.”[27]
If, in other words, conspiracy theorists were seeking to locate a Jewish stranglehold on the international economy, Soros seems almost too good to be true. His very existence would seem to corroborate the fear of a tiny minority pursuing domination over the majority, through the deployment of financial resources, through the manipulation of the media and through the sordid conversion of politicians into puppets. (In 2010 Glenn Beck offered Fox viewers a multipart special entitled: “George Soros: The Puppet Master.”) If judeophobes were seeking to update the fantasy of the formidable tentacles of behind-the-scenes power that can make or break governments, he would fit nicely. As early as the fourteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary confirms, both Wyclif and Chaucer were using the word “conspire” to refer to the Jews. And although contingency is incompatible with conspiracy theory, one oddity in this entirely odd story is the site of the meeting of the Elders of Zion. According to an early version of the Protocols, Hermann Goedsche’s Biarritz (1868), the plot was hatched in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In 1994, when Soros established his Open Media Research Institute to analyze political and economic developments in Eastern and Central Europe, he located the office in Prague.[28]
More than any other living Jew, Soros can account for the persistence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion–or rather for the recalcitrance of the idea behind the Protocols. For those who fear the influence of foreign elements and who profess to defend a settled and secure way of life, for those who feel dispossessed, the deracinated biography of George Soros cannot have escaped their attention. Propaganda campaigns in Hungary categorized him as a “cosmopolitan,” a label that makes superfluous any effort to bother to identify him as Jew. Wild exaggerations of Jewish influence form a staple of the antisemitic imagination, but it would be foolish to argue that Soros’s prodigious wealth (earned and spent) and political passions (honed at LSE) have exerted merely a negligible impact in international affairs. He has spent billions of dollars to promote liberal democratic ideals and institutions in Eastern and Central Europe. “He’s the only man in the US who has his own foreign policy–and can implement it,” according to Morton Abramowitz, the ex-Ambassador to Turkey and former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This mammoth effort to encourage the evolution of civil society, “a one-man Marshall Plan” (according to one journalist), is unprecedented.[29]
As a result, Soros has come to personify whatever the stew of nationalism and tribalism and xenophobia manages to consider evil. In Slovakia he has borne the double burden of being Jewish and Hungarian. A Russian nationalist newspaper called Zavtra called him “an enemy of humanity” whose “bank checks are infected,” and whose “gendarmes are local Jews.” In the summer of 1998, when the ruble collapsed, Soros was predictably blamed. Although the international Jewish conspiracy is supposed to operate below the radar, he can’t help being conspicuous. By the end of the last century, a Bulgarian public opinion poll reported that his name recognition was 85 percent.[30]
Hungary has however been the nation most aggrieved by the danger that he supposedly poses. A poster campaign launched in 2017 warned against an influx of illegal immigrants, coupled with a photograph of a smiling Soros. The caption read: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.”[31] Orban, who had studied at Oxford with a scholarship that Soros’s foundation had provided, crossed a line when he addressed one campaign rally in Budapest by assaulting “an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the world.”[32] The devotion of this “enemy” to promoting open societies has thus collided with the transformation of much of Eastern and Central Europe into governments hostile to liberalism and even to democracy. These “populist” and authoritarian tendencies have undoubtedly accelerated in countries where raw antisemitism, which his prominence has stirred, can be most effectively tapped. The demonization of George Soros has thus produced (or at least demonstrated) real political consequences in the post-Communist milieu.
He has personified the threat that the Protocols recorded, and yet a paradox of this glum history is that the forgery itself has probably never been less influential than at present. The fantasy is evidently durable; its most notorious documentation remains disreputable. What the Tsarist police, known as the Okhrana, concocted at the dawn of the twentieth century cannot be cited as verification of what Jewish billionaires like Soros are doing. The Protocols were composed at the same historical moment as the Dreyfus scandal, an affaire that was also founded on a forgery. The belief in the secret rule of Jewry nevertheless dates from earlier in the nineteenth century. Emancipation in France, the German states and elsewhere allowed some Jews to become exceptionally rich, often through finance; and a popular 1845 antisemitic tract about such families called them Rois de l’Époque. Enough such banking families emerged to excite the feverish imagination and to arouse hostility to such power in the economies of Europe. Nor were such anxieties allayed when the elderly widow of the legendary banker Amschel Rothschild was asked, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, about the prospect of more bloodshed from the crowned heads of the continent. “Nonsense” was Gutele Rothschild’s gruff reply. “My boys won’t let them.”[33]
The influence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion probably peaked a little less than a century ago. This book, for example, constituted the bedside reading of the last of the Romanovs, whom the Bolsheviks executed in 1918. So widespread was the fascination with the Protocols that Henry Ford “Americanized” them as The International Jew, which ran as excerpts in his widely-distributed newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, for 91 straight weeks. Soros has a name and a face. The cabal against which Ford warned was shadowy and basically anonymous, which enabled the most admired businessman of his epoch to ascribe ubiquitous historical agency to Jews in general. Thus they bore responsibility for manipulating the South into trying to secede from the Union, having already dominated the slave trade. Louis Farrakhan later peddled this false accusation under the auspices of the Nation of Islam, which also–unsurprisingly–has sold copies of the Protocols to buttress its case against the international Jewish conspiracy to harm black people. And though historians have quite rightly emphasized the creativity of African Americans in inventing jazz, Ford blamed Jews instead–and added to his bill of indictment against them their influence in the liquor business and in the white slave trade. The Protocols also buttressed his claim that Jews were behind the crisis of the old order by disseminating the two great explosive intellectual systems that had been forged in the nineteenth century: Darwinism and Bolshevism.[34] Not even Prime Minister Orban thinks that Soros is that powerful.
The history of the Protocols in America explains why its Jewish community has felt itself to be so secure. Ford’s pivotal importance to the dissemination of this forgery began to recede by the end of the 1920s, and in the following decade his own iconic status dramatically declined. Jewish resistance to this particular version of antisemitism mattered too. In the courts (and in the court of public opinion), Ford was compelled (a bit like Captain Renault in Casablanca) to express shock, shock, shock that Judeophobia could be contaminating a weekly newspaper like his Dearborn Independent. Such bigotry hardly vanished in the 1930s (or thereafter). But such obsessive bigotry looked sordid in a nation that at least professed egalitarianism and that also valued religious tolerance and even acceptance. The Protocols were robbed of respectability, and the evidence of the influence of the Protocols in the 1930s becomes rather scattered. In denouncing the New Deal, Father Charles E. Coughlin did descend into antisemitism in the latter part of the decade, and his Social Justice did choose to publish excerpts from the Protocols. But he was wary about endorsing their accuracy, and merely floated the suggestion that they might be of “interest” to his readers.[35]
To be sure that does not constitute exculpation. But take the case of the ambivalence of a far more significant figure in the history of the Protocols: Adolf Hitler. In the first recorded speech that he ever delivered, in 1919, the future Fuehrer depicted an international conspiracy of Jews–of all Jews–to weaken and poison the Aryan race and to extinguish German culture. Even though Jews constituted less than 1% of the German population, the threat that they posed was both powerful and lethal. But whether the Protocols were authentic may not have mattered all that much to the Nazis. One of their leading ideologues, Alfred Rosenberg, did produce a gloss on the document, entitled Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die jüdische Weltpolitik.[36]But Hitler himself may have resembled Father Coughlin’s ideal reader, who might find the Protocols interesting–but not necessarily genuine. The Fuehrer told aide Herman Rauschning that the Protocols were “immensely instructive” in exposing what the Jews had accomplished in terms of “political intrigue,” and in showing their skill at “deception [and] organization.”[37] National Socialism was therefore poised to emulate a conspiracy that did not in fact exist.
That Soros has revived in our own time the fears that a discredited document once fanned remains among the weirdest and most unsettling aspects of this story. The collapse of the Third Reich made antisemitism in the United States so disreputable that only the wildest right-wing extremists were likely to credit the Protocols as a true picture of how history operates. In an essay on the Protocols published in 2012, for example, the historian Deborah Lipstadt devotes nearly twelve pages to “The Contemporary American Scene.” Yet five of them deal with Henry Ford and another page with Father Coughlin, an angle that suggests that her essay needed some padding in order to find twenty-first century pertinence to the Protocols. Indeed, Lipstadt acknowledged their “limited” influence in the United States, and rightly warned against “aggrandizing the potential of that threat,” which was restricted to the especially credulous and prejudiced. Americans who subscribed to the likely genuineness of the Protocols make up only “extreme fringe groups.”[38] Richard Landes, the co-editor of the volume to which Lipstadt contributed, was teaching at Columbia University in 1985, when he read the Protocols for the first time. Given their impact earlier in the century, he sensed the need for a scholarly edition to identify “the sources of such paranoid and demonizing rhetoric.” But the German-born historian Fritz Stern warned Landes: “You think you’re inoculating people, but you’re spreading the disease.”[39] A century ago the danger was palpable. But inoculation due to the appearance of an annotated edition hardly seems exigent. The malignant fantasy behind the Protocols is what has proved so impossible to suppress.
That is why the problem of what to do about the actual book is minor. Early in the current century, the world’s largest retailer was revealed to have been selling the Protocols. Wal-Mart did not explicitly endorse the truthfulness of this particular product. On this epistemological question, the company was agnostic. In the marketplace of ideas, Wal-Mart took a neutral stance: “We neither support nor deny its message; we simply make it available for those who wish a copy.” When Jewish representatives protested this policy, the retailer further asserted that it was fulfilling the responsibility of satisfying the curiosity of Wal-Mart’s consumers. The ACLU of California was ordinarily a champion of maximal freedom of expression. In this instance, however, the organization pointed out that Wal-Mart refused to carry slightly risqué magazines like Maxim and Stuff. Did it make sense to prohibit pictures of mostly naked women but treat naked lies as merely a marketplace choice? Wal-Mart then backed down. It stopped selling the Protocols and called its removal “a business decision” (rather than a moral objection to hate speech).[40]
On-line booksellers have continued to sell the Protocols, however. At least Amazon calls the volume “one of the most infamous, and tragically influential examples of racist propaganda ever written,” and for good measure rightfully calls it a fake, citing the Anti-Defamation League.[41] To be sure the fringes have moved closer to the mainstream under the Trump administration (as signaled by the President’s praise of the Charlottesville, Virginia mob of racists and antisemites as “some very fine people”). But the persuasiveness of the Protocols–once widely disseminated, now confined to the shadows–is very difficult to discern in fortifying the rise in right-wing extremism. That judgment is not intended to be an alibi for the President’s knack for “encouraging his army of violent misfits,” Alterman writes, “to find new targets for their frustration, ignorance, and boundless hatred.”[42]
Conspiracy theories often depend on some ingredient of plausibility, however far-fetched and overstated. Can it be irrelevant that venom against other minorities besides Jews did not produce forgeries akin to the Protocols? The sense that powerful Jews exercised economic and political influence beyond their pitifully small numbers was not entirely, utterly without warrant. The role of Soros has antecedents. During the First World War, for instance, Walter Rathenau directed the economy of Wilhelmine Germany, while his American counterpart as head of the War Industries Board was the financier Bernard Baruch. And during the New Deal, President Roosevelt told an aide that Baruch had sixty Congressmen in his pocket. He “owned” so many of them (the verb is FDR’s) that the antisemitic crank and pro-Fascist poet Ezra Pound proposed changing the name of the capital of Washington, D. C. to “Baruchistan.”[43] The call-and-response that Louis Farrakhan adopted to engage with his audiences (“Who owns the Federal Reserve?” “Jews”) was intended for no purpose other than to instill or reinforce hatred of them. But more than anyone else, Paul Warburg did create the Federal Reserve System; and in recent decades three of its chairpersons in a row were co-religionists Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. The distortion of their prominence also accounts for the persistence of the animus that one made the Protocols pervasive.
The extent to which the paranoia behind this preposterous fabrication continues to have a pulse is the strongest possible evidence of human irrationality, which neither education nor enlightenment can entirely defeat. That no evidence ever surfaced of an international Jewish conspiracy helped destroy the authority of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That one rootless cosmopolitan philanthropist has somehow managed to become so reviled a cynosure confirms the resilience of the subterranean anxieties that the Protocols once exploited.
Notes
1 “Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings Toward Religious Groups,” February 15, 2017, at: http://www.pewforum.org/2017/02/15/americans-express-increasingly-warm-feelings-toward-religious-groups/.
2 Quoted in Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 129; Thomas Jefferson to Nehemiah Dodge and Others, January 1, 1802, in The Portable Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Viking, 1975), 303.
3 John-Paul Pagano, “Why We Need to See Leftist Anti-Semitism as a Conspiracy Theory,” Forward, 122 (April 2018), 24.
4 Janet Reitman, “State of Denial,” New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2018, 47.
5 Quoted in Reitman, “State of Denial,” 47.
6 Reitman, “State of Denial,” 41, 68.
7 D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Mercury Books, 1961), 329.
8 Eric Alterman, “Deaths Foretold,” Nation, 307 (December 3-10, 2018), 11.
9 Quoted in John Burt, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 414.
10 Michael Steinberger, “The Billionaire’s Losses,” New York Times Magazine, July 22, 2018, 31.
11 Quoted in Michael Lewis, “The Speculator,” New Republic, 210 (January 10 & 17, 1994), 22.
12 Corey Kilgannon, “Felicia Ferioj! Toasting the Holidays in Esperanto,” New York Times, December 22, 2017, A23.
13 Jane Mayer, “The Money Man,” New Yorker, 79 (October 18, 2004), 186, 187; Joshua Muravchik, “The Mind of George Soros,” Commentary, 117 (March 2004), 48; Connie Bruck, “The World According to Soros,” New Yorker, 46 (January 23, 1995), 58-59; Lewis, “Speculator,” 19.
14 Eric Alterman, “The Real Big Lie,” Nation, 305 (September 25/October 2, 2017), 8; David Gelles, “Soros Gives Billions to His Charity, Now the Second Biggest in U. S.,” New York Times, October 18, 2017, B1.
15 Quoted in Mayer, “Money Man,” 178.
16 Quoted in Alterman, “Deaths Foretold,” 10.
17 Benjamin Soskis, “George Soros and the Demonization of Philanthropy,” 1, at: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/soros-philanthropy/547247/.
18 Quoted in Soskis, “George Soros,” 7.
19 Quoted in “Roy Moore suggests George Soros is headed to hell,” 1-2, at: https://www.jta.org/2017/12/05/news-opinion/politics/roy-moore-suggests-george-soros-is-headed-for-hell.
20 Soskis, “George Soros,” 2; Steinberger, “Billionaire’s Losses,” 45.
21 Quoted in Alterman, “Deaths Foretold,” 10; Nellie Bowles and Zach Wichter, “Facebook Uses Holiday to Drop Bad News,” New York Times, November 23, 2018, B3; Steinberger, “Billionaire’s Losses,” 45.
22 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 29.
23 Bowles and Wichter, “Facebook Uses Holiday,” B3; Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg, “Sandberg Asked Staff to Research Soros Links,” New York Times, November 30, 2018, B1.
24 Quoted in Steinberger, “Billionaire’s Losses,” 47.
25 Quoted in Marc Santora and Helene Bienvenu, “Having Conquered Hungary, Orban Turns His Focus to Brussels,” New York Times, May 12, 2018, A4; Hannah Beech and Richard C. Paddock, “Malaysia Finds an Unlikely Champion of Democracy,” New York Times, May 12, 2018, A9.
26 Steinberger, “Billionaire’s Losses,” 26; Amotz Asa-El, “By George,” Jerusalem Post, July 14, 2017, 15; Benjamin Novak and Marc Santora, “A Democratic Institution is Forced Out of Hungary,” New York Times, October 26, 2018, A5.
27 Quoted in Timothy L. O’Brien, “He’s Seen the Enemy. It Looks Like Him,” New York Times, December 6, 1998, 3:1, 11.
28 Steinberger, “Billionaire’s Losses,” 45; Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 33-34; Bruck, “World According to Soros,” 77.
29 Quoted in Bruck, “World According to Soros,” 57; Steinberger, “Billionaire’s Losses,”
30 Mayer, “Money Man,” 178, 183-84; Lewis, “Speculator,” 20.
31 Alterman, “Real Big Lie,” 6.
32 Quoted in Steinberger, “Billionaire’s Losses,” 29
33 Quoted in Frederic Morton, The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 100.
34 Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 16, 172-74.
35 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 266-67, 267-73.
36 Richard J. Evans, “A Warning from History,” Nation, 290 (March 20, 2017), 48; David Redles, “The Turning Point: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Eschatological War between Aryans and Jews,” in The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, eds. Richard Landes and Steven T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 117.
37 Hermann Rauschning, Voice of Destruction (New York: Putnam, 1940), 238-41; Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 118-19.
38 Deborah Lipstadt, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the Contemporary American Scene,” in Paranoid Apocalypse, 180, 182, 183.
39 Richard Landes and Steven T. Katz, eds., “Introduction: The Protocols at the Dawn of the 21st Century,” in Paranoid Apocalypse, 2.
41 Marc Ballon, “Wal-Mart Stops Selling Hate,” Jewish Journal, September 23, 2004, at: http://jewishjournal.com/category/culture/religion/up_front/10240
42 Ballon, “Wal-Mart.”
43 Alterman, “Deaths Foretold,” 11.