A fascinating new documentary shows how antisemitic lies were the 'original fake news'
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Oldest Hatred added a new innovation.
Amid the aftershocks of the French Revolution, many Jews gained civil rights, and with the anxiety of a liberalizing Europe, accounts began to spread of secret meetings in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. An influential letter alleged that the “Hebrew sect” was controlling the Jacobins and Freemasons. Jews, once marginalized and reviled on theological grounds, were now held up as master manipulators.
Within a generation or two of their new freedoms, three Jewish families with nothing in common would be implicated in the alleged conspiracy, and, soon after, countless more would be murdered in its name. The libel is still with us, and shows no signs of abating.
“Antisemitism’s about a bad idea — an intellectually stupid idea that’s also a toxic lethal idea that’s been disastrous” said Russian-American director Maxim Pozdorovkin, whose new animated documentary, “The Conspiracy,” chronicles the development of canards about secret Jewish control.
Following the Warburg banking family from Germany, the Bronsteins of Ukraine (you may recall Leon, who rebranded as Trotsky) and the Dreyfuses of France, Pozdorovkin demonstrates the human toll of baseless libels. More remarkably, he reveals the true conspiracy at work: not between Jews, but between people like Henry Ford and lesser-known polemicists who worked to frame them as interlopers in world affairs.
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