Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Read Online Free PDF Page A

have benefited from the war and the revolutions that followed it. For if they had benefited (and were still benefiting), might they not also have helped bring this situation about?

    The Jews
    It did not seem ludicrous to the conservative man or woman of 1919 to suspect the Jews. Unlike most peoples, the Jews were international, living in every country and apparently holding positions of influence and wealth in almost all of them. But though they were omnipresent, they were also aloof, and though ubiquitous in public life, they were separate in the private domain. With their archaic language of worship, their aversion to mixed marriages, their extreme attachment to education, they gave the impression of being heirs to a great secret.
    What was more, throughout history the Jews could be found standing next to—or just behind—the agents of radical change. It was pointed out by many right-wing writers and amateur historians that one of Oliver Cromwell’s earliest acts, after executing Charles I, was to readmit Jews into England, whence they had been banished nearly four hundred years earlier, and that both the American and French Revolutions, with their advocacy of the rights of man, had released Jews from previous restrictions. Napoleon’s conquests had been followed by Jewish emancipation, and in 1806, the Corsican tyrant had even convened the Grand Sanhedrin, a gathering of notable European Jews. Jews had been prominent in the bourgeois and nationalist revolutions of 1848, in the Paris Commune of 1871, and in the 1905 revolution in Russia.
    But it was not just a matter of political radicalism. Jewish banks had financed the Industrial Revolution; Jewish entrepreneurs were at the forefront of the revolution in retailing, their names to be found on the fronts of great department stores. During the second half of the nineteenth century, public Jews like Disraeli and fictional Jews like Trollope’s adventurer Melmotte in The Way We Live Now excited public opinion with their political and economic activities. The large populations of ordinary, poor, or illiterate Jews mostly failed to register. In proportion to their numbers, it was said, the Jews did incredibly well.
    For the most part, this was seen as a product of the character of the Jewish community—family-oriented, cosmopolitan, and ambitious. There had always been that strain in European conservatism, however, which, observing that the natural order of things was being subverted by progress and radicalism, preferred a more organized explanation. They suggested that secret societies had been behind the major upheavals of the past century or so: the Freemasons had been the organizing force behind undermining the eighteenth-century ancien régime ; a secret body called the Illuminati had been involved in French Jacobinism and the revolution; and the Jews and Freemasons working together were responsible for the Year of Revolutions in 1848. There was some historical basis for these beliefs. In the early stages of the movement for Italian unity, for example, secret societies known as the Carbonari (charcoal burners) had indeed met in dark forests, sworn horrible oaths, and conspired against foreign occupiers and petty kings. As the century ended, real anarchists with bombs and guns hatched plots to kill prime ministers and blow up emperors, sometimes with real success. So the idea of a more ambitious conspiracy seemed not so very far-fetched, and the possibility that the Jews might act in concert to achieve particular objectives not so very eccentric.
    What brought the two ideas together was the Russian Revolution of October 1917. From the beginning, it was evident that a large number of those most active in the building of the new Soviet Russia were Jews. Persecuted under the tsars and subject to occasional massacres, known as pogroms, whenever there was political unrest in the empire, Jews had tended, naturally enough, to side with the reforming or revolutionary left,