International Jewish conspiracy

The international Jewish conspiracy or the world Jewish conspiracy is an antisemitic trope that has been described as "one of the most widespread and long-running conspiracy theories". Although it typically claims that a malevolent, usually global Jewish circle, referred to as International Jewry, conspires for world domination, the theory's content is extremely variable, facilitating its wide distribution and long-standing persistence. It was popularized especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by the antisemitic fabricated text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Among the beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy are Jewish Bolshevism, Cultural Marxism, Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, White genocide conspiracy theory and Holocaust denial. The Nazi leadership's belief in an international Jewish conspiracy that it blamed for starting World War II and controlling the Allied powers was key to their decision to launch the Final Solution, which culminated in the Holocaust.

History

Belief in an international Jewish conspiracy for world domination can be traced back to the thirteenth century, but increased in the second half of the nineteenth century under the influence of writers such as Frederick van Millingen, an Ottoman Army officer who wrote The Conquest of the World by the Jews in 1873, and Hermann Goedsche, a Prussian agent provocateur promoting a new ideological antisemitism. The invention of the newspaper invited the new accusation that Jews controlled the press. Goedsche's novel Biarritz was plagiarized in the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Protocols appeared in print in the Russian Empire as early as 1903, published as a series of articles in Znamya, a Black Hundreds newspaper. The forgery was a creation of the Okhrana secret police.