The Persistence of the Protocols

Abstract

The fear of a secret Jewish conspiracy that dominates and manipulates the political economy began not long after the Emancipation from the ghettos, and was formalized over a century ago in the Tsarist forgery known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That document itself has been shredded of credibility, but the animating idea of a Jewish cabal continues to show some life. The figure who inadvertently keeps that fantasy alive is the octogenarian financier George Soros (b. 1930), and the attacks upon his ideas and influence are inflected with the paranoid style that had given birth to the discredited Protocols.