From Henry Ford to Hitler to Hamas, modern antisemitism is based on a century-old hoax
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Antisemitic demonstrations across the globe since Hamas’s barbaric attacks on Israel have been nothing short of breathtaking.
As the calls for the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews ring out, we must understand the curiously dark and unbelievable story behind modern antisemitism.
While Hitler and the Nazis are best known for popularizing hatred of the Jews, the recent expansion of antisemitism traces its roots to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Russian newspaper Znamya first published portions of the Protocols in 1903. In 1905, Russian writer and mystic Sergei Nilus again published the Protocols as an appendix to “The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth.”
The Protocols allegedly reveal a historical conspiracy of high-ranking influential Jews to dominate the world beginning in the late 15th Century:
The advice of the Grand Satraps and Rabbis is: Become Christians, but keep the law of Moses in your hearts. Make your sons merchants that they may despoil the Christians. Make your sons and daughters doctors and apothecaries that they may take away Christian lives. Make your sons canons and clerics that they may destroy their churches. Make your sons advocates and lawyers that you may put Christians under the yoke and dominate the world. DO NOT SWERVE FROM THIS ORDER.
Signed V.S.S.V.F.F., Prince of the Jews, 21st Caslue, (Nov.) 1489.
From there, the Protocols outline plans for economic, political, and social control over the entire world in excruciating detail.
According to the Protocols, the tools of Jewish domination are “limitless ambitions, burning greed, merciless vengeance, hatreds, and malice.” The Protocols contain every single anti-Jewish trope imaginable. Jews control the financial system. They dominate the media. They determine elections. The Protocols declare Jewish global triumph as inevitable in spite of their relatively small numbers.
It’s all a grand lie.
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The Protocols are a fiction cribbed from Maurice Joly’s French political satire “Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu,” or “The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.”
Joly’s work makes no mention of the Jews because it’s a protest against the regime of Napoleon III. The unattributed authors of the Protocols presumably found lifting Machiavelli’s plot to replace freedom with despotism most convenient for their antisemitic purposes.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Protocols made their way across the globe. In the 1920s, editions circulated in Europe, South America, Japan, and the Middle East. They found a listening ear in industrial magnate Henry Ford.
Smarting from a failed 1918 Senate bid where he believed his opponent “stole” the election, Ford began publication of the Dearborn Independent in 1919. He was convinced that bankers and shadowy financial forces had led to his electoral defeat, and he wanted an outlet to express his views.
Ford also realized he could force his automotive dealerships to subscribe and distribute copies of the paper to their customers. At its peak in 1926, the Independent’s circulation reached almost one million subscribers. Beginning in 1920, Ford published a series of antisemitic articles based partly on the Protocols.
"The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on," Ford stated in a New York World interview on February 17, 1921. "They have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now."
Not only did Ford distribute the Protocols and other anti-Jewish content through the Independent, he also published a four-volume compendium of the articles called “The International Jew,” which was translated into at least 16 languages.
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Anti-Jewish sentiment flourished in Nazi Germany and the U.S.
Hitler likely encountered “The International Jew” while in a Munich prison for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Hitler’s well-known work, “Mein Kampf” published in 1925, directly praises Ford. “It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,” Hitler wrote. “Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.”
As Hitler’s Nazi Party rose to power, the Protocols found another adherent in America. Reverend Charles E. Coughlin was a Canadian-born Roman Catholic Priest based in Royal Oak, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. At the peak of his media popularity, Coughlin enjoyed more than 40 million weekly listeners. Not only did Coughlin admire Ford, but he distributed on the airwaves what Ford promoted in print.
In 1938, Coughlin’s magazine “Social Justice” again pushed the Protocols as truth. That same year, the Nazis perpetrated Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass against German Jews and Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners.
We know the rest.
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An antisemitic fabrication passed on as authentic by influential conspiracy theorists fueled the extermination of six million Jews. The horrors committed at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau scarred the flesh of humanity itself.
As Hamas displayed only a few weeks ago, such nightmarish treatment of our fellow man is not as buried in our past as many of us had hoped.
In a hellish irony, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (known as Hamas) dated August 18, 1988, specifically cites the Protocols as well:
“The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
From Nilus to Ford and Coughlin to Hitler and Hamas, the Protocols have been passed along as fact by antisemites for 120 years.
Proponents never attest to the veracity of the Protocols themselves, instead suggesting that the actions of Jews render such fiction self-evident. The “common knowledge” of racism has proven to be little more than destructive shared lies time and again.
On the heels of World War II, “Never Again!” became the clarion call to remember the Holocaust and the immense sacrifices paid to put down such a great evil.
For those words to have meaning, we must take seriously the rebirth of antisemitism, call out its lies, and stop it before it bears more lethal fruit.
USA TODAY Network Tennessee Columnist Cameron Smith is a Memphis-born, Brentwood-raised recovering political attorney who worked for conservative Republicans. He and his wife Justine are raising three boys in Nolensville, Tennessee. Direct outrage or agreement to smith.david.cameron@gmail.com or @DCameronSmith on X, formerly know as Twitter. Agree or disagree? Send a letter to the editor to letters@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Hitler to Hamas: Modern antisemitism is based on a 120-year-old hoax
