The names of the alleged controllers keep changing. The underlying idea is very old — and social media may be its perfect delivery system.
Everyone knows about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious 1903 Russian forgery purporting to reveal the minutes of secret Jewish leaders plotting to control governments, finance, the press and ultimately the world. (At least, I hope so — no one would understand the irony of my blog name otherwise.)
But the Protocols did not invent the idea that visible events were secretly being controlled by Jews. It collected, modernized and systematized an idea that was already many centuries old. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum itself notes that the Protocols pulled together longstanding accusations that Jews secretly fomented wars and revolutions, spread epidemics and controlled politics and economics.
In fact, one version of the hidden-Jewish-hand myth appears more than a thousand years before the Protocols. Medieval Christian writers sometimes explained the actions of non-Jewish rulers by placing a Jew behind them. David Freidenreich has documented Christian accounts from the early Middle Ages in which Muslim rulers were supposedly manipulated by Jews into attacking Christianity. The visible ruler made the decision; the Jew supplied the hidden malevolent agency. The Jew is the puppet-master.
Sound familiar?
By the twelfth century the idea became much more ambitious. Thomas of Monmouth, whose account of the supposed ritual murder of William of Norwich helped establish the European blood libel, described an alleged international Jewish conspiracy. According to his story, Jewish leaders from different countries supposedly gathered at Narbonne and selected by lot the place where a Christian would be murdered that year. Johannes Heil has compared this imagined gathering to the much later Protocols: an international Jewish elite, secret communication across borders, coordination among apparently separate Jewish communities and a concealed program directed against Christian society. The Protocols' “Elders” had ancestors centuries before anyone had heard of Zionism.
The pattern expanded further during the medieval accusations that Jews poisoned wells. When plague and mass death struck Europe, the obvious explanations were inadequate for people searching for intentional causes. The conspiracy theory was not simply that local Jews poisoned wells. it was that the local Jews supposedly received poison from rabbis or other Jewish leaders and spread it through water supplies via a hidden Jewish network.
That is why the Protocols should be understood as a consolidation point, not an invention. By the nineteenth century the old religious accusations had been secularized. Jews could now supposedly control banks, newspapers, revolutionary movements, Freemasons, political parties and governments. An 1806 letter sent to the French conspiracy theorist Augustin Barruel claimed that Jews secretly controlled other secret societies. Hermann Goedsche's 1868 novel Biarritz imagined Jewish leaders meeting secretly to coordinate world domination; parts of it later helped inspire the mythology surrounding the Protocols. The Protocols then assembled all of these pieces into a single universal theory: if something consequential happens in public, perhaps the people visibly making the decisions are not really making them at all.
There are really three related accusations here. The first is the hidden adviser: the ruler appears to decide, but Jews secretly cause the decision. The second is the secret network: Jewish organizations that appear independent are actually coordinated parts of one collective project. The third is the hidden causal agent: an event with an ordinary apparent explanation — war, revolution, assassination, economic collapse, epidemic — actually has Jews behind it. Stack all three together and you get the mature conspiracy theory: Jews form a hidden network, the network controls visible leaders, and those leaders produce events that secretly serve Jewish interests.
This is why the exposure of the Protocols as a forgery did not affect its influence. The pieces were already in place for decades, some for centuries, and accepted in the back of people's minds. The Protocols put it all together so even when it was exposed, it still appeared to explain the larger truth of Jewish control.
This way the ideas that Jews were behind capitalism and communism, nationalism and internationalism, working secretly and in public, all could thrive even if the particular delivery system was found to be flawed. The conclusion remained stable while the premise changed.
And it remains today, with the cosmetic replacement of "Zionists" for "Jews." Blaming Jews for all problems is so backward; but blaming Zionists is trendy. The need for a simple explanation of a complicated world remains, and Israel provides the excuse. .
“Congress supports Israel” is a fact requiring political explanation. “Israel controls Congress” is a theory about hidden agency.
“The United States and Israel share strategic interests” can be debated. “Zionists dragged America into the war” assigns the visible American decision-makers a secondary role and moves the true causal agency somewhere else.
“Mossad has assassinated people” is a historical fact. “Mossad probably killed X” because the event is mysterious and Israel might benefit from it is the old hidden-causation template.
This is why conspiracy theories involving Israel so easily spread far beyond disputes about Israeli policy. Israel supposedly knew about 9/11 in advance, arranged 9/11, created ISIS, controls Western governments, owns the media, manipulates American elections, starts wars and even engineers antisemitic attacks to create sympathy for itself. A 2005 Syrian edition of the Protocols, officially authorized by the Syrian Ministry of Information, simply updated the ancient script by claiming that the “Elders of Zion” had coordinated the September 11 attacks. The Protocols had become modular: insert the newest catastrophe and the explanation still works.
What has changed most dramatically is not the conspiracy theory but the technology that distributes it.
This week David Frum discussed Warren Kinsella's new book The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda. Kinsella's argument, as Frum describes it, is that the extraordinary explosion of antisemitic and anti-Israel material on social media is not entirely organic. Political actors deliberately seed propaganda, but the social-media environment then does something previous propagandists could only dream of. Algorithms select for material that generates engagement, and fear, anger, disgust and conspiracy generate plenty of engagement.
That means the transmission of antisemitism no longer requires someone to read the Protocols. A person does not have to study medieval Christian theology, Nazi propaganda or Soviet “anti-Zionism.” He doesn't even need to know where the idea came from. The Internet can deliver the finished product stripped of its historical packaging.
This helps explain something that otherwise looks strange: antisemitic ideas now jump effortlessly between political camps that despise each other. A white nationalist, an Islamist, a Marxist activist and an America First isolationist may disagree about nearly everything, yet all four can find a version of the proposition that hidden Zionist power explains what is wrong with the world. Historically those traditions had separate transmission routes. Today they share memes, screenshots, videos, influencers and algorithms.
Antisemitism increasingly operates like an open-source codebase. Christianity contributed some modules; medieval Europe contributed others; nineteenth-century racial and economic antisemitism added more; the Protocols packaged the conspiracy modules particularly effectively; Nazi, Soviet, Arab nationalist and Islamist propagandists translated them into their own ideological languages. Today anyone can download a module without adopting the ideology that originally produced it.
And social media adds something genuinely new. For most of history, somebody had to transmit the accusation. A priest preached it, an author printed it, a government broadcast it, a political movement distributed it. Now the information system itself helps select which versions spread. The historical antisemitic library supplies the material and all are welcome to visit the library. Propagandists seed it; the algorithm rewards the most emotionally effective versions.
The media becomes a critical part of the spread. A new study by Jeremy Mushigi documents how news stories about Israel are produced way out of proportion to the actual importance of the stories.
Israel is a country of 10 million people. It holds 0.12% of humanity on a territory smaller than New Jersey. And in 9 of the last 10 years, it has been the subject of more international news coverage per capita than any other country on Earth — double to quadruple the rate of any Western democracy, 7 - 16x more than Canada, 50 - 137x more than Brazil, 200 - 600x more than India. In 2024, 1 out of every 50 news articles published anywhere on the planet, by outlets outside Israel, was primarily about Israel — and in absolute terms only the United States, a country 34x its size and the world's hegemon, was the subject of more.
Why does a country the size of a mid-tier metropolis city command a fixed, permanent, disproportionate share of the entire world's attention, decade after decade, mostly in a negative register — while catastrophes 10 and 100 times larger pass in silence? The size of the spotlight, its persistence, and its tone are facts. They can be measured. And once you measure them, only one class of explanation survives: the spotlight is not a response to events. The spotlight is the operation — aimed at making Israel the thing you think about. The thing that infuriates you.
Conspiracy theories do not require a conspiracy to spread. Once culturally available, they can propagate through ordinary human psychology, political opportunism and now automated recommendation systems. It has become self-replicating; so many people talk about Israel because so many people talk about Israel. And while there is no central media conspiracy to maintain focus on Israel, that focus allows the next round of conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel to thrive, because the most attractive explanation for a confusing world is a simple one: the one in the headlines every day.
The media, academia, NGOs and international institutions don't need to endorse conspiracy theories to help create the environment in which they flourish. By making Israel an extraordinarily salient subject—producing a constant stream of accusations, controversies, reports and explanations—they furnish the raw material from which conspiratorial minds can construct their next hidden-hand theory.
That may be why the hidden Jewish hand has proved so extraordinarily durable. It supplies something conspiracy thinking desperately wants: a single intentional agent behind a confusing world. Wars, economic changes, elections, migrations and cultural transformations are enormously complicated. “The Jews did it” is simple.
But we still need to understand - why the Jews in particular?
We'll tackle that next.
Friday, September 18, 2026
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