In his recent book Everyday Hate, Dave Rich seeks to explain the ubiquity and persistence of anti-Semitism in the West, focusing in particular on Britain. Kathleen Hayes sums up his argument in her review:
Anti-Semitism does more than provide a scapegoat. Uniquely among forms of racism, it provides adherents a seemingly all-encompassing explanation for why evil exists. From the time of the first blood libel, Jews have been cast as not only an enemy, but an inordinately powerful, sinister, scheming one. (As Theodor Adorno put it in a nutshell, “Anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews.”) COVID-19 has inspired a spike in conspiracy theories that blame the pandemic on Jews. Those who spread this lie unwittingly invoke the 14th century, when Jews in continental Europe were blamed for spreading the plague by poisoning wells.
The lodestar of present-day conspiracy theories, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,“built a bridge into modernity” for Europe’s traditional anti-Jewish mythology. The idea that all Europe’s problems were caused by Jews just seemed to make sense on a visceral level. The Protocols were tremendously popular in Britain, with respectable newspapers enthusiastically asking if it was genuine. The fact that it was soon proved a Russian fake did little to stem its appeal; it remains all too alive today.
Conspiracist theories around Brexit, with George Soros deployed as a demonic figure seeking to undermine democracy, invoke the same tropes. At the same time, conspiracy theories about Israel gain traction in the popular imagination because Israel is Jewish: “They latch onto pre-existing beliefs about how Jews behave, like a climber using footholds cut into the rock by those who have scaled the same mountain centuries before.”
Read more on Fathom: https://fathomjournal.org/book-review-everyday-hate-how-antisemitism-is-built-into-our-world-and-how-you-can-change-it/