Traditional anti-Jewish tropes and debunkings thereof

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Lately I've posted quite a few threads denouncing Israel, its behavior in the war in Gaza, and its treatment of Palestinians more generally.

But I certainly do NOT want to see American Christian Zionism get replaced by a return to traditional hatred of Jews. I want a world in which Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and everyone else can be safe and have their basic human rights respected.

Alas there seems to have been a recent wave of violent hatred against Jews. So I've decided to devote a thread to opposing traditional anti-Jewish bigotry.

I've already posted quite a bit about modern variants of the traditional anti-Jewish blood libel, in the following two threads:

- QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic
- Secret Tunnel Under New York Synagogue Sparks Chaotic Scenes

In subsequent posts in this thread, I will post about various other anti-Jewish tropes and debunkings thereof. I will also dig up some resources for debunking Holocaust denial.

I invite others to post useful links for debunking anti-Jewish tropes too.

Please do NOT use this thread to discuss Israel/Palestine. This thread is for debunkings of traditional anti-Jewish tropes, most of which long pre-date the modern state of Israel.

Much of today's all-too-popular grand conspiracy ideology is based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in the early 1900's. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

Pope Benedict: Jewish people not guilty for Jesus death
Romans are to blame for death of Jesus - Washington University in St. Louis

I'll now post links to some resources for debunking Holocaust denial.

The Holocaust is one of the best-documented war crimes in all of recorded history. The Nazis themselves documented it in detail, albeit with a thin veil of euphemisms. Many World War II historians have studied it in detail since then.

So there's no good reason to doubt that it happened. There were some anti-German war propaganda stories that turned out to be just war propaganda, but the mass murder of millions of Jews, Romani and Sinti, disabled people, gays, etc. isn't one of them. Nor is there any good reason to suspect that the numbers of people killed, in any of the above categories, have been over-estimated by any huge amount. They are more likely to be slightly under-estimated, if anything.

Nevertheless, Holocaust denial and "Holocaust revisionism" are alive and well these days. Holocaust deniers/"revisionists" usually (though not always) have an anti-Jewish agenda, often claiming or implying that the consensus about the Holocaust among mainstream historians isn't based on the evidence, but instead is due to control of the academic establishment by an evil cabal of Jews.

Arguments about the Holocaust often get very detailed and technical-sounding, e.g. claims by an alleged expert on gas chambers that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, or claims that the crematoria at Auschwitz could not have burned enough bodies per day. However, if you run into someone making an argument like this on TikTok, or wherever, chances are that the argument has already been made -- and debunked -- many times before. So, whatever argument they make, you can probably look it up on at least one of the sites I will mention below.

Probably the best site for looking up responses to Holocaust denial claims is the Holocaust Encyclopedia on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There's a search bar at the top of the main page, in which you can enter keywords for any specific Holocaust denial claim. I just now looked up "debunking holocaust denial" for a general list of articles debunking the more common Holocaust denial claims.

Here is a general series of articles about Holocaust denial, and here is an article on how to identify reputable historical sources.

Another good site is the Nizkor Project, a very old website that has been around almost as long as the World Wide Web itself. According to the Wikipedia article about the Nizkor Project, it was founded by Ken McVay and is now maintained by B'nai Brith Canada.

The Nizkor Project website contains huge amounts of historical documentation of the Holocaust, organized by categories such as "Camps" (information about specific Nazi concentration camps) and "People" (information about a wide variety of specific people, including "Antisemites," "Holocaust deniers," "Holocaust perpetrators," and "Holocaust victims"). It also has a section on the Nuremberg trials and a collection of research guides.

If anyone knows of any other good resources for debunking Holocaust denial, please let me know.

Some background on older conspiracy theories that were among the inspirations for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

Simonini’s letter: the 19th century text that influenced antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Illuminati: "How a conspiracy theory about the origins of the French Revolution became steeped in antisemitism," by Claus Oberhauser, The Conversation, March 31, 2020:

Here are some web resources about anti-Masonry and its overlap with anti-Jewish conspiracy claims.

First, some pages on Masonic websites:

- On the website of the Masonic Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, in Canada:
--- Anti-Masonic claims refuted - large collection of pages, including an Anti-Masonry FAQ, rebutting many anti-Masonic claims and other grand-conspiracy claims
--- History of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
--- Milton William Cooper

- Anti-Masonry Frequently Asked Questions on Mastermason.com

- Anti-Masonry: Points of View by Edward L. King, including responses to many objections to Freemasonry (via the Wayback machine)

- Criticisms of Freemasonry & Where to Find Refutations of those Criticisms by Paul M. Bessel (via the Wayback machine)

Second, some pages by various other people:

- The Illuminati Freemason Conspiracy on PublicEye.org (Political Research Associates). Brief introductory article with bibliography. (link via Wayback machine)

- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Anti-Masonry and Anti-Semitism by Leon Zeldis

- The Myth of the Judaeo-Masonic Conspiracy by W. Bro. A Israel, Master, in a collection of pages about Masonry on the website of Gary L. Dryfoos at M.I.T. (via the Wayback Machine)

- Freemasons - from the 700 Club to Art Bell, an object of conspiracy thinking by Conrad Goeringer, May, 1998, on the American Atheists site.

Closely related to Protocols-style grand-conspiracy claims is the idea that the world is secretly run by a cabal of Jewish bankers, e.g the Rothschilds (a European Jewish banking family, who in reality are far from being the world's wealthiest bankers).

Various right wing groups have advocated grand-conspiracy theories featuring "international bankers." Such theories don't necessarily target Jews. After all, the Rockefellers and the Morgans are not Jews.

Nevertheless, banker-conspiracy claims closely parallel and are often linked to Protocols-style Jewish-cabal claims, via the idea that the Rockefellers and the Morgans are somehow "owned" by the Rothschilds. And one of the most popular banker-conspiracy writings is Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins, who also believed in the traditional anti-Jewish blood libel.

So, if one is going to debunk anti-Jewish claims, it helps to be familiar with "banker" claims too, and their fallacies.

Some common false claims, e.g. in popular conspiracy-theory videos such as Zeitgeist, are the following:

1) That the Federal Reserve System is nothing but a private banking cartel, "as Federal as Federal Express." In fact, it's a mixture of public and private, neither strictly a government agency nor strictly a private entity either, nor is it a for-profit entity. It has a Board of Governors who are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. But it consists of 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, each of which has "member banks," which are private banks.

2) That the Fed's profits go into the pockets of member banks, at the expense of the U.S. Treasury. In fact, only a very small portion of the Fed's profits go to member banks. The member banks are required to keep some of their own money at the Federal Reserve Bank, and they earn a dividend on that money. But those dividends are only about 2 or 3 percent of the Fed's profits, most of which go into the U.S. Treasury. (See, for example, the Federal Reserve System's income and expense tables for 2005 and 2006.)

Some helpful web resources:

- Debunking the Federal Reserve Conspiracy Theories by Edward Flaherty (via the Wayback Machine)

- 9 myths about the Federal Reserve — debunked - Bankrate

- Debunking '#FedNow' and '#digitaldollar' conspiracies (video) - NBC News, Apr 13, 2023

- Common myths about the Federal Reserve - Pragmatic Capitalism

- Jewish "Control" of the Federal Reserve: A Classic Antisemitic Myth by the Anti-Defamation League (via the Wayback Machine)

My list above includes some general resources about the Fed, not just responses to anti-Jewish banking conspiracy claims, because the anti-Jewish claims are often accompanied by general misunderstandings about the banking system.

I just now read a very interesting article that should have been titled "How anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant bigotry was one of the causes of the Great Depression," but instead has the more boring title of The Bank of United States, East European Jews and the Lost World of Immigrant Banking by Rebecca A. Kobrin, The Gothan Center for New York City History, December 21, 2021.

Problem was, the New York Federal Reserve Board refused to bail out a bank that happened to be owned by Jews and catered to immigrants. (Most other banks were owned by WASPs and tended to deem working-class immigrants as not being credit-worthy.)