In light of the times we are a-livin’ in right now, I thought it might be interesting to do a series this week on the history of conspiracy theories. The first photo you see here is one that just won’t go away, no matter how much evidence gets stacked against it time and time again. I am talking about the spurious accounts in the infamous _Protocols of Zion_.
Written around 1901, _The Protocols_ falsely claimed to be the recordings of a gathering of international Jewish leaders from the late 1800s in a plot to take over the world. The meeting never existed; the leaders’ group, the “Elders of Zion” never existed; and an international Jewish plan of global domination never existed. But the text played into widespread feelings of anti-Semitism and insecurities common to many Americans and Europeans in the early 20th century: fear of the erosion of Christianity, of their wealth being threatened, of a loss of power to a group they considered “other.”
The thing is, _The Protocols_ caused a lot of harm. The American car manufacturer Henry Ford funded the publication of half a million copies in the 1920s, and Adolf Hitler used the _Protocols_ in _Mein Kampf_ to critisize Jewish people. In fact, Nazis taught the document as fact to German students in the 1930s. (And we know that that six million Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust.) Those who fall prey to conspiracy theories often do so because they dislike uncertainty, and the theories make sense of their world. They also are drawn to ampliphying their own confirmation biases. So if a person already had anti-Semitic prejudices, then _The Protocols_ seemed to justify the suspicions.
Despite the fact that _The Protocols_ was demonstrably proven to be a faked document (as shown in the article from 1921 in the _London Times_), it is still upheld as truth by extremist leaders in alt-right groups and among some leaders in the countries of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.
