Antisemitic trope
Antisemitic trope
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Antisemitic trope

Antisemitic tropes, also known as antisemitic canards or antisemitic libels, are antisemitic allegations[failed verification] about Jews as an ethnicity or Judaism as a religion.

Since the 2nd century, malicious allegations of Jewish guilt have become a recurring motif in antisemitic tropes, which take the form of libels, stereotypes or conspiracy theories. They typically present Jews as cruel, powerful or controlling, some of which also feature the denial or trivialization of historical atrocities against Jews. These tropes have led to pogroms, genocides, persecutions and systemic racism for Jews throughout history. Antisemitic tropes mainly evolved in monotheistic societies, whose religions were derived from Judaism, many of which were traceable to Christianity's early days. These tropes were mirrored by 7th-century Quranic claims that Jews were "visited with wrath from Allah" due to their supposed practice of usury and disbelief in his revelations. In medieval Europe, antisemitic tropes were expanded in scope to justify mass persecutions and expulsions of Jews. Particularly, Jews were repeatedly massacred over accusations of causing epidemics and "ritually consuming" Christian babies' blood.

In the 19th century, allegations about Jews plotting "world domination" by "controlling" mass media and global banking spread, which mutated into modern tropes, especially the libel that Jews "invented and promoted communism". These tropes fatefully formed Adolf Hitler's worldview, contributing to World War II and the Holocaust, which killed at least 6 million Jews (67% pre-war European Jews). Since the 20th century, antisemitic libels' usage has been documented among groups that self-identify as "anti-Zionists".[page needed]

Most contemporary tropes feature the denial or trivialization of anti-Jewish atrocities, especially the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust, or of the Jewish exodus from Muslim countries. Holocaust denial and antisemitic tropes are inextricable, typical of which is the libel that the Holocaust was "fabricated" or "exaggerated" to "advance" Jews' or Israel's interests. The most recent example is the denial or trivialization of the October 7 attacks, with the victims overwhelmingly Jewish, including several Holocaust survivors.

The publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 is usually considered the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature. The trope embodied by the book is manifested in both writings and imagery, where Jews are accused of plotting world domination nefariously. Typical examples include Nazi-originated cartoons depicting Jews as a giant octopus reaching across the globe. A 2001 Egyptian reprint of Henry Ford's antisemitic text The International Jew, with the same octopus imagery on the front cover.

Among the earliest refutations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery were a series of articles printed in The Times in 1921, which revealed the forgery's content to have been plagiarized from the unrelated satire The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Russian imperial state popularized the forgery to discredit the Bolsheviks by accusing Jews of organizing the Russian revolution. The forgery scapegoated Jews as the leading subversive force to try to dispel mass revolt and keep the empire united.

Later, the trope spread westward when the Great Depression and Nazism's rise catalyzed its dissemination. A Polish equivalent goes by Judeopolonia, which posited an imaginary Jewish domination of Poland. Contemporarily, the trope often goes by Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), which accuses the Jews of "controlling Western governments" for selfish ends, like benefitting Israel. The ZOG is widely peddled by antisemites, such as the Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, Islamists and black supremacists.

Malcolm X, a well known Black American activist, believed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he introduced to the Nation of Islam (NOI) for circulation among their Black American audience. In 2003, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed drew a standing ovation at an OIC conference after alleging:

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