The idea of a subversive conspiracy to undermine social and political order first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution when a French Jesuit wrote about Jacobinism, ascribing the outbreak of the Revolution and the Terror to the machinations of Enlightenment thinkers and secret societies such as the philosophes, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the Freemasons. A fellow Frenchman later wrote the Jesuit author to posit the idea that it was really the Jews that were behind all these plots, and giving as evidence Napoleon's granting of civil equality to Jews in ever land he conquered, as well as Napoleon's convocation of an assembly of Jewish rabbis and scholars in France in 1806.
Twenty years after an outbreak of revolutions in Europe in 1848-49, Hermann Goedsche published a novel, under the penname "Sir John Retcliffe, which contained a scene in a cemetery regarding a once a century meeting of representatives of the 12 tribes of Israel and a representative of the Jewish diaspora in which participants plotted to take over the world. Among the chosen means for fulfilling the plot was driving the aristocracy into bankruptcy, provoking revolutions, taking over stock exchanges, abolishing laws preventing profiteering, dominating the press, driving countries to war with each other, encouraging industry and impoverishing the workers, spread free thought and undermining the Church, emancipating Jews, etc. In fact, the goals and methods described effectively distorted and interpreted negatively almost the entire program of mid-19th century German liberalism.
Goedsche actually borrowed the cemetery scene from Alexander Dumas, who wrote in his novel Joseph Balsamo a scene of such gothic flummery that it is hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously, much less seeing it as a description of real events. But the passage written by Goedsche would be borrowed by others, first appearing in a pamphlet in Russia in 1872. Subsequent editions appeared in other countries in the following years. In Germany it was publicized in the 1907 Handbook of the Jewish Question, written by Theodore Fritsch, and it quickly became a standard component in the paranoid imagination of antisemites across Europe.
In the more than 200 years following the French Revolution, the specifics about goals and methods may change, along with just who makes up the shadowy group behind the conspiracy, but the underlying idea that there is such a conspiracy continues to endure.
lol my random thought for the day
