Power

Myth: Jews Have Too Much Power

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Jews account for approximately 0.2 percent of the global population. And yet antisemites believe that this tiny minority is not only on a quest for total world domination, but is already in control of banks, the media, industry, government — even the weather.¹

As recently as March 2018, a Washington D.C. city council member claimed that the Rothschild family, a Jewish family known for a bank they founded in Frankfurt, was “controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities.”² Jews have also been blamed for economic crises, from the Great Depression to the 2008 recession.³

Antisemitism Uncovered video on the antisemitic trope of power.

A German propaganda cartoon from around 1938 warning of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

At the core of this strain of conspiratorial antisemitism is the belief that Jews do not deserve to have power, regardless of what values they may stand for. Jews who pursue or occupy leadership roles in elected office or other stations of public life too often are deemed conspiratorial, rather than commended for their investment in concerns of the collective. The myth of excessive Jewish power also relies on historical claims of Jews controlling global affairs. Jews are cast as manipulative and conniving schemers who work in the shadows to advance an evil agenda. Antisemites often position themselves as truth-tellers, whose mission it is to unmask a supposed insidious Jewish plot to take over the world.

An antisemitic political cartoon, published in 1898 in the French humor magazine Le Rire, depicts a caricatured Rothschild holding the world in his hands.

Antisemites blame social ills on baseless notions about Jewish power. The Rothschild family, for example, has been targeted with conspiracy theories after their Frankfurt bank grew to prominence in 19th-century Europe. These misguided condemnations have had less to do with the family or its behavior than with millennia-old stereotypes of Jews as disloyal, greedy abusers of power. In 1846, for instance, a political pamphlet circulated across Europe, falsely alleging that a patriarch of the Rothschild family used insider knowledge to profit from the Napoleonic wars.⁴ The pamphlet was pseudonymously authored by “Satan.” In America, the Rothschilds have been blamed for instigating the Civil War, plotting to assassinate Abraham Lincoln (and later John F. Kennedy) and controlling the economy.⁵

Ideas and fears about Jewish power were codified in the early 20th century with the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an elaborate forgery, reporting a supposed meeting that never occurred. Tsarist secret police in Russia first circulated portions of The Protocols, purported to be leaked minutes from secret meetings of Jewish leaders who were conspiring to take over the world.⁶

A 1934 edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. — A 1934 edition of The Protocols of The Elders of Zion.

The Protocols falsely “revealed” a purported Jewish plan for global domination: how they would take over industries, infiltrate governments and use their stranglehold on the media to advance their hidden agenda. No such meeting had ever occurred, and the document was pure fiction, an elaborate forgery. Nevertheless, The Protocols attracted much attention, was translated into multiple languages and was disseminated around the world.⁷

The Protocols and its portrayal of an international Jewish conspiracy heavily influenced Nazi ideology. Nazi propaganda in the German tabloid Der Stürmer detailed the Jews’ “Secret Plans Against Germany”:⁸

“The secret goals of the Jewish people are laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion…They contain the Jewish plan for world conquest…

The Jews will fight without pity. We must also fight without pity against Pan-Jewry. The Jewish people must be exterminated from the face of the earth.”

The text also gained traction in the United States among such noted antisemites as automaker Henry Ford, who published a series of antisemitic articles based on The Protocols in his weekly newspaper and which he would eventually republish in the book, The International Jew.⁹

By 1925 the first of many Arabic editions of The Protocols emerged in Cairo. Since that initial publication, it has endured as a bestseller and, according to historian Norman Stillman, has remained widely available in bookstores “from Casablanca to Baghdad to this day,” praised by political leaders of the Islamic world.¹⁰

The Protocols laid the groundwork for modern conspiracy theories about the reach and influence of “Jewish Power”: that the wealthy Rothschild family controls the world banking system, that the Federal Reserve is under the thumb of Jewish financiers, that Jews control Wall Street, that Jews plotted terror attacks and that Jews have fomented global conflict and war.¹¹

Today, in many parts of the world, The Protocols remains widely read and accepted as fact.¹² World leaders such as Reycep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey or Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia still blame a sinister Jewish conspiracy for their misfortunes.¹³ The Protocols is featured for sale at many book fairs across the Arab world.¹⁴ The Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies peddle The Protocols as a sinister form of statecraft, enshrining it as policy and using it to justify their irrational hatred for Jews around the world and for the Jewish state. Such anti-Jewish prejudice arguably is one of modern Iran’s most impactful and far-reaching exports. Language and conspiracy theories from The Protocols still creep into the modern lexicon — in tweets, social media posts, newspapers and out of the mouths of public figures and elected officials.

Now, in the dark corners of the Internet, on white supremacist websites and in underground chatrooms, promotion of The Protocols and the notion of an international Jewish conspiracy functions as a kind of perverse social currency. “Globalist” functions as a codeword for Jew,¹⁵ the “cosmopolitan elite” a stand-in for wealthy and erudite Jews accused of acting against the common man to install a new world order.¹⁶

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The secret goals of the Jewish people are laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They contain the Jewish plan for world conquest.

Der Stürmer

See It

A sign reading ”Zionist control the media” was displayed at a protest in Seattle on November 18, 2023.

A sign reading ”Zionist control the media” was displayed at a protest in Seattle on November 18, 2023. ¹⁷
Sign held at a Texas state-wide rally in February 2024.

Sign held at a Texas state-wide rally in February 2024. ¹⁸
Antisemitism Uncovered – Power
Truck spotted in Los Angeles, CA, posted online in November 2023.

Truck spotted in Los Angeles, CA, posted online in November 2023. ¹⁹
On November 9, 2023, far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters interviewed former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Here is what she said:
“And so we’ve got…a legislative branch of 535 individuals. They all swear some kind of allegiance to Israel one way or the other because that’s the way you get campaign finance, you cannot get money out of the big PACs….And if you look at labor unions, labor unions, uh the working class people in the United States who are members of labor unions are actually buying Israeli bonds. So they’re supporting the state of Israel. If a hurricane happens to come your way and you need help from your local emergency agency. Well, it’s likely that you’ve signed the pledge that you’re not going to advocate any policies that Israel doesn’t like. So, I mean, they have penetrated the executive branch, the, the legislative branch, they have, uh, penetrate, created our state and local branches of government.”
“90% of Black people in entertainment — from sports, to music, to acting — are in some way tied into Jewish businesspeople…there’s a Jewish person right there controlling the country, the Jewish people controlling who gets the best video or not, controlling what the media says about me.”
— Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” 10/24/22) ²⁰
“The “cabal” is a satanic sect of Judaism called sabbatean frankism. It’s inverted Judaism mixed with khabbala [sic] and the Talmud. They gained power in Europe through usury which was banned for Christians. Eventually doing banking for the royals and fomenting wars and revolutions like bolshevism. Sabbatean frankism grew through banking families like the Rothchilds, Warburgs, and Schiffs…That’s the global central banking system we’re dealing with. It’s why the same people run Hollywood, media, tech, porn, etc, and have been involved in much of the ideas/movements destroying the world. It’s pretty obvious once you pay attention to who runs everything that conservatives don’t like or came up with ideas they don’t like. #SynagogueOfSatan”
— Shared by QAnon John (John Sabal, major QAnon influencer, 60.5K followers on Telegram), 1.27.2022
“Through diplomacy, NGOization, education, trade, tourism, and cultural exchange, the zionist entity and its agents have invested billions to make the colony accepted and viable to a world that knows that zionists are fascists [all sic]. When these paths to normalize do not work, zionists move to violent censorship of those who adamantly oppose normalizing with imprisonment, exile, and martyrdom.” Jisr Collective, a self-described anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist group, August 2022 ²¹
In 2020, Rodney Muhammad, then president of the Philadelphia NAACP, the NAACP being most prominent Black American civil rights organization, shared an antisemitic meme that depicted a Jewish man wearing a kippah and pressing a large, bejewelled hand down on a faceless mass of people next to photos of celebrities who recently came under fire for their allegedly antisemitic comments. Below the image was a quote, incorrectly attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire, that read, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”²²²³
“…they manage the media, the finances and have hidden the truth from the world.” – president of the Palestinian Federation in Chile, an umbrella organization representing the country’s Palestinian population, May 22, 2021²⁴
Much of the antisemitic messaging around the vaccine highlighted Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s Jewish heritage. This fact provided antisemites with “evidence” that the vaccine effort is part of a calculated, long-term Jewish plot to institute a “Global Jew Government.”²⁵
Individuals associated with the Goyim Defense League (GDL), a network of antisemitic provocateurs, distributed antisemitic propaganda on numerous occasions in cities across the U.S. in 2021, claiming that “every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish” and naming several Jewish federal health officials and pharmaceutical company executives.²⁶²⁷
“The truth is the American media, and the American political system, and the American Federal Reserve, is dominated by a tiny minority: the Jewish Zionist cause.” – David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, speaking at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, 2017.
“But, I mean it’s not that Jews are bad, it’s just they are the head of the Jewish mafia in the United States. They run Uber, they run the health care, they’re going to scam you, they’re going to hurt you.” – Alex Jones, conspiracist radio talk show host and founder of Info Wars, on “The Alex Jones Show,” 2016.
Three years before he became the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, British politician Jeremy Corbyn voiced support for an artist whose mural depicted, in a style reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, “hook-nosed” caricatures of Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the bare backs of workers. Corbyn consoled the artist on Facebook after the mural was set to be removed: “You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”²⁸
In France, the populist “Yellow Vest” demonstrations — which sprung up in late 2018 as a protest against rising fuel taxes and economic inequality — have included antisemitic signs that accuse French President Emmanuel Macron of being a “whore of the Jews” and a Jewish “puppet.”²⁹
“The Jews have control over those agencies of government…When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door.” – Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Black nationalist hate group Nation of Islam (NOI), 2018.³⁰
The white supremacist shooter who killed 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 accused President Trump’s Jewish advisors of causing the caravan of Central American migrants to move toward the US-Mexico border.³¹
A common antisemitic trope depicts Jews as the head of an octopus with tentacles stretched out across the globe.
During an interview, Lou Dobbs, Conservative American news pundit, stated that the founder of the Open Society Foundations George Soros’ “tentacles reach out into various non-government organizations and nonprofits.” – September 11, 2019³²

Louis Farrakhan with his book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.

Photographer unknown, Louis Farrakhan (date unknown), photo, Nation of Islam Research Group https://noirg.org/photos-2/attachment/farrakhan-w-tsrv2-holding-and-serioius-face/

Address It

Poster for a 1937 art exhibition, “The Eternal Jew,” in Munich, Germany.

At times, this myth is invoked unintentionally. Some might not realize the historical roots of such antisemitic conspiracies. Such ignorance is one of the reasons we must educate ourselves and each other about harmful social myths. We also can take action to show where we stand. When alt right trolls took to targeting Jewish users on Twitter by adding three parentheses around their names to suggest an “echo,” or reverberation of Jewish power and destruction, some non-Jewish Twitter users placed triple parentheses around their own names in acts of solidarity.³³

The great irony of the myth about Jewish power is that, historically, Jews have had very little influence or control over even their own fate. There is a difference between cultivating the resilience, discipline and drive necessary to survive adversity and lusting after power over others. The pogroms of the 19th century and the genocide of the Holocaust in the 20th century are just two tragic reminders from recent history of the powerlessness that Jews ultimately have experienced at the hands of despotic and murderous regimes.

Jews are not monolithic. They do not act as one to advance a particular, unified agenda. Their interests are diverse, as are their identities.

Antisemitic Myths

Join The Fight

Antisemitism Uncovered is a guide to help you understand more about the history and current manifestations of antisemitism. What’s the next step? Join the fight against it! We’ve gathered all our most practical resources—the tools and strategies you need to engage in that fight—in one place: right here in Antisemitism Uncovered Toolkit: Resources to Speak Up, Share Facts and Show Strength Against Hate.