Yesterday a federal court unsealed legal documents in a lawsuit against an accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, listing names that were formerly redacted of people mentioned in the proceedings. [1] Although this seemingly is unrelated to things antisemitic, a deeper dive shows how almost anything can be seen through the lens of antisemitism. and how this particular situation can be “not good for the Jews”. “X” was literally atwitter about the names and relationships revealed. When a desired narrative could not be shown, ones were literally made up and “documented” by modern technology. More on that in a bit.
Let’s back up, first to the early 20th century, when a book was published, commonly referred to as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Let’s be lazy and go to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-FOOTNOTEBronner20031-3 The article details the use, till the present day, of this forgery, flexible enough to support multiple flavors of Jewish conspiracy for over a century.
Essentially, the book, a forgery, detailed an international Jewish conspiracy to acquire property and wealth, eventually seize political power and take over the world. The Nazis later used the book as part of their propaganda effort.
So. I will not go into depth about Jeffrey Epstein — a wealthy. businessman and convicted sex offender who threw parties and invited the rich and influential to a private island where underage girls were supposedly provided for sex. Some of the most famous and influential people in the world were alleged to have participated in illegal activities. I will not parce through individual narratives here. Epstein was found hanged, supposedly a suicide, in his jail cell in 2019, awaiting trial on multiple sexual offenses. All the above formed the basis of multiple flavors of conspiracy theories about both his life and death.
What I am about to say is my feeling, and not the result of any statistical analysis of mainstream, fringe, or social media. At the time of Epstein’s death, for the most part, the conspiracies tended not to have an antisemitic flavor. Many were politically oriented. Now, however, it seems things have turned, and the sense of the narrative spin is turning to The Protocols. All this is anecdotal, but social media references to Epstein being an agent of the Mossad (gathering blackmail fodder for them), references to some names still redacted — one poster mentioned “Rothschild” without specificity or real context, the implied being that this fit into a Protocols scenario in some way, mention of the people involved who were Jewish, etc. As this is the Internet, and modern technology being what it is, “documents” were posted with names seemingly inserted to fit a narrative (one comment on such a document referenced the fact that the page number was not part of the document drop). The forging of Protocols took months or more, it took years to be translated out of Russia and to be disseminated. Internet forgeries are created in the time it takes to order a pizza.
In our current climate, the morphing of a story such as this one into support for an antisemitic narrative is a bellwether of, perhaps, worse.
[1]Jeffrey Epstein Documents Reveal Names of Associates | Live Updates from Fox News Digital https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/jeffery-epstein-documents-list; Jeffrey Epstein court documents released with names unsealed | CNN Businesshttps://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/03/business/jeffrey-epstein-documents-list-names/index.html
Wandering Jew 