A Crash Course in the World’s Oldest Conspiracy Theory |
I did not grow up thinking about antisemitism. I did not study it in school. It was not part of my professional life. For nearly a decade after law school, I was a management-side employment lawyer — I defended large employers against discrimination claims, and I was good at it. My Jewishness was a fact about me, like being right-handed. It shaped my holidays, not my worldview.
Then came October 7. Like a lot of Jews I know, something cracked open that has not closed since.
For some people, it was the attack itself. For me, it was what came after. The speed with which people I knew — educated, progressive, thoughtful people — began contextualizing, rationalizing, or simply looking away. The sense that something I had always taken for granted — that the people around me would recognize the mass murder of Jews as wrong, full stop — was not as solid as I had believed.
I could not make sense of it. So I did what I always do when something does not make sense: I started reading. And I have not stopped since.
Here is what kept nagging me: a lot of otherwise smart people cannot actually identify antisemitism when it is standing in front of them waving. Not because they are stupid. Because they are looking for the wrong thing. They scan for garden-variety bigotry — slurs, swastikas, the kind that announces itself — and miss everything else.
Some Jewish advocacy organizations have lately tried to rebrand antisemitism as simply “Jew hatred.” I understand the impulse. It is cleaner. It is punchier. It fits on a T-shirt. It is also wrong. Antisemitism is not just hatred. Hatred is a feeling. Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory — arguably the oldest and most durable one in the world — and like any conspiracy theory, it mutates. It changes costumes, swaps vocabulary, moves into new institutions. That is why it is so hard to recognize. You are not looking for a feeling. You are looking for a structure.
What follows is the short version of what I found. Quick disclaimer: I am not a scholar of antisemitism. I am a girl with a library card, an Audible subscription, and a hyperfixation I did not ask for, trying to synthesize what I have learned from people who actually know what they are talking about. The footnotes are there for a reason. Use them.
The writer who cracked this open for me was René Girard — a French-born literary critic and anthropologist who spent most of his career at Stanford chewing on one stubborn question: why do human communities, over and over again, turn on individuals and groups, and why does the violence always follow the same choreography?
Girard’s answer starts with mimetic desire — the observation that we do not generate our desires independently. We learn what to want by watching each other want things.[1] It is why advertising works. It is why middle school is a hellscape. It is why we are all a little miserable on Instagram.
Imitation breeds rivalry. If I want what you want and there is only one to go around, we become competitors. Scale that up across a whole community and you get a mimetic crisis: everyone wanting what everyone else wants, rivalries unresolved, social cohesion fraying.
Here, according to Girard, is the ancient trick civilizations keep reaching for to bleed off the pressure: the scapegoat mechanism.[2] The community unanimously blames a single target. Economic anxiety, political instability, cultural upheaval — it all gets loaded onto someone different enough to single out but embedded enough to serve as a symbol. The unanimity — everyone agreeing at once — is precisely what makes it feel righteous. Nobody pauses to ask whether the target is actually guilty. The crowd moves as one. The tension is released.
Girard wrote in the abstract. He did not need to spell out which group Western civilization has, more consistently than any other group in human history, loaded its anxieties onto. The pattern speaks for itself.
If this still sounds hypothetical, look at what happened on college campuses in the weeks after October 7. An entire moral framework reorganized itself in real time around a single consensus: one group was to blame, their values and their very presence were the problem, and the consensus was so obviously correct that anyone who paused to ask a question was........