The endless Israel/Palestine problem is the source of all sorts of Jewish-conspiracy theories. They are usually cut out of whole cloth by Arab improvised "theorists". The Palestinians have a solid case against Israel , but their cause is not helped by wild speculations, which are really harmless but which reveal a tendency to self-discrediting historical distortions.

After 9/11 it was rumored that no Jews had died in the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center or in the attack on the Pentagon. These claims were completely groundless. But conspiracy theories are often based not on facts but on the absence of facts which does not preclude that there could be facts however improbable.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper proposed the falsification criterion according to which a theory is scientific if it can be falsified. On this basis Einstein's cosmological constant, which cannot be falsified (or verified), is not scientific. Outside of science, Popper's thesis makes room for all possible conspiracy theories. But of course Popper, who was Jewish himself, was not thinking of non-provable claims. The most far-fetched Jewish-conspiracy theory is probably that Kennedy was assassinated because he was trying to force Israel to dismantle the Dimona nuclear plant, in which nuclear weapons are produced. 

All Jewish-conspiracy theories eventually revert to the perennial assertion that Jews are following a blueprint to take over the world. Its most famous statement is found in a work titled The protocols of the learned Elders of Zion , which was concocted by the Tsarist secret police and became well-known in America because Henry Ford quoted it in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent . That this concoction is based on nothing does not necessarily mean that Jews are not, as many Arabs want to believe, influential enough to determine the course of world history. 

The proportional prevalence of Jews in American media and finances, just to consider two crucial sources of power, is prima facie a case for a Jewish conspiracy. After all, how is it possible that Jews, who are a tiny minority in America, have scaled such eminent positions? One specific case that could be cited is the Walt Disney corporation, whose founder was notoriously and mildly anti-Semitic but is now controlled by Jews. 

There is at least one incontrovertible fact in the anti-Jewish libel cited and it is that if there exists a world Jewish conspiracy it began in the late 19 th century, since when it appears to have been snowballing. Jews are also disproportionally present in science and the arts, especially literature and music. Before the 18 th century, Jews, who had only restricted civil rights in European countries, made only sporadic contributions to western civilization. The first great Jewish composer was Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was perhaps the first great Jewish literary figure in Europe . It stands to reason that Jews began their ascent in the most advanced western countries during the 19th century.

If Jews are conspiring to take over the world, the obvious place to look for evidence is in America, where prominent Jews in any field are more numerous than any where else. (Let's skip the USSR, where the influence of Jews was incalculable, or for that matter Russia today, many of whose most powerful magnates, starting with now downfallen Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are Jews.) So where do we begin?

Let's do so with the myth that Jews in America number 3 or 4 or 5 million. Jews are definitely not the majority of the American population, but they certainly must number 20 million and over. But the census? How about the figures? Let's look at the concept of Jew itself. What is a Jew? Strictly speaking, a Jew is a person who professes Judaism. Widely, Jews include the latter as well as descendants of practicing Jews, including converts to Judaism. On the say-so of Jews themselves, Judaism is a religion and an ethnicity, like being Hispanic or black. But the census does not have a box for Jews as ethnics. Most Jews also probably do not practice Judaism. In sum, the US census undercounts Jews in the wide sense and Jews have no problem whatever with that. 

But even if Jews were immensely more numerous than the ridiculously low figure that they are commonly assigned, they still figure in the upper tiers of American society out of proportion to their real number. So what to make of this? Are Jews not only powerful but also numerous? Wouldn't this make the basic Jewish conspiracy much more likely? There is a cultural consideration here that is overlooked, which is, to put it briefly, that in America Jews are simply Americans. Whatever discriminations they might have had to put up with in the past--and they probably weren't greater than those against Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans--Jews are as much a part of America as are WASPs, who are overblown (the inverse of Jews) except electorally. To say that Jews are taking over America is equivalent to saying that Americans want to take over their own country. 

There is one area in which perhaps Jewish influence as such is observable in America and that is in the privileged position that Israel occupies in over-all American foreign policy. The only point on which the USA has not cosseted Israeli objectives is in moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and if it were up to the House of Representatives this would have been done many years ago. This raises the issue of whether American-Israeli relations are the doing of Jews against what the American public wishes and here again it is impossible to distinguish between American Jews and the rest of Americans.  

There is a way to get out of this circle, although it puts us in another circle. Public opinion in America is manipulated by the media. Since Jews in the wide sense are in the thick of mediadom, then it could be argued that America feels as it does about Israel because it is influenced by Jews. But if being American Jewish and being just plain American are indistinguishable, then the control of the media is not in the hands of others than Americans themselves.  

There remains the nagging question of why America sees Israel in a way that the rest of the world does not. So, in this specific sense, the USA might be considered to be Judaized, or more specifically, Israelized. But from this to a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world there is a very long distance, which shows precisely in that Jews do not have the wherewithal to shape world opinion, especially not public opinion in countries as developed as the USA. 

Let us, finally, look at the other aspects of the big Jewish conspiracy theory. Conspiracies usually involve secretive minorities opposed to visible majorities. Since the argument that Jews the world over are maybe ten or fifteen million can be ignored, then the idea of a tiny conspirational Jewish minority can be set aside. 

There remains the question of how Jews came up in the world so quickly and in such large numbers during the 20th century. The facts are that Jews were good at making money long before they were enfranchised in the West and, whether we like it or not, wealth, which implies intelligence, cannot be separated from cultural achievements. So the Jewish world-domination theory comes down to that Jews belonged to a culture which placed a premium on accumulating riches. Calvinists believed that prosperity was a sign of God's favor. From here, in good conspirational fashion, we could say either that Jews were Calvinists or that Calvinists too wanted to hog the world. It is much more within reason, however, that ultimately what the Elders of Zion believed was that money gives power, a lot of power, and who can quarrel with that?