Antisemitism

Antisemitism in the novel appears both as historical persecution and as a reusable mechanism for inventing enemies and explaining political failure. The account of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion traces how accusations against Jews were attached to older anti-Masonic and anti-clerical conspiracies, adapted by political actors, and circulated as fabricated proof. At the same time, Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi’s game of connecting everything to the Plan reveals how the desire for a total explanation can reproduce the very habits of conspiratorial thought the novel exposes.## Political accusation and the hidden enemySalon’s remarks make antisemitism present-tense rather than merely historical. He insinuates that underground tunnels and metropolitan railways are evidence of hidden Jewish activity, then cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as though its allegation that underground passages would be used to destroy capitals established the truth of a plot. Casaubon recognizes that Salon’s claims invoke a conspiracy of some Jews, not Jews collectively, but Salon’s distinction does not make the accusation less conspiratorial: the supposed plot is made credible by assigning hidden agency to an imagined group and treating the underground as proof of its reach. The episode presents the allegation as a projection, not as a discovery of an actual Jewish conspiracy.Salon’s collection of objects is part of the same interpretive habit. He sees signs of the Antichrist in an indiscriminate assortment of collars, badges, utensils, and other belongings; elsewhere the account recalls the disorderly objects in a coffer and the linked triangles he takes for a sinister seal. His example dramatizes how a theory can convert unrelated things into confirmation. The narrator places this episode within the history of Russian antisemitism and links it to the wider persistence of claims that Jews secretly direct public events.## From anti-Masonic conspiracy to Judeo-Masonic accusationThe novel follows the adaptation of anti-Jewish ideas through successive political contexts. It describes how Napoleon I’s rapprochement with Jews altered the course of Jesuit polemic: Barruel’s earlier account had not named Jews, but a letter attributed to Captain Simonini claimed that Jews had founded Freemasonry and infiltrated secret societies. The accusation proved politically useful in the dispute surrounding Napoleon’s contact with the Grand Sanhedrin. Barruel accepted the expanded theory of a Judeo-Masonic plot, which allowed it to be turned against further opponents, including the Alta Vendita Carbonara and anticlerical figures associated with the Risorgimento.This history does not present antisemitism as a coherent doctrine passed down unchanged. It depicts it as an adaptable accusation that absorbs existing enemies and changes its targets. In the investigators’ account, the Protocols’ appearance in Russia becomes a new stage in that process: Diotallevi speculates that the Paulicians were responsible, while Belbo constructs a story in which a Jerusalemite tradition has separated into rival branches, including one established in Russia. These are characters’ conspiracy-driven explanations, not independently confirmed historical facts. Their confident arrangement of groups and motives demonstrates how readily suspicion can turn contested histories into a seemingly complete system.## The Protocols and the manufacture of authorityThe novel describes the Protocols as twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion, offering a purported program for gaining world power. Its stated program is internally contradictory: it attacks press freedom while appearing to encourage libertinage, criticizes liberalism while invoking means associated with capitalist power, and proposes both political manipulation and the fomenting of disorder. The contradiction does not prevent the text from functioning as an accusation. Rather, its breadth allows readers to interpret almost any political development as evidence of the alleged plot.The narrative traces the text’s literary and political recycling. It recounts how the Times of London identified Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel as a source for passages in the Protocols. Joly’s pamphlet had used a fictional argument between Montesquieu and Machiavelli to criticize Napoleon III; the novel’s account then proposes that an earlier document by Sue had already reworked the Plan, making the Protocols part of a chain of borrowing and adaptation. Instead of treating the discovery of plagiarism as the end of the conspiracy claim, Nesta Webster is said to have reinterpreted it: if Joly knew the Plan, his copying did not disprove its existence. The logic absorbs the evidence that might have undermined the claim and turns it into further support.The same conversion occurs in the account of an alleged meeting in a Prague cemetery. A scene that had appeared in a Russian pamphlet and later reports is repeated as fact, with successive versions altering its supposed speaker and source. The narrative also recounts letters attributed to fifteenth-century Jews that describe concealment, occupational advancement, and revenge. It frames these materials as another iteration of an existing conspiracy template, one previously attributed to Jesuits and to the Templars, rather than as reliable evidence of a Jewish plan. Across these examples, repetition and changes of attribution help a fabricated narrative acquire the appearance of accumulated testimony.## Political use and the feedback of suspicionThe novel’s account of Sergei Nilus and Rachkovsky shows how conspiratorial material can be used for practical political ends. It describes Rachkovsky’s anti-Semitic organizing and his cultivation of an appeal that mixes apparent self-criticism with claims designed to lend credibility to the falsehoods it circulates. In the investigators’ reconstruction, Rachkovsky adapts a text associated with Elie de Cyon and Joly or Sue, substitutes Jews for Witte, and circulates the result as an account of Jewish power. The name Cyon itself is treated as suggestive of Zion, helping make the document seem to implicate an eminent Jewish figure in a Jewish plot. The account then follows the document through Juliana Glinka to Russian authorities and the tsar, where it contributes to political trouble for Witte. The episode depicts antisemitism as an instrument in political conflict, not as a neutral interpretation of evidence.Yet this reconstruction is itself delivered through the investigators’ speculative framework. Their claims about hidden factions and their motives are presented as the products of the Plan-making exercise, and the narrator observes that their invented story felt rational because it was assembled from facts. That tension matters: the novel can show the machinery by which antisemitic fabrications gain force while also exposing the risk that its own characters will treat a persuasive synthesis as proof.## The Plan’s method and its consequencesThe three investigators begin by recognizing that their connections are unwarranted associations, made as parody. Over time, however, gathering material and joining everything to everything else becomes a habit. Casaubon describes the danger as a gradual loss of the ability to distinguish resemblance from identity and metaphor from reality. He sees himself as the least affected because of his daily life with Lia and their baby; he characterizes his own condition as addiction, Diotallevi’s as corruption, and Belbo’s as conversion. Their different degrees of involvement do not protect them from the common method that makes the Plan seem increasingly real.The Plan’s defining move is to turn a rumor of conspiracy into a universal explanation. One formulation imagines a secret society whose purpose is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. Another extends the method until even a fact that reveals no mystery seems, to the conspiratorial mind, to violate its assumptions. The Templars are consequently made to have something to do with everything. Antisemitic narratives fit easily into this structure because they provide a ready-made hidden enemy and a long history of supposed secret action. But the novel’s criticism is not limited to the accusation’s falsity: it also identifies the human appeal of blaming unseen agents rather than confronting confusion, failure, or responsibility.The Plan’s invented history can acquire real effects when people believe in it and act on its fragments. Casaubon recognizes that the supposed secret sought by the conspirators is most powerful when it remains undisclosed: every refusal to reveal it strengthens their belief that it exists. In this sense, the Plan and antisemitic conspiracy narratives share a self-protecting structure. Contradictions, missing evidence, and challenges to authenticity need not end belief; they can be absorbed as signs of concealment. The novel’s account makes that process legible without validating the accusations, showing how prejudice becomes a political story, how a borrowed story can masquerade as proof, and how the habit of total explanation can draw its inventors into the world it imagines.