My first encounter with the Rothschild name happened in a thrift store. I used to be perhaps nine years old and ran across a bit wool dress coat just my size. The tag said “Rothschild,” and once I showed my find to my mother, her eyes lit up. “The Rothschilds are very famous and wealthy,” I remember her saying. “That’s probably a really nice coat.”
I don’t remember how nice it was, and on the time I didn’t know enough to wonder if the Rothschilds, whose company made my coat, were connected to those Rothschilds, the remarkably successful banking family whose name is a longstanding byword amongst conspiracy theorists and antisemites. I feel I wore it under the impression that the child in Rothschild was a family tribute (Roth’s child), or perhaps a nod to their sale of kids’s attire.
But the seam within the word shouldn’t be after the S but before it: roth-schild, from the German for “red shield.” It’s a reference to a marking on the house where Mayer Amschel Rothschild lived as he founded the family dynasty within the 18th century. By day, he served within the court of the princely House of Hesse, and at night, he returned to the cramped quarters of the Judengasse, Frankfurt’s prison-like, one-street ghetto by which Christian authorities literally locked the local Jewish population every night and each Lord’s Day.
That’s but one small piece of the history covered in Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, a recent release from journalist Mike Rothschild, who’s—because the delightfully clever cover notes—“no relation” of those Rothschilds. The subtitle undersells the scope of the work, which traces the family’s history from 1565 to present and examines the worldwide development of Jewish tropes, legends, and conspiracy theories along the way in which.
The Rothschild allure
“It is a sprawling story, told over centuries and continents,” as Rothschild writes in his introduction, replete with “fake Russian counts, Parisian pamphlet wars, lizard people,” and so way more. Thus does Jewish Space Lasers cover every thing from the Judengasse to the Battle of Waterloo to the titular lasers—the concept, pitched in a 2018 Facebook post by Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene before she ran for Congress, that a California wildfire was the results of a Rothschild-involved conspiracy to advance green energy projects and, in fact, make gobs of cash.
Rothschild guarantees early on that his book is “not a biography of the Rothschilds, neither is it a deep archival study of their various business ventures,” nor “an examination of the political and societal forces at play” in the various ways the Rothschilds have affected world history. It’s a promise he doesn’t quite keep and maybe couldn’t have: To effectively reject the concept “that Jews control every thing, and that the Rothschilds are the ‘Kings of the Jews’” requires quite numerous biography, archival study, and examination of the political and societal forces. And if Jewish Space Lasers bogs down intimately, this, too, is inspired by the subject material—the book is repetitive, but so are the conspiracy theories.
But negative perceptions of the Rothschilds will not be all Rothschild has in view. Perhaps essentially the most nice surprise of Jewish Space Lasers was its peek inside Jewish culture across the storied family. “For many Jews, the Rothschilds have been a beacon of hope in dark times, a reminder that anything is feasible with unity and a steadfast devotion to family and tradition,” Rothschild explains. “They were heroes who fought tenaciously for the liberty of other Jews, while never giving in to the temptations of conversion and assimilation.”
The Rothschild allure was as much about their faithfulness and generosity as their aspirational wealth—however the wealth was a part of it too. For example, the source text for Tevye’s “If I were a wealthy man” refrain in Fiddler on the Roof originally read “If I were a Rothschild.” And Tevye’s goals there are greater than three staircases. “If I were Rothschild I might eliminate war altogether,” he muses. “You will ask how? With money, in fact.”
I knew going into Jewish Space Lasers that cash could be an enormous a part of the story. It’s not possible to not anticipate that, if you have got any knowledge of our culture’s stereotype of Jewish people as—within the phrase of the primary chapter’s title—“greedy, low-cost, and blessed.” And I knew, too, that centuries of gross and officially sanctioned antisemitism would come into it; the history of how some European Jews got here to be bankers was already familiar.
But much of what Rothschild recounts was recent to me, supplying a treatment for an ignorance each glad and untenable: glad since it got here from a scarcity of exposure to explicit antisemitism; untenable because antisemitism is persistent and pernicious, and since it’s difficult to ward off against evil in case you fail to acknowledge it once you see it.
New extremists and old tropes
One place we see the evil of antisemitism, in fact, is in church history. Though Rothschild has a lightweight touch in connecting antisemitism with Christianity, never painting with too broad a brush, the majority of his tale is about in Christendom Europe. Even outside overt misuses of our faith to oppress Jewish people, then, the story of the West’s antisemitism is undeniably a story about individuals who no less than professed Christianity, whatever was of their hearts.
This history—of expulsions and pogroms, blood libel and other slanders, forced conversions and baptisms—is galling and repulsive. It’s also absurd, since the core of our faith is that God became man and, as Rothschild observes, that man was Jewish.
Christian antisemitism can only exist through blatant rejection of God’s commands (Eph. 2:11–22) and scandalously silly misreadings of Scripture (Rom 1:16, 3:29, Gal. 3:28). But there’s no escaping the incontrovertible fact that it has existed, and never only in centuries past. Greene, the space-lasers theorist and a sitting member of Congress with a big, popular following, professes an evangelical faith, having been baptized on the Atlanta-area North Point Community Church in 2011. In his 1991 book The New World Order, the late Pat Robertson, erstwhile head of the Christian Coalition, cited explicitly antisemitic works—books with chapter titles like “The Real Jewish Peril”—to posit a conspiracy of malevolent global domination, with the Rothschilds in on the scheme.
Are things getting any higher? Considering the current and future state of antisemitism, Rothschild takes a dim view within the book and online, where he greeted this week’s news of war in Israel with worry for a way it can affect Jews worldwide, because, “[h]istorically, whatever will be blamed on Jews can be, irrespective of their nationality.”
This century has seen a disturbing “resurgence of public and unapologetic antisemitism,” he argues in Jewish Space Lasers. Today, “recent extremists are espousing the identical hateful tropes that were once relegated to being fodder for fringe pamphlets and whispered accusations. But now they aren’t fringe, and so they aren’t whispering,” Rothschild contends. “They are a danger to everyone. And they’ll never stop—because they never have.”
I hope he’s flawed in that prediction, and I’m wondering if he hopes it too. After all, why write a book-length debunking of tons of of years of antisemitic theorizing unless you have got some hope that it can help? Not, perhaps, to the purpose of persuading confirmed antisemites, but no less than to teach the remainder of us and shock us well away from a hateful path that too many have trod.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
