User:TheMadDesperado/sandbox

Thoughts
According to Laqueur's article, the bulk of Cohn's book attempts "to trace the origins of the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy over the last hundred and fifty years." Cohn draws a distinction between pre 19th century forms of anti-semitism and modern anti-semitism motivated by conspiracy theories. Earlier anti-semitism was closer to other forms of xenophobia, according to Laqueur.

Per Laquer, the thrust of Cohn's argument is that there is a kind of group psychosis (is this right?? IDK...) or psychotic behavior built around perceptions of Jews or of "Jewry". Cohn argues that Jews are seen in two ways: the "Bad Son" and the "Bad Father". The "Bad Son" because they are God's chosen people and they did not accept God's own son, Jesus. I believe the "Bad Father" part might be because the Christian faith tradition emerged from Judaism, but I don't have a source that says it explicitly.

Book Review in Sociology by Riddle
1. Ridde DS. Book Review: Warrant for Genocide: The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sociology. 1967;1(3):308-310. doi:10.1177/003803856700100309 <- AMA citation

Found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/003803856700100309 and here (better): https://www.jstor.org/stable/42850549

"In the final chapter the book is interpreted as a case study in collective psychopathology, and the Jews are considered as symbolizing a hated father-figure against whom all harbour repressed death wishes..."

1967 article in Commentary by Walter Z. Laqueur
https://www.commentary.org/articles/walter-laqueur/warrant-for-genocide-by-norman-cohn/

According to Laqueur, Cohn argues that people can be captivated by conspiracy theories such as The Protocols and then spurred to act. In this case, people were convinced that the Jews had a vast and powerful conspiracy based on no evidence. "As the author says, “There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious.” In certain historical situations such an underworld captivates millions of otherwise sane people, becomes a political force, and changes the course of history." "What Cohn shows in this absorbing study is that the most deadly form of anti-Semitism, that which aims at and results in genocide, has little to do with real conflicts between living people or even with racial prejudice as such (“traditional anti-Semitism”); it is a secularized version of the medieval belief that the Jews are in league with the devil, and that all Jews form a conspiratorial body bent on ruining and dominating the rest of mankind."

Discussion of Cohn's conclusions on authorship of The Protocols.

"The real origins of the Protocols have been the subject of much conjecture; Mr. Cohn, having gone over the whole ground, reaches the conclusion that they were fabricated in France around 1895 by a group of Tsarist secret police officers on the basis of Maurice Joly’s pamphlet against Napoleon III and certain other sources. This much has been broadly known since 1921, when the London Times (after initially accepting the Protocols at face value) realized the document was a forgery. Norman Cohn shows that the truth is probably more complex than was originally thought and that the Protocols was not simply an attempt to attack Jews and “revolutionaries.” Internal dissension and rivalries within the Tsarist government and even within the Okhrana, its secret police, may have played a role. There was also apparently an attempt to denigrate Witte, then a rising force in Russian politics and the representative of “industrial capitalism.” However, the search for the real authors and their intentions is of less importance than the question, what made millions believe them?"

How the Protocols moved the needle (from excluding Jews from public life towards extermination).

"But it was no longer the traditional anti-Semitism that was involved: as pictured in the Protocols, the Jews were not merely objects of contempt, agents of social decomposition. They now appeared as a world danger, made more powerful by their international connections, and aiming to establish their rule everywhere. Hence it was not enough to exclude them from public life—they had to be utterly destroyed. The Protocols were not like those old-fashioned anti-Semitic pamphlets which called for limiting Jewish influence in one field or another; they were an appeal for a radical final solution, a “warrant for genocide.”"

Structure

"The main part of Professor Cohn’s book is an attempt to trace the origins of the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy over the last hundred and fifty years. In the final section—the most important but also the most debatable—he attempts to analyze its deeper psychological roots."

"Bad Father" IDK...

"To the anti-Semite, Cohn says, the figure of the Jew has a dual symbolism; he is, first of all, the “bad son”—because of his rebellion against the Church—and, secondly, the “bad father.” Out of his own destructive impulses and deep-seated sense of guilt, the fanatical anti-Semite creates a father figure of monstrous cruelty, projecting onto the bad father all his own forbidden impulses."

"In Cohn’s rendition, the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy thus answers certain deep emotional needs of those who harbor an abnormal degree of fear and hatred of the parental figure."

Laqueur doesn't seem to like the "Bad Father" thing either

"A Rothschild could be transformed without undue difficulty into an all-powerful being, but as far as the medieval Jew is concerned, the distance between reality and fantasy seems too great. Even the weakest father is big and strong in the eyes of a small child, while the Jews were few and powerless. Hence the “bad father” label seems oddly inappropriate to the Jews. But even if it fit better, would it prove anything except that anti-Semitism can be expressed in the concepts and language of psychoanalysis?"