The Rothschild conspiracy debunked

The Rothschild family served as bankers to European governments for centuries — so why are so many people afraid of them?

Why are people so afraid of the world’s biggest banking family?

When the French anti-semitic La Vieille France folded in 1923, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency offered no words of mourning for its ending, dryly noting that its publisher said it had closed shop “because of lack of support or interest”. It left little international impression in life but achieved astonishing influence after its death.

While the magazine that had once published the anti-semitic tract known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion might have found too few subscribers wanting to read about a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, articles from La Vieille France found favour among some American anti-semites who had developed an unhealthy fixation with the House of Rothschild, one of the wealthiest banking families in the world — and the object of obsessive fear and loathing.

Writing in a book published in America in 1926, the expatriate Russian count and outspoken antisemite Arthur Cherep-spiridovich, then resident in the United States, cited an article by Conrad Siem in La Vieille France as evidence that the Rothschild family were the masterminds of a global Jewish conspiracy to destroy the United States. Siem had alleged that in 1876, when he was just a teenager, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had told him personally that Jewish bankers had purposely planned the

American Civil War and had favoured the Southern states. Siem claimed to recall Bismarck’s words perfectly:

“These bankers,” he allegedly said,

“were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economical and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds predominated.

They foresaw tremendous booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies, indebted to the Jewish financiers, to the vigorous republic, confident and selfproviding.” To this, Cherep-spiridovich added that the Rothschilds had ordered the murder of Abraham Lincoln for spoiling their plans.

In 1921, the anti-semitic automobile magnate Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which had recently published the Protocols in English, also translated Siem’s article. Nearly a century later, the central claim of Siem’s La Vieille

“He initiated each into the ways of finance before sending them to the great capitals of Europe”