Anti-Semitism needed no organizational secret society because folklore supplied it

Evidence

Compared with anti-Catholicism and anti-Masonry, large-scale anti- Semitism was a latecomer to America, ignited only by the mass immigration that began in the late nineteenth century. Once introduced, however, it was not inhibited by the fact that Judaism was neither a secret society nor a centrally organized religious community. Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, in their study of right-wing extremism, remark that “they had no Pope and no Vatican, but a special aura of secrecy and intrigue deeply imbedded in the folklore of Christian civilization.” This perception, developed over centuries of ghettoization, helps explain why, by the turn of the twentieth century, Jews were scapegoats for other immigrant groups as well as the objects of scorn on the part of native-born elites. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 616

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter-5 pattern that secret societies are the preferred conspiracy target because secrecy allows projection; Jews became targets with no real secrecy at all. — connects to: Rothschild conspiracy fears grew as their real banking influence waned; The Khazar hypothesis attacks Jewish claims to Israelite ancestry without evidence — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 706