Catholic leadership coordinated a global antisemitic campaign fusing Jew-hatred with imperial rivalry.

Evidence

More striking, however, than the attitude of the Catholics in France was the fact that the Catholic press throughout the world was solidly against Dreyfus. “All these journalists marched and are still marching at the word of command of their superiors.” As the case progressed, it became increasingly clear that the agitation against the Jews in France followed an international line. Thus the Civiltà Cattolica declared that Jews must be excluded from the nation everywhere, in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. Catholic politicians were among the first to realize that latter-day power politics must be based on the interplay of colonial ambitions. They were therefore the first to link antisemitism to imperialism, declaring that the Jews were agents of England and thereby identifying antagonism toward them with Anglophobia. The Dreyfus case, in which Jews were the central figures, thus afforded them a welcome opportunity to play their game. If England had taken Egypt from the French the Jews were to blame, while the movement for an Anglo-American alliance was due, of course, to “Rothschild imperialism.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 331

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to How to Read Donald Duck and the Frankfurt School’s analysis of how mass media and organizational hierarchy manufacture ideology; also to the machinery of ‘manufacturing consent’ in a pre-mass-media era.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism being traced — that antisemitism could be run ‘on command’ by organizational superiors as a coordinated international instrument, and that Jew-hatred was fused to colonialism BEFORE the classic Nazi period — is a dense, counterintuitive claim about the genealogy of antisemitism’s link to imperialism.