World-conspiracy legends existed in mass circulation before the Protocols appeared.

Evidence

After thirty years of a mild, purely social form of and-Jewish discrimination, it had become a little difficult to remember that the cry, “Death to the Jews,” had echoed through the length and breadth of a modern state once before when its domestic policy was crystallized in the issue of antisemitism. For thirty years the old legends of world conspiracy had been no more than the conventional stand-by of the tabloid press and the dime novel and the world did not easily remember that not long ago, but at a time when the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were still unknown, a whole nation had been racking its brains trying to determine whether “secret Rome” or “secret Judah” held the reins of world politics. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common assumption that the Protocols invented world-conspiracy discourse; supplies pre-history for the reader’s toolkit on how conspiracy narratives precede their canonical texts. — connects to: The international-Jew conspiracy framework predated the Protocols by decades — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1697; The refuted Eurabia demographic conspiracy structurally mirrors the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 52
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how the ‘secret Rome vs. secret Judah’ framing shows conspiracy theory split by confession before it became antisemitic — the blaming game itself predates the Protocols.