‘Jewish Space Lasers’: Rothschild antisemitic canards that refuse to die

In Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, Mike Rothschild (who is not related to the banking family) shows how seamlessly fantasies freshly baked by today’s Rothschild-crazies connect to the antisemitic mythology of yore.

Members of the Rothschild banking dynasty spent much of the 19th century and a smidgen of the 20th at the forefront of the world’s finances. Not hiding their Jewishness, they lent money to Europe’s royals, built railroads, lived in castles and palaces, and assembled massive art collections. 

Today, the Rothschilds are far from the almshouse, even though they have lost their financial dominance of a century ago. However, consider yourself warned: If you type “Rothschild” into a search engine, you should brace for a torrent of deeply disturbing material.

On InfoWars, an ultra right-wing website, you will see posts identifying the Rothschilds as a “global banking crime syndicate.” Elsewhere, you will find claims that the family controls a $500 trillion fortune – that’s trillion, with a “t” – more than 20 times the US GDP. 

Even though the Rothschilds were barely active in the United States, on the Internet you will find mind-blowing allegations about their American shenanigans. You will read, for example, that during the Civil War, the Rothschilds lent money to both the North and the South – and offed Abe Lincoln after he grew uppity.

You might also learn about the Rothschild-Rockefeller Jewish conspiracy. John D. Rockefeller, you see, was a secret Jew. (Who knew? Poor John D. might have been tricked into self-identifying as a Baptist. However, both names begin with an “R,” like Rabinowitz. Might this explain the confusion?) 

Click around some more, and you will learn that a Rothschild had impregnated Hitler’s grandmother, that the Rothschilds had manufactured both AIDS and COVID, and that, if the QAnon conspiracy cult is to be believed, they operate an estate where humans are hunted for sport.

The hated of Jews rife in Rothschild conspiracy theories

As the world fills with ignorance and hatred, Jewish Space Lasers reminds us that there is no such thing as a benign conspiracy theory; and Rothschild, whose previous book was laser-focused on QAnon, has the expertise to tell this story.

“Almost all conspiracy theories are rooted in antisemitism, and almost all antisemitism is rooted in conspiracy theories,” Rothschild writes. 

“Jewish people will always be scapegoats for some people, and the Rothschilds are some of the best-known Jews in modern history. In many ways, the story of the Rothschilds is the story of modern antisemitism.”

THE AUTHOR draws straight lines from the Dreyfus Affair to the Nuremberg Congress, from the medieval blood libel to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to William Jennings Bryant’s 1896 “The Cross of Gold” speech that likens America’s deflationary gold standard to deicide. (“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”)

It’s impossible to miss the direct relationship between Joseph Goebbels’ speeches and Ezra Pound’s Nazi radio broadcasts, as well as the screeds that Pound’s acolyte Eustace Clarence Mullins Jr. penned about the Federal Reserve and the Jews who he alleged, despite evidence to the contrary, to have created and controlled it.

Jewish Space Lasers is especially ominous because Rothschild connects the antisemitism of 200 years ago with the slop served on today’s Internet – in QAnon prophecies, as well as in news publications that include InfoWars, Breitbart News, and Fox News. Antisemitism, he reminds us, is a living, breathing, evolving ideology that has been newly weaponized by the disinformation superhighway of the Web. 

In recent years, the mythology was updated to include George Soros, who, being a Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire and advocate for civil society, makes for great fodder for a fantasy cabal.

The book gets its title from a 2018 Facebook post by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon believer and Republican member of Congress.

To be fair, Greene didn’t use the words “Jewish space lasers” – that was a journalist’s fair interpretation of what she wrote – but she did speculate that the deadly Camp Fire in California might have been sparked by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in partnership with the Rothschilds, as the company used a space laser to either beam clean energy to Earth or clear room for a high-speed rail project. 

In the convoluted Facebook post, Greene noted that it’s “very interesting that Roger Kimmel on the board of directors of PG&E is also Vice Chairman of Rothschild Inc.” For good measure, Greene looped in a clean energy start-up called Solaren and then-California governor Jerry Brown.  

Wrote Greene: “If they are beaming the sun’s energy back to Earth, I’m sure they wouldn’t ever miss a transmitter receiving station right??!! I mean mistakes are never made when anything new is invented. What would that look like anyway? A laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth I guess. Could that cause a fire? Hmmm, I don’t know. I hope not! That wouldn’t look so good for PG&E, Rothschild Inc, Solaren, or Jerry Brown who sure does seem fond of PG&E.”

The Rothschild family, which operates an archive where the author did some of the research for this book, avoids debunking wild claims.

“As their London-based archivist told me over email, to address the rumors would force the family to do something that essentially can’t be done, which is prove a negative,” Rothschild writes.

GRANTED, YOU can’t prove the negative, but there is room for discussion. Rothschild’s book demonstrates that much can be accomplished by laying out available historical data. 

He accomplishes this nicely by debunking the oft-repeated canard about Nathan Meyer Rothschild, who after having supposedly observed the Battle of Waterloo, rushed to England to spread lies about Napoleon’s victory, causing a sell-off on London’s stock exchange, buying stocks cheap, and making his big fortune bigger.

Many canards described in this book continue to circle over world politics today. Remember the one about Hitler’s Yiddishe zaide? Nothing is known about Hitler’s paternal grandfather, and it appears that the first known assertion of Hitler’s Jewish grandparent was voiced by Hans Frank, Hitler’s legal adviser and head of the Nazi government in Poland. 

Frank was hanged in Nuremberg in 1946, but the story of Hitler’s “Jewish blood” lives on. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov used those very words in an effort to explain his country’s propaganda assertions that Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky is, of all things, a Nazi. 

Lavrov’s argument: If Hitler was part-Jewish, why can’t Zelensky be a Nazi? This line of thinking is more insidious than garden-variety Holocaust denial. It reduces the Holocaust to an internal squabble among the Jews. 

Jewish Space Lasers does such a fine job of demonstrating that today’s conspiracy theories are consistent with those of 200 years ago that, with full realization of the absurdity of what I was doing, I ended up underlining about a third of the review copy. This book will give you a multitude of horrifying factoids that will make you sleep less soundly. If you are like me, you might use this material to scare friends, but your core beliefs and those of your friends will remain unaffected. 

Alas, the people whom we would want to read this book will not. They are delighted with their supply of conspiracy theories and the alternative facts that underpin them. 

Paul Goldberg’s novel The Dissident was published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in June. He is the president of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union.

• JEWISH SPACE LASERS: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories
• By Mike Rothschild
• Melville House, 
• 336 pages, $28.99