Not sure if this was posted before (I couldn't find one of this topic, but it is a legitimate question.)
From the
horrific shooting in Pittsburgh to "
casual anti-Semitism" to a Muslim politician
making remarks about Israel, it makes me wonder where does this conspiracy of Jews stem from? Why are Jews usually the source of conspiracy theories and hate from multiple walks of life?
Sorry if it's a sort of cliffnotes version, there is a lot of material to cover and a lot that needs to be left out.
Historically it started first with the attitudes of the Persians towards the Jews and then further the Romans.
Judaism itself was a relatively unique religion during the time period when all of the surrounding cultures were polytheistic, the Jews were monotheistic and had been a regional powerhouse in the area with the rise of the Israelites after the exodus and reached the ultimate peak of its power under the leadership of King Solomon.
The Jewish Kingdoms, both Judah and Israel fell apart during the invasions of the Persians and then later the Romans, despite the best efforts on parts of the Persians and then latterly the Romans the Jews managed to prevent any major cultural invasions of their new conquerers, even to the point of having been sent out of the traditional territory of Israel, by the Persians and the destruction of the 2nd temple by the Romans and the renaming of the kingdom to that of Palestine.
These were the initial building blocks that would form the European roots of antisemitism. Jews because of their cultural and familial ties as well as religious obligations tend to do well as introduced outsiders, one group is the portion of the Jewish diaspora that would adopt the local customs of the invaders and practice their religion, and the other group the Zealots would practice without any sort of acclimatization to outside culture. The Persians thought that by removing the Jews from the territory they would be able to disinherit them from their homeland, and the Romans later thought that through destruction of the temple, (an act of reprisal) they would be able to culturally dispossess the Jews as a people.
At the time of the Roman occupation, Palastine was a dangerous part of the Roman Empire, as there were strong Jewish nationalist movements in the territory and the imposition of Roman rule, law, and the pantheon came into conflict with the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees. This along with home grown movements pro Jewish, such as the zealots, and the expansion of apocalypse prophets in the area such as the early Christian movement, contributed much to the Roman cultural idea of negativity of the Jews as a religion. Especially as Jews being citizens of Rome were free to travel, and so you had self sufficient Jewish communities springing up in parts of the Mediterranean and elsewhere.
As Christianity took hold and started to spread, the early church came into conflict with Jews as well. In part because there was a theological disagreement over the divinity of Christ, and also because the Jews themselves considered Jewish converts to Christianity to have removed themselves from the Jewish community by allowing gentiles and others into the religion and not practicing all of the laws of Leviticus that were superseded.
As a result resentment started to form between the two communities, and once Christianity had gained prominence as the dominant religion in the Empire, the Jews became hated for the fact that they hadn't converted to the new religion, and then on top of that the early Roman church started to hold the view that Jews were to blame for the persecution of Christ. (Because under Roman law a man could not be tried for apostasy, the Sanhedrin through Caiphus and Herod had to come up with the charge of apostasy and Pontius Pilate as governor was the man who signed off on it, since all extension of rabbinical law needed approval of the Roman consul in the area.)
By the time that the early middle ages came to pass, with the failure of the Roman empire, and the establishment of the new Christian kingdoms, laws were passed with a view of preventing Jews from being able to interact in typical franchises in competition with local businessmen. This created parallel industries, where you had Jewish goods and services, such as doctors and the like, which only balkanized any interaction between the two parallel communities further.
The only interaction between the two communities came in a form that cemented the pernicious stereotypes that exist to this day. Tax collection and usury. The Catholic church forbade the collection of taxes from Christian to Christian and also any form of interest charged on loans. As a result, the local lords would employ Jews in the forms of bankers, loan businesses, and tax collectors. So aside from being the medieval form of the IRS, they also were the loan sharks, and the majority of those loans would have been to the wealthier elites of the Europe, so any collection enforcement would have added to the creation of a negative feed back loop.
A good example of this idea of the two different realities is the interactions in the Merchant of Venice between Shylock and Bassanio. Bassanio borrows money from Shylock he can't afford to pay back, even though the two hate each other openly.
Also historical context abounds of different powerful banking dynasties of Jews being established in Europe, Aaron of Lincoln is a fine example of just how powerful some of these money lenders had become.
The reason they were attracted to money lending, it was a way to increase their wealth with relatively little work outside of the risks put up through collateral. It also gave them access to power and privileges through contacts with the European elite that were outside the purview of their craftsmen bretheren, and so a lot of Jews became involved in this type of business venture. Since they operated in clans it also helped solidify the idea that they worked cooperatively against European interests.
The Jews as a result were scapegoats for a lot of evils through the middle ages.
They were second class citizens, with no actual rights above what the local law and rulers of the country afforded them. They could be removed at any period, and have their property seized, and for any number of reasons they were persecuted in Europe. An example would be Philip the IV of France who deported all Jews from France after seizing all money and properties, around the same time he forcibly dissolved the Knight Templar for heresy.
The Templars like the Jews had been expert bankers, and Phillip it would seem did not want to return the 3 million marks that he'd borrowed from the order to wage war on England and the rest of the smaller French principalities.
The fact that they managed to survive the plague better by living in ghettos, having better doctors and practicing the Talmuds hygienic laws also led to speculation that it had been the Jews who had intentionally brought the plague to Europe to kill Christian.
They also were accused of poisoning water during cholera and other outbreaks, though all evidence for this seems to point to actual attempts by the local Jews to purify the water rather than any maleficence.
All sorts of stuff that would be used as evidence by a majority group versus a minority group once mass hysteria had set in. Just like witch burnings, antisemitism was often based on unfounded hatred or cultural misunderstanding.
This sustained period of religious and physical persecution along with the reinforcement of the negative stereotypes towards disenfranchised Jews, as well as fears about competition from local populations of orthodox or just culturally practicing Jews that refused to integrate fully with the Europeans led to consistent persecutions of Jews in Europe that would flare up occasionally into full blown violence throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th century and didn't realistically end in most of Europe until 1945 with the end of the 2nd World War.
The antisemitic movements in Europe that would fuel Nazi's ideology and philosophy as well as lending an air of legitimacy to the well held Jewish conspiracies of the period and fueled the final solution were merely an eventual but inevitable build up of the attitudes of persecution and antisemitism along with a modern biased press, and an increasingly influenced general public, which led to a mass imprisonment and then liquidation of European Jews as a matter of course, when repatriation to a different country was no longer an available option to them.
In an ironic twist the creation of the Jewish state came directly out of the actions of the the SS and the attempts to eliminate Jews in Europe. The Zionist movements had existed before that in sporadic influence, with a lot of settlement in British mandated Palestine done by orthodox Jews and in the form of Kibbutz's, small communal farming communities. The liberation of the European Jews along with the disenfranchisement of the Jews in their home European countries supercharged the Zionist movement, and led to the development of the nation of Israel which the British were happy to give them because the Arabs in the area were considered ungovernable.
The main conspiracy theory that evolved after the war, the Jewish control of media came from two fronts, one the war time propaganda that was put forward by the the German foreign and domestic news services was that the US and Britain were being run by Jewish banks, and that the media outlets of these countries had been infested by Jews who took control and were running the show. (Never mind that prior to declaring war, those same Jew infested American companies funding Britain's war efforts were funding Germany as well.)
The second and legitimate part of this conspiracy is the part that was aided by the expulsion of creative Jews from Europe. The majority of early American Jews settled in parts of Brooklyn and New York, and from there started building businesses. One of the new pioneering ideas that Edison had come out with was the invention of the earliest form of movie cameras, and a large chunk of money that aided the development of this was from entrepreneurial Jews trying to cut into a new industry.
The issue with the burgeoning east coast film studios was one Edison patented everything, and New York law at the time meant that copyright meant royalties on all pre-existing patents, even if the innovation was a new design. Since Edison had the first "moving picture camera" it stymied any real expansion of films outside of nickelodeons or other short developments. The second issue was sunshine. Film cameras of the period required massive amounts of natural light, and the only game in town again was Edison. So a lot of east coast Jews moved their film making operations to Hollywood, because it was outside of the restrictive patent copyright laws, and it had lots and lots of sunshine.
What solidified the Jews run the media conspiracy, was as these west coast outfits started to innovate and make a new industry in the terms of films, a majority of European Jews who had started to suffer under Germany and its antisemitic laws. (Prussian laws which were already restrictive only became worse under the NASDP, which prevented all Jewish directors from making or taking part in the German film industry.
Which at that point in time, was an actual rival to Hollywood in terms of production, if not output.) As more Jews migrated to Hollywood, and were given welcome places in the new industry they began to dominate it, in terms of studio funding, writing and directing, and this eventually would have a spill over effect into other media industries due to Jewish collectivism and nepotism.
As for Jewish persecution elsewhere in the world, it has been varied.
Jews managed to flee and find safety in Japanese occupied Shanghai and Canton during the war. The irony being is that the Japanese did not recognise the German antisemitic laws, and so it was the one place in the axis that any remaining Jews who had not been able to get out before the declaration of war had the opportunity to flee from Reich controlled or influenced territory.
In Russia there had been a multitude of pograms in order to control or limit Jewish influence in society, leading the the laughable publication of "The Protocols Of The Elders of Zion" which in turn fueled much of the European and American grown antisemitism. It experienced a brief periods of relaxation when the Soviet government supported by Jewish communists and intelligentsia revoked the Tsarist "Pale of Settlement" act which had proscribed Jewish religious rights, and ethnic identity and forced them to live under a system of persecution.
The irony being that under the new Communist system, religious freedoms disappeared, synagogues were seized along with property and religious leaders removed from positions of power. They at least had equal rights under the law, and Lenin used them to secure the government of the USSR. Under Stalin this all changed when realizing that there was a large Jewish influence in the party, and they had effectively outlived their usefulness started to purge them out of Russian society.
The largest source of modern antisemitism and Jewish conspiracy is the middle east and Islam.
In order to understand the animosity one needs to understand the source. The two religions despite being Abrahamic, do not share the same origin story. The Muslims consider themselves to be descendants of Abraham through his illegitimate first son Ishmael father of all Arabs.
Where as the Jews consider themselves to be descended from the second though legitimized son Isaac. Both consider the prophecy laid out in the bible/talmud about the first son born to Abraham to be a legitimate claim to being God's "Chosen People" the argument is about which son.
Added onto this is the fact that Muhammehd came into the same problem that the earlier Christians had, when he started his war lording and forcible mass conversions of the people around the deserts and the conquering of the city of Mecca the Jews in the region and around would not convert to the new religion. Even though it was the legitimate successor of all prior religions. (Christ is considered a prophetic being in the Quran, and Christians are just misguided) as such the Jews through the interactions with the new religion, and already existing religious, tirbal, and historical animosities, (The Jews had when not suffering from major outside military intervention, had always been a regional power and furthermore aggressive against the smaller less organised neighbors,) really fueled a hatred of Jews which in turn ended up being part of the Quran and further commentaries prescriptions to genocide all ethnic and religious Jews.
Come the creation of the state of Israel by the British with American pressure and funding, they probably didn't think that the Jews would make a go of it, and would be flattened by their Arab neighbors, but at least it would shut the wealthier Jews in their own home countries up.
What happened instead is that the Jews determined to fight or die started illegally arming themselves by mass producing resistance style weapons from the period, sten guns, and other assortments as well as illegally acquiring arms or machining tools from US firms that were sympathetic, and legally acquiring arms from elsewhere.
The experiment with arms productions, as well as each successful victory against the Arab armies in the area eventually led to a cooperation between the western powers and the Israelis, as Israel ended up becoming a western style democratic power in a traditionally fundamentalist tyrannical middle east.
The reason that funding has been kept up to this day is because despite the ongoing issue with Palestinians (ethnically Jordanians, but they don't want them because they're literally just obsessed terrorists at this point) they act as a counter point to the two main powers in the region, Iran and Saudi Arabia, both of which despite being Muslim are bifurcated into the two majority belief systems in Islam, Shia and Sunni. Both of which claim to be the only legitimate followers of Mohammehd and butcher each other accordingly when given the opportunity.
(EDIT was to flesh out more details and add in some stuff I'd forgotten first time round.)