Jews Are a Fifth Column: A Libel as Old as the Pyramids

In the course of retelling the Passover story, the Haggadah quotes the passage from the first chapter of Exodus in which Pharaoh justified the unspeakable repression he intended to inflict on the Hebrews.

“Come, let us deal wisely with them,” he exhorted his nation. “Otherwise they may become so numerous that if there is a war they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the land.” Though the tyrant’s idea of dealing wisely with the Hebrews began with slave labor, it wasn’t long before he advanced to murder. “Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying: ‘Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile.’”

Pharaoh’s false accusation set the pattern for what became one of the history’s most durable antisemitic conspiracies. Down through the millennia Jews have been portrayed as a fifth column, malevolently disposed to betray the nations in which they live. Again and again, the libel resurfaces: When war comes, it will be the Jews who caused it, or who had the most to gain from its outcome, or who manipulated others into fighting and dying. The libel is as old as the pyramids — and as current as today’s news.

To be clear, this is not an essay about antisemites. It is addressed to good and reasonable people who would never knowingly endorse bigotry.

Michael Oren, the distinguished historian who was Israel’s ambassador to Washington during the Obama administration, observed recently that the war against Iran has revived “the slanderous claim, from right and left, that Jews have dragged America into a futile war.” The ideological range of those promoting that accusation spans the spectrum. Oren quotes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, podcaster Tucker Carlson, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and MAGA fanatic Candace Owens. He could have easily extended his list.

But it is only the most recent incarnation of Pharaoh's logic.

The modern template was forged in the early 19th century, when the Rothschild banking family was portrayed by French propagandists as profiting from Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo — proving Jews could engineer wars for their own benefit.

In a 1941 speech, American aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh recycled an ancient libel when he told an America First rally in Iowa that Jews were among the “most important groups” agitating for war.

Henry Ford blamed Jews for World War I and bought a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to publish vitriolic articles like "Jewish Dictatorship of the United States during War." A generation later, Charles Lindbergh revived Ford's smear. At a 1941 America First rally in Des Moines, he accused Jews of being "war agitators" who were "pressing this country toward war."

The calumny is indestructible. When President George H.W. Bush assembled a coalition to drive Iraq from Kuwait, former White House aide Patrick Buchanan railed that only two groups were "beating the drums for war in the Middle East" — the Israeli government and its "amen corner in the United States." The 9/11 attacks instantly spawned a false rumor that 4,000 Jews had been warned to stay home from the World Trade Center. That fueled lies, still circulating, that Zionists had orchestrated the attacks. And when Harvard's Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer indicted "the Israel lobby" for the decision to go to war in Iraq, the same ugly slur was cloaked in academic respectability.

So here’s a question for those whose outrage at the current war seems to orbit around Israel, Zionists, or Jewish influence: Shouldn’t this history give you pause?

I am not questioning your honesty. I am not calling you antisemitic. I am asking something more unsettling: Are you sure you're not falling into the same trap as all those well-meaning people in centuries past, who genuinely believed that wars were being waged to advance Jewish interests, never realizing that they were perpetuating a classic big lie?

My purpose isn't to convince you that your views about the present war are wrong. It is to remind you that Jews have been falsely blamed for the world's wars throughout history — and that there have always been decent people who were seduced into believing it, certain that where there is so much smoke, there must be fire.

Every Passover, Jews recount the story of Pharaoh's slander and what it led to — not only as ancient history, but as living warning. "In every generation," the Haggadah teaches, "they rise up against us." For millennia, the world's wars have been blamed on Jewish cunning and Jewish manipulation — the same "hateful old lie," as Oren calls it. When you find yourself reaching for an explanation that sounds remarkably like the one Pharaoh offered 34 centuries ago, are you sure you're making an argument grounded in truth? Or are you, just possibly, recycling the oldest lie in the world?

This op-ed originally appeared in the Boston Globe