Member-only story
Jewish and Trans: Conspiracy Theories Won’t Leave Us Alone
On ‘Jewish Space Lasers’ by Mike Rothschild, with my own reflections on transphobia
Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories was published last month. The author, Mike Rothschild, describes himself as “a Rothschild not related to these Rothschilds.” He couldn’t convince any of them to sit for an interview.
He understands their reluctance. So many conspiracy theories target this family, he couldn’t even itemize them all. Ultimately, he doesn’t expect the Rothschild family to “prove a negative… [that] they don’t have $500 trillion, that they didn’t conspire to use the Civil War to divide the United States between Britain and France, or that they didn’t sell their Austrian hunting lodge in a rush because QAnon found out that they hunted humans for sport there.” Never mind debunking Lara Logan’s false claim that they “‘employed [Charles] Darwin’ to come up with the theory of evolution.” No one can prove anything to anyone who isn’t open to real evidence and logic, as conspiracy theorists are not.
Targeted with Antisemitism for Two Centuries
The relatively modern antisemitism that Mike Rothschild examines in this book is the idea “that Jews control everything, and that the Rothschilds are the ‘Kings of the Jews.’” In the late 1500s, “the Jews of Frankfurt weren’t allowed to take last names,” yet today’s conspiracy theorists treat the fact that the early Rothschilds went by different last names “as ‘proof’ that the Rothschilds changed their names for some unknown but definitely villainous reason.”
Because many Europeans believed that Jews had special knowledge of or talent for money management, the nobility created the position of “court Jew,” “essentially the private bankers of European royal courts.” In 1769, Mayer Amschel Rothschild became one of Europe’s last court Jews. As a family, the Rothschilds enjoyed the peak of their success in the early…
