ABSTRACT
Conspiracy myths have always played a central role in antisemitism throughout its history. They constitute a specific way of explaining the world by reducing the complexity of social relations through personalisation. The ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ is the archetype of conspiracy ideology, claiming that Jews pull the strings behind the scenes. This chapter analyses antisemitism and misogyny as interlocking forms of conspiratorial thinking that organise modern experiences of crisis through projection and personification. It argues that conspiracy narratives construct Jews and women as paradoxical figures who are imagined as simultaneously weak and omnipotent, vulnerable and dangerously powerful. These contradictions are not accidental but central to the logic of conspiracy ideology: they allow diffuse anxieties about social change, gender relations, sovereignty, and authority to be externalised and channelled into a compensatory pseudo-resolution. The chapter traces how conspiratorial fantasies transform structural conflicts into personalised enemies, from National Socialism to contemporary Islamism. In doing so, it shows how antisemitic and misogynistic conspiracy narratives stabilise authoritarian worldviews by converting social contradictions into myths of hidden domination – culminating in their violent enactment, most starkly visible in the events of 7 October.
