That great classic of anti-Semitic literature, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has found its way into the news recently: last week, an FBI Twitter account, apparently without any malicious intent, tweeted a link to excerpts of the work in its archives; a few days ago, a speaker was removed from the roster at the Republican National Convention when it was found out that she had disseminated a series of anti-Semitic tweets that cited the Protocols as evidence. Why, asks Steven J. Zipperstein, has this book—published in Russia in 1903, but purporting to have been written by a leader of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination—remained so popular when other works of anti-Semitism have deservedly faded into oblivion:

The book sells widely in Turkey, Syria, and Japan; remains a staple of Russian Orthodox bookshops; and in 2002, was the subject of a long-running Egyptian television series. It is widely available on eBay and on the Barnes & Noble website. The British charity Oxfam sold it on its site until March of this year. When asked by the New York Times in 2018 to name the books at her bedside, Alice Walker listed David Icke’s And the Truth Will Set You Free, a contemporary summary of the Protocols.

For [its] devotees, the Protocols’ capacity to explain the world remains so resonant that the COVID-19 pandemic has now been blamed on the machinations of the ubiquitous Jewish elders. The Protocols has survived, more so than any other text of its kind, . . . not because its ideas are particularly original, and certainly not because they’re correct. It has done so for the simple reason that the Protocols is, curiously enough, a compelling read. Conspiracy theories are many things, but most of all, they’re narratives—understandable, comprehensive stories about how the world works, complete with the arcs and the rhythms of any other epic tale of heroes and villains. Part of what makes certain ones endure is how well they unfurl that story.

The Protocols’ voice is cool, patronizing, vile; the voice of someone who is ready to perform any task, however dastardly, in the march toward world domination. This, then, is no secondary source, unlike other familiar, formulaic expressions of anti-Semitism, but a chance to overhear a consequential Jewish leader plotting the fate of the world. This narrative immediacy is the difference between a newspaper article and a novel, between remove and urgency. The Protocols is not, purportedly, mere narration of a diabolical plot—it’s evidence of one. It projects authority by obscuring its authorship.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.