“Wasn’t he, though?” Mapping digital responses to an antisemitic conspiracy theory: an analysis of social media users’ endorsement of the myth of Hitler’s Jewish origins
On May 2nd, 2022, the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergueï Lavrov, shocked international public opinion by claiming on Italian television that Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins. Lavrov’s rehashing of the myth reinvigorated a decades-old conspiracy theory. Israel and several other Western democracies, including Germany and the US, issued stern rebukes, which eventually prompted a rare apology from the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. This symbolic crisis, which fits a long-standing pattern of Russian state propaganda misconstruing the historical memory of Nazism and of the Second World War, has thrust into the limelight a debunked conspiracy theory which had long been circulating on the fringes of revisionist Second World War histories. Hitler’s murky genealogy allowed the antisemitic rumour of his Jewishness to spread, first of all amongst his right-wing rivals in the 1920s and then, after the war, amongst former Nazi circles eager to shift the narrative away from the victimisation of the Jewish people. Since then, the theory remained a somewhat nebulous object of pop culture fascination; some were drawn by the opportunity to rewrite and undermine the political memory of the Holocaust by claiming it was the brainchild of a disturbed self-hating Jew or an “inside job” overseen by the Rothschild and the Jewish financial aristocracy; others were mainly attracted by the shock value of such a hypothesis. However, unlike other antisemitic conspiracy narratives, this theory received scant scholarly attention.
In this context, the paper sets out to analyse and deconstruct the language patterns observable in the responses of social media users to the notion of Hitler’s alleged Jewishness, with a strong focus on the comments endorsing Lavrov’s statement. My research aims to explore the manifold ways in which the ideological architecture of antisemitic beliefs map onto conspiratorial logic.
One of the rather surprising observations of the underlying empirical study, a language and image-based content analysis: the reactions to Lavrov’s claims in the commentaries of British and French mainstream media proved how well entrenched this narrative is. 11% of French and 16% of British commentaries attempted to directly confirm the claim or referred to other related antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy myths, bringing historical fake news back into the mainstream and potentially entrenching it there.