On Extremism in our Time

“And Now for the News: The disturbing freshness of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.” The Atlantic Monthly March, 1997, p. 17.

Yale Univ. Press, p. 60.

In addition to the text, the diary contains fifty eight illustrations scattered throughout, five of which are ugly caricatures of Jewish faces. Only four chapters contain no illustrations; two of these carry titles that include the name of Abbe Dalla Piccola.

Eco provided an historical chronicle of the forgery of The Protocols in another location, in the sixth and final of his Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard. See Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Harvard Univ. Press, 1994. The myth of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy emerged from an even longer history of the claims against the Rosicrucians in fourteenth century. They were described by their detractors as a secret society that began after the Knights Templars had been destroyed. Four centuries later, a similar allegation was made against the Freemasons in France. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits, fearful of the anticlerical priests associated with the wars over Italian unification “adopted … the claim that Italian carbonari were the agents of a Judeo-Masonic plot.” Novelist Alexander Dumas, in Joseph Balsamo, “chronicled” the life of an Italian charlatan, Cagliostro, who changed his name to Balsamo and became involved in a secret organization. One conversation from that novel was lifted by a German postal employee who published a novel titled Biarritz under a British pseudonym. That conversation was transformed into a discussion, in the Prague cemetery, of a vision of a world conspiracy by a gathering of Jews representing the twelve tribes of Israel.

A meticulous Reader might wonder if Simone’s grandfather was hiding something when he declared to his grandson, “Now, as you know, I am a fervent Catholic and profess the highest respect for any man of the cloth, but a Jesuit is surely always a Jesuit – he says one thing and does another, does one thing and says another.” Such a reader might also wonder if in light of the intensity of his hatred of Jews, that when the fact that the grandfather repeats to his grandson that he learned about the Jewish conspiracy from someone who had converted from Judaism to Christianity the grandfather might have been that convert.