Conspiracy theorists are obsessed with the Rothschild family.

"Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories. By Mike Rothschild. Melville House; 336 pages; $32.50 and £30

Brutal wildfires ravaged Maui in August, killing at least 115 people. Some conspiracy theorists claimed that the fires were caused by energy beamed from satellites, reviving an idea advanced in an online post from 2018 that attributed Californian wildfires to "space solar generators". The author, Marjorie Taylor Greene (pictured), speculated about the novel technology's backers, including a company she identified as "Rothschild Inc".

When Ms Greene wrote those words she was a conservative activist and gym owner, but her past pronouncements faced closer scrutiny when she was, improbably, elected to Congress in 2020. Her screed, later described as a rant about "Jewish space lasers" (a phrase she had not in fact used), drew mockery. It also led to accusations of anti-Semitism, in response to which she insisted that she "didn't find out until recently that the Rothschilds were Jewish".

Mike Rothschild is an American journalist with no connections to the Rothschild family he writes about. "This is the biography of an idea," he explains, "and it's a simple enough one: that Jews control everything, and that the Rothschilds are the 'Kings of the Jews'."

After giving a potted history of the Rothschild banking dynasty that began with Mayer Amschel Rothschild, born in Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto in 1744, he then highlights conspiracy theorists' twisted, alternative version. This portrays the Rothschilds as puppet-masters who engineered the American civil war and hired Charles Darwin to invent the theory of evolution so they could promote a godless one-world government. They now supposedly control 80% of global wealth and run sperm banks to expand their bloodline. For reasons not wholly unrelated to his surname, the author is keen to discredit such preposterous notions. (A branch of the Rothschild family owns a stake in The Economist. Make of that what you will.)

Mr Rothschild has immersed himself in anti-Semitic propaganda. Familiar examples include "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a forgery published in Russia in 1903 that purports to be a Jewish blueprint for world domination, and Eustace Mullins's anti-Rothschild volume "The Secrets of the Federal Reserve" (1952). The latter was among the 39 English-language books found on the shelves of Osama bin Laden's compound when American special forces tracked him down and killed him in 2011.

In 1846 Mathieu Georges Dairnvaell, a Frenchman, published a hostile pamphlet after a fatal rail crash on a line owned by James de Rothschild, Mayer Amschel's youngest son. Dairnvaell attributed the crash to the Rothschilds' penny-pinching neglect of passenger safety and linked it to the family's financial gains following the Battle of Waterloo , arguing that "they have enriched themselves with our impoverishment and our disasters." (The Rothschilds probably made money from early knowledge of the outcome of Waterloo but did not cause the rail accident.) Dairnvaell's pamphlet about these "vampires of commerce" is now obscure, but its reach has been long. An inheritor of Dairnvaell's bile is Alex Jones , a right-wing radio host. The Rothschilds have been mentioned in more than 1,300 episodes of his podcast.

Mr Rothschild's trawl through libels and canards risks repetitiveness, but he illustrates how and why conspiracy theories spread. They begin with a paranoid aversion to official accounts of events and an eagerness to see causation where there is only correlation; they burgeon because they tap into what terrifies or enrages people , especially those who feel powerless. They travel quickly when they lend themselves to gossipy soundbites, sick humour and tasteless online memes. Like a never-ending laser show, they captivate people and distract them from reality." [1]

1. "Conspiracy theorists are obsessed with the Rothschild family." The Economist, 9 Sept. 2023, p. NA.