Conclusion

Heinrich Gräfe, Joseph Lasies, and Gerald Winrod built political careers as peddlers of what Gavin Langmuir terms chimeric anti-Semitism. Their prejudice was not limited to what Langmuir sees as the historically more common form of prejudice against Jews, namely, a xenophobia in which an in-group extrapolates from the actual observed conduct of a minority of an out-group negative stereotypes about the out-group as a whole and attributes to the latter the status of social menace. It was not limited, for example, to xenophobic accusations that Jews were persecutors of Christians or money-hungry usurers. Instead, each of our subjects constructed a prejudicial edifice untethered from any observed “kernels of truth.” Most clearly evident in Winrod’s predication of his worldview on the apocryphal Protocols of the Elders of Zion, our subjects were prone to the type of prejudicial chimeria that “attribute[s] with certitude to an outgroup and all its members characteristics which have never been observed.” Whether in the form of the Golden International of the 1890s or the Elders of the 1930s, the Jews of our subjects’ obsession were “fantasies, figment of the imagination, monsters which, although dressed syntactically in the clothes of real humans, have never been seen and are projections of mental processes unconnected with the real people of the outgroup.” Though Gräfe, Lasies, and Winrod often pointed to real, existing Jews like the Rothschild family or New Deal cabinet members as prime movers behind worldly ills, the conjuring of world-spanning cabals to explain such Jews’ actions moved our subjects’ prejudice into the realm of “socially significant chimeric hostility against Jews,” or chimeric anti-Semitism.