Mick Hartley

The Franklin Prophecy – the canard that Benjamin Franklin warned his fellow Americans about the supposed dangers of admitting Jews to the nascent United States – has become a staple of antisemitic propaganda, perhaps second only in popularity to the equally spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Tablet, Scott Seligman gives us the full sordid history, with its origins in the swamp of Nazi and white supremacist groups in America in the Thirties, in particular in the pages of "lifetime anticommunist and antisemitic nutjob" William D Pelley's Silver Legion pro-Nazi magazine Liberation.

Pelley, whose philosophy was an odd amalgam of fascism and the occult, had set up the white supremacist organization at the behest of an oracle he claimed had appeared to him during an out-of-body experience. In 1933, the day after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Pelley had organized the Silver Shirts to fulfill its prediction that he would one day lead a “national vigilante organization.” The turmoil and poverty engendered by the Great Depression had rendered many whites receptive to his messages, and over time Pelley was able to build the Silver Shirts into a 15,000-man force. He hoped to use it to seize power in the United States and set up a “Christian commonwealth” with no room for Jews or other nonwhites.

During the early 1930s, Pelley was a whirling dervish of crazy right-wing energy. He founded several organizations, including the Galahad Press, which published books devoted to spiritualism; The New Liberator, a magazine whose contents “were obtained … via the psychic radio from great souls who have graduated out of this three-dimensional world”; and Galahad Extension University, a correspondence college that offered instruction in his ideology. Diabolical antisemitism pervaded all of Pelley’s endeavors.

The story was taken up enthusiastically by the Nazis – and by Ezra Pound…

“Remarked Ben: better keep out the Jews or yr/grand children will curse you.”

…and has become a staple for Middle East demagogues – here, for instance, or here.

Ironically, as Seligman notes, a serious study of the history shows that Franklin was in fact something of a philosemite, and "the only ethnic group Franklin had ever suggested excluding were Germans":

In 1755, the Founding Father had written of them that “those who come hither are generally the most stupid of their nation,” and asserted that if they were permitted to immigrate unfettered, “even our government will become precarious.”

And our very own Jeremy Corbyn gets a well-deserved mention:

In recent years, warning signs have appeared that—even as the screed continues to be pressed into service regularly by the far right—the far left seems to be tolerating it. A good example is former U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who invited Sheikh Raed Salah (b. 1958), a Palestinian whom Israel has accused of supporting terrorism, to Parliament in 2012 and praised him as a voice who “must be heard.” Salah has repeated vicious lies about Jewish blood libels and Benjamin Franklin’s view of Jews with no comment on the record from Corbyn.