On 1 March, the day after the United States and Israel launched strikes against the Islamic Republic, Candace Owens told her 7.6 million followers on X, “goyim always must die so the Khazarian mafia can expand their borders.” The post had 1.8 million views. A few days later, Tucker Carlson told his audience that Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement best known for campus outreach, was part of a plot to orchestrate the Iran war, in order to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and rebuild the Jewish Temple.
These are not fringe ideas hatched in fetid corners of the internet. The underlying ideas about secret Jewish networks, occultist sects manipulating world events, and non-Jews dying in Jewish wars are outgrowths of an ancient prejudice. And their contemporary form did not emerge from American political culture.
The characterisation of Chabad as a nefarious conspiratorial organisation, references to a “Khazarian mafia,” the idea that Jews are Satanic, and the links between these ideas and anti-Zionism can all be traced to Moscow. Russia’s use of anti-Jewish disinformation predates the Soviet Union. The most widely disseminated antisemitic text in history, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is an early 20th-century Tsarist Russian fabrication purporting to document a Jewish plan for world domination. It was assembled in part from a 19th-century French political satire that had nothing to do with Jews, with the goal of redirecting social unrest and was subsequently disseminated by the Nazi regime.
Through forged documents, fabricated attributions, and coordinated disinformation campaigns, the KGB regularly weaponised antisemitic tropes to discredit Western institutions and used antisemitism to deepen social divisions. To work, such conspiracies do not need to be universally believed. They only need to circulate widely enough to polarise, distract, and degrade institutional trust.
In 2024, the US Department of Justice unsealed the files documenting a Russian disinformation operation that was part of the broader “Doppelgänger” campaign targeting American Jewish communities. Operatives created a fraudulent version of a Jewish newspaper and impersonated Israeli citizens on social media. According to an FBI affidavit, this was a deliberate effort to exploit divisions within the American Jewish community in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Moscow has also cultivated Western far-right extremists. The Russian Imperial Movement, designated a terrorist organisation by the US government in 2020, provided paramilitary training to Western extremists on Russian soil. As a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty investigation has documented, Russian military intelligence recruit saboteurs via Telegram. Global intelligence and terrorism analysts at the Soufan Center allege that the founder of “The Base,” a transnational neo-Nazi network that carried out “Operation Kristallnacht” by vandalising synagogues in Michigan and Wisconsin, is a Russian intelligence asset.
Izabella Tabarovsky
While Putin publicly claimed that the “denazification of Ukraine” was one of his reasons for invading the country, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that, on Telegram, the invasion was framed as a war against a covert Jewish power structure. As the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented, the same claim was common on social media: “Ukraine is NOT at war with Russia, it’s being SET FREE BY Russia! The Khazarian Jewish Mafia is being brought down.”
The “Khazarian mafia” conspiracy theory is Russian state-adjacent propaganda that begins with the false claim that Ashkenazi Jews descend from a medieval Turkic empire. Though academically debunked and genetically disconfirmed—Jews from the three diverse diaspora groups of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi are genetically closer to each other than to non-Jews from their respective regions—the lie is hard to kill. These Khazarian “fake Jews,” the conspiracy theory alleges, secretly control global finance, media, and governments.
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