Cover not available

In:Conspiracy Theory Discourses
Edited by Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 98] 2022
► pp. 395–420

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 17
Anti-Sorosism

Reviving the “Jewish world conspiracy”

ORCiD logo with link | Keele University | University of the Sunshine Coast
 | Lancaster University | University Vienna
Published online: 1 December 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.98.17ric
Abstract
This chapter presents a Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA) of the antisemitic conspiracy theory at the heart of ‘anti-Sorosism’. Anti-Sorosism is a term used to label the global campaign against George Soros, a Jewish American philanthropist of Hungarian origin, launched by extreme-right activists (see Wodak 2020). We argue that anti-Sorosism is a modern synecdoche of the antisemitic ‘Jewish world conspiracy’. In addition to extreme-right individuals and organizations, several mainstream right-wing politicians have blamed George Soros for many complex global and local phenomena such as migration, the political decisions of the EU, the COVID pandemic, and so forth. Indeed, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has instrumentalized Soros time and again as a Feindbild [enemy image] when campaigning against the rules and regulations of the European Union as well as when justifying and legitimizing his restrictive immigration policies.
In this chapter, we will first briefly trace the origins of this archetypical conspiracy theory throughout the 19th and 20th centuries up to the present. The chapter then turns to a case study examining posters produced by Hungary’s governing party Fidesz. Following a summary of the DHA and contextualization of the politics of Fidesz, and its leader Viktor Orbán, we then proceed to the multimodal discourse analysis of a series of posters produced and displayed in Hungary. We conclude by arguing that conspiracy theories help to simplify complex issues and to provide clearly separated Manichean divisions of the ‘innocent’ and of those ‘to blame’. In doing so, they help achieve a strategic political function for the Orbán government.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.History of the ‘Jewish World Conspiracy’
  • 3.Functions of antisemitic Feindbilder
    • 3.1The emergence of a Feindbild – anti-Sorosism
  • 4.Multimodal discourse-historical analysis
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Context
    • 5.2Posters
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (45)
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1959. “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit”. in T. W. Adorno Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. (English translation as “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” in his Critical Models, trans. by Henry Pickford. New York: Columbia Press, 89–103).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anthonissen, Christine. 2003. “Interaction between Visual and Verbal Communication: Changing Patterns in the Printed Media.” In Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity, ed. by Gilbert Weiss, and Ruth Wodak, 297–311. Houndmills: PalgraveGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Billig, Michael. 1978. Fascists: A Social Psychology of the National Front. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Byford, Jovan. 2011. Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cairns, James. 2009. “Politics? Fear not! The rise of the Average Superhero in the visual rhetoric of Bill Davis’ 1971 election pamphlet.” In Communicating Canada’s Past: Approaches to the History of Print and Broadcast Media, ed. by Gene Allen, and Daniel J. Robinson, 194–230. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evans, Richard J. 2020. The Hitler Conspiracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Feldner, Gloria. 2019. Die Konstruktion des Feindbildes George Soros in Ungarn. Diplomarbeit, Universität Graz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Freyenhagen, Fabian. 2020. “Adorno (and Horkheimer) on Anti-Semitism.” In Blackwell Companion to Adorno, ed. by Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky, 103–122. Oxford: Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heil, Johannes. 2012. “Thomas Monmouth and the Protocols of the Sages of Narbonne.” In The Paranoid Apocalypse: a Hundred-year Retrospective on ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, ed. by Richard Landes, and Steven T. Katz, 56–76. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1947. “Elemente des Antisemitismus”. In Dialektik der Aufklärung, ed. by Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, Amsterdam: Querido. (English translation as Dialectic of Enlightenment by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hyman, Paula. 1989. “The Dreyfus Affair: The Visual and the Historical.” The Journal of Modern History 61 (1): 88–109. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hyman, Paula E. 2005. “New Perspectives on the Dreyfus affair.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 31 (3): 335–349.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klymenko, Lina. 2018. “The Language of Party Programmes and Billboards: the Example of the 2014 Parliamentary Election Campaign in Ukraine.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Bernhard Forchtner, 440–453. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langer, Jacob. 2007. “Corruption and the Counterrevolution: the Rise and Fall of the Black Hundred History.” Phd Thesis, Durham, NC: Duke University. Available at: [URL] (accessed 3 February 2021)
Lockwood, Erin. 2020. “The Antisemitic Backlash to Financial Power: Conspiracy Theory as a Response to Financial Complexity and Crisis.” New Political Economy 26 (2): 261–270. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McLaughlin, Neil, and Skaidra Trilupaityte. 2012. “The International Circulation of Attacks and the Reputational Consequences of Local Context: George Soros’s Difficult Reputation in Russia, Post-Soviet Lithuania and the United States.” Cultural Sociology 7 (4): 431–446. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oberhauser, Claus. 2020. “Freemasons, Illuminati and Jews: Conspiracy theories and the French revolution.” In Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, ed. by Michael Butter, and Peter Knight, 555–568. London and New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oppenheimer, Louis. 2006. “The Development of Enemy Images.” Peace & Conflict. J Peace Psychology 12 (3): 269–292. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Orbán, Viktor. 2018. “Viktor Orbáns Festrede zum 170. Jahrestag der Revolution und des Freiheitskampfes von 1848/49.” [URL] [accessed 11 May 2021]
Peham, Andreas. 2021. Kritik des Antisemitismus. Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Political Capital. 2012. “The Conspiracy Worldview.” [URL] [accessed 11 May 2021]
Pörksen, Bernhard. 2005 [2000]. Die Konstruktion von Feindbildern. Zum Sprachgebrauch in neonazistischen Medien. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pulzer, Peter. 1988. The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin. 2018. “The Discourse-Historical Approach.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by John Flowerdew, and John E. Richardson, 44–59. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin & Wodak, Ruth. 2009 “The Discourse-Historical Approach”. In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis ed. by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 87–121. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Richardson, John E. 2017. British Fascist Discourse: A Discourse Historic Analysis. Columbia University Press/ibidem-Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018. “The National Front, and the Search for a ‘Nationalist’ Economic Policy.” In Tomorrow Belongs to Us: The British Far Right since 1967, ed. by Nigel Copsey, and Matthew Worley, 48–68. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Richardson, John E., and Monica Colombo. 2013. “Continuity and Change in Populist Anti-immigrant Discourse in Italy: An Analysis of Lega Leaflets.” Journal of Language and Politics 12 (2): 180–202. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. “Race and Immigration in Far- and Extreme-Right European Political Leaflets.” In Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by Christopher Hart, and Piotr Cap, 521–542. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosensaft, Menachem Z. 1976. “Jews and Antisemites in Austria at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 21 (1): 57–86. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simonsen, Kjetil Braut. 2020. Antisemitism and Conspiracism. In Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, ed. by Michael Butter, and Peter Knight, 357–370. London and New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stögner, Karin, and Ruth Wodak. 2015. “‘The man who Hated Britain’ –The Discursive Construction of ‘National Unity’ in the Daily Mail.” Critical Discourse Studies 13 (2): 193–209. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Szombati, Kristóf, and Anna Szilágyi. 2020. “Enemy in the Making: The Language of “Anti-Sorosism” in the US and Hungary.” Available at [URL] [accessed 16 July 2020].
Trachtenberg, Joshua. 1943. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Uscinski, Joseph E. 2019. “Down the Rabbit Hole We Go!” In Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, ed. by Joseph E. Uscinski, 1–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Volkan, Vamik D. 2013. “Large Group Identity, International Relations, and Psychoanalysis.” Internatiional Forum of Psychoanalysis 18 (4): 206–213. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wall, Derek. 2003. “Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 14 (3): 99–122. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 1989. “Iudeus ex Machina.” Grazer Linguistische Studien 32: 153–180.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. “Right-wing Populism and Antisemitism.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, ed. by Jens Rydgren, 61–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2020. The Politics of Fear. The Shameless Normalization of Far-right Populist Discourses. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022. “Re/inventing antisemitic Feindbilder.” In Festschrift for András Kovács, ed. by Michael Miller. Budapest: CEU Press (in press).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, Peter Nowak, Johanna Pelikan, Helmut Gruber, Rudolf de Cillia, and Richard Mitten. 1990. ‘“Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!” Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus’. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth and Richardson, John E. eds. 2013. Analysing Fascist Discourse: European fascism in talk and text. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zamperini, Adriano, Luca Andrighetto, and Marialuisa Menegatto. 2012. “The Deconstruction of Enemy Images for a Nonkilling Society.” In Nonkilling Psychology, ed. by Daniel Christie, and Joám Evans Pim, 320–340. Honolulu: Creative Commons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Czimbalmos, Mercédesz
2025. Antisemitism in the Finnish Blue and Black Movement: Ideological Roots and Contemporary Expressions. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society DOI logo
Hamrak, Bence, Erin K. Jenne, Levente Littvay & Gabor Simonovits
2025. The public opinion effects of antisemitic elite cues: a survey experiment on the Hungarian Soros campaign. East European Politics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Rybicki, Viktoria
2025. PiS as Mnemonic Warriors A Comporative Analysis of Changes and Continuity of Memory Narratives in the Election Campaigns 2015 and 2023. SSRN Electronic Journal DOI logo
Scott, James Wesley
2024. Border-making as illiberal politics. Journal of Language and Politics 23:3 ► pp. 416 ff. DOI logo
Szalai, Andras
2024. Bordering and crisis narratives to illiberal ends. Journal of Language and Politics 23:3 ► pp. 391 ff. DOI logo
Burnett, Scott
2023. Healthy White Nationalists: Far-Right Selbstbilder in a Digital Age. In Masculinities and Discourses of Men's Health [Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality, ], ► pp. 161 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue