Memories stirred of the secret international Jewish assemblies which had supposedly met to pick the town selected each year for the ritual murder. Thus a new conspiracy theory appeared, launched the same year by the Abbé Barruel in his book Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme. It adumbrated most of the fantasies later set forth in myths about the ‘Elders of Zion’ and their secret plots. The Sanhedrin also attracted the attention of the new secret police organizations which the autocracies of central and eastern Europe were creating to counter the radical threat, now seen as a
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