Jewish Space Lasers

Distant Journeys and Prodigious Challenges

The heiress was fake, but the name was real. Sort of.

Anna de Rothschild seemed like a natural among the usual ornate displays of wealth and power that make up the poolside and golf course scenes at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in South Florida. She wore a fancy watch and drove a $170,000 black Mercedes, which she stood next to in the pictures she took with rappers and finance bigwigs. She spoke the language of the land, effortlessly telling stories of luxury real estate developments in Monaco and the Bahamas, sprawling vineyards, her $13 million Miami Beach mansion, and the vast country estates where she grew up. She had founded charities devoted to children, took selfies on private planes, made smooth golf shots, and had face-to-face meetings with some of the most powerful people in the Republican Party.

And why shouldn’t she? Anna de Rothschild wasn’t some billionaire tech kid in a hoodie or obnoxious political operative looking for face time with The Donald. Striking, confident, and dark-haired, she was a descendent of the Russian branch of the Rothschild family. Yes, those Rothschilds—the legendary European banking dynasty that rose up from the Frankfurt ghetto to become the kings of continental finance, lending, mining, and railroads. Their largesse, their wealth, their old money class, their ability to make or break nations with a loan of mere peanuts (to them), and their sheer everything are famous around the world. And their heirs are still out there, still working in banking, finance, art, literature, and philanthropy.

So maybe it was the name, or her affect, or the loosey-goosey, endless party vibe at Mar-a-Lago. But nobody questioned Anna de Rothschild. Allegedly, nobody bothered to background-check her or vet her ancestral claims during any of the four visits she made to the club. Because she carried herself like she’d never been among anyone other than rich and powerful people. She was so convincing that after posing on the Mar-a-Lago golf course with Trump and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the guest who took the photos joked about charging her for the pictures, saying, “Anna, you’re a Rothschild—you can afford one million dollars for a picture with you and Trump.”

She couldn’t. Because she wasn’t.

Instead, Anna de Rothschild, according to FBI officials, was actually 33-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Inna Yashchyshyn. She wasn’t a member of the Rothschild family; “Anna de Rothschild” doesn’t exist in any family lineage, nor was there ever a Russian Rothschild branch. Instead, she’s alleged to have built a fake identity to help run charity scams, fraudulent business ventures, and a variety of grifts where she inserted herself into wealthy circles based on the power of her name. For her part, Yashchyshyn denies ever having taken on the persona of a wealthy European heiress and instead claims she’s the victim of an abusive former partner, a Florida-based Russian businessperson who she said forced her into these schemes. And the story gets even more sordid—said former partner was soon shot dead in a small Quebec resort town by a purported member of the Canadian Hells Angels, while Yashchyshyn herself seems to have fallen afoul of Russian organized crime, allegedly owing $150,000 to a tattooed member of a Russian criminal syndicate who, in turn, threatened to kill Yashchyshyn.

One might be tempted to focus on how a person with such dangerous and criminal associations could get into the orbit of the former president and current members of the US Congress. But the answer might lie in how her chosen nom de grift opened the door in the first place. “De Rothschild” almost certainly wasn’t picked at random, but chosen precisely because of its connotations. And it was a wise choice. Another Mar-a-Lago member remarked in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece that broke this story that guests “fawned all over her and because of the Rothschild mystique, they never probed and instead tiptoed around her with kid gloves.”

“The Rothschild mystique” was all it took to get an accused grifter and associate of the Russian mob past the Secret Service and next to Donald Trump. Such is the power of the history and legend of the Rothschild name. People heard the name and were able to be convinced that the person who held it had access to vast familial wealth passed down through generations. And sure enough, if she had been a Rothschild, that would have been true.

But that mystique has a longstanding dark side that goes much deeper, and is much more profound, than one alleged con artist.

There’s an alternate history of the Rothschild banking family that portrays them not as a family of accomplished businesspeople but as puppet masters who control all but a few central banks, have funded both sides of every war since the American Revolution, hold as much as 80 percent of the world’s wealth in their coffers, and are part of a sick occult web of rituals that involve murder and human sacrifice. The Rothschild mystique walks alongside a Rothschild conspiracy theory industry that is, unfortunately, tied to some of the most violent spasms of antisemitism of the last two centuries.

It started with inflammatory pamphlets on the streets of Paris, continued through pro-Union US newspapers of the 1860s, morphed into whispers of Jewish control of the Federal Reserve and the rise of fascism, then wormed its way into the deepest recesses of Cold War paranoia, Clinton-era anti-New World Order hysteria, and the internet hate culture of this very moment. And in the twenty-first century, the industry dedicated to smearing the Rothschilds turned against a more recent public figure of Jewish wealth, the Hungarian billionaire George Soros, while continuing to attack the Rothschilds for things they haven’t done and a scale of wealth that nobody possesses.

Almost all conspiracy theories are rooted in antisemitism, and almost all antisemitism is rooted in conspiracy theories. Jewish people will always be scapegoats for some people, and the Rothschilds are some of the best-known Jews in modern history. In many ways, the story of Rothschild conspiracy theories is the story of modern antisemitism. That is how inseparable they are.

Antisemitism is an ideology that’s easy to exploit and lucrative to monetize any time there’s a major political upheaval, health crisis, economic disaster, military setback, or degradation of “traditional” social mores—which is to say, all the time. Some of this stereotyping is benign enough: jokes about how cheap Jews are, books extolling “Jewish business wisdom,” and the like. But Rothschild conspiracy theories have been used as fodder for pogroms, riots, blood libel panics, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings and played a critical role in ginning up the necessary level of hate and bloodlust to make the Holocaust possible.

And it’s still happening. The antisemitism powered by Rothschild conspiracy theories has seen a considerable upswing during and after the Trump years, with neo-Nazis and antisemites emboldened enough to pass out antisemitic fliers at Broadway shows, harass people on the street, hang anti-Jewish signs on overpasses, vandalize Jewish property, and, in some cases, commit overt acts of violence. Celebrities and conservative influencers now openly speak to huge online audiences of how much they love Hitler, and of Jews being a lesser, disloyal race, while controlling banking and entertainment—all accusations consistently leveled at the Rothschild family, but often couched in the past in equivocations like “we don’t hate all Jews, just these Jews.”

The echoes of the hoaxes and myths written about the Rothschilds in generations past ring out clearly in the attacks on Soros and other prominent Jews today. The new attacks are, with the exception of a few names changed and a few dollar amounts inflated, the same attacks as before. The impact of these theories on the Rothschilds themselves is hard to quantify, but for the Jewish people, the harm is obvious. Modern Jews are still battling the myths that started in a game of telephone almost two hundred years ago.

To understand Kanye West ranting on Alex Jones’s show about how great Hitler was requires understanding the influence that John Birch Society speechwriter Gary Allen’s 1971 book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, had on Jones, an effect which he has spoken of many times. Allen’s book, which sold millions of copies by attacking Jewish “insiders” like the Rothschilds, was inspired in part by Secrets of the Federal Reserve, a bestselling conspiracy book funded by the antisemitic and openly pro-fascist poet Ezra Pound. And Pound was inspired by that deathless work of anti-Jewish paranoia, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which  emerged from the antisemitism of Tsarist Russia at the start of the Twentieth Century.

These tropes, in turn, were based on those that came out of France in the 1890s, which were inspired by the same tropes coming from the United States’s gold-versus-silver debate at the same time. And all of it can be traced back to the anti-wealth fervor of the European Revolutions of 1848 and the fallout of an obscure train crash outside Paris—on tracks owned by one of the sons of Rothschild dynasty founder, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, whose other son had gained a reputation among cranks for having manipulated the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo to do nothing less than take control of global finance.

All these conspiracies and events, and so many more, lead us to the place where we are now. This book is a study of that dark and winding path. It is not a biography of the Rothschilds, nor is it a deep archival study of their various business ventures and loans. It’s also not an examination of the political and societal forces at play in the Rothschilds funding England’s purchase of part of the Suez Canal, or their misadventures with Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, or the family’s internal conflicts over Zionism. And it’s not a glossy look at the opulence bought with their wealth. Many of those books already exist—and most don’t touch on the lurid and bizarre whispers about them.

Instead, this is the biography of an idea, and it’s a simple enough one: that Jews control everything, and that the Rothschilds are the “Kings of the Jews.” Behind this notion lies a tangled web of absurdities that are equal parts bizarre and deeply sad. And it’s not all conspiracy theories, either. When popular culture has needed a rich family, particularly a Jewish one, to satirize or caricature, writers and artists pick the Rothschilds as a stand-in simply because they’re the best known of the bunch. Some of these portrayals are positive and others deeply weird, but most are negative—or at least based in negative stereotypes. And while the left/right divide in the United States has calcified into constant partisan argument, a 2022 study of whether American conservatives are more likely to believe conspiracy theories found that of the most popular fringe ideas of the last decade, belief that the Rothschilds are secret global controllers was split directly down the middle between conservatives and liberals.

It is a sprawling story, told over centuries and continents. There are fake Russian counts, Parisian pamphlet wars, lizard people, internet memes and extremist newsletters, masked balls full of servants in cat costumes pawing each other, arcane feuds, luxury saunas in Siberia, Broadway songs about interest rates, a poem called “Lord Rothschild’s Soliloquy” that doesn’t rhyme, and a pro-silver tract called The Secret of the Rothschilds that doesn’t actually mention the Rothschilds. There are crank political parties, assassination attempts, war and disaster, revolutions, economic calamity, Crosses of Gold and fascist Silver Shirts, heroism and aspiration and frenzied escapes from evil. There are appearances by T.S. Eliot and Boris Karloff and Ed Sullivan and Thelonious Monk and Stanley Kubrick. There are Anne Frank sanitary napkins. There is that very famous, yet misunderstood, “Jewish Space Laser” that lends this book its title even though the person alleged to have said it never actually did ...