This paper looks at how racist thugs felt entitled to run riot against British Jews because of how Revisionist Zionist leaders were waging war thousands of miles away in the Middle East. This is a story with obvious contemporary relevance: but it took place in 1947. There have been three episodes of mass violence against British Jews in modern times: in South Wales in 1911, in Leeds and London in 1917, and around the country in 1947. None of these episodes has been given sufficient attention in either academic or popular writing. The 1947 riots were a particularly disturbing episode. They seemingly came out of nowhere in a population that had only recently learned of the horrors of the Holocaust; and card-carrying Fascists played only a minor role in fomenting them. The events of 1947 provide troubling insight into how quickly large-scale physical violence against people and property can break out if a certain combination of circumstances comes into alignment: casual antisemitism, socio-economic discontent, and a pretext provided by Middle-Eastern politics.

The property transfer resulting from the Holocaust wasn’t reversed after the war but was further enabled by the Communist authorities through the implementation of property laws. The fact that some non-Jewish Poles benefited materially from the Holocaust, along with non-Jewish complicity, has contributed to the persistent power of antisemitism in Poland.

Since 1989, several legislative proposals regarding the restitution of, or compensation for private property have been introduced, but none was enacted into law. Since the US Congress introduced legislative initiative on monitoring the issue of Holocaust-era property restitution (JUST Act) in 2017, the far-right movement in Poland has weaponized Jewish claims for political reasons and fueled antisemitic attitudes. According to a far-right conspiracy theory, the alleged instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory alongside accusations of Polish complicity are a political strategy to advance “Jewish claims”. Thus, the Jedwabne massacre in 1941, when non-Jewish Poles had burned in a barn and murdered the entire local Jewish community, has become a focal point in the revisionist discourse.

My paper aims to map the themes of far-right discourse concerning the restitution of Jewish property by employing a content analysis that focuses on internet materials created by the extreme right circles.

Conspiracy theory is the belief that a group with nefarious intentions is responsible for world-wide events. Conspiracies offer quick answers for unexplained phenomena often involving unfounded beliefs, superstitions and fantasy –popularly held beliefs previously relegated to legend status. Conspiracies can be entertaining providing explanations from monster sightings to UFO/UAPs abductions. Other conspiracies viz. political conspiracies are less than benign harboring popularly held notions of group differences in race, ethnicity and religion. Understanding group differences as unscientific and incendiary, anthropologist Ashley Montague rallied against employing any form of man’s “most dangerous myths.” His book was published in 1942. Responding to a question of climate change origins, U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene offered the following explanation: “giant Jewish space lasers.”