When Vice President JD Vance discussed foreign influence and American policy on Joe Rogan’s podcast this month, he likely believed he was making an argument about geopolitics. Many Jewish listeners heard something else entirely. They heard echoes of one of history’s oldest accusations: that Jews wield hidden influence or possess loyalties separate from the nations in which they live.

I do not doubt that Vance intended to raise a legitimate policy question. In a democracy, foreign influence, lobbying and government decision-making should be debated openly. But many Jewish Americans were responding to something deeper than a disagreement over foreign policy. They were hearing language through a historical tradition shaped by centuries of studying how prejudice develops before persecution begins.

The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. It began years earlier with propaganda, conspiracy theories, respectable speeches and ordinary........

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