IN “MASQUERADE”, Tivadar Soros’s memoir of Nazi-occupied Budapest, he describes how he procured false IDs for fellow Jews, including his 14-year-old son George. The elder Soros’s approach to the forgeries is enlightening. With wealthy clients, he “asked for whatever the market would bear”. From the desperate he made nothing: “I felt that I was just a little responsible for everyone.” George posed as the godson of an official who conducted inventories of confiscated Jewish estates. “Without risks,” his father says of a time when each day was a life-or-death gamble, “there’s no life.”

An appetite for risk made George Soros a billionaire, but also made him enemies, as has his congenital philanthropy. In recent months these resentments have reached a new, alarming pitch. Two strands of criticism, in America and abroad, seem to have fused, a confluence epitomised by a pair of obscure letters sent by Republican politicians. A group of senators wrote to Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and a clutch of congressmen to the comptroller-general, taking aim at the same detail: the role of USAID, America’s foreign-aid agency, in Macedonia, specifically its collaboration with the local arm of Mr Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF).

Mr Soros has supported democratic reform in central and eastern Europe since he distributed photocopiers among activists in the 1980s. His programmes avowedly promote free media, fair elections and clean government, rather than opposition parties, but local autocrats often miss the distinction. The Kremlin, which blamed Mr Soros for peaceful uprisings in Russia’s ex-Soviet neighbours in the 2000s, kicked his affiliate out in 2015. Belarus and Uzbekistan have also given him the push.

A name to conjure with

As Russia revives its influence in Europe, antipathy to Mr Soros is redoubling: in Romania, Poland and especially Macedonia, where, amid a political crisis and allegations of graft and vote-rigging against a former prime minister, a “Stop Operation Soros” movement was launched. Meanwhile Viktor Orban—prime minister of Mr Soros’s native Hungary and himself a recipient of a Soros-funded scholarship—reviles his benefactor’s “transnational empire”. Hungary’s parliament passed a law that might close Central European University, which was founded by Mr Soros in 1991. Another pending law could be used against his foundation.

His political views and hefty donations have led to vitriol in America as well. Denunciations of George W. Bush and the Iraq war made him a bogeyman among right-wing fulminators and conspiracy theorists. His support for Hillary Clinton and disparagement of Donald Trump—an “impostor” and “would-be dictator”—have reinvigorated his assailants. Recently he has developed a controversial sideline in local prosecutorial races, from Louisiana to Illinois, betting that reformist prosecutors can help change the criminal-justice system. Sometimes the candidates he backs seem as baffled by his interest as their rivals, but 12 out of his 15 picks have won.

Still, even if they disliked his influence at home, mainstream American politicians of both parties have mostly endorsed his foreign goals. Now the distinction is crumbling, as the Macedonian letter shows. It is a bizarre intervention: American politicians are in effect aligning themselves with a far-away, scandal-plagued party that is also backed by Russia, and which has allies who have resorted to violence, while disparaging their own government and, of course, Mr Soros. They have got their facts wrong, too: USAID has never funded Mr Soros’s outfit in neighbouring Albania, as the senators alleged. In the scheme of the agency’s budget and the Foundations’, the sums involved are tiny.

In any case, Mr Soros’s infamy from the bayous to the Balkans is odd. He is certainly no saint. Some of his wealth comes from currency speculation, as when, short-selling the pound in 1992, he “broke the Bank of England”. He has a French conviction for insider trading in 1988. Yet he has given billions to worthy causes. Michael Vachon, a longtime adviser, points out that Mr Soros derives no personal benefit from his advocacy of, say, the rights of Roma or the abolition of the death penalty. In politics, Mr Vachon says, unlike many big-time donors he “is always lobbying for a public purpose, never for private gain”. Often he promotes policies, as on tax, that could cost him.

Canary in the global mine

In part his predicament is an indicator of authoritarianism’s advances. As Radek Sikorski, a former Polish foreign minister, puts it, Mr Soros “has been a consistent advocate of the liberal order, and the liberal order is itself under attack”. European regimes may see an opening in the ascendancy of Mr Trump, who is sceptical of exporting democratic ideals (and whose own campaign demonised Mr Soros). For their part, some in Congress may see him as a tool as much as a target, their real aim being to discredit overseas aid.

Whatever the causes, as Soros-bashing spreads—the idea of his global meddling gaining a meretricious credibility with repetition—so do other troubling views. One is the cynical claim that peaceful protesters, whether against Mr Trump’s policies or corruption in Romania, take to the streets only if they are bribed: usually, run the calumnies from Bucharest to Washington, by Mr Soros. “If we’d paid all the protesters they say we have,” jokes Laura Silber of OSF, “we’d be bankrupt many times over. It’s an insult to people standing up for their beliefs.” Second, ever-more supposedly democratic leaders are relying on external adversaries to bolster their positions, confecting them if necessary.

Finally, there is the particular kind of foe that Mr Soros is made to embody. Portrayals of him as an octopus, or, as in a Hungarian billboard, as a puppet-master, inevitably recall the last century’s anti-Semitic propaganda. Some such echoes may be accidental, the conspiracists unconsciously defaulting to ancient tropes, but they are striking. In a tweet praising Mr Orban, for example, Steve King, a Republican congressman, called Mr Soros a “Marxist billionaire”. That chimes with the old slur against Jews whereby, as Tivadar Soros says in his book, “at one and the same time they held in their hands…the Western capitalist countries and Russian Bolshevism.” “He survived the Nazis,” Mr Vachon says of Mr Soros’s current situation, “and he takes a long view.” No doubt, but in some ways this must be depressingly familiar.