As a Hungarian-born Jew and naturalized U.S. citizen who made billions betting against national currencies, Soros was an easy target in the 1990s for corrupt pols from Bratislava to Kuala Lumpur. “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews,” then–Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad famously said after Soros helped devalue the ringgit, "but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.” Did he mention that Soros is Jewish?

(Soros, who has an almost perverse yen for self-criticism, would a decade later warn of the “danger of excessive capital movement” while sitting literally at Mahathir’s side. He has also said that he’s “very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world … As an unintended consequence of my actions, I also contribute to that image.”)

Soros’s Open Society foundations and Central European University campuses in struggling post-Cold War countries were so disproportionately well-funded compared with all other philanthropical outlets that they couldn’t help but become competing power centers. Yes, he was delivering water to besieged Sarajevans and free-market textbooks to students poisoned by communism. But in the process he was also effectively funding the liberal intelligentsia and political opposition. His fingerprints on the region’s color revolutions were both real and exaggerated by conspiracists.

Back when I was covering the post-Communist transitions of 1990s Central Europe, my journalistic colleagues and I had a crudely accurate rule of thumb: The more a government criticized Soros, the lousier it was at meeting its citizens’ needs. Soros-bashing, we thought then, was the last resort of unreconstructed apparatchiks, soon to be swept away by a younger generation untainted by dictatorial habits. Boy, were we wrong.

The modern swing toward nationalist populism arguably started in Soros’s native Hungary. Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats)—initially an anti-communist, Western-friendly environmentalist movement that did not admit members over the age of 35—made the fateful decision in the early 1990s to turn from liberal integrationism to conservative nationalism. Once a regional leader in economic and political freedom, Hungary under Fidesz Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become the leading demonstration project of ethno-populism.

That means Soros, who was already treated with the wariness that greets wealthy emigres worldwide, has now become enemy number one in his homeland. New legislation that makes it illegal to assist asylum-seekers is referred to casually as the Stop Soros law, since he and his foundations are always championing minority rights and cultural assimilation. Orbánism—which can charitably be characterized as a reassertion of national sovereignty at the expense of transnational organizations such as the European Union—now rules Poland, and is growing in Scandinavia, German-speaking Mitteleurope, and the Balkans.