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When masked men distributed leaflets last week in the eastern Ukraine city of Donetsk advising Jews they needed to register with authorities or face deportation, shivers were felt well beyond Ukraine’s borders.

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Western media took the flyers at face value. (U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called them “grotesque” and “beyond unacceptable.”) And it’s easy to see why: That last bit about Ukrainian Jews being “hostile to the Orthodox Donetsk Republic and its citizens” is a pitch-perfect take on the universal theme of traditional European anti-Semitism — that Jews are rootless, untrustworthy aliens who must be publicly shamed, or worse.

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These themes were at the heart of the most infamous and influential anti-Semitic tract of them all — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As with many anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns, the real target wasn’t only the Jews: The Protocols were cobbled together by Czarist hardliners seeking to tar political reformers as pawns of a diabolical Jewish conspiracy to control the world. In the Europe of the late 19th and early 20th century, using false documents to smear your enemy as a Jew-lover was viewed as effective hardball politics.