The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem

Overview
Henry Ford's The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem (1920–1922) is an infamous antisemitic tract that presented a sweeping conspiracy narrative about Jews as a unified, hostile force manipulating modern society. Issued under Ford's name but largely written and compiled by associates at his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, it framed social, economic, and cultural changes after World War I as the product of deliberate Jewish influence. The text is widely discredited for its falsehoods, stereotypes, and reliance on fabricated sources, yet it became one of the most widely circulated antisemitic publications of the 20th century.

Publication and Structure
The work originated as a multi-year series of Dearborn Independent articles beginning in 1920, later collected by the Dearborn Publishing Company into four volumes under the overarching title The International Jew. The installments blended purported investigative reporting with polemical commentary, claiming to reveal hidden networks and strategies. While Ford's public stature amplified the series, much of the editorial direction and prose is associated with William J. Cameron, a key figure at the newspaper.

Core Claims and Methods
At its core, the book alleges the existence of a coordinated, transnational Jewish entity that seeks control over finance, media, politics, and culture at the expense of national sovereignty and Christian civilization. It assigns collective blame to Jews for capitalism's excesses and for revolutionary movements like Bolshevism, depicting them as two prongs of a single plan. The method is conspiratorial: it cherry-picks incidents, reinterprets ordinary economic or cultural phenomena as evidence of hidden design, and presents hearsay as fact. A central source is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian-origin forgery that the series treated as authentic. The work also misquotes and decontextualizes Jewish writers and public figures to suggest unanimity of purpose where none exists.

Targets and Themes
Recurring chapters portray the press, Hollywood, popular music and theater, banking, department stores, and labor as spheres supposedly captured by Jewish interests. Immigration policy and urban modernity are framed as tools for weakening traditional American life. The narrative uses longstanding antisemitic tropes, dual loyalty, financial manipulation, moral subversion, repackaged for postwar anxieties about mass culture and global interdependence. It invokes a language of reform and “exposure,” claiming to defend Americanism while proposing vague remedies: boycotting alleged offenders, demanding cultural “Americanization,” and reasserting Christian norms. These prescriptions rest on collective suspicion rather than evidence, converting complex structural changes into a personalized plot.

Reception and Criticism
From its first appearance, the series drew strong criticism from journalists, clergy, civic leaders, and Jewish organizations, who documented inaccuracies and denounced its bigotry. Legal pressure mounted with the Aaron Sapiro libel suit, which exposed the Independent's practices and led to Ford's public 1927 apology and promise to retract the material. Although the Dearborn Independent ceased publication and Ford claimed to halt distribution, the volumes continued to circulate through reprints and translations beyond his control or consent.

Impact and Legacy
Despite its discrediting, The International Jew exerted significant influence. It reinforced and modernized antisemitic conspiracy rhetoric in the United States and abroad, found eager readership among far-right groups, and was translated widely; Nazi propagandists cited and disseminated it, and Ford's prestige lent it unwarranted credibility. Historians treat the book as a case study in how industrial-era media can manufacture a pseudo-factual scaffolding for prejudice, aggregating forgery, selective quotation, and spurious pattern-finding into a totalizing narrative. Today it is read primarily as evidence of the social and political harms of conspiratorial thinking and as a cautionary document about the responsibilities that accompany mass influence.