The collective Jew, power and influence (perception report)

I am Jewish. Therefore, speaking publicly about this subject is not neutral - not for you, reading me, and not for me, writing it.

Most people reading this already know it anyway. My name is Cohen. It is not exactly subtle.

Some have spent years trying to determine where my "loyalties" lie before they even listened to what I was saying.

I stayed silent on this subject for a long time.

Not out of fear. I grew up with antisemitism.

I encountered it early - including inside French elite academic environments, Sciences Po to name it, long before October 7 made the subject socially acceptable again.

One of the first things I learned is that educated environments are not necessarily less antisemitic. They are simply more sophisticated in the language they use to express it.

Eventually, when I understood what kind of "elite" was going to rule France in the upcoming decades, I left France.

Yes, to Israel.

Ironically, Israel was probably the only place where I no longer had to be "the Jew" constantly. I was just another citizen among others. Jewishness was no longer an identity under observation. It was the background condition of society itself.

I left Israel too, almost ten years later, for different reasons I will perhaps write about another day.

And I find myself in diaspora again. This time, by choice.

A familiar historical position: the wandering Jew, tolerated inside other civilizations as long as she does not become too visible, too loud, too disruptive to the equilibrium around her.

The eternal insider-outsider.

Then came October 7.

And with it, something I had already seen many times before, but never at this scale: obsession.

A visceral, almost gravitational pull returning everything, in geopolitical conversation, to one central symbolic figure: the Jew.

That obsession is precisely why, a few weeks ago, I conducted an anonymous qualitative study among my audience on perceptions of Jews, power, and influence.

148 people responded. Long-form responses, no ideological framing.

My goal was simple: let participants express themselves freely, and then read what was actually there. The words, the associations, the contradictions, the hesitations, the projections.

Based on these responses, I wrote a report.

It is not a report on antisemitism. It does not adjudicate facts. It maps perception: the mental and cognitive structures of the respondents.

I wanted to understand how do people mentally organize the relationship between Jewish identity and power. What does the architecture of those mental patterns reveal - not about Jews, but about the minds that hold them, the systems that produce them, and the historical conditions that have made them so durable?

The Receptacle

After reading the answers, one thing is impossible to ignore: the Jew functions, historically and persistently, as a receptacle.

A surface onto which societies project their anxieties about power, disorder, fragmentation, and invisible coordination.

The content changes with every era. The mechanism does not.

• In medieval Europe: the Jew became associated with plague, contamination, poisoning, hidden corruption.
• In the age of capitalism: banking, finance, the circulation of money.
• In the revolutionary era: subversion, cosmopolitanism, ideological infiltration.
• Today: algorithms, global finance, elite networks, intelligence infrastructures, lobbying - and Israel.

The figure adapts with remarkable efficiency to each era's dominant anxiety. The cognitive structure underneath it does not change.

The deepest misunderstanding: power

What the corpus revealed at its core (and I did not expect to find it so consistently, across such different respondents, in such different cultural contexts) is this:

Most people do not understand what power actually is.

Power, in the intuitive model held by some respondents, is:

• intentional
• coordinated
• coherent
• centralized

A small group somewhere, running things. This model feels psychologically intuitive. It is also structurally wrong.

Modern power is primarily systemic: it emerges from institutions, historical incentives, distributed networks, economic structures, bureaucracies, algorithms, path dependencies - complex systems that no single actor fully controls or even fully understands.

The problem with systemic explanations is that they are cognitively exhausting.

They offer no face, no coordinator, no villain whose removal would fix things.

And the human brain, under conditions of complexity and fear, does not want a system. It wants a story.

There is an irony here that the study made visible.

If most people had even a minimal understanding of Judaism itself (not internet mythology, but the actual intellectual structure of Jewish tradition) they would realize that Judaism does not conceptualize power the way they imagine Jews exercise it.

Jewish tradition is constitutionally suspicious of centralized authority.

The King is subject to the Law.
Interpretation matters more than domination.
Debate is institutionalized.
Argument is sacred.
Talmudic reasoning is built on contradiction.

Authority is constantly fragmented by commentary, dissent, and the radical decentralization of who gets to be right.

Historically, Judaism survived precisely because it could continue existing without empire, without centralized sovereignty, sometimes without territory itself through transmission, memory, education, law, and adaptation.

The very qualities that made Jewish communities resilient across millennias of dispersion are the qualities that, misread from outside, look like coordination.

The sovereign rupture: Israel

For most of their history, Jews existed primarily as a dispersed minority surviving through portability: memory, study, law, adaptation, networks.

They were sovereign - in the full political sense of the word - for roughly 141 years across more than 3,500 years of recorded history. For the rest: diaspora, negotiation, accommodation, endurance...

Then came Israel in 1948. A modern nation-state. With an army, borders, intelligence services, political sovereignty... And for the first time in centuries, the Jew ceased to exist only as a witness of history and became again an actor inside history.

Many societies cannot cognitively reconcile the two figures simultaneously:

• The diaspora Jew - associated with fragility, exile, complexity, persecution, intellectual achievement, trade, finance, surviving against all odds.
• And the Israeli Jew - associated with force, sovereignty, military agency, geopolitical alignment.

The contradiction is unbearable.

It is even unbearable for some Jews, and for some Israelis!

So what is Israel? What is a Jew? How can there be simultaneously sovereign Jews in their land, and diasporic Jews living in host nations?

Complex topic, and I address it in depth in the report (below).

But for now, let's agree that Israel is an existing nation-state. One, that is different than most.

It is one of the only countries in the world with a constitutionally diasporic dimension. The "Law of Return" extends national belonging to millions of people who live elsewhere, who hold other passports, who have never set foot on Israeli soil.

The nation-state of the Jewish people is a nation-state whose nation is, by design, also outside its borders.

This is a genuine historical anomaly.

This hybrid ontology is written into the Basic Laws, the institutional architecture of the state itself. It is what Israel is: a sovereign political entity and the institutional expression of a people's claim to exist as a people, simultaneously.

And it is precisely this singularity that the outside world does not know what to do with.

The categories of the modern nation-state - territory, citizenship, borders, loyalty - were not built for this case. And you know what happens when categories fail: the human mind reaches for the next available explanation.

And for two thousand years, that explanation has had a name.

Eight patterns: what the study revealed

After analyzing the full corpus of answers to the anonymous study I led, eight recurring cognitive structures have emerged.

Pattern I - Direct contact humanizes, distance mythologizes.

The less exposure respondents had to actual Jewish individuals, the more abstract and conspiratorial their perception became. Proximity dissolves the myth by replacing the category with a person. Distance preserves it, because in the absence of the person, the category does all the work.

Pattern II - The geopoliticization of Jewish identity.

The old hostility migrated. "Israel" became the symbolic address of the older obsession making it simultaneously more socially acceptable, more politically scalable, and far more difficult to identify as what it actually is.

Pattern III - The old software, modern interface.

The underlying myths barely changed. Rothschild became Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs became Silicon Valley. Epstein. AIPAC. The content remained structurally identical across centuries. Only the interface updated.

Pattern IV - The kernel of truth.

Partial truths are progressively scaled into total explanations. Overrepresentation in a sector becomes control of that sector. Influence becomes coordination. Coordination becomes intentionality. Each step feels like logic. None of them are.

Pattern V - The scapegoat as cognitive shortcut.

René Girard was right: scapegoating is one of the stabilizing mechanisms of social life. Jews have historically occupied the impossible structural position of being simultaneously inside and outside every society they inhabited. Integrated enough to be threatening. Distinct enough to be expelled. This inside-outside position is precisely what the sacrificial mechanism requires.

Pattern VI - The paradox of admiration.

Many respondents simultaneously described Jews as intelligent, resilient, adaptive, and cohesive while perceiving those exact same qualities as suspicious. Admiration and hostility appeared repeatedly as intertwined psychological dynamics.

Pattern VII - The speech trap.

The discourse around Jews and Israel has become so colonized by mutual accusation (from every political direction simultaneously) that nuanced analysis has become unviable. Many people capable of making the necessary distinctions simply remain silent. And silence, as the historical record shows, is preparation.

Pattern VIII - The Shoah as active variable.

The Holocaust functions simultaneously as a moral shield, an unresolved source of collective guilt, and a contested political reference. As living memory fades and generational distance grows, the shield weakens and the inversion accelerates.

These eight patterns converge toward one conclusion that I find both analytically clear and deeply uncomfortable:

The model is intentionalist: it imagines power as coordinated, ethnic, centralized, conscious, directed by identifiable actors toward unified ends.

But modern power is rarely organized this way. Most modern systems are distributed, structural, impersonal, partially ungoverned, producing outcomes that no one fully planned and that no one can fully stop.

This creates a psychological tension that the human mind cannot bear.

This study matters beyond the Jewish case.

The Jewish case is one of the most durable historical containers for this mechanism.

But the mechanism itself is portable. It appears wherever people misread complex systems as coordinated actors.

It appears in markets, politics, media, corporate environments, elite networks, geopolitical analysis, intelligence work, and high-stakes decision-making.

The same cognitive errors documented here are used every day to misread competitors, overestimate coordination, invent intent, simplify systems into actors, and make decisions based on false coherence.

This is how people lose contact with reality. Because they hold a partially wrong model of power while believing it is lucid.

This report is therefore not only a report on perception. It is also a case study in how the human mind compresses complexity, constructs false coherence, and assigns authorship where there may only be structure.

If you cannot distinguish between perceived power and actual power, you will constantly react to reality without having the ability to read it, for what it is.

Stay lucid,

Download the 107-page report here ↓