It seems surprising to us today that people believe these things, but you have to remember just how insular the world was before the development of satellite communications. When I was a kid, it was still possible for entire armies to mass on the borders of countries without anyone knowing about it.
The first time most soldiers in World War II met anyone who wasn’t from their home area was usually in the Army.
Granted, Henry Ford probably kept tabs on things a little better than most people, but the population of the US in general had little idea of what was going on in the next county. Newspapers covered things like national elections and spectacular crimes, but that was about it – and they were often as racist and insular as the rest of the population.
Today, most of the people who believe in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are from countries hostile to Israel. The material in that book is still frequently taught in Moslem schools and blood libel is still widely believed in most Moslem countries.
Most, perhaps, but there are still a hell of a lot of Americans who buy into that crap too (albeit not with much conviction – I don’t think we’ve ever been all that good at antisemitism). The blood libel, on the other hand, is something I’ve personally only heard espoused by Arabs and Persians. It seems to have fallen out of favor in the West.
My mother tells how in grade school in the 1950s (in growing suburbs of Los Angeles, so not in the middle of nowhere and, er, pretty near Hollywood), the teacher had a special sit-down with one day to tell them that a new girl was coming to class the next day, and to treat her nicely, and that new girl was (gasp!) Jewish.
And the kids speculated all day on how she might look weird, or dress weird, or talk weird, and of course she was perfectly normal (well, a bit weird, she talked like she was from New York). But even in L.A., it was a remembered event.
Although anyone with half a brain would see that Philip Graves’s debunking was thorough and compelling, there may be somewhat more to it than that. One commentator on the Elders hoax put it this way:
To the paranoiacally inclined, everything seemed to be happening exactly as if it were the result of a secret plot. Even before the publication of the Protocols, there was in France a widespread belief in a “Syndicate”, a shadowy conspiracy of Jewish leftists (perhaps even backed by Germany!) seeking to undermine the French nation and society.