This paper analyses the efforts made by Jewish agencies, early scholars of antisemitism and State intelligence services to identify the author(s) behind the "Plot against the Church", first distributed at VaticanII, before becoming a long-standing bestseller for opponents to the aggiornamento on the Church teaching on the Jews. Archival findings outline an uncanny obsidional alliance between three groups, all embodying a specific form of antisemitism but with no prior contacts with the other two: Mexican antimodernist Catholics, Italian neofascists and Egyptian diplomacy.
Building upon Stoler's "epistemic anxieties", the paper addresses not only the antisemitic networks behind The Plot, but also the representations of antisemitism conveyed in the hypotheses made by the investigators aiming to identify its authors. While The Plot was often seen as a derivation of the Protocols, we argue on the contrary that it embodies a complete shift of dynamics and power balance in transnational antisemitism after WWII.