Penguin Random House is a major international publisher. Photo: ActuaLitté.

Top international publisher Penguin Random House this week finally bowed to pressure to cease publication of a book branded antisemitic by several critics.

The company did not accede to demands to withdraw Pedro Baños’s How They Rule the World: The 22 Secret Strategies of Global Power from sale, but will print no further copies of the book after an external review found that the Spanish-language edition contains “echoes of Jewish conspiracy theories.”

The book by Baños, a colonel in the Spanish army, was criticized in May by author Jeremy Duns, who noted that the cover features a drawing of octopus tentacles — an image long associated with antisemitic propaganda.

Duns compared the Spanish-language edition of the work to its English translation, and found that references to the Rothschild family, a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories, had been removed.

In Spanish-language interviews, Baños — previously the counter-intelligence and security chief for the European Army Corps — “called the Rothschilds dominant and likened them to the Illuminati. On Spanish TV, he also once accused Israel of being behind the assassination of John F Kennedy,” The Guardian reported at the time.

Nevertheless, Penguin initially stood by the book, prompting an independent review led by the British Rabbi Julia Neuberger.