Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an antisemitic hoax and forgery, arguably the most damaging fraud in human history, and an example of conspiracy theory literature. It purports to be the proceedings of a conference of Jews plotting world domination, and details the methods by which a group of Jewish elders were proposing to use their control over the media and finance to undermine traditional authorities, destroy Christianity, and ultimately establish a Jewish theocracy.^[1][2]

The Protocols was first published in tsarist Russia in 1905, and following the Russian Revolution of 1917 was translated and published in the West, first in Germany in 1919, and in Britain and the United States the following year.^[1]

In 1921 two British journalists, Lucien Wolf and Philip Graves, exposed the Protocols as having been plagiarised from Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (1864) (Dialogue in the Underworld between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), a political satire of Napoleon III that contained no antisemitic themes.^[3] The pamphlet was nevertheless promoted by the American auto magnate Henry Ford, and in particular the Nazi Party and Fascist groups in Italy and South America. They exploited its “superficially compelling argument” of a “hidden hand” responsible for perceived societal ills,^[1] which resulted in the Nazi policies of extermination, and pogroms in Russia and the Ukraine.^[2][a]Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germay, wrote that “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery”, but continued “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols“.^[4] The historian Svetlana Boym has observed that the logic of the Protocols is inverted projection, allowing the perpetrators of violent crimes to present themselves as victims.^[2]

Origins

The Protocols masquerades as an anonymous book discovered and translated by Sergius Nilus, a Russian religious mystic. But the overwhelming body of evidence, including Russian archive material, points to the real author as being an agent of the Okhranka, the tsarist secret police, then under the leadership of Peter Ivanovich Rachkovsky. He was responsible for countering Russian revolutionary groups, and in an attempt to discredit their activities he asserted that all revolutionaries were Jews, and orchestrated the first major antisemitic campaign in Russia. Rachkovsky also planned to use the Protocols to destabilise Western democracies, and make them “more like Russia”.^[1]

Legacy

The novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco has described the importance of the Protocols as: