An Unconvincing Hoax
The Vicious“Protocols of the Elders of Zion”
In 1872, Hermann Goedsche, an antisemitic German author writing under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe, published a novel called Biarritz. One of the chapters, titled ‘In the Jewish Cemetery of Prague' describes a secret night meeting that takes place once in every century between thirteen Jewish leaders. The purpose of the meeting is to review the progress, over the previous hundred years, of their campaign to overcome their enemies, and to formulate a plan to achieve world domination in the coming century.
The chapter is, of course, fictional but it was soon believed to be true and reprinted in pamphlets in Russia, Paris and Prague. It became one of the sources for the most notorious of all antisemitic publications, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a work universally condemned as a hoax and yet still circulating freely today on the Internet and in those places where government policy encourages antisemitism.
Goedsche’s book Biarritz was adapted from, and partly plagiarised, a book published in 1864 by the French author, Maurice Joly: Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Joly’s book was a satirical attack on the French Emperor Napoleon III but Goedsche converted it into a diatribe about Jews. One of the most compelling proofs that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an elaborate hoax, is its similarity to the books by Joly and Goedsche. The Protocols is an unoriginal document, lacking imagination both in the ideas it contained and in the way it was written.
A protocol, in the document’s understanding, is the minutes of a meeting between the imaginary “Elders of Zion”, presumably people of similar status to those who were supposed to have met in the Prague Cemetery. There were 24 protocols in the original document, each detailing a fictional secret plan for dominance drawn up by the Elders, covering topics still current in antisemitic discourse: the financial markets, world politics, the media, banks, overthrowing Christianity, war and so on.
Although exposed many times as a hoax and a fantasy, the Protocols remains the basis of many of the antisemitic conspiracy theories that circulate today. Like the conspiracy theories that have helped fuel the rise of present day political populism, its appeal, to those who believe it, lies in its apparent ability to explain complex world problems in simplistic terms and to offer up a convenient scapegoat to those seeking one.
The Protocols first appeared in the Russian newspaper Znamia, published in St Petersburg, in 1903. Over 120 years later historians are still divided over who wrote them and why. One view is that they were written by the proprietor of the newspaper which first published them, a known antisemite who may simply have been looking to increase his paper’s circulation. The dominant opinion however, is that they originated with the Russian Secret Police, who were looking for a suitable victim to blame the country’s problems upon. Jews were active in the revolutionary movements in the country; it was the job of the Secret Police to suppress these movements. By accusing the Jews of a political conspiracy, and fabricating evidence to support their accusation, the Secret Police hoped to show that they had the problems under control.
Over the years, the Protocols were published and republished in various editions. In 1905, a version that was appended to a book about the coming of the Antichrist, by Sergei Nilus, became the definitive version.
The Protocols remained largely unknown outside hard-core antisemitic circles until the Russian Revolution in 1917 when the opponents of the revolution seized upon it as evidence that the Bolshevik uprising was a Jewish conspiracy. It was soon translated into other languages, appearing in a German translation in 1919, followed by French, English, Italian, Arabic and even Japanese. The wider it was circulated, the more it was believed. On May 8th, 1920, The Times in London published an article under the heading “The Jewish Peril: A Disturbing Pamphlet, Call for an Inquiry”:
Never before have a race and a creed been accused of a more sinister conspiracy. We in this country, who live in good fellowship with numerous representatives of Jewry, may well ask that some authoritative criticism should deal with it, and either destroy the ugly "Semitic" bogy or assign their proper place to the insidious allegations of this kind of literature. . . The pamphlet has been allowed, so far, to pass almost unchallenged. The Jewish Press announced, it is true, that the anti-Semitism of the "Jewish Peril" was going to be exposed. But save for an unsatisfactory article in the March 5 issue of the Jewish Guardian and for an almost equally unsatisfactory contribution to the Nation of March 27, this exposure is yet to come….
The response was immediate. The following day the paper published an excoriating criticism of the article, in a letter from the South African judge, J.A.J de Villiers: “I cannot imagine that any sane person in this country of ours can possibly be disturbed by the evident twaddle contained in the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" discovered (or invented?) by "a minor official in the department of foreign religions at Moscow." Why, indeed, given all this prominence to these protocols when their true worth or credibility can so easily be ascertained from "the numerous representatives of Jewry with whom your correspondent lives "in good fellowship.”. . . What balderdash!”
But Mr de Villiers was not the only voice. Others praised the article. A Mr Clarke astonishingly claimed that he had studied the names of the “principal State functionaries of Russia” and found that out of 556 people, 458 were Jews. And writing from St Luke’s Vicarage in Finchley, Sonia Howe defended the Protocols as a deeply religious text, though she argued that they were not about Jews at all.
Far worse than the article in The Times was a series of 17 pieces in the conservative Morning Post, published in July 1920, all treating the Protocols as factually correct. The British, Jewish historian Lucien Wolf fired back immediately with a rebuttal. He published articles in three newspapers then combined them into a pamphlet, The Myth of The Jewish Menace in World Affairs, or, The Truth about the Forged Protocols of The Elders Of Zion. Scathing about the Morning Post he wrote,
That reputable newspapers in this country should be seeking to transplant here the seeds of Prussian anti-Semitism, and that they should employ for this purpose devices so questionable and a literature so melodramatically silly, cannot but cause a sense of humiliation to any self-respecting Englishman.
In 1921 The Times printed its own rebuttal of the Protocols. Their reporter, Philip Graves, published passages from the Protocols alongside those from Joly’s book Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. He showed, conclusively, that large passages of the Protocols were copied from Joly, notwithstanding that the French author had been writing about Napoleon III and not the Jews.
The rebuttals in the English press, however, made no difference to the popularity of the Protocols in parts of Europe. They were absorbed into Nazi ideology, though only as an alleged support for their perverted world view; there is no doubt that they would still have committed the same crimes, even had the Protocols never existed.
In 1933 the Jewish communities of Switzerland filed a lawsuit against Nazis who were disseminating the Protocols. The suit was brought under the Swiss law prohibiting the printing and publication of indecent writings but the real intention of the plaintiffs was to demonstrate the falsity of the Protocols in a court of law, to put to rest once and for all any suggestion that there may have been some truth to them. Held partly in October 1933 and partly in May 1934, the trial attracted worldwide attention, (despite much of it stemming from a prurient interest into the activities of the Russian Secret Police, rather than the veracity of the Protocols).
The judge at the trial ruled that the Protocols were indeed indecent, plagiarised from Joly’s book. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that there will come a time when nobody will any longer understand how in the year 1935 almost a dozen fully sane and reasonable men could for fourteen days torment their brains before a court at Berne over the authenticity or lack of authenticity of these so-called ‘protocols’, these Protocols that, despite all the harm they have caused and may yet cause, are nothing but ridiculous nonsense.’
And yet, the Protocols continue to circulate. They are common currency in Iran and among militant Islamist groups who use them to indoctrinate their supporters. In recent weeks we have seen some of the most unpleasant people in politics stretching their arms upwards at a 45 degree angle, claiming unconvincingly, and in true cowardly fashion, that they were not intending to give a Nazi salute. None of them have yet brandished a copy of the Protocols. Even they must know how ridiculous it would seem.
