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The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion is a fraudulent document purporting to describe a plan to achieve Jewish global domination.
It was first published abridged in series from August 28 to September 7 (O.S.), 1903 in Saint Petersburg daily newspaper Знамя (Znamya, The Flag) by Pavel Krushevan who four months earlier initiated the Kishinev pogrom. There is an evidence that the text was written by an operative of the Imperial Russian Okhranka Matvei Golovinski and was based on an early work by Maurice Joly linking Napoleon III to Machiavelli. For Tsar Nicholas II, who was fearful of modernization and protective of his monarchy, it would have been convenient to present growing revolutionary movement as a part of a powerful world conspiracy and blame the Jews for Russia's problems.
The Encyclopædia Britannica describes the Protocols as a "fraudulent document that served as a pretext and rationale for anti-Semitism in the early 20th century".
The overwhelming majority of historians in the United States of America and Europe have long agreed that the document is fraudulent; this has also been stated in a number of court cases worldwide, e.g., as early as the 1930s in Bern, Switzerland. In 1993 a district court in Moscow, Russia, formally ruled that the Protocols were faked in dismissing a libel suit by the ultra-nationalist Pamyat organization, which had been criticized for using them in their anti-Semitic publications.
The Protocols is accepted as factual in some parts of the world in which people hold negative opinions of Jews or Israel, as well as in countries such as Japan, where some believe it can be read as a textbook description of means to obtain power. In the current conflicts in the Middle East, the Protocols is sometimes being used as evidence of Jewish conspiracy.
The Protocols are widely considered the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature, such as None Dare Call It Conspiracy and Conspirators Hierarchy: The Committee of 300. The book is popular among those interested in conspiracy theories, although most of them consider it to be false. It has often been declared a major influence to every other book concerning conspiracy theories. Other editions study its great influence in Anti-Semitism during the previous century.
Some recent editions proclaim that the "Jews" as depicted in the Protocols are used as a cover identity for other conspirators such as the Illuminati, Freemasons, or even aliens . Other minor groups that believe in its authenticity have claimed that the book does not depict the way that all Jews think and act but only of those belonging to an alleged secret elite of Zionists.
Subject matter
The Protocols take the form of an essay that is written as if it were an instruction manual to a new member of the Elders, which describes how they will run the world. The Elders seem to want to trick all "gentile nations", whom they call "goyim", into doing their will. This they will achieve by encouraging liberal ideas: such as the undermining of traditional morality, questioning authority, and sowing doubt about Christian and patriotic values. By controlling the media and finance the conspirators will replace the traditional sources of social order with one based on mass manipulation. In these respects the Protocols draw on long-standing conservative and Christian criticisms of modernity, radicalism and capitalism, but present these developments as part of an orchestrated plot, rather than as a product of impersonal historical processes.
The document is written from the point of view that the reader will already understand that the Freemasons are a secret society with a hidden political agenda, but the Protocols purport to show that even that agenda is being really controlled by the Elders, a sort of conspiracy theory within a conspiracy theory. The idea that the Freemasons formed part of an anti-Christian conspiracy had a long history prior to this date. Furthermore, the Abbé Barruél had already accused the Jews of founding the Bavarian Illuminati. At the time, Freemasonry was popular as were many fraternal organizations. Their biggest opponent, the Catholic Church, opposed them for their open support for freedom of religion and "enlightenment ideals". In the Protocols, Freemasons and "liberal thinkers" are shown to be tools for the Jews to eventually create a Jewish theocracy.
Another unusual point is that the Protocols seem to describe a forthcoming "kingdom", and goes into great lengths as to how things will be run in this kingdom. However, even during this kingdom the Elders will still not have direct control over the laws, and instead will continue to assert control via usury and manipulation of money. Even the "King of the Jews" himself, will be nothing more than a figurehead.
History
The plagiarized document
The actual origin of the Protocols can be clearly traced back to its beginnings and associated with known historical events. There is no actual connection with any Jewish conspiracy.
The origin of most of what make up the Protocols lies in an 1864 pamphlet titled Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu or Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by the French satirist Maurice Joly, which attacks the political ambitions of Napoleon III by using the device of diabolical plotters in Hell. In turn, Joly appears to have plagiarized a good amount of the material from a popular novel by Eugene Sue, The Mysteries of the People. In Sue's work, the plotters were Jesuits, and the Jews do not appear in the pamphlet. There seems to be some confusion here, because the Jesuit plotters were in Sue's book The Wandering Jew, which wasn't in fact about Jews.
It being illegal to criticize the monarchy, Joly had the pamphlet printed in Belgium, and then attempted to have it smuggled over the French border. It was seized by the police, who confiscated as many copies as they could, then banned the book. The police traced the book to Joly, who was then tried on April 25 1865, and sentenced to fifteen months in prison.
The forger
Hermann Goedsche, a German anti-Semite and a spy for the Prussian secret police who had been removed from his job as a postal clerk after forging evidence for the prosecution of political reformer Benedict Waldeck in 1849, included Joly's Dialogues in his 1868 book Biarritz, written under the name Sir John Retcliffe. In the chapter "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel", he invented a secret rabbinical cabal which meets in the cemetery at midnight every hundred years to plan the agenda for the Jewish Conspiracy. To portray the meeting, he borrowed heavily from the scene in the novel Joseph Balsamo by Alexandre Dumas where Cagliostro and company plot the affair of the diamond necklace, and likewise borrowed Joly's Dialogues as the outcome of the meeting.
Goedsche's book was translated into Russian language in 1872, and in 1891 an extract of the chapter containing the meeting of the fictional centennial rabbinical "council of representatives", including the plagiarized Joly's Dialogues was circulating in Russia; whether they originated it or not, the Russian secret police found the work useful in their fight to discredit liberal reformers and revolutionaries who were rapidly gaining support among the populace. During the Dreyfus affair in France in 1893–1895, when polarization of European attitudes towards the Jews was at a maximum, the Dialogues were edited into their final form, which appeared in Russia in 1895 and began to be privately published starting in 1897 as the Protocols.
Russian reactionaries use the forgery
It enjoyed another wave of popularity in Russia after 1905, when the progressive political elements in Russia succeeded in creating a constitution and a parliament, the Duma. The reactionary "Union of the Russian People", known as the Black Hundreds, together with the Okhranka, the Tsarist secret police, blamed this liberalization on the "International Jewish conspiracy," and began a program of widely disseminating the "Protocols" as a propaganda support for the wave of pogroms that swept Russia in 1903–1906 and a tool to deflect attention from social activism.
In 1905, a self-proclaimed mystic priest Sergei Nilus gained fame by publishing the full text of the Protocols in the appendix of the third edition of his book The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth promulgating it as the work of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. After it had been pointed out that the First Zionist Congress had been open to the public and attended by many non-Jews, he claimed the Protocols were the work of the meetings of the "Elders of Zion" in 1902–1903, despite the conflict with his claim of having received a copy previous to that date:
- In 1901, I succeeded through an acquaintance of mine (the late Court Marshal Alexei Nikolayevich Sukotin of Chernigov) in getting a manuscript that exposed with unusual perfection and clarity the course and development of the secret Jewish Freemasonic conspiracy, which would bring this wicked world to its inevitable end. The person who gave me this manuscript guaranteed it to be a faithful translation of the original documents that were stolen by a woman from one of the highest and most influential leaders of the Freemasons at a secret meeting somewhere in France—the beloved nest of Freemasonic conspiracy.
Nilus was aiming to the position of the royal couple's confessor and managed to bring his book to Tsar's attention, with the help of the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna. This was part of a faction fight against Papus and Nizier Anthelme Philippe at the Tsarist court. (Indeed Papus was accused in 1920 of having forged The Protocols to discredit Philippe.) Nicholas II's notes handwritten in the margins are the evidence of his first reaction: "What precise execution of their programme!", "Our 1905 was clearly orchestrated by the Zion Elders!", "The Jews' guiding and destroying hand is visible everywhere".
The Grand Duchess introduced him to a maid of honour, Helena Ozerova, whom Nilus later married. She intervened with the censor, so the Protocols were published despite their anti-semitism. A subsequent secret investigation ordered by the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers Pyotr Stolypin soon determined that the Protocols were authored by operatives of the Okhranka in Paris. The details were not made public to avoid compromising the chief of secret service Pyotr Ratchovsky and his agents, but when Nicholas II learned of the results, he requested: "The Protocols should be confiscated, a good cause cannot be defended by dirty means". Despite of the order, or because of the "good cause", numerous reprints proliferated.
Simultaneously a popular edition published by George Butmi claimed that the Protocols were the work of the Masonic/Jewish conspiracy.
Western distribution by Anti-Bolsheviks
After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, various warring fractions used the Protocols to perpetrate hatred and violence against the Jews. The idea that Bolshevik movement is a Jewish conspiracy for world domination sparked worldwide interest in the Protocols. In a single year (1920), five editions were sold out in England. The same year in the United States, Henry Ford sponsored printing of 500,000 copies and until 1927 published a series of anti-Semitic articles in The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that he controlled.
In 1920, the history of the Protocols was traced back to the works of Goedsche and Joly by Lucien Wolf and published in London in August of 1921. The history of the Protocols was similarly exposed in the series of articles in The Times by its Constantinople reporter Philip Grave who got his information from Wolf's work; and the same year, an entire book documenting the hoax was published in the United States by Herman Bernstein. Despite this widespread and extensive debunking, the Protocols continued to be regarded as important factual evidence by anti-Semites.
Some scholars compare the Protocols to The permanent instruction of the Alta Vendita, supposedly found by Italian Secret police and endorsed by several Popes. The nature of the plans in both is very similar, as the Protocols go into much detail as to how to replace the Pope as the head of the Catholic Church.
Besides the Tsarist forgery, another popular theory amongst scholars was that the Protocols were written by an offshoot Masonic or other fraternal lodge (of which many invoked the name Zion in their name at the time), as a sort of fantasy as to how they would like to control things.
Textual evidence seems to disqualify that the document was written by someone Jewish. One example is the semi-messianic idea that constantly appears in the text, of establishing a "King of the Jews". This was never a Jewish term, and was only referenced on the cross of Jesus.
Western history after 1920
After the October Revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks imprisoned the correspondent of The Morning Post Victor E. Marsden in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Upon his return to England, he translated Nilus' version of the Protocols to English and wrote an introduction, concluding with a comment on the remark given by Chaim Weizmann at a banquet on October 6, 1920, "A beneficent protection which God has instituted in the life of the Jew is that He has dispersed him all over the world":
- It proves that the Learned Elders exist. It proves that Dr. Weizmann knows all about them. It proves that the desire for a "National Home" in Palestine is only camouflage and an infinitesimal part of the Jew's real object. It proves that the Jews of the world have no intention of settling in Palestine or any separate country, and that their annual prayer that they may all meet "Next Year in Jerusalem" is merely a piece of their characteristic make-believe. It also demonstrates that the Jews are now a world menace, and that the Aryan races will have to domicile them permanently out of Europe.
In 1921, Henry Ford cited the "Protocols" in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent as evidence of a Jewish threat: "The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. ". His newspaper published the "Protocols" in 1920.
The Protocols eventually became a part of the propaganda arsenal of the Nazis in their justification for the persecution of the Jews. The book was prescribed for compulsory study in schools.
Nora Levin, in her book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933-1945, states that ""Hitler used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews": Despite conclusive proof that the Protocols were a gross forgery, they had sensational popularity and large sales in the 1920's and 1930's. They were translated into every language of Europe and sold widely in Arab lands, the United States, and England. But it was in Germany after World War I that they had their greatest success. There they were used to explain all of the disasters that had befallen the country: the defeat in the war, the hunger, the destructive inflation."
Hitler refers to the ""Protocols" in his Mein Kampf, chapter XI: Nation and Race , Vol I, pp. 307-308. ". . . To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. "
In 1934 the Swiss Nazi Dr. A. Zander published a series of articles accepting the Protocols as fact. He was brought to court, in what has come to be known as the Berne Trial, by Dr. J. Dreyfus-Brodsky, Dr. Marcus Cohen and Dr. Marcus Ehrenpreis. The trial began in the Cantonal Court of Berne on 29 October 1934. On 19 May 1935 the court, after full investigation, declared the Protocols to be forgeries, plagiarisms, and obscene literature.
In a similar case in Grahamstown, South Africa, in August 1934, the court imposed fines totalling 1775 pounds ($4,500) on three men for disseminating a version of the Protocols.
In 1937 Italy, the Protocols were published by Julius Evola, who also wrote the introduction. In the United States, the Protocols were republished as fact in William Milton Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse.
Contemporary use
Among Muslim nations and groups after 1948
- See also Arabs and anti-Semitism
Many Arab governments fund the publication of new printings of the Protocols, and teach them in their schools as historical fact. The Protocols have been accepted as fact by many Islamic extremist organizations, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda.
In the past, the Protocols were publicly recommended by Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, one of the President Arifs of Iraq, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Colonel Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, among other political and intellectual leaders of the Arab world, and in March 1970, the Protocols were reported to be the best 'nonfiction' bestseller in Lebanon.
Egypt
The Egyptian state-owned publisher al-Ahram editorialized in 1995 in a foreword to a translation of Shimon Peres' book The New Middle East:
- "When The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were discovered, some 200 years ago, and translated in various languages, including Arabic, the World Zionist Organization attempted to deny the existence of the plot, and claimed forgery. The Zionists even endeavored to purchase all the existing copies, in order to prevent their circulation. But today, Shimon Peres proves unequivocally that the Protocols are authentic, and that they tell the truth."
An article in the Egyptian state-owned newspaper al-Akhbar on February 3, 2002 stated:
- "All the evils that currently affect the world are the doings of Zionism. This is not surprising, because the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were established by their wise men more than a century ago, are proceeding according to a meticulous and precise plan and time schedule, and they are proof that even though they are a minority, their goal is to rule the world and the entire human race."
In November 2002, Egypt, despite being bound by a 1979 treaty preventing "incitement" against Israel, allowed their state-owned television network to produce A Horseman Without a Horse (Fares Bela Gewad), a 41 part "historical drama" largely based on the Protocols, which ran on Egyptian television as well as numerous Arabic satellite television channels for a month.
Iran
Translations of the Protocols are extremely popular in Iran. The first edition was issued during the summer of 1978 at the time of the Islamic revolution. In 1985 a new edition of the Protocols was printed and widely distributed by the Islamic Propagation Organization, International Relations Department in Tehran. The Astaneh-ye Qods Razavi (Shrine of Imam Reza) Foundation in Mashhad, Iran, one of the wealthiest institutions in Iran, financed publication of the Protocols in 1994. Parts of the Protocols were published by the daily Jomhouri-ye Eslami in 1994, under the heading The Smell of Blood, Zionist Schemes. Sobh, a radical Islamic monthly, published excerpts from the Protocols under the heading The text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for establishing the Jewish global rule in the December 1998–January 1999 issue, illustrated with a caricature of the Jewish snake swallowing the globe.
Iranian writer and researcher Ali Baqeri, who 'researched' the Protocols, finds their plan for world domination to be merely part of an even more grandiose scheme, saying in Sobh in 1999:
- "The ultimate goal of the Jews ... after conquering the globe ... is to extract from the hands of the Lord many stars and galaxies".
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabian schoolbooks contain explicit summaries of the Protocols as factual:
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- These are secret resolutions, most probably of the aforementioned Basel congress. They were discovered in the nineteenth century. The Jews tried to deny them, but there was ample evidence proving their authenticity and that they were issued by the elders of Zion. The Protocols can be summarized in the following points:
- 1. Upsetting the foundations of the world's present society and its systems, in order to enable Zionism to have a monopoly of world government.
- 2. Eliminating nationalities and religions, especially the Christian nations.
- 3. Striving to increase corruption among the present regimes in Europe, as Zionism believes in their corruption and collapse.
- 4. Controlling the media of publication, propaganda and the press, using gold for stirring up disturbances, seducing people by means of lust and spreading wantonness.
- The cogent proof of the authenticity of these resolutions, as well as of the hellish Jewish schemes included therein, is the carrying out of many of those schemes, intrigues and conspiracies that are found in them. Anyone who reads them - and they were published in the nineteenth century - grasps today to what extent much of what is found there has been realized (See: The Danger of World Jewry, by Abdullah al-Tall, pp. 140-141 ).
from 'Hadith and Islamic Culture', Grade 10, (2001) pp. 103–104
Hamas
The Charter of Hamas explicitly refers to the Protocols, and promotes them as factual. Article 32 of the Hamas Charter states:
- The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.
The Charter also makes several references to Freemasons as one of the "secret societies" controlled by "Zionists".
Palestinian National Authority
On February 20, 2005, the Mufti of Jerusalem Ikrima Sabri appeared on Al-Majd Saudi Arabian satellite TV to comment on the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister. Sabri stated "Anyone who studies The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and specifically the Talmud will discover that one of the goals of these Protocols is to cause confusion in the world and to undermine security throughout the world."
On May 19, 2005, The New York Times reported that PA Minister of Information Nabil Shaath removed from his ministry’s web site an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Other contemporary appearances
The American retail chain, Wal-Mart, was criticized for selling The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on its website with a description that suggested it might be genuine. It was withdrawn from sale in September 2004, as 'a business decision'. It is distributed in the United States by some Palestinian student groups on college campuses, and by Louis Farrakhan's "Nation of Islam". In 2002, the New Jersey based Arabic-language newspaper The Arab Voice published excerpts from the Protocols as true; in his defense, editor and publisher Walid Rabah protested (in Arabic) that "some major writers in the Arab nation accept the truth of the book."
The document is generally accepted as truthful in large parts of Asia and South America. In Japan, where many people regard the Protocols as genuine, there have even been "self-help" books published, expressing admiration for the Jewish conspiracy portrayed in the Protocols and suggesting that the Japanese should attempt to emulate it to become as powerful as Jews, or more so. The publication of this document has also seen a resurgence in Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union among the new generation of national socialists.
In Greece the Protocols have had multiple publications in recent decades, along with various commentaries depending on who published the book and what is their point of view. The anti-Semitic minority party Hrisi Avgi ("Golden Dawn") consider the book to be an accurate document and distribute their edition to their members.
The final work of cartoonist Will Eisner, published after his death in 2005, was a graphic novel titled The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, detailing the document's complex history.
The New Zealand National Front sells copies published by their former national secretary, Kerry Bolton. Bolton also publishes (and the NZNF sells) a book entitled "The Protocols of Zion in Context" that seeks to refute the idea that the Protocols are a forgery.
References
- The Fraud of a Century, or a book born in hell, by Valery Kadzhaya (Retrieved Sept 2005)
- Shofar FTP Archive File: documents/protocols/protocols.001] (Retrieved Sept 2005)
- UNISPAL United Nations Economic and Social Council, Dissemination of racist and anti-Semitic hate material on television programs (Retrieved Sept 2005)
- In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Hocus Pocus, there is a manifesto known as The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore, which claims that aliens from another planet conspire to control all aspects of Earth's economy, politics, and society.
- Morris Kominsky, The Hoaxers, 1970. p. 209
- Introduction to English edition by Victor E. Marsden
- A documentary film, Protocols of Zion (2005), connects the original document to a resurgence of anti-Semitism following the September 11 World Trade Center attacks.
See also
- Anti-Semitism
- Black propaganda
- Conspiracy theory
- False document
- Priory of Zion
- Tanaka Memorial
- A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century
External links
- Actual text of the Protocols
- Refutation of "The Protocols"
- Essay by Shaul Wallach on the Protocols
- 1921 investigation by the Times of London into the Protocols: contains transcripts and .PDF files of the Times articles
- Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu - pamphlet by Maurice Joly on which The Protocols are based - from Project Gutenberg
- The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: Plagiarism at its Best by José Delacruz
- Tsarism and Black Hundredism the role of the Tsarist state in the history of the Protocols. 1992 International Conference for National Egalitarianism and Responsibility for Fomenting Racial Hatred (in Russian)
Further reading
- Will Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ISBN 0-393-06045-4
- Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 1967 (Eyre & Spottiswoode), 1996 (Serif)
- Hadassa Ben-Itto, The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 2005 (Vallentine Mitchell). Review
- Danilo Kis presents a narrative history of the "Protocols" as The Book Of Kings And Fools in The Encyclopedia of the Dead, 1989 (Faber and Faber)