Dangerous Fraud of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

It has been proved that these ‘Protocols’

are a fraud, a clumsy plagiarism. . . made for

the purpose of rendering the Jews odious...

Father Pierre Charles,

Professor of Theology,

Jesuit College in Louvain,

France, 1938

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by "Jewish elders". Written by Hermann Goedsche in the 1860s, and redacted by Matvei Golovinski in the 1890s. First printed in 1897. Debunked by Lucien Wolf in 1920. But these anti-Semitic legends of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world (and using the blood of Christian children for passover) continued to find adherents, mostly because the hoax played on prejudice more than gullibility per se. 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a tract alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. The book purports to be derived from "protocols" written by a secret group of Jews known as the Elders of Zion, and underlies 24 protocols that are supposedly followed by the Jewish people. The Protocols has been proven to be a literary forgery and hoax as well as a clear case of plagiarism.

History

The original source has been identified as an 1864 book by Maurice Joly titled The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which was written as a satirical attack against the ambitions and methods of French Emperor Napoleon III. In the book, Machiavelli represented Napoleon III, and described a series of steps that he intended to take to become ruler of the world. The Joly book was in turn based on material borrowed from a popular novel of the time by Eugène Sue titled The Mysteries of the People, in which those plotting to rule the world were the Jesuits instead of Napoleon III. Neither the Joly book nor the Sue book mentioned either Jews or Masons.

Based on evidence repeatedly corroborated by British, German, Ukrainian, Polish and Russian sources over a 75 year period, The Protocols, far from being a "discovered" document as it was claimed to be, was in fact deliberately fabricated sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski. In a Swiss lawsuit in the late 1930s concerning circulation of the Protocols, "Two of the Russian witnesses gave testimony pointing to the involvement of Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky in the forgery". Rachkovsky was head of the Paris branch of the Russian secret police.

The source material for the forgery was a synthesis between Joly's book and a chapter from a work of fiction titled Biarritz, which was written in 1868 by antisemitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche and translated into Russian in 1872. In creating the Protocols, Golovinski took Joly's novel and changed the plotters from Napoleon III to the Jews, just as Joly had changed the plotters from the Jesuits to Napoleon III in his version of the story. The current belief is the forgery was initiated and authorized by factions of the Russian aristocracy opposed to the political and social reforms initiated by the previous Tsar, (Alexander II). The fabricated document was meant to convince the antisemitic Tsar Nicholas II not to allow additional reforms, since all reforms would play into the hands of this just uncovered "secret Jewish plot". Once the Russian Revolution began in 1905, however, the use of the forgery changed. The same group, now part of the White movement, disseminated the document during their 18 year fight against the Bolsheviks in an attempt to link the Red Army, which had a few Jews in its leadership, to the fictitious conspiracy.

First fraud investigation, 1905

A secret investigation ordered by the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers Pyotr Stolypin came to the conclusion that the Protocols are definitely a fraud, and that they first appeared in Paris in anti-Semitic circles around 1897-1898. When Nicholas II learned of the results of this investigation, he requested, in spite of his natural anti-Semitic beliefs: "The Protocols should be confiscated, a good cause cannot be defended by dirty means." Despite the order, or because of the "good cause", numerous reprints proliferated.

The Russian Revolution, 1920s

After the Russian Revolution, factions connected to the White movement used the Protocols to perpetrate hatred and violence against the Jews. The idea that the Bolshevik movement was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination, plus the fact that some top Bolsheviks, particularly Leon Trotsky, were Jews, sparked worldwide interest in the Protocols.

The Times exposes a forgery, 1921

The Times exposed the Protocols as a forgery on August 16–18, 1921. In 1920-1921, the history of the concepts found in the Protocols was traced back to the works of Goedsche and Jacques Crétineau-Joly by Lucien Wolf, and published in London in August 1921. But a dramatic expose occurred in the series of articles in The Times by its Constantinople reporter, Philip Graves, who discovered the plagiarism from the work of Maurice Joly.

According to writer Peter Grose, Allen Dulles, who was in Constantinople developing relationships in post-Ottoman political structures, discovered 'the source' of the documentation ultimately provided to The Times. Grose writes that The Times extended a loan to the source, a Russian émigré who refused to be identified, with the understanding the loan would not be repaid. Colin Holmes, a lecturer in economic history of Sheffield University, identified the émigré as Michael Raslovleff, a self-identified antisemite, who gave the information to Graves so as not to "give a weapon of any kind to the Jews, whose friend I have never been."

In the first article of Graves' series, titled "A Literary Forgery", the editors of The Times wrote, "our Constantinople Correspondent presents for the first time conclusive proof that the document is in the main a clumsy plagiarism. He has forwarded us a copy of the French book from which the plagiarism is made." The New York Times reprinted the articles on September 4, 1921. In 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.

The Nazi propaganda, 1930s-1940s

The Protocols also became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews. It was made required reading for German students. In The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945, Nora Levin 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 1920s and 1930s. 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 Mein Kampf:

... 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.

Hitler endorsed it in his speeches from August 1921 on, and it was studied in German classrooms after the Nazis came to power. At the height of World War II, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed: "The Zionist Protocols are as up-to-date today as they were the day they were first published." In Norman Cohn's words, it served as the Nazis' "warrant for genocide".

Interesting is that the not all the Nazi leaders supported the Protocols existence at the time. In contrast to Hitler's rantings, Nazi leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky admitted that there really was no "Jewish menace" (judische Gefahr) -- to use Hitler's own phrase in Mein Kampf -- or conspiracy for world domination:

“I am the only living witness but I must say the truth. Contrary to the opinion of the National Socialists, that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling fact was that they had no organization whatsoever. The mass of the Jewish people were taken complete by surprise. They did not know at all what to do; they had no directives or slogans as to how they should act. This is the greatest lie of anti-Semitism because it gives the lie to that old slogan that the Jews are conspiring to dominate the world and that they are so highly organized. In reality, they had no organization of their own at all, not even an information service. If they had had some sort of organization, these people could have been saved by the millions, but instead, they were taken completely by surprise. Never before has a people gone as unsuspectingly to its disaster. Nothing was prepared. Absolutely nothing”.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Verdict, 1964

In 1961 Richard Helms, then Assistant Director of the CIA, stated at a Senate subcommittee hearing: "The Russians have a long tradition in the art of forgery. More than 60 years ago the Czarist intelligence service concocted and peddled a confection called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee issues a report titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A “Fabricated” Historic Document. The committee concludes: “The subcommittee believes that the peddlers of the Protocols are peddlers of un-American prejudice who spread hate and dissension among the American people.”

Contemporary usage and popularity

While there is continued popularity of The Protocols in nations from South America to Asia, since the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in WWII, governments or political leaders in most parts of the world have generally avoided claims that The Protocols represent factual evidence of a real Jewish conspiracy. The exception to this is the Middle East, where a large number of Arab and Muslim regimes and leaders have endorsed them as authentic. Past endorsements of The Protocols from Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, one of the President Arifs of Iraq, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya, among other political and intellectual leaders of the Arab world, are echoed by 21st century endorsements from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sa'id Sabri, and Hamas, to the education ministry of Saudi Arabia.

Aftermath

Yes, many literary hoaxes were exposed and became the occasional source of a good laughter. But not this one… There are many people around the World, including the free Western Countries, who actually believe that everything is a pure truth, well hidden by the conspiracy. Most of these people never read a book, that just got few “terrible” facts, and that is virtually enough to get factual justification to their anti-Semitic views and beliefs. Why? It is, probably, a topic for another discussion, another place, another time. Not here, on the pages of a “light” blog.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion

http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com/2005/10/top-20-literary-hoaxes.html

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread54862/pg1

http://www.scamtypes.com/the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion.html

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007244

http://www.adl.org/special_reports/protocols/protocols_condemnation.asp