The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an antisemitic forgery, first published in Russia in 1903, purporting to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders planning world domination. It is one of the most consequential fabrications in modern history. It was exposed as a forgery within two decades of its first publication and has been exposed repeatedly since. It continues to circulate.
Origins
The Protocols was fabricated by agents of the Okhrana, the Russian imperial secret police, around 1902 to 1903. The text plagiarised heavily from a French satirical pamphlet of 1864 by Maurice Joly, The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which attacked Napoleon III and had nothing to do with Jews. The Russian forgers lifted passages from Joly’s text almost verbatim and inserted them, attributed to Jewish conspirators, into their fabricated minutes.
The plagiarism was exposed comprehensively in August 1921 by Philip Graves, the Constantinople correspondent of The Times, who identified the Joly source text and demonstrated sentence-by-sentence parallels in a series of articles. A Swiss court in Bern, in a 1935 civil case, ruled that the Protocols were obvious forgeries and “immoral literature.” Neither exposure significantly slowed the document’s circulation. It had already been translated into German, English, Arabic, and numerous other languages. Henry Ford promoted it in the United States through his newspaper The Dearborn Independent from 1920 to 1922.
The Protocols and the Nazi regime
The Nazis embraced the Protocols as confirmation of everything they claimed about Jewish power. Hitler cited it in Mein Kampf in 1925, acknowledging that it was alleged to be a forgery but arguing that whether it was authentic or not was less important than what it revealed about Jewish methods. The regime promoted the Protocols through Goebbels’s propaganda apparatus throughout the twelve years of Nazi rule. Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer and a key promoter of the Protocols, was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity. The Protocols formed part of the ideological education of SS recruits.
The relationship between the Protocols and the decision to proceed with the Final Solution is not one of direct causation: the Protocols did not cause the Holocaust. But they were part of the ideological environment in which the genocide was conceived and carried out, providing a narrative in which the destruction of the Jews could be presented as defensive rather than aggressive, a pre-emptive strike against a global conspiracy rather than the murder of civilians.
Continued circulation
The Protocols remain in active circulation in the twenty-first century, particularly in the Middle East, where they have been incorporated into the founding documents of Hamas and are sold openly in many countries. They have been republished in Russia, in Egypt, in Iran, and in Turkey. Their persistence illustrates a general truth about antisemitic conspiracy theory: exposure of the factual falsity of the charge is not sufficient to defeat it, because the charge is not really about facts. It is about a pre-existing belief that finds the Protocols useful, and discarding them when exposed would require discarding the belief, which their adherents are unwilling to do.
See also
- Julius Streicher
- Der Sturmer and the Pornography of Hate
- Mein Kampf, the Blueprint Everyone Ignored
- Crimes Against Humanity, a New Concept in International Law
Sources
- Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Harper and Row, 1967
- Philip Graves, The Truth About the Protocols, The Times, 16-18 August 1921
- Will Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, W.W. Norton, 2005
- Steven Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, Liveright, 2018
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, encyclopedia.ushmm.org