The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Are Genuine

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery. It was fabricated in the late 1890s by agents of the Russian Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, drawing on a French satirical pamphlet of 1864. The forgery has been demonstrated repeatedly: by the journalist Philip Graves of The Times in August 1921, who placed it side by side with its source text; by court findings in Bern in 1935 and Basel in 1937; and by every reputable historian of the document since. The Protocols’ status as a forgery is among the most settled questions in the historiography of antisemitic literature. Its continued circulation as if authentic is itself the marker of the antisemitic political tradition the document was created to serve.

What the Protocols claim to be

The Protocols purport to be the minutes of a series of secret meetings held by Jewish leaders (“the Elders of Zion”) at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, at which they laid out a plan for the gradual subjugation of the world’s gentile populations through control of finance, media, government, education and revolutionary movements. The text is divided into twenty-four chapters or “protocols”, each describing an aspect of the supposed plan. It first appeared in print in 1903 in a serialised version in the Russian newspaper Znamya, edited by Pavel Krushevan, a leading figure of the Russian antisemitic right. It was published in expanded form in 1905 by Sergei Nilus, a Russian mystic, as an appendix to his book The Great in the Small. From the 1905 Nilus edition the text spread across Europe in the chaos of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

The forgery

The text is plagiarised, almost word for word in many passages, from a French political satire of 1864 by the lawyer Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu. Joly’s pamphlet was a satire on the regime of Napoleon III, written as an imagined conversation between Machiavelli (representing Napoleonic absolutism) and Montesquieu (representing liberal constitutionalism). The pamphlet had nothing to do with Jews; it was an attack on Bonapartist autocracy. Joly was prosecuted by the French authorities, the pamphlet was suppressed, and most copies were destroyed.

The Russian Okhrana agents who composed the Protocols took the Joly text, replaced “Napoleon III” with “the Jews”, and reissued the resulting plagiarism as a Jewish conspiracy document. The textual relationship was demonstrated definitively by Philip Graves in three articles in The Times of 16, 17 and 18 August 1921, in which Graves printed parallel columns of the Joly original and the Protocols, showing the near-identical wording. The articles ended any serious scholarly discussion of the Protocols’ authenticity. The Bern court in 1935, in a libel case against publishers of the Protocols brought by the Swiss Jewish Federation, heard expert testimony from the historians Boris Nicolaevsky and Vladimir Burtsev tracing the document’s production by named Okhrana agents, and ruled the Protocols a forgery. The Basel court in 1937 reached the same conclusion. The Norman Cohn study Warrant for Genocide (1967) gives the full account.

How the regime used the Protocols

The Nazi regime used the Protocols as core ideological material. Hitler had cited the Protocols in Mein Kampf (1925, 1926). The text was part of the standard education curriculum in Nazi Germany from the mid-1930s. Goebbels distributed it through the propaganda apparatus. It was published in dozens of editions in German and translated for use across the regime’s territories. The 1940 propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) drew explicitly on the Protocols. The text was used to justify the persecution of German Jews and, after 1941, the killing operation; the text’s claim that the Jews were a coordinated international threat was invoked as the rationale for what the regime called the “defence” of Germany against Jewish action.

Hitler’s own attitude towards the Protocols’ authenticity is revealing. Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks (1939) attributes a remark to Hitler that he did not really care whether the Protocols were authentic, only that they were a useful template for understanding the supposed Jewish threat. Rauschning’s reliability as a witness is contested by some historians, but the underlying point is consistent with the regime’s wider treatment of the Protocols: as a politically useful text, the question of forgery was set aside. The deniers’ insistence that the Protocols are authentic is therefore a deeper layer of denial, since even some of the original users of the document had stopped pretending.

The continuing circulation

The Protocols continue to circulate in the present day. They are sold openly in many countries, including throughout the Arabic-speaking world (where they have been translated and reprinted in dozens of editions), in Iran, in Russia, and on extreme-right websites in the West. They were the basis for an Egyptian television drama, Horseman Without a Horse (2002), which depicted the Protocols as factual. They are cited in some current antisemitic and anti-Israel discourse as evidence of a Jewish or Zionist plan for world domination. In every case, the text being cited is the same Okhrana forgery of the late 1890s, with the same textual lineage to the Joly pamphlet. The continued circulation does not establish the authenticity of the document; it establishes the persistence of the antisemitic tradition that produced and preserved it.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the Protocols are authentic is harmful because the Protocols are the central document of modern antisemitic conspiracy theory. Their authenticity-claim is the licence under which Jews have been described as a coordinated international threat for the past 120 years. The forgery’s exposure has been complete since 1921; the courts that have considered the question have been unanimous; the historiography is settled. To accept the authenticity-claim is to accept the licence, with the consequences that licence has historically had. The Holocaust was justified to its perpetrators in part by the Protocols-derived framing of Jews as an international threat; that framing relied, and still relies, on the assumption that the document is what it claims to be.

Where did the Protocols come from? What is their textual relationship to the Joly pamphlet? What did the Bern and Basel courts find?

See also

• Adolf Hitler
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
• The First World War Connection
• Mein Kampf, the Blueprint Everyone Ignored

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Sources

• Philip Graves, “A Literary Forgery: The Source of ‘The Protocols of Zion'”, in The Times, London, three articles of 16, 17 and 18 August 1921
• Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, Brussels, 1864 (the satirical source text plagiarised by the Protocols’ authors)
• Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967
• Bern court judgment of 14 May 1935 in Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund v. Theodor Fischer, with the expert testimony of Boris Nicolaevsky and Vladimir Burtsev on the Okhrana origins
• Basel court judgment of 1 November 1937 confirming the Bern finding
• Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion, second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
• Cesare G. De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, University of Nebraska Press / Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2004
• Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Munich, 1925 and 1926, with the citations of the Protocols
• Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, edited by Elke Fröhlich, K. G. Saur, 1993 to 2008, on the use of the Protocols in propaganda
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
• Anti-Defamation League, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Hoax of Hate”, https://www.adl.org