Creation
The Protocols is a fabricated document purporting to be factual. Textual evidence shows that it could not have been produced prior to 1901.[citation needed] It is notable that the title of Sergei Nilus's widely distributed edition contains the dates "1902–1903", and it is likely that the document was actually written at this time in Russia, despite Nilus' attempt to cover this up by inserting French-sounding words into his edition.[2] Cesare G. De Michelis argues that it was manufactured in the months after a Russian Zionist congress in September 1902, and that it was originally a parody of Jewish idealism meant for internal circulation among antisemites until it was decided to clean it up and publish it as if it were real. Self-contradictions in various testimonies show that the individuals involved—including the text's initial publisher, Pavel Krushevan—purposefully obscured the origins of the text and lied about it in the decades afterwards.[3]
If the placement of the forgery in 1902–1903 Russia is correct, then it was written at the beginning of the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, in which thousands of Jews died or fled the country. Many of the people whom De Michelis suspects of involvement in the forgery were directly responsible for inciting the pogroms.[citation needed]
Political conspiracy background
The antisemitic works of Osman Bey (pen name of Frederick Millingen) The Conquest of the World by the Jews[4] and the subsequent Russian editions of Hippolytus Lutostansky's The Talmud and the Jews had claimed in the 19th century that Jews wanted to divide Russia among themselves.[5] (Incidentally, in a 1904 edition of The Talmud and the Jews, Hippolytus directly quoted verbatim the first, little-known 1903 edition of the Protocols[6]).
Sources employed
Source material for the forgery consisted jointly of Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelliand Montesquieu), an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly;[7] and a chapter from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by the antisemitic German novelistHermann Goedsche, which had been translated into Russian in 1872.[8]
A major source for the Protocols was Der Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl, which was referred to as Zionist Protocols in its initial French and Russian editions. Paradoxically, early Russian editions of the Protocols assert that they did not come from a Zionist organization.[9] The text, which nowhere advocates for Zionism, resembles a parody of Herzl's ideas.[10]
Literary forgery
The Protocols is one of the best-known and most-discussed examples of literary forgery, with analysis and proof of its fraudulent origin going as far back as 1921.[11] The forgery is an early example of "conspiracy theory" literature.[12] Written mainly in the first person plural,[a] the text includes generalizations, truisms, and platitudes on how to take over the world: take control of the media and the financial institutions, change the traditional social order, etc. It does not contain specifics.[14]
Maurice Joly
Elements of the Protocols were plagiarized from Joly's fictional Dialogue in Hell, a thinly veiled attack on the political ambitions of Napoleon III, who, represented by the non-Jewish characterMachiavelli,[15] plots to rule the world. Joly, a monarchist and legitimist, was imprisoned in France for 15 months as a direct result of his book's publication. Scholars have noted the irony thatDialogue in Hell was itself a plagiarism, at least in part, of a novel by Eugène Sue, Les Mystères du Peuple (1849–56).[16]
Identifiable phrases from Joly constitute 4% of the first half of the first edition, and 12% of the second half; later editions, including most translations, have longer quotes from Joly.[17]
The Protocols 1–19 closely follow the order of Maurice Joly's Dialogues 1–17. For example:
| Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu | The Protocols of the Elders of Zion |
|---|---|
Philip Graves brought this plagiarism to light in a series of articles in The Times in 1921, the first published evidence that the Protocols was not an authentic document.[18][19]
Hermann Goedsche
Main article: Hermann Goedsche
"Goedsche was a postal clerk and a spy for the Prussian Secret Police. He had been forced to leave the postal work due to his part in forging evidence in the prosecution against the Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck in 1849."[20] Following his dismissal, Goedsche began a career as a conservative columnist, and wrote literary fiction under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe.[21] His 1868 novel Biarritz (To Sedan) contains a chapter called "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel." In it, Goedsche (who was unaware that only two of the original twelve Biblical "tribes" remained) depicts a clandestine nocturnal meeting of members of a mysterious rabbinical cabal that is planning a diabolical "Jewish conspiracy." At midnight, the Devil appears to contribute his opinions and insight. The chapter closely resembles a scene in Alexandre Dumas' Giuseppe Balsamo (1848), in which Joseph Balsamo a.k.a. Alessandro Cagliostro and company plot the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.[22]
In 1872 a Russian translation of "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague" appeared in Saint Petersburg as a separate pamphlet of purported non-fiction. François Bournand, in his Les Juifs et nos Contemporains (1896), reproduced the soliloquy at the end of the chapter, in which the character Levit expresses as factual the wish that Jews be "kings of the world in 100 years" —crediting a "Chief Rabbi John Readcliff." Perpetuation of the myth of the authenticity of Goedsche's story, in particular the "Rabbi's speech", facilitated later accounts of the equally mythical authenticity of the Protocols.[21] Like the Protocols, many asserted that the fictional "rabbi's speech" had a ring of authenticity, regardless of its origin: "This speech was published in our time, eighteen years ago," read an 1898 report in La Croix, "and all the events occurring before our eyes were anticipated in it with truly frightening accuracy."[23]
Fictional events in Joly's Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, which appeared four years before Biarritz, may well have been the inspiration for Goedsche's fictional midnight meeting, and details of the outcome of the supposed plot. Goedsche's chapter may have been an outright plagiarism of Joly, Dumas père, or both.[24][b]
Structure and content
The Protocols purports to document the minutes of a late-19th-century meeting attended by world Jewish leaders, the "Elders of Zion", who are conspiring to take over the world.[25][26] The forgery places in the mouths of the Jewish leaders a variety of plans, most of which derive from older antisemitic canards.[25][26] For example, the Protocols includes plans to subvert the morals of the non-Jewish world, plans for Jewish bankers to control the world's economies, plans for Jewish control of the press, and – ultimately – plans for the destruction of civilization.[25][26] The document consists of twenty-four "protocols", which have been analyzed by Steven Jacobs and Mark Weitzman, who documented several recurrent themes that appear repeatedly in the 24 protocols,[c] as shown in the following table:[27]
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