The infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, being, supposedly, evidence of a plot by Jews to take over the world, are repeatedly posted by anti-Semites as if they were true. However their authenticity has been disproven on numerous occasions. Despite this, some people are unwilling to accept the evidence. The following historiographies are worth reading in this regard.

David S. Maddison dmaddison@geocities.com

This article was written by Prof. Saul Wallach of  Bar-Ilan University.

Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
From: dzk@cs.brown.edu (Danny Keren)
Subject: Re: Protocools of Zion
Message-ID: <1993Feb10.181522.20796@cs.brown.edu>
Sender: news@cs.brown.edu
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
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Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1993 18:15:22 GMT

     The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the most notorious and most successful work of modern antisemitism, draws on popular antisemitic notions which have their roots in medieval Europe from the time of the Crusades. The libels that the Jews used blood of Christian children for the Feast of Passover, poisoned the wells and spread the plague were pretexts for the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities throughout Europe. Tales were circulated among the masses of secret rabbinical conferences whose aim was to subjugate and exterminate the Christians, and motifs like these are found in early antisemitic literature.

    The conceptual inspiration for the Protocols can be traced back to the time of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. At that time, a French Jesuit named Abbe Barruel, representing reactionary elements opposed to the revolution, published in 1797 a treatise blaming the Revolution on a secret conspiracy operating through the Order of Freemasons. Barruel's idea was nonsense, since the French nobility at the time was heavily Masonic, but he was influenced by a Scottish mathematician named Robison who was opposed to the Masons. In his treatise, Barruel did not himself blame the Jews, who were emancipated as a result of the Revolution. However, in 1806, Barruel circulated a forged letter, probably sent to him by members of the state police opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte's liberal policy toward the Jews, calling attention to the alleged part of the Jews in the conspiracy he had earlier attributed to the Masons. This myth of an international Jewish conspiracy reappeared later on in 19th century Europe in places such as Germany and Poland.

    The direct predecessor of the Protocols can be found in the pamphlet "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu", published by the non-Jewish French satirist Maurice Joly in 1864. In his "Dialogues", which make no mention of the Jews, Joly attacked the political ambitions of the emperor Napoleon III using the imagery of a diabolical plot in Hell. The "Dialogues" were caught by the French authorities soon after their publication and Joly was tried and sentenced to prison for his pamphlet.

    Joly's "Dialogues", while intended as a political satire, soon fell into the hands of a German antisemite named Hermann Goedsche writing under the name os Sir John Retcliffe. 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. Goedsche adapted Joly's "Dialogues" into a mythical tale of a Jewish conspiracy as part of a series of novels entitled "Biarritz", which appeared in 1868. In a chapter called "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel", he spins the fantasy of a secret centennial rabbinical conference which meets at midnight and whose purpose is to review the past hundred years and to make plans for the next century.

     Goedsche's plagiary of Joly's "Dialogues" soon found its way to Russia. It was translated into Russian in 1872, and a consolidation of the "council of representatives" under the name "Rabbi's Speech" appeared in Russian in 1891. These works no doubt furnished the Russian secret police (Okhrana) with a means with which to strengthen the position of the weak Czar Nicholas II and discredit the reforms of the liberals who sympathized with the Jews. During the Dreyfus case of 1893-1895, agents of the Okhrana in Paris redacted the earlier works of Joly and Goedsche into a new edition which they called the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". The manuscript of the Protocols was brought to Russia in 1895 and was printed privately in 1897.

    The Protocols did not become public until 1905, when Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War was followed by the Revolution in the same year, leading to the promulgation of a constitution and institution of the Duma. In the wake of these events, the reactionary "Union of the Russian Nation" or Black Hundreds organization sought to incite popular feeling against the Jews, who they blamed for the Revolution and the Constitution. To this end they used the Protocols, which was first published in a public edition by the mystic priest Sergius Nilus in 1905. The Protocols were part of propaganda campaign which accompanied the pogroms of 1905 inspired by the Okhrana. A variant text of the Protocols was published by George Butmi in 1906 and again in 1907. The edition of 1906 was found among the Czar's collection, even though he had already recognized the work as a forgery. In his later editions, Nilus claimed that the Protocols had been read secretly at the First Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897, while Butmi in his edition wrote that they had no connection with the new Zionist movement, but rather were part of the Masonic conspiracy.

     In the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the reactionary White Armies made extensive use of the Protocols to incite widespread slaughters of Jews. At the same time, Russian emigrants brought the Protocols to western Europe, where the Nilus edition served as the basis for many translations, starting in 1920. Just after its appearance in London in 1920, Lucien Wolf exposed the Protocols as a plagiary of the earlier work of Joly and Goedsche, in a pamphlet of the Jewish Board of Deputies. The following year, in 1921, the story of the forgery was published in a series of articles in the London Times by Philip Grave, the paper's correspondent in Constantinople. A whole book documenting the forgery was also published in the same year in America by Herman Bernstein. Nevertheless, the Protocols continued to circulate widely. They were even sponsored by Henry Ford in the United States until 1927, and formed an important part of the Nazis' justification of genocide of
the Jews in World War II.

                           Bibliography

Lucien Wolf. The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Press Committee of the Jewish Board of Deputies, London (1920).

The Truth About "The Protocols": A Literary Forgery. From The Times of August 16, 17, and 18, 1921. Printing House Square, London.

Encyclopaedia Judaica. Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem (1971), entries on Antisemitism and Elders of Zion, Protocols of the Learned.

Herman Bernstein. The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion" (reprinted with introduction by Norman Cohn). Ktav Publishing House, New York (1971).

Norman Cohn. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Brown Judaic Studies, No. 23). Scholars Press, Chico, CA (1981).

-Danny Keren.
 
 

The author of this article is not known.

http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~nevai/ISRAEL/The_Protocols_of_The_Learned_Elders_of_Zion.README
(Note: The URL no longer seems to be valid.)
 

About "The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion"

In a sentence it is a fraud, a forgery. Based upon an earlier anti-semitic tract even it appeared over 10 years previous to the "meeting" it claims to document. It was apparently written by some members of the secret police force working for the czar, in the late 19th century. See the text below for details.

                                 -//-

This is quoted from _Holy Blood, Holy Grail_, written by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It is THEIR theory, not mine.

There were esoteric, powerful enclaves surrounding the Czars of Russia long before Rasputin. During the 1890s and 1900s one such enclave formed around an individual known as Monsieur Phillipe and his mentor, a French esotericist named Papus. Their enclave was opposed by other powerful interests--the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, for example, who was intent on installing her own favorite close to the throne. One of her favorites was a contemptible individual known as Sergei Nilus. Sometime around 1903 Nilus presented a highly controversial document to the Czar--a document that supposedly bore witness to a dangerous conspiracy. The Czar declared the document to be an outrageous fabrication and ordered all copies of it to be destroyed. Nilus was banished from the court in disgrace.

Of course the document--or at any rate, a copy of it--survived. In 1903 it was serialized in a newspaper but failed to attract any interest. In 1905 it was published again--this time as an appendix to a book by a distinguished mystical philosopher, Vladimir Soloviov. At this point it began to attract attention.

The document in question was a tract, or more strictly speaking, a purported social and  political program, It has appeared under a variety of slightly differing titles, the most common of which is _The Protocols of the Elders of Sion__ The Protocols allegedly issued from specific Jewish sources. And for a great many anti-Semites at the time they were convincing proof of an "international Jewish conspiracy." In 1919, for example, they were distributed to troops of the White Russian army--and these troops, during the next two years, massacred some sixty thousand Jews who were held responsible for the 1917 Revolution. By 1919, the Protocols were also being circulated by Alfred Rosenberg, later the chief racial theorist and propagandist for the national Socialist Party in Germany. In _Mein Kampf_ Hitler uses the Protocols to fuel his own fanatical prejudices, and he is said to have believed unquestioningly in their authenticity. In England the Protocols were immediately accorded credence by the Morning Post. Even the Times, in 1921, took them seriously and only later admitted its error. Expert today concur--and rightly so we concluded--that the Protocols, at least in their present form, are a vicious and insidious forgery. Nevertheless, they are still being circulated--in Latin America, in Spain, even in Britain--as anti-Semetic propaganda.

The Protocols propound an outline, a blueprint for nothing less than total world domination. On first reading, they would seem to be the Machiavellian program--a kind of interoffice memo, so to speak--for a group of individuals determined to impose a new world order, with themselves as supreme despots. The text advocates a many-tentacled hydra-headed conspiracy dedicated to disorder and anarchy, to toppling certain existing regimes, infiltrating Freemasonry and other such organizations, and eventually seizing absolute control of the Western World's social, political, and economic institutions. And the anonymous authors of the Protocols declare explicitly that they have "stage-managed" whole peoples "according to a political plan which no one has guessed at in the course of many centuries."

When they were first publicized, the Protocols were alleged to have been composed at an international Judaic congress that convened in Basle in 1897. This allegation has long since been disproved. The earliest copies of the Protocols, for example, are known to have been written in French--and the 1897 congress in Basle did not include a single French delegate. Moreover, a copy of the Protocols is known to have been in circulation as early as 1884--a full 13 years before the Basle congress met. The 1884 copy surfaced in the hands of a member of a Masoniclodge--the same lodge of which Papus was a member and subsequently Grand Master. Moreover, it was in this same lodge that the tradition of Ormus had first appeared--the legendary Egyptian sage who amalgamated pagan and Christian mysteries and founded the Rose-Croix.

Modern scholars have established that in fact the Protocols, in their published form, are based at least in part on a satirical work written and printer in Geneva in 1864. The work was composed as an attack on Napoleon III by a man named Maurice Joly, who was subsequently imprisoned. Joly is said to have been a member of the Rose-Croix order.

It can thus be proved that the Protocols did not issue from the Judaic congress at Basle in 1897. That being so, the obvious question is whence they did issue. Modern scholars have dismissed them as a total forgery, a whollly spurious document concocted by anti-Semitic interests intent on discrediting Judaism. At the same time, they contain a number of enigmatic references tha are clearly not Judaic. They are so clearly not Judaic that they cannot plausibly have been fabricated by a forger. No anti-Semitic forger with even a modicum of intelligence would possibly have concocted such references in order to discredit Judaism, for no one would believe those references to be of Judaic origin.

For instance, the text of the Protocols ends with a single statement, "Signed by the representatives of Sion of the 33rd Degree."

Why would an anti-Semitic forger have made up such a statement? Why would he not have attempted to incriminate all Jews rather than just a few--the few who consititute the "33rd Degree"? Why would he not declare that the document was signed by, say, the representatives of teh international Judaic congress? In fact, the "representatives of Sion of the 33rd degree" would hardly seem to refer to anything in Judaism at all, or to any "international jewish conspiracy." If anything, it would seem to refer to something specifically Masonic.

The Protocols contain other even more flagrant anomolies. The text speaks repeatedly of the advent of a "Masonic kingdom" and of a "King of the blood of Sion" who wil preside over this "Masonic kingdom." It assert that the future king will be of "the dynastic roots of King David." It affirms that "the King of the Jews will be the real Pope" and "the patriarch of an international church." And it concludes in a most cryptic fashion, "Certain members of the seed of David will prepare the kings and their heirs... Only the King and the three who stood sponsor for him will know what is coming."

As an expression of Judaic thought, real or fabricated, such statements are blatantly absurd. Since biblical times no king has figured in Judaic tradition, and the very principle of kingship has become utterly irrelevant. The concept of a king would have been as meaningless to Jews in 1897 as it would be to Jews today; and no forger can have been ignorant of this fact. Indeed, the references quoted would appear to be more Christian than Judaic. For the last two millennia the only "king of the Jews" has been Jesus himself--and Jesus, according to the Gospels, was of the "dynastic roots of King David."  If one is fabricating a document and ascribing it to a Jewish conspiracy, why include such patently Christan echoes? Why speak of so specifically and uniquely Christian a concept as a Pope? Why speak of an "international church" rather than an international synogogue or temple?

The conclusion drawn by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail is:

There was an original text on which the published version of the Protocols was based. The original text was not a forgery. It had nothing to do with Judiasm or an "international Jewish conspiracy." It issued, rather, from some Masonic organization or Masonically oriented secret society that incorporated the word "Sion."  The original text may well have included a program for gaining power, for infiltrating Freemasonry, for controlling social, political, and economic institutions. Such a program would have been perfectly in keeping with the secret societies of the Renaissance. Nilus brought this document to the attention of the Czar with the purpose of discrediting the enclave of Papus and Monsieur Phillipe, doctoring the language before he did. When this failed, he saw it as a means to foster anti-Semitism.
 

References:
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide
Bernstein, Truth about the "Protocols"
 
 
 

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