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).

From: dzk@cs.brown.edu (Danny Keren)
--
Two relevant files are available in the archives at
oneb.almanac.bc.ca:

1. FASCISM/PROTOCOLS PROTOCOLS.001 - an article from the LA Times
(1993) concerning a Russian court ruling concerning the forgery of
the "Protocols."

2. FASCISM/PROTOCOLS PROTOCOLS.ZION - an interesting article by Dr.
Kerens (alt.revisionism) about the history of the Protocols.

Either may be obtained from listserv@oneb.almanac.bc.ca by sending
these commands as the text of a message:

GET FASCISM/PROTOCOLS PROTOCOLS.001
GET FASCISM/PROTOCOLS PROTOCOLS.ZION

The Russian court found that the Protocols were forged in Russia, by
the Czar's secret police, in 1903.

         The Nizkor Project: An Electronic Holocaust Resource
   (For full file listing, send INDEX to listserv@oneb.almanac.bc.ca)
                      kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca
          http://www.island.net/~kmcvay/rue/RUE1-HomePage.html

_______________________
Additional notes:

Maurice Joly's "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" is
commonly cited as the source for the PoEZ. In fact, it appears that Joly
plagiarized a good amount of the material from Eugene Sue's  "The
Mysteries of the People". (Sue was an outrageous popular novelist whose
characters were taken quite seriously to the extent that mail was sent to
various persona in "Les Mysteres de Paris".) In Sue's work, the plotters
were Jesuits, however.

In the novel "Joseph Balsamo" by Dumas, there is a scene in which
Cagliostro and company plot the Diamond Necklace affair. In 1868, a German
bureaucrat and dedicated pamphleteer (Hermann Goedsche) wrote a novel
called "Biarritz"  under the name of Sir John Retcliffe. He borrowed
heavily from Dumas for a scene of plotters in a graveyard, but made these
plotters the representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel and their
master rabbi.

A Russian named Rachovsky raided the house of a man named Elie de Cyon, an
enemy of his patron's. He found a copy of Joly's work in which Cyon has
substituted the name of the patron (Witte) to make the plot his idea.
Rachovsky then re-edited and released it with Cyon's name and attributed
the plot to the Jews.

In the US, it was most recently republished (as legit) in Bill Cooper's
magnum opus "Behold a Pale Horse". (If you want to read it, this may be
the easiest to find.)

templar+@osu.edu (Andrew S. Hall)
--
Trevor W. McKeown € Editor, Mensa World € "The heart may conceive and the head devise in vain, if the hand be not prompt to execute the design."