The document known in English as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is,
to many people, obviously a clumsy piece of false antisemitic propaganda.
Nevertheless, there have been and still are others who have taken and take the work
to be a kind of revelation of the truth about a conspiracy of a small number of
Jewish leaders to gain political control of the whole world.
The Protocols seem to have been first made available to a wide public in
Russia in book form in 1905, in a Russian version. However, there was a somewhat
truncated version published in a St. Petersburg (Russia) newspaper Znamya (The
Banner) in 1903. Norman Cohn says (Warrant for Genocide, 1966-7, p
65-66): "Znamya was edited by P. A. Krushevan, the noted and militant
antisemite. A few months before publishing the Protocols he had instigated
the pogrom at Kishinev in Bessarabia [Russia], in which forty-five Jews were killed
and more than 400 injured and 1,300 houses and shops destroyed." There was also
an untruncated edition of this version published as a pamphlet in St. Petersburg in
1905, apparently edited by a retired officer of the Russian Imperial Guard, G. V.
Butmi, a Bessarabian and associate of Krushevan (Cohn, p 66).
The first version in book form appeared as an appendix in the third edition, in
1905, of a book called (in Russian) The Great in the Small: Antichrist considered
as an imminent political possibility, by a Russian mystic named Sergei Nilus. The
original manuscript, which has never been discovered, may well have been written in
French (cf. Cohn, p 69) and translated into Russian. Cohn says (p 67) "It was
Nilus's version, not Butmi's, that was to become a force in world history. That did
not even begin to happen in 1905 . . . It happened only when the book reappeared,
somewhat revised and enlarged, under the title [in Russian] He is Near, At the
Door . . . Here comes Antichrist and the reign of the Devil on earth. And it
happened because of the moment: 1917." Some say widespread attention to the
Protocols began a little later, in 1918, after the defeat of Germany in World
War I (cf. Herman Bernstein, The Truth About "The Protocols of
Zion", 1935, p 50, quoting Count du Chayla, who knew Nilus personally).
In 1921, The Times of London published three articles written by the
newspaper's Constantinople (now Istanbul) correspondent, Philip Graves, which showed
that the Protocols had been extensively plagiarized from a book by a French
lawye r and writer named Maurice Joly. The book by Joly was called (in French)
Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. It was published in
Brussels (Belgium) in 1864 (with a Geneva imprint, although the edition I have seen
is dated 1868 and has a Brussels imprint). Cohn notes (p 74-5): "In all, over
160 passages in the Protocols, totaling two-fifths of the entire text, are
clearly based on passages in Joly; in nine of the chapters the borrowings amount to
more than half the text, in some they amount to three-quarters, in one (Protocol VII)
to almost the entire text. This should be enough to demonstrate that plagiarism
occurred.
There is one very notable difference between the Protocols as put forth by
Nilus and the Dialogues as put forth by Joly. In the Dialogues there
is no mention of Jews. These Dialogues were a political satire directed at
the government of Napoleon III in France, during the Second Empire. Joly was given
15 months in prison by this government for his satirical effort. The author or
authors of the Protocols, so far as they were plagiarized from the
Dialogues, substituted Jews where Joly had (non-Jewish) members of the
government of Napoleon III.
Some current believers in the truth of the Protocols have argued that
parallel passages of this sort do not damage the credibility of the Protocols
since, for example, both the Protocols and the Dialogues could have
been based on a third undiscovered document in which the original protagonists were
Jews. In this view, I suppose Joly becomes the plagiarist who changed the alleged
perpetrators of a world-wide plot to take over the world. No such preceding document
has ever been discovered. Of course, it is impossible to prove that none ever
existed. This is a favorite tactic of many of those whose believe in the
authenticity of the Protocols. They argue on the basis of documents that
might have existed, and actions that could have taken place, even
though no evidence whatsoever is available that they existed or took place.
Cohn says (p 103): "All in all it is practically certain that the
Protocols were fabricated some time between 1894 and 1899 and highly probable
that it was in 1897 or 1898. The country was undoubtedly France, as is shown by the
many references to French affairs." There are good grounds for concluding that
forgery of the Protocols was undertaken or directed by a Paris agent of the
then Russian secret police, the Okhrana. I say "forgery" because the
Protocols are presented as a kind of minutes of a meeting of a number of
"Elders of Zion" or "Wise Men of Zion". Since it seems clear
that no such meeting as claimed by presenters of the Protocols ever took
place, the work is a forgery as well as a plagiarism.
Bernstein, in the book cited above (p 26) is of this opinion: "The
'Protocols' were concocted not for the purpose of impressing statesmen, theologians,
or even public opinion; they were drawn up in France and published in Russia to
influence a nd inflame a feeble-minded person whose spirit already was filled with
hatred of the Jew. That person was none other than Tsar Nicholas II." However
this may be, in the years after 1918, the Protocols had a considerable
influence on public opinion in numerous countries of the world. Not least was their
influence on Adolf Hitler. It can be argued that the Protocols were actually
used by Hitler as a partial guide for his own political programs. But that's another
story.
The origins of the basic ideas of the Protocols can be traced back much further than the work of Joly. To examine this tangled skein, one can examine the following works:
