Abstract
The Protocols became the most influential piece of antisemitic propaganda ever created. Inspired by the first Zionist Congress of 1897 in Basel, when Mathieu Golovinski finished his fabrication of the tract in 1901, Imperial Russia was still suffering from an economic meltdown: its stock market had crashed, two major banks lay in ruins, and millions found themselves unemployed. The Zionist Congress seemed to justify his fears that Jewish capital was subverting the Russian monarchy. That the Dreyfus affair should have taken place just when Russia was in turmoil, and the Zionist Congress had been called, also confirmed Golovinski’s paranoid fantasy that an international Jewish conspiracy was causing global havoc while plotting to take over the world. An aristocrat’s son, a lawyer disbarred for embezzlement, and a scandal-mongering journalist, Golovinski was the agent of an arch-reactionary faction at the Russian court while he lived in Paris. But he was also flexible and an opportunist. Golovinski joined the Bolsheviks after 1917 and quickly rose through the ranks before his sudden death in 1920 at the age of 55. His background would undoubtedly have proven an embarrassment to the revolutionary authorities and, consequently, his role in the tale of a forgery ultimately wound up buried in the Soviet archives until the fine Russian historian, Mikhail Lepekhine, uncovered it in 2007 after five years of painstaking research.
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Notes
- 1.
See, Eric Conan, “The Origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: The Secrets of an Anti-Semitic Manipulation” in L’Express (16 November, 2007) and trans. by NOT BORED! http://www.notbored.org/protocols-history.html.
- 2.
Note the collection of the various introductions, commentaries, and secondary material relevant to the Protocols by Pierre-André Taguieff, Les Protocols des Sages de Sion, 2 vols. (Paris, 1992), 2:472ff.
- 3.
Lucien Wolf, The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs: The Truth About the Forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 8ff.
- 4.
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967), 31.
- 5.
Ibid., 32ff.
- 6.
Nikolaus Markow, Der Kampf der dunklen Mächte: Historischen Übersicht über die menschenfeindliche Tätigkeit des Judentums, vor allem in Russland, trans. W. Klingelhofer (Frankfurt am Main: Welt-Dienst Verlag, 1944), 51.
- 7.
Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1926),” trans. and ed. Richard S. Levy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 53.
- 8.
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 53ff.
- 9.
Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Steven J. Zipperman, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York: Liverwright, 2018).
- 10.
Armand du Chayla , “Sergey Alexandrovitch Nilus et les Protocols des Sages de Sion (1909–1920),” in La Tribune Juive (May 14, 1921). Translation in the archives of the American Jewish Committee (Protocols ab), 3ff. Note also the fine discussion by Michael Hagemeister, “Sergei Nilus und die “Protokolle der Weisen von Zion:” Überlegungen zur Forschungslage” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 5 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1992), 133ff.
- 11.
Hadassah Ben-Itto, “Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion”: Der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschworung: Anatomie einer Fälschung (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1998), 113.
- 12.
Hagemeister, “Sergei Nilus und die “Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,”” 136ff.
- 13.
Sigmund Livingston, Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion (New York: Educational Commission of the B’Nai Brith, 1945), 8.
- 14.
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 68ff.
- 15.
Leslie Fry, Waters Flowing Eastward: The War Against the Kingship of Christ, ed. and rev. by Rev. Denis Fahey (New Orleans: Flander Hull Publishing Co., 1988 ed.), 37ff.
- 16.
“The Truth About the Protocols: A Literary Forgery,” The Times (London), 16, 17, 18 August 1921, 18.
- 17.
Ben-Itto, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, 101–109.
- 18.
Ibid., 121–29. Also note “The Protocols of the Saints of Siam.” http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&u=http://aumagic.blogspot.com/2012/08/os-protocolos-dos-sabios-do-siao.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dstephen%2Beric%2Bbronner%2B%2522a%2Brumor%2Babout%2Bthe%2Bjews%2522%26start%3D110%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Den%26biw%3D1324%26bih%3D1200.
- 19.
Fry, Waters Flowing Eastward, 73ff.
- 20.
Herman Bernstein, The Truth about “The Protocols of Zion:” A Complete Exposure (1935) (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1971), 32.
- 21.
Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion: Das Weltoberungsprogramm der Juden (Berlin: Institut für Antisemitismusforschung, Technische Universität Berlin, ca. 1940).
- 22.
Chayla, “Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus et les Protocols des Sages de Sion,” 7.
- 23.
Umberto Eco, “Eine Fiktion, die zum Alptraum wird: Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und ihre Entstehung” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2.7 (1994), s. B2ff.
- 24.
Ben-Itto, “Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,” 50.
- 25.
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 32ff.
- 26.
Hermann Goedsche, Biarritz (Munich: Deutsche Volkverlag, 1933).
- 27.
Note the discussion by Jeffrey Sammons, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion—eine Fälschung. Text und Kommentar (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998).
- 28.
Bernstein, The Truth about “The Protocols,” 22–23.
- 29.
Benjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel, 95ff.
- 30.
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Its History and Current Revival” in Bulletin No. 5-A (1933), The American Jewish Committee Library, 3ff. Also see Die Protokollen der Weisen von Zion (1998), 10, 21.
- 31.
H. De Vries de Heekelingen, Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion: Constituentils un Faux? (Lausanne: Imprimere A. Rochat-Pache, 1938), 4.
- 32.
Unwilling or unable to deal with its inauthenticity, seeking to evade responsibility, the Protocols has recently been interpreted as an authentic, original program of the Freemasons. Note the section dealing with the Protocols in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, The_Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982).
- 33.
Walter Creuz, “Les Protocols des Sages de Sion: Leur Authenticite,” in Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion (Berlin: Institut für Antisemtisimusforschung, Technische Universität Berlin, 1978), 9–10.
- 34.
Ben-Itto, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, 221ff.
- 35.
For a comparison of the texts in French, see Pierre Charles, S. J., “Les Protocols des Sages de Sion,” in Taguieff, Les Protocols des Sages de Sion, 2:11ff.
- 36.
Cited in Segel, A Lie and a Libel, 100–101.
- 37.
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 74ff.
- 38.
Ibid., 78.
- 39.
Ibid., 106.
- 40.
Hans-Dietrich Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction, and Antisemitism in Imperial Russia, 1772–1917 (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), 46.
- 41.
Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia, 22–23.
- 42.
A. Linden, “Die permanente Pogrom gegen die russichen Juden (1882–1903),” in Die Juden-Pogrome in Russland, published in Auftrag des Zionistischen Hilfsfonds in London von der zur Erforschung der Pogrome eingesetzten Kommission 2 Bde. (Köln-Leipzig, 1910), 99–133ff.
- 43.
Bernstein, The Truth about “The Protocols of Zion,” 27–28.
- 44.
John Gwyer, Portraits of Mean Men: A Short History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1938), 77ff.
- 45.
Robert Neumann, “Protokolle,” in Tribune 9: 34 (1970): 3635ff.
- 46.
Livingston, Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, 4.
- 47.
Ben-Itto, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, 54ff.
- 48.
A case in point is the popular reception given the self-serving The Last Diary of Tsarita Alexandra, eds. Vladimir A. Kozlov and Vladimir M. Khrustalev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Among the rare genuinely critical portraits of the royal couple in the postcommunist world is the study by Brian Moynahan, Rasputin : The Saint Who Sinned (New York: Random House, 1997).
- 49.
Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews, 222.
- 50.
Ben-Itto, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, 53.
- 51.
Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 173.
- 52.
Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: New York University Press, 1992).
- 53.
Cited in Rev. Elias Newman, The Fundamentalists’ Resuscitation of the Antisemitic Protocol Forgery, in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Forgery (Minneapolis, 1934), 19. An early account of the horrible fate suffered by many victims of these pogroms, particularly in Kishinev, is provided by Michael Davitt, Within the Pale (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1908).
- 54.
Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 61.
- 55.
Maurice Samuel, Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case (New York: Knopf, 1966).
- 56.
Immanuel Geiss, Der Lange Weg in die Katastrophe: Die Vorgeschichte des ersten Weltkriegs, 1815–1915 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1990).
- 57.
Felix Gilbert, The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 106; Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism (London: Ashfield Press, 1980), 105ff., 2–37, 157–223.
- 58.
Gilbert, The End of the European Era, 15.
- 59.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Moments of Decision: Political History and the Crises of Radicalism 2nd Edition (New York: Boomsbury Academic, 2014), 6ff.
- 60.
John C. G. Rohl “Kaiser Wilhelm II und der deutsche Antisemitismus” in Vorurteil und Völkermord: Entwicklungslinien des Antisemitismus, eds. Wolfgang Benz and Werner Bergmann (Freiburg: Herder, 1997), 264.
- 61.
Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel, 59.
- 62.
An interview with Henry Ford in the New York World, February 17, 1921.
- 63.
An interview with Henry Ford in the New York World, February 17, 1921.
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Bronner, S.E. (2019). The Tale of a Forgery: Inventing the Protocols. In: A Rumor about the Jews. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95396-0_4
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