The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

A Century-Old Myth

Esther Webman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136706097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has attracted the interest of politicians and academicians, and generated extensive research, since the tract first appeared in the early twentieth century. Despite having repeatedly been discredited as a historical document, and in spite of the fact that it served as an inspiration for Hitler's antisemitism and the Holocaust, it continues, even in our time, to be influential.

Exploring the Protocols' successful dissemination and impact around the world, this volume attempts to understand their continuing popularity, one hundred years after their first appearance, in so many diverse societies and cultures. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book covers themes such as:

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• Why have the Protocols survived to the present day and what are the sources from which they draw their strength?

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• What significance do the Protocols have today in mainstream worldviews?

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• Are they gaining in importance?

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• Are they still today a warrant for genocide or merely a reflection of xenophobic nationalism?

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• Can they be fought by logical argumentation?

This comprehensive volume which, for the first time, dwells also on the attraction of the Protocols in Arab and Muslim countries, will be of interest to specialists, teachers, and students working in the fields of antisemitism, the far right, Jewish studies, and modern history.

1 Introduction

Hate and absurdity: The impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion¹

Esther Webman

As a forgery and a construct of antisemitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (hereafter, the Protocols²) has attracted the interest of politicians and academicians, and generated extensive research. Attempts have been made to identify the roots of the document, analyze it in a historico-political context, and examine its abiding reception and dissemination, as well as its influence and exploitation.³ Yet, an enigmatic aspect remains, and in spite of the many critical studies the questions raised by historian of antisemitism Richard Levy are still valid: “Why has the Protocols seized the imagination and informed the political judgment of men and women throughout the twentieth century? Why did it survive to the present day and what are the sources from which it draws its strength?”⁴ To these one can add others: Why is “the abstract Jew” such an ideal instrument for conspiracy theories in so many languages and diverse cultures − ranging from Europe to Japan and from North America to the Arab/Muslim world? What significance do the Protocols have today in mainstream worldviews? Are they gaining in importance? Are they still today a warrant for genocide or merely a reflection of xenophobic nationalism? Can they be fought by logical argumentation?

This volume, which comprises a compilation of papers presented at a conference held in October 2004 at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin to mark the one hundredth anniversary of their publication in Russia, does not pretend to answer all these questions. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the Protocols’ continuing popularity, over a century after their first appearance, in so many diverse societies and cultures. In his monumental analysis of the Protocols, Pierre-André Taguieff suggests four approaches toward their study: within the framework of a history, typology, and psycho-sociology of conspiracy theories connected to the phenomenon of modern secret societies both as fact and myth; the history of antisemitism and the development of anti-Jewish ideologies in the modern age; the history of forgeries linked to police falsifications; and the history or anthropology of devil worship and Satanism.⁵ Since the following chapters are written mostly by historians, they adopt in the main a historical approach for reassessing the dissemination of the Protocols and the social conditions that facilitated their diffusion before and after World War II, as well as examining their significance, centrality, and impact in different periods of time and place.

It is still not certain who wrote this antisemitic pamphlet, but the evidence suggests that it was cobbled together from pre-existing sources by agents of the Russian secret police (Okhrana) working in France during the years of the Dreyfus affair (1894−1906). The accusations against Jews in the Protocols were commonplace in popular French publications in the 1890s, and the authors of the tract plagiarized numerous sources. In particular, Maurice Joly’s anti-authoritarian A Dialogue in Hell: Conversations between Machiavelli and Montesquieu about Power and Right (1864) provided the nucleus for at least nine of the twenty-four chapters. If the plot ascribed to Jews in the Protocols has a pronounced Machiavellian character, it is because the authors put the words of Joly’s fictional Machiavelli into the mouth of the Grand Rabbi (also known as the Jewish Elder), whose address to a secret conclave in a cemetery in Basel, Switzerland, forms the core of the book. The conceit of the Grand Rabbi’s delivery derives from another of the Protocols’ sources, an 1868 novel titled Biarritz, by the German antisemite Hermann Ottomar Friedrich Goedsche (1815−78), known by his pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe.⁶

The Protocols were in part a reaction to contemporary events. A real Jewish gathering, the first Zionist Congress, was in fact held in Basel in 1897. A financial crisis did arise in Russia in 1898. And there were powerful Jewish financial families such as the Rothschilds, who at times exercised a measure of influence over the western political scene. But the Protocols were less a response to any real-world event than they were a product of the Jew-hatred that was rampant at the time, evidenced in the Dreyfus affair in France and the frequent murderous assaults on Jews in Russia, such as the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.

By the outbreak of World War I, several versions of the Protocols had appeared in Russia. The most well known was the adaptation by Sergei Nilus (1862−1929) in his devotional book The Great within the Small and Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility, first published in 1905 as an appendix to the second edition of a 1903 book.⁷ In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, Nilus published an expanded edition of the book, re-titled He Is Near, He Is Hard by the Door! warning of an imminent apocalypse initiated by the Jews. The Protocols were interpreted as an uncanny predictor of the revolution, offering a simple explanation for what had happened and absolving the defenders of the ancien régime from their failure to prevent or reverse it. The revolution was construed as the product of an irresistible, centuries-old global Jewish conspiracy to wreak havoc upon the gentile nations through financial manipulation and theories such as rationalism, materialism, and atheism, in order to overthrow legitimate and divinely appointed monarchs like the tsar and subjugate the world to a Jewish dictatorship. Beyond Russia’s borders the Protocols remained unknown until after the 1917 revolution.

The first, anonymous English translation of the Protocols appeared in 1920 under the title The Jewish Peril. It was published by the respected house of Eyre and Spottiswoode, which had also issued the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Prayer Book; it thus bore the stamp of His (or Her) Majesty’s Printers, which gave the volume an imprint of authority. That same year, Victor Marsden, Russian correspondent for the British newspaper Morning Post, produced another translation, and it was this one that became the standard English edition. German and American versions also appeared in 1920.⁸ In the United States, the automobile magnate Henry Ford, who published the Protocols in 1920 under the title The International Jew, made the tract truly famous. Under pressure, Ford renounced the Protocols in 1927, but with his backing they had achieved prestige and staying power.⁹

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a barely coherent, self-contradictory collection of twenty-four supposed “lectures,” purportedly delivered by the Grand Rabbi to Jewish Elders of the “twelve tribes of Israel” assembled in the aforementioned Basel cemetery for one of their periodic conclaves to plot the conquest of the world. The essence of the Grand Rabbi’s “lectures” is that world history has been manipulated for centuries by a secret Jewish cabal whose only aim is ruthless self-aggrandizement. Accordingly, the Jews, who scheme indefatigably, with supernatural cunning, to transform humanity into docile cattle, have invented every evil known to humanity, including capitalism, communism, liberal democracy, and mindless popular culture as diverse means to a single nefarious goal: the enslavement of the world and the establishment of a Jewish world government.

In Germany the Protocols found fertile soil in the Völkisch nationalist movement. Emerging in the course of the nineteenth century out of Social Darwinist, Germanic, and antisemitic thought, the Völkisch movement developed into a nationalist and racist ideology on the eve of World War I. Propagating the alleged right of the stronger, its proponents strove to establish its dominance in eastern Europe. With the radicalization of the Völkisch movement after the war, this ideology paved the way for National Socialism. Ultranationalist aspirations joined forces with racist notions of superiority and antisemitic delusions to form a political creed which, ever defiant and resolutely obstinate because of its irrational basis, had no hold in reality.

After World War I, which became a national trauma for the Germans, the doctrine of “the Jews’ goal of world dominion” was taken up avidly by those disappointed and embittered by the outcome of the war. With their illusions and ambitions swept away by defeat, they were forced to seek explanations for German misfortune that lay beyond the bounds of rationality, because any rational explanation for the military and political demise of the Wilhelminian Reich would have called into question their own position, power, and political aspirations, as well as their self-perception as members of a superior nation and “race.” Rooted in Social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, pervaded by the belief in the necessity of extending the Germanic people’s “living space,” and deeply convinced of the doctrines of antisemitism that racially stigmatized the Jews as inferior and held them responsible for all of the world’s troubles, the Völkisch movement was the ideal vehicle for adopting and disseminating the messages of the Protocols.

The Völkisch movement comprised groups and organizations such as the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German league), the antisemitic Reichshammerbund, the secret society of the Germanenorden, and the Deutsch-völkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (German-nationalist union for defense and defiance), one of the precursors of, as well as an organization parallel to, the National Socialist Party. The Lebensreformer and agrarian romantics, supporters of social-reactionary utopias, also belonged to the Völkisch movement. National egoism, persecution mania, fundamentalism, and the inability to rationally come to grips with existing political, social, and economic conditions, characterized Völkisch supporters who, in a diffuse expectation of salvation, sought to escape reality and restore their sense of self-esteem through the exclusion of minorities, which they blamed for their woes.

The reception of the Protocols in Germany began in these Völkisch and nationalist circles. The Protocols were published in July 1919 by the Völkisch publishing house Auf Vorposten and edited by Gottfried zur Beek, whose real name was Ludwig Müller von Hausen. The book went through eight impressions by 1923, and the ninth came out in 1929 from the publishing house of the NSDAP, which had acquired the rights of Beek’s translation. In 1924, the antisemitic publisher Hammer-Verlag issued another edition edited by Theodor Fritsch. Discussing the issue of authenticity of the Protocols in the preface, Fritsch expressed doubts that “the gullible, naïve, and credulous German” would believe them and that an “Aryan mind” could even imagine such a vile system. Fritsch concluded that as the Protocols arrogantly proclaim, international Jewry has ruled and continues to rule nations for centuries, steering their fates using every possible means, including cunning, deception, witchcraft, and financial machinations. Describing the Jews as the sworn enemy of decent humanity, he blamed them for all the disasters and misery suffered by nations, including the horrific crime of the Great War. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg published another version, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish World Policy, with the Deutsche Volksverlag Dr. Ernst Boepple (an antisemitic Völkisch branch of the Munich publishing house J. F. Lehmann) in 1923, dating its origins to Basel in 1897. Rosenberg’s tract quickly underwent several reprints, reaching 25,000 copies by the autumn of 1933. Such sales demonstrate the extent to which the Protocols became integrated into the canon of National Socialist doctrine.¹⁰

Hitler adopted the Protocols as a textbook for global conquest, and it was required reading under the Nazis. Not only was the supposed existence of an unscrupulous Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany widely accepted among the German people, who made the extermination of the Jews and elimination of the threat they allegedly posed a sacred national mission, but the Protocols became a model that Hitler and the Nazis diligently sought to follow. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt points out, the Protocols

presented world conquest as a practical possibility [and] implied that the whole affair was only a question of inspired or shrewd know-how, and that nobody stood in the way of a German victory over the entire world but a patently small people, the Jews, who ruled it without possessing instruments of violence − an easy opponent, therefore, once their secret was discovered and their method emulated on a large scale.¹¹

In Mein Kampf, claimed renowned German scholar of antisemitism Wolfgang Benz in his lecture presented at the Tel Aviv University conference, Adolf Hitler used the Protocols as a building block in his antisemitic program. He attributed to the text − which already served as a basis in Germany for reaching a consensus about “the Jews” − a dual function: proof of the existential falseness of “the Jews,” and a weapon against them. One need not read the text in order to regard it as authoritative, just as one need not read Mein Kampf in order to be a National Socialist, or to declare one’s support for Hitler’s movement and promote the aspirations of the Nazi party, he added. German writer and anti-war activist Arnold Zweig considered the Protocols the “core of the Völkisch persecution psychosis.” Their reception by the right-wing political spectrum, which found in it confirmation of their assumptions, as well as their certainty of the text’s authenticity, indeed demonstrates psychotic antisemitic demagogy.¹²

Explaining in Mein Kampf that what many Jews unconsciously wished to do was clearly set forth in the Protocols, Hitler praised them for being absolute proof of the constitutive evilness of the Jews and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction – hate and absurdity: the impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
• Part I: Revisiting the origins of the Protocols
• Part II: The impact of the Protocols since the 1920s till the end of World War II
• Part III: The appeal of the Protocols after World War II
• Part IV: The Protocols on trial
• Bibliography
• Index