Protocols of the Elders of Zion - did the Jewish Elders write it?

[Sharing Lights]

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The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", is the most notorious work of modern antisemitism,
draws on popular antisemitic notions which have
their roots in medieval Europe from the time of
the Crusades.

Not Jews but haters of Jews wrote that garbage.

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.


Let's examine a few verities.

Getting an answer from a typical Jew is not that easy (no offense to any one but I speak both: from a personal experience and opinions of many folks.)


Each question is, often, met with even more questions.
Many Jews, particularly those who have reached senior age, are very cautious when express their beliefs to the public and/or are aware that their words would be "heard" or "read."


It is absurd to, even, suppose that the Jewish Elders at the top of the Command and Hierarchy would be so careless as say and/or write what the anti-Semites advocate.

It defies basic, common sense.

I can state the following.

If the Jewish Elders ever decide to plot anything as a group, they would make sure that their ideas woulds not be known to the world.

You can be sure of that.

They would be extra cautious and candid.

These Elders would take such preventive measures that the most evil plot would appear as an angelic message.

You can be sure of that too.

It is just not possible for them to be so blunt and frank in revealing their plans as in the fake Protocols.

The anti-Semites have not designed a believable strategy to frame the whole Jewish Nation as, the former have, clearly, appealed to the masses and their instincts only.


We must note that it is true that some of the most powerful banking dynasties of the world are of the Jewish heritage.


Yes, they are ruthless, greedy, and immoral.

However, the other dynasties of other backgrounds are not any less evil than most of the Jewish bankers.

All of them like money and power.

I would go as far as to say that most bankers, regardless of their heritage, are just not very moral people - period.

Let's face the music - people.

Only certain individuals would pursue certain careers and use certain means of achieving their goal.

It takes a certain character to become a cop, mortician, banker, judge, or politician.

All do it for different reasons.

However, I can state this:
mostly, unethical people try to gain a position of power.

The more unethical they are, the more ambitious is their drive.

Nationality, race, religion play a secondary, if not lower, role there.

I know that I make sense to those who have common sense.

I, also, know that those who are guilty of either corruption or plain stupidity, just, love pointing fingers at those whom they find convenient scapegoats so that they don't have see their, own inadequacies.

Anytime they point a finger, they should do so in front of a mirror!

[Sharing Lights]

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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.

[Sharing Lights]

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).

--

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.)

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[Sharing Lights]

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There is a legitimate research and junk copy/paste.

I, easily, proved that clowns from Quatloos and some here, who "claim" to be Sui Juris, copy each others junk and repeat the same nonsense.

When they are confronted, they would curse or lie but cannot substantiate their malice.

The nature of the Protocols of Zion is nothing new or different, as nature of those who spread libel and malice is always the same - in a cheap toilet style of copying each other.


Go on different Websites where the Protocols are published.

Copy them to your PC.
Copy a bunch of those.

You would, quickly, find out that they are all copied from the same junk matrix.

Even commas' positions and grammatic errors are the same.


One main source has published the same article and many copied.

Unfortunately, numbers of Website where the owners have good intentions have fallen a prey to the hoax and believe it to be genuine.


One has to rise above controversy and realize that, even, when some authors re-print garbage in their naivety, that does not negate the valuable work or ideas they have shared.


We should all strive to become so objective that can concentrate on truth and derive it from anywhere where it is by its merit disregarding fallacies instead of labeling the authors one way or another.

The world is not always black and white - there may be shades in-between and, often, there are.

The Federal Reserve is the syndicate that controls the US and much of the world despite the anti-trust and monopoly Laws.

The top banking dynasties are its exclusive members.
Yes, money talks and very, very loudly.

Many of the FR's members are of Jewish heritage - many - are not.

They all love money and power.

So do many of us.

The degree varies.

That's the truth - that is the reality!


The rest is details...

The Colors of Liturgy are Flying and Intact;
So Is the Spirit!

Amen!

[Sharing Lights]

RUSSIAN COURT RULES 'PROTOCOLS' AN ANTI-SEMITIC FORGERY

By Michael A. Hiltzik
Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1993

MOSCOW -- In what observers called a historic ruling, a Russian
court has pronounced the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" an
anti-Semitic forgery -- the first such verdict in the land where the fraud
originated 90 years ago.

"Up to now every country had disengaged itself from this shameful
book, except Russia, where it was concocted," Tancred Golenpolsky, the
publisher of the Moscow Jewish newspaper that won the ruling, said
Saturday.
The court case arose 10 months ago after Golenpolsky's Jewish
Gazette accused the radical nationalist group Pamyat ("Memory") of printing
anti-Semitic sentiments.

Fostering ethnic conflict is punishable under
Russian law.


Pamyat responded with a $19,000 libel suit, saying it has nothing
against Arabs, who are also Semitic.


In its defense, the Gazette noted that Pamyat's newspaper published
extracts from the Protocols.

The document, which details purported
meetings of Jewish elders at which they plotted to seize control of the
whole world, became the focus of the trial.


On Friday, a Moscow district court judge ruled that the document
was indeed a forgery.

She turned down Pamyat's claim and fined the
organization court costs of about $190.


The ruling by Judge Lyudmila Belikova was hailed by the Los
Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which provided financial support for
Golenpolsky and documentary material to the court.


"The ruling today under Russian law destroys any veneer of
respectability that hatemongers around the globe have tried to bestow on
this hateful work," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center's associate dean,
in a statement.


Pamyat was unrepentant.


"They have no decency left to say the Protocols are a fake when the
entire history of Russia after 1917 is solid proof that they are genuine,"
said Dmitri D. Vasiliev, head of the organization, in an interview
Saturday.

Referring to the fact that such communist theoreticians and
luminaries as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky were Jewish, he said: "Who made
the revolution? Who ruined and sold out the country?

Take time and read the
Protocols; the answers are there gaping at you from every page."


But Golenpolsky argued that the significance in the ruling lies not
in its prospect of eradicating anti-Semitism in Russia.

"Anti-Semitism will
appear every time prices on potatoes and bread go up," he said in an
interview.

"What's important is that law and the government will take a stand."


For most of this century, the Protocols has been a key manifesto of anti-Semitism.

It was used as a pretext for Eastern European pogroms,
was a centerpiece of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and
permeated Nazi propaganda.

It consistently surfaces across the globe as purported documentation of a Jewish conspiracy.

At the same time it has been consistently condemned by courts
around the world.


In 1927, an American judge ordered auto magnate Henry
Ford to destroy a large printing of the book he had personally financed; as
recently as 1991 the South African government banned it as an immoral
publication.

Contemporary evidence shows that the Protocols were written by
members of Czar Nicholas II's "Okhranka," or secret police, in 1903.

Its very birth was particularly unsavory; as much as 60 percent of the document
is a bald plagiarism from an anti-Semitic tract published in France around
that time.

The Okhranka fashioned the document as the purported agreement of a
group of Jewish elders meeting in Switzerland in 1897 to plot Jewish
hegemony through the destruction of Christian civilization.

It was first
published in Russia on the eve, and as the instrument, of the vicious 1903
Odessa pogrom.


Judge Belikova based her ruling in part on testimony by a
three-member panel of Russian academic experts who examined the document
and its textual and legal history.

The experts were agreed to by both
sides, although Golenpolsky said his only stipulation was that they not be
Jewish.

"My conclusion was that this is prima facie apocryphal and that
this is an anti-Semitic document," said one of the experts, Lionel Dadiani
of Moscow's Institute of Sociology, who wrote a 67-page opinion for the
court.

Pamyat's Vasiliev said Saturday that he intends to bring further
cases against the Jewish Gazette.

[Sharing Lights]

Contents
1 Title
2 Origins and content
2.1 Maurice Joly
2.2 Hermann Goedsche
2.3 Structure and themes
2.4 Comparison to the Dialogues
2.5 Conspiracy references
3 Historical publications, usage, and investigations
3.1 Emergence in Russia
3.1.1 First printing and Nilus editions
3.1.2 Stolypin's fraud investigation, 1905
3.2 The Russian Revolution and the spread of the Protocols, 1920s
3.3 German language publication
3.4 English language publication
3.5 The Times exposes a forgery, 1921
3.6 Arab lands, 1920s
3.7 The Bern Trial, 1934-1935
3.8 South Africa
3.9 The Protocols in Nazi propaganda, 1930s-1940s
3.9.1 Fascist Italy
4 Contemporary usage and popularity
4.1 Middle East
4.1.1 Syria
4.1.2 Egypt
4.1.3 Iran
4.1.4 Saudi Arabia
4.1.5 Lebanon and Hezbollah
4.1.6 Hamas
4.1.7 Palestinian National Authority
4.2 Other contemporary appearances
4.2.1 United States
4.2.2 Soviet Union and post-Soviet states
4.2.3 The Soviet Union
4.2.4 The Russian Federation
5 References
6 Further reading
7 See also
8 External links

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: "Протоколы сионских мудрецов", or "Сионские протоколы", see also other titles) is an antisemitic pamphlet that purports to describe a Jewish plot to achieve world domination. It is one of the most well known and discussed examples of literary forgery.

Numerous independent investigations have proven it to be a plagiarism and a hoax.[1]

Scholars generally agree that the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, fabricated the text in the late 1890s or early 1900s. Among the most notable early refutations of the Protocols as a forgery were a series of articles printed in The Times of London in 1921. This series revealed that much of the material in the Protocols was plagiarized from earlier political satire that did not have an antisemitic theme. Since 1903, when the Protocols appeared in print, its earliest publishers have offered vague and often contradictory testimony detailing how they obtained their copy of the rumored original manuscript.[2]

The Protocols are widely considered to be the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature,[3] and take the form of an instruction manual to a new member of the "elders," describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, and replace the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation.

The text was popularized by those opposed to Russian revolutionary movement, and was disseminated further after the revolution of 1905, becoming known worldwide after the 1917 October Revolution. It was widely circulated in the West in 1920 and thereafter. The Great Depression and the rise of Nazism were important developments in the history of the Protocols, and the hoax continued to be published and circulated despite its debunking.

Continued usage of the Protocols as an antisemitic propaganda tool substantially diminished with the defeat of the Nazis in World War II. It is still frequently quoted and reprinted by some antisemitic circles, and is sometimes used as evidence of an alleged Jewish cabal, especially in the Middle East.[4]

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Title
The text is alternatively known in English as Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion, Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom, Protocols of the Sages of Zion, Protocols of Zion, The Jewish Peril, The Protocols and World Revolution, and Praemonitus Praemunitus. The variation in title derives partly from the fact that the book has two titles in Russian - "Сионские протоколы" (Sionskiye protokoly, lit. "Protocols of Zion") and "Протоколы сионских мудрецов" (Protokoly sionskih mudretsov, lit. "Protocols of the Sages of Zion") - and partly due to the different translations of the Russian word мудрец (mudrets, a wise man or a sage).

The variation in title also derives from the fact that various (often anonymous) compilers or editors give it a different main title (as distinct from a subtitle), as well as the interest of these to advertise or suit their particular antisemitic agenda, and the fact that the text, which consists roughly of no more than 2 or 3 dozen paragraphs is only sufficient for a pamphlet, and it becomes a book by expansion with prefaces, introductions, addenda, etc.

For example, the first American English language edition, published in Boston in 1920 by Small, Maynard & Company, has the following full title: The Protocols and World Revolution Including a Translation and Analysis of the "Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom". Only pages 11 through 73 contain the so-called Protocols. The word "Zion" in this edition has not been used; rather, the word "Zionist" is used. This contrasts to a similar practice of the prior Russian editions. For example, in 1905 Sergei Nilus's book on the imminent arrival of the anti-Christ The Big within the Small, the Protocols constituted the final twelfth chapter.


Origins and content

Maurice Joly

Elements of the text in the Protocols appears to be plagiarized from an 1864 pamphlet, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), written by the French satirist Maurice Joly. Joly's work attacks the political ambitions of Napoleon III using the device of diabolical plotters in Hell as stand-ins for Napoleon's views. Joly himself appears to have borrowed material from a popular novel by Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of the People, in which the plotters were Jesuits. Jews do not appear in either work. Since it was illegal to criticize the monarchy, Joly had the pamphlet printed in Belgium, then tried to smuggle it back into France. The police confiscated as many copies as they could, and it was banned. After it was traced to Joly, he was tried on April 25, 1865, and sentenced to fifteen months in prison. Joly committed suicide in 1878.

[Sharing Lights]

Hermann Goedsche

Hermann Goedsche's 1868 fiction novel, Biarritz (in English as To Sedan) contributed another idea that may have inspired the scribe behind the Protocols. In the chapter, “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel”, Goedsche wrote about a nocturnal meeting between members of a mysterious rabbinical cabal, describing how at midnight, the Devil appears before those who have gathered on behalf of the Twelve Tribes of Israel to plan a “Jewish conspiracy”. His depiction is also similar to the scene in Alexandre Dumas, père's Joseph Balsamo, where Cagliostro and company plot the affair of the diamond necklace. With Biarritz appearing at about the same time as The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, it is possible that Goedsche was inspired by the ideas in Joly's pamphlet, especially in detailing the outcome of the cabal's secret meeting.[5]

Goedsche, a reactionary to the revolutions of 1848, lost his job in the Prussian postal service after forging evidence to implicate democratic leader Benedict Waldeck of conspiring against the king. Following his dismissal, Goedsche began a career as a conservative columnist, while also producing literary work under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe.[6] Goedsche was allegedly a spy for the Prussian Secret Police.[3]

In 1871, the story was being presented in France as serious history. In 1872, the “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague”, translated into Russian, appeared in St. Petersburg as a separate pamphlet of purported non-fiction. François Bournand, in his Les Juifs et nos contemporains (1896), reproduced a speech from the chapter as that of a Chief Rabbi “John Readclif” [sic].


Structure and themes

The twenty-four Protocols are posited as instructions to a new Elder, outlining how the group will control the world. The Elders want to trick all "gentile nations", whom they call "goyim", into doing their will. Their preferred methods include:

Protocol Theme

1 Alcoholism, Annihilation of the privileges of the non-Jewish aristocracy, among other topics.
2, 9, 12 The propagation of ideas of all possible complexions with the task of undermining established forms of order, including Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche-ism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, and Utopianism
4 Materialism
5 World government
7 World wars
10 Staging catastrophes against one's own people, then claiming a moral high ground for leverage
11 Universal suffrage
11, 12, 17 Curtailment of civil liberties with the excuse of defeating the enemies of peace
13 Creating the impression of the existence of freedom of press, freedom of speech, democracy and human rights, all of which are subsequently undermined and become mere illusions or deceptive smokescreens behind which actual oppression lies
14 Distractions
14, 17 Pornographic literature
16 The destruction of Christianity, other religions and cultures, followed by a transitional stage of atheism, followed finally by the hegemony of Judaism
20 Brainwashing
21 Economic depressions
22 Undermining financial systems by foreign loans, creating national bankruptcy, destroying Money Markets and replacing them with government credit institutions
23 Justification of previous acts of evil and expectation of a great new society
24 Reduction of the manufacture of articles of luxury, destruction of large manufacturers, prohibition of alcohol and hashish, unleashing forces of violence under the mask of principles of freedom, only to have the 'King of the Jews' demolish those very forces to make him appear a saviour
25 Training of the king, direct heirs, irreproachability of exterior morality of the King of the Jews

Control of the media and finance would replace the traditional sources of social order with one based on mass manipulation and state engineered propaganda, where powerful elites and institutions conspire to conceal unpalatable truths from the masses. In these respects, the Protocols draw on long-standing criticisms of modernity, radicalism and capitalism, but present them as part of an orchestrated plot, rather than as a product of impersonal historical processes.

The text assumes that the reader already believes that the Freemasons are a secret society with a hidden political agenda, and the Protocols purport to demonstrate that this hidden agenda is itself controlled or guided by the 'Elders', a sort of conspiracy theory within a conspiracy theory. In the Protocols, Freemasons and "liberal thinkers" are shown to be mere tools that the Elders will eventually replace with a Jewish theocracy. The Protocols describe a forthcoming "kingdom" and go into great lengths about how it will be run. Yet even in this kingdom the Elders will avoid direct political control, preferring to assert themselves via usury and manipulation of money. Even the "King of the Jews" himself will be nothing more than a figurehead.

[Sharing Lights]

Comparison to the Dialogues

The Protocols 1-19 closely follow the order of the The Dialogues in Hell 1-17, with a few exceptions. In some places, plagiarism is incontrovertible:

Montesquieu: How are loans made? By the issue of bonds entailing on the Government the obligation to pay interest proportionate to the capital it has been paid. Thus, if a loan is at 5%, the State, after 20 years, has paid out a sum equal to the borrowed capital. When 40 years have expired it has paid double, after 60 years triple: yet it remains debtor for the entire capital sum. (Dialogues, p. 250)
A loan is an issue of Government paper which entails an obligation to pay interest amounting to a percentage of the total sum of the borrowed money. If a loan is at 5%, then in 20 years the Government would have unnecessarily paid out a sum equal to that of the loan in order to cover the percentage. In 40 years it will have paid twice; and in 60 thrice that amount, but the loan will still remain as an unpaid debt. (Protocols, p. 77)


Another example is the reference to the Hindu deity, Vishnu, which appears exactly twice in both the Dialogues in Hell and the Protocols:

Machiavelli: Like the god Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, and these arms will give their hands to all the different shades of opinion throughout the country. (Dialogues, p. 141)
These newspapers, like the Indian god Vishnu, will be possessed of hundreds of hands, each of which will be feeling the pulse of varying public opinion. (Protocols, p. 43)

Montesquieu: Now I understand the figure of the god Vishnu; you have a hundred arms like the Indian idol, and each of your fingers touches a spring. (Dialogues, p. 207)
Our Government will resemble the Hindu god Vishnu. Each of our hundred hands will hold one spring of the social machinery of State. (Protocols, p. 65)


In addition to mentioning Vishnu, improbable in the Jewish religious literature, and the lack of Talmudic citations that would be expected in it, textual references to the "King of the Jews", the semi-messianic idea that carries strong connotations of Jesus, further suggest the author was not well-versed in Jewish culture, as this term has been avoided in the Judaic tradition since the schism between Judaism and Christianity.[7]

Once Philip Graves' Times article showed the extent of the similarity between the two texts, it became clear that the Protocols were not authentic.


Conspiracy references

The idea that the Freemasons formed part of an anti-Christian conspiracy, either separate from or in association with Jews, long predated the spreading of The Protocols. In the late 18th-early 19th centuries, Freemasonry was popular (as were many fraternal organizations), and its most significant opponent, the Roman Catholic Church, opposed its open support for freedom of religion and enlightenment ideals.

After some interaction with masons, a Scottish natural philosopher John Robison became an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist and expanded on his impressions in his 1797 pamphlet Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. He did not take into account that French masons were members of several mutually hostile factions and that many of them were executed by their rivals. Robison's work does not mention Jews.

Jesuit priest Abbé Barruél had some contact with Robison, but extended the notion to include Jews. He had accused the Jews of founding the Bavarian Illuminati.

According to Daniel Pipes,

"The great importance of the Protocols lies in its permitting antisemites to reach beyond their traditional circles and find a large international audience, a process that continues to this day. The forgery poisoned public life wherever it appeared; it was "self-generating; a blueprint that migrated from one conspiracy to another."[8] The book's vagueness — almost no names, dates, or issues are specified — has been one key to this wide-ranging success. The purportedly Jewish authorship also helps to make the book more convincing. Its embrace of contradiction — that to advance, Jews use all tools available, including capitalism and communism, philo-Semitism and antisemitism, democracy and tyranny — made it possible for the Protocols to reach out to all: rich and poor, Right and Left, Christian and Muslim, American and Japanese."[9]

Pipes notes that the Protocols emphasize recurring themes of conspiratorial antisemitism: "Jews always scheme", "Jews are everywhere", "Jews are behind every institution", "Jews obey a central authority, the shadowy 'Elders'", and "Jews are close to success."[10]

The Protocols are widely considered influential in the development of other conspiracy theories, and reappear repeatedly in contemporary conspiracy literature, such as Jim Marrs's Rule by Secrecy. Some recent editions proclaim that the "Jews" depicted in the Protocols are a cover identity for other conspirators such as the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Priory of Sion, or even, in the opinion of David Icke, "extra-dimensional entities." Other groups that believe in their authenticity have claimed that the book does not depict the way that Jews think and act, but only those belonging to an alleged secret elite group of Zionists, and that the "Elders" were not Rabbis, but secular Zionist leaders.

[Sharing Lights]

Historical publications, usage, and investigations

Emergence in Russia

The chapter "In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague" from Goedsche's Biarritz, with its strong anti-semitic theme containing the alleged rabbinical plot against the European civilization, was translated into Russian as a separate pamphlet in 1872.[11] Okhranka, the tsarist secret police, found these works useful in their effort to discredit liberal reformers and revolutionaries who were rapidly gaining popular support, especially among oppressed minorities such as Russian Jews.


Recent research by Russian historian Mikhail Lepekhine traced the Protocols to Matvei Golovinski, agent provocateur of Okhranka, as part of a scheme to persuade Tsar Nicholas II that the modernization of Russia was really a Jewish plot to control the world. Lepekhine discovered Golovinski's authorship in Russia's long-closed archives and published his findings in November 1999 in the French newsweekly L'Express.[12] According to Will Eisner, "From the Tsar's French files, Lepekhine unearthed the evidence of Golovinski's role."[13] Golovinski had been linked to the work before; the German writer Konrad Heiden identified him as an author of the Protocols in 1944.[14] Golovinski worked together with Charles Joly (son of Maurice Joly) at Le Figaro in Paris and wrote articles at the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, Chief of the Russian secret service. During the Dreyfus affair in France, when polarization of European attitudes towards the Jews was at a maximum, the publication began private circulation as The Protocols in 1897.[15] After the 1917 revolution, Golovinski became a Bolshevik propagandist.

A Ukrainian scholar Vadim Skuratovsky offers extensive literary, historical and linguistic analysis of the original text of the Protocols and traces the influences of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's prose (in particular, The Grand Inquisitor and The Possessed) on Golovinski's writings, including the Protocols.[16]

In his book The Non-Existent Manuscript. A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, Italian researcher Cesare G. De Michelis writes[17] that hypothesis of Golovinski authorship was based on statement by Princess Catherine Radziwill. She claimed that she had seen a manuscript of the protocols written by Golovinski, Rachkovsky and Manusevich in 1905, but in 1905 Golovinski and Rachkovsky had already left Paris and moved to Saint Petersburg. Princess Radziwill was known to be an unreliable source.

The Protocols were first mentioned in the Russian press on April 1902, by the Saint Petersburg newspaper, Novoye Vremya (Новое Время - The New Times). The article was written by a famous conservative publicist Mikhail Menshikov as a part of his regular series "Letters to Neighbors" ("Письма к ближним") and was entitled "Plots against Humanity." The author described his meeting with a lady (Yuliana Glinka, as it is known now) who, after telling him about her mystical revelations, implored him to get familiar with the documents later known as the Protocols; but after reading some excerpts Menshikov became quite skeptical about their origin and did not publish them.[18]