Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy

7. Interlude: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Fabrication It is ironic that the most widely ballyhooed conspiracy between the two world wars found virtually no contemporary literary resonance. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in 1903 in a St. Petersburg newspaper, had no impact outside Russia until the tract was brought to Western Europe after the Revolution by White Russian émigrés and then immediately (1920) translated—first into German, English, French, and Polish and soon thereafter into many other languages. The “document,” allegedly the protocol of a meeting of the assembled Elders of Zion—that is, the leaders of international Jewry—notoriously lists in twenty-four articles the methods by which they propose to take over the world: by acquiring the financial establishments, controlling the press, infiltrating the political and cultural institutions, exploiting existing governments both capitalist and communist, and so forth. The Protocols were almost immediately unmasked as a blatant fabrication. As early as 1921 the American diplomat Herman Bernstein attacked the hoax in his book The History of a Lie. In August of that same year the Times of London published a series of articles demonstrating that the publication was plagiarized extensively from Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu , or the Politics of Machiavelli in the Nineteenth Century (1864). Joly’s Chapter Seven Interlude The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 160 Lure of the Arcane work, a satire by a liberal French lawyer composed in the traditional genre of “Dialogues of the Dead” and directed against the despotic régime of Napoleon III, consists of twenty-five dialogues—mostly arguments by Machiavelli in which the political theorist expresses his skeptical view of constitutional government , denies the validity of morality and law in politics, adapts his Renaissance ideas to the new industrial society, advocates the role of terror, recommends the annihilation of the liberal press and secret societies, discusses the dangers of all collective agencies, and so forth. After ten years of this reign the nation has been transformed: Machiavelli has been crowned and is regarded by the people as greater than Louis XIV, Henry IV, and George Washington. In his closing line the horrified Montesquieu exclaims, “Eternal God, what have you permitted!” In his articles Philip Graves, the correspondent for the Times in Constantinople , related the adventurous story of a mysterious “Mr X” who, wishing to remain anonymous, shared with him a copy of the still anonymous work, which the newspaper’s researchers in London soon determined to be that of Joly. Detailed comparisons have revealed numerous and often verbatim parallels between the two works. Often, indeed, the plagiarist simply replaced “France” with “the world” and “Napoleon III” with “the Jews.” Fifteen years later, in a highly publicized trial in Bern, to settle a suit brought in 1934–35 by the united Jewish communities of Switzerland against the anti-Semitic National Front for distributing copies of the thirteenth (Nazi) edition of the Protocols, the judge again concluded that the work was clearly plagiarized from Joly’s book. (His additional judgment that it was salacious and hence “indecent literature” was later quashed on technical grounds.) In the course of time further details concerning the forgery emerged. Hermann Goedsche (1815–78), a onetime German postal official who lost his position because he fabricated documents incriminating a liberal politician, went on to become a journalist for conservative newspapers and achieved considerable popularity as the author of multivolume political-historical novels under the pseudonym of Sir John Retcliffe. Only four years after Joly’s satirical dialogues he published his episodic novel Biarritz (1868), which contains a chapter entitled “At the Jewish Cemetery in Prague” (“Auf dem Judenkirchhof in Prag”). According to the fiction of the episode, a young German scholar named “Dr. Faust,” eager to add the secrets of the kabbalah to his learning, is taken by an Italian Jewish acquaintance, as a reward for saving his life three years earlier, to witness Interlude: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 161 an unusual gathering in the Jewish cemetery on the festival of Succoth (October 8, 1860). Shortly before midnight the two men climb over the wall and watch from their hiding place as thirteen spectral figures, clad in white, gather at the tombstone of the Rabbi Simeon Ben Jehuda, which glows with a bluish light, and whisper a code word. “Out from this point goes the impulse which makes the exiles into the masters of the...