Contextualizing the Mystery: Three Approaches to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Aleksandr Men', "Predislovie" ["Introduction"] and "Kratkaia istoriia antisemitizma" ["A Short History of Antisemitism"], in Norman Kon [Cohn], Blagoslovenie na genotsid: Mif o vsemirnom zagovore evreev i protokolakh sionskikh mudretsov [Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion]. Trans. Sergei Sergeevich Bychkov. Moscow: Rudomino, 2000. 175 pp. ISBN 5-7380-0133-8.

Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion."New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 177 pp. ISBN 0-312-21804-4. $24.95.

Vadim Leont'evich Skuratovskii, Problema avtorstva "Protokolov sionskikh mudretsov" [The Problem of Authorship of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"]. Kiev: Dukh i Litera, 2001. Series: "Biblioteka Instytutu Iudaiiky. 241 pp. ISBN 966-72-73-12-1.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is Russia's major contribution to 20th-century racial antisemitism. Along with the "blood libel" revived under Nicholas II, the "doctors' plot" under Stalin, and the equation of Zionism with racism under Brezhnev, the Protocols represents a turning point in the 200-year-old tradition of Russian antisemitism, the impact of which extended beyond the Russian far right and considerably shaped the discourse of nationalist parties across Europe. The chilling worldwide success of the Protocols in the 1920s led to the rise of an international scholarship that pursued primarily two goals: to investigate the murky circumstances leading to the initial publications of the Protocols in Russia between 1903 and 1907, and to place the Protocols in the political context of the rise of German National Socialism in the 1920s—30s. ¹ However, despite the considerable input of scholars, most of whom agree that the Protocols was commissioned and forged by the foreign office of the Russian secret police, a number of important questions still remain unsolved. For example, what was the function of the Protocols in the development of anti-Judaic sentiments, which Robert Wistrich has called "the longest hatred"? What was the typically "Russian" ingredient in the parole of the Protocols and what belonged to the more or less standard anti-Semitic langue? What was the stance of the Russian Orthodox Church on the Protocols and what was its role in its distribution, given the fact that Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus, whose version of the Protocols became the standard for further publications, was a church writer who sought the position of Nicholas II's confessor (dukhovnik)? Who in fact wrote the Protocols, if not Petr Ivanovich Rachkovskii himself, the chief of the Russian secret police in Paris? Recent scholarship provides some direct and oblique insights into these questions.

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Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn's classic study of TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion, ² has finally reached a Russian audience — the very audience targeted by the Protocols back in the 1900s. However, the full Russian translation would hardly constitute a reference point for discussion but for two brief essays by Father Aleksandr Men' included in the 2000 edition of the book. Men' was one of the most prolific Russian Orthodox church writers who in the 1970s and 1980s embodied for Orthodox — and, to be sure, Catholic and Protestant — intellectuals the absolute standard of integrity, honesty, and spiritual opposition to the stagnating communist regime. Men''s essays linking Nazi antisemitism and the Protocols were purged from the first Russian edition of Cohn's book (1990), together with a brief note on Masonry that Men' wanted to append. Unfortunately, they reappeared too late, ten years after Men''s mysterious assassination; they came to light in a socio-political atmosphere in which the appearance of Men''s name in the Russian translation of Cohn's book was hardly enough to outweigh the influence of widely circulating Russian publications of the Protocols, let alone the new hagiographies of...