The Russian Protocols of Zion in Japan: Yudayaka/Jewish Peril Propaganda and Debates in the 1920s (review)

Along with the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the most important ideological tracts of the last century and a half. It has served to motivate and justify some of the most heinous crimes ever committed. Despite a century of continuous debunking, it continues to circulate, and its central contention-that Jews are engaged in a centuries-old and largely successful conspiracy to take over the world and are at this very moment working single-mindedly to destroy those last few who resist them-is widely believed, particularly but by no means exclusively in the Arab-Muslim world. The Islamist group Hamas cites the Protocols by name in article 32 of its governing charter ¹ ; and in October 2003, Malaysia's then-prime minister Mahatir Mohamad told an Arab summit, "The Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." ² In the United States, the Protocols remains popular among white supremacist and other right-wing groups. In 2004, it was for sale on Walmart's website with a description suggesting it might be credible. ³ And international outrage erupted in the mid-1980s when The New York Times reported that dozens of books inspired by the Protocols were being published in Japan. ⁴

The exact origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are shrouded in mystery, although it is clear that much of it was plagiarized from other sources, including 160 passages or 40 per cent of the entire work that was lifted from Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (A dialogue in hell: conversations between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, 1864), a satirical critique of Napoleon III by Maurice Joly. ⁵ Recent research by the Italian scholar Cesare de Michelis argues that the widely held view that the Protocols was originally composed in French in Paris by agents of the czarist secret police in the late 1890s is incorrect. De Michelis argues that it was composed by antisemitic publicists in Russia between 1902 and 1903 to discredit Zionism. ⁶ In any case, the version of the Protocols that became canonical appeared in 1905, as an appendix to Velikoe v malom i antichrist (The great in the small: the coming of the Antichrist and the rule of Satan on earth), a religious tract by a little-known Russian Orthodox mystic named Sergei Nilus. The Protocols garnered scant attention, even in its native Russia, however, until after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when Nilus's work was reprinted and offered as a simplistic explanation of why the revolution had taken place and who was to blame.

An English translation of the Protocols appeared in Britain in 1920; and the automobile magnate Henry Ford published it in the United States the same year under the title The International Jew. Throughout much of the 1920s, Ford's newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, serialized articles that reinforced the antisemitic worldview of the Protocols. The credence Ford gave the Protocols facilitated its spread around the world. Hitler idolized Ford and is said to have kept a picture of him on his desk.

The Protocols arrived in Japan at the same time it did in the United States and other countries. Japan dispatched more than 70,000 troops to Russia between 1918 and 1922 in the Siberian Expedition, part of an abortive international attempt to reverse the Russian Revolution. There they were exposed to the forgery by White Russian troops, who had been issued copies to familiarize them with the ruthless enemy against whom they were supposedly fighting. Japanese soldiers and personnel brought the Protocols back to Japan, where it was translated and disseminated.

There are two views concerning the Protocols' reception in Japan. The first is that the Protocols essentially created antisemitism in Japan, where it was previously unknown. This theory suggests...