The Perennial Conspiracy Theory

Reflections on the History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Michael Hagemeister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000532753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

The Perennial Conspiracy Theory is a collection of essays on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document which has created a pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory.

The author analyses the murky origins of this notorious forgery and the contested claims of authorship. He explores the impact of the Protocols on various countries during the interwar years including Soviet Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Nazi Germany, and the United States. He also profiles figures closely associated with the dissemination of antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as Sergei Nilus and Leslie Fry, as well as examining the controversies arising from the famous Bern trial related to the Protocols. The book concludes with an assessment of the ongoing influence of the Protocols in post-Soviet Russia.

This volume will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of antisemitism, conspiracy theories, the far right, Jewish studies, and modern history.

1 A fake conquers the worldThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200789-1

This chapter gives an overview of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First, the central ideas of the text are outlined, the plan of the conspiracy, the strategy, tactics, and objectives. Then the question of literary genre is discussed: Is it a negative utopia, a programme for world conquest, or the “Charter of the Antichrist”? The dissemination and reception of the Protocols is traced in detail, from Russia to the United States, United Kingdom, and France, and especially in Germany. In this context, reference is also made to the controversial assessment of their influence on Hitler and the Nazis. The question of the origins of the Protocols is then explored, distinguishing between legends and established facts based on the latest research. Finally, the reception of the Protocols today is outlined and the question of the unbroken seductive power of conspiracy thinking is raised.

It is amazing how effective fakes can be. Once published, they take on a life of their own, attracting “believers” and generating further lies and distortions. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (henceforth Protocols), first published at the beginning of the twentieth century, have been particularly successful in this respect.¹ Barely noticed at first, after two decades they had been translated into the world’s main languages and sold millions of copies. They have become the most influential text of modern antisemitism and the cornerstone of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory. They have spread to all corners of the earth and their “career” is far from over. How could this happen?

At first glance, the text itself seems rather dry, business-like. An unknown Jewish speaker appears in front of an unidentified audience (probably Jews) and explains – in quasi-confessional tones – the secret methods and goals of a supposedly centuries-old Jewish conspiracy against the entire non-Jewish world. The location and time of the meeting are as obscure as the identity of the speaker and his audience.² These conspiratorial circumstances and, even more so, the mysterious origin of the Protocols have encouraged speculation and obfuscation, and this not only on the part of their promoters and promulgators but also their opponents and debunkers who, according to Richard S. Levy, “since the 1920s and continuing into the present hour, have created their own set of durable myths concerning the Protocols” (Levy 2014: 44). While we can rule out that the Protocols are “genuine” – the meeting and the revelation scenario never took place in reality and the text has been proven to be a patchwork of plagiarism and fiction – we still do not know when, where, and with what intention the text was written. It is precisely the fact that the author or authors are not known, but also the emphasized objectivity with which the alleged conspiracy plan is presented point by point, that made it possible for the Protocols to be received as an authentic document and make what is described appear “real” in the eyes of their adherents.

The conspiracy plan – strategy, tactics, and objectives

The Protocols describe in great detail the strategy and tactics with which the alleged conspirators wish to subvert all areas of political, social, economic, and cultural life and subordinate them to their objectives, using the world association of Freemasons, who are their slaves unto death, for this purpose. The nations are to be ground down by party in-fighting and class struggles, wars and revolutions, economically ruined by the “power of gold” and financial manipulation, infected with the “poison of liberalism” and morally corrupted by rationalism, materialism and atheism – explicit reference is made to the “disintegrating effect” of “Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzscheism” (Anon. 1972: 24).³ Even a seemingly deep-rooted antagonism like that between capitalists and socialists is in fact part of the common plan of the conspirators, who are both the rulers of the financial markets and the agitators of the working class. Having been shattered and exhausted by anarchy and poverty in this way, the Gentiles, longing for peace and security, will then finally hand over all power to “the Jews” of their own free will.

Upon the ruins of the old social order, the Jewish leaders will then establish – in the guise of legality – a perfectly organized centralist and paternalistic dictatorship headed by a king “of the holy seed of David” (ibid.: 89). This world ruler, chosen and advised by the “Elders”, is described as a charismatic father-figure, a model of virtue, self-control, and reason: “The king of the Jews must not be at the mercy of his passions … [He] must sacrifice to his people all personal inclinations. Our supreme lord must be of an exemplary irreproachability” (ibid.: 88–89). Adored and idolized by the people as a devoted, loving, and kind-hearted father, the Jewish king will rule “with unbending will” over a pacified, unified, and hierarchically ordered world. There will be no room in this world either for the moral corruption engendered by luxury or for the debasing effects of drunkenness, and everyone will have a right – or rather an obligation – to work. Arbitrariness, corruption, and abuse of office will be severely punished: the necessary laws will be short, clear, and cast in stone. In the words of the speaker, who describes himself and his fellow conspirators as “benefactors of mankind”:

We shall contrive to prove that we are benefactors who have restored to the rent and mangled earth the true good and also freedom of the person, and therewith we shall enable it to be enjoyed in peace and quiet, with proper dignity of relations, on the condition, of course, of strict observance of the laws established by us. … Our authority will be glorious because it will be all-powerful … Our authority will be the crown of order, and in that is included the whole happiness of man.

(ibid.: 85)

The goal of the conspiracy, as extensively documented in the Protocols (more than half of the text is devoted to its description), is therefore not a bloody tyranny of terror or the extermination of the non-Jews,⁴ but the establishment of a “new society”, a conflict-free “sovereignty of reason” (ibid.: 28). It will be an empire in which the “mass of the people”, described as “blind” and incapable of ruling, are completely manipulated, taken care of, and controlled by the State, and live out their lives in dull happiness without having to assume the impossible burden of freedom.⁵ Although there is occasional talk of “despotism”, this refers less to physical violence and more to a rigid system of punishment and control. It is emphasized that the “inviolability of the person who honourably and strictly observes all the laws of life in common” will be preserved (ibid.: 85). In order to establish this realm of peace and security, sacrifices will, of course, be necessary, but as the speaker is at pains to point out: “the result justifies the means” (ibid.: 19).

It is noticeable that the text of the Protocols is completely devoid of the old, traditional accusations against Jews such as deicide, host desecration, well poisoning, ritual murder, blood defilement, fake conversion, or interest taking and usury.⁶ The Protocols have no relation to the Talmud, the alleged secret anti-Christian book of the Jews, either. Finally, the motives and images of modern, racially motivated antisemitism (such as physical inferiority, financial and sexual greed, racial intermixing) are also lacking. The only clearly anti-Jewish motives and defamations found in the Protocols concern the pursuit of world domination, the possession of money and gold, and global networking. On the other hand, there is extensive talk of law and order, a monopoly on violence, state finance and fiscal policy, national economics, the gold standard, higher education, mass media and its control – topics which dominated public discourse at the end of the nineteenth century and are still relevant today.

It is remarkable how rarely the Protocols, with their vision of leader cult and mass propaganda, universal surveillance and total subordination, denunciation, control of the legal apparatus, censoring of the press and aspiration to world domination, have been read as an anticipation of the modern police state and related to the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. This has only happened on a few occasions, for instance, in the work of Hannah Arendt, who in her famous book The Origins of Totalitarianism points to the “strangely modern elements” and the “extraordinary actuality” of the Protocols (Arendt 1986: 569)⁷ which “in their crackpot manner touch on every important issue of the time” (Arendt 1951: 348). And historian Geoffrey Hosking (1997: 394) observed: “Ironically, its [the Protocol’s] nightmare vision anticipated features of the Soviet Communist state far more accurately than it described Imperial Russia or the actual organization of the Jews”. One can read into the Protocols the fear of a dawning modern-totalitarian age, fear of the consequences of industrialization, globalization, and all-encompassing surveillance. The Jewish conspirators then appear as the all-powerful representatives and agents of modernity and become the objects of hatred for modernity’s opponents and losers.

The Protocols – a negative Utopia

The goal of the Jewish conspirators as depicted in the Protocols is the establishment of a worldwide totalitarian welfare dictatorship with socialist features. The Jewish king will ensure social peace and prosperity. For these great services the non-Jews will accept him and worship him as “benefactor”. This, however, corresponds to a recurring theme of the famous dystopias in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian literature. For instance, we encounter it in “The Grand Inquisitor” in Fëdor Dostoevskii’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), who – like the speaker of the Protocols – deems the majority of human beings weak, immature, and despicable, and relieves them from the burden of freedom in exchange for bread and security (Poliakov 1980: 69–78; Skuratovskii 2001: 193–204). The Jewish emperor of the Protocols bears similarities to the Antichrist as sketched by Vladimir Solov’ëv in his Short Tale of the Antichrist (1900) (Solov’ëv 1988; Hagemeister 2000, 2010). Solov’ëv’s Antichrist is a charismatic “superman” and self-proclaimed “benefactor” (blagodetel’), who gains world power with the help of the “mighty brotherhood of the Freemasons” (Solov’ëv 1988: 745) and builds his reign on the promise of universal peace and welfare, by providing “the most basic of all equalities – the equality of universal satiation” (ibid.: 747).⁸ In the same vein, the Protocols’ Jewish conspirators see themselves as “benefactors”, bringing eternal peace and order to the world (Hagemeister 2012b: 81–82, 87). And even in Evgenii Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We (1920), the vision of a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian “One-State”, the all-powerful ruler is known only as “the Benefactor”.⁹

However, unlike the literary works cited, in which the critical attitude of their authors is clearly indicated through the way in which the protagonists are presented and the stories told, the Protocols lack a narrative or narrated standpoint that could introduce an alternative voice, commenting on the proceedings. At no point is the fictitious speaker’s monologue interrupted or broken up. The very artlessness and unemotional, pedantic objectivity with which he describes the plan to conquer the world reinforces the “reality effect”, i.e. makes it easier for the reader to believe that this speech is genuine.

“Programme for world conquest” or the “Charter of the Antichrist”

The Protocols were first mentioned in April 1902 in an article by Mikhail Men’shikov (1859–1918), a well-known Saint Petersburg journalist and notorious antisemite who dismissed them as an obvious forgery (Men’shikov 2019 [1902]: 286–290). The first documented publication – still incomplete – occurred between August and September 1903 in a series of nine instalments in a small-circulation and short-lived newspaper of the extreme right called Znamia (The Banner) in Saint Petersburg.¹⁰ It was entitled Programme for World Conquest by the Jews. According to its publisher, the antisemitic publicist and writer Pavel Krushevan (1860–1909), it was a Russian translation of the original French “minutes (or protocols) of a meeting” of the so-called “World Union of Freemasons and Elders of Zion” (Krushevan 1903).

Expanded and amended versions of the Protocols appeared under various titles in the revolutionary year 1905 and in the following years in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and in the Russian provinces; these versions vary considerably not only in the number of sections or “protocols” they comprise and their content, but also as regards the information they provide on their age and origin (De Michelis 2004: 5–22).

The version that was finally to become notorious worldwide – which comprises 24 “protocols” and was supplemented with subheadings, a kind of guide for the reader – is linked to the name of Sergei Nilus (1862–1929). Nilus, a conservative publicist and religious writer, included the Protocols in the second edition of his devotional book The Great in the Small, published at Tsarskoe Selo in December 1905, to which he then added a new subtitle And the Antichrist as an Imminent Political Possibility (Nilus 1905). Nilus said he had received the Protocols in 1901 from a friend who had since died. The manuscript, “signed by the representatives of Zion, of the 33rd degree”, was supposedly stolen from one of the most highly placed leaders of Freemasonry in France (ibid.: 321–322); later he referred to the “Jewish plan to conquer the world” and claimed that it had been presented by Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel (Nilus 1917: 88–89).

In his commentary, Nilus interpreted the Protocols within the framework of his apocalyptic world-view as the “charter of the Antichrist”, a revelatory unveiling of the hidden strategy of the Satanic forces of darkness and their worldly allies – Jews and Masons – in their struggle against the divine forces of light, a struggle which seem...