Setting the Record Straight Regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Fool's Errand?

Summary

My proposition is this: the history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been so muddled, so embroidered and embellished, that the damage to the historical truth concerning it is irreparable. A realistic, evidence-based assessment of that work, to replace the inflated, sensational, overwrought distortion of its importance—which is what the world possesses at this moment—may well be beyond us. Blame for this state of affairs cannot be laid at the feet of the scoundrels and lunatics who perpetrated and promoted the fraud. Rather it is the legacy of the debunkers, who since the 1920s and continuing into the present moment, have, in an undeniably good cause, allowed themselves too great a latitude in their methods, arguments, and applications of the rules of evidence. The essay advances several general explanations for this state of affairs and then relates them to a number of individual cases: the putative role of the Protocols in the worldview and practical politics of Adolf Hitler; the claims that the Protocols served as nothing less than the “warrant for genocide,” that is, the Holocaust; and the book's alleged capacity to mobilize mob action against Jews.

At any rate, the fact of the plagiarism has now been conclusively established, and the legend may be allowed to pass into oblivion.

—The Times of London, 1921

THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION is a forgery and a plagiarism. In its most popular versions, the text is always presented as of Jewish provenance, a deeply incriminating document that by one means or another fell into the hands of Gentiles. This utterly false claim of the document's Jewish authorship is what makes the Protocols a forgery. Its various promoters and interpreters also claim that it contains the records of twenty-four speeches delivered by the “Chief Sage of Zion” to a secret meeting of co-conspirators. Woven together, the individual protocols comprise an intricate Jewish plot to take over the world, destroy Christian states and communities, and reduce non-Jews to robot-like passivity. Employing the world association of Freemasons, who are their slaves unto death, the Jews conspire by means of liberal slogans, the subverting of sacred traditions, and both capitalism and anti-capitalism gradually to undermine all nations, “making a desert and calling it peace” (Tacitus). A heartlessly cruel despot will then rule over a Jewish world state.