“I’ve made my mind up; don’t confuse me with the facts. . . “
The strange history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery many times exposed, illustrates this human failing. It shows how readily men can ignore anything which does not support ideas and intentions long preconceived; it is also remarkable evidence of how God has used unscrupulous men to fulfil His promise that the Jews would find no rest during their long banishment.
The Protocols first saw light of day in Russia in a series of St. Petersburg newspaper articles in 1903. Based on what were claimed to be the minutes of a meeting in France of freemasons and Jewish elders, they purported to be details of a plot to overthrow civilisation and establish a Jewish world state. The plan was to manipulate the international money markets and bring about financial chaos, allowing a few Jewish millionaires to take complete control; as an alternative strategy the world population was to be infected with disease.
Two years later in 1905 the Protocols appeared again in Russia in a book, The Great Within the Small, written by Sergei Nilus,
“. . . a learned, pious, credulous Conservative, who combined much theological and some historical erudition with a singular lack of knowledge of the world”.
Nilus seems to have known from the start that the Protocols were dubious, and in this and later editions in French and English gave conflicting explanations. First they had been stolen from “one of the most influential and most highly initiated leaders of Freemasonry”.
Then they had been found “in the safes at the headquarters of the Society of Zion . . . in France”. Later they were claimed to be notes of a plan submitted to the ‘Council of Elders’ by Theodor Hertzl at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. When bluntly taxed about their authenticity Nilus said: “Let us suppose that the Protocols are false. Is it not possible that God should nevertheless make use of them in order to expose the iniquity that is already approaching?. . . He can proclaim truth through the mouth of a liar”; a remarkable example of a mind closed to the truth.
The Protocols attracted little attention until after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the appearance of the Bolsheviks, among whom were many Jews professing and practising political doctrines that in some points resembled those in the Protocols, led many to believe that Nilus’s alleged discovery was genuine. They were widely discussed and translated, appearing in London under the title of The Jewish Peril in 1920, and in German translation the same year, selling 120,000 copies. A contemporary Jewish reporter wrote:
“In Berlin I attended several meetings which were entirely devoted to the Protocols. The speaker was usually a professor, a teacher, an editor, a lawyer, or someone of that kind. The audience consisted of members of the educated class, civil servants, tradesmen, former officers, ladies, above all students, students of all faculties and years of seniority . . . Passions were whipped up to the boiling point”.
A year later, in August 1921, the Protocols were conclusively and comprehensively exposed. In a series of articles in The Times, “Our Constantinople correspondent” (Philip Graves, half-brother of the writer and poet Robert Graves) showed in detail that they had been hastily and carelessly plagiarised from a French book, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, ou la Politique de Machiavel au XIX Siecle. Par un Contemporain, published in Brussels in 1865 and written by Maurice Joly, a Paris lawyer and publicist. The book was a thinly veiled attack on the despotism of Napoleon III in the form of a series of dialogues between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, and for his pains Joly was swiftly arrested and imprisoned.
Graves’s articles contain a detailed analysis and quotations at length from the Protocols and the Dialogues to substantiate his conclusion. He wrote:
“Is it necessary to produce further proofs that the majority of the Protocols are simply paraphrases of the Geneva Dialogues, with wicked Hebrew Elders, and finally an Israelite world ruler in the place of Machiavelli-Napoleon III, and the brutish ‘goyim’ ( Gentiles) substituted for the fickle masses, ‘gripped in a vice by poverty, ridden by sensuality, devoured by ambition . . . ‘?”.
How did the Dialogues reach Russia, and who perpetrated the forgery? They came into Graves’s hands from a Russian living in Constantinople who had bought them from an ex-officer of the Okrana, the Russian secret police. At that time there were close connections between the secret police of Napoleon III and the Okrana, which led Graves to conclude that the plagiarist was in the ranks of the Okrana, and that the motive was to focus general discontent on a vulnerable racial minority.
Graves’s final comment on the Protocols is, in the light of Bible prophecy, more perceptive than probably he realised:
“They have done harm not so much, in the writer’s opinion, by arousing anti-Jewish feeling, which is older than the Protocols and will persist in all countries where there is a Jewish problem until that problem is solved; rather they have done harm by persuading all sorts of mostly well-to-do people that every present manifestation of discontent on the part of the poor is an unnatural phenomenon, a factitious agitation caused by a secret society of Jews”.
Surely, no more would have been heard of the Protocols after such a comprehensive exposé. Yet they have, on the contrary, continued to be drawn upon from that day to this to justify anti-Semitism. The murderers of the German foreign minister Rathenau in 1922, for example, tried to justify their crime by pleading that, as a Jew, he was one of the Elders of Zion. Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote in 1924:
” . . . with groans and moans the Frankfurter Zeitung repeats again and again that the Protocols are forgeries. This alone is evidence of their authenticity. What many Jews unconsciously wish to do is here clearly set forth”.
The Protocols appeared in 25 European cities between 1903 and 1944, in addition to further afield, in New York, Chicago and Brazil, despite court proceedings in Berne between 1934 and 1937 which declared them to be “ridiculous nonsense” and “immoral”.
In more recent years the Protocols have played their part in fostering Arab anti-Semitism. President Nasser of Egypt recommended the document to an Indian visitor:
“It proves beyond all doubt that 300 Zionists, each knowing the others, control the fate of the European continent and elect their successors from among themselves. . . “.
Finally, Yehoshafat Harkabi, an Israeli scholar and student of the Arab-Israeli conflict, estimated in 1967 that of 160 recent books in Arabic dealing with Israel, some 50 were based directly on the Protocols or quoted them sympathetically.
Why is it that such a thoroughly discredited document has been drawn upon for so long? The immediate answer lies in the wickedness of men untroubled by scruples about authenticity so long as their predilections are fed. The underlying and definitive answer lies in the will of God.
The history of the Protocols prompts indignation against those who perpetrated and have perpetuated such a fraud; sorrow for those who suffered as a result; but, above all, wonder, that in the most unlikely places evidence of prophecy being fulfilled is to be found. Well was it written that “among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest” (Deut. 28:65), and with good cause we can trust in the Bible as the inspired Word of God.
Footnote
For an account of the Protocols in the broader setting of the development of Zionism see: Zionism—A Bible Student Study by Sister Ray Walker (Bible Student Press, 27 Wayside Linley, Alsager, Stoke-on-Trent), from which material for this article was drawn, together with the following other sources:
The Times newspaper, 16-20 August 1921
Jewish History Atlas, Martin Gilbert, London 1981
The War against the Jews 1933-45, Lucy Dawidowicz, Penguin 1983
The Israelis—Founders and Sons, Amos Elon, Penguin 1983.
The Kingdom of God has been a cornerstone of the gospel from the earliest church