A Fatal Fraud: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Quiz

Answer: True

The "Protocols" were plagiarized from a satirical work by the French lawyer and author Maurice Joly entitled "Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu" ("Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu"). The "Dialogues", which was published in Belgium in 1864, was a political satire lambasting the government of Napoleon III during the Second Empire. It has been estimated that over two fifths of the "Protocols" were plagiarized from Joly's work.

Some defenders of the "Protocols have seized upon this fact to argue that, although the "Protocols" as we know it is indeed a forgery, there was nonetheless an "original" document of a similar nature from which the work was plagiarized. This argument omits one vital point: Joly's "Dialogues" had nothing whatsoever to do with the Jews. It was aimed at the government of the Second Empire in France and did not mention Jews at all, either individually or collectively. The author (or authors) of the "Protocols" simply substituted the Jewish elders for the government officials mentioned in Joly's work.

Answer: Russia

The "Protocols" were written in Paris somewhere between 1895 and 1899; opinion differs as to whether the author was Pytor Ivanovich Rachovsky (an agent of the Russian secret police, the Okhranka), Russian propogandist Mathieu Golovinski, or Russian journalist Ilya Tsion (whose name, ironically, means "Zion" in Russian). The general consensus, however, seems to be that the work originated amongst the Okhranka. The "Protocols" were first published by Sergei Nilius, one of Rachovsky's associates, in 1905 (An abbreviated version had appeared in the Russian newspaper "Znamia" two years earlier).

The reasons for the work's creation were threefold; a very similar forgery had been making the rounds in Europe for some time which purported to be a Will and Testament drawn up by Peter the Great to the successive tsars of Russia, which consisted of a dictum to conquer and control the world. This forgery, which had appeared in France during the reign of Napoleon, fed into European fears of a "Russian threat" (not unlike the "Communist threat" which gripped the U.S. in the 1950s); the "Protocols" neatly subverted the "Russian threat" into a "Jewish threat". The Okhranka also hoped to use the work to make Jews the scapegoats for Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese war (much as Hitler would later make them the scapegoats for Germany's defeat in WWI); in this, they were horrifically successful. Finally, it was hoped that national fears inspired by the "Protocols" would shore up the flagging support for the reign of the weak-willed Nicholas II.

Nicholas was the son of the virulently anti-Semitic Tsar Alexander III; in the first year of Alexander's reign alone, there were approximately two hundred pogroms among the Jews of Russia which left about forty people dead, numerous women raped and many others homeless and destitute. Many more pogroms followed throughout his reign. Alexander also enacted the "May laws" which drove Russian Jews back into the Pale of Settlement. Nicholas shared his father's regard for the Jews as a depraved race who bore the so-called "ancestral burden of deicide" as a result of the crucifixion of Christ; under his reign occured the single most horrific attack on Jews in Russian history during the week of October 18-25, 1905, when the Black Hundreds (an unofficial Russian police force) killed hundreds of Jews throughout Russia, destroyed countless homes and businesses, and left thousands wounded and injured. Over 200,000 Jews emigrated from Russia during this year alone. According to Edvard Radzinsky's biography of Nicholas ("The Last Tsar; the Life and Death of Nicholas II") the Tsar was delighted when the "Protocols" first appeared and accepted them as genuine. Later, he eventually recognized that they were a forgery (although both he and the tsarina were known to keep a copy at their bedside); by this time, however, the fuse had been lit.

Answer: The Jewish cemetery in Prague

The germ of what would eventually become the "Protocols" began in the mid nineteenth century with a single chapter of a novel entitled "Biarritz" by one Hermann Goedsche, writing under the pseudonym of "Sir John Retcliffe". Goedsche was an anti-Semitic Prussian government bureaucrat who had been dismissed from his post and had done time in prison for forgery. The chapter in question was entitled "In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague" and relates a secret centennial midnight conference of Jewish elders presided over by a Rabbi alternately named Eichhorn or Reichhorn. This conference details a Jewish plot against Western Christian civilization. This single chapter was excerpted and printed in Russia as an anti-Semitic tract in the early 1870s and was widely accepted as fact, even though it originated as part of a novel. "In the Jewish Cemetery" frequently appears as a prologue in editions of the "Protocols"; in some editions, it is not a rabbi but Satan himself who addresses the Jewish elders.

According to the "Encyclopedia Judaica", cemeteries are not considered to be hallowed ground in Jewish tradition, as they are in much of Christian tradition. The Talmud contains warnings against visiting or remaining in a graveyard after dark, as they were once considered the habitations of evil spirits. Members of the Jewish priesthood (the Kohanim) are prohibited even from entering a cemetery except to bury an immediate family member. A midnight meeting of Jewish elders convening in a graveyard, such as the one described in "Biarritz", would have been completely out of keeping with Jewish law and tradition.

Answer: Wolves

Many passages in the "Protocols" are so moustache-twirlingly evil that the work might actually be amusing to read if it were not for the malice with which it was created and the havoc and tragedy that it created. Protocol #11 contains the phrase "The Goyim is a flock of sheep and we are their wolves. And you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock?" Elsewhere (#15), Gentiles are compared to cattle to be led to slaughter. Such passages fed into ancient fears that the Jews were a diabolical race who ritually slaughtered Christians; the most pernicious of these was the medieval "blood libel", which alleged that it was a Jewish practice to slaughter Christian children (sometimes by crucifixion) and use their blood to make the Passover matzoh. These rumors incited countless attacks on Jews throughout Europe throughout the Middle Ages, even though they were denounced and declared baseless by at least two popes (Innocent IV and Gregory X), who pointed out that Jewish law in fact prohibits the consumption of blood.

One passage in Protocol #3 promises that Jews will be safe in the ensuing world chaos following the collapse of the world economy: "'Ours' they will not touch, because the moment of attack will be known to us and we shall take measures to protect our own." Much of the history of European Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century makes this passage a particularly sick joke.

Answer: England

The English journalist Phillip Graves (a non-Jew), who was the Constantinople correspondent for the London "Times", exposed the "Protocols" as a fraud in a series of articles in the London "Times". Graves' articles (which appeared on August 16, 17 and 18, 1921) detailed point by point how the "Protocols" were "... paraphrased very hastily and carelessly" from Joly's work and ends by deploring that "... they have done harm by persuading all sorts of mostly well-to-do people that every recent manifestation of discontent on the part of the poor is an unnatural phenomenon, a factitious agitation caused by a secret society of Jews." In the year prior to Graves' exposure, Lucien Wolf had written a pamphlet of the Jewish Board of Deputies exposing the work as spurious. In 1935, the American author Herman Bernstein wrote "The Truth About 'The Protocols of Zion' ", which included information provided by Count du Chayla, a personal acquaintance of Sergei Nilius, who had originally published the work.

In 1934, the "Protocols" were the subject of a lawsuit in Berne, Switzerland, brought at the behest of the country's Jewish community against several individuals who were using the work to stir up anti-Semitism. The defendants were totally unable to verify the work's authenticity or refute the testimony of expert witnesses who demonstrated that it was a fraud. The Swiss court denounced the "Protocols" as "ridiculous nonsense" and declared the work to be a forgery. In 1938 Father Pierre Charles, a Belgian Jesuit priest, also published a sharp rebuttal of the "Protocols". Sadly, these events had little effect on the inexorably rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the "Protocols" were denounced and declared fraudulent by a U.S. Senate committee in 1965 and by a South African court in 1991.

Answer: Adolf Hitler

This statement appears in "Mein Kampf". Disseminating the "Protocols" among the German people (particularly German youth) and propogating its message was of paramount importance in Hitler's campaign to eradicate the Jewish race. He writes of the "Protocols": "Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken."

During the Nuremberg trials, former Nazi leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky, head of the anti-partisan forces in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, gave the lie to the theory of the "Jewish menace" ("jüdische Gefahr"): "I am the only living witness but I must say the truth. Contrary to the opinion of the National Socialists, that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling fact was that they had no organization whatsoever. The mass of the Jewish people were taken completely by surprise. They did not know at all what to do; they had no directives or slogans as to how they should act. This is the greatest lie of anti-Semitism because it gives the lie to that old slogan that the Jews are conspiring to dominate the world and that they are so highly organized. In reality, they had no organization of their own at all, not even an information service. If they had had some sort of organization, these people could have been saved by the millions, but instead, they were taken completely by surprise. Never before has a people gone as unsuspectingly to its disaster. Nothing was prepared. Absolutely nothing."

Answer: Henry Ford

Although in many respects a genius, and certainly a consummate man of business, Ford was essentially very provincial and ignorant when it came to world affairs. This did not, however, deter him from speaking "authoritatively" on any number of issues, not the least of which was the supposed Jewish stranglehold on the world's economy; moreover, his wealth and influence bought him the means to publish his views in his weekly newspaper, the "Dearborn Independent".

The "Independent" ran a series of ninety-one articles between 1920 and 1922 written by three of Ford's associates (one of whom was a friend of Hitler's vice-chancellor; another was a former tsarist officer in Russia and leader of the "Black Hundreds") citing the "Protocols" as definitive proof of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to control the global economy and undermine Christian values and morals. From the articles in the "Independent", Ford published "The International Jew" which was widely distributed in the U.S. and, especially, in Germany. Hitler was a great admirer of "Heinrich Ford", whom he acknowledged as his inspiration and to whom he awarded the "Grand Cross of the German Eagle" in 1938.

In 1927, faced with a series of libel suits filed by Jewish businessmen and financiers whom he had attacked in the "Independent", Ford publicly acknowledged the fraudulence of the "Protocols" and expressed deep regret that his publication had "...been made the medium for resurrecting exploded fiction". Privately, however, Ford's views had not changed; he would later maintain that the Jews were responsible for World War II. The infamous Father Coughlin (who had printed the "Protocols" in his own weekly paper "Social Justice" and whom Ford supported both financially and otherwise) stated subsequently that "Mr. Ford did retract his accusations against the Jews. But neither Mr. Ford nor I retract the statement that many of the events predicted in the 'Protocols' have come to pass."

Answer: Japan

Despite Japan's alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II, thousands of European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution were welcomed into Japan and given sanctuary. The Jews are now a small minority in Japan (about two thousand) and have generally been treated with great tolerance. Nonetheless, a considerable anti-Semitic movement does exist; a large body of literature alleging Jewish plots for national and international control, much of it fueled by the "Protocols".

The fundamentalist Christian preacher Uno Masami, who has authored a few bestselling books and is a frequent guest on television talk-shows, has expounded a number of classic anti-Semitic doctrines, such as Jewish control of the media and economy and Holocaust denial (that such movements exist in a country with such a tiny Jewish minority is an indication of just how insidious anti-Semitism is).

However, there exists a curious school of thought among certain Japanese which holds that the Jews are to be admired, not condemned, for their plan of global dominance; there have even been "self help" books which explain how the plans set forth in the "Protocols" can help the Japanese achieve the same power as the Jews have (supposedly) achieved.

Answer: Egypt

The 41-part series "A Horseman Without a Horse" takes place in the time just before the formation of the state of Israel. The villains of the story are three stereotypical Jewish elders engaged in a desperate plot to keep a copy of the "Protocols" from being translated from the Russian and distributed throughout the Middle East. The series, which aired in the fall of 2002 during the Muslim holy period of Ramadan, was denounced, not only by Jewish, Israeli, and American groups, but by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, which stated that the principles of free expression "... should not be abused to propagate events that might incite hatred." (Since 1979, Egypt has been bound by treaty to prevent incitement against Israel). The organization strongly recommended that the show begin with a statement acknowledging that the "Protocols" are a forgery. The prominent Egyptian writer Samir Raafat said of the series "Once it goes on television it enters everyone's living room, and that's where the danger is. You are spoon-feeding them more hate propaganda. This is not conducive to tolerance of the other or knowing the other. There's a price going to be paid."

Several thoughtful and intelligent authors and commentators in the Muslim world have decried the proliferation of long-discredited European anti-Semitic myths (such as the "Protocols" and the aforementioned "blood libel", which originated around the time of the Crusades) among the same Muslim extremists who continually deplore the pernicious influence of the West on Arab life and culture. Sallah 'Issa, editor of the Egyptian weekly "Al Qahira", highlighted this paradox in an article published in the January 14, 2004 issue of the independent weekly "Nahdhat Misr", in which he stated that certain Muslim groups "... do not flinch from disseminating, espousing, and publishing all the legends that were common in medieval Europe in order to justify Europe's persecution of the Jews because of their monopoly in financial activity and money-lending, one of which was the 'matzah of blood' that the Jews [allegedly] prepare on Passover from the blood of a gentile child ... They embraced, and still warmly embrace, the stupid book "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", fabricated by the advocates of the Czarist tyranny in Russia to arouse hatred of the Jews because many of them were participating in revolutionary activity against the [Czarist] empire." Earlier, in 1997, the Arab author Abu Fakhr had published a series of articles entitled "Seven Prejudices about the Jews" in the Lebanese newspaper "al-Hayat" severely criticizing widespread ignorance and misconceptions about the Jews and Judaism in modern Arab culture and thought.

Answer: Malaysia

The departing Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahatir Mohammad, delivered this astounding speech which maintained among other things that the Jews "... invented Socialism, Communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others." Years earlier, in 1998, Mahatir had blamed the decline of the Malaysian ringgit (unit of currency) on a Jewish conspiracy. Despite the unequivocally anti-Semitic nature of the speech, it met with surprisingly little condemnation from the U.S., largely because Malaysia is overall one of the more moderate and pro-U.S. countries in the Muslim world. Copies of "The International Jew" were distributed at this rally; when questioned about this afterward, Mahatir disavowed any association with the book or its contents.

Copies of the "Protocols" have been distributed in the U.S. by the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam, and assorted neo-Nazi groups; throughout the world certain fringe groups, both Christian and Muslim, distribute copies and continue to insist that they are genuine. Copies were also made available at the United Nations' 2001 conference on racism, characterized by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as a "circus of calumny" (another Holocaust survivor, American Congressman Tom Lantos of California, described the display of the "Protocols" and other hate literature at the conference as "the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period."). All of which illustrates that the real tragedy of the "Protocols" is not that it was created in the first place, but that a work which has, upon analysis, been repeatedly characterized as "ridiculous nonsense" and exposed as a plagiarism "paraphrased very hastily and carelessly" from another work (to quote Graves) should have been believed by so many and used as a pretext for genocide and mass-murder.