The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a literary forgery that promotes an alleged Jewish conspiracy for world domination. It has been considered an anti-Semitic hoax since its first publication in 1903. Despite being debunked, it continues to spread as an authentic text and has been used for propaganda by the Nazis and Hamas.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or “The Protocols of Zion” is a literary forgery that propagates an alleged Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. Since its first reported publication in a Russian newspaper in 1903, it has been considered by scholars to be an anti-Semitic hoax. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion gained greater notoriety in 1905, when they were incorporated into the second edition of a book on the Antichrist by the mystic of the same name, Serge Nilus.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is written in the first person, intended as the perspective of a Zionist Elder. He instructs fellow Zionists on methods, or protocols, for conspiratorially dominating the world’s financial institutions and harnessing the power of the mass media. The protocols cited in the text include social problems such as alcoholism and materialism, and therefore present them as the result of an orchestrated conspiracy. Extracts of the text were plagiarized from an 1864 book by the French satirist Maurice Joly, entitled “Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu)”.
Also known as “The Protocols of the Illuminati”, “The Jewish Peril”, “The Protocols and the World Revolution” and “The War Against the Kingship of Christ”, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion have adopted several titles from various anonymous publishers, and has been tailored to fit different anti-Semitic agendas. After the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Protocols were used to propagate the conspiracy theory that the Bolshevik movement had been a component of the so-called Jewish conspiracy for Jewish world domination. The publications distributed of the Protocols were often printed with ominous occult symbols such as the Antichrist’s mark, “INRI,” or the slogan, “Thus We Will Conquer.”
In 1919, excerpts from an English-language translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, now called the “Red Bible,” were published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. The text was presented as a Bolshevik manifesto and all references to an alleged Jewish authorship were omitted. In 1920, the first English-language edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in London, under the title “The Jewish Peril” and ran out of five editions. Also in 1920, industry magnate Henry Ford sponsored the publication of 500,000 copies; Ford also ran an anti-Semitic periodical, The Dearborn Independent.
In 1921, Times of London reporter Philip Graves exposed the Protocols as a combined plagiarism of both Maurice Joly’s “Dialogue Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell” and the German anti-Semite, Hermann Goedsche’s novel, “Biarritz ”. The Protocols were again exposed as literary forgeries by the anti-Bolshevik Russian émigré, Vladimir Burtsev, in his 1938 book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proven Forgery, published in Paris. Despite its debunking, the Protocols continued to be treated as authentic and were used as propaganda by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s as required study material for students in Germany.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continue to spread as an authentic text in the new millennium. The Protocols is a best seller in Syria, Türkiye and Japan; the basis of anti-Semitic public TV documentaries in Iran; listed as effective in school books distributed under the Palestinian National Authority; and formally accepted by the Hamas Charter.
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