The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a pamphlet made by police officers of Tsarist Russia copying a French text of political satire and other documents. The Protocols contain the minutes of the alleged meetings held by representatives of the Jewish communities in the Jewish cemetery in Prague to establish how to dominate the world. The falsification was proven beyond any reasonable doubt in 1921 by the London Times, but, nevertheless, the document continued to circulate. For anti-Semites and supporters of conspiracy theories it was in fact a perfect text, because it presented the Jews exactly as they imagined them and seemed to demonstrate that conspiracy ideas were founded. Even today the Protocols circulate in some environmentsincluding some political movements in our country, but fortunately their diffusion is much more limited than in the past and any sensible person recognizes that they are false.
What are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a false document, created in the last years of the 19th century in Paris by agents of the Ochrana, the secret police of Tsarist Russia. The purpose was discredit liberal political systems and Jewshypothesizing that a conspiracy to dominate the world was underway. The Protocols would be a sort of minutes of the meetings that took place at Jewish cemetery in Praguein which the “elders of Zion”, that is, the leaders of the Jewish community, established how to gain control of the world.
In reality, the “elders of Zion” never existed and no one ever organized secret meetings at the Jewish cemetery in Prague, but the authors of the pamphlet presented the meetings as real. The tools that the “elders of Zion” intended to use to achieve their goals were parliamentarism, freedom of the press, criticism of nationalism and religious authoritarianism. In essence, all the achievements of modernity they were passed off as tools used by a minority of evil people for the purpose of world domination. The authors of the falsification, in fact, intended to defend an autocratic regime, that of the Tsar, and to put liberal systems in a bad light. The Jews, after all, were already subject to discrimination and were often considered promoters of social subversion, particularly in Eastern European countries. There was also a widespread idea that they were plotting to control the economy and politics. The Protocols, therefore, had to provide evidence (fabricated atd hoc) of a conspiracy that was already believed and presented the Jews with the negative characteristics that anti-Semitic propaganda attributed to them: greedy for money, false, dangerous for social stability.
History of the document
The Protocols were created in several phases. Already in 1868 the German anti-Semite Hermann Goedsche published a work entitled Biarritz, in which he imagined that every hundred years the leading rabbis held a meeting in the Jewish cemetery in Prague to discuss how to dominate the world. The “complete” version of the Protocols was instead drawn up in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century by agents of the Ochrana and published in installments in 1903 by a Petersburg newspaper. Two years later, the Russian Revolution of 1905, which forced the Tsar to establish the Parliament, was interpreted by supporters of the autocracy and anti-Semites as proof of the authenticity of the Protocols, which were again published by self-styled mystic Sergei Nilus.
For some years the text circulated only in Russia, but after the First World War it arrived in Western Europe, favored by the conspiracy climate widespread in many countries. It was translated into the main European languages, including Italian, and many newspapers presented it as an authentic document. II Protocols favored the spread of anti-Semitismbecause they gave proof of the alleged “Jewish conspiracy” to dominate the world.
Proof of forgery
The falsification was proven beyond any reasonable doubt in 1921 by the London Times, which published five articles on the subject and demonstrated how the Protocols were the plagiarism of a text of political satire, the imaginary dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieupublished in 1864 by the French author Maurice Joly.
Nonetheless, the Protocols did not disappear from circulation: for anti-Semites and supporters of conspiracy theories they were a document of exceptional value, because they perfectly reflected their beliefs (in fact it was created on purpose!). For this reason, they continued to be presented in many quarters as an authentic document. They were widely spread in the Nazi Germany and in other countries where anti-Semitism was widespread, but they were also printed in the rest of the world. In the United States, for example, the publication was financed by Henry Fordthe famous automotive industrialist. In Italy, they were published for the first time in 1921, but had maximum diffusion at the end of the 1930s, when the fascist regime began the campaign against the Jews and introduced the racial laws.
The diffusion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion today
After the Second World War and the discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism drastically decreased in the West and the diffusion of the Protocols also waned. The pamphlet, moreover, had contributed to creating the climate of anti-Jewish hatred from which the extermination had arisen.
However, even after the war the document continued to be circulated and presented as authentic in some circles. It is cited and considered authentic by some political movements and some (minority) newspapers Arab and Islamic countriesdue to the conflict with the State of Israel. It also circulates in far-right movements of many countries, including Italian ones, and is sometimes mentioned by supporters of conspiracy theories.
