From Pogrom: Kishinev and the tilt of history (Steven J. Zipperstein, 2018) pp167-70
Known universally, albeit read sparingly, with its essential message a commonplace, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as the document would soon be called, was translated into German, English, Swedish, Danish, Bulgarian, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Italian, Greek, and Arabic. In recent years it has become a mainstay of popular culture as the immediate backdrop to the wildly popular Da Vinci Code books and movies. The Protocols’ belief in dark, hidden forces that have long controlled the destiny of humanity remains among the cardinal assumptions of conspiracy theorists throughout the world.
Why this continuing allure? In part, no doubt, it is the byproduct of the document’s anonymity as well as its insistence that it was an authentic transcript. The authors never came forward to acknowledge it as their creation: Its authorship was attributed variously by its devotees to a member of King Solomon’s entourage, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, or the chief rabbi of Stockholm. The fact that it purported to be the real and uncensored words uttered by an elder of the Jews gave it a rare immediacy. Its repetitiveness, which for some was a source of annoyance, was also a boon, because no more than a few pages were required for readers to absorb its message. This meant that even the illiterate or semiliterate could be readily acquainted with it if others read them just a page or two. And though it was written and first published in 1903, the text would rise to prominence only once Russia was in the grasp of the Bolsheviks and their explosive message was getting a receptive hearing across Europe. As an accessible, readily digestible text with a tantalizingly mysterious authorship, The Protocols’ horrifying message was tested amid the convulsions of war and revolution.
It has, of course, long been recognized as a forgery. Almost from the moment of its first widespread circulation, it was clear that it was lifted from an obscure anti-Napoleon III political satire: Maurice Joly’s 1864 Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavelli et Montesquieu, In 1921 the London Times published a three-part series featuring side-by-side passages from The Protocols and Joly’s work, revealing that nearly 70 percent of its words—still more, as it happens, in the 1903 version published by Krushevan—were drawn verbatim from Joly. The fact that the Times saw the value in this exercise is a good indication of the credibility that the document had already achieved.
The first mention of such a text had appeared in print a year before Krushevan’s version, Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov, a well-known antisemite and journalist, described how in 1902 a “mysterious lady” came to him with it, saying she had managed to acquire the document—apparently stealing it—in Nice and had translated it from its original French into Russian, Menshikov said that he doubted its authenticity and refused to have anything to do with it.
Questions regarding its credibility were raised, as we will see, even by Krushevan. Why was it discovered in French? Why would the Jewish elder, whose voice is its centerpiece, admit to all the dastardly things he acknowledges in it? What relation were these protocols meant to have with the protocols of the Zionist movement published in German, not French? These and many other issues—aside, of course, from the verifiable fact that nearly the entire document was lifted from a book that had nothing at Sages of Zion, Pavel Krushevan, and the Shadow of Kishinev
all to do with Jews—have bedeviled the text’s credibility from nearly the moment it first surfaced in the public arena. But for many people these questions were overshadowed by its rhetorical power, the prospect it provided for eavesdropping on the most horrible of Jewish voices—one who was willing to acknowledge his contempt for all, including the Jews, his plans for world con quest, and his map for the restoration of the Davidic kingdom.
Such enormous ambiguities have also done little to dampen the allegiance of the text’s adherents, some of whom insist, core trary to all evidence, that Joly himself was Jewish—as if that were a test of its accuracy. And the secrecy surrounding its authorship those who produced it were committed, of course, to sustaining its anonymity—helped to perpetuate the notion that the voice captured in the document contained the actual words of a vaulted Jewish leader: It is a text whose greatest thrill is in the purported access to the unvarnished talk of humanity’s greatest foe.
Until recently it was widely assumed—beyond, that is, its most loyal devotees—that The Protocols had been stitched together by the Paris-based Okhrana chief Pyotr Rachkovsky and right-wing journalist Matvei Golovinskii, and that it was produced either at the time of the First Zionist Congress in 1897 or a year or two before then. Evidence supporting the claim, solidified in the wake of testimony at the Bern trial of 1934-35, in which Swiss publishers of the tract were accused by leaders of the Jewish commu hity of plagiarism and forgery, has subsequently been upended by conclusive linguistic and historical evidence. Especially because of its reference to events occurring after its reputed composhk tion in the mid-1890s, it is clear that neither Rachkovshy nor Golovinskii was its author.”
Amid the welter of tales surrounding the document’s origins, there has never been any doubt that its first version was in Krushevan’s newspaper. This remained, however, the most obscure of all its Russian-language versions, all but forgotten until it appeared in several editions in book form in 1905-6. Krushevan himself would never mention the document again, despite its many subsequent editions and his continued prominence on Russia’s Right. Benjamin Segel, the author of one of the ear. liest exposés of the text—Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, published in 1924—did not even know of the existence of Krushevan’s version. In the tale of the origins of The Protocols as told in right-wing circles by a Russian princess of Polish origin, Catherine Radziwill, it was an agent of the foreign branch of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, Golovinskii, who visited her Paris apartment in 1904 or 1905 (on Rachkovsky’s orders) and handed her the first version, in French, of The Protocols. “Radziwill,” writes Michael Hagemeister, “gave an exact description of the manuscript: different handwritings, yellow paper, and a big spot of blue ink on the first page.” Radziwill also showed no awareness that The Protocols had already been published in Russia a year or two earlier.“
Evidence that Krushevan was its author, or at least its coauthor, is convincing. The Italian linguist Cesare G. De Michelis has identified crucial markers in the document itself that he likens to fingerprints in his annotated translation of the first version, The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion. To unearth the document’s author, he considers “the sole element that cannot lie: the text itself, its linguistic nature, its construction and the modalities of its tradition …an operation as obvious and banal as it has been systematically overlooked.
It was revealed by these textual markers that the text was produced in the eastern Ukraine or Bessarabia.
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