Telling Tales (7 page)

Although summarized here, the full-length
Protocols
is hardly discursive. In fact it extends only to enough pages to form a slim pamphlet, and has traditionally been fleshed out with similarly extreme anti-Semitic literature and commentary in order to fill up a respectable-sized paperback book. Its tone is general and its style is quasi-official-sounding, as in this extract from Protocol 16, in which the role of a Jewish president is delineated:

The president will, at our discretion, interpret the sense of such of the existing laws as admit of various interpretation; he will further annual them when we indicate to him the necessity to do so, besides this, he will have the right to propose temporary laws, and even new departures in the government constitutional working, the pretext both for the one and the other being the requirements for the supreme welfare of the State.

Typically, this entry is light on specifics and heavy on pseudo-legalese, and this of course is one of the reasons that
The Protocols
lends itself so easily to the ideologies of so many racist leaders the world over, from the Arab states to Africa and America.

The story of the origins of
The Protocols
is still shrouded in some mystery, and may never be known in full, but it is now generally agreed that the author was a Russian secret police officer known for his forging abilities. His name was Pytor Ivanovich Rachovsky and he was part of the movement whose aim was to quell the troublesome revolutionary uprisings in a Russia beginning to outgrow its old aristocratic leadership, and for whom the prospect of a Jewish rebellion was regarded as a real possibility. One of the specific targets of Rachovsky and his cronies was the national finance minister, Sergei Witte, whose reforms seemed to play into the hands of the modernizers so feared by the old guard. This was in the very first days of the twentieth century, but the story of how the text came to take the form it did begins several years earlier: for Rachovsky was not just a hoaxer, he was a plagiarist too.

There were two works of fiction from which the author drew to create his bogus historical tract. The first was a little-known piece of satirical writing by the Frenchman Maurice Joly, published in 1864 under the title
Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu
. This imagined dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and the Enlightenment theorist Montesquieu was intended as a veiled attack on the political aims of Napoleon III (represented by the Italian) whose methods were set against the liberal thesis of Montesquieu. An example of the popular dialectical style of rhetoric, the satire has each speaker make increasingly drastic claims for their preferred style of ruling. At one point, Joly’s Machiavel boasts of how he would seize power through control of the press, employing an image unusual in nineteenth-century France to illustrate his point: ‘ “Like the god Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, and these arms will give their hands to all the different shades of opinion throughout the country.” ’

Invoking the Hindu god Vishnu would have been equally unexpected to readers in turn-of-the-century Russia when, in
The Protocols
, we find the intention that: ‘ “These newspapers, like the Indian god Vishnu, will be possessed of hundreds of hands, each of which will be feeling the pulse of varying public opinion.” ’

The second literary precedent for the hoax was a novel called
Biarritz
written by a particularly shady Prussian called, variously, Hermann Goedesche, Sir John Retcliffe or John Readcliffe. By day he worked as an openly anti-Semitic journalist and post office employee, but by night he was a romantic novelist – a sort of Prussian Walter Scott. And all this time he was actually a spy for the secret police as well. Just like Rachovsky, he used his literary skills to fake papers and letters which exposed left-wing politicians as dangerous democrats. And just like Rachovsky, he was a plagiarist. In
Biarritz
he borrows heavily from the satires of Maurice Joly as well, but appends to his story a section of his own creation that would directly prefigure the setting of
The Protocols
: the chapter entitled ‘In the Jewish Cemetery, Prague’ features an evil rabbi detailing a plot to overtake Europe with his bloodthirsty, Christian-hating ways.

This passage caught the attention of impressionable readers and publishers so readily that it would go on to be published as an essay in its own right, independent of the rest of the book. It would be seized upon for its consolidation of a Jewish threat that was felt by many, in the turbulent Eastern Europe of that time, to be all too real. Quite quickly, it seems, the fictional origins of Goedesche’s writings were forgotten and by 1872 it was being circulated as reportage. So by the time
The Protocols
were first published in St Petersburg in 1903, in the newspaper called the
Banner
, the ideological framework of them would have been familiar to many readers. And the Jewish menace, as it was perceived by many of them, was tied up with the mystical threat of the Masons, with whom the evil Zionist Elders were supposed to be in league.

A couple of years later there was another craze for the pamphlet, as an anti-Semitic group who opposed Russia’s progressive new parliament used it to garner support for their cause. At this time, in 1905, a publisher and dabbler in the occult called Sergei Nilus included the full text of
The Protocols
in his book
The Great Within the Small: The Coming of the Anti Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth
. Nilus was known to be slightly mad, but his book became a success and the idea of the secret Jewish summit was kept alive.

Then, throughout the time of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Nazism in Germany, the text was used over and over again to authenticate the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Eastern and Central Europe. Hitler quoted it in
Mein Kampf
. In 1920 it was published in Britain by one George Shanks, whose father, a businessman in Moscow, had been ruined by the Russian Revolution and so had a vengeful axe to grind.

Finally, in 1921,
The Times
published a detailed exposé of what many had long suspected, and what the British-Jewish journalist Lucien Wolf had already outlined in a groundbreaking article of his own: that this inflammatory piece of writing was a work of pure fiction, engineered to sow hatred and fear among its readers. The lengthy piece in
The Times
describing the literary and political origins of
The Protocols
was written by the paper’s stringer in Constantinople, Philip Graves (half-brother of the more famous Robert), and it was he who set passages from the Frenchman Joly’s text side by side with those of Rachovsky.

That, you might think, was that. But the allure of this particular hoax will not die. Consistently, since that detailed and incontrovertible 1921 debunking, anti-Semites the world over have used Rachovsky’s text to support their far-fetched claims. In 2009 the student who searches for ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion text’ on the internet will be offered, at the top of the list, the online proceedings of a group called Jew Watch. Leaders and mainstream thinkers in countries such as Syria (where it is apparently a bestseller), Iran (where a popular 2004 television series promoted it as a historical document) and Saudi Arabia (where extracts from it are used in educational textbooks), as well as Africa and Asia, all advise their people to take seriously the message of a Jewish conspiracy as it is outlined in this phoney text. Pytor Rachovsky was no doubt an unpleasant man working for a desperate secret service in the last days of the old Russia. But would he regret the end result of his hoax if he could have lived to see it acted upon so terribly by Hitler and others? Or would he look upon the afterlife of his hoax with pride? Hopefully there will never be a comparable literary hoaxer to provide a model for answering that question.

O
NE DAY IN
Paris in 1867 the eminent mathematician Michel Chasles approached the French Academy of Science with a most extraordinary discovery. He had in his possession a number of letters which could change the course of the history of science, proving that it was a Frenchman, not an Englishman, who discovered gravity; and not a Dutchman but an Italian who first saw Saturn’s moons. Chasles, then in his seventies but still producing ground-breaking work at the Sorbonne, was one of the most respected academics of his generation: unmarried, doggedly focused on his subject and never known to be swayed by the many social diversions of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, he had worked solidly all his life to prove new mathematical truths and correct the theoretical mistakes of his forebears. He was known to be a man of absolute honesty, professional integrity and perfect good manners, as well as one possessed of a tremendous intelligence. In short, he was not the type to fool or be fooled.

Yet the letters he presented to his peers at the Academy seemed almost too good to be true, especially the folder of notes from the seventeenth-century academic Blaise Pascal, which contained letters he wrote to fellow scientists Boyle and Galileo, as well as Newton himself, claiming in no uncertain terms that he had discovered the forces of gravitational attraction long before Newton did. Many of these letters were in a chatty style, but contained fairly detailed accounts of experiments and observations which would indeed alter the course of scientific history, placing France at the centre of the great discoveries of Enlightenment Europe. And that of course was a circumstance greatly desired by the Parisian establishment.

At first, the Academicians were overjoyed. And more so when they learnt of the existence of other letters by other Frenchmen, all purporting to support the notion of France as an ages-old centre of learning and culture. Before long, however, some members began to wonder about the origins of the papers that had fallen into their laps. When the Pascal letters were inspected more closely, questions began to be asked. Was that really his writing style? Did those dates quite add up? And as for the Galileo letters, in which he claimed the astronomical discoveries of Huygens for his own, they seemed to be dated after the year when the great Italian famously went blind.

Old Chasles assured his colleagues there must be a perfectly rational explanation for this, and when he went back to the source of these documents he was able to purchase more letters explaining away these apparent inaccuracies, including an extraordinary missive from Galileo confiding that he was not really blind, as he had been making out, but in fact just pretending, and would be grateful if his correspondent would keep this fact to himself. The fellows of the Academy found themselves in a terrible quandary. Here was one of the greatest, most revered brains in Paris presenting them with documentary evidence of things that in their nationalistic hearts they longed to believe, but which could not by any stretch of the imagination be deemed to be genuine. And they hadn’t even seen the letters from Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene and Alexander the Great, yet. All written in idiomatic French and all praising that country to high heaven, these were tucked away in Chasles’s library alongside the 27,000 others he had paid over 100,000 francs for over the previous twenty years.

What, the Academy finally dared to ask, was the source of these letters? According to Chasles’s supplier, they came originally from a Revolution-era collector named Boisjourdain, who had acquired part of the famous antique Charnage Library and taken it to show academics in America, but had thankfully brought it back to France intact, albeit slightly water-stained after a shipwreck that interrupted his passage home. He had, Chasles said, been forced to sell off his priceless papers after falling on hard times and had sold them on to an intermediary for whom Chasles’s supplier was working. This supplier was a young man called Vrain-Denis Lucas. He was the most prolific and daring literary hoaxer France has ever known.

Lucas was born to a poor family in the humble village of Lanneray, near Chateaudun, about a hundred miles south-west of Paris, in 1818. His father was a labourer and for some time the young Lucas worked alongside him to help earn enough to keep their family fed and clothed. But in his early teens he heard about a position vacant at the house of a local gentleman, and went into service. It was here that his intelligence and interest in history was first noted and here too, it is safe to assume, that he first got a taste for things slightly finer than those he had known growing up. The clothes, books, good food and witty conversation in even a relatively unremarkable provincial French manor house would have seemed dazzling to a young peasant brought up in the squalor of rural poverty, and Lucas resolved to better himself at all costs. Before long, his master recommended him for a lowly job in a lawyer’s office, and Lucas transferred his skills from the domestic environment to a professional one, working as a clerk and messenger by day and, in any spare time he had, holing himself up in the local library to improve his knowledge of history, literature, science and classics. There is even a note left by a Chateaudun librarian observing that this hardworking little autodidact ought to go far.

In 1851 he got as far as Paris, where he arrived with no money and no possessions apart from a folder of his own poems, which were fairly uninspired verses imitated from the old poets he had been studying in the library back home. Paris in 1851, although the best place in the world for a young man to be if he were rich, was no fun for the homeless unemployed, and the fact that Lucas threw himself into life there and landed on his feet so quickly shows he possessed that combination of ambition and audacity so typical of the successful hoaxer. Somehow he managed to get a job with a company that would both help him earn money in the short term and provide him with the technical and psychological skills that would enable and sustain him in his career as a phoney letter-writer.

The place was a ‘
cabinet généalogique
’ – a service for researching the pedigrees of any Frenchman with money and social ambition enough to seek proof that he was, indeed, related to whichever noble old lord he had in mind. Much of this work was genuine historical research, and the great boon for Lucas was that the firm’s employees were granted access to the Imperial Library, the splendidly beautiful and complete bibliographic collection that was the predecessor to today’s ugly Bibliothèque National on the left bank. When a client came to the atelier whose ancestry could not be traced satisfactorily, however, it was common practice for Lucas and his colleagues to use their knowledge of antique styles and forms to invent the kind of pedigree that they might have hoped to find. The place was a school for mendacious scribes.