Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (7 page)

Scholars suggest that Protocols One to Nineteen correspond to Dialogues One to Seventeen.
²⁰
According to the historian Norman Cohn, a total of 160 passages, or two-fifths of the total text of the
Protocols
, is lifted directly from Joly. Readers will recall the excerpt from Protocol Twelve quoted earlier, concerning control of the press (see page 23)
.
They can now compare it with this, from Machiavelli in the
Dialogues
:

I shall count on devoted journals in each party. I shall have an aristocratic one in the aristocratic party, a republican one in the republican party, a revolutionary one in the revolutionary party, an anarchist one, if necessary, in the anarchist party. Like the God Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, each hand of which will feel the nuances of public opinion.

Whoever transformed the
Dialogues
into the
Protocols
couldn’t even be bothered to change the categories or the order in which they appeared.

The Times
refutation, written by Graves and titled “The End of the
Protocols
,” appeared over three days in August 1921, and should, one might imagine, have brought the curtain down on the matter. Even the
Spectator
was now calling the
Protocols
a “malignant lunacy.” There were, however, a couple of questions remaining, of which the most interesting was, who had done it? Who had forged the
Protocols
, when, and why?

From Nilus to Rachkovsky

Zur Beek had claimed that the
Protocols
had been secretly transcribed by the
Okhrana
in 1897, taken back to Russia, and translated and studied by certain scholars, among them Sergei Nilus, who had published them in 1905. Nilus himself, it turned out, had another view. Or, rather, several other views. In the epilogue to the 1905 edition of his book, he had claimed that the
Protocols
were an extract from a longer document, removed from the “Zionist executive archives” somewhere in France. Six years later, however, the picture had become more complex. In the 1911 edition, Nilus gave the following account:

In 1901 a now deceased acquaintance, Court Marshal Alexei Sukhotin of Tchernigov, gave into my possession a handwritten manuscript that detailed completely and clearly the secret Jewish-Freemason conspiracy that will surely lead to the end of our vile world. The person who gave me this manuscript assured me that it was a faithful translation of the original document. It had been stolen by a lady from one of the highest and most influential leaders of the Freemasons following a secret meeting in France . . . He mentioned her by name, but I have forgotten it.
²¹

No Basel Congress, no crack team of scribes in Frankfurt, but a postcoital robbery by a brave lady.

Other publishers had variations on the theme. A French translator, Roger Lambelin, claimed the
Protocols
were stolen from an iron chest in a town in Alsace (then part of Germany) by the mistress of a top Freemason. A Polish translator averred that they were stolen from the home of the father of Zionism, Dr. Theodor Herzl himself. Theodor Fritsch, a German, told readers that the text had been confiscated during a house search by the Saint Petersburg police, who gave it to Nilus for translation.

Hermann Bernstein was an American journalist and diplomat who, on his return from an assignment in the Far East in January 1919, was asked by his editor at the
New York Herald
to take a look at the
Protocols
. They had been brought in to the newspaper by a Dr. Harris Houghton, who was connected with the army intelligence department. Houghton was enthusiastic, saying the documents were his “prized possession” and had been given to him by his assistant, a young woman named Natalie de Bogory, who, in turn, had acquired them from Russian exile Boris Brasol. Hermann Bernstein took a look and, unlike Henry Ford and Ernest Liebold, saw at once that they were a crude hoax, bearing no relationship to Jewish custom or life.

Bernstein also understood how dangerous the
Protocols
were.

Instead of verifying them, he set about exposing them. In February 1921, as a result of his researches, Bernstein published a book called
The History of a Lie
. This detailed the transfiguration of the cemetery scene in Goedsche’s potboiler, but it also referred to a meeting in 1909 between Sergei Nilus and a French-Russian nobleman, Count Alexandre du Chayla. Although Nilus lived in a villa outside Moscow in a rather irreligious ménage with his wife and mistress, this encounter had taken place under the auspices of Archimandrite Xenophont at the monastery of Optina Pustyn in the district of Kaluga. After dinner, as du Chayla recounted later, the conversation turned to the
Protocols
. And here Nilus elaborated upon his earlier explanations. His mistress, said Nilus, was the woman who had brought him the manuscript, but she had acquired it in Paris from a “General Ratchkovsky,” who had given her a manuscript removed, he said, from the secret archives of the Freemasons in France.

Piotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky was no invention. A former student radical turned secret policeman, he was, from 1884 to 1903, the head of the external branch of the Okhrana, based in Paris. Rachkovsky was not a bureaucrat by nature. He was a speculator, a politician, an author, a provocateur, an employer of assassins and, most notably, a forger. In 1892, he forged a newspaper letter from the Russian radical exile Plekhanov, and the following week some letters supposedly from other radicals attacking Plekhanov. And in the same year, under the pseudonym Jehan-Préval, he published a book,
Anarchism and Nihilism
, which argued, among other things, that following the French Revolution the Jews had become the masters of the continent, “governing by discreet means both monarchies and republics.” This understanding, wrote Rachkovsky/Préval “provides the key to a host of disturbing and seemingly insoluble riddles.”
²²

Subsequently, at least two colleagues of Rachkovsky were to testify that he had caused the
Protocols
to be concocted, creating evidence for the assertion he’d already made in the forged
Anarchism and Nihilism
. If this is true (and these people were, after all, police agents), it would seem that the forgers went about the business of creating their text by borrowing material that was already to hand but a bit obscure: a whole lot of Joly here, a dollop of Goedsche there.

The Rachkovsky
Protocols
were originally designed for the domestic Russian market—a weapon in the battle between those who wanted the absolutist regime to stay much the same and those who wished to reform it. As ever, the reform party was identified with the Jews, and Jews indeed supported it. The reactionaries, therefore, used the Jewish connection as part of their crusade against change, adding a religious and mystical dimension to an argument about power. And early appearances of the
Protocols
had a way of coinciding with anti-Jewish and anti-reform campaigns. A pre-Nilus version was published in southern Russia in 1903, around the time an anti-Jewish pogrom took place in the area. Nilus’s own first effort appeared as the tsar was being forced into his October Manifesto of reforms, which created a constitution and a parliament. The leading absolutist politician was also the chief of police, D. F. Trepov, who responded by encouraging a series of pogroms in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, local peasants being told that the Jews had coerced the tsar into this devilish work. His deputy chief of police was one Piotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky.

Nicholas II himself received one of the first copies of Nilus’s book and was delighted, scribbling exclamations in the margins: “What depth of thought!” “How prophetic!” “How perfectly they have fulfilled their plan!” “This year of 1905 has truly been dominated by the Jewish Elders!” “All of it is undoubtedly genuine! The destructive hand of Jewry is everywhere!” And more.
²³
The sovereign’s pleasure took a practical turn: in the years 1905-1906, he personally contributed 12 million rubles to disseminating anti-Semitic tracts.

And then, abruptly, the tsar withdrew his support from the
Protocols
and forbade their dissemination. Sixteen years before Bernstein, Graves, and Stanjek, Nicholas had become convinced that the book was tainted. “It is impossible,” said the tsar honorably, “to defend something sacred by dirty methods.”
²⁴
Few partisans of the
Protocols
, however, shared his scruples.

“Reality Provides the Best Commentary”

Salvaging the
Protocols
was not going to be an easy task. Anybody comparing the text with that of the much earlier
Dialogues
could see that the first was a plagiarism of the second, and anyone looking at the weird evolution of the “Rabbi’s Speech” could trace the notion of the assembly of super-manipulative Jews back to the excited prose of “Sir John Retcliffe.” The section of respectable Establishment opinion that had, like
The Times
, flirted with the notion of Jews sitting around and plotting the takeover of the world, was now lost to the Protocoliers.

But there were many other people outside the Establishment left to convince, and the conspiracy’s partisans could not be accused of a lack of invention. At some point in his turbulent life, Lord Alfred Douglas, the “Bosie” whose caresses had helped earn Oscar Wilde his place in Reading jail, had become Britain’s leading anti-Semite. Now in middle age, Douglas was the proprietor and editor of his own literary magazine,
Plain English
. Within a week of the Graves articles in
The Times
, Bosie had the answer: Maurice Joly was not Maurice Joly at all. In the edition of
Plain English
of August 27, 1921, it was revealed that he was, in fact, Moses Joel, a circumcised Jew.
²⁵

The implication of this racial identification was spelled out a little later by Gottfried zur Beek in the preface to his 1923 edition. Joly/Joel “is in fact a precursor of the Elders of Zion,” he wrote, “and affords us an excellent look into the art of Jewish conspiracy.”
²⁶
In other words, though the
Dialogues
might have seemed to be about Napoleon III, coming from a Jew they were actually a revelation of Jewish thinking—thinking that would later become the
Protocols
. Another German
Protocols
supporter, Count Ernst zu Reventlow, added the twist that it was perhaps the elders who were plagiarists, with Herzl himself raiding the
Dialogues
for his speeches to the First Zionist Congress—though it has to be said that this theory does rather reduce the demonic potency of the
Protocols
, with the image of the supreme rulers of the world borrowing entire phrases from obscure French books.

In 1924, even the Moses Joel theory was exploded when, by chance, a Parisian legal journal published shortened biographies of past members of the profession. Included were excerpts from a lost autobiography of Maurice Joly himself, written in the 1870s. This showed that Joly, far from being Jewish, came from a strict Catholic family with links to the rural nobility. It even included a copy of his baptismal certificate from the church register, complete with the name of the presiding priest.

This discovery, however, did nothing to change the opinion of the man who was to become the most important and active supporter of the
Protocols
. After the abortive Nazi putsch in Munich in 1923, Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in the Landsberg fortress to serve an absurdly short sentence for armed insurrection. There he wrote his apocalyptic manifesto
Mein Kampf
. His attitude toward the
Protocols
is worth quoting at length.

The extent to which the whole existence of the people is based on a continual lie is shown in an incomparable manner in
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, which the Jews hate so tremendously. The
Frankfurter Zeitung
is forever moaning to the people that they are supposed to be a forgery; which is the surest proof that they are genuine. What many Jews do perhaps unconsciously is here consciously exposed. But that is not what matters . . . What matters is that they uncover, with really horrifying reliability, the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose them in their inner logic and their final aims. But reality provides the best commentary. Whoever examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of the book will at once understand why the Jewish press makes such an uproar. For once this book becomes generally familiar to a people, the Jewish menace can be regarded as already vanquished.
²⁷

The argument is undefeatable: the
Protocols
confirm what I believe and what I think I see around me, therefore they are true in the most important sense, even if they themselves are forgeries. Furthermore, whether they are forgeries or not does not matter; because they confirm what we see around us, they will help people better understand what is going on. As Henry Ford had suggested, they fitted in the past, they fitted now.

Ford himself recanted in 1927. As early as January 1921, there had been loud voices raised in Christian communities against rising anti-Semitism. The writer John Spargo got up a petition urging Americans to “strike at this un-American and un-Christian agitation.” Former presidents Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft signed, as did luminaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois, William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, and the poet Robert Frost. Under pressure, Ford issued a statement saying he was deeply mortified that his newspaper should have been used for the propagation of “gross forgeries.” He asked forgiveness of the Jewish community “for the harm I have unintentionally committed.” And he demanded of those people abroad who were reprinting
The International Jew—
particularly the German Nazi Theodor Fritsch—that they desist. They ignored him. Hadn’t Ford been pressured into his change of heart? Wasn’t he too a victim of the Jews? To Hitler, Heinrich Ford the anti-Semite was always to be a hero.