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Concept
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Summary
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an antisemitic forgery purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination. Largely plagiarized from several earlier sources, it was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. It played a key part in popularizing belief in an international Jewish conspiracy.
Distillations of the work were assigned by some German teachers, as if factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent by the British newspaper The Times in 1921 and the German Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924. It remains widely available in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by antisemitic groups as a genuine document. It has been described as "probably the most influential work of antisemitism ever written".
The Protocols is a fabricated document purporting to be factual. Textual evidence shows that it could not have been produced prior to 1901. The title of Sergei Nilus' widely distributed first edition contains the dates "1902–1903", and it is likely that the document was actually written at this time in Russia. Cesare G. De Michelis argues that it was manufactured in the months after a Russian Zionist congress in September 1902, and that it was originally a parody of Jewish idealism meant for internal circulation among antisemites until it was decided to clean it up and publish it as if it were real. Self-contradictions in various testimonies show that the individuals involved—including the text's initial publisher, Pavel Krushevan—deliberately obscured the origins of the text and lied about it in the decades afterwards.
If the placement of the forgery in 1902–1903 Russia is correct, then it was written at the beginning of a series of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, in which thousands of Jews were killed or fled the country.
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