The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

A "representation" of old documents: Not the original "Protocols"

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: History's Most Influential Fanfiction

A Forgery for the Ages

If you're going to fabricate a world-dominating conspiracy, you might as well go big. The Protocols of the Elders of Ziondidn't just go big—it went apocalyptic, becoming perhaps the most consequential literary fraud in human history. This toxic masterpiece of paranoid fiction has inspired pogroms, influenced Nazi ideology, and continues to circulate in conspiracy circles over a century after its creation, rather like a particularly virulent case of ideological herpes.

The document purports to be the minutes of secret meetings held by Jewish leaders plotting to achieve global domination through control of media, finance, and government. It's essentially a Dan Brown novel without the self-awareness, written by people who genuinely believed that shadowy cabals met to discuss their evil plans whilst presumably twirling their moustaches and cackling over brandy.

The Frankenstein's Workshop: Origins and Authorship

The Plagiarised Foundation

The Protocols didn't spring fully formed from some anti-Semitic fever dream—it was cobbled together like a particularly malicious collage project. Historian Norman Cohn's research, detailed in Warrant for Genocide (1967), traced substantial sections to Maurice Joly's 1864 political satire Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which had absolutely nothing to do with Jews whatsoever. Joly was satirising Napoleon III's authoritarian regime in France.

The plagiarism is so brazen it would make a university ethics committee weep. Entire passages were lifted wholesale, with "Jewish conspiracy" simply substituted where Joly had written about political tyranny. It's rather as if someone took Animal Farm and rewrote it, claiming to expose a genuine conspiracy of talking pigs.

German scholar Wolfgang Benz's analysis (1981) demonstrated that approximately 160 passages were directly copied or barely modified from Joly's work. Additional material was pilfered from Hermann Goedsche's 1868 antisemitic novel Biarritz, which included a chapter titled "In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague," featuring rabbis plotting world domination every hundred years. Goedsche published under the pseudonym "Sir John Retcliffe," presumably because openly admitting to writing such drivel would have been embarrassing even by nineteenth-century standards.

The Russian Connection

The document first appeared in Russia between 1903 and 1905, published serially in the newspaper Znamya (The Banner) by Pavel Krushevan, a particularly energetic antisemite who had helped orchestrate the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. The timing was hardly coincidental—Russia was convulsing with revolutionary unrest, and the Tsarist regime desperately needed scapegoats more substantial than "perhaps our autocratic police state is deeply unpopular."

The most commonly accepted narrative of authorship, supported by historians including Richard S. Levy (Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia, 2005) and Steven Zipperstein (Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, 2018), points to Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the Paris branch of the Okhrana (the Tsarist secret police). Rachkovsky ran an entire forgery operation producing inflammatory materials to discredit revolutionaries and reformers. Think of it as a nineteenth-century disinformation troll farm, but with more quill pens and fewer bots.

The actual assembly work was likely done by Matvei Golovinski, a former revolutionary turned Okhrana agent. Cesare G. De Michelis's extensive textual analysis (The Non-Existent Manuscript, 2004) makes a compelling case for Golovinski's authorship based on writing style, historical knowledge, and documented connections to Rachkovsky's operation.

The Purpose: Blaming Revolution on "Others"

The Okhrana didn't create the Protocols merely for entertainment. Russia was experiencing genuine revolutionary ferment—workers were striking, intellectuals were agitating for reform, and in 1905 the empire would face a revolution that nearly toppled the regime. Rather than address legitimate grievances like "perhaps serfdom was bad" or "maybe absolute monarchy has some drawbacks," the Tsarist establishment preferred to claim that revolution was artificially imposed by an external conspiracy rather than organically arising from systematic oppression.

The geniusM if we can use such a word for something so malevolent, was in externalising blame. Not "our system is unjust and people are angry," but rather "malicious outsiders are manipulating otherwise-content populations." It's the political equivalent of a spouse who insists their partner was happy until poisoned against them by friends, when actually the partner just tired of the dirty socks on the floor.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Content: A Conspiracy Theory Buffet

The Protocols consists of 24 "protocols" or chapters, each supposedly recording discussions at these mythical meetings. Let's examine some key claims, keeping in mind that we're analysing a fabricated text:

Protocol I: Might Is Right

The opening establishes that morality is a constraint only fools observe, and that political success requires cunning and force. This is essentially Machiavelli's The Prince, but with explicit antisemitic framing claiming this represents specifically Jewish political philosophy. The irony of plagiarising actual political theory whilst claiming it as evidence of ethnic conspiracy seems lost on the authors.

Protocols II-V: Control Through Chaos

These sections describe methods of societal destabilisation: promoting liberalism (which will supposedly cause moral decay), using economic crises to consolidate power, and encouraging conflicts between political factions. The "elders" allegedly plan to establish a "Super-Government" once existing systems collapse.

The historical context makes this particularly rich: these were precisely the tactics the Okhrana itself employed—creating agent provocateurs, encouraging political extremism, and manufacturing crises to justify repression. It's projection on a grand scale, attributing one's own methodology to one's enemies.

Protocols VI-IX: Economic Domination

Here we get detailed plans for financial control: accumulating gold reserves, manipulating stock markets, encouraging debt, and eventually establishing a universal economic system controlled by Jewish bankers. It reads rather like someone took legitimate concerns about the concentration of financial power and decided "let's blame it on an ethnicity" rather than examining systemic issues with capitalism itself.

The document specifically mentions establishing monopolies, encouraging luxury and corruption among gentiles, and using economic leverage to influence governments. These were real nineteenth-century concerns—monopolies wereforming, corruption was endemic, governments were beholden to financial interests. The Protocols simply offered a conveniently racialised explanation rather than structural analysis.

Protocols X-XV: Political Control

These sections detail methods of political manipulation: controlling the press, using propaganda, establishing secret societies, manipulating elections, and eventually establishing a despotic world government once democracies prove themselves unworkable (allegedly through Jewish manipulation).

Protocol XII is particularly choice, claiming: "Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control. Even now this is already being attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies." This reflects genuine anxieties about consolidated media ownership—concerns that were legitimate then and remain relevant now—but again diverts analysis from structural media criticism toward ethnic conspiracy.

Protocols XVI-XIX: Education and Religion

The conspirators allegedly plan to destroy classical education, promote materialism over spirituality, control universities, and undermine Christianity whilst preserving Judaism. This section reveals particular anxiety about modernity and secularisation, which were genuinely transforming European society. Rather than engage with the Enlightenment's challenge to traditional authority, the Protocols frames modernisation itself as a conspiracy.

Protocols XX-XXIV: The Endgame

The final sections describe the ultimate goal: establishing a global Jewish kingdom with a "King of the Jews" as absolute ruler, ruling through a mixture of terror and apparent benevolence, with complete control over information, movement, and thought.

This is standard apocalyptic conspiracy fare: the villain explains their entire plan in detail, conveniently providing readers with a comprehensive guide to spotting the conspiracy everywhere they look. It's rather like Blofeld explaining his scheme to James Bond, except humourless and with catastrophic real-world consequences.

The Exposure: Truth Catches Up

The London Times Investigation

The Protocols might have remained an obscure Russian pamphlet but for their international promotion after World War I. Henry Ford, the automotive pioneer and enthusiastic antisemite, published them in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent beginning in 1920, giving them massive American circulation. They were translated into multiple languages and promoted by various nationalist and fascist movements.

The exposé came in 1921 from an unexpected source: Philip Graves, Constantinople correspondent for The Times of London. Graves was shown a copy of Maurice Joly's Dialogue by a Russian émigré, and immediately recognised extensive parallels with the Protocols. His three-part series in August 1921 demonstrated the plagiarism conclusively.

Graves published side-by-side comparisons that were devastating. For instance, from Joly's Dialogue:

"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."

From the Protocols:

"These newspapers, like the Indian god Vishnu, will have hundreds of hands, each of which will feel the pulse of varying public opinion."

Spot the difference? There isn't one, really. It's plagiarism so clumsy that any undergraduate would be expelled for it.

Additional Scholarly Exposés

Herman Bernstein's The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion" (1921) provided further documentation of the forgery. Russian historian Vladimir Burtsev's investigation traced the document's origins to the Okhrana. Court cases in Bern, Switzerland (1933-1935) heard extensive testimony about the document's fabrication, with the court ultimately ruling it "ridiculous nonsense" and "obvious forgeries."

The Bern trials are particularly instructive. Expert witnesses, including historian Carl Albert Loosli, dissected the text, demonstrating its logical contradictions, historical impossibilities, and plagiarised content. The court concluded: "I hope the time will come when nobody will be able to understand how in the year 1935 almost a dozen fully reasonable and intellectually sound men could for two weeks torment their brains before a court of Berne over the authenticity or lack of authenticity of these Protocols, these Protocols that... are nothing but ridiculous nonsense."

Lovely sentiment, that. Shame about how it aged.

The Influence: A Poison That Keeps On Giving

Nazi Adoption

Despite concluSive proof of forgery, the Protocols found enthusiastic embrace in Nazi Germany. Alfred Rosenberg published an annotated edition in 1923, and the document became required reading in German schools under the Third Reich. Hitler referenced it in Mein Kampf, demonstrating either genuine belief or cynical willingness to use any propaganda that served his purposes.

The Nazi embrace reveals something crucial about conspiracy theories: evidence of fraud doesn't matter if the fiction serves political purposes. The Protocols provided a ready-made ideological framework for explaining all of Germany's problems—the Versailles Treaty, economic collapse, political instability—as machinations of a hidden enemy rather than consequences of, say, starting a catastrophic world war and then refusing to acknowledge reality.

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, put it plainly in 1933: "The Protocols of Zion are as up to date today as they were the day they were first published." Whether he believed they were genuine is almost irrelevant; they were useful, which was sufficient.

Post-War Persistence

One might hope that the Holocaust, the ultimate consequence of such antisemitic conspiracy theories, would have discredited the Protocols permanently. One would be tragically wrong.

The document continued circulation in various forms:

In the Islamic World: Following the establishment of Israel, the Protocols found new audiences in Middle Eastern countries. The Egyptian government published editions in the 1950s and 1960s. The Hamas charter (1988) explicitly references the Protocols in Article 32: "Their plan is embodied in the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" The text has been serialised in Egyptian and Iranian television dramas, reaching audiences of millions.

In the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet States: Despite the irony of Communists promoting a Tsarist secret police forgery, the Protocols circulated in samizdat and later openly after the Soviet collapse. Pamyat, a Russian nationalist organisation, distributed it widely in the 1990s.

In the Western Conspiracy Subculture:

The Protocols influenced countless conspiracy theories, from the John Birch Society's fears of global communist conspiracy to contemporary "New World Order" theories. David Icke's theories about reptilian overlords follow a structure remarkably similar to the Protocols, merely substituting shapeshifting lizards for Jewish bankers—marginally more creative, equally evidence-free.

Modern Mutations: Same Poison, New Bottles

The Protocols' influence persists even when not cited directly. Its structure—a hidden elite manipulating world events toward totalitarian global government—forms the template for numerous contemporary conspiracy theories:

QAnon

The QAnon conspiracy theory, which emerged on internet imageboards in 2017, follows the Protocols blueprint remarkably closely: a hidden cabal of powerful elites controls world events, operates through secretive symbols and communications, manipulates finance and media, and will eventually be defeated by an awakened populace led by a heroic figure. QAnon typically avoids explicitly antisemitic framing (though such elements exist in some variants), but the structural similarities are unmistakable.

"Cultural Marxism"

This conspiracy theory claims that Marxist intellectuals deliberately subverted Western culture through academic and media institutions. The theory is essentially a repackaging of the Nazi concept of "Kulturbolschewismus" (Cultural Bolshevism), which itself drew from the Protocols framework of hidden subversion. The Frankfurt School supposedly infiltrated universities to destroy Western civilisation through promoting feminism, multiculturalism, and progressive social values.

The historical irony is rich: the Frankfurt School intellectuals were predominantly Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, yet conspiracy theorists cast them as villains in a plot remarkably similar to Nazi propaganda about Jewish cultural subversion.

"Globalist" Conspiracy Theories

Contemporary conspiracy theories about "globalists" manipulating world events through international organisations (UN, WTO, IMF) follow the Protocols template precisely, often using "globalist" as a euphemism for Jewish, though sometimes explicitly naming Jewish figures like George Soros. The structure is identical: hidden elite, secretive coordination, manipulation of finance and politics, goal of world government.

Why It Persists: The Psychology of Conspiracism

Understanding the Protocols' enduring influence requires examining why people believe conspiracy theories despite contradictory evidence:

Pattern Recognition Gone Wrong

Humans are pattern-recognition machines, which served us well when patterns like "rustling grass means predator" determined survival. Modern conspiracy theories exploit this tendency, connecting genuine historical events (wars, economic crashes, political changes) into a narrative of deliberate manipulation. The Protocols provides a master pattern into which almost any event can be fitted.

Simplifying Complexity

The world is complicated. Economic systems, geopolitical relationships, technological changes—understanding them requires substantial knowledge and comfort with uncertainty. Conspiracy theories offer simpler explanations: events aren't random or resulting from complex systems, but deliberately orchestrated by identifiable villains. As Michael Butter notes in The Nature of Conspiracy Theories (2020), conspiracism provides "a feeling of control through knowledge."

Externalising Blame

The Protocols originated in a regime refusing to acknowledge its own failures, and this function persists. Conspiracy theories allow believers to externalise responsibility for social problems. Economic struggles aren't due to systemic issues or one's own circumstances, but due to deliberate manipulation by others. This is psychologically comfortable and politically expedient.

Community and Identity

Conspiracy belief creates in-group/out-group dynamics and provides community. "Truthers" see themselves as an enlightened minority who've seen through deception. This is particularly appealing to those feeling marginalised or powerless in conventional society. The conspiracy community provides identity, purpose, and social belonging.

Unfalsifiability

Conspiracy theories are structured to be unfalsifiable. Evidence against the conspiracy is dismissed as planted by the conspiracy. Lack of evidence is proof of the conspiracy's power to hide itself. Official debunking confirms the conspiracy's influence over official channels. This closed epistemic system makes conspiracy theories remarkably resistant to contrary evidence.

The Real Conspiracies: What Actually Happened

The profound irony of the Protocols is that it documents an actual conspiracy—just not the one it claims. The real conspiracy was the Okhrana operation to fabricate the document itself, involving:

• Rachkovsky's direction of the forgery operation

• Golovinski's research and writing

• Coordination with Russian nationalist publishers

• Strategic timing to coincide with revolutionary unrest

• Cover stories about the document's discovery

  
  

This conspiracy had:

• Identifiable perpetrators with documented roles

• Clear motives (discrediting revolutionaries, deflecting blame from regime)

• Physical evidence (drafts, correspondence, publishing records)

• Testimony from participants and witnesses

• Demonstrated methodology (plagiarism from identified sources)

In other words, everything conspiracy theorists claim to seek—documented evidence of coordinated deception—exists for the creation of the Protocols itself. Yet conspiracy believers accept the document whilst dismissing evidence of its fabrication. The forged conspiracy theory is more appealing than the real conspiracy to forge it.

Additionally, actual historical conspiracies existed during this period:

• The Okhrana's agent provocateur operations

• Various governments' colonial machinations

• Industrial monopolies' coordination to fix prices

• Political machines' electoral manipulation

  
  

These involved genuine coordination and deception but were systemic features of institutions, not ethnic plots. The Protocols diverts attention from analysing power structures toward scapegoating a minority group.

Refuting the Claims: An Exercise in Obviousness

Refuting the Protocols point-by-point seems almost absurd given its proven forgery, but conspiracy believers often claim "well, even if it's a forgery, maybe it still reveals truth." Let's address key claims:

"Jews Control Global Finance"

The Claim: Jewish bankers control world financial systems and use this power to manipulate nations.

The Reality: Banking was one of few professions European Jews were historically permitted to enter, as Christianity prohibited usury. This created overrepresentation in finance, but not dominance. Global banking has always been predominantly non-Jewish. The 2008 financial crisis was primarily caused by major American banks (Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, etc.) led by predominantly non-Jewish executives, following deregulation pushed by predominantly non-Jewish politicians.

Modern global finance is controlled by diversified institutional investors, central banks, and international regulatory bodies with no ethnic coordination. The largest banks globally (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America) are not Jewish-controlled.

"Jews Control Media"

The Claim: Jewish ownership of media enables manipulation of public opinion and cultural values.

The Reality: Media ownership is diverse and predominantly non-Jewish. The largest media conglomerates (Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Paramount Global, Sony) have varied ownership structures including institutional investors, with management representing multiple backgrounds.

Jewish individuals have been prominent in certain media sectors (particularly Hollywood's founding), but prominence is not conspiracy. Media ownership patterns reflect capital concentration, not ethnic coordination. Media bias exists but reflects commercial imperatives, ideological orientations, and owner preferences—factors operating across all backgrounds.

"The Protocols Predicted Current Events"

The Claim: The Protocols describe contemporary globalisation, international institutions, and media consolidation, proving its authenticity.

The Reality: The Protocols describes trends already visible in the nineteenth century (financial consolidation, international organisations, mass media) and extrapolates them as a deliberate conspiracy. This is cold reading at a societal level—make vague predictions about ongoing trends, and some will inevitably seem prescient.

International organisations (UN, IMF, WTO) arose from demonstrated needs for coordination (preventing wars, managing international finance, facilitating trade), not a secret conspiracy. Their actions are documented, their decision-making processes are known, and their failures are obvious. They're bureaucracies, not cabals.

"The Logical Impossibility"

The most devastating refutation is logical: the conspiracy described in the Protocols is operationally impossible.

Maintaining a multigenerational conspiracy involving thousands of participants across multiple countries, coordinating complex financial and political manipulations whilst leaving no credible evidence and preventing any leaks or defections, violates everything we know about human behaviour and organisational dynamics.

Real conspiracies (Watergate, Iran-Contra, COINTELPRO, etc.) involved limited participants, short timeframes, and specific goals, yet still failed through leaks, defections, or investigative exposure. The conspiracy described in the Protocols would require perfect coordination over generations across nations during periods of massive upheaval, including two world wars in which Jews fought on opposing sides. It's logically absurd.

The Harm: Real-World Consequences

The Protocols isn't merely a curiosity for historians of propaganda—it has facilitated real violence:

Pogroms

The document's circulation in pre-revolutionary Russia accompanied waves of anti-Jewish violence. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903, organized by Krushevan (the Protocols' first publisher), killed 49 Jews and destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes. The Russian Civil War (1918-1921) saw massive pogroms by White forces who explicitly cited Jewish conspiracy theories.

The Holocaust

While the Holocaust's causes are complex, the Protocols provided ideological justification for Nazi antisemitism. The document was taught in German schools, cited in propaganda, and helped create an atmosphere where genocide became psychologically possible. By portraying Jews as existential threats engaged in deliberate subversion, the Protocolsfacilitated viewing mass murder as defensive necessity.

Contemporary Terrorism

The Protocols has inspired violence into the twenty-first century. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter (2018) posted conspiracies about Jewish manipulation of immigration. The Christchurch mosque shooter (2019) referenced "replacement" conspiracy theories ultimately derived from the Protocols framework. The Poway synagogue shooter (2019) cited Jewish control of media and finance.

Political Weaponisation

Beyond direct violence, the Protocols enables political scapegoating. When leaders need to explain failures or distract from unpopular policies, conspiracy theories provide convenient targets. This has occurred in Russia, Middle Eastern countries, and Western nations, where conspiracy theories about "globalists" or specific Jewish figures deflect attention from systemic issues.

Conclusion: A Warning From History

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery created by the Tsarist secret police, plagiarised from French political satire and German antisemitic fiction, demonstrably false in every particular, conclusively exposed over a century ago. Yet it persists because it serves psychological and political functions unrelated to truth.

This should terrify us.

We live in an age of unprecedented access to information, yet conspiracy theories flourish. The Protocols demonstrated that evidence doesn't matter if fiction serves emotional or political needs. Debunking doesn't work on true believers because belief isn't based on evidence.

The document's enduring influence reveals something uncomfortable about human cognition: we're pattern-seeking animals who prefer simple narratives over complex reality, who'd rather externalise blame than examine systemic issues, who find community in shared beliefs regardless of truth.

The Protocols is a test case for information literacy in democratic societies. If a proven forgery can continue influencing political movements over a century after exposure, what hope have we against sophisticated modern disinformation? If no amount of evidence suffices to discredit a politically useful fiction, how do we maintain shared reality necessary for democratic discourse?

These aren't merely historical questions. The Protocols lives on in QAnon, in "globalist" conspiracy theories, in social media-spread antisemitism. Different antagonists, same structure: hidden elite, secretive coordination, deliberate subversion, apocalyptic confrontation.

The lesson of the Protocols is this: conspiracy theories don't persist because of evidence but despite lack of it. They fulfill needs unrelated to truth—psychological comfort, political convenience, social belonging. Countering them requires addressing those needs, not merely providing facts.

We need media literacy education, critical thinking skills, psychological understanding of conspiracism, and political courage to address actual systemic problems rather than scapegoating minorities. We need to make truth more appealing than fiction, complex reality more satisfying than simple narratives.

Otherwise, we're doomed to keep recycling the same conspiracy theories, merely updating the villains whilst maintaining the structure. The Protocols will continue poisoning political discourse under new names, facilitating new violence, enabling new authoritarians to deflect blame onto convenient others.

The Protocols are not history. They are a warning about how easily humans can be manipulated into believing monstrous fictions, and how catastrophically dangerous such beliefs become when weaponised politically.

Sleep well with that thought.

Alan /|\

Selected Bibliography

• Bernstein, Herman. The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion." 1921.

• Butter, Michael. The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. 2020.

• Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 1967.

• De Michelis, Cesare G. The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion. 2004.

• Levy, Richard S. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. 2005.

• Segel, Benjamin. A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 1995.

• Zipperstein, Steven. Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. 2018.