The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

What happened

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion presents itself as the minutes of a secret meeting at which Jewish leaders plan to take over the world. ¹ There was no meeting. The text was assembled by people who invented it, and the paper trail of how they did it survives.

It first appeared in serialized form in the fall of 1903, in a St. Petersburg newspaper called Znamya, or The Banner, owned by the antisemitic publisher Pavel Krushevan. ¹ Krushevan presented the text as the record of a body he called the World Union of Freemasons and Elders of Zion. ¹ His own paper had helped stir the Kishinev pogrom earlier that same year. ² In 1905, the Russian mystic Sergei Nilus reprinted the text as an appendix to a book about the coming of the Antichrist. ¹² In a later edition, Nilus claimed the document had been stolen from a Zionist headquarters in France, an office that did not exist. ³ He also claimed at one point that the Protocols had been read aloud at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. ⁴ The Jewish Virtual Library places the fabrication with agents of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, working in Paris during the years of the Dreyfus affair. ⁴

The forgers did not write from scratch. Much of the Protocols was lifted from Maurice Joly's 1864 satire Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a French attack on Napoleon III that contains no references to Jews at all. ¹⁴ A second strand came from a chapter of Hermann Goedsche's 1868 German novel Biarritz, which staged a fictional gathering of Jewish conspirators in a Prague cemetery. ¹

The plagiarism made the debunking easy. On Aug. 17, 1921, Philip Graves of The Times of London, then the paper's correspondent in Constantinople, published columns setting Joly's sentences beside the Protocols' sentences so readers could see the copying for themselves. ¹⁴ Herman Bernstein published his own book-length exposé, The History of a Lie, the same year, and Lucien Wolf had published one in 1920. ² Courts followed. A South African court ruled the document a lie in 1934, and a Swiss court in 1935 called it "ridiculous nonsense," in a case the ADL describes as a prosecution of Nazi followers for circulating it. ²³ A U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee called it "a vicious hoax" in 1964, and a Russian court ruled it a forgery in 1993. ²

None of that stopped it. In 1920, the year before Graves published, Henry Ford's newspaper the Dearborn Independent began a 91-part series drawn from the Protocols. ²⁵ The ADL dates the run of articles under the title "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem" to May through September of 1920. ³ The paper was handed out at Ford dealerships across the country and reached a circulation of at least 900,000 by 1926. ⁶⁵ Collected as a book, The International Jew was translated into at least 16 languages, including German, and sold more than half a million copies. ¹³ The Nazis noticed. In 1924, Heinrich Himmler called Ford "one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters." ⁶ Ford issued a public apology in 1927, after the attorney Aaron Sapiro sued him for libel, and shut the paper down. ²⁵ The statement he signed was drafted by Louis Marshall on behalf of Ford's legal team. ⁵

Hitler encountered the Protocols in the early 1920s through the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, and wrote about them in Mein Kampf in 1925. ¹² The Nazi Party secured the German copyright in 1929. ² Franz Eher Verlag, the party's publishing house, issued 22 editions between 1919 and 1938. ¹ Julius Streicher ran stories built on the Protocols in Der Stürmer through the 1930s. ¹² Hitler cited them to justify the April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses, framed as a defense against what he called the "Plan of Basel." ³ Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Protocols were a forgery and that he believed in their inner truth anyway. ¹

Why it still matters

Goebbels conceded the forgery and kept publishing anyway, and that is the argument the Protocols have always run on. Its strongest form gives up the question of authenticity entirely and says provenance is beside the point, because the document describes a pattern the reader believes he already sees, and the origins are a technicality. That argument fails on its own terms. A text copied out of a satire about Napoleon III is evidence of what the forgers wanted, and nothing else. If the pattern were real, it would show up without the invented minutes.

The record after 1921 is a record of reprinting. The first Arabic translation appeared in Damascus in 1925. ² The ADL counted roughly 50 Arabic-language books between 1965 and 1967 that cited the Protocols. ³ Hamas cited them in Article 32 of its 1988 charter. ² The Iranian government published a Farsi edition in 2000. ² Egyptian television aired a 41-part dramatic series, Horseman Without a Horse, drawing on the Protocols in 2002, the year the U.S. Senate passed a resolution on the subject; Al-Manar aired Al Shatat in 2003, the same year copies were displayed at the Library of Alexandria and UNESCO issued a denunciation. ² Syria's Ministry of Information authorized an edition in 2005. ² President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made claims based on the Protocols in 2012. ²

The West kept circulating it too. American extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations have circulated it, and the ADL documents editions in Japan and across Latin America. ³ An Indian edition appeared in 1974 under the title International Conspiracy Against Indians. ² In 2020, the Protocols were pressed into service for COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and recent editions have blamed Jews for the Sept. 11 attacks. ¹² A 2024 U.S. State Department report found the text "retains significant influence in Russia." ¹²

The words you'll hear

The Protocols. Shorthand for the forged text first published in Russia in 1903, purporting to record a Jewish plan for world domination. ¹

The Okhrana. The tsarist secret police. The Jewish Virtual Library attributes the fabrication to Okhrana agents operating in Paris during the Dreyfus years. ⁴

Dialogue in Hell. Maurice Joly's 1864 French satire attacking Napoleon III, with no Jewish content, from which much of the Protocols was copied. ¹⁴

The International Jew. The 91-part series Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent ran from 1920, later a book translated into at least 16 languages that sold more than half a million copies. ¹³⁵

Der Stürmer. Julius Streicher's antisemitic newspaper, which ran stories built on the Protocols throughout the 1930s. ¹²