Vile Anti-Semitic Hoax 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ Still Around

 

An anti-Semitic hoax more than a century old reared its ugly head again as the Republican National Convention was underway last week.
 
Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of the advisory board of President Trump’s reelection campaign, was due to speak on Aug. 25. But she was suddenly pulled from the schedule after she had retweeted a link to a conspiracy theory about Jewish elites plotting to take over the world.
 
In her now-deleted tweet, Mendoza urged her roughly 40,000 followers to read a lengthy thread that warned of a plan to enslave the “goyim,” or non-Jews. It included fevered denunciations of the historically wealthy Jewish family, the Rothschilds, as well as the top target of right-wing extremism today, the liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros.
 
The thread also made reference to one of the most notorious hoaxes in modern history: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” As a scholar of American Jewish history, I know how durable this document has been as a source of the belief in Jewish conspiracies. The fact that it is still making the rounds within the fringe precincts of the political right today is testament to the longevity of this fabrication.
 
Fake news
 
Surely no outright forgery in modern history has ever proved itself more durable. In the early 20th century, the Protocols were concocted by Tsarist police known as the Okhrana, drawing upon an obscure 1868 German novel, “Biarritz,” in which mysterious Jewish leaders meet in a Prague cemetery.
 
This fictional cabal aspires for power over entire nations through currency manipulation and seeks ideological domination by disseminating fake news. In the novel, the Devil listens sympathetically to the reports that representatives of the tribes of Israel present, describing the havoc and subversion that they have wrought, and the destruction that is yet to come.
 
The Okhrana – “protection” in Russian – worked for what was then the most powerful anti-Semitic regime in Europe and wanted to use the hoax to discredit revolutionary forces hostile to the reactionary policies and religious mysticism of Tsarist rule.
 
The document became a global phenomenon only about two decades after the Okhrana’s fabrication. Widespread publication and republication coincided with both the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 – both of which stirred fears of obscure forces that menaced social control.
 
Scapegoating Jews for disease and political unrest was nothing new. Medieval Jews had been massacred in the wake of accusations of having poisoned wells and spreading plagues.
 
But a century ago, the crisis in public health probably mattered less than the Communists’ seizure of power in Russia, which, if unchecked, might overwhelm the political order that the Great War had destabilized. That some of the revolutionary leaders were of Jewish birth seemed to reinforce the predictions of the Protocols.
 
Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, was known to have read the Protocols before being executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. In the following year, Hitler delivered his first recorded speech, in which he depicted an international conspiracy of Jews – of all Jews – to weaken and poison the Aryan race and to extinguish German culture.
 
Hitler himself was unsure of the authenticity of the Protocols – a question of verification that may not have mattered all that much to the Nazis. The Führer told one of his early associates that the Protocols were “immensely instructive” in exposing what the Jews could accomplish in terms of “political intrigue,” and in demonstrating their skill at “deception [and] organization.”
 
‘Americanized’ conspiracy
 
In the U.S., the hoax was given a wide distribution by the most admired businessman of his time: Henry Ford. By 1920, Ford had “Americanized” the forged document as “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” It ran as excerpts in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, for 91 straight weeks. “The International Jew” was translated into 16 languages.
 
Though Jewish communal leadership mounted a lawsuit that forced the auto magnate to issue a retraction in 1927, the malignant hatred behind the Protocols continued to seep into the public conversation.
 
In the 1930s, the popular anti-New Deal “radio priest” Charles E. Coughlin excerpted the Protocols in his newspaper, Social Justice. But Father Coughlin was wary about endorsing its accuracy, and merely stated that it might be of “interest” to his readers.
 
History as conspiracy
 
Why is it that this demonstrably false document continues to hold sway today?
 
Perhaps the simplest explanation is human irrationality, which neither education nor enlightenment has ever managed to defeat.
 
The willingness to believe in the fantasy of a surreptitious Jewish stranglehold on the international economy and on mass media also validates the insight of the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter. He traced in political extremism of both right and left an apocalyptic strain and a belief in an imminent confrontation between good and absolute evil.
 
Hofstadter was well aware that conspiracies punctuate the annals of the past. But especially for those Americans who hanker for the security of a settled way of life, political paranoia is tempting, such as the belief – as Hofstadter wrote – that “history is a conspiracy,” in which unseen forces are the shadowy driving mechanisms of human destiny.
 
Because anti-Semitism has survived nearly a couple of millennia, no form of prejudice has yet found a more vivid place in the imagination. And the fact that no international Jewish conspiracy was ever located has never depleted the power of the Protocols to tap into subterranean currents of demonization.
 
From the Rothschilds to Soros
 
What sustains the influence of the Protocols among cranks and extremists is not the language of the text itself – which few of them are likely to have fully read in its various versions – but what this forgery purports to underscore, which is the astonishingly cunning influence of Jews in modern history.
 
The Protocols thus have no importance in themselves; they are spurious. But they do bestow precision upon apocalyptic fears, which could not survive without some ingredient of plausibility – however wildly far-fetched.
 
The Rothschild family was pivotal to the emergence of finance capitalism in 19th-century Europe. The family firm had branches in Germany, France, Austria, Italy and England, which lent credence to the charge of “cosmopolitanism” during an era of rising nationalism. The boom-and-bust oscillations of the economy generated not only misery but also grievances against financiers who seemed to benefit from such uncertainties.
 
Today, Soros, a Hungarian-born, British-educated American Jew, has become an especially hated figure for the far-right. Among the world’s canniest investors, he has spent billions of dollars promoting progressive causes. He seems to personify what Ford called “the international Jew.”
 
Venom against minorities other than Jews has not resulted in any equivalent to the Protocols. Judeophobia produced a specious documentation that bigotry against no other minority has ever elicited. Perhaps the very explicitness of the Protocols helps strengthen the suspicion that majority beliefs and interests are under attack, and keeps this dangerous form of anti-Semitism alive.
 
 
Why the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is still pushed by anti-Semites more than a century after hoax first circulated.   By Stephen Whitfield. The Conversation ,  September 2, 2020.

 

Here are some facts about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: they were first published in the US exactly a hundred years ago this summer. While they were presented to readers in 1920 as the secretly recorded words of a Jewish leader forming a conspiracy to overtake the world, we now know it is a fabrication, created by tsarist agents in Russia two decades earlier. Published here by Henry Ford in his anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent newspaper starting in June 1920, The Protocols purport to be the minutes of a series of lectures given by a Jewish elder, plotting world domination. And in their broad incoherence, they sound a lot like the conspiracy theories inundating our discourse now—and the president’s speeches.
 
The text itself is comprised of 24 numbered sections. Each is two to six pages long, loosely based around a subject or a theme. Well, very loosely. Subjects are listed in terse sentences at the top of each section, and include “topics” such as gold, economics, international Masonry, gold (gold comes up a lot), drunkenness and “the meaning of anti-Semitism.” The Protocols is the most famous anti-Semitic tract in the western world, and though it’s regularly referenced in that context, I’ve never met anyone who has read it. Frankly, I suspect the vast majority of people who have referenced it have not read it.
 
With so many conspiracy theories surfacing toward the mainstream in 2020, no small number of them with an anti-Semitic bent, I felt it was time to read it myself.
 
So here are some other facts I can share, having done so: The Protocols are repetitive, unconvincing, fragmentary, a pure slog; disordered, ridiculous, elliptical, deliberately confusing, and above all, incoherent. So, so incoherent. One gets the sense while reading The Protocols that while a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters given a thousand years couldn’t compose King Lear, those same monkeys given six months and a bottomless pot of coffee might have created this mess. Here’s a sample paragraph, taken from “Protocol No. 1,” that will give you a sense of how they sound:
 
The despotism of Capital, which is entirely in our hands, reaches out to it a straw that the State, willy-nilly, must take hold of: if not—it goes to the bottom.
 
Should anyone of a liberal mind say that such reflections as the above are immoral I would put the following questions:– If every State has two foes and if in regard to the external foe it is allowed and not considered immoral to use every manner and art of conflict, as for example to keep the enemy in ignorance of plans of attack and defense, to attack him by night or in superior numbers, then in what way can the same means in regard to a worse foe, the destroyer of the structure of society and the commonwealth be called immoral and not permissible?
 
So, yes . . . willy-nilly and despotic, to be sure. We could take the time to break down the broken syllogism, the extraneous interpolations, the half-formed similes—but clearly the intention is not for it to be read so closely. It’s to confuse, to obfuscate, and as recourse for their confusion to make the reader think, “Right, hate the Jews, we’re supposed to be hating the Jews.” The text goes on like this for almost 80 pages, and its lone appeal is as a secretive look into secretive meetings—the sound of a voice in situ, a clandestine peek into the clandestine. There’s something far more complicated about it for its unintended audience, in possession of it as a forgery; reading it as the words of a tsarist agent trying to imitate a Jewish plotter, I found myself in that strange confusion I used to feel when on the satirical Colbert Report there was an author interview, and I’d lose the thread of Colbert in faux-Fox-News persona. In that case, the recourse was to say, Oh, right, satire and book promotion. Again, with The Protocols, the recourse is always: anti-Semitism.
 
It’s also worth pointing out that there are almost no proper nouns in The Protocols, granting the text a sense of universality, but also causing a broad atmosphere of generalized confusion. It’s hard to comprehend purely from a close reading, at any specific moment, who is speaking, and to whom, and why. There is no effort, to borrow Coleridge’s phrase, to conjure “willing suspension of disbelief.” The forgery relies entirely upon our accepting its verisimilitude as a given. The voice of The Protocols doesn’t convince the reader that it truly represents spoken word. There is no attempt at persuasion.
 
Which makes sense on its own terms, but is heavily troubled by the fact that Coleridge was describing how fiction works. We’re meant to believe that this particular incoherence is reality. In which case it strikes the reader that the incoherence is the point—we enter this text in a state of confusion, seeking answers. We grow only more confused as it incoherently proceeds. The only purchase we can really gain over it is remembering that is it meant to be factual, an artifact, authentic. Its lack of authenticity on its own terms hardly matters.
 
Incoherence, pseudo-authenticity, secrecy: the same qualities define the conspiracy theories that have overwhelmed the discourse in Right Wing circles for four years (and longer, frankly, none more than QAnon. Without rehearsing its entire history, in brief: a purported administration insider who calls himself Q began posting what appeared to be inside information on how Donald Trump was breaking up a ring of “deep state,” or pedophile, or otherwise nefarious actors not only in the world of politics, but in Hollywood (Spielberg, Hanks, COME ON) and philanthropy (Soros). While at first it seemed a fringe hobby, in recent days disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has taken the group’s oath, sharing a video saying, “Where we go one, we go all,” and multiple GOP primary winners to varying degrees are open supporters of the conspiracy theory. They sell a lot of merch. The theory itself builds around Trump’s cryptic comment in a 2017 Oval Office interview that “a storm’s coming.”
 
The language of Q’s initial posts shared many qualities with The Protocols. Clipped, terse, bearing an aesthetic that suggested military concision and allusiveness, the style helped those who jumped on with Q early to be swayed by a sense of its verisimilitude. Here’s Q’s first post in its entirety:
 
          HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.

Of course there are aspects of Q’s voice that are markedly different from the voice of The Protocols. There are knowable proper nouns, starting with the reference to Hillary Clinton, as “HRC.” There are time stamps, dates, the repeated reference to the National Guard as “NG.” But these references serve the same purpose at the elliptical generality of the voice of The Protocols—where in 1920 Henry Ford was presenting us with the purportedly authentic minutes of a meeting (leaving aside the fact they contain no real “protocols” in a literal way), in 2017 Q was presenting an ostensibly authentic voice of a government official on social media. Marshall McLuhan would remind us that each medium—the secrecy of meeting notes, the exposition and revelation of information on Twitter—determines the message. And in each case the message is: something serious is going down, and you’re not in on it.
 
Beyond that, there are some clear similarities in each voice. Compare Q’s cadences, the terse constructions, with the introductions to each of The Protocols. Here’s the opening of “Protocol No. 18”:
 
           Measures of secret defense. Observation of conspiracies from the inside. Overt secret defense—the ruin of authority. Secret defense of the King of the Jews. Mystical prestige of authority. Arrest on the first suspicion.
 
One quality of this writing is that it appears to require some inside clandestine knowledge of its own system of reference. If you have to ask what HRC means, what NG means, you’ll never know. Same with the coded language of “the King of the Jews,” that “secret defense” both Wilsonian Americans and tsarist Russians might have feared in the Communists in their midst. It serves as well as a shorthand, pushing back against the painful project I myself undertook: You don’t really need to read the whole thing to get what it’s about. Here are some conspiratorial SparkNotes. There is also a marked absence of narrative. Narrative itself suggests causation—this happened, and then that happened next as a result. In The Protocols, in Q world, there is only one causal relationship: this exists because of the conspiracy itself, which predates and always supersedes the argument.
 
This kind of coded language as it pertains specifically to The Protocols themselves carries over into the rhetoric of our moment more directly. In anti-Semitic flare-ups this summer, NFL receiver DeSean Jackson caused controversy after sharing fabricated Hitler quotations on his Instagram account, and after apologizing, was backed up by former NBA star Steven Jackson, who was less contrite. Comedian Nick Cannon was fired from one of his jobs for referring to a Protocols-like conspiracy involving “Rothschilds,” language from all three appearing to derive from the rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan. Longtime anti-Semitic commentator and one of the few humans I believe actually has read The Protocols, British former footballer and full-time conspiracy theorist David Ickes, made a video claiming COVID was caused by new 5G cellular phone towers. It was immediately taken down in June by YouTube, but only after Britons had torn down 5G towers in England (it didn’t kill the virus). But the Icke video found new hosts, including space on the official personal website of longtime vocal anti-Semite, the novelist Alice Walker, who also posted on her site the pseudo-documentary Plandemic, about COVID-denier and disgraced former doctor Judy Moskovitz.
 
All these threads converged at the 2020 RNC. Only hours before she was to speak as part of the convention, Mary Ann Mendoza, the mother of an Arizona police officer killed in 2014 by a drunk driver, had her speech canceled. That day she’d retweeted a long Twitter thread claiming that QAnon had uncovered a Jewish plot, led by “Rothschilds,” [sic] to take control of world governments. “‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ Is Not A Fabrication,” a part of the thread read. “And Certainly It Is Not Anti-Semetic [sic] To Point Out This Fact.” Mendoza had a long history of tweeting out such anti-Semitic canards.
 
So. Yes. Varied conspiracy theories proliferate, and The Protocols themselves have found their way back into our discourse alongside them. Early in Trump’s impeachment trial, in November 2019, security analyst Fiona Hill brought up the fact that anti-Semitic smears by Roger Stone, against her and philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, were literally out of the same playbook: “This is the longest-running anti-Semitic trope that we have in history,” Hill told congress. “This is the new Protocols of The Elders of Zion.” She at least was involved enough to describe the text as a tsarist forgery. On his Fox News show, GOP propagandist Tucker Carlson recently disparaged the popular book White Fragility by suggesting that seeing someone reading it on the subway is akin to watching someone reading The Protocols openly (I only brought my own copy to the public pool, and was careful to cover it up with my daughter’s Pocahontas towel).
 
And in May of this year, when the president himself went to visit a Ford factory in Michigan, he made his not so subtle dog whistle to all these conspiracists. Speaking to reporters, he said, “The company was founded by a man named Henry Ford. Good bloodlines, good bloodlines, if you believe in that stuff you’ve got good blood.” The ouroboros of conspiracy theorizing was complete. Who can even tell head from tail at this point.
 

Which inevitably, as all things seem to do in 2020, brings us back to the fascism-curious POTUS himself. In the epilogue of The Protocols, in the edition I read—I’m consciously not mentioning the publisher or editor, as it’s packed with all kinds of other anti-Semitic hate and doesn’t deserve our attention—the purported translator of the 1905 edition of the text, a Czech named Sergius A. Nilus, writes that when The Protocols were supposedly discovered, “the storm was about to break on apathetic Russia.” Is this the same storm Trump was dog whistling in Michigan, along with his propping up of Henry Ford? Could he be expected to remember such details? Wasn’t Churchill’s World War II memoir called The Coming Storm? How specific are storms, and their coming, their breaking? At some point when reading so much conspiratorial thinking one fears he’s growing to be part of the conspiracy, and ducks out. Remembers that the point of all these primary documents—The Protocols, Q’s posts, Plandemic, even Trump’s speeches and comments themselves—signify to the listener simply because they exist. There’s no narrative, no causation, just patterns in the rug.
 
This is almost certainly true of the rambling, incoherent speeches the president has given since the pandemic began. At his ill-conceived indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, Trump’s long speeches could go on for endless paragraphs. Take this one, a kind of conspiratorial thinking about the upcoming presidential election:

     Joe Biden and the Democrats want to prosecute Americans for going to church, but not for burning a church. They believe you can riot, vandalize and destroy, but you cannot attend a peaceful pro-America rally. They want to punish your thought, but not their violent crimes. They want to abolish bail, abolish and open up your borders. They want open borders, let everyone, and by the way, we’re doing so well. We have a record this month on the borders. Nobody’s coming in. Very few people. And they want to abolish ICE, our great people from ICE who send the roughest toughest, meanest people that you’ve ever seen or ever heard.
 
The paragraph reads like someone who has read The Protocols and wants to sound like them. I’d be remiss not to point out that even this long paragraph doesn’t come close to approaching the length and prolixity of any single protocol, and served as a reminder to this reader, at least, that the sheer length of each protocol strains the credibility of The Protocols as a record of actual spoken lectures. Reading a Trump rally speech on the page bears out something of the same thing that we find in The Protocols, in QAnon. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It doesn’t often cohere. It’s so broad as to be difficult to track, and hides its outright lies (“Biden wants to prosecute Americans for going to church”) in a willy-nilly garble. It purposely obfuscates. But in the midst of the miasma, the confusion, we’re forced to grasp back at what we came here for. In The Protocols, it’s the anti-Semitism, fulfilling our belief in a Jewish plot to destroy non-Jewish culture merely because it exists. In Trump, it’s Trump’s desire to gain and retain power.
 
Some facts about this speech, still: it is repetitive, unconvincing, fragmentary, a pure slog; disordered, ridiculous, confusing, and above all, incoherent. But it’s not the voice of The Protocols, not exactly. It belongs to the same genre: spoken, boasting, elliptical. Early on in “Protocol No. 1” the forgery reads, “Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if he could.” That part, at least, is not at all hard to comprehend. In fact, it sounds quite familiar.
 
The Incoherence of Hate: Reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By  Daniel Torday.  LitHub, August 27, 2020.
 

 

The modern world’s most consequential conspiracy text was barely noticed when it first appeared in a little-read Russian newspaper in 1903. The message of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is straightforward, and terrifying: The rise of liberalism had provided Jews with the tools to destroy institutions—the nobility, the church, the sanctity of marriage—whole. Soon, they would take control of the world, as part of a revenge plot dating back to the ascendancy of Christendom. The text, ostensibly narrated by a Jewish leader, describes this plan in detail, relying on centuries-old anti-Jewish tropes, and including lengthy expositions on monetary, media, and electoral manipulation. It announces Jewry’s triumph as imminent: The world order will fall into the hands of a cunning elite, who have schemed forever and are now fated to rule until the end of time. 

It was a fabrication, and a clumsy one, largely copied from the obscure, French-language political satire Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, or The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by Maurice Joly. But it has enjoyed a remarkable appeal, despite various attempts to ban it and calls for individuals to denounce it—and now, in our conspiracy-saturated moment, it has decisively reemerged.
 
The book sells widely in Turkey, Syria, and Japan; remains a staple of Russian Orthodox bookshops; and in 2002, was the subject of a long-running Egyptian television series. It is widely available on eBay and on the Barnes & Noble website. The British charity Oxfam sold it on its site until March of this year. When asked by The New York Times in 2018 to name the books at her bedside, Alice Walker listed David Icke’s And the Truth Will Set You Free, a contemporary summary of The Protocols. At a 2019 congressional hearing, the former National Security Council official Fiona Hill described The Protocols’ image of a greedy, devious Jew as “the longest-running anti-Semitic trope we have.” Last week, when an automated Twitter bot managed by the FBI posted a 139-page file containing the text and the agency’s documents on it, hate-filled praise streamed in alongside the replies condemning the tweet for its lack of context. For devotees, The Protocols’ capacity to explain the world remains so resonant that the COVID-19 pandemic has now been blamed on the machinations of the ubiquitous Jewish elders.
 
A mountain of writings has surfaced over the past century and more, each devoted to revealing the supposed perfidy of the Jews. But nearly all have disappeared: The back shelves of research libraries are packed with anti-Semitic best sellers now turned to dust. (Who still reads Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a massive best seller celebrated by George Bernard Shaw at the time of its publication in 1899 as a “masterpiece”?) Even Hitler’s Mein Kampf is rarely cited, though it remains a favorite of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and in a newly energized far right. 
 
But The Protocols has survived, more so than any other text of its kind. It has done so not because its ideas are particularly original, and certainly not because they’re correct. It has done so for the simple reason that The Protocols is, curiously enough, a compelling read. Conspiracy theories are many things, but most of all, they’re narratives—understandable, comprehensive stories about how the world works, complete with the arcs and the rhythms of any other epic tale of heroes and villains. Part of what makes certain ones endure is how well they unfurl that story.
 
The Protocols’ voice is cool, patronizing, vile; the voice of someone who is ready to perform any task, however dastardly, in the march toward world domination. This, then, is no secondary source, unlike other familiar, formulaic expressions of anti-Semitism, but a chance to overhear a consequential Jewish leader plotting the fate of the world. This narrative immediacy is the difference between a newspaper article and a novel, between remove and urgency. The Protocols is not, purportedly, mere narration of a diabolical plot—it’s evidence of one. It projects authority by obscuring its authorship, not unlike various religious texts—or, to use a much more recent and pertinent example, the anonymous dispatches that form the foundation of QAnon.
 
And beneath its wild, hate-filled surface, The Protocols has a surprisingly solid, if plagiarized, core. Joly’s source material is an astute portrait of modernity’s ills, imagining a collision between (the well-meaning, but inadequate) Montesquieu and (the brilliant, immeasurably more persuasive) Machiavelli, and ultimately reveals the susceptibility of liberal society to manipulation and distraction using war, or greed, or the clouds of nostalgia. It was a prescient view of the world, as the political theorist Hans Speier has said, one that perceived “the hazards of popular sovereignty as well as the abuse of power by social engineers.” Nearly everything about The Protocols is wrong, but just enough about its depiction of the onset of totalitarianism is insightful that it is harder to dismiss than other, more outlandish conspiracy theories.
 
And though its most fervent following is on the far right, the text itself is without any emphatic leftist or rightist coloring. This is why it can be embraced as it is today by disparate groups such as evangelicals, neo-Nazis, some anti-Israel activists, and a slice of black-metal fans. It is endlessly versatile, a Rorschach test onto which a great assortment of convictions can readily be sketched.
 
Perhaps the finest of all scholars writing today about The Protocols is Michael Hagemeister, a mild, left-leaning German based at the Ruhr University in Bochum. His entry into the study of this text provides a useful look at its rapid move in recent years from obscurity at the far fringe of political life to something close to the mainstream.
 

Hagemeister was introduced to The Protocols when he was visiting the Soviet Union in the early 1980s to research a dissertation on the 19th-century right-leaning philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. Hagemeister’s interest in Fedorov, coupled with his ancestry—relatives had served as senior figures in the Romanov administration—convinced the rightist intellectuals he encountered that he was a kindred spirit. As a result, one of them, a specialist in German thought, asked if on his next trip he might bring along a copy of a book of great importance, a book that proved worldwide Jewish domination.
 
To Hagemeister, the plot laid out in The Protocols seemed no more current than the fear of the Illuminati or the Freemasons, the stuff of a Dan Brown bestseller. Its fortune has risen considerably since. Having now spent 30 years studying the text, Hagemeister told me recently that he isn’t surprised that it’s been used to explain the pandemic. The Protocols feels all the more pertinent, he added, at moments of crisis such as this one, when the righteous are urged to close their ranks to repel the enemy—a strategy the book suggests could effectively stop the Jews. Like QAnon’s missives or some of the finest novels, The Protocols is a narrative about the crucial moment just before cataclysm, and the notion that those horrors can still be averted with a swift and unequivocal response.
 
The belief captured by The Protocols that the world is in the clutches of a cabal—mighty, yet small enough to fit itself into the discreet, darkened corner of a club—certainly isn’t the sole possession of those who loathe Jews. But Jews, whether in the guise of Soros or Rothschild, Disraeli or Marx, provide a time-tested, biblically vetted vortex. And at a jittery moment such as ours, when it’s so easy to feel the world is cascading out of control, it’s revealing that The Protocols has shed its archaic feel.
 
The Conspiracy Theory to Rule Them All. What explains the strange, long life of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? By Stephen J. Zipperstein. The Atlantic, August 25, 2020.