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.
