" THE ELDERS OF ZION "
By S. K. RATCLIFFE
AT Berne, on )lay -14th,.the astounding case concerning the so-called Protocols of . the Elders of Zion came to an end. Suit had been brought by representatives of Jewry against certain leading Swiss Nazis for the sup- pression of these documents in the canton. The plaintifA gained a decisive victory, though the penalties were light. The " Protocols" were described in the judgement as ridiculous nonsense, and the Judge expressed a hope that the day would come when the world would feel amazed that in the year 1935-a question so idiotic as that of their authen- ticity should have been debated for seventeen days in a court of law. The proceedings, which began last October, turned-upon a matter that defies analysis or description. The " Protocols " are fantastic lunacy, not so much a forgery as a crazy and malignant fake. They are today among the most notorious of publications—at once the silliest and the most dangerous of all incitements to Anti- Semit ism .
. In England we have known this iniquity for fifteen 3ears. Early in 1920 a half-crown pamphlet containing the " Protocols " was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode, under the title of The Jewish Peril. The first English scholar to point out its obvious character was, I believe, Sir Hagberg Wright. His word alone should have sufficed for any adult reader, after a glance through the pages; But the pamphlet continued to be widely circulated, and on May 8th its sale was stimulated by an article in The Times, from a correspondent who, though interrogative, was plainly impressed. Then The Spectator intervened, with the lavishness of space enjoyed in those heroic days— namely, a long leading article, of unmistakable author- ship, and a detailed review of The Jewish' Peril filling almost five columns. Mr. St. Loe Strachey noted a few points in the prefatory explanation which, as he said, were very " fishy," and quoting the translator's assertion as to " original documents stolen by a woman " from one of the " most highly initiated leaders of Freemasonry," he remarked that all of us knew that woman. The Spectator's serious treatment of the " Protocols," as an example of the worst and most malevolent type of pro- paganda, brought out that able publicist, the late Lucien Wolf, who produced a convincing part-demonstration of the genesis of the document, which, however, for all its weight of knowledge and proof, made no impression at all upon the journals devoted to " the Hidden Hand," then excessively vocal. It remained for a correspondent of The Times, Mr. Philip Graves, to clinch the exposure by a brilliant piece of comparative criticism.
" The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion " purport to consist of notes or minutes taken at secret meetings of the " Sages of Zion " or the " Zionist Men of Wisdom," divulging a diabolical conspiracy of Jewry, world-wide in scope, designed to overthrow Christendom by gold and bloodshed and to set up a Jewish super- government under a royal despot of David's line. They were produced in 1905-by one Serge Nilus, a minor official of the Tsardom, from whom they came as " signed by the representatives of Zion, of the 88rd degree." Many stories of the originals have been told, each one doubtless no less valid than Nilus's reference to a theft accom- plished at the close of a secret meeting of the initiated in France. The first German edition appeared in 1919- They had already been thoroughly exposed when, in 1922, Mr. Henry Ford used them as the basis of the anti-Jewish crusade for which he afterwards expressed the fullest contrition. Their material is largely drawn upon by Herr Hitler in Mein Kampf. They were formally reissued by Herr Alfred Rosenberg as an essential portion of the Nazi canon. They have been translated into all the most important languages, and are at the present time being circulated in enormous numbers throughout the world.
The " Protocols " have in the main a two-fold root. The first was disclosed by Lucien Wolf, who, following a German investigator, showed that much of the material had been taken from a novel (1868) by Hermann Goedsche, a forgotten writer of pornographic thrillers. This discovery was interesting, but it was entirely eclipsed a few months later by the triumphant achieve- ment of Mr. Philip Graves. In 1921 Mr. Graves was in Constantinople. There came into his hands from a Russian acquaintance a small book published at Geneva in 1864, entitled Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, ou la Politique de Machiavel au XIX Mick, a satire on the Government of Napoleon III, by Maurice Joly, a Paris lawyer. Mr. Graves's friend, a White Russian refugee with an interest in the Russo- Jewish question, had found in this book a clue to the " Protocols." Mr. Graves followed it up, and in three articles in The Times (August, 1921), since spread far as a pamphlet, he set forth in parallel columns many specimens of the surprisingly clumsy trick of plagiarism practised by the Moscow official. Professor Nilus took chunks of Machiavelli's argument and prophecy, as devised by Maurice Joly for his ridicule of the Second Empire, ascribed them to a Jewish Elder, and, with the aid. of Goedsche's rubbish and what not made up 100 pages of venomous rubbish into the " Protocols "- a thing unequalled, one would say, in the modern age, for its mixture of clotted nonsense, sheer raving and pretentious malignity.
For fifteen years now the reiterated explanation has gone along with an ever-renewed and expanding circula- tion of the " Protocols " as anti-Jewish poison. The exposure itself need never be done again ; the Joly parallels finish the thing off. And yet I am struck with the odd fact that one most ironic aspect of the affair has not been so effectively displayed as it might have been. At first glance, said Nilus ingenuously in his preface, " these minutes might convey the impression of being what we call truisms, though expressed with a pungency and a hatred which does not usually accompany ordinary truths." Exactly. The political substance of the " Pro- tocols " is pure Nazism : e.g., " Only sheer force is vic- torious in politics ; 'Violence must be the principle ; Our right lies in might ! " One wonders how much of Herr Goebbels's direct propaganda has been lifted, without change as without acknowledgment, from the rich pages of Joly-Nilus ? And, meanwhile, there are no Protocols ; there are no Elders of Zion.
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