The most notorious antisemitic forgery was copied from a satire about Napoleon III
In 1921 a Times correspondent laid two texts side by side and showed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sold as secret minutes of a Jewish plot, lifted passage after passage from an 1864 French pamphlet attacking Napoleon III, a book that never mentioned Jews at all.
The Protocols first appeared in Imperial Russia in 1903, after circulating in pamphlets from 1902, and were soon translated and spread worldwide. The text betrays its own date: it refers to the assassinations of Italy's Umberto I in 1900 and US President William McKinley in 1901 as if they had been planned in advance, so it cannot predate 1901. The scholar Cesare De Michelis argues it was concocted shortly after a Zionist congress held in Russia in September 1902, possibly beginning as an in-group parody before being polished for publication as genuine. Those involved, including its first publisher Pavel Krushevan, later gave contradictory accounts and deliberately clouded its origins.
Its main source was Maurice Joly's Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, in which Machiavelli stands in for a scheming Napoleon III. Joly, a republican, served 15 months in prison because of it. By one count some 160 passages of the Protocols were borrowed from him, and the first 19 protocols follow the order of his dialogues. Another ingredient was a chapter from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by Hermann Goedsche, a former Prussian postal clerk sacked for helping to fabricate evidence against a democratic politician. His invented midnight meeting in a Prague cemetery was later reprinted as supposed fact.
The ground had been prepared in 1860s Russia, where a convert named Jacob Brafman published books claiming the Jewish community councils secretly survived as an international network. Some Russian officials took the claim seriously in the 1880s.
Exposure did not end the damage. Philip Graves revealed the plagiarism in The Times in 1921, and the Frankfurter Zeitung followed in 1924, yet from 1933 some teachers in Nazi Germany assigned extracts to schoolchildren as fact. Scholars point out that its vagueness, with almost no names or dates, let rival movements read whatever they wished into it. It has been called probably the most influential antisemitic work ever written, and it remains in circulation.
Source: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
