Religion: Protocols of Zion

In a courtroom in the pleasant Swiss city of Berne last week a world-wide idea went on trial. The idea; Jewry has long been plotting to overthrow all governments and replace them with a vast and tyrannical Jewish super-government.

Most famed foundation for this allegation of a Jewish world-conspiracy is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Always purporting to be fact, this ingenious work has been circulated in 15 languages. Last year Swiss Jews caught Swiss Nazis distributing copies of it. Eager to scotch the old charge publicly, the Jews brought a libel suit which became a criminal action when it appeared that the Nazis had violated a Swiss law against circulating literature “calculated to excite vile instincts or to cause brutal offense.”

“Plot.” First published in 1905 by a Russian named Sergei Nilus, the Protocols are supposed to be a verbatim account of a secret meeting of Jewish Elders. Composed of 24 separate Protocols, the work is variously intended in various editions to represent a speech by one Elder, or the successive speeches of 24 Elders. Machiavellian, wily and devious are the methods by which the Elders plan to gain their world hegemony. According to the Protocols “he who would rule must have recourse to cunningness and hypocrisy.” Biding their time while they contrive the collapse of Christian society, the Elders plan to: “Corrupt the young generation by subversive education, dominate people through their vices, destroy family life, undermine respect for religion, encourage luxury, amuse people to prevent them from thinking. Poison the spirit by destructive theories, weaken human bodies by inoculation with microbes, foment international hatreds and prepare for universal bankruptcy and concentration of gold in the hands of the Jews.”

In their political beliefs the Elders are made to combine the worst features of Bolshevism and of reactionary Despotism. At times they seem to favor a carefully controlled Communistic system, but they also have a haughty contempt for the masses. Thus: “In their intense meanness the Christian peoples help our independence—when kneeling, they crouch before power; when they are pitiless towards the weak; when merciless in dealing with faults, and lenient to crimes; when they refuse to recognize the contradictions of freedom; when they are patient to the degree of martyrdom in bearing with the violence of an audacious despotism.”

Craftily the Elders are represented as planning to gain control of the land, induce ruinous speculations, and knife the Christian churches while pretending to protect them. And meanwhile, according to Protocols Nos. 3 and 5: “We will represent ourselves as the saviors of the laboring classes who have come to liberate them from this oppression by suggesting that they join our army of Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, to whom we always extend our help under the guise of the fraternal principles of the universal solidarity of our social masonry. . . . We will adopt for ourselves the liberal side of all parties and all movements and provide orators who will talk so much that they will tire the people with their speeches until they turn from orators in disgust.”

Origin. Surreptitiously circulated in Russia during the War, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion spread through Europe in 1917 largely because they furnished a handy explanation of the Russian Revolution. They reached the U. S., were reprinted in Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent. They are currently in circulation* along with such kindred pamphlets as The Plan in Action, by “Earnest Sincere,” who declares that Bernard Mannes Baruch is slated to be “Sponsor” for the Western Hemisphere under “Akad Ha’Am, the Unknown and Uncrowned King of Jewry throughout the earth.”

The fact that the Protocols are still widely read and widely believed might well discourage Jews from putting much faith in a trial in Switzerland. The Protocols were effectively disposed of as fraudulent long ago, notably by the London Times in 1921, and by the Soviet Government which outlawed them in 1917. Based on old-wives’ tales current three centuries ago, they have been shown to draw most heavily upon two obscure books of the mid-19th Century. First of these, published in Brussels in 1865, was a political attack on Napoleon III, written by a French lawyer named Maurice Joly and entitled A Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. In this work, for publishing which its author was jailed for 18 months, the famed French essayist acts as literary stooge to the Italian courtier, whose unscrupulous policies are, by implication, ascribed to the Bonaparte Emperor.

Second source of the Protocols is an economic romance entitled Biarritz, written in 1868 by Hermann Goedsche, a German who used the pen name of Sir John Retcliffe. As a melodramatic interlude in his book Goedsche pictured a secret assemblage of the “Elect of Israel,” gathered in a Prague cemetery around the tomb of a mythical “Holy Rabbi.” The gathering plots the destruction of the world much as do the Elders in their Protocols. Goedsche’s notion, besides inspiring the author of the Protocols, lived on in its own right. In 1893 German editors reported it as the authentic speech of a Jewish rabbi to his congregation, crediting the story to an “eminent Englishman, Sir John Retcliffe.” By 1912 the story became the “stenographic report” of a speech at a Jewish congress in Lemberg.

Compilation, How the Protocols were compiled from such sources was amply described last week not only in the Berne courtroom but also in the American Hebrew by various writers including Princess Catherine Radziwill. Reason for compiling anything at all lay in the fact that in the years preceding the Russian revolution of 1905. the Russian Conservatives were badly in need of a red herring to drag before credulous Tsar Nicholas. With Liberals demanding reforms, the Conservatives could forestall them by picturing Russia’s restlessness as result of a great Jewish conspiracy.

Hand in glove with the Russian Conservatives was the fearsome Okhrana (secret police). In a Paris library a number of Russian agents set to work, among them ferocious General Rachkowsky, local head of the Okhrana, a gentleman so unpopular among spies that he never let himself be photographed. Another participant in writing the Protocols was a librarian and agent provocateur named Golovinsky.

Nevertheless, witnesses at the Berne trial last week gave considerable credit for the Protocols to the man under whose name they first appeared, Sergei Nilus. Variously described as a mad monk, an erudite theologian, a judge and an Okhrana official, Nilus apparently received the manuscript from General Rachkowsky, made numerous additions of his own. Like many another man of his time, Mad Monk Nilus was much struck with the opulent, auburn-haired beauty of Actress Sarah Bernhardt. Incongruous as it was to introduce a frivolous note, Nilus nevertheless wished to mention the portrayer of L’Aiglon and Camille in the Protocols. According to testimony last week by Sergius Swatikov, onetime Russian official, the Mad Monk felt that world Jewry could well use Jewess Bernhardt to “charm Christians.” But the Russian imperial censors deleted the reference.

A Count du Chayla testified that the Protocols were originally written in poor French, that Sergei Nilus seemed to doubt their authenticity but remarked: “What of it? Christ said wisdom came from an ass; why cannot truth come from a forgery?”

Seats of the Mighty. Though the authenticity of the Protocols was the chief concern of everybody in the Berne court room, the tactics of the Nazi defense seemed to be to admit nothing, attempt to prove that even if spurious the Protocols had been borne out by history. Defense counsel was burly Theodor Fischer, No. 1 Swiss Nazi, who boasted to newshawks that he and not Adolf Hitler had first organized Nazi groups. Cried he: “We Swiss Nazis are few, but we sit in the seats of the mighty. We are essentially anti-Jewish not because of Jewish culture or Jewish religion, but because we object to the Jewish race. We are pro-Christian and pro-Aryan.”

Most distinguished witness for the prosecution was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, goateed chemist whose Wartime gift to Britain of a process for speeding production of alcohol gained Balfour’s promise of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. Onetime President of the World Zionist Federation, Dr. Weizmann is a Jew who might well be slated to be the Uncrowned King of the Jews if their Elders were really planning a world kingdom. But Nazi Fischer did not suggest that possibility. Instead he bombarded Jew Weizmann with questions about the first Zionist Congress of 1897, at which Sergei Nilus declared the Protocols were drawn up. This Dr. Weizmann denied. Admitting he did not attend the Congress, he explained: “I did not have enough money. … I was a poor student in Russia.”

Experts. What qualifications a man needed to be an expert on the Protocols was not made clear by the court. Expert for the prosecution was C. A. Loosli, a Berne author who declared the Protocols “scandalous literature of the worst sort,” cited 170 passages paralleling those in the Joly Dialogue and unqualifiedly labeled the whole thing spurious. The defense had no experts. A Herr Rev. Munchmeyer of Oldenberg, Germany had not even replied to the Nazi invitation to represent their side. The defense state of mind seemed to be that of Dr. Alfred Zander in whose journal Eisernen Besen (Iron Broom) the Protocols had been published. He testified simply that he considered them authentic because no one had ever complained about them before.

*Last week the American Hebrew & Jewish Tribune named among others the following as current distributors: William Dudley Pelley of the Silver Shirts of America; Representative Louis T. McFadden from Pennsylvania; the Order of ’76; the Friends of New Germany and the Moody Bible Institute.